II

Tuesday, July 18

Every day the temperature climbed a little higher. At four in the morning the house was already hot enough to wake the bluebottle flies and send them buzzing and bumbling over the faces of humans trying to sleep. The pastures were dry and brown.

At dinner George said to Lucy, “I’ve got a good kid job for you this afternoon. I want you and the dog to take the cows over to Oscar Johnson’s land there, across the road, and watch so they don’t run away or get out on the road. I saw Oscar over town yesterday, and I promised him I’d fix up his car for him this winter if he’ll let us get whatever pasturing we can out of that section of his. He isn’t going to use it anyhow. There’s a lot on the hillsides there that doesn’t get burned too bad in the afternoon. It’ll give our pastures a little rest. Maybe if we’d get one rain we’d get some more grass yet. Anyhow, we’ll see how it goes for a couple of weeks over there.”

“Oh, George,” Rachel said. “She’s too little to do such a long hard job as that! She’s not even eight yet!”

“I herded cows when I was five! And not just in the afternoons, neither. I got sent out as soon as the morning’s milking was done and I got told not to come back till it was time for the evening chores. And I knew what I’d get if I came back too early, too! They gave me a piece of bread and a bottle of water and packed me off! That’s the trouble with kids nowadays. They’re spoiled and lazy and good-for-nothing. I’m not asking her to go out all day—just afternoons!

“I saddled my first horse when I was five. By the time I was her age I’d be out in the barn of a morning, harnessing up the team, while my dad finished the milking. I had to stand up on a block of wood to reach over the horse’s back, but I harnessed up a team, I tell you. I don’t expect anything like that of a girl, but she can certainly herd a few milch cows for a few days. It’ll be the best thing in the world for her. Why, I learned how to keep myself from ever being bored—I could watch a bunch of ants working for hours—or a hawk trying to catch a gopher—or—any one of a hundred different things.…”

Rachel did not argue. She walked into the kitchen and started the dishes. George sat whittling a match down to a fine enough point so it would get at a spot that a toothpick wouldn’t reach. Lucy was numb and still. When her parents quarreled over her this way, she realized that she was the cause of all the trouble in the house. If only she were not here, there would be nothing for them to fight about. And if only she had a dappled-gray pony like her cousin’s. She would love to herd cows with a pony like that.

The cows were gathered under the spreading box elder tree, chewing their morning’s cuds while they lay in its shade. They kept the ground bare beneath it, and the dust they kicked up heavily coated its leaves. They had come in for water around noon, as they did almost every day now, and they would not head out to the pasture again for an hour or so—and then only out of desperation. George was already supplementing what they foraged for themselves with his precious hay, but he hated to be using it up when there was still a little pasture available anywhere. They never produced as well without green stuff, and since the price of butterfat was staying up so high this summer, he felt it was worth a great deal of effort to get as much cream as possible.

“I’m going up towards the road myself, so I’ll help you get them started,” George said. “Looks like they’re a little low on water. We better give them some first.”

He primed the dry leather and began to pump. The cows walked eagerly to the stream of water. What little water they had left was thick with red box-elder bugs and other insects drowned in the feathery slime on the bottom of the tank and when the water was like that they would blow into it, trying to push the bugs aside before they drank. When the tank was half full, the pump began to strain and then came the sound of sand rasping against the leather. The water choked off into spasmodic, discolored, thin spouts. George let go of the pump handle.

“Is it going dry?” Lucy asked anxiously.

“Well, now, that’s a silly question!” George said. “Of course not! You can see we got water, can’t you?”

“Let’s go,” he said. When they reached the edge of the wheat, he turned off to go and hoe in the potato patch.

“Just go on up and straight across the road, and let them go anywheres on that unfenced section. All you have to do is keep them off the road and bring them home at chore time.”

Lucy went on behind the cows. A leaning barbed-wire fence along the driveway kept them in line and out of the wheat. There was no challenge to the job. Their hoofs were almost silent in the deep dust but the air was full of insect noise—mostly of grasshoppers. Without the indifferent cows ahead of her to deflect them, the grasshoppers that rose in hordes from their feasting in the wheat would be rattling through the air, smacking their hard-shelled bodies against her own nakedness. She would feel the whining of their long, brittle wings, and some of them would become entangled in her hair or hang on her bare arms and legs and chest, half stunned by the force with which they had struck her, clinging frantically and spitting their filthy brown juice in big drops on her skin.

She would flail her arms at them, and jump up and down, and brush herself all over, and run to get out in the open again. Even in winter when she walked between the fields she remembered how it would be when summer came again. Even in winter she had nightmares in which an endless stream of thick bodies flew at her and pressed their millions of resined feet into the flesh of her neck.

She wondered if there could possibly be as many grasshoppers all through the acres of wheat as there were along the lane. It seemed as though all the grasshoppers for miles around must be concentrated along that one stretch of wheat, just waiting for her to have to pass them every day to fetch the mail or do other errands.

Her mother had explained that they flew up at her because she scared them. Well, then, why didn’t the silly things just stay where they were and mind their own business, since she was just as afraid of them as they were of her?

She followed the cows across the county road, and she noticed that their pace quickened as they scented the new pasture. Even here the grass was withered and sparse, but still it was much more appetizing than the worked-over remnant that had been their pasture for the last month. They were no trouble at all to herd, for they set to work hungrily, moving slowly and not spreading away from each other too much.

They no longer grazed the way they had early in spring, flitting from one place to another, unable to settle at one spot because the grass was so new and green everywhere. Now they sank their noses into whatever turf they could find and tugged at the very roots of it till they had cleaned out every blade and leaf.

Still they would not touch the pungent rosinweed. Perversely, its gummy leaves grew lush and healthy beside the dying edible weeds and grass. From the porch in the early morning the smell of the nearest rosinweed patch was fresh and clean, like sagebrush sprinkled with cinnamon. But later in the day the smell altered and intensified; the weed exuded a sour mustiness. Then the strong fragrance that accompanied the glad sounds of birds at their breakfasts and the gentle touch of the only cool moments of the day became instead the reeking adjunct of hot sticky skin and dust that crawled in her scalp. She could see why the cows might try eating rosinweed once and then resolve to starve to death before they would touch it again. She had been so surprised, herself, to find that the same thing that sent the beautiful smell blowing across the porch in the morning could also give off such a rank and nose-burning stench in midafternoon.

“You can start them home when the sun is about there in the sky,” her father had said, pointing to a place above the northwestern horizon. “It’ll be about six o’clock then.”

But the sun seemed to have caught, today, on an invisible snag in the sky. She had read the story of Icarus, and she could imagine, with the sun on her shoulder blades, how it must have felt when the wax began to melt away from the feathers of the boy’s wings and the sun just got hotter and hotter. There was no shade except the short shadow at the base of a huge rock that was half the size of their house. The last time she had sat there she had been too near a hill of fierce red ants nearly half an inch long. She had gone home full of bleeding welts. This time she decided she would climb the rock instead, but it blistered her hands even to touch it.

All these rocks had been left here by the glaciers, her mother said. The giant rock hung restlessly on the brow of the hill, brooding over the smaller strays below it. Her mother had told her that the earth had worn away from it—that it never would have just stuck there that way of its own accord.

It was hard to imagine a glacier on this parching hill. The rocks shot flecks of gold and silver into the sun. Lucy searched around for a while, thinking that some time she would surely have to find a gold nugget. Her father had told her that gold nuggets did not look at all like gold; they did not shine that way, and that without knowing what a gold nugget looked like, she could walk past a million dollars’ worth of gold and never know it. It was the same with diamonds. The biggest diamond in the world had been mistaken for a clod of earth. But she had a feeling that if she ever got near that much gold or that big a diamond she would surely know, somehow, that it was there. After all, God wouldn’t let her get that close when they were so poor and not let her find it, would He?

What was it that her father said he had done when he herded cows—all those things that were so interesting? There were the ants to watch—foot-high cones of deathly dry pulverized earth, blank and smooth on the outside but horribly populous on the inside, with rooms full of tiny eggs and big pupae, and hallways up and down where millions of ants rushed about on mysterious errands. She could see all the ants anybody could ever want to see if she just poked a stick into one of those cones. She could watch them—terrified and angry—scrambling over the ruins of their city, rescuing the long white bundles encasing their next generation. One had to respect the organized speed with which they could disappear when there were so many of them. Still, she did not really like ants well enough to want to watch them all afternoon. What else had her father done? Watched a hawk after a gopher, he said. She searched the sky for a hawk, but it seemed too hot up there even for birds. She couldn’t even hear the call of a meadowlark. She couldn’t think what else he said he had done. It was easier to imagine that she was in Africa than to try to think of the things her father had done when he was a little boy.

Compared to glaciers, African animals here were perfectly believable. In fact, she needed only to think of them and they populated the rolling hills, hiding behind the rocks, treacherously blending their stripes and spots and tawny skins with the clumps of thistles and weeds that made wavering black shadows in the wind—it was really only the wind moving, of course. She sat down on the highest curve of the hill and looked down to where there was a draw which was mostly hidden from her by another ridge above it that ran along the big hill. The draw was a moist, cordial little place in spring, blooming with crocuses, and later with buttercups. It was the kind of place she would have picked to live in herself if she had been a wild animal. There was a rocky ledge a bit above the bottom of the draw, and once she had found the skull of a rabbit there. A hawk had probably got it, her father told her.

In summer the ledge was sparsely tufted with rough brown grass, and it looked savage and strange, like a ledge pictured in the National Geographic Book of North American Mammals. A yellow-eyed cougar waited on the ledge in the picture. He peered down in feline concentration, holding his haunches tightly and leaning on his forelegs, making the muscles of them swell against the white chest that seemed, even in the picture, to breathe with the lion’s lungs and to throb with his heart. She wondered if a cougar could have eaten the rabbit that belonged to the skull she found, instead of a hawk.

Or why not a real African lion or tiger? She had been to a movie once, in Jamestown, after she had had to go to the dentist there. It was a Tarzan movie, and it had all the animals in it, alive, that she had studied in the pictures in a book on Africa. People should not be so sure that there could be no such animals around here. Circuses and carnivals went through on the highway all the time. They never set up their shows any closer than Jamestown, but thirty miles was no distance for an angry lion to travel. Animals could escape from those flimsy red cages. There was plenty of unfenced room around her for every single animal she had seen in the movie or in the book or ever even imagined.

The most terrible thing in the movie had been the way, time after time, the great mane and wide-open jaws of a white-toothed lion could emerge from the empty grass. The grass in the movie had been very like the grass that grew in this abandoned grazing land. The grass in the floor of the draw was especially tall because the shade of the hill protected it from the drought. Plenty of room for whole prides of lions down there. They would be asleep, for it was too hot to hunt unless they were disturbed, just as a house cat or a dog would sleep in the shade on such a day as this.

At home she had a four-year collection of illustrated Sunday-school papers that she liked to look through on stormy days. The very best picture of them all was the one of David when he was only a shepherd boy, hardly bigger than she was. The picture showed him on a hillside that looked like her own hillsides under a hot blue sky that was like her own sky. His sheep were spilled down the hill around him, like her cows, and a huge lion was jumping over a rock at him.

On the inside of the paper were the Bible verses telling about it. “Thy servant kept his father’s sheep, and there came a lion, and a bear, and took a lamb out of the flock.” Here the teacher had explained that the lion and the bear did not both come at the same time. “And I went out after him, and smote him, and delivered it out of his mouth: and when he arose against me, I caught him by his beard, and smote him, and slew him.” The memory verse that was printed in black type at the end of the lesson read “The Lord hath delivered me out of the paw of the lion, and out of the paw of the bear.”

David, of course, was a boy. How much more wonderful if she, a girl, should manage to triumph over such a lion as that one in the picture. She kept an eye on the entrance to the draw, which was in deep shadow now, though the sun was still fairly high. The cows had all disappeared in it, as she had known they would. She had to keep a sharp look around her all the time. Bing was so hot and sleepy he probably wouldn’t smell a lion even if it came right up behind them. What good was a dog anyway? No dog could kill a lion, and especially not Bing. He was part Boston bull and part terrier and he wasn’t any bigger than Cathy.

Occasionally she would hear a sound and whirl about on her knees, her heart banging, to see what was behind her. Then she would whirl back again to make sure the sound behind her wasn’t just a queer echo of a danger in front of her that she had somehow missed seeing.

If she lay on her stomach, so that the next hill rose up against the sky in her line of sight, the sun was low enough. She manuevered stealthily down the hill and over the little ridge, keeping close to the ground. Bing was close behind her. She started running the last lap down to the cows. Bing rushed after her, yipping and begging to play. She whispered frantically to him. “Shut up! Shut up! Be quiet!”

But he was determined to play. He ran at one of the cows and barked straight into her face before she had time to raise her startled head out of the grass. She tossed her stubs of horns at him and he jumped at her face again. Lucy shouted at him to stop. But Bing never minded anybody except her father.

The cows broke into a sham stampede. Bing barked and nipped at their flying heels, and Lucy ran far behind them—the straggler, the helpless one with the delicious human blood, and no one at all behind her to divert the lion for even a moment. The grass shivered and rippled. Shadows leapt from thistles to hollows to rocks.

Bing worried the herd into an honest gallop. They labored up the hill and Lucy began to gain on them, but when they reached the top they shot over the crest and down toward the road, making a beeline for the faraway barn. They tumbled madly into the ditch, clattered across the dusty gravel, tumbled in and out of the next ditch, and bunched up in the driveway.

Shoving and bumping against one another, they snapped one of the posts of the weak fence. Lucy got to the ditch on the far side of the road just in time to see them jumping over the fallen wires and fanning out through the wheat field.

George looked up from his potato row. He dropped his hoe and ran along the edge of the wheat. By the time the first cow reached him, the dog was far behind in the grain, taking extra high leaps into the air to get his bearings. George headed off the cow and turned her toward the barn. The rest slowed down and followed her, leaving their meandering, trampled swaths behind them.

“Bing! Come here!” The dog slunk toward him, showing teeth in a half-grin, half-snarl. George swung his fist down into his ribs, holding him by the scruff of the neck while he beat him.

Lucy had lapsed into an exhausted trot and she stopped far down the road when the dog began to howl.

“Get along here!” It was the same voice that had called the dog. He was waiting for her. When she came to him, he grabbed her arm just below her shoulder. She could feel how his fingers went around and lapped half way around again. All of her arm—bone and flesh from shoulder to elbow—was contained so easily and so tightly in the palm of his hand. When he took hold of her like that, she knew what would have to come next, just the way Bing had known. She felt as though her arm no longer belonged to her. He hurried her along toward the house, shouting down to her, “What in the Sam Hill did you think you were doing?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“What do you mean, you don’t know? Haven’t I told you never to run a cow when she’s got her bag full of milk? Never run a cow any time. It’s a wonder they haven’t all got their legs broke in the gopher holes. And they’ve gone and tromped down forty bushels of wheat into the bargain.”

He was holding her arm so hard and lifting it up so high that she felt as though her feet did not touch the ground at all. This was the first part of the nightmare—this swift movement toward the beating when she did not tell her feet to take the steps they took, when a force rushed her through the air to the pain that she would finally not be able to bear without screaming, even though the humiliation of screaming was worse than the pain.

She hovered above the porch steps and felt herself flung toward the door.

“Get the razor strop!”

“No! It wasn’t my fault!”

“I’ll teach you to talk back to me!”

The feeling came back into her legs as he tore open the door to get the strop, but before she could take one step the strop was swishing, flaming, cutting. The bare skin of her thighs and back burned away and still the strop rose and fell, still it branded her with its own passionate torment.

At last the sounds she could not stop became the screams that showed she had learned what he wished to teach her. He let go of her arm and kicked her away like a loathsome thing. She ran into the house.

He did not go back through the door. Instead he hung the razor strop on the outside nail where he kept his straw hat. Then he walked down the hill to let the cows back into the worn-out pasture.

He lifted the pump handle and then let it drop. It was too soon to try it again. If it had really gone dry, he didn’t want to know it yet.

The beans and peas and the root-cellar vegetables—carrots, beets, turnips, rutabagas, onions, parsnips—were far enough along to produce something without more irrigating and the potatoes would probably make it without much more water, but it would be a hard thing to watch the tomatoes die. Tomatoes took so much water that he had already begun to wonder if they weren’t a luxury this summer. But they took the place of fresh fruit through the whole long winter. Rachel always put up quarts and quarts of them.

They were more work than anything else to raise. They had to be started in flats, transplanted, staked, tied, irrigated, and conscientiously weeded. Nine-tenths of the work of growing them had already been done. It would be hard to watch them die now, but if the well acted up any more, he wouldn’t dare to water them and they would dry up long before they produced anything. He had to think of the human and animal needs first, and the hottest, driest month was still before him.

Rachel came back from a trip to town for canning rubbers and took up where she had left off with her pea canning. She already had one boilerful of jars nearly processed and she wanted to get the next load ready to go before she had to stop to fix supper. The baby played about her feet, chewing on an empty pea pod and always being in the wrong spot when boiling water had to be poured or a few hot peas from the parboiling pan escaped and plopped on the floor. She wore only her diapers and her skin was as red with the heat as if she had been scalded. Up above the stove, Rachel felt as scalded as the peas. It couldn’t be quite so bad in the rest of the house. She walked the baby into the dining room, hoping she would decide to stay there.

A little later, when she heard the baby making happy exclamations of discovery, she thought she had better make sure the discovery was not the button drawer in the sewing machine or Lucy’s paper dolls. In the bedroom she found Cathy peering under Lucy’s cot. That was the place Lucy had hidden ever since the first time, when she was barely three years old.

“Lucy! What happened? What did you do? Come here to me!”

The only sound from under the cot was an indrawn breath, fighting its way into her lungs against the spasms of her chest.

“Lucy! Please!”

But this child was already so proud. She would keep her shame under the cot rather than bring it out with her and come for comfort.

Rachel was afraid even to stoop down to her, knowing how that would shame her. She wanted to roll under the cot with her and sob with her and never come out again.

How many times had he done it since that first time? Twenty? A hundred? Five? How was it that she had gone on living with a man who could turn into an insane wild beast? She couldn’t believe it.

She could never believe it when the man she had married became a beast. He would not come back to the house until he was in control of himself again. Then he would look like a man, speak like a man. She would pity him as a man. He would be her husband; he would not be a beast. He would explain how he had beaten his child out of his love for it—out of his obligation to rear it properly. What was there to do? End her marriage? Go back to her father and the farm that joined this land? Watch from there while the man she had promised to cherish forever went ahead and killed himself trying to keep possession of the place to which they had both given nearly a decade of their lives?

He had not been this way in those first years. He had truly loved Lucy when she was Cathy’s age. While Lucy was still creeping she would scramble to the door when she heard him scraping his boots on the porch. She would make little baby shouts of excitement waiting for the door to open. He would throw her in the air. He would swing her up and down on his foot while she held his fingers in her fists and clamped her strong, tiny legs around his instep. He had been so powerful, the baby so confident. They had reveled in their combination of power and confidence. They had laughed hysterically together, and even then it had been so easy to see how much they were alike. And it had been so charming to see how the giant red-haired father and the elfin platinum-haired baby were so alike, how they both loved what their bodies could do, how they could intoxicate each other with the wildness of their spirits.

When they played that way, she, the mother, the one who had brought the spirits together, had herself felt a wild gaiety that was new and exquisite, as though a great and remarkable thing had come to pass because of her. It had been such an unexpected feeling. Always before, her life had been spent watching on the edge of something and never understanding what it was, but then suddenly, with the bass drum rolling and the miraculous bell pealing, with the laughter of the man and baby all around her in the house, she saw that she had been caught unawares and made a part of the very mechanism of the universe. Paradoxically, she felt that she had already accomplished what she had been put on earth to do, and yet she also knew that her life had only just begun. The hand of God moved her and her own will submitted as it had never done before, and yet she was necessary to the will of God in a way that she had never been before. That was how it was when a woman had her first baby. Every day was filled with unprecedented, humbling, exalting paradoxes.

In those days could the beast have been in the father of the baby? Was the beast in him the day he led the three-thousand-pound bull away from the schoolyard? Did a man have to have a beast in him to deal with such a beast? If the beast had been in him then, why hadn’t she seen it in time? If it had not been in him then, where had it come from since, and why had it come? What was there to do? What was there to do?

And now this child was still like him, so much more than he knew. Now she was proud and there was never anything to say that did not make things harder. The worst part of the beating was not over, but only beginning. It was the humiliation that hurt now, and it was the humiliation that would remain. Long after the welts had gone down and the last greenish-yellow mark of an old bruise had disappeared, the humiliation of a child would defile the house. What was there to do?

Her arms, her body, her throat, her face, even her eyes ached with her need to comfort the child who would never be comforted. She yearned for one thing only—to sit in the corner on the floor of the shadowed bedroom holding the proud doomed little head against her breast till night fell and the merciful angel came for them both. What else was there to do?

It was very hot under the bed. Lucy lay looking up at the lines of short springs hooked together and crossing each other to fasten into the little holes along the frame.

She heard her father come in with the milk and run it through the separator. She heard them all sit down to dinner.

“Where’s Lucy?” her father said.

“She’s not hungry,” her mother answered.

“I’m telling you, Rachel, I’m not going to raise a kid that doesn’t obey me! Absolute obedience must be required of a child! Otherwise, they grow up spoiled rotten. They’re no good to anybody then. Not even themselves. I don’t see why you can’t understand that you don’t do a kid a favor when you spoil him.”

Lucy did not hear her mother say anything. Only after she had heard them all go to bed did she creep up to lie on top of the mattress that she had contemplated so long from below. She had not answered when her mother called to her again after supper. She was beginning to feel a little hungry, but not hungry enough to give in and ask for food.

That night she dreamed again about the great yellow-eyed lion sleeping in the grass. Then the mischievous, noisy monkeys woke him and he saw her and came bounding after her like a flaming thistle in a black wind, while she ran through fields and jungles in a rampant maze with her feet never quite touching the ground. In the morning it seemed that this hysterical landscape had burned against her eyelids all night long until it was replaced by the burning of the early hot day shining strongly down on her bed—the day that finally brought back memory of the reason why her eyes were so dried and salted.

“Lucy isn’t going out with the cows again,” Rachel said to George, quietly, so Lucy could not hear. She was cutting the bread for breakfast; and she paused, resting the knife on the breadboard, and looked up at him. He forced himself to meet her eyes, to prove that he was right.

Then he turned his back to go out the door and summed up the situation as it looked to him.

“If a man can’t count on his own family for help,” he said, “I don’t see how he can be expected to make a go of it. If he has to fight every fat middleman in the country and then his family too, what in Sam Hill is he going to do? When I was half her age, if I’d done a fool thing like that my old man would’ve beat me with a black-snake. Your father spoiled you, and you want me to spoil her”

“I love my father! And just how did you feel about yours?”

“What has that got to do with it?” He grabbed his cap in one hand and the milk pail in the other and headed for the barn. It was nobody’s damned business how he felt about his father—nobody’s.

After breakfast he went out to rake the hay he had mowed a few days before. Hay-raking was about as pleasant as any job he could think of. It was a job that went much faster than most, and gave a man the feeling of having accomplished a great deal in a little while. When he finished a field he liked to look at the long low mounds of half-cured hay, sweetly pungent with the stored work of the resting acres.

But two things spoiled his pleasure in the job today. The hay was so thin this year because of the drought—thinner than he could ever remember it. That was the first thing. The second was that he would have to start using it up almost immediately if he couldn’t figure out some way to get the cows to pasture. Now he was committed to paying for grazing land that would go to waste for the lack of a fence or a herder. How maddening could a man’s life get, anyway?

He could always just drive the cattle over there and hope they’d stay. They probably would, but he could not be sure; and anyhow, he wasn’t the kind to let his stock run loose the way Otto Wilkes did. He could stake out the whole herd, but that would be so much effort for him that it would hardly be worthwhile, considering how rushed he was. The only thing to do was find a herder somewhere or just forget about the pasture. This was what happened when a man’s family let him down. Well, he’d let them know he could manage without them. Next time he went to town he’d find himself a boy. All the farm boys would be working for their own fathers, as children ought to do, but he could find a town boy to do it.

There was one big thing to be optimistic about. He still saw little rust damage in the wheat, though the fields of Marquis all around him were in bad shape. It was just a little too early yet to tell about smut. He didn’t even have to look at his Ceres to know that it was suffering from bad grasshopper damage. But so was every other field. His competitors had nothing on him there. If the smut didn’t get him and the rust got everybody else, then he would be one up, at least, on the others.

The price of cream was another thing to be hopeful about, if he could only keep up the production of his herd. Cream was up ten cents a pound over July of last year. He decided to go to town that very day and see if he could find a boy.

He went to Herman first, to ask him if he knew of anybody and to get a package of Bull Durham. Mrs. Finley and her boy Audley were getting their week’s groceries. Now there was a likely-looking lad—about ten, George would judge, and certainly in need of the money. It was handy to have his mother there, too. He could ask them right now.

George cleared his throat. “Say, how would you like to make a loan of this boy here?” he said.

Audley looked as startled as she did. “Loan him? What for?”

“Simplest job in the world. Herd six cows on a section that isn’t fenced alongside of the road.”

“Well,” she hedged, “he’s quite a lot of help to me around the house with the littler ones. I don’t know if I could let him go just now.”

“I’d fetch him and bring him back and pay him a quarter a day for five days a week. How’s that?” George said.

When she got a check at all, Pearl Finley got a relief voucher for four dollars’ worth of groceries a week, for herself and the five kids. Another dollar and a quarter was a lot of money.

“Why, I think that’s just wonderful,” she said. “Audley would love to do that, I know.”

“I don’t like cows much,” Audley said.

“Oh, that don’t matter,” George scoffed. “Who does? A fellow doesn’t have to like them to herd them, does he?”

“Audley would thank you kindly for the job,” Mrs. Finley said firmly.

“Would it be all right if he started today?” George said. “I can wait a minute and run you home with your groceries.”

George waited by the counter, tapping an aimless rhythm on it. He couldn’t get the well out of his mind for a minute. It had filled up just enough in the night so he could water the stock, but they’d have to forget about the tomatoes. What if he had to take time off now to sink another deep well? And what if he couldn’t find water at all? What then? Haul it? Where would he haul it from? And how could he spend all day hauling water, even if he did find somebody who would let him have all he needed? Get rid of the cattle? Then no cream checks. What then?

That was why it was worth a lot to him to get the cows to green pasture, or what passed for that. He was going to pay the boy as much, almost, as it would cost to feed hay, but when cows ate grass they didn’t need so much water. And for the next six weeks, literally every drop made a difference. He could always buy hay, too, though the price was going up. But water he might not be able to buy. If the railroads had to start hauling it in, he could certainly never pay their prices. Other men in other places were doing that, to preserve herds they had spent a lifetime breeding, but he was in no position to buy water.

He and Audley did not talk on the way home after they had let Mrs. Finley off. George felt too triumphant to mess with kid talk. He hadn’t told Rachel what he was going to town for. He jumped out of the car. “Come on in,” he said. “I’ll get the old lady to fix you a bite to eat and then we’ll fetch the cows.”

Audley followed him into the kitchen.

“Well, I got me a boy!” George said loudly. “You know Audley Finley, don’t you? Got me a cow-herder!”

“That’s wonderful,” Rachel said. She knew George wanted her to be angry, but she wasn’t. He never seemed to understand that such things would not anger her.

Haying was the first heroic once-and-for-all job of the summer. The wheat had a month to go yet, and the corn had more than two months. Most of the work between planting and threshing was gardening—long days of weeding and fussing with bugs and sprays. A man got to hating every tiniest seedling weed that had used up some drops of precious water—precious enough when the well had given plenty and only the labor of hauling it up the hill to the garden had made it costly. It was nerve-wracking and degrading to have to feel such anxious solicitude for each root, such anger with each pale green cutworm.

It was a relief to get away from that hard, dry ground, to stand upright with head and shoulders against the sky, and pitch clean hay into the loader. Nobody had to worry about weeds in the hay. The cows could eat around the spiky brown thistles in this, their winter pasture, just as they could eat around the fuzzy green thistles in the summer pasture. A man could charge into haying with all the impatience he had accumulated hoeing in a garden all day.

Lucy loved haying because she was in charge of the hayrack and she drove the team. Every once in a while her father would vault into the hayrack and pitch a few huge forkfuls to the front to make room for more hay coming down from the hay loader in the rear, and then he would jump back to the dusty stubble to pitch to the loader again.

Then it was Lucy’s job to tramp down the hay he had pitched to her. After five minutes of tramping, her legs began to balk, and after ten minutes her thighs turned to stone and her raw tendons disconnected themselves from her ankles and stopped lifting her feet. After that, with a boy out there across the road herding her father’s cows and shaming her, she kept her legs working only by praying all the time that God would not let her be humiliated any more.

She was just turning around the corner of the field and feeling the hot wind shift to her other cheek when she noticed a car stopping at their mailbox. A man got out and read their name. Then he turned down their road, but instead of going on to the house, as they expected him to, he parked as near to them as he could. He climbed through the barbed wire, stretching it badly, and cut through the wheatfield.

“Look at that bird!” her father yelled. “All I’d need is fifty or sixty more like him and there wouldn’t be any wheat left standing to cut. I thought he was the Watkins man. Don’t the Watkins man have a green car like that?”

“Yes, he does,” she yelled back.

The man hurried toward them. Once they saw him skitter sideways and take a few running steps while he watched behind him.

“Scared of a garter snake!” George shouted.

“Good morning,” the man said. Then they knew for sure he was from the city. Nobody in the country said that, just as nobody in the country would say lunch for dinner or dinner for supper.

George swung his fork down and planted the tines a good two inches in the rock-hard ground, gripping the handle with only one fist. The tines struck into the dust very near the man’s shoes. “You know, Mister, nobody ever sold me a thing by trespassing on my property and tramping down my wheat, but bigger men than you have got in trouble for provoking me a lot less than you just did. This here is private property, and I reckon you just better take whatever it is you want to sell me and get right back to your car. And you better walk around that wheat this time or I’m liable to hit you on top of your head so hard you’ll have three tongues in your shoes.”

The man seemed surprisingly unworried—insolent, in fact. George wished the fellow would do something that would justify hitting him. “You must be George Custer,” he said in a peculiar way.

“That’s me,” George said, “and that’s George Custer’s wheat you just walked through.”

“Well, this must be for you, then” the man answered, smiling up at him.

He thrust an envelope into George’s hands and walked away across the hayfield, almost running.

“Now just a minute!” George yelled after him.

“It’s self-explanatory, Mr. Custer!” the man yelled back. “That is, if you can read!”

“Why you little yellow …” George took a half step after him and then stopped to look at the letter. It might be a telegram or something.

The return address impressively printed on the outside was enough. He knew what it was. It was trouble from the office of Sheriff Richard M. Press in the courthouse of Stutsman County. Well, the sheriff had to make it seem as though he was doing his job. Since the law was already working for the really big crooks, it was forced to look hard for some legitimate business.

George watched the little city man backing his car out of the lane. He didn’t even have the guts to drive on down and turn around in the yard. They were all yellow when they weren’t on their own territory. They had to get him alone, down on their own ground, before they dared to go to work on him. He wondered what would happen if he didn’t go. They’d probably come after him with a posse twice the size of the ones that used to go out after Jesse James. That would be gratifying. He’d think about it. After he saw that it was a kind of subpoena, he stuck it in his overall bib pocket and jerked his fork out of the ground. He would have to tell Rachel about it because Lucy would tell. She was looking down at him now from the hayrack.

“Is it a telegram?” she asked. They had got a telegram once when somebody had died. She could barely remember it.

He didn’t really read it until that night after supper. Then he showed it to Rachel. It seemed to him that it was oddly worded. He wished to God he had the money for a lawyer or the time to read up on subpoenas himself. He was positive they were pulling a fast one on him. It ordered him to appear the next Monday as a material witness in a sheriff’s investigation of conspiracy to obstruct the due processes of the law. All the fancy language was there, but that didn’t mean that this was a really legal subpoena.

“What do you think would happen if I didn’t go?” he said, feeling her out. Was she willing to back him up now? To go to war?

“Oh, George,” she said miserably. “For heaven’s sake, do what they say. They’ll fine you, probably, and if they have to come after you, they’ll fine you even more. And besides, how awful that would be—if they came and took you away in one of those cage cars! Oh, why did you do it?”

“Oh now, Rachel! They’re not going to do anything like that! You’re just hysterical. And I did it because once in a while a man has to take a stand and act the way he believes!”

“I don’t think you acted out of any belief at all!” she cried out. “You did it because you got mad, that’s why!”

“That just shows all you know about it. Women!”

Monday, July 31

George rushed through his chores and breakfast and then changed his clothes. He was supposed to be at the courthouse at ten o’clock, and he wanted to be on time. He didn’t want to give them an excuse to add additional penalties to any they might now have in mind. The one thing that terrified him was a fine. He didn’t think they’d dare to lock him up; that would arouse the rest of the men too much. But a fine could easily take at least a month’s extra checks.

He put on the only suit he had—the one he had bought to get married in. It was still new-looking; it had maybe too many buttons on the sleeves, or maybe not enough—he didn’t worry about such things. It fit the way it fitted nine years ago, except that it was a trifle looser here and there. Rachel had starched his collar as stiffly as she could, to make it survive the heat as long as possible, and he wore a smart-looking figured maroon tie to set off the suit.

If only he had a summer hat. He needed it to complement the rest of his outfit. He bent to see the top of his head in the mirror over the washstand. His hair was thinning in an unattractive way, with kinky, sandy wisps straggling over the sunburned skin of his scalp. His neat instincts were bothered by the way his hair was going. He wouldn’t have minded being completely bald so much as he minded this. He felt that he had always looked very youthful for his age. It wouldn’t matter if he did get bald young. But he needed a hat to make himself look really snappy, and cover up that ragged hairline.

“Well, Mrs. Custer,” he said. “You have to admit I make a good-looking jailbird. I’ll be the best-dressed con in the hoosegow.”

He had a way, it seemed to her, of always refusing to admit that things were as bad as they were. He could conceivably be on his way to signing away every bit of cash they would get from the wheat before it was even harvested. How could he joke?

She had a way, it seemed to him, of deflating every effort he made toward rendering an impossible situation possible. All she needed to do was to look up at him the way she looked now.

He knew he couldn’t kiss her goodby. She would turn away. So he turned himself away first.

On the way to Jamestown he decided to buy a hat. He’d get a good one, too, by God—one that went properly with his suit. He’d show them that just because a man wore overalls to get in his hay, he wasn’t any hayseed. In another few weeks he’d show everybody, when he harvested the Ceres. The smutty whiffs he got from the wheat didn’t mean anything. One smutted head in a square yard of healthy heads could stink up the atmosphere. He wasn’t going to worry about it. The well was a more immediate problem.

He paid two and a half for the hat—more than half of a week’s cream checks. To hell with it. Maybe the hat would scare them into giving him his legal rights, whatever they were. He walked up the steps to the second floor of the courthouse and presented himself at the sheriff’s door at exactly ten o’clock.

A sweating, red-faced woman sat before a typewriter at a desk on the other side of the counter from George. Her breasts appeared to be rolled, like thick wads of heavy cotton batting, and they were haphazardly and precariously straining the thin silk blouse.

George took off his hat.

“What can I do for you?” she said. She acted as though anything she did for him would be a very big favor that would put him forever in her debt. Political job, of course, George thought. She probably had something pretty good on Sheriff Richard M. Press. Otherwise he’d have a pretty girl behind that desk.

George pushed the subpoena across the counter. She scudged back her chair and hauled herself out of it. The contrast between the amorphous weight in her pink blouse and the straight narrowness of the skirt encasing her thighs was enough to make a man wonder what she would look like—not that it would be especially desirable. She studied the subpoena—or whatever it was. George could have sworn she knew it was at least questionable, if not downright illegal.

“I see it’s for today,” she said finally. “Couldn’t you serve it yet?” He had a pleased moment, knowing that she did not take him for a criminal, but then he was irritated at having her class him with the little weasel who had served the thing to him.

“No, this is me,” he said. “I’m George Custer!”

She looked at him with a different expression—the one she used for people she could browbeat with impunity. He looked back, and he thought he could see her deciding not to browbeat him.

“Well, I don’t know what he aims to do about it,” she said. “He ain’t in any special place that I know of, so I expect he’ll show up around here sooner or later. He usually checks in around lunchtime. You might as well just set and wait for him.”

The picture was not developing the way George had expected it to. He looked around for a hatrack, but he saw none, so he sat down on a bench and laid the new summer hat beside him. He read the subpoena once again, and wondered for the hundredth time if he could just walk out of the office and forget the whole thing. He reconstructed the picture the way it should have been. He walked in, looking so dapper and polished that the sheriff didn’t recognize him. He handed the subpoena to the sheriff in the envelope so that the sheriff had to take it out himself. The sheriff looked fat and awkward as he fumbled with the envelope. George looked down at him, composed and waiting.

When the sheriff looked back up at him, George would be able to detect his surprise. He would be expecting a chastened farmer in sweaty overalls; instead he would be looking up at a well-dressed, self-possessed man of the world in a new hat. He would realize he didn’t dare go very far with this fellow. George would watch that realization dawning on him. Then they would have a little talk, with the sheriff blustering out of the mess he had got himself into, and George would leave, after letting the sheriff know that he had taken up the time of a very busy man.

And when wheat was pushing three dollars a bushel again, and the rain came again, the picture enlarged with the inspiring clarity of a movie closeup. He would have his own lawyer in Jamestown then, and he would simply pick up his telephone and tell his lawyer to fix everything up—the way his enemies did. But of course they never tried to pull anything like this in the first place with a man who could afford a lawyer.

George picked up the front page of the morning’s Jamestown Sun. It was wilted and used, the way his suit and shirt were beginning to look. In New York State the farmers of four counties were refusing to ship milk into the city at the rates set by the Milk Control Board. They stopped trucks and dumped the milk into ditches, just as the men along Highway Number 20 had done last fall in Iowa. Babies in New York City were dying of malnourishment while the roads leading into the city ran with milk, said the paper. A Pennsylvania coal striker was killed by the state militia. Those poor devils—27,000 of them out on strike while their families starved. The mine-owners who controlled the militia knew damned well their whole ill-gotten empires would collapse if those miners ever really started marching. A five-day heat wave in New York City was blamed for fifty-one deaths. Phooey! In the first place those fifty-one people probably just starved to death, and in the second place those pantywaist Easterners didn’t have the vaguest idea of what a heat wave was.

Noon came and went. The secretary took a sack lunch from her desk drawer. “He probably won’t be back now till after he’s ate,” she said. “You might as well go on out and get a bite yourself. I’ll tell him not to leave till you get back.”

“I’ll wait,” George said.

“Suit yourself.” She shrugged her flabby shoulders and the movement wobbled down the front of her blouse. George went back to the paper.

At a quarter of two the sheriff walked briskly through the door. He nodded toward George and said to the secretary, “Any mail worth looking at?”

“Well, just these. But I think they can wait. This man here —”

“I got some phone calls to make,” the sheriff said. “I’ll get around to him in a while.” He disappeared behind the frosted glass in the door of his office.

George sat for another half hour. A man came through the door behind him, chirped, “Hiya, Toots,” to the secretary, and walked into the sheriff’s office without knocking. Presently Toots’s desk buzzed and she said to George, “You can go on in now.”

Both men sat waiting for him. “Close the door,” the sheriff said, before George had quite managed to get through it. “You wasn’t born in a barn, was you?”

George slammed it hard. The sheriff turned to the man sitting with him behind the desk. “I reckon maybe he was, at that.”

“You are Custer, aren’t you?” he said. “You ain’t dressed quite the way I remember you, but I never forget a face.” George felt as though he was in overalls again. “This here’s the county prosecuting attorney,” he went on, pointing with an elbow at the man beside him.

“Mr. Custer,” the lawyer said.

“A pleasure,” George said savagely.

“Now then, Mr. Custer,” the sheriff began. “We’re busy men—the county attorney here and me —”

“I’m a busy man myself!”

“Well, fine, then, we’ll start right off understanding each other, won’t we?”

“You bet!” George said.

“The attorney here, and me, have the lawful duty to collect money that rightfully belongs to holders of delinquent mortgages. If a sale of chattel property is the only way to do it, then it’s our lawful obligation to hold a sale. When something goes wrong at a sale, we got to have an investigation, see? We got to have records to show just how things went. And we got to have witnesses to them records, so’s nobody can come around later and say to us, ‘No sir, I just don’t believe that’s the way that happened at all. You must’ve been in on that swindle yourself, Sheriff Press.’ Just suppose, now, that Mr. Burr has sent in his report on the sale—just suppose that a man from the head office out in Hartford was to come out here and put it to me—suppose he was to say to me, ‘You’re the man this county elected to enforce the law. What have you done about it?’ So you see, we try and get these records all fixed up while everything is still fresh in everybody’s mind. Do you follow me?”

“Perfectly!” George shouted.

“Now, then, Mr. Custer, I’m just trying to do my job here. Just ask yourself where would you be without the protection of the law.”

“A hell of a lot better off than I am!”

“Now then, Mr. Custer—the county attorney and I have simply got a factual statement of the way the Wilkes auction went on, and we simply have to have that statement attested to by a man that was there. The county attorney here can notarize your signature, of course.”

George was sure, now, that he was being slickered. “What’s the matter with those stool pigeons you had there?” he asked. “Can’t they write? They need a farmer to come all the way down here to Jimtown and show them how to make an X on a dotted line?”

“Oh, my deputies will sign it, too, don’t you worry. But we think, Mr. Custer, that there’d be less chance of argument from your side of the fence if one of you signed it too. After all, you might want to argue some day that our version of the goings-on was attested to only by stool pigeons, mightn’t you?”

“What the hell are you getting at, anyhow! You know I’m not going to argue with you about Wilkes’s sale, and neither is anybody else. It’s all over and done with! Let’s cut out this pussyfooting around. You know damn well that moneybags back in Hartford isn’t going to know me from Adam, and I know my signature on a piece of paper isn’t going to get him off your tail if he takes a notion to send you back out to Wilkes to collect his money for him. Now let’s quit beating around the bush.”

“All right, Mr. Custer! You don’t suppose I’m going to go out and conduct another foreclosure sale with rabble-rousers and crazy men there, do you? I don’t have to explain to you that it wouldn’t be smart for a man with his name signed on a paper like this to show up at any more sales in this county, do I? Now I advise you to sign your name here and stop wasting everybody’s time. Go ahead and read it.”

George snatched the paper from the desk. He was prepared to see Wilkes’s name there, and somehow the sheriff had found out who he was, so he expected his own name. But how had Press found out that they met at Will’s house the night before the auction? Good God—they had even found out who owned the mare! And who had told him that Wallace Esskew had been the one to haul out a gun at exactly the right moment? Oscar Johnson’s name was there—every man who had opened his mouth in the sham bidding was named. Who was the stool pigeon whose name wasn’t on the paper? But the shocker was the last brief paragraph. It was written as though he himself had given all the information that preceded it.

It was so far-fetched that he began to laugh.

He stood up. “I advise you,” he said, “to get the Judas that gave you this to sign it. Whoever he is, he’d steal the pennies off a dead man’s eyes, so you shouldn’t have no trouble.”

“Oh, there is one trouble, Mr. Custer. He’s not nearly such a dependable witness as you. If a man like you signs his name, it means something, doesn’t it, Mr. Custer?”

“You bet it does! There’s not a man that knows my name that doesn’t know it stands for an honest man and a gentleman!”

“Well, now, that’s just why that name is worth a lot to me — and to you too, I imagine. Maybe it’s even worth enough to you so if it sets here in my file when I go out to the next foreclosure sale, you just won’t be able to find the time to be on hand. What do you think?”

George did not say what he thought. He was so far gone in rage that he was becoming two men—one observing the other—the way he often did in dreams—one wondering what the other might do.

“Well,” the sheriff went on. “I was hoping we wouldn’t have to show you this other paper here. I was hoping we could just tear it up.” He twisted his ugly square head toward the attorney. One man in the dream twisted it the rest of the way around—all the way off.

The attorney hauled another sheet of legal-size paper from his coat pocket.

“Compliments of the county attorney’s office,” he said, smiling.

One man in the dream read the paper and saw that it was a warrant for his arrest on a charge of inciting to riot, and saw also that it looked very legal, except that nobody had incited a riot. The dream ended with a noise made by both men and then by George himself. “There wasn’t any God-damn riot!”

“Oh?” The county attorney smiled again. “That could be kind of expensive to prove, couldn’t it? And if you did win your case, you’d still have to sit in jail for a few weeks before you got to court—unless, of course, you could lay your hands on a considerable amount of cash bail. Otherwise you might sit right here when you ought to be out threshing, mightn’t you?”

“You haven’t got a jail in this town that could hold me!”

“Oh, come, Mr. Custer. Take another look at this statement. It’s really a perfectly accurate statement, is it not? We wouldn’t ask you to perjure yourself, now would we? There’s no reason for this paper ever to bother you again, if you’ll only remember to conduct yourself in a sensible manner henceforth. Don’t you agree? Come now. We’re all busy men.”

There was only one way to spring the trap—for a little guy without any money. So what if he could win a case? He couldn’t spare even this day away from the farm. Weasels were the cleverest creatures at getting out of traps, and here was the weaseling all written out in front of him, waiting for the signature of the weasel. But somebody before him had been the big weasel. That was the first traitor—the one to blame. But the first traitor was nameless. He was protected by the sheriff. George realized that now he himself would have to have the same protection from the same repugnant source.

“If you get my name on that statement,” George said, “What do I get?”

“It doesn’t seem to me, Mr. Custer, that you are in a position to ask for anything at all,” the attorney said. George could see him hesitate. They obviously hadn’t expected him to be quite so difficult. He was losing, of course, but not so easily as they had thought he would. “How would you like this for a little keepsake?” the lawyer asked, holding the riot arrest warrant at George and looking at the sheriff.

George didn’t understand for a moment, and then he saw that, in his own hands, the arrest warrant had considerable power. For one thing, it was certainly not a document he would have legitimate reason to possess. He could bother them with it if they bothered him with his signature on the statement. They still had the upper hand, for they could ruin him with his neighbors if they wanted to, but if he didn’t bother them any more, they would not want to waste time bothering him either. This was the law in practical operation. Learn something every day.

George flipped the warrant out of the attorney’s hand and stuffed it into his inside coat pocket. He took the pen the sheriff was holding for him and scratched his name across the paper beside the X.

“Very good, Mr. Custer.” the prosecutor said.

It wasn’t till he was going to turn on to the highway and he looked up into the rear view mirror that he realized he had left the new summer hat on the bench in the sheriff’s office.

All the way home he could think only far enough to feel his fists beating the body of the stool pigeon—the anonymous first traitor, the betrayer from the ranks of little men who had stood together, for once, against the conspiracies of rich men and government.

As he drove through Eureka, he glimpsed Otto’s Percherons trotting down the road to the elevator.

The witness had a reputation for being undependable, the sheriff said. The witness would also be a talkative man, wouldn’t he? And a man over whom the sheriff had power—a man who would be eager to make a deal with the sheriff—a man who would gladly exchange a few of his neighbors’ names for the promise that his precious pair of Percherons would not be put on the auction block again.

If anybody had tried to tell him early this morning that he, George Armstrong Custer, would put his own priceless signature to the statement of a deadbeat cock-sucker, and that he would do this in order to survive for one more year on a rented half-section of dried-up prairie—if anybody had tried to tell him that G. A. Custer would sell his honor and his guts for a chance to harvest a drought-stunted, grasshopper-infested hundred and sixty acres of wheat—well, he probably would have killed the man that had tried to tell him that.

Will had mowed his last field of hay and raked it and turned it once when the clouds appeared one day in the clear northwestern sky. The clouds probably did not mean rain, for rarely had summer clouds brought rain in the last nine summers. But while the wheat could still profit from rain, and rain on the garden could save rows of dying plants, rain on nearly cured hay would only damage it, cause extra labor in turning it, and run him short of time for other things he had to get done before the threshing began. He already had all the outside haystacks he had planned on, and this premium hay was slated for the mow.

He walked through the field, studying the sky, feeling the formidable drag of the pain. He didn’t know but what he might be too sick to work one of these days. If he lost time with the hay and then had to take a couple of days off in bed, he’d be impossibly far behind. He stuck his fork into a long pile of sweet alfalfa and lifted. The hay was on the green side, no doubt of it. If he put this hay into the mow and turned it into musty compost, he would never forgive himself. But his abdomen felt as though he had used the pitchfork on himself instead of the hay.

Rain, sickness, mold, time—these things all had their laws, some of which he understood and some which he did not. Sometimes the laws worked together usefully, from a man’s point of view, and sometimes they did not. Sometimes rain and mold and time made compost just as he wanted them to. Sometimes, if a man had been unlucky or foolish, they made spoiled hay. Decay, sickness, death—sometimes, from a man’s point of view, they were good—sometimes bad. A man’s life was totally dependent upon the same microscopic events that would eventually destroy his life and return him to dust. Sometimes it appeared that he had more choice, or at least more leeway, in his manipulations of the laws than he had at other times. Sometimes he felt forced to confront the laws with his own needs and risk himself to his own ignorant impertinence.

The hay was green, but he would put it away now. He went to town to get help before the rain came. He bought some chewing tobacco and hired Herman Schlaht’s boy Buddy on the spot. Then they got Carl Stensland from the pool hall and rushed back to the hay field.

They set to at a frantic pace. The clouds rolled and blackened, and heat lightning flashed around them in tiers of silent white flames that ignited half the sky. In a few hours the three men had swung the last load on the hay lift in through the high gaping doors of the mow, and stuffed it to the roof with the rich-smelling hay. Despite the drought, the alfalfa had not done too badly. Will was well satisfied to have the top half of his big barn filled with such fine winter pasture, and he was glad he had decided to put it away before rain could wash it out and a second curing would bake more of the nourishment out of it.

The clouds remained all day, but they did not move any nearer and they began to turn lighter again. Perhaps a breeze would spring up in the night and blow the clouds over them and they would wake to the sound of rain. Then he would lie in the darkness rejoicing that rain had come and exulting because for once he had managed to win against the weather.

The next morning the clouds were gone but the sky was less pure than usual. The air was sultry, but there was no rain in it; if they got any precipitation at all, it would be a twenty-minute hailstorm that would beat the wheat down flat and thresh out all the grain and bury it in a slushy white wasteland. In the afternoon the sky began to clear, with the sun growing ever brighter and hotter. The vanished clouds had not been, after all, the overtures of a repentant universe about to send forth the fountains it had so long stopped. Still, there was reason to be grateful; for the murderous balls of ice had been up there and they, like the rain, had gone away again.

After that there were no more clouds. Each day seemed unnatural, endless. When he went out to milk in the evening at six o’clock, with the sun still hours away from setting, the air seemed as hot as it had at noon or at two or four.

Finally one night as he leaned in the doorway of the smothering barn, he confessed to himself that he would have to take it easy the next day unless either the heat or the pain let up a little. The combination was doing him in.

He was so tired that his eyes kept losing their focus on his nine milch cows filing through the door. They kept fading into insubstantial blotches. He was shaken by his pity for the weary blotches. All day long the sun crushed them, withered them. How could they hold back enough water to make their milk? Maybe he ought to skip the milking tonight. Maybe they wouldn’t care whether they were milked or not. Maybe this was the day he should have spent resting. Maybe this was the night he wouldn’t make it through the chores.

He directed himself into the barn, into the first stall. He slid the wooden stanchion against the neck of the first cow. The block of wood that braced the bar felt abnormally big in his hand. Fingers swollen with the heat, he thought. He went in and out of eight more stalls, pushing the stanchions, letting the wood blocks fall. The blocks made a hollow sound as though they were quite far away—much farther away than the length of his arm. The heat, he thought, the heat deadened the air between his ear and the sound.

He went to Charlotte—black, mean, grouchy Charlotte—and clipped her tail to the wire above the stall. Then he snapped the kickers around her smeared legs. She always dirtied herself worse than any other cow. He looked around for the rag to clean her with, but it seemed to be missing. Rose would bring another.

He began milking the cow by the pasture door of the barn. Rose would come soon and begin at the other end of the line. The first jets of milk broke sharply against the sides of the pail between his knees and made a hissing metallic echo that was too close to his ear. Peculiar, how sounds were all coming from the wrong distances. He settled in to the rhythm of the job, leaning forward on his one-legged stool and resting his forehead against the cow’s soft, heated belly. The two thin lines of milk steadily punctured the rising white froth. The sound of the first stream was always pitched higher than the second. Spit-spat, spit-spat, spit-spat, spit-spat, spit—he was sprawling in the straw, the white froth was wetting his legs, the pail was banging the cow’s shanks, the cow was trampling him, she was bending his shin the wrong way, she was breaking it, the roof was flying apart and the hurricane was booming in his ears.

He heard Rose’s screams contending with the cows and the flames, and then the screams shaped themselves into his name.

“I’m all right!” he shouted. “Go back! Go back! Shut your doors! The draft! Stay out! Go back!” Even while he was shouting, gulping smoke, tearing his throat, he could not hear any of his own words. He was as demented as the screeching cows. He lay in the straw commanding his sanity to come back. No matter what else he did in his life, he could do this. He could be sane now.

The heat pressed down out of the mow, but no flames broke through. There was enough fuel up there so the fire would continue to follow its natural upward direction for a little while. There was time, he thought. The smoke was getting bad, but there would be time.

He wormed his way through the straw beside the cow while she did her terrible dance—bracing her feet and hauling back till her jawbones locked against the wooden bars, crying out, plunging forward to crash her shoulders into the stanchion as though she pursued the screaming head there on the other side of the bars.

He pulled himself up by the side of the manger, balanced on his good leg, and lifted the wood block. She was gone before he could get back down on his knees to crawl to the next stall. Thank God it was cows, not horses in here. A cow could get herself out of a fire, but a horse couldn’t. Thank God it was cows.

He got another bad kick in the next stall and he could not really see the cow escape. His streaming eyes had stopped seeing anything but smoke. He felt his way in and out of two more stalls and knew that four of the nine were liberated. He understood that he ought not to try coping with Charlotte, but before he could get around the years of morning and evening habit, he was hanging on the side of the stall and reaching up for the clip that held her tail. It burnt his fingers, but he squeezed until the tail stripped itself away.

Still there were the kickers to undo. He worked at the clamp on the chain between her knees, telling himself how he would shove with his good foot and fall away from the blows of the unfettered legs. But when he shoved, he did not seem to be altogether sure of which direction to fall in. He seemed, in fact, to fall directly into a hoof and knock out his wind on it. When he finally could breathe again, he discovered that there was no air to breathe anyway; it was amazing that a man could keep on moving after he had stopped breathing air, but he found that he had got himself dragged up to the wood block on her stanchion and black, mean, grouchy Charlotte was free.

He started on his hands and knees to find the next cow, keeping one hand cupped over the edge of the refuse ditch in order to know where he was going. The smoking boards of the haymow floor still intervened between him and the holocaust, but down through the knotholes and crevices rained the live sparks—the meteors spewing from a galactic ambush that had been waiting such a long time for him—billions of years it had waited for this blunder of the stellar system containing him. Now the earth fell into the fire, fell at ten thousand miles a minute into the fire, and the meteors rained into the stalls of his barn—the drops of incandescent rain came now to drown his dry planet with light, to transmute it to an evaporating star and to scatter it in darkened cinders.

He thought of Rose, but he couldn’t hold on to the thought long enough to wonder what might have become of her—the thought was only her name, as her screams had been his name. And then he heard only the ancient recapitulation of anguish. In a flight as blazing and lucid as the flights of the meteors raining around him, he understood and entered into the fellowship of despair.…

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me!

She found him lying across the ditch near the next cow he had been going to save. Her scorched eyes barely saw, through the yellowish liquid smoke of the burning grass, the way his body joggled over the strawed floor after her as she backed down the aisle toward the door.

Some burning hay dropped down through a feeder hole over a manger and she imagined she heard above all the other sounds the one last sound that came from the head between those stanchion bars.

She dragged his body over the graveled yard toward the house till his weight collapsed her on the ground beside him. She lifted his head and laid it in her lap.

“Will!” she cried. But the only sounds were the wind of the fire, the snapping of beams, the rasping supplications from the smoke-seared throats of the roasting cows. “Will!”

A cough as frightful as the sounds from the barn vibrated his throat. She began to sob. “Oh thank God! Oh thank God!”

She went on repeating it as she plucked at him—unbuttoning his shirt and pulling the underwear back from his chest, as though by exposing the outside of him to the air, she could clear away the smoke from the inside of him. He smelled like a firebrand. He smelled as if he were a living sacrifice tumbled down from a funeral pyre. His clothes were full of brown-ringed holes and there was a red spot on his skin beneath every hole.

A sensation of movement made her lift her eyes from the face on her lap in time to see the great flower of the windmill plummeting into the flames. The few surviving beams of the haymow gave way and the floor of the fire dropped into the main part of the barn, burning away the bars from the throats that screamed no more. Oh, God, God, God, what if he was in there now?

“Oh, thank God!” She began saying it over and over again.

She never heard the Custer car come up the hill behind her, and when she looked up to see them running toward her, she began to cry again. Only a few tears fell—she was too dried out to have any tears left—but the sobs shook her body and the unconscious head on her lap undulated with her motion in a dreadful acquiescence, as though it would never again move of its own accord.

Rachel knelt beside her mother and took her father’s head into her own lap. “He’s alive,” she said. “He’s alive. He’s alive.”

Rose clutched at her daughter’s arm, yielding as she had not yielded before in all her life, and fainted, drooping forward while a little humming sigh came out of her white lips. George rubbed her wrists. Then he ran into the house for a cup of water and bathed her face with it.

Miraculously, as though her soul had deserted her unconscious body and gone clear to Hell for him this time, refusing to come back until he came too, dragging him back out of the smoke once more, Rose opened her eyes just as Will opened his. He coughed and began to groan softly from his fiery throat. Rose heard him and raised herself on one elbow. “Oh, thank God!” she cried again. The sound of her voice made him aware of the sounds he was making himself. He realized he was groaning and he stopped at once.

“The stock,” he whispered. “Is all the stock out?”

A stampeding litter of shoats came pouring around the side of the granary. Their mother lumbered after them. Her torn snout dripped blood and her face was blood-smeared all around her maniacal little eyes. She had battered through the planks of her pen to get her babies out of the fire.

Rose counted the baby pigs. “They’re all there, Will,” she said. “They got out—every one.”

Will settled more heavily into Rachel’s arms. He closed his eyes.

Neighbors began to arrive and Adolph Beahr came with his big truck and some volunteers. The nearest hospital was in Jamestown, and they decided to go and meet the ambulance. They laid Will in the back seat of Clarence Egger’s new Chrysler and Rachel sat in the front, helping her mother sit up. As Will felt the car slant down his drive, he thought, It’s all downhill now—just one direction now.…

The Eureka volunteer firemen finally ceased their touring inspections and gathered in a watchful, awed knot at the truck. Buddy Schlaht was the most awed of all, for he felt that he bore some responsibility for what had happened.

“I wondered, when I seen how green that hay was, if the old man really knew what he was doing,” he said for the third time.

“I never seen such a sight in my life,” said Ed Greeder. “I was out yonder in my pasture there and all of a sudden I seen that whole roof just blow up. The whole roof afire—all over, all at once. I bet you that thing burnt to the ground in twenty minutes flat. And that was a big barn, too.”

Adolph had reason to be an authority on that kind of fire. “Well, this ain’t the first time I’ve gone out to throw water on what’s left of one of these things—not by a long shot. Usually happens around this time of day, after the sun has beat down on the roof all day long. They always go the same way, too—all at once. Think how hot that hay has to get to just blow up like that. It stands to reason they’re going to go mighty quick.

“I just got a little booklet here the other day from the government,” he said. “I always send for them things. The government says last year there was over a million dollars lost from spontaneous combustion just in grain elevators around the country. Lots of people killed, too. Remember that dust explosion back in Chicago just a couple days before Christmas? Blew the whole damn elevator into little pieces—and two poor devils into littler pieces. You just can’t be too careful when it comes to this kind of stuff. You just can’t believe how hot a big mow jammed up with green hay can get. It ferments and then it’s just like green beer in a bottle. Put a little heat on it and the bottle blows to pieces. You just can’t realize that anything can get so hot till you’ve seen one or two go like this.” He waved his hand toward the spotty red lines around the spaces where the barn used to be.

The sky darkened and the long timbers, broken and fallen into chaos, glowed like the framework of an elaborate burned-out set of fireworks. The wind shifted and the odor of the four cows came around with it. The men smoked and chewed their tobacco and did not mention the smell.

Rachel had been trying to prepare herself for the way her father’s farm would look without its barn, but even from the road none of the other buildings looked right. They were sad, mute orphans, cowering around the spot from which the cords of each proceeded and returned—the sheep shed which sent its population to the barn every year to give up the winter fleeces, the granary which held in its bins the corn and oats that went to the horses, cattle, and pigs, the outbuildings housing the machinery that harvested the hay for the vanished mow. Even the tall yellow building that sheltered the farmer and his family looked as bereft as the others. The most stalwart farmhouse was too frail without a barn looming between it and the outstretched prairie.

For thirty years the structure above that hideous bared space had sheltered animals from week-long blizzards. It had penned in soft-haired calves smelling of the milk they drank. It had provided a high, warm, prickly privacy for the births of generations of barn cats. It had provided eaves over the barnyard to be plastered full of the straw and mud nests of the swallows who swooped through the dusk and helpfully devoured the blood-sucking insects drawn by the animal smells. Now the distraught birds fluttered about the roof of the granary. There were no babies to feed this morning.

The barn was the comfortable meeting place of all the dwellers in its precincts. Even those who properly lived in the other houses were drawn by the barn. The poultry strolled in and out to peck at stray bits of grain and to dust in the straw on blistering days and the dog sought out the coolest stall for a summer nap. If a sheep managed to squeeze under the fence around its shed, it would go to the barn, followed by the rest of the flock, to investigate the interesting sounds and smells there. Children went to the barn to watch a row of tiny pink pigs gluttonously nursing a sow, or they went there to hold a bucket of skim milk for a calf or to seek out the newborn kittens whose eyes were so tightly shut and whose fearful claws, like burrs, sought always to implant themselves in the hay or a sweater or a bare leg.

The menfolk would retire to the barn to perch on the rails of the calf and pig pens whenever womenfolk filled the house. City men, because they had no barns to retreat to, almost always became shockingly coarse on the infrequent occasions when they found themselves in a barn with a farmer. Rachel’s father had often remarked on how surprised some salesman’s wife would be if she could hear what came from her scissor-bill husband out there. Once in a while even a preacher could come up with something that set an old hobo on his ear.

A farm without a barn was like a body with its digestion stopped and the warm and sensual lower portions of its brain gouged away.

“Oh, how will he stand it!” Rachel moaned. “How will he bear it? How will he bear it!”

“Oh, now Rachel! Don’t get hysterical, for Pete’s sake! He’s got insurance, hasn’t he?”

Rachel went into the house with the baby; but George saw Lester Zimmerman’s car slowing on the road below, and he waited for him by the porch. Lucy slipped away and went to the place where the barn had been. She had rather expected to see it there this morning. It had always been there.

The four cows lay where they had fallen at their stanchions. In a few spots where there had been little flesh between the hide and the bones, the hide had burned completely away, leaving the bones a dark dirty yellow. The legs stuck straight out from the bellies as though the cows were standing on a vertical floor that she could not see. The black gristle of their noses was shrunken, and the thin skin that rippled under their jaws was gone, exposing the appallingly long lines of their yellow jawbones set with the jaundiced teeth that had chewed a cud out in the pasture yesterday morning at this hour. Bone showed all around the great eye sockets, swimming with dark jelly.

She stepped over the shards of two crossed beams and felt the heat from a crumpled black milk pail against her leg. Another bit of metal brushed her and she recognized it as the far, proud weather vane she had so often wished to touch. It was much bigger than she had thought it was.

She began to perceive the enormity of the thing that had happened, and she was afraid they would be angry with her for coming to the barn. They often seemed angry when she understood something that she was not supposed to understand. She ran to hide in the granary before the men coming from the house could find her. She sat inside the door on the powdery, rumpled top of a sack of chicken mash and watched what they did.

Her father drove the tractor down from the shed, towing the stoneboat. The other men cleared away enough of the burned wood so he could maneuver it down the aisle. They looped ropes around the stiff legbones of the first cow and pulled her body toward the stoneboat, resting between spurts of hauling.

“Jesus, I never seen an animal burnt up like this,” said Mr. Zimmerman. “A haymow fire don’t usually take off the skin this way. I seen a bunch of horses once that was in a livery stable, and outside of not having no hair left, they could of been just normal. They looked like they just had their hides scraped off and tanned. But I never seen anything like this!”

“The ceiling give way,” Mr. Greeder said. “I could tell, even from where I was at. It just dropped right down onto ‘em. Probably twenty, thirty tons of hay burnt right on top of ‘em.… Ready! Heave! Heave!”

When Rose came home from spending the night in the hospital, she refused to go to bed. “I’ve been in bed all morning!” she said. “I’m not sick! Just leave me be, now. Will wants to see the papers right away.”

She sat down at the desk and located a paper that folded and unfolded like an accordion. “I can’t believe this is all we had,” she said. “There must be a later one than this.” She took the papers out of each pigeonhole and finally emptied each drawer. George loitered in the kitchen, wondering if she already knew about the money, and wondering if she would come across the promissory note for his loan, and if she would be surprised. Will must have kept a record of it somewhere.

“Well, I guess this is all. As far as I can see, this may or may not cover it,” she said. “I just don’t know what I’m going to tell him. He thinks we got them all out. I just don’t see how I’m going to tell him. He would have stayed right there and burned up with them, trying to get them out, and he blames himself for the whole thing. He thinks I got them out. He doesn’t remember.”

“Do we have to tell him?” Rachel asked.

“Now, Rachel, just stop and think a minute!” George said. “Just where is he going to think they are when he gets back?” George was only too well acquainted with where they were. They were in an enormous hole that he and Will Shepard’s neighbors had damned near killed themselves to dig so that Will would never come upon their stinking carcasses or their burnt bones as he went about his farm.

“How am I going to tell him?” Rose asked again.

Will lay in his room in Trinity Hospital, his cracked shin in a cast, his wried shoulder on a hot pack that aggravated two cinder burns on the skin more than it helped the shoulder muscle, and his smashed thumb wrapped in an oversized bandage. Pills to dull his various miseries were dissolving in his stomach.

“Why did I do it? Why did I do it why did I do it?”

He had said the words to himself so many times that they became as abstract and confusing as the pain in his body. The words ran into each other until they wouldn’t go into the rhythm of a sentence any more. All that day he lay adrift in his abstractions, but that night he slept, and when he waked up the next morning his head was clear again.

A doctor came in and poked at him. “Now let’s see about your middle, here,” he said. “We just want to know that nothing is ruptured down here. We didn’t want to pester you with X-rays yesterday, because what you mostly seemed to need was air. You obviously got a kick or two, if we can judge by these.” He touched a couple of spots that Will didn’t have to see in order to know they were black-and-blue.

“When can I go home?” Will said.

“Mr. Shepard, yesterday you acted like a man with a lot of trouble somewhere. We have to make sure you’re all right before we release you. Tomorrow we have to get some pictures.”

The doctor probed farther down in his abdomen. Will could not stop an agonized reflex in a couple of places.

“I don’t see why it should hurt here.” He delved into the bad spots again. “No contusions at all, that I can see.”

Of course it doesn’t show—what’s really gone wrong—Will could have told him. You don’t know what I know and how could you? You know about your microscopic events and I know about mine. You can’t see what’s wrong with me, but I understand it. It’s a set of laws working a different way, toward a different end. I thought that if I wasn’t going to save my hay it would be because the laws destroyed it with mold, but the laws destroyed it with fire instead. All perfectly legal—however unexpected, however unprepared for.

That morning I put the hay in—then I saw only as far as those clouds—the half-inch of water that might have fallen from them, the hay grown in a few mortal weeks on a tiny piece of a tiny particle in space, the few mortal days of my own that I coveted as though they were mine alone and not a part of all those laws around me. Now I see that rain, that field, those bits of time—I see them from the other side of the clouds. There was that moment in the hot rain when I was so foolish as to believe that God ought to save me from the laws. But now I can see things in a longer light, from the other side of the clouds. Go ahead and take all the pictures you want.

They took the pictures the next morning and in the afternoon the doctor came again. He looked at the purple thumbnail, felt the shoulder, tapped the cast nervously with his pen.

“Mr. Shepard,” he said. “I want you to go and see a specialist in Bismarck as soon as you can comfortably travel there.” He wrote on a prescription pad and handed it to Will.

“He’s as good a man as there is in the state.”

“When can I go home?” Will asked.

“Probably day after tomorrow, if the leg seems to be doing all right. Of course you’ll have to stay off it for quite a while. But it’s not a bad break and you ought to mend nicely.”

Will looked at the scrap of paper. There was the name of a drugstore on it, and a telephone number. Under that the doctor’s handwriting said, “Oliver Murdoch, M.D. Internist. Bismarck. Mercy Hospital.”

He laid it on his bedside table and then he picked it up to throw it away, but instead he stuffed it into his billfold.

The Eggers came all the way down to get him because their Chrysler was so much smoother-riding than the Custers’ old car. Where Clarence had got the money for it, Will couldn’t imagine. For a one-armed man Clarence drove with amazing skill.

Will had the whole back seat to himself, and he was comfortable enough, but he couldn’t think of anything except how his barnyard was going to look without a barn in it. And he kept trying to remember how he had got all those cows out.

When he and Rose were finally alone, he said, “We got them all out, of course.”

He knew, because she wouldn’t look at him.

“How many?” he asked.

“Four. Four cows. All the pigs got out.”

Four cows tortured to death because he had locked them in stanchions under hay he had put away knowing that it was too green.

But it had been harder for Rose than for him. He had been lying in a hospital, not having to know, while she had been here alone with the knowledge, with the cleanup, with the night memories and the screams.

“You ought to have told me right away,” he said.

“What good would that have done? Do you want to go to sleep now?”

For four days he had been fighting to extricate himself from the clawing images of the fire. Every time he closed his eyes he was like a fly trapped in an infernal kaleidoscope. He was surrounded by the multiplying images of flame and torture and guilt and condemnation that fell together and then fell apart as the garish triangles spun and spun. Even before he knew about the cows, he had wondered when the mirrors would slow in their spinning—when he would be allowed to crawl to their convergence and escape through the long empty eye of forgetfulness. But now he knew that the kaleidoscope would never let him go. No, he did not wish to close his eyes just now.

“No, I think I’ll just catch up on the Sun, if you saved the back copies.”

The Custers did their own chores early and came over to help Rose and to have supper with Will. After supper George lingered in the bedroom while the women did the dishes, waiting for Will to mention that the loan would come in handy now, for the doctor and the hospital, not to mention finishing the new barn.

I should simply bring it to him, George thought, but since he had no idea of where he could get what he had spent of it or how he could last through the summer without the rest of it, he continued to talk of nothing and to sit with his kitchen chair tipped back against the dresser, his wrists dangling at his sides, his fists curling and uncurling around the rungs of the chair. He was positive that Will knew what he was waiting for. Why didn’t the old man go ahead and spring it?

But Will was thinking of the boy last heard from nearly eight months ago in Arizona. Would he come home in time or not?

Finally George let down the front legs of his chair and stood up. “Well, take ‘er easy,” he said. He went out to the kitchen to start the family moving toward the car. He couldn’t stand it any longer.

After they had gone, Will called out to the kitchen. “Rose, do you think if we could get in touch with Stuart he’d come home?”

“I think he’ll come home if and when he feels like it. He’ll come home if he runs out of money or if he gets sick. We wouldn’t have heard from him the last time or the time before that if he hadn’t needed money to get out of trouble—or to spend on liquor! Where does he always find it? What good are the laws, anyway?”

George lay awake in the stagnant air of the low little house. A man might as well try to sleep in a fireless cooker as a one-story house after a day of so much sun. The house, like the cooker, absorbed heat all day long and cooked all night.

The old man expects me to bring it to him, George thought, but he’s not going to ask me for it. After he practically forced it on me in the first place. What if he needs it to get his wheat threshed? He must have finished off his Jimtown account to bail himself out of the hospital. Now Rachel will have to know. Damn him—if he needs it he ought to ask for it. How am I supposed to know what to do? God-damn it, this is what comes of borrowing from a man’s inlaws.…

A small futile sound escaped from his throat. From the way Rachel moved, he knew she heard it and was not asleep either. He rolled over to her roughly, and roughly took what was his.

Afterwards, like the man in the desert whose last reckless strength has brought him running to an illusion, he was more alone than ever. What the hell had made her change so much, anyway? He’d never forgotten the joke his brother had made when he got married. “You just remember what I say, Georgie-Porgie. Put a bean in a jar for every time during the first year, and then take one out for every time after the first year. I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts you’ll never get all them beans back out of the jar again.”

Rachel didn’t wake up until just before five, and she hurried to make a fire in the kitchen range. “Monarch” was stamped in the nickel-plated frame around each of the warming-oven doors at her eye level. She wondered idly, as she had a thousand times, what could possibly be royal about the black monster that dominated her life. She doubted that the manufacturer had meant quite the quality of dominance she had in mind. She lifted out the two lids, each as big around as the bottom of her gallon teakettle. Lately in the mornings her wrists had been so weak and achy that she had to use both hands on the lifter. By the time she went out to get the first bucket of water she was usually all right, but still it made her desperate to wake in the morning and not have her joints work properly. The only hope left was in the strength of their limbs. The strength of the land was wasting away, and they had to make up for that depletion with their own strength.

She went out to the porch to get the boiler and she saw how the weeds that had managed to survive in the afternoon shade of the house seemed to be wilting already in the morning sun. It was going to be a bad day to wash, but there were no clean diapers left for the baby.

She was just ready to start down the hill for water when George came into the kitchen.

“I’ll fetch you a couple of pails full,” he said. “Just as soon as I tie up my shoes here.” He guarded the well now, even from her. He was like a dragon brooding over a magic fountain. If he was attentive enough, the temperamental fairy in the fountain would feel propitiated; she would not give the order that dried up the fountain.

He came back up with the two buckets and dumped them in the boiler for her. Then he brought two more, but he dumped only one into the boiler.

“Can you get along on that?” he said.

While he was milking she started wringing out the diapers she had had soaking in the wash tub on the porch. She unfolded them and dropped them into the boiler, poking them down into the warming water and stirring the soap around to try to get a little suds. Then she dipped the mop pail full of the soiled water in the tub and carried it out to the garden where she poured it gently around several hills in a row of beans. It was not good to do any watering now, early in the morning, because so much would be lost through evaporation, but she had forgotten to wring out the diapers the night before and now she had to empty the tub so she could put clean rinse water in it.

George came up with the milk as she was returning from the garden with the empty bucket. “My God! You’re not watering this time of day?” He was almost hysterical. He acted as though he might strike her.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know I should have emptied the tub last night. I was too worried about Dad to be able to think straight.”

“Honestly, Rachel, I just don’t understand why you can’t keep a thing like this well on your mind all the time! Just what do you think we’re going to do if we run out of water, anyway? Do you think I can just say abracadabra and produce an unlimited supply of water for you to waste?”

“Oh, George, you know I don’t waste water!”

“You are wasting it—right now! Just deliberately wasting it! I can see with my own eyes, can’t I?”

He went into the kitchen but she stayed on the porch till she got control of herself. After nine years he could still wound her by saying things they both knew weren’t true. She wondered why it was that his wildest, most farfetched accusations were the ones that hurt the most. They were the ones she ought to be able to forget entirely, weren’t they? She emptied the last pail of fresh water into the tub and watched while the sun flitted over its agitated surface and then settled into the trembling rings of light made by the galvanized ridges around the bottom of the tub. It was a hot light—as though the sun would drain the tub before she could come back out and rinse her clothes. Wherever she looked, she saw the greedy sun. Would the sun never be satisfied till every well in the world was dry?

After breakfast George took a hoe and went out to the potato patch. As he walked along the edge of the wheat, he couldn’t help noticing that the fishy odor of smut was getting stronger. “Must be the way the wind’s blowing,” he thought.

Lucy came too, carrying her gallon Karo pail with a cup of kerosene sloshing in its bottom. She knelt at the end of the row he was hoeing and began plucking the striped potato bugs from the leaves and dropping them into her kerosene. Some of the leaves were eaten away to the delicate lace of their skeletons; they were quite pretty, those leaf skeletons; but if there were too many of them the plants no longer breathed, and then the potatoes would be no bigger than pullets’ eggs, and sacks and sacks of them together would never feed the family through the winter.

She had to watch, too, for the deposits of eggs glued to the undersides of the leaves, though there were not so many now as there had been earlier in the summer. The eggs were bright yellow, like the yolk of a hen’s egg, and rather soft. Any leaves with eggs on them had to be picked off and dropped into the kerosene along with the black-and-yellow bugs. Most horrid of all were the fat squishy larvae which had not yet grown their hard beetle shells. They were made of nothing but mashy insides that popped all over her fingers.

Potatoes and potato bugs. They were about equally monotonous. After attending to ten plants she had the bottom of her pail almost covered with the bodies of bugs in both stages, a mixture of segmented larvae and striped beetles, like buttons in a drawer. They all died the moment they sank beneath the kerosene. She could scarcely bear the feel of their legs struggling against the ball of her thumb and because of that awful feeling she was not sorry that they had to die, but it did make her a little sick to have to drop them into her noxious pail. Why hadn’t they gone ahead and died when her father sprayed them with the Black Leaf 40?

The heat made the fumes rise around her face till she seemed herself to be drowning along with the bugs, and she wondered, as she often did, how it felt to be a bug. Once she had sat on the porch for a long hot time after Sunday school and tried to imagine how God had started. God had made everything else, but how had He been made? She had decided, after thinking of all the smallest things in the world, that God must have been a bug in the empty air—a very tiny bug that made Himself grow and grow and grow until He was big enough to fill part of the sky and to start making the rest of the world. Everything started by being small and growing bigger, and that must have been the way God started, too. A tiny bug was the smallest thing there was. That had to be what He used to begin Himself with.

She had an awful feeling, when she had to kill bugs, that God had a special attachment to them. She could feel Him hovering over her shoulders, telling her through the blasting rays of the sun that she was doing an unforgivable thing.

“How many you got there?” he called.

She felt the deadly ice pierce through her and then she was embarrassed to have been overtaken and so violently surprised in her own silly feelings. She leaped obediently to her feet and made a mark in the dust with her toe, as though she could order the potato-bug commerce to stop on either side of it, and ran toward him with her pail.

George had merely meant to be companionable when he called to her. He had wanted to let her know that he knew how it was to work at a job that there was no possibility of finishing—how he understood her frustration at knowing that no matter how many bugs she found, she still would have to be aware that all the potato bugs in the patch seemed to be rushing to repossess the row behind her. He felt the same way about the weeds he was hoeing.

He had meant for her to call back something that might be friendly, or even jocular, so long as it was respectful—anything to complement the effort he had made to create in the potato patch the kind of cordial family cooperation that could refresh and inspire all those who worked together for survival. Now he felt trapped by the hopelessness of trying to be friends with her, and when she held up the pail to him, with its smell and the dead dozens of beetles circling slowly in its bottom, he tightened his lips and looked away from her raised eyes.

“Quite a fair number, I see,” he said. “Now just make sure you don’t miss any. One old grandma can lay a lot of eggs.”

Lucy nodded her head and lowered her pail. Back on her knees at the mark she had made, she took up where she had left off, pushing each plant away from her with one forearm and letting the leaves shuffle back gradually while she watched for the yolky eggs and the black-and-yellow stripes.

Her father liked to tell her when she worked at this job that President Hoover had got paid a penny a hundred for picking potato bugs when he was a little boy. Hoover liked to talk about that in his speeches about people helping themselves. “I guess that’s why he kept saying prosperity was just around the corner. I guess he had things too easy when he was a kid. He never found out how hard it really is to earn a penny!” Her father would say that and look down at her on the ground in the potato row and laugh, and she would not be able to see exactly why.

Monday, August 14

The news came from Austria that while Soviet wheat was being dumped on the world market for less than it cost to produce, millions of Russians had died of starvation during the summer. The Kremlin officially denied that anyone had starved to death in Russia, and then doubled the price of a loaf of bread.

George Custer decided that the day had come to cut his wheat, and early in the morning he went out and oiled a few spots on the reaper, installed a new roll of binder twine, hitched up the horses, and trundled the big old machine out to the near corner of the field he had planted first. He lowered the blade and let it bite its first swath of the Ceres. Despite his repairs, the ancient machine couldn’t do the kind of job it should have. It flailed about like a rampaging Dutch windmill, wasting more wheat than he cared to think about. All day long the serrated blade chopped through the dry stems and the revolving wooden wings swept up the wheat and the spool of twine rotated as the bundles dropped behind him. It was an outmoded way to do things. He should have had a tractor and a combine, but he didn’t. A combine handled the wheat once. With a reaper a man handled it four times: first he cut it, then he shocked the bundles, then he pitched the bundles into a hayrack to carry it to a threshing machine, then he pitched it out of the hayrack into the machine.

The smut was bad. He was out in the middle of the field now, and he rarely got a breath of air that did not smell of it. Stinking smut alone, of all the enemies of wheat, he had read in the Sun last night, was causing a loss of as much as eighteen million bushels per year in the United States. The stench filling his nose and mouth assured him that he would be contributing at least his share to this year’s national smut losses.

Besides the initial loss in the field, he might be docked as much as ten cents a bushel by the millers who had to clean it out of the wheat. He had had the feeling all along that Adolph lied to him about the seed. Now he was sure of it, but how could he prove that Adolph deliberately swindled him?

Still, he couldn’t help being excited when he began the shocking. Even if some of the heads were smutted, the stems and leaves, considering the drought, were remarkably strong and healthy. Next year, with properly treated seed, then everybody would see how right he was.

He felt sorry for people who punched a time clock all year round and never knew when one season ended and another began. And it was his pleasure in seasons that kept him from being altogether sorry that he didn’t own a combine. If he had a combine he’d never see his fields in shocks. Ever since he’d been big enough to tag the men around, he’d liked wandering over the new golden stubble, through the rich marshaling of the mown treasure, between the formal ranks casting their shadows across the hundreds of acres.

It always made him proud to see shocks or bundles of wheat on the great seals and the coins of states and nations, or even to see the two heads of wheat curved around the back of a penny beneath the E PLURIBUS UNUM. Somebody a long time ago had figured out that unity and abundance went together. Now it seemed that abundance was on the verge of shattering unity. Perhaps some people whose pennies were all too abundant would be forced to think a little more, before long, about the men who grew the wheat that framed the motto.

The stories about the threshers preceded them, traveling from wife to wife, from county to county, from South to North, from Texas to Manitoba. The migrant threshing crews had numbered a quarter million men when Rachel was a young girl helping her mother cook for the threshers; but now there were only a few thousand left, because combines had replaced them. Nevertheless, the straggling remnant kept alive all the traditions of the former great army. Every year somebody told Rachel the same kind of stories she remembered hearing some neighbor woman recount to her mother in the kitchen while they cooked in frantic preparation for the epic digestions that were coming to feed at their table for four or five eternal days.

Long before the threshermen got to the Custer place, Rachel had heard about the oversized Swede who ate a dozen eggs for breakfast and then demanded fried potatoes and sometimes pie besides. For the midmorning lunch he ate five sandwiches of thick-sliced homemade bread and more pie. For dinner he ate a quart of mashed potatoes, half a pound of ham, a pint of cole slaw, five or six slices of bread, and a quarter of a pie. For the midafternoon lunch he ate only three sandwiches because he did not want to spoil his appetite for supper, at which time he ate about what he had at dinner, except that he wanted cake instead of pie. Even allowing for the way Elsie Egger exaggerated things she had heard, Rachel wondered how she was ever going to manage if the whole crew ate that way. It sounded like the worst crew she had ever heard of.

There was one man who was no more than a boy, really, who could drink even the Swede under the table on a Saturday night and then go on a binge that would have finished off most of his elders. He had never been known to turn down the vilest brew, and it was only a question of time till he would get hold of something that would kill him on the spot—not that it would matter at all to him, the way he carried on. Rachel hoped he wouldn’t manage to find any of it while he was around their place. It was hard to know what she should really expect because she was getting the crew before anybody else in the community. Elsie, as always, had got her stories from her sister-in-law down at Gackle.

Rachel baked two batches of bread a day for the two days before they came. She hoped she wouldn’t have to feed them store bread because they always complained that there was nothing to it. She also baked a half dozen pie shells to be filled with lemon or chocolate custard just before a meal.

On the night before the threshers were due, George helped her put all the leaves in the round table, making its oval length fill the room. The oilcloth was not big enough to cover it, so she put on the good damask cloth she used for Sunday dinners, hoping she would somehow be able to get all the stains out of it again.

The next morning they were up at four. Rachel had to begin the day’s cooking, and George wanted to be sure the chores were out of the way and the horses hitched and the hayrack loaded with the first bunch of sheaves by the time the separator arrived. The family sat about the table, strangely far from each other. George was nervous. Crews didn’t always show up when they said they would. The wheat had been standing in shocks long enough. Every day, even though the sky remained cloudless, he feared that rain or hail or a high wind might come and knock the ripe heads out of the wheat.

Lucy, feeling remote enough from watching eyes, used her thumb against the edge of her oatmeal bowl to push the last bite of porridge into her spoon. Her father caught her, of course. “Oh, George!” her mother said. “She’ll never eat right if you keep at her like that!”

“I just don’t want her to be embarrassed! I’m trying to teach her some manners for her own good,” said her father. He pushed back his chair and went down to harness up the teams.

Lucy ran up the road to wait for the threshers. There were not nearly so many grasshoppers now that the wheat was cut. If one did jump at her, he had to jump from the stubble, not the top of the wheat, and that made him land against her legs instead of her neck or her face.

The rig would be coming from the south, and she was watching in that direction when the Sinclairs’ car came up behind her from town. Giles was driving it and Douglas was with him. Giles was coming to help with the threshing, but what was Douglas doing here?

He was always teasing her at school. Once when she was riding on the merry-go-round, the garter on her stocking broke and the end of it hung down below her dress. Douglas saw it and started laughing and pointing and yelling, “I see Germany, I see France! I see Lucy’s underpants!” Everybody on the merry-go-round had laughed then, and it was almost the worst thing that had ever happened to her in two long years of school. She had to wait forever until the merry-go-round stopped and she could get off. And just before school ended last spring Douglas had chased her and gotten two pencils away from her and he had kept one of them.

“Hello there,” Giles said. “Where’s the thrashers?”

“I don’t know,” Lucy said, not looking at Douglas at all.

“Well, I’ll go on down and start loading bundles, I guess.” Giles started to drive away but Douglas yelled to be let out.

“Let’s play hide and seek behind the shocks.” He spoke in the bossy way boys always did to girls. He wasn’t asking if she wanted to play; he was telling her to play.

“No,” Lucy said. “I want to watch for the thrashing machine to come.” Even if there had been nothing else to do, she would not have played with Douglas, but now she was especially annoyed at having him around. She had the same feelings about the threshing as she had about watching a train. She wanted to see it from the very beginning to the very end. She wanted to catch the first sight of the separator trundling slowly along the road to the waiting shocks in her father’s fields, to be near it while it threshed out all the wheat, and then watch it out of sight again as it moved away toward her grandfather’s farm.

“Besides,” she told Douglas, “you never gave back my pencil.”

“What pencil?”

She looked away from him. Wasn’t it bad enough to be pestered by him at school? Did he have to come all the way out here to keep it up?

Then she saw the threshing machine. It was a spot she had had her eye on for quite a while but she hadn’t wanted to say anything till she was sure. It had disappeared behind a hill and reappeared, much larger, and now there was no mistaking it—after all, it was bigger than the house she lived in. The first sounds of it began to reach them and soon she could distinguish the noise of the tractor pulling it from the sounds of its own ponderous joints.

George came up to the road to watch it travel the last half mile. He was as excited as Lucy. He’d know, now, in a few more hours, what a difference planting the Ceres had made. It was hard to judge a yield just by walking through the wheat and plucking a head of it here and there. He waved his hat, when the rig got close, and the man driving the tractor waved a speck of white.

As the noise grew louder still, it was like the finale of a resolute, yet triumphant war song. The little parade of the tractor, separator, and truck was more throat-tightening to a man like George than any city street parade of bugles, drums, or bagpipes could ever be. He was grinning and swallowing as he watched it and listened to it. The cry of the final hours of fierce and iron-hearted toil was in the chaotic music coming toward them, but there was a cry of victory, too—an incredible, prayed-for, cursed-for, watched-for victory. Just two more days without rain or hail or wind or fatal accidents or locust migrations and the war song would be unequivocally a victory song when the parade moved on again.

The tractor driver leaned down to howl over the engine, “Where do you want her?”

With one hand George pointed toward the field where he and Giles had begun to work. With the other he made a megaphone to carry his voice through the six feet of noise between his mouth and the man’s ear. “Set ‘er up right in the middle over there,” he shouted.

The man swung as wide as the road would let him and managed to bring the threshing machine straight in behind the tractor. There was no room to spare on either side of the locomotive-like wheels as they rolled across the approach that spanned the deep ditch. He did a nice job, George was glad to see, and he seemed to take such a touchy piece of maneuvering in his stride.

George and Douglas and Lucy walked beside the rig till it stopped. The tractor driver shut off the engine and climbed down. He was the boss of the outfit and he hurried around giving orders to get the big machine ready to go. He walked past the hayrack and got a whiff of the wheat. “That sure must be damn smutty wheat!” he said. “Been a lot of smutty wheat this year, but I never smelt it any worse than I do right now. One time I got too many of them smut balls in a old separator and blew it all to hell. Damn near killed a thrasher, too.”

“You got insurance on this rig?” George asked.

“Ya, but none on the men. How you going to insure a crew when they change every week on you? Looks like I’m going to have to find another man this morning if my drinkin’ boy don’t show up. He got hold of some stuff last night and we couldn’t even find him this morning. Somebody said he went back down to Gackle.”

“Has the Marquis been smutty?” George wanted to know.

“Ya, pretty bad. They figure there’s some new kind of smut this year. Everything’s smutty. You can’t win. Even if you do get the stuff to grow, you can’t sell it, can you?”

“Oh, the price is up a lot over last year,” George said. He made up his mind not to wonder how much he’d get docked for the smut. In a few minutes now the crop that had required so much work and so much waiting would begin pouring out of the machine. Finally he had a little control. The crows he couldn’t control had left some seed in the ground for him; the freak late frost he couldn’t control had not come; the grasshoppers had not cleaned out the fields, though they tried; the black clouds had not brought tornadoes or hail.

Now at last there was a job he could do—a job to put all his strength into—a job that would quickly fill the truck, while he watched, with the results of all the work and the waiting. It was an intoxicating feeling. It made him want to slap somebody on the back and sing, even with his throat full of dust and chaff.

Despite the man-killing tempo set by the separator’s roaring appetite, the field was a festive place. Once every second the engine uttered a sharp, open-mouthed sneeze—“Ka-chung! Ka-chung! Ka-chung!” It was like the engines that ran the concessions at carnivals and fairs. Down below the people whirling around in capsules called Dipsy-Doodles, and down below the people turning in the great circles of the Ferris wheels would be the same sneezing engines and the oil-smudged men with their hands on the long throbbing levers that stopped and started the machines that made the rides go round. But this field resounding with one such engine was a thousand times better than a carnival to George.

Lucy stayed at a little distance from the machine, watching them get ready. There were so many belts and pulleys to slip over wheels and tighten, hatches to batten and unbatten, spouts to extend and bolt together, levers to adjust, and cranks to crank that turned grinding parts deep inside the machine. There were steadying blocks to put beneath the separator’s belly and finally there was the truck to be backed up under the grain spout and the hayrack to be drawn up beside the bundle chute.

Lucy saw her father high on top of the bundles, shoving them in by huge forkfuls. He leaned far over the chomping ravening insides of the separator. She knew that Clarence Egger had only one arm because the other one had got caught in a threshing-machine belt. And last year she heard about the thing she knew was bound to happen. She heard one thresher tell another one about a big dumb Finn who fell into a threshing machine.

“Yes sir,” the thresherman said, “that Finn wanted that job so bad and he was so scared he’d get the boss mad at him. He just kept on pitching harder and harder until he went right on in with a big forkful. That was his last forkful. Unless the Devil give him a pitchfork when he got down to Hell. Nowadays these rigs couldn’t of handled him, but that thing was one of them big steam jobs—kept two-three men busy just stoking her with wood to keep the steam up. That separator could of thrashed ten Finns, all at once! We hollered at the boss, ‘The Finn’s in the bundle chute! Stop the engine!’ The boss yells back, ‘He’s a goner!’ He was right, too. By the time we got it stopped, that Finn wasn’t in the bundle chute any more. He just wasn’t anywhere at all—that is, his top half wasn’t anywhere at all. We hauled out his legs and laid ’em in a blanket and started up the machine again.

“When his buddy from the Old Country come back in from the field with a load of bundles, we says, ‘There’s your pal down there,’ but he couldn’t understand the language. Somebody took him over and showed him what was wrapped up in the blanket. When he seen it was his buddy’s boots you never saw such a surprised man in your life.

“Finally he pointed to himself up above his waist, and patted his hands up and down over his stomach, and felt of his head. All the time he kept yelling in his own language. We kept pointing at the thrashing machine, and when he finally come to believe it, he just up and run. You never seen a man run like that. Just took off right over the stubble and never did stop, as far as I know. Anyhow, we never seen him again. You know, there in Europe they don’t have any of this machinery. Those foreigners that come over here, they just don’t know what to make of it all. They’re scared to death of a rig like this here one even, and they can’t understand nothing you yell at them. It’s no wonder they get theirselves killed off all the time.”

He was nearly finished with his sandwich, but he wanted to spread out his rest break a little longer. Lucy had to stay and wait for his coffee cup. She remembered how he kept switching his legs as he sat on the ground, bending up the knee of the one that had been straight and laying the other one out flat.

“You know, it’s hard to know just how to bury the legs of a man. Do you just build a box long enough for half of him or do you build him a full-size coffin and just pretend all of him is in it? What do you do about a man that’s thrashed so you could never find a whole hair from his head? Where do you say he is, anyhow, on the grave-marker?” He gave a short laugh. “Besides, we never even knew the bastard’s name! Never knew even what to call his legs!

“You’re giving me a look like you don’t believe me! Why you aren’t even dry behind the ears yet!

“You should of been around in the days when they had them special trains full of machinery. I’ll never forget the time the J. I. Case Special come into Teed’s Grove, back in Iowa, when I was just a little kid—around nineteen-aught-eight—somewheres along in there. I’d never saw anything like it in my life. Right then I made up my mind to be a thrasherman. It was a whole train full of J. I. Case machinery—steam engines with ten-foot iron wheels. And thrashing machines. And on one car a crazy old son-of-a-gun, he played all day on a steam calliope.

“And then, by God, they revved up one of them new agitator thrashers—they was new at that time—and a fella got up there to show off what it could do, and you know what he did? He started feeding two-by-six planks into ’er! You should of seen the sawdust fly. You still think it couldn’t of thrashed one flesh-and-blood Finn?”

Lucy herself had been totally convinced. She remembered the conversation perfectly, and even the looks of both the men—the old one and the young one.

She had always wondered what it would be like to fall into a threshing machine. Even from several yards away, the noise was almost more than she could stand. What would it be like inside?

Finally she had told the story to her mother, who had instantly said it couldn’t be true. “That’s just the kind of story these thrashers love to tell,” she said. “Don’t you ever believe a word they say!”

“But what if it was true!”

“Well … if it really did happen … he couldn’t have suffered long, poor fellow. Don’t you think about him. Once a person is dead he can’t feel anything hurting his body, you know. It’s worse for the people who are left behind. He probably never knew what happened at all. There are really worse ways to die.”

Lucy could not think of anything worse than suddenly having life taken away without even knowing anything about it. She couldn’t imagine everything just going on and not being there to watch it herself. She could not imagine being the legs wrapped in a blanket on the stubble while the threshing crew started up the machine again and went on with the harvest.

And yet farmers were broken in pieces every year by their own machinery. She heard people talk about it. Somehow they slipped under the cleated iron wheels of the tractors they were driving, or the tractors moved as they tinkered with the hitch of a disc or a harrow and they fell beneath the knives or the teeth and were sliced into the dirt they had cultivated all their lives. They got caught in the tines of hayloaders; they looped an ankle in the rope of a haylift and were yanked into the air and flopped back on the ground; they fell into wells and off barn roofs and windmills.

And there was the vanished arm of Mr. Egger. Her grandfather had been there when that happened. He had told her about it so she would be sure never to get too close to the threshing machine. It hadn’t been so terrible, even, because it had happened so fast that nobody heard the arm come loose or noticed the blood spurt. And Mr. Egger had not even yelled. He jumped back and looked at his torn, empty shirtsleeve and said, “Why, I never even felt it. I never even felt it.”

But the more dangerous the separator was, the more exciting it was, too, and Lucy couldn’t have stopped watching her father up there even if she had wanted to. Even if it frightened her to see how fast her father worked and how he leaned. Not even the strongest man could keep the bundle chute full for more than fifteen or twenty minutes at a stretch. It wasn’t at all hard to see how a man who had never threshed before would pitch too fast and too long until he grew dizzy there on top of the bundles and lost his balance.

The chaff blew high in the air and formed a great light cloud, and the straw blasted out and settled into the beginnings of the wide lopsided stack, and the little stream of grain poured down to make a golden cone on the rough gray boards of the truck floor. The sides of the cone slipped and trickled and the base of it inched from one row of rusty nailheads to the next. She would pick a smutted kernel to concentrate on and watch it, never blinking from the time it came out of the spout till it was buried. Then when she looked back out at the field again, she would seem to be seeing it through a solid rain of wheat.

When the cycle got going, they really missed the fellow who had gone back to Gackle on a bender. George told the boss he expected the crew to finish in two days, even if they were shorthanded. “Well, if he don’t show up by noon, I’ll go over town at dinnertime and get somebody else,” the boss promised. “Don’t worry. We’ll make ‘er.”

They had better make it. If they began to see that they wouldn’t finish in two days, George knew they’d slow down to make it another whole morning. Just paying for that extra half day could decimate the profits he was counting on.

He took a bead on the sun and went to Lucy. “You better go along in and help Mother bring out the sandwiches,” he said.

Douglas tagged her into the house. He stood around in the way while Lucy helped to butter the bread. It was not quite ten o’clock and Rachel had been working as fast as she could work for more than five hours, but she was getting behind.

“If Douglas helps you,” she said to Lucy, “do you think you two could take all this food out by yourselves, so I won’t have to leave the baby?”

“I can do it by myself,” Lucy said.

“I want to help,” Douglas argued.

“I think it’s very nice that Douglas wants to help,” Rachel said. “Why don’t we let him pull your wagon, and we’ll load it with the food and coffee. You can pretend you’re like the men with the popcorn and sandwich wagons at the fair.”

“I want to pull it,” Lucy said.

They filled the rusty red wagon with the sandwiches, a cut pie wrapped in a flour-sack dish towel, a kettle full of coffee, two gallon pails of water, and the cups. The wagon was so heavy that it took both of them to pull it, and neither of them argued as they went up the hill, walking backwards to keep an eye on the kettle of coffee.

“Let’s just have one piece of pie before we take it all out to them,” Douglas said.

“No!” She was amazed at the very idea. Boys were so sneaky. “Not unless there are some left over.”

“Okay,” he said. “Then let’s have our own picnic with what’s left.”

“Maybe,” she said.

Presently two men who had been pitching bundles climbed down from the hayrack and came toward her. One was tall, and the closer he came the bigger he looked. He was even bigger than her father and moved as though he would walk right over her. She couldn’t help ducking away when he came up to her. The other man laughed.

“Don’t let Swede bother you none. He loves kids, don’t you Swede? He eats ’em for lunch if he don’t get his pie.”

The big man’s face was a fiery red against the near-whiteness of his hair. He had a blank, foreign expression. He was dumb, like the Finn. His face was very long, and his lower lip swelled farther out than his upper one, giving him a very hungry look.

“Swede don’t speak English, but he sure found out about apple pie in a hurry,” his friend chuckled. “You better have some apple pie there.”

“No, it’s in the wagon, and it’s cherry,” Lucy said.

“Well, Swede’ll take cherry this one time. Won’t you, Swede? But you better bring him apple tomorrow. Huh Swede?

“We call him Swede because it’s the only word he knows from the Old Country,” the man told Lucy. “Pie is the only American word he knows for sure.”

The giant slapped the little man on the shoulders. The little man laughed as though he liked it.

“What kind of sandwiches you got there?” he asked.

“Chicken and cheese,” Lucy said.

“Swede’ll have cheese,” the man said. “That’s what his mamma raised him on back in the Old Country, ain’t it, Swede?” The little man laughed again—an insulting, high laugh.

Once Lucy had fed a colt sugar from the palm of her hand. The colt was not used to being fed that way, and when he finished the sugar, he spread his lips and nibbled at her skin, trying to get the last of the wonderful taste. The feeling of his big teeth had made her know what a big bite he could have taken out of her hand. She had the same feeling now about this great blank man. It was hard to tell what he might do but it was easy to tell what he could do. She held out the sandwich toward the giant, not looking at his face. The minute she saw the black-nailed fingers touch the bread, she snatched her hand away.

The men took in the food like cruising whales. They seemed to be able to swallow without ever closing their mouths. They sloshed in the water and coffee so fast it dribbled back out the sides of their mouths again. Lucy watched the debris escaping like plankton in little streams down their cheeks—bits of bread and butter, pie crust, and cherry juice, all finally mixing with the dust in their bristled chins. Sometimes men made her feel sick.

When all of them had eaten there were still a few sandwiches left. Douglas had been riding with Giles on one of the hayracks, but he came running when he saw her start back toward the house. “Let’s have our picnic!” he shouted. They settled beneath one of the nearer shocks.

“You should of saved out some pie,” he said.

“Phooey! The pie was for the thrashermen, not you! You didn’t earn a piece.”

“Well,” he said, “when I grow up I’m going to be a thrasherman myself. Or maybe just a farmer. I’m going to get married to you, too, when I grow up.” He put his bare arm around her neck and kissed her a wet cheesy kiss on the cheek. She had a swift impression of his bright blue eyes and white teeth and lips full of bread crumbs grinning an inch away from her face. He laughed and laughed as she ran away—the same way he had laughed that day on the merry-go-round. Nothing so disgusting had ever happened in her whole life.…

After making sure that Douglas was nowhere in sight, Lucy went out to the first truckload of wheat which stood some distance from the separator, waiting to be driven to town. Though it was in the middle of a blistering field, far from the shade of so much as a fence-post, the wheat in it was cool. One of the memories she carried from year to year was that surprising coolness of the threshed wheat that had so lately been first in the hot field and then in the hotter insides of the threshing machine. Yet each year she was surprised all over again to feel it around her bare legs as she sat in its clean, shifting granules. One grain of wheat was hard, with the richness of the earth and the air crystallized into a tiny sharp gem. Yet a whole truckload of wheat was a soft and regal couch.

Once wheat was in granary bins, it was different. It was not cool, but cold, and the stillness of the granary was worrisome compared to the excitement of the threshing field. And a bin piled high with wheat was a dangerous place, for if a child worked himself too far down in the midst of the slipping grains, it was like being in quicksand. He never got out unless help was near. That had happened to a little girl her mother knew. The little girl’s mother and father looked for her for days and weeks before they found her.

But she was safe out under the mounting sun. She could play until it was time to ride in to the elevator.

She made a road from the cab to the tailgate along the dark line of shadow made by the truck side across the wheat. She was starting to plow a field in her precious cool landscape when Douglas came and flopped over the side into the wheat—just as though he had never done anything terrible in his life. “Boy this is fun!” he said.

“I want to play by myself,” she said.

“I’ll tell your dad.”

“All right,” she said. “Take it all.” She climbed out over the tailgate and jumped down.

“Aw, come on back!” he cried. “I’ll do just what you want if you’ll come back and play.”

It was a new experience for her to have a boy beg her to do anything. This was the first time a boy had ever abdicated his birthright to be the boss.

“Okay,” she said. “You can bring in the wheat and I’ll be the elevator man and tell you how much I’ll pay you for it and all the things that are wrong with it.”

They played until dinnertime and then they followed the men in. The table was still not quite set and her father was mad. “Now Rachel,” he said, “why haven’t you had Lucy in here helping you with these little chores that she can do as well as you? Then you’d be all ready now.”

“I let her play because she never has anybody to play with,” her mother said. “I want her to have a little bit of childhood! That’s why! When she has somebody to play with I’m going to let her have as much time as I can!”

Lucy and Douglas took their plates out to the porch steps to eat. They had just sat down when a young man came walking around the porch. “Well,” he said. “I see I’m just in time for dinner.”

Nobody except her father had talked about him much, but Lucy knew he had done something incredibly bad.

“Hello,” he said. “What’s the matter? Aren’t you going to say hello! Cat got your tongue?”

“Hello,” they both said, because you had to say that when people asked if the cat had got your tongue.

“Stuart!”

Rachel went to him but she did not touch him. He looked so much older, with all those whiskers. He was twenty now; he was a man.

The crew boss shouted from the dining room: “Stuart! Is that drinkin’ bum here finally? Get in here and put some food on toppa that liquor! By God, you’re gonna do a full day’s work out there between now and quittin’ time or I’ll know the reason why!”

“Oh, Stuart!” Rachel said.

“Just watch to see Swede don’t eat it all,” Stuart yelled back. “I’ll be ‘long in a minute.” His speech was fuzzy, like his face. His whiskers did not hide the sick greenish color of his skin. “You going to invite me in or not?” he asked her.

“Oh, Stuart!” she cried again. But still she could not touch him. The booze on his breath was revolting. “Haven’t you been to see the folks yet, Stuart?”

He propped himself against the corner of the kitchen, with an elbow braced on the towel bar. He looked over her head, across the kitchen at the window, but the light seemed to hurt his eyes. He closed them. “Nope. I started over there last night but I just didn’t seem to make it.”

There was a frightful banging in the dining room. “Oh, get those potatoes in there,” he said. “I don’t know why that Swede don’t learn to speak English. He just stomps on the floor when he runs out of potatoes. Liable to go right through this little house.” He kept his eyes closed. Was it the light or his family he could not look at?

George came out and took a whiff of the air. “Pew!” he said.

“George!” Rachel begged.

“We need spuds in there,” George said. He looked at Stuart, who would not open his eyes. “Nobody told me my wife’s little brother was supposed to be the sixth man on this crew. We all sweat a little extra for you this morning!” Stuart said nothing.

George erupted. “What was it this time, anyhow, Junior!” “Embalming fluid? Hair tonic? Or did you get hold of some genuine rotgut moonshine? Why don’t you wait till you’re big enough to shave before you start trying to drink with the men? Maybe then you’d know what to leave alone. You better get in here and eat before that stuff burns out your guts!” He went back to the table.

“Just give me a plate,” Stuart said to Rachel. “I’ll eat with the kids.”

His hand shook as though the plate was more than he could hold. “Stuart,” she said. He pushed the screen door open and let it slam behind him.

It was queer, she thought, how little shocked she was. But this was so like him. When he was a little boy not yet in school and she was already in her last year of high school, he would hide for half the afternoon in the barn just so he could jump out from a manger to startle the folks when they went out to milk. “I declare,” her mother would say, “what ails the child! Here I thought he was out with Will all afternoon! And Will thought he was with me in the chicken house. And just when we were sure he was lost and we were going to look for him, out he came, making that outlandish noise. He scared us half to death. It’s the third time. Whatever makes him do it!”

What did make him do it? He seemed to have a need to do shocking things, even though he was always so shy. Did he crave attention so much that the one titillating moment when he could command all the thoughts of his surprised parents was worth such a long wait lying in the manger hay? What had he thought about while he waited? What did a five-year-old think about?

Lucy had run away once when she was five. She had gone to sleep in a straw stack and when she woke up she came home. Rachel had never even known that the child had run away. She had just thought Lucy was exploring birds’ nests or following George around. That had been the part about the running away that still haunted her. Not to know, until your child comes back—stiff, desolate, swollen-eyed—that she had run away from you because something had been so much more important to her than you had ever dreamed. Something you had said—had commanded or forbidden as you rushed through your work—had changed her whole world. If only you had not been so busy, you cried out to yourself. If only you had noticed. If only you could expunge those hours of lonely anguish from her life. Was that how it had been with Stuart? Had his mother been too busy? Rachel had hardly been at home after he started doing the things he did. On weekends her mother would only say, “What makes him do these things?”

And now here he was. What had made him run away? What had made him come back? Why had he come here first, sneaking in with this uncivilized crew? How could anybody find it easier to face George Custer than Will Shepard? Yet Stuart must think it easier to come here first. He must be hoping that she could do something. What could she do?

He was sitting beside Lucy now, with his plate in his lap, pretending that he and the two children were the only people there. “Do I look different?” he asked Lucy. “You look different.”

“Yes,” Lucy said carefully. “You look different.”

“I’m a big man now,” he said. “When I went away I was just a kid like Giles in there. Now I’m a man. When I went away you weren’t even in school yet, were you? What grade are you in now?”

“Third,” she said.

“No!” he said. “You’re … let’s see—you’re not hardly eight yet, are you? Did you skip a grade, like your mother? Oh, I see what you mean. You’ll be in the third this coming fall, right?”

“Yes,” she admitted.

“That’s just where you should be, isn’t it? Haven’t skipped any grades yet, huh? Maybe you’re like me, instead of like your mother. What grade are you in?” he asked Douglas.

“Third,” Douglas said forcefully.

“He’s just the same as me,” said Lucy.

“Is that so?” Stuart said. “Which one of you is the smartest?”

“I am,” Douglas said.

“He is not!” Lucy said. “He copies me all the time!”

“I bet you she’s right,” Stuart said to Douglas. “I bet you she can beat you sixty ways to Sunday because I bet she takes after her mamma. Is that right, Lucy?”

“No, I take after Daddy,” she said. “But he always got a hundred in arithmetic and sometimes I don’t.”

“So did your mama always get a hundred,” Stuart said. “At least that’s the way I always heard it from the teachers. ‘Why, I can’t understand why you aren’t more like your big sister!‘ “ he said in a silly high voice. “‘Why, I remember how she was always the smartest one in the room. Now, Shtew-art, I just know you can work harder!’ ” He said the last sentence with his tongue between his teeth and his lower lip, making a silly face and an even sillier sound. Lucy and Douglas thought he was very funny.

Suddenly he leapt off the porch and sprinted for the barn. After a while he came back. He looked at Lucy trying to shoo the flies off his plate.

“Much obliged,” he said. “I reckon it isn’t quite time for me to eat yet. You bring me something good this afternoon, huh? And tell your dad I’ll be out by the rig.”

He walked away up toward the field. Lucy brought the barely touched plate back into the kitchen. “He said he wasn’t hungry yet.”

“I heard him,” Rachel said. She scraped the plate into the pigs’ slop bucket.

She could tell when she took dessert into the men that they were more shocked than she was. They looked down at their plates as if she were a mother or a sister to them, or at least as if they thought of a woman or a family somewhere. None of them can go home, either, she thought, and was more shocked by all the men around her than by her brother. They can’t go home and they don’t know why not. It doesn’t make sense. I’m thirty-two years old and I’m an old woman because I can’t understand anything about the world any more.

“I told that kid to lay off that stuff while he’s workin’ for me,” murmured the boss. “I don’t want to be unwrapping his innards from the innards of that there thrashing machine. But I never hardly saw anybody work like him when he’s cold sober.”

George walked out with the rest of the crew—avoiding her as well he might after the greeting he had given to her brother.

“George!”

He came back into the kitchen.

“For heaven’s sake, don’t let him kill himself out there!” she pleaded. “And don’t let him get away. We have to get him back to the folks! He wouldn’t have come this far if he didn’t want us to get him back.”

“Now, Rachel, I can’t order your little brother around. He’s a grown man—or he thinks he is! Nobody could ever tell him anything. He’s just as stubborn as the rest of your family. I’m not going to try and keep him here if he doesn’t want to stay. But he damn well better do his job this afternoon because that’s what I’m paying for! And he can pitch his share of bundles too, like anybody else!”

“Oh, George, don’t let him get near the separator if he’s still weaving around like that, please! Dad will pay you for whatever work you think you haven’t gotten. Please!”

George simply could not understand how women’s minds could work the way they did. Who the hell was she married to, anyhow? Him or her family? “Now, Rachel,” he said, “just how do you expect me to figure what the work of one man of a six-man crew is worth when I pay by the job—machinery and all? I’d look pretty silly going to your father and asking him for your brother’s wages, wouldn’t I? I’m paying this outfit for two days of thrashing, and if it goes more than two days, we’re going to be in the hole. But I’m not going to ask your father for Stuart’s wages and I’m not going to try to tell a stubborn Shepard anything at all about where to stay or where to go. Talk to him yourself. He’s your brother. If he wants to quit the crew right now, we’ll go get somebody else. If he don’t want to quit, he works!”

George left, hurrying to catch the crew. Lucy and Douglas were gone too. The house was so quiet now. Rachel wondered if Stuart would really be waiting at the threshing machine or if he had just kept going again.

He had begun this disappearing when he was only nine or ten. He would get up before it was light, steal out of the house, and disappear until suppertime without telling where he had been. Then one morning just before his eighteenth birthday, he had got on a freight train. Fred Wertzler saw him go. Fred was hanging the mail sack on its hook by the tracks when he glimpsed Stuart ducking behind a box car. He thought that the Shepard boy was only playing truant again.

But it was days and then agonizing weeks and finally months before the first brief letter arrived. There were a few more letters in the two and a half years of his disappearance, but none of the letters mentioned his return. It had begun to be plausible to them that this disappearance could be permanent. They were all preparing themselves to bear the pain and shame and eternal anxiety of it. Now he had reappeared and he was a man—a man who had been sleeping for the last week in fields not thirty miles from his father’s farm instead of going home to his father’s house. And what would such a bitter thing do to his father’s heart?

Stuart was born when Rachel was twelve, and she had cherished him as if he were her own baby when he was tiny. But because he had always seemed more like her baby than her brother, she had had the instincts of a mother about him. That first time he had got drunk in high school she and her mother both felt as though he had died. He was permanently separated from them by their own incredulity. They could not believe it had happened. “Wherever did he get the taste for it?” they asked each other. “Where did he get hold of it? How can he do it? What makes him do it?”

“Males,” her mother would say. “They don’t care what they do, most of them. But how could a son of Will’s be like this?”

How? Yes, how. And how was she to get her brother the rest of the way home? She worked feverishly in the kitchen so she could spare the time to talk to him when she took out the midafternoon lunch. She boiled the custard, filled the pies, set them to cool while she made the sandwiches, and then managed to get the meringue on them before leaving to go to the field. The baby had gone to sleep amenably for her nap. It was the first agreeable thing she had done all day and Rachel hurried out to the field so she could get back before the nap ended.

The Swede and his sidekick were again the first to come. The small laughing man stared at her body. “Swede saves his appetite now,” he giggled, “but be ready for him at supper time. And he’ll want a dozen fried eggs in the morning.”

“I know,” Rachel said shortly. She had a pretty good idea of who started the stories about the mute Swede—the stories that had got from Elsie Egger’s sister-in-law down in Gackle up to her. This little man was the kind she despised most of all—the kind who got away with everything because he laughed. The kind who liked to attach himself to another man and somehow feel safe in his shadow. That was the way that fellow had been in college who had asked her to marry him. There was a basketball player he was forever talking about. She could never explain to her parents why that boy had repelled her so because she didn’t really know why herself.

The small man was annoyed. No doubt he liked to think of himself as a man who could at least get a smile from any woman. When he and the Swede stood up to go back to work he ogled her again.

“You’re just the type of woman Swede likes,” he said as he handed back the tin cup. “Kind of nice and round. You better tell your old man to lock up your door tonight. Swede could lick him with one hand tied behind him.” Swede smirked at her whenever he heard his name.

Rachel walked away from the little man—violated and despoiled by his rutting eyes. How she despised males. If George could have known what that man had said, he might have killed him. And then he probably would have taken on the Swede, too. But not for her sake. It would have been for his own honor that George would have bloodied the stubble with a filthy little stray that dared to insult his wife. She had never ceased to be amazed at the grossness of most men. To think of cooking for such debauched animals—of politely waiting on them for another day and a half! To think that such men had been her brother’s companions for two years—to think of how they might have influenced him—how they must have influenced him.

Had Stuart ever stood in a harvest field eating sandwiches served by a farmer’s wife, made from bread baked by the farmer’s wife, and looked at her that way—as though she was nothing more than an animal who existed only for his animal pleasure?

He was coming for his sandwich now, moving as though his legs were melting. The field was nearly cleared and there were no shocks behind him—nothing but burning stubble, burning sky. He was a tin soldier dying in a great forge all alone—his face blank, his heart hidden. But such a fine face, even unshaven. Not like these other faces. Surely the heart of a man with such a face could be reached by somebody someday. But he must never be with this other kind of man again—never.

“Just some water first,” he said, when she held up the plate of sandwiches. He took the cup in hands that still shook and drained it, then filled it and drained it again. He wiped his mouth with his dusty arm and sat down on the stubble.

He still looked very sick. She couldn’t imagine how he could keep on working so hard. “Do you want a sandwich now?” she asked again.

“Wait’ll I get my breath for a minute,” he said. It was obviously all he could do to keep down the water.

“Stuart, you’re going to go home now, aren’t you?”

“I heard about the barn,” he said. “Was it Dad’s fault, really?”

“He blames himself,” she answered. “Are you going to go home?”

“That’s where I was headed for last night,” Stuart said. He waited to see a hint of comprehension in her face, but there was none. She would never understand why a prodigal son might need a little alcohol to get him back through the Old Man’s door. Not to mention the Old Lady’s.

“You ought to try to eat,” his sister said.

“A little more water will do it.” He drank another cup and turned back toward the threshing machine.

“Stuart! You’ll go home tonight won’t you?”

“Maybe,” he said.

“What shall I tell them?”

“Anything at all, just like you always did,” he said.

She hurried back to the house. There wasn’t time to think about what he’d said. The screen door was ajar; she supposed Douglas had left it open. The half-grown cats that had taken to sleeping under the porch in the hot weather were up on the kitchen table. Their tails stuck straight up with pleasure, as if they were still kittens drinking warm cow’s milk from an old saucer. They were rapturously licking neat trails across the gleaming meringue on the pies.

Rachel seized a tail in either hand, walked out on the porch, swung her hands as far behind her as they would go, swung forward again with all the momentum the backward swing had given her, and let go of the cats. They lit running at least fifteen feet away and never stopped until they disappeared into the barn. She stood on the porch, watching them go, feeling still in her fists the narrowing vertebrae of their tails under the soft long hair and the thin warm skin, seeing still the way the tails had pointed in the air over the kitchen table as the cats ruined her pies.

I must be losing my mind, she thought. I must be losing my mind.

She went back into the kitchen and looked at the pies. Ruined utterly. What would she feed those lustful, gluttonous men? She looked at the clock. There was simply not time to make another dessert. Swede would probably stamp on the floor if he didn’t get pie. It would serve him right if she just repaired these pies. What they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt any of them, including George. She skimmed the rest of the meringue off and tossed it in the slop pail. There were the barest traces of the busy quick tongues in the chocolate custard. The lemon showed nothing at all, being less solid. If there had been trails in it, they had all flowed together again. She hurried with the new meringue so she could get the pies back in the oven before Cathy woke up.

And all the while she broke the eggs, separated them, beat the whites, measured the sugar, poured the vanilla—all the time she worked on the meringue she felt sure that none of it had happened. She had never done a violent thing in her life—never come close to hurting an animal. And she had never lied, either, and now she was lying—covering polluted pies so nobody would ever know. But if what she was doing now was not real, then Stuart was not out there in the field, either, was he? Either this day was all true or none of it was true.

Douglas and Lucy stood outside the elevator watching a long freight pulling toward Bismarck. The heat from the building pounded at their backs.

“I’m going home,” said Douglas. “It’s too hot out there at your place.”

“Sissy.”

“Sissy yourself,” he said dully. He started off across the street. Then he saw Roger Beahr come out of the grocery store. “Hey Roger!” he yelled. “Got some candy?”

Roger held up a little white paper bag and began to run. Douglas went after him.

Lucy watched them run up the wooden sidewalk. She wondered what it would be like to live in town and to be a good friend of Roger Beahr, who always had pennies.

“Where’s the Sinclair boy?” her father asked.

“He went home. The sissy.”

“What’s the matter? Didn’t you act nice to him?” George said. “You can’t expect to have any friends if you’re not nice to people.”

“I don’t like him.”

“Oh, now, Lucy, that’s not any way to talk. You’ll never have any friends if you talk like that. Shame on you!”

Lucy felt her throat start to swell and she got up on her knees to look out the window in the rear of the cab. As the truck turned she could see the two boys coming back down the sidewalk, heading for the elevator. It must be nice to have your father own an elevator. Even from a distance she could see that both of them had a cheek puffed out with a jawbreaker.

When they got back home it was nearly six o’clock. “Time for you to get at your chores,” her father told her. “You haven’t done a lick of work all day. Probably a good thing your boyfriend didn’t come back.”

“He’s not my boyfriend! I hate boys!”

“Gonna be an old maid, huh?”

“No!”

It seemed to her that a man or a boy had been laughing at her all day in the wheat fields. How mean, mean, mean they were. And if you didn’t want to marry one of them, they made you always be alone and called you horrible names.

She had a hopeless, forsaken feeling in her stomach as she scattered the corn for the chickens, cleaned and filled their muddy water pans, and looked in the nests for eggs that might have been laid late in the day. She wondered if Douglas would come back with Giles in the morning.

After supper the men went back to the field to smoke and then to spread their blankets on the straw and sleep. Stuart walked out of the kitchen with them.

“Stuart!” Rachel said. “Are you going to sleep in a field when you’re half a mile away from your own bedroom?” If he did this, then she would have to give up. How could she drive over and tell her mother and father that now they could know where their son slept? They could know, but he couldn’t be bothered to come home. He was answering her, speaking in a casual sensible way.

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” he was saying. “Used to do it all the time. I’d be so hot in that old upstairs I couldn’t go to sleep at all, so I’d go out in the field. You’d be surprised. Twenty or thirty degrees cooler out there. Try it some time. After the thrashermen have gone, of course!” He walked away.

She had read stories about men who disappeared from their homes in crowded tenements and moved into little windowless apartments a block away and so lived out their years. She had always thought that such a pathetic insanity was proof that cities perverted the human race. People felt so hemmed in by each other that they couldn’t stand even their families any longer; yet they were so timid that they could not move away from the spot where they had always lived—nor could they go home again. What could make a boy like Stuart behave like these mole-hearted men in the slums of cities?

What did he want, anyway? Did he want his mother and father to come to him in the stubble tonight and beg him to come home, just as they had once exclaimed in the barn, “Oh, there he is!” She was afraid, now, to go over and tell them that he had come, for there was nothing in the world she could say or do to make him stay.

George had gone to bed long before she finished the dishes. She lay down as far away from him as she could and clung to the edge of the mattress all night. It was possible that she would do something awful if he so much as touched her. She might scream in his ear or slap him. She could still feel the cats’ tails in her sweating hands. She wondered if it really was thirty degrees cooler out there where those bestial men were sleeping beside her brother.

Stuart knew that he would not have to lie awake long—not after the way he had spent the last twenty-four hours. Still, it would be too long. One minute under this home sky was too long. If he were able to travel, he would not be here to see the sun come up. Well, that was the way he had done it all along. He either stayed or moved on, depending on what shape he was in when the feeling came. It was always the same feeling: He was alone among people he knew. The only relief, outside of liquor, was to hurry somewhere else, so he would only be alone among people he didn’t know. For two years he had told himself that this feeling would go away when he was home again. It was silly to ask himself why he had not come home before, if he really believed that. It was sillier still to wonder how two years had gone so quickly. It was silliest of all to pretend, like a baby, that he didn’t know how ridiculous he was—out here in the stubble.

It was funny how sky over one part of the prairie could be different from all the other skies. It was the things you could see from the corners of your eyes that shaped the sky you knew so well—nothing about the sky itself. It was the low blackness of hills and the lines of windbreaks. And trains sounded different in different places. Oh, he was home all right. Every night when he went to sleep like this in some farmer’s field, he knew how silly that son in the Bible felt. Yes, almost every night he had gone to sleep wondering why he wasn’t in his own bed in his father’s house. Now he wondered whether he would be in that bed tomorrow night or not. He couldn’t see how he was going to do it. There would be only one way to do it.

Has the cat got your tongue? What’s the matter? People always used to say that to him and he always hated them for it. But he’d said it himself today, because he hadn’t known what else to say. Was that why people had always said it to him, too? Did people go around all their lives saying things that didn’t mean anything just because they thought they ought to be saying something? Was that all they cared for each other?

Supper the second night was more rushed than the first night because they were going to move on to their next field after they had eaten and get set up to go the first thing in the morning. Before Rachel realized they were leaving, George and all the men had left the porch and gone back to the field.

It was nearly dark when George came back into the kitchen. “Well—that’s that for this year. Boy, I think I’d rather be the thrasherman than the farmer—they sure get paid more for an hour’s work than I do.”

“Oh, George! You haven’t paid them already!”

“Rachel! For God’s sake don’t jump at me like that! You’d startle a man half to death! Of course, I paid them. Why wouldn’t I?”

“Oh, I didn’t want Stuart to have any money. He won’t go home now, I know he won’t! Oh, dear! What can we do?”

“Rachel, it beats me the way you can carry on! We can’t do anything, of course! He’s a grown man! I’ve said to you a thousand times before—if a man wants to drink himself to death, no power on earth is going to stop him.”

Somewhere he found enough that night to take him the rest of the way home. Just before dawn he banged open the kitchen door. Rose scurried out, clutching her nightgown about her, afraid that the dog had been frightened by something to make him crash in the door that way.

“Is that you, Mom?” came the crucifying voice out of the darkness.

She had been preparing herself for it, but no preparation could stop in time her first horrified gasp. Nor could she stop her first words to him.

“You’re drunk!”

“Gone for two years and that’s all she has to say to me,” he remarked, as though there were a third, more sympathetic person in the room.

Will lay in bed listening. He was able to get around now, but he did not go out to the kitchen. He had seemed to know exactly what was happening the instant he awoke. That was the way it was with your children. They possessed you forever, from the moment they were born. The two and a half years of his absence might never have been. It could have been the same night—the first night that Stuart came home that way. In a way it was always the same night they had been living with for three years. It was really no shock at all now to hear him speaking again in the belligerent, chaotic sentences they had heard before he left. Will’s strongest feeling was one of weariness. He knew he’d never get back to sleep that night. Why couldn’t the boy have waited till morning, if he was going to come in this way? When he realized what his first thought had been, he knew how sick he must be. He hoped to God that Stuart had come back to stay.

He got out of bed and stood in the hall, but he did not say anything. Stuart was still meandering on; he talked more when he was drunk than in all the rest of his waking hours put together. Rose had not lit the lamp and Will hoped she wouldn’t. It would be enough to get through till rising time with the memory of his sounds; let there not be a memory of his looks to go with it. He had been waiting for two years to see his son, but not this way. There was a paradoxical, disorganized doggedness—a kind of animal forcefulness—in the boy when he was drunk that was nowhere in evidence when he was sober. One sight of him drunk established a more lasting image than many sights of him sober.

Finally Will said, “Your bed is all made up for you, Stuart. You sound tired to me. Why don’t you go crawl in?”

“Why, Dad, I couldn’t sleep in that bed without a bath! I’m nothing but a filthy thrasherman!”

“The sheets are washable,” his mother told him. “Go on up.”

In a few hours he was sober again, and as much of him as had ever been there had come back.

Will’s Marquis yielded not quite eight bushels to the acre. He had two hundred and fifty acres in wheat, as opposed to George’s hundred and sixty, but the difference in their harvest was not so great as the difference in their acreage, for George’s yield was better. However, the smut in the Ceres caused George to be docked almost eight cents a bushel. It graded Number One despite his fears that the protein content was light, but the smut docking reduced it to eighty-two cents, while Will got ninety.

George sat down and worked it all out. It was the kind of thing he enjoyed doing. He could even forget, while he was doing it, that the numbers represented his survival.

Will got checks of $1800 for his wheat and George got $1296 for his. That worked out to $7.20 per acre for the Marquis and $8.10 for the Ceres. Not a significant difference. Not enough to pay for the smutty Ceres seed he had got from Adolph. He and Will paid the same freight rates. Everybody except the big fellows paid the same freight rates. And the freight rates never went down, no matter what the farmer earned or what the consumer paid. Will paid $110 and George paid $88 to ship the wheat to Minneapolis.

It cost Will about $250 to thresh and himself $180. That left George with roughly $1000, after the two major expenditures of marketing the crop were taken care of, and Will with $1440. As far as real profits were concerned, though, he had to consider so many other things. Will had used his own seed, saved when wheat was selling for twenty-six cents a bushel, which made it much cheaper seed than George’s. Most of the seed money came out of George’s pocket, too, after the splitting of the cash profits with James T. Vick. Vick had allowed him twenty-six cents a bushel for what he had spent on the seed. And Vick considered that the mill’s price minus seed, threshing, and freight, was the net profit, a third of which was his. Vick wasn’t interested in labor, food for horses all winter long, machine repair, binder twine, or other such incidentals. They were all the farmer’s business. Vick just owned the land and paid the taxes on it.

Vick’s cut this year, after subtracting the thirteen cents a bushel he paid for seed, would come to $340. That left George with $660. Pay Will $250 plus interest for four months—make it five months. He couldn’t believe it. Scarcely $400 left from the wheat. That was quite a little more than he had made last year, the way prices were then, but he knew, without doing any more figuring, that he would have been far ahead to plant the Marquis and take the rust loss.

Still, there were reasons to hope. In the first place, the Ceres, he was sure, had not had anything like a fair trial because the seed had not been properly treated; in the second place, poor as he felt, he was so much better off than so many people below him that he really should be able to get along somehow. After all, if there were only enough other farmers below him, the things he would have to buy would have to be cheap enough, that was all there was to it.

If the USDA figures for last year’s farm profits were at all accurate—figures that he had kept in his mind ever since they had been in the Sun a couple of months ago—then more than forty per cent of his fellow wheat farmers had gone in the hole last year and only about twenty per cent had made more than he had. Only six per cent had cleared over five hundred dollars. His father-in-law was in the six per cent, of course, and he would be there again this year. If a man could only start with enough cash, money would make money.

Look at what Vick had done with a little cash. He had taken advantage of the slump that began in 1921 and bought this half section for scarcely more than delinquent taxes in 1924, just before George moved onto it. He paid forty-three dollars a year in taxes now, while George and Rachel fretted over the state of the school, the lack of a school bus, the condition of the county road, and a score of other things that taxes ought to cover, and yet George had paid Vick as much as five or six hundred dollars a year. Some years Vick got as high as a twenty per cent return on his investment. And he was nothing but a cheap chiseling dime-store owner who had had a little spare cash at the right time. The return on his investment was a simple translation of George’s sweat, good only on a farm, into the medium of exchange called cash—good anywhere in the world for anything he desired. He could buy other men’s sweat with that return earned for him by George Custer’s sweat, and that was the way little dime-store owners became millionaires.

George knew what he could do about it, of course. He could get out of farming and forget that he ever hoped to exercise the option rights that had been dangled in front of him for nine years. He could get out of the occupation he had been raised in and trained for, and then what could he do?

But there was the one hope left. There were still so many farmers so far below him. They were competing to undersell him, but they had to compete to buy machinery and pay rent, too. Over half the farmers in the state had to pay rent. When things got so bad that no tenant farmer could make a living, then all the tenant farmers would get together and do something about the landlords. So long as seventy-five per cent of the nation’s wheat farmers made less than George did, he would either succeed because he was ahead of the majority, or else, if he fell back into that growing ruined majority, he would revolt with them.

Any time George Armstrong Custer could not make a living, one way or another, then the system had to be wrong. If a man like him tried every possible scheme and worked fourteen- and sixteen-hour days and still went broke, then the system certainly needed major repairs, didn’t it?

Meanwhile, for one more winter he would figure things so closely that even the occasional pennies he gave Lucy in the store had to be considered part of his budget—and he would repay Will at an interest rate that would restore his self-respect.

When he showed his figuring to Rachel, she did not seem at all surprised that they had cleared scarcely a third of what he had predicted they would. Her lack of surprise discouraged him.

“Well, look at it this way,” he said. “Next year I’ll have two hundred bushels of properly treated seed. It doesn’t look like cash now, but it will be. That will make a vast difference, can’t you see that?”

“Enough to buy a tractor?” she asked.

“Well … sooner or later.”

“How much longer can we work the way we worked this year?”

“As long as we have to!” he said.