Wednesday, September 27

Spanish farmers were setting torches to thousands of acres of crops. Sweden and Holland renounced the tariff truce they had signed with the United States thirty days before, and declared that they would again bar American food exports from their countries. A hundred and fifty thousand American factory workers were on strike, and a thousand farmers around Chicago were dumping milk again.

With the wheat checks all in, Will was planning to take the morning train to Bismarck to see Dr. Oliver Murdoch. His leg was in fair shape, and he and Stuart took a walk around the farm to use up the hour till it was time to go.

They went first to the far sheep pasture. A couple of half-grown ewes bleated at him as he walked among them, and followed him a few steps away from the flock. He smiled to think how they remembered those bottles.

Prince swished his tail and cantered away. He was enjoying his rest after the summer’s work and he was going to make Will fight to get him into harness today. He was unaccountably mean for a gelding; but Will had never had the heart to sell him, because he knew most people who bought such a horse would beat him.

But now he thought Stuart ought not to be stuck with Prince. “For Pete’s sake, sell that horse before he takes a bite out of you,” Will said. “He’s just about ready for the glue factory anyway.

“And we should get those truck brakes fixed. I’ve been putting it off for months. You might do that right away, now that we can get along without it for a day or two.”

Finally, when they were coming back through the new barn still smelling of raw lumber, Will had to say it. “I hope to God, Stuart, that you’ll leave that stuff alone while I’m gone! What in the world will your mother do here all by herself? She won’t drive the truck and she won’t ask George for help.”

He went on to the other subject that must be brought up now. “We were talking last night … When I come back, we think you ought to go to college. You’re still young—a lot younger, maybe, than you feel. I didn’t feel so young myself after a couple years with a thrashing crew, but I was—now I see how young I was.… Your mother’s calling. I never knew her not to have a fit over catching a train. Start up the truck, will you?”

Rose’s face was red with heat and nervousness. “Where on earth have you been?” she said. “What do you want me to put in this suitcase?”

She was wearing her best winter dress for the trip. It was a hot day, but it was September, after all, and no decent woman would wear a summer dress to Bismarck in the last week of September. It was fine light wool plaid with a big collar and a low belt line.

Will was as hot as she was. He had on his heavy black suit, with its thick vest. She had made him wear it because she wanted to make sure he would be warm enough when he wore it home again.

She looked him over, from his hat, to the chain of his watch looped across his vest, to his freshly polished shoes. “Look at you!” she said. She snatched a whisk broom from the closet. “Come out on the porch.”

She swept the bits of hay and straw from his suit. “Now take a rag and dust off your shoes. What ever made you go out in the fields after you had got all dressed up?”

“What ever made you make me put all these glad rags on at six o’clock in the morning?” he teased her.

“Because I thought it would keep you in the house! With no supper and no breakfast you oughtn’t to be moving around so much!”

He had been ordered not to eat for twenty-four hours before the X-rays, which were to be made as soon as he got to the hospital.

“I wanted to take a look at the mare and remind Stuart to put her in nights now. She could drop the foal in a week or so, or even sooner. And it’ll frost again any time now. We don’t want to lose the colt.… I think Stuart’s going to straighten up, Rose.… Just be a little easy with him. That’s the ticket, don’t you think?”

“I think we ought to be going,” she said.

He hauled his watch out. “It’s not due till eleven-fifteen. I make it only ten now.”

“You’re ten minutes behind the clock and I set it with the radio this morning,” she said. It terrified her to think they might have depended on his watch. “It takes that old man half an hour to get far enough down the tracks to flag that fast train.”

“Yes, but Stuart said he told him yesterday to be sure to stop it for us.”

“Oh, you know he’ll forget. Come on, let’s go!”

Stuart swung the suitcase up into the back of the truck and Will felt, for the hundredth time since Stuart had come home, a great pride at how strong the boy had grown. Nobody in the world—not even loggers or miners—grew stronger muscles than a thresherman. Stuart had hit the work at just the right time in his life, too. A few years earlier and he would have worked too hard and perhaps stunted himself a bit, even while he grew strong—the way Will had himself. A few years later and he would have been a little overripe to do the best job of hardening. But from eighteen to twenty—those were the years to make a man out of a boy, if he had the stuff.

As for Will himself now—it was a relief not to be carrying the suitcase. It was even a relief to be able to admit, finally, that he was too miserable and too weak to walk fast or to stand up straight.

Stuart got in under the wheel, Rose sat in the middle, and Will hauled himself up with his hands braced against the door frame, like an old man. He shook like an old man from the effort of getting his weight a mere three feet off the ground. Those muscles that had served him so well all his life were burdens now. He reminded himself that he was weak from hunger, even if he did not feel hungry.

They had already had the first killing frost of the fall. This morning’s baking sun was a little ironic on the blackened stalks of the hollyhocks by the house and on the slender snapped necks of the heavy-headed sunflowers he had planted along the orchard fence to shade the strawberries.

This year there had been only a few dehydrated berries, rich and sweet because they were so distilled. Next spring there would be enough for a shortcake or two. This year he had saved every one for Rachel’s babies. Just the look on Cathy’s baby face and the bright red berry stains all over her hands and cheeks and chin had been worth all the work he had gone to. Lucy’s reactions were pure bonus. She made every berry last a good five minutes, almost eating it seed by seed like a little goldfinch.

He had covered the plants with straw and canvas just in time, only a few days before the heavy frost had come, and now they must be as hot as he was himself under this sun. Almost every year there would be as much as a month of Indian summer after the first frost, with several more frosts coming between the hot days. It was sometimes frustrating to swelter during the daylight hours long after the growing season was ended, and then have the temperature drop so far at night. Still, there was something about Indian summer that made him rejoice to shiver while he did the morning’s milking and then to sweat in the field a couple of hours later.

There was something in the wild extremes that roused something in him—like the clamor in himself that responded to the clamor of the ducks and geese streaming south in their countless stately chains, or the clamor of the gold and scarlet leaves, hanging brilliantly dead in the brassy clamor of the sun itself. Let the sun make its daily withdrawal to the south, following the emerald heads of the mallards; let the sun go so far away that the green blood of plants froze black. He had red blood himself, and he would be there, ready for the sun when it came north again, waiting to hear the first mallard cries volley through the cold spring air.

He had read one of the Happy Farmer’s musings on Indian summer only a day or so ago: “By gosh, I see the time is here, Again to feel the traitorous cheer, Brung by Old Sol, that Indian giver, Who laughs to see us sweat, then shiver.”

The weak resignation of the poet offended him; there ought to be something better than that to say about Indian summer—something about how good it was for a man to sweat and then to shiver.

Stuart was humming a tune that sounded so familiar, yet so far removed. At last Will recognized it as a variation of a song from his own roving days—a song about some monstrous escapades of Paul Bunyan. It had the kind of words that helped a young man to get through the years of living in a womanless world. He had an impulse to start singing along with Stuart, but Rose was sitting there between them. He felt such a bond with the boy, knowing that the same words went through both their heads at the same time.

“Are they going to bring Lucy to the station?” he asked Rose. He’d never seen a prairie child who didn’t love trains, but he thought Lucy must love them more than any child he’d ever known. She made him tell her, over and over, the stories of his own boxcar riding days. She even had dreams about trains.

“I think so,” Rose said. “One of these days you ought to take her on the train to Jamestown. She wants to ride on one so much.”

“I’ll do that! I wonder why I never thought of that! I’ll do that the first Saturday I can spare the time!” Will was elated. He’d hit upon a fine thing to look forward to.

When they got to the station, Old Man Adams was still dozing over his telegraph keys. Stuart lifted the suitcase out of the back of the truck and set it on the long platform. The sight of the mail sack already hanging on its hook threw Rose into a near panic. “For heaven’s sake,” she cried. “Let’s get him waked up!”

Millard Adams heard their voices and straightened up in his chair, looking fully awake at once. He had spent his life as a telegraph operator, and he knew how to listen in his sleep for the things that mattered—mostly the sound of keys. He had a white moustache that fanned out over his face and made him look like a Civil War general. He did always claim that he had been a drummer boy for the Union. Otherwise, the only outstanding event in his life had been the time when, as a loyal employee of the railroad, he had gone out on one of the posses that failed to catch that notorious train robber Jesse James.

He had grown so small and thin now that his railroad watch seemed as big as an alarm clock when compared with his body. He wore a black suit and a white shirt.

He stepped out into the tobacco gloom of the depot and smiled. “Why, by golly, I clean forgot!” he said. “The railroad has got passengers today. I better get out my flag, hadn’t I? How are you? Good to see you, Stuart. You been getting some free rides from my company?”

Stuart had to smile too. “I reckon,” he admitted.

“How are you, Will?” Adams asked again.

“Fine, just fine,” Will said, but in the shadow of the waiting room his face had the same luminous whiteness as Millard’s moustache. It was because he was so hungry, Rose told herself. She nudged him, when Millard went to get the flag. “I told you he’d forget!”

“He’s getting on,” Will agreed. “I don’t hardly remember when he didn’t seem old to me.”

“Let’s go back out now,” she said. She hadn’t noticed his paleness so much before, she decided, because he had just gradually bleached out from being inside the house nursing his leg.

Will had finally caught Rose’s nervousness. The sight of the red flag did it. His heart quickened and climbed up under his collarbone. He looked around the town. From where he stood he could see the boards across the windows of Harry’s bank. A broken-down wagon hitched to the two most beautiful horses in the county stood in front of Ray Vance’s garage. Otto must be in there dickering for some old scraps to patch something with.

A half-familiar man came out of Gebhardt’s Pool Hall, obviously already full of beer. He seemed to float from town to town along the railroad. Just about the time one had forgotten him completely, he reappeared. He was very small; that was why one remembered him at all.

Mrs. Finley came out of Herman’s store carrying a sack of groceries that was so heavy she had to balance it against her hip as she would a two-year-old child. Her head leaned to the side opposite the grocery bag to compensate for it. She had the look of an apologetic beast of burden which felt the shame of its weakness. Will couldn’t stand to watch her.

“Stuart,” he said, “there’s lots of time yet. You take the truck and go ask Mrs. Finley if you can give her a lift home. Go on, quick! And watch the brakes or you’ll smash the eggs!”

Will watched the truck move to a stop behind Mrs. Finley. It slipped and squeaked at the last minute and made her give a little jump. She looked up when Stuart leaned out of the cab toward her. They talked for a moment; she was protesting, of course. The poorer she got, the prouder she acted. But Stuart got down, took the groceries, put them in on the seat, and handed her up as though she was his best girl.

What a fine boy he really was. Whatever made a boy like him drink, anyway? He ought to be out squiring some pretty girls around once in a while—some girls as pretty as he was handsome. Will wondered if there were any pretty girls around. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed that the only pretty girl he’d seen in a long time was Lucy. Girls were a little like young apple trees, he thought. They could stand only so many years of drought.

“Here they come,” Rose said.

Lucy was running to him, leaving the rest of the family behind. “Where is Mr. Adams’s flag?” she said.

“Stuffed right in his hip pocket,” Will said. He squatted down to pull her between his knees and talk to her. It was remarkable how she was growing lately—how far above his head her face was.

“How would you like to take a train ride with me?” he said. “And have Mr. Adams flag the train just for us?” She looked at her mother. “Can I please!”

Rachel looked at George and George looked at Lucy. “I don’t think she ought to get a treat like that unless she does something to deserve it,” he said. “She doesn’t even know her table of eights yet.”

“I’ll know them tomorrow! — Oh, it’s coming.”

Old Man Adams came out and put his ear to the tracks, kneeling down carefully, balancing on his hands and knees and toes to keep his sharp old shins from pressing against the ties. He stood up, nodded at Will, and started down the tracks with the slow shuffle of a railroad man, never stepping between the ties, never trying to take two at a time.

They could all hear the train now, and they knew how fast it would be coming, but Old Man Adams had fooled them. Like Aesop’s tortoise, he had managed to get far enough down the tracks so that he looked no bigger than a blackbird, with his speck of a bright red flag.

The train flashed past the waving red speck. It was coming too fast; it would never be able to stop. The engineer’s slowly waving glove passed so high above them. They were down beside the great rods pushing back and forth, up and down. It was so eccentric and yet so regular—that blinding-fast up-and-down, back-and-forth of the rods circling the centers of the wheels. One could never keep track of the motion. Everything went by too quickly—the wheels, the lunging rods, the rolling drivers, the earsplitting steam, the waving glove.

Yet each swaying car uttered lower, slower squeaks, each blurred line of windows became more nearly separate, and each whiteness behind them became more nearly a face. And all at once the faces were faces, and the brown man vaulted out with his little yellow step. Lucy often wondered why everybody else in the world was white except for those brown men with their yellow steps.

Stuart got there just in time. He handed the suitcase to the brown man while the conductor yelled, “Board!” in the offended voice he used at flag stops.

Her grandmother and grandfather climbed up the iron steps of the car. When they reappeared at a window they looked almost like all the other strange faces.

Lucy lost track of which car had been theirs and when she looked back from the distant train, the platform and the rails below it seemed so alone and useless—as though there would never be another train. But there would, of course—to take her to Jamestown when she learned her 8’s.

“Well, it’s kind of a hot day for a trip,” Mr. Adams said to her father. “Awful hot for this time of year, isn’t it?”

“Yes it is,” her father said. “Well … see you later. Let me know if there’s anything you need, Stuart.”

“You bet,” said Stuart.

They got in the car to go back to school. Lucy was in the back seat, but she could tell when her mother began to cry. The baby kept pulling at the handkerchief she held over her eyes.

“Now, Rachel,” her father said, “you’re probably just borrowing trouble for yourself. You know what a tough old buzzard he is—as tough as he is stubborn. There ain’t another man his age in the county that would have come out of that fire alive. You ought to try to think reasonably about this.”

Her mother never cried unless something was as bad as it could be. Lucy had tried not to notice all the other signs, but she knew for sure, now, that something bad was going to happen far away in Bismarck.

Will settled back in his seat for the seventy-mile ride. “Mighty skinny bunch of cows out there,” he said, looking past Rose’s fine thin profile. “I wonder if they’re some of Egger’s.”

“Probably. I don’t see how those poor things will get through the winter. They look half dead now.”

“Nobody anywhere in the country can get a price for feed and yet the animals have to starve to death,” Will mused. There seemed nothing more to say after he’d said that.

Presently Rose asked, “Do you really think this Murdoch is the best doctor we could get? Maybe you should be going to Fargo instead. Or back to Rochester.”

“Oh, he knows as much as anybody knows, I think,” Will said. “Lawyers, doctors, politicians. They’re all good talkers. Who knows what they know?”

He was so unlike himself, she thought. He was like an injured animal, snapping at people it had always trusted. It was because he was so hungry.

After a while she said, “My, I’m surprised it can be so hot in here.”

He looked out at the telegraph wires running in liquid lines against the sharp blue sky. “Liable to get cold tonight though. I hope Stuart remembers to put the mare in.”

“And I hope he remembers to turn that lock on the chicken house all the way down. The weasels are worse, now that the birds are gone.”

They passed through Driscoll, Sterling, McKenzie, Menoken, slowing just enough at each station to snatch the mail sack from its post. Then they began to lose speed as they entered the outskirts of Bismarck. The train tracks crossed and multiplied into numerous sidings. They made a widening wasteland of cinders between the elevators and mills and cylindrical storage tanks. There was an air of prophetic antiquity about that cindered wasteland. The towering white columns could have been remnants of desert temples built by generations of slaves. Now the white pillars simply stood there, bursting with wheat—monuments left over from a system that had once had significance.

This very morning’s Sun said that the domestic wheat stocks on hand came to over a hundred and fifty million bushels. That was not counting any of the grain already bought by millers, or any of the new crop en route to the mills. That was counting only the grain committed to storage—floating in ships and barges on the Great Lakes or sealed up in those tall white pillars.

“ ‘Whited sepulchers,’ “ Will thought. He didn’t know exactly why the phrase had come to him, but he could not let the thought go. They were like tombs. Why? Perhaps it was their estrangement from the brown, billowing land. They were so white and vertical against it. They seemed more like urns filled with death than reservoirs filled with life.

A year ago the lowest prices in history had been blamed on the wheat in storage—the wheat going begging. This year prices were a little better but there was still almost as much wheat in storage. He did not believe that the drought had cut away the surplus enough to have any lasting effect on prices. The drought had scared the speculators into raising their bids a little, that was all. Soon prices might very well drop again. Except for the farmer, almost everybody who made his money from bread profited by having those white cement cylinders always filled with wheat. It made a man wonder if this government could ever change things enough to move the wheat out of the sepulchers.

At the hospital he showed the woman behind the admission desk the paper Murdoch had filled out for him. “In cases like this we require an advance deposit of fifty dollars,” the woman told him. He didn’t like to carry cash around, and fifty dollars was more than he had with him. He wrote her a check, wondering as he did so what she meant when she said, “in cases like this.” Probably nothing at all. That was the way with people who sat behind desks all their lives. He had noticed it before. They all had a few things they always said in almost any situation. She looked at the bank name and his name and said, “It’ll be just a few minutes. Why don’t you sit down?”

They sat on a hard leather bench that was fenced away from the desk by a high-growing potted plant. It made Will think of the plant in a Chicago hotel lobby in a movie he’d seen about bootleggers. In the foreground of the movie scene, next to the leaves of the plant, would be a closeup of the scarred jaw of one of the bootleggers. He would be hiding behind the plant, waiting for signals from the crooked desk clerk. Finally there had been a battle in the hotel lobby between the bootleggers and the prohibition agents, and the stalks of the plant had been severed by the invisible line of machine-gun bullets. It had been a ridiculous show, which the theater had run for some reason in place of the Will Rogers picture he had expected to see.

He heard his name called and he made his way around the plant back to the desk. “Now, Mr. Shepard,” the woman said, “if you and Mrs. Shepard will both sign this release, you can go right on up.”

The release appeared to absolve the hospital of all responsibility for exactly the sort of calamities Will had thought a hospital existed to prevent. But before he could protest, a nurse stopped beside them with a wheel chair and asked him if he wanted a ride. And before he could say no thank you, she was helping him into the chair.

She gave it a twirl, pushed him into an elevator, bumped him out again, and zoomed into a ward. Was it because he hadn’t eaten that everything was double-time? Even his heart was double-time. This was all silly. There was still time to turn around and go back home—where he belonged.

“Now, then, I’ll let you get yourself into bed, Mr. Shepard, if you think you can manage.” She pulled the sheet curtains around the bed. “While you’re busy I’ll just take Mrs. Shepard back down and see if we can find a room for her. But I’ll bring her back again, don’t you worry.”

He sat down on the white chair to take off his shoes. The sheets brushed his forehead as he bent over. It was a mighty small space they gave to a man for the amount of money they charged. He laid his black pants across the back of the chair and fitted the empty shoulders of his coat over the pants.

And there was his black suit—getting along without him much better than he could get along without it. Would he wear it home tomorrow or two weeks from now, or only for that final dressed-up occasion when it would not matter at all to him what he wore? And should he not put the suit back on and go home now, before this hospital made his heart step up to triple-time and caused him to fall into a panic that would make him forget again all the things about the laws that he understood perfectly well?

Yet, while he had been contemplating his suit, he had irrationally removed his underwear. That was why the hospital employed a nurse like the one who brought him here. She hypnotized a man with her hurrying, and hurried him into bed before his good sense could reassert itself.

Suddenly her voice pounced at him from the other side of the sheet. “Mrs. Shepard is just getting herself settled. She’ll be right along.”

Will pulled the blankets around his neck. Without more warning the nurse drew back the sheet-curtains. “Now I want you to meet your new neighbor,” she said. “This is Mr. Oblonsky. Mr. Oblonsky, this is Mr. Shepard. Mr. Oblonsky talked so much to his last neighbor that the poor man finally moved to a private room. Now I want you to let Mr. Shepard rest.” She turned from one to the other of them as she talked.

The man contemplated her from under brows so long and droopy that hairs hung out over his eyes. He did not speak at all, as if to make a liar of her. “Just tell him right out when you want to be left alone,” she told Will.

Rose appeared in the doorway of the ward, hardly able to bear being in the presence of so many men in bed.

“How is your room?” Will asked her.

“It’ll be just fine. It’s right near the maternity part. There were two babies in the nursery, but there’s ten baby beds. I guess people have quit coming to have their babies in the hospital. They can’t afford it any more, I suppose.”

“Well, sometimes I wonder,” he said, “if it’s a normal birth and all, if a woman needs to go to a hospital anyhow. It’s never made too much sense to me to take a new little baby away from its mother for a couple of weeks right after it’s born. Why, a foal would die of fright if you did that to it. We don’t do that to lambs or any other little babies except for calves, and I always hate to do it to a calf. Remember when we went to see Rachel when Cathy was born, and Cathy was all the way down the hall in the nursery, crying so hard she was purple? It just didn’t seem sensible to me. Rachel was just sitting there in bed with nothing to do except listen to that woman next to her. She’d a lot rather have been with that new baby, wouldn’t she?”

“You are absolutely right,” came a polished voice from the next bed. “It is foolish and barbarous, but even so, it is less barbarous than a thousand other practices of this great American civilization.” It was a carefully shaped sentence and delivered as though it was broadcast over the radio. There was no doubt that Mr. Oblonsky had been shaping it, and listening in, throughout the entire conversation.

Will looked at him, without being able to think of anything to say. The man’s name, his coarse features, his bushy hair—nothing had prepared Will for the voice or the language. He had been steeling himself to tolerate the incomprehensible accents of a foreigner who would rattle on at a great speed, expecting him to answer as though he understood.

Dr. Murdoch came in and stuck out a freckled hand to Will. He had so many freckles on his face that they made a solid brown rim around his smiling lips. A bright green tie hung out over the lapels of his white coat and one tube of his stethoscope dangled from a big square pocket.

“Well, you’re looking fine, Mr. Shepard,” he said loudly.

Rose moved to leave but he said, “Oh, no, no, no, no. Just slide back an inch and let me take a little listen here.” He planted the stethoscope against Will’s chest for a few seconds, nonchalantly, as though he already knew exactly what Will’s personal heartbeat was going to sound like.

He took the plugs out of his ears and let the stethoscope ride around his neck like a medal on a ribbon. Will thought that nobody but a doctor could look quite so sure of himself, quite so eminently and appropriately placed in the world, with the badge of his position so modestly displayed as part of his working attire. The doctor could play negligently with the end that had received the secret, desperately important sounds, as Murdoch did now, holding the little black cup in one hand and plopping it into the palm of the other. He tapped it with an irregular beat that made a man wonder if the doctor was imitating the rhythm he had just listened to.

“How’s the bellyache?” he asked.

“About the same,” Will said.

“Well, you’re in fine shape. Wonderful physique for a man your age. We’ll take your picture now, and see what we can see.”

Will was awakened the next morning so he could be put back to sleep again. He was dizzily aware of being lifted from his bed to a wagon, of the wall of white-shrouded masked people around him, of Rose momentarily in their midst, of a supine levitation in an elevator, of the white people lifting him again, of the narrow cold slab, of the jolly sounds of Dr. Murdoch. He wanted to tell Murdoch just to forget it all—that he understood the laws, that he knew it was too late. But the black rubber mask came down like a vulture to clutch at the bones of his cheeks, steadying his skull with its claws in order to pluck out the delicacies of his fainting eyes. “Just breathe deeply, now,” they said into his ear. “Just a few deep breaths and you’ll be all right.”

A wind had come in the night and herded before it a multiplying flock of brilliant clouds that clambered up and up into the steep heights of the sky. Their shadows moving over the stubble seemed too thick and black to be cast by such shining white things so far away.

Lucy was walking home under the shadows, thinking of all the people who would be at her house today when she got there and how they would laugh and joke as they worked. To make the three miles seem shorter, she would fix her eyes on a distant marker—a mailbox or a big rock or an extra high fence post—and never look down at the gravel crunching so sluggishly beneath her till she reached the marker. Whenever she remembered, she would recite her 8’s aloud to the empty road.

Somebody inside the kitchen had to move a chair before Lucy could get through the door. It was Mr. Egger. “Well, here’s Lucy!” he cried. He always teased her and she never knew how to answer him. He was running the big meat press he had brought with him. He and the grinder seemed to go together. They both had but a single arm to crank round and round. He let go of the crank and reached across his chest, across the space where his sleeve was folded back and pinned to his shoulder, and grabbed her wrist.

“Here!” he exclaimed. “Here’s a hand I found. It’ll give us just what we need to finish off this first pan. Umm num num! I bet it’ll be the best-eating sausage of the bunch—but we’ll have to watch out for the fingernails.”

She stood looking down at his hand on her wrist, while the women in the kitchen laughed at what he was saying. It made her shiver to have him yanking her hand around right in the space of air where his own other arm should have been.

Her mother saved her. “You run and change into your overalls, now, Lucy, the way I told you to, and then go down and tell the men to bring up some more sausage meat.” She made it sound as though it was Lucy, not Mr. Egger, who was to blame because Lucy was dallying in the messy kitchen when she ought to have been taking off her good school clothes. Lucy had begun to understand that it was always polite to blame yourself or your family instead of your company.

On her way to the barn she had to squeeze past Mr. Egger again, who was waiting for more meat to grind. He wasn’t much good at most heavy butchering chores, which took two hands, so the only thing he did outside with the men was a thing which required only one finger—one very accurate and sensitive finger. He supervised while they filled the great steel barrel with water from a caldron steaming over an outdoor wood fire. When the barrel was ready for the pig, he ran his finger through the water—once, twice—if he couldn’t stand to do it the third time, the water was too hot—thrice—if he could just stand it, the water was just right. But if he could do it a fourth time, the water was too cold. “Watch out, now,” he would say. “She’s still too hot in there—you’ll set the hair on that pig! Give her a minute to cool off or else fetch me a bucket of cold water.” He would motion to the man pouring the water, making him stop after a quart or so, and stir a ladle back and forth in the drum a couple of times. Then he’d test it again. Or if he could stand it to put his finger in the fourth time he’d begin to fuss and worry.

“For God’s sake bring some boiling water! Shake a leg there! If those women haven’t got you some boiling water up there to the house, tell ’em they can come shave this critter themselves!”

If the water couldn’t be brought up to the temperature that seemed exactly right to him, and the men decided to go ahead and scald the hog anyway, he’d tuck his wet hand into his pocket and predict the troubles they were going to have. “All right, do it your own way, do it your own way! I tell you it’s too cold. You’re gonna set the hair on that pig.”

When the water was just right, half the hair came off as they sloshed the pig up and down in it. Then the rest of the hair sloughed off easily with long strokes of the big knives. When the water was wrong, every single hair had to be cut off at its root.

It had been a perfect day for butchering—cold and dry. It was a very big pig, and they had had to use the block and tackle in order to scald it and get it up for bleeding. Against the side of the barn they had made a table of boards placed across two small barrels. The table held what amounted to nearly half of the pig—the same pig that had squealed to Lucy last night for the food he could not have. Now he was a baffling, monstrous, three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle.

The gray bristles were strewn on the ground where they had been rinsed off the table and slopped out of the scalding drum. Around the corner of the barn the stupendous innards sprawled out in swollen convolutions, seemingly ready to burst despite the pig’s last hours of starvation. The veins on the organs were red, blue, even green. Lucy was always amazed at how brightly colored an animal was on the inside. The pig’s blood was clotted along the several arcs which had jetted from the warm slit throat before the pressure lessened and the stream poured into the tub beneath the fat face. Even if his pieces of meat and insides could be put back together, what could be done about the pieces of his blood?

His narrow, flat lower jaw gaped away from the round, gristled snout, and above the snout, exactly centered between the two short rows of hoary closed eyelashes, was the rust-colored spot. Her father never missed with his rifle, no matter how an animal bucked and plunged. It was hard to shoot a pig that squarely, but it was also embarrassing to make a pig squeal. Even some of the best shooters sometimes had to shoot an animal two or three times, but her father never did. “They just lose their nerve,” he would say to her mother. Lucy studied the rust-colored spot. It bothered her because it seemed to her there was something about it that she did not understand.

The pig would be dodging, taking little runs this way and that, trying to elude the men who had dragged him from his pen and stood about him in a circle. He would pause, at bay, swing his head to look toward her father, and know nothing more. He would not even hear the shot. The sudden rust-colored spot would appear in his forehead and then the men would hurry to string the wires through the tendons of the quivering hind legs and hoist the carcass up with the block and tackle. Then came the knife sticking deeply through the inches of white fat, the numberless capillaries tracing their shocked red lines in the whiteness, then the eruption from the jugular itself. But about all this the pig would know nothing.

Then, after the bleeding, the lowering into the scalding barrel, the scraping on the table, the return to the hook on the block, the long incision down the belly all the way from tail to throat, the deft slices to free the membranes of the stomach and intestines from the chops and bacon which housed them, and finally the whole severed digestive system bouncing out into an empty tub or on the ground. Thus were the parts of paramount interest to the pig dispensed with, while the parts of paramount interest to the men were subjected to a complex further division.

The men flensed away the fat, so pure white between the rim of hide and the red meat. They tossed the chunks of fat into the rendering pot and then they began cutting and sawing to separate the picnic shoulders from the spareribs and the spareribs from the ham roasts, and the ham roasts from the hams. Then they cut Boston butts, pork steaks, loin roasts, and several kinds of chops. When they had divided one half of the hog into all these pieces and more, they did the same with the other half. And the beginning of that puzzle made of all the pieces of muscle and blood and fat and bone and hair was the original riddle—the perplexing rust-colored spot. What exactly did the bullet do when it made the spot?

There was a full bucket of small pieces standing on the ground by the table. The pieces were inferior morsels to be ground by Mr. Egger into much smaller pieces.

“Is this the sausage meat?” Lucy asked. Her father nodded.

She took the pail into the kitchen and Mr. Egger said, “By golly, now I’ve got me a helper prit-near as good as another arm. You feed it in, Lucy, and then I won’t have to quit cranking all the time. Set right over here.”

She dipped her hand into the bucket and dropped some chunks into the wide mouth of the meat press, letting them fall several inches from her fingertips.

“Push ’em down there a little,” Mr. Egger said. “It grabs hold better that way.”

She pushed with one index finger and jerked her hand back when she felt the meat pulled from below. He laughed and laughed while he cranked and cranked. He certainly acted as though he would think it was funny to grind off her finger. If people who scared you and teased you did it because they liked you, as her mother was always saying, then it would be better if a lot of people didn’t like you. Especially when you did not like them. This way a person like Mr. Egger would make you jump in a fright and then he would laugh and you were supposed to laugh, too, because everybody was watching. If only your family wasn’t too poor, you could buy your own meat press and then perhaps Mr. Egger would not have to bring his and he would stay at home on your butchering day.

Rachel rushed from one job to another on butchering day, trying to make sure that each job was done to suit her. She always did the final scraping of the casings herself. They were nothing more than a flimsy, translucent pile in the bottom of an enamel pan now, but they represented a lot of work. The men did the first part of the job; they squeezed out the last of the contents and sent the casings up to her empty but still the color of what they had held. Then they had to be scraped and scraped till they were pressed absolutely clean, and then put to soak in warm water and then scraped again. She herself couldn’t see a bit of difference between sausages simply fried in patties and sausages stuffed into casings. Either way they had to be canned, anyhow. But George liked them in casings, so that was the way she did them.

She gently inserted a fork handle through the center of the pile and lifted up the membranes and then let them slide off like a twisted line of writing. They were ready for the sausages.

The men brought up the brutal head, reposing on the base of its neck in the wash tub, the snout pointing defiantly up at her. The head contained a great deal of good meat which had to be salvaged. George was always after her to make head cheese, but that was where she drew the line. She used the cheeks, jowls, and tongue in the sausage and discarded the rest.

Besides the pans full of sausage there were other pans. One held the liver. Lucy hated liver, but she would have to eat what they didn’t put in the sausage because it was so good for her.

In another pan lay the huge heart, letting the last of its blood into the red water around it. Considering the chicken, turkey, steer, and hog hearts she had seen, Lucy always wondered what made people think a valentine looked like a heart.

They doled out the stronger meat of the ground-up organs to the several pans, kneaded the sausage once more, inserted a finer blade in the meat press, and commenced the work of stuffing the pig’s intestines with its own minced body. Lucy knew there must be some significance in such an operation—using the innards that digested the corn and slop as containers for the meat that the corn and slop had produced. She had somewhat the same feeling about this that she had about the rusty hole between the eyes in the head. There was too much to understand. What happened when a person died?

Mrs. Egger stretched the casing tightly over the spout of the meat press and held it there. Mr. Egger turned the crank again and Lucy watched while the meat forced out the tough tube of the casing into its original shape. “You got enough sausage here for the next five years,” Mr. Egger told her.

Rachel got the dining room table cleared and wiped clean just as the men tramped up on the porch, walking heavily because of the weight they carried. They thumped the slabs of meat on the table and went back down for another load. The cold air that came in with them made Rachel feel how cramped and hot and loud the house was. Her mind had been in one room of the hospital in Bismarck all day. He was making a good recovery, they said. He was doing every bit as well as could be expected.

“By golly, Clarence,” said Ralph Sundquist, “what a man you’d be with two arms!”

“Don’t lighten the load,” Clarence proclaimed. “Strengthen the back!”

And shut the mouth, Rachel nearly said. George was always wondering how Clarence put up with Elsie, but she wondered how even Elsie could put up with Clarence.

“That’s what I’ve always did, too,” Clarence was saying. “Any other man could never of run this here meat press all afternoon like this without changing off his hands a hundred times, but when a man hasn’t got but one arm he just learns how to make it keep going.

“I come from a line of hardy men,” he went on. “My old man got an arrow prit-near through the muscle of his upper right arm when he run into some renegades. He went and yanked it out backwards, barbs and all, and throwed it right back, left-handed.”

“Pshaw—your old man’s Indian stories. Why I bet he never left Illinois till there wasn’t nothing but cigar-store Indians left loose in this country!”

“He showed me the scar!”

“Maybe he stopped a bullet with it when he was running away from the revenuers.”

“You could see where the edges of the barbs was pulled out, I tell you. He was a tough old bird—but he wasn’t as tough as his daddy, I’ll tell you that, too.”

“Fiddlesticks! Your granddaddy was the real booze-maker and you know it! He’d of made a fortune if he’d been alive the last fifteen years! I remember him!”

They hurried through the rest of the cutting and then they cleared off the table for supper. They could not, of course, eat any of the meat yet; it was still too warm. But they had all worked up great appetites for the beef Rachel had canned the year before, the string beans put up from this year’s garden, the potatoes that had turned out fairly well despite the bugs and drought, and the two pumpkin pies she had baked.

By the time they got to the pie, heaped with sweet whipped cream, they were relaxed and triumphant. One more bit of harvest was safely put away, preserved from all future accidents. Surrounded by the bounty of the huge pig they did not feel poor. Tomorrow or the next day, depending on their feelings about how long it took for the meat to cool properly, they would all eat premium pork. George always saw to it that his meat was carefully raised and perfectly fattened. The small room was filled with a cheerful joking optimism that dimmed their anxieties the way the warm air full of sausage spices steamed the windows to hide the frosty darkness outside.

George leaned back in his chair when the meal was over, and passed the little china cup of toothpicks around to the other men. He felt expansive and proud for several reasons. In the first place, the others had been forced to admit, when they started cutting up the meat and seeing how solid it was, that his estimate of the hog’s weight had been conservative if anything. Usually such a big hog would be comparatively light: his volume would be composed of such a big percentage of lard that his density would be less than that of a smaller pig. This hog had plenty of lard on him, of course, but the bacon was lean enough, and the chops and the hams were top grade.

In the second place, things in general had gone well. He had worried about the size of the barrel, but it had been just big enough to do a decent job; the water had pleased Clarence without a lot of dilly-dallying around; Ralph Sundquist had managed not to cut himself for a change—it had been, all in all, a satisfying day. But still he was not so completely satisfied that he couldn’t appreciate it when Clarence said, “By golly, George, you sure called it. If that pig didn’t go five hundred, I never saw one that did.” Now Rachel would believe him, he thought—now that somebody else had said it—especially a ladies’ man like Clarence.

“I never saw such a heavy pig,” Ralph put in. “Anyhow I never butchered such a heavy pig. I guess I saw heavier ones—at the fair.”

Ralph always made a person want to go him one better. Sometimes he seemed put on earth just to be shown up and bested.

George laughed. “This one was a baby, compared to one my dad butchered once,” he said. “That hog weighed eight hundred and seventy-five pounds. My dad had to scavenge around till he found a hundred-gallon barrel to scald him in and we had to hoist him up with the hay-stacker in order to bleed him. When we got him all rendered out we had two hundred and sixty pounds of lard! Think of it! Two hundred and sixty pounds of lard! Why, that’s enough for five hundred pie crusts! It took two strong men to carry that pig’s head. Imagine that! How did the pig carry it? Two big men just to carry his head!”

“Did you have an elephant gun to shoot that one with?” Ralph asked.

“Naw! Finished him with one shot—same as I did today. He never said a word. If you aim right, it don’t matter how big they are. They’ve all got that one spot.”

The helpers filed out the door, carrying their pork in big bundles of white paper. The Custers stood in the doorway while the freezing air blew in around them, waving and calling goodby.

The voices came back to them out of the darkness: A good five hundred pounds all right … so glad about your father, Rachel … I want a taste of that new kind of ham … delicious pie … hope the sausage is all right … let me know how your soap turns out.

Soap. Lucy had been thinking of how her father had said that one spot Now she thought of how they would render out the kettle of fat tomorrow. Her father would build a bonfire outside and when the cooking was done she would eat so many of the delicious rich cracklings that she would not want any supper at all.

Then everybody was gone and Lucy was sent to bed. George got out the kit he had ordered from Montgomery Ward. It had a stainless steel syringe for injecting the salt and sugar deep into the ham before it was smoked so the ham would cure evenly.

“My, oh my,” he said gaily. “Even with the extension, I don’t know if this needle is going to be long enough. What hams!”

Rose was waiting when they wheeled him back. Murdoch was not with them. A strange doctor came, but he did not speak to her until he had supervised the six nurses lifting Will’s body back into his bed. They behaved as though they knew the entire incision would split open if they bent his straight form so much as half an inch. When they drew the blankets up from the foot of the bed over his legs, slowly over his stomach, over his chest, Rose suddenly knew that they were going to bring the blankets on up over his head and that the strange doctor was going to turn to her and tell her that it was all over. That was why Murdoch wasn’t there—that jolly man.

But then the blankets stopped at Will’s chin and the strange doctor said softly to her, “He came through it very well, Mrs. Shepard. He’s got the heart of a man twenty years his junior. Remarkable physique for a man his age—especially considering what he’s been putting up with for God knows how long.… Well, Doctor Murdoch did a beautiful job. Beautiful. I sometimes ask myself why he doesn’t move on to Minneapolis or Chicago—or even Rochester. Well, he’s got another operation now—he’ll be down to see you as soon as he can make it. Don’t you worry now.”

The strange doctor was following the wagon out the door before she came to herself enough to realize that he hadn’t told her a blessed thing. She hurried after him. “Wait! What ailed him? Is he all right now? Is he cured?” But she didn’t say even the first word. The doctor was already an inseparable and unapproachable member of the rustling pilgrimage in the hall. She could still catch the smell of the wagon, and she understood how the portentous stench of its rumpled sheets must waft through each open door, and how the people in the rooms who had had their rides, or were waiting for their rides, were looking out (even while they tried not to breathe that essence of the helpless sleep) to watch the white, masked neuter beings sweep past in their purposeful rush like the avenging Hosts flitting through the Egyptian streets behind the Lord of the Passover and sniffing for the lambs’ blood on the lintels.

She understood that there was nothing at all she could do but go back and sit beside him, curtained in with the effluvium from his lungs while she listened to them labor for less tainted air.

He made no move except to breathe. Sweat began to shine on his ivory face. What if he should get a case of ether-pneumonia on top of everything else? She began to feel very hot herself, though whether it was because the ward was too hot or because she felt so nauseated from the ether, she could not tell. Nor did she have any idea of how long she waited for Murdoch to come.

He did come, finally, wearing the same tweed trousers and green tie and stethoscope that he had worn the day before. He looked fresh and hearty—not at all like the other haggard envoys descending from that mysterious bloody sanctum above her. She looked at his face and at Will’s, and the difference between the faces so stopped her throat with terror and rage that she could not speak.

“I’ll bet you haven’t even been out to lunch yet,” he chided her. “You’ve just been sitting here doing nothing more useful than thinking about how bad he looks, haven’t you? How do you expect him to look after he’s been carved around in for more than two hours? How do you expect him to look with a ten-inch cut across his belly? He’s lost a lot of blood, but he’ll get it back. Now don’t worry about him! He’s got a wonderful physique for a man of his age. Go on out and get yourself something to eat before we have to give you an anesthetic too!”

The next morning Will showed a bit of color under the gray bristles that had grown out since his last shave. His body still produced whiskers even if he could not eat or drink and even if his mind was shuttered under sedation. When the time came for her to catch the train, she touched her lips to the bristles and left. They had agreed that they mustn’t leave Stuart alone too long.

On the train she tried to read a newspaper. The J. R. Williams cartoon was entitled, “Why Mothers Get Gray.” She passed over that. She tried not to wonder about whether or not Stuart would be at the depot. She would wait till she got there and either saw him or didn’t see him.

The Communist riots and counter-revolutions in Cuba were getting rather monotonous. She skipped them too. The story that caught her eye was one about Herbert Hoover and his wife. They had just made a visit to the Century of Progress World’s Fair in Chicago and then stopped to see how things were going on one of their farms in Missouri. She could hear the fit George would be having over that.

“What possible excuse,” he would be asking, “what possible legitimate reason can that man have for owning farms and competing with the rest of us that have to make a living off a farm or starve to death! The Great Humanitarian!” George had a way of talking that made people who knew him able to hear him talking even when he was miles away.

But the thing about the story she couldn’t get out of her mind was the Fair. Will had wanted to go to the Fair. All summer long the cars had been coming from the Fair along Highway Number 10. And Will would come back from town telling how he’d seen another car in front of Gebhardt’s loaded with souvenirs and with stickers all over the windows.

Now she thought perhaps she knew why he had wanted to go to the Fair so much. She held the paper up close to her face and bent over it so no one would notice her. Why should reading about the Chicago Exposition make her lose control when she had held together through all the rest of it?

The county agent had scheduled a meeting in the Town Hall for farmers of the Eureka area. He wanted to get them all to sign up for the production control campaign that was part of the Agricultural Adjustment Act. The USDA preliminary estimates of the 1933 harvest were in and formulas had been all worked out.

George had planned to boycott the whole silly affair, but Rachel begged him to go.

“I know what this guy is going to say, Rachel!” he argued. “I’ve been keeping track of all this stuff in the papers. I know this is just another scheme to get tax money out of the little fellow and into the hands of the big man—because the big man is the only man that can afford to let his ground lay idle. This damned county agent is not going to be any more good to me than the last man that came up here from Jimtown to talk to me! If I’d known what that little weasel had in his hands, I’d have torn him limb from limb and scattered him for fertilizer. No, I can’t say much for the government men they send me up from the county seat!”

“Oh, George, you always complain about how the government helps the big farmer instead of the little farmer, but what do you do to find out if you’re right? Why don’t you go tonight and find out exactly what the government will offer you?”

“I know what the government will offer me—a chance to retire a few acres and get paid twenty-five cents a bushel for what I could have raised on them. If I was a big man, and I could retire a couple thousand acres and cut down my overhead by firing two or three hired men to go on relief—why then it would pay me to go along with the government. The big men came in and caused the surplus in the first place, and now the government is going to pay them to cut down! I tell you, it burns me!”

“I still wish you’d go.”

“I’ll go, I’ll go! But that county agent is nothing but a stooge for the rich men in the Farm Bureau. You know that as well as I do. The government has been using tax money for fifteen years to pay those extension agents to go around and wait on the big boys. You haven’t forgotten what happened when we first came here any more than I have! We wanted some soil tests made—but the county agent just somehow never could get around to us, could he? But if we’d owned four or five sections of land and ten thousand dollars’ worth of machinery, what then? ‘Oh, yes, Mr. Custer. And just how can we be of service to you today, Mr. Custer!’ They make me sick!”

“How do you know things aren’t different now? Go and find out. What have you got to lose?”

“Two hours of my time and my pleasant disposition!” he said loudly.

Rachel did not reply. It was enough that he had consented to go. A little later she would suggest that he stop by and pick up Stuart. Her mother wanted Stuart to go because she thought if Stuart attended the meeting and was in at the beginning of their plans for the coming year, he might feel more like the future owner of the farm. But they didn’t want to send him into town alone at night—that was a little too much like tempting the Devil.

Rachel couldn’t recall trying to manipulate George for private reasons in all the years she had been married to him. She had asked him forthrightly to do things, yes, but she had never asked him to do one thing because she really wanted him to do another thing.

But she had never felt so desperate about her family, either. What would become of the farm, of her mother and father, if Stuart did not stay? What would become of Stuart if he ran away again? He had been home for six weeks now, and he had been perfectly steady for the whole time. The longer he was steady, the more reason there was, surely, to believe that he was finally ready to settle down. Yet the longer he was steady, the more reason to fear that his inscrutable tensions were bringing him nearer and nearer to another outbreak.

It didn’t seem from the cars outside the Town Hall that twenty people would be there. One car in front of the hall was nearly as shiny as Clarence Egger’s new six-cylinder Chrysler. Small letters under the driver’s window read “United States Government County Extension Service.” George had noticed how clever the government—Republican or Democratic—was at picking words to make the people think they were getting something. “Service!” he snorted to Stuart as they walked up the steps of the hall.

There was nobody whose official job it was to introduce Jim Finnegan and so he introduced himself, standing alone on the stage, looking out over his audience scattered around the floor. A covey of bare bulbs hung from the ceiling and no matter where he stood, at least one of them struck squarely into his glasses.

He smiled at them. “You all know me,” he said. “Like hell,” George murmured to Stuart.

“Jim Finnegan—just one of the Finnegan boys. I’m sure glad to see all you folks here tonight, but I’m sorry you didn’t bring along your better halfs.… I have one or two things for the ladies tonight. Well, I’ll just have to trust you menfolks to pass the word along, and tell them I sure hope they can make it next time. You’ll do that, now, won’t you?”

“Oh, you betcha,” George whispered.

“The Sun has been pretty good about printing the releases I’ve passed on from Washington.” There was a tinge of importance in his voice. “But I know how it is, when you’re getting in a harvest.”

You do, do you? thought George.

“You sometimes can’t keep up with the paper when you’re working sixteen hours a day [Oh, you know all about it, don’t you, down there in your little easy chair?], and if you’ll bear with me I’d like to summarize for you, as briefly as I can, some things that have happened in the last couple of months that concern you and your plans for the future. [My plans for the future are to stay alive, damn you.]

George thought it, but somebody else said it—“Just tell me what to pay my rent with, will you? I can’t seem to plan no further ahead than that!”

Finnegan trotted out a chuckle from somewhere. “That’s all right, we want it nice and informal,” he said, “and if you’ll just go along with me I think I can show you how you’ll have a better chance to pay your rent next year, anyhow. The government wants to help you get a fair price for your wheat but we can’t help you unless you’ll do something about planning ahead. Now you know this summer at the meeting in London all the big wheat-producing countries agreed on export allotments.”

“All except the Roosians,” George said to Stuart.

“The allotment for this country is forty-seven million bushels for this year and ninety million for the next two years combined. Now let me remind you that in 1920, which certainly was a golden year for a lot of you men, we exported three hundred and seventy million bushels. Last year we exported forty-one million. In other words, last year we exported less than thirteen per cent of what we exported twelve years ago. For over a decade, now, wheat has been building up into more and more of a surplus problem—by far the biggest surplus problem of any farm item—or any other item, for that matter. [Except for the item of hungry people, you jackass.] Now it stands to reason you’ll never get a decent price for wheat with more than half a year’s supply in storage. It’s just common sense that the millers aren’t going to pay you anything for your crops so long as that extra wheat is just sitting there. And we can’t sell it abroad, that’s all there is to it. Nobody has any dollars over there.”

[Nobody has any dollars over in Europe because big business won’t let any imports in over here, you hypocritical son-of-a-bitch.]

“We simply have way too much acreage in wheat,” Finnegan repeated. “During the war all you heard was ‘Wheat Will Win the War,’ and we admit it, the government did everything it could to get you to expand your operations. And you sure did. Do you realize that wheat acreage went from fifty-three million acres in 1914 to seventy-three million in 1919? That’s almost a forty per cent increase in five years. Now the main reason that the parity years of 1910 through 1914 were such good years for farmers is that we didn’t have so many acres in wheat and there was no surplus to contend with. Europe wanted everything we could produce and the prices were good. Then during the war, of course, we actually had a scarcity. Now it’s true that acreage has dropped again since 1920, but not enough. The government wants to help you cut back enough so that you’ll get a fair price.”

“A fair price from who?” somebody said loudly. “Even if wheat was scarce again, what difference would it make? Who’s got any money? You just said yourself there’s no dollars over there in Europe any more.”

Finnegan had no answer, of course, but that didn’t stop him from talking. “Well, things are going to pick up a lot. There’ll be money in circulation again. [That’s not what fourteen million men out of a job think.] And when there’s money, there’ll be money for you, too, if we can just empty the elevators and storage bins and barges so the millers won’t be able to offer whatever price they want and know that somebody will sell. And this brings me to the business for tonight.” He stopped and read his notes and when he spoke again, he sounded just like another newspaper release from the mass of publications flowing from Washington desks to country mailboxes.

“This is a matter which requires the cooperation of every single one of you—and not only the cooperation, but the good faith and the solemn promises. This country was built on the words and deeds of honorable men like you, and it will endure on those same words and deeds. Now you know I’ve been to see some of you individually, but tonight I wanted to get you all together. I want you to look around at your neighbors and realize that you’ve got to work together if you want to save your own skins. I know you can say competition is what made this country great—but so did cooperation. And now you’ve got to work together or the competition between you will ruin all of you. Six million farmers are competing against each other. How are you going to get anywhere that way? I brought you together so you could look around at each other and see just who it is that’s ruining you at the markets in Chicago and Minneapolis and Liverpool.”

“B.S.!” A red-faced man jumped up and began to talk. It was Lester Zimmerman, and he could make quite a speech if he felt like it. “We all know damn well who’s wrecking those markets. For one thing it’s the Guardian Trust Company in Jimtown that’s foreclosed on at least ten thousand acres in this county and plants every last one of them to wheat with great big tractors. And I’ll bet you that the damned Guardian Trust Company owns six combines—that’s what I’ll bet! And that’s the kind of outfit that’s wrecking the wheat markets, mister! Don’t you try and tell me it’s my little two hundred acres that’s doing it!”

“Yeah,” said somebody else, “what’s the government going to do about these banks and insurance companies?”

“Everything will be done on a percentage basis. There’s no other fair way to do it,” Finnegan argued. “Everybody has got to cut down. A lot of people thought the crops would be poor enough this year so as to eliminate the wheat surplus. But it just hasn’t worked out that way, has it? A third of the Kansas winter wheat acreage was abandoned at harvest time last May and the rest of the acreage yielded very poorly too. Kansas this year produced only forty-seven per cent of what they produced last year, and—listen to this—only twenty-three per cent of what they produced in 1931 when the moisture was anywhere near normal. And you don’t have to be told what happened in South Dakota this summer, because we got enough of it ourselves up here. The worst damage came from the hoppers, but what with the drought and rust and smut, South Dakota harvested ten per cent of what they got last year. And still we have a surplus that’s ruining your prices. You’ve got to see that it is the two-hundred acre farms that have to cut back. It’s everybody.”

Another man stood up. “How can I plant less? What am I going to do for cash? You tell me what to use instead of cash and I’ll go along with you.” He sat down, then added, “Maybe it’s time to get us a printing press and make our own.”

“The government understands that you can’t survive without a certain minimum of cash. [Minimum!] I’m here to try to show you how you can get your hands on that minimum and still work toward a better balance between the supply and demand in your market. The government knows that you also don’t like relief. Why should you? You’ve lived independently all your lives and your fathers before you were independent. The government is proud that men like you keep struggling to stay independent. [And also the government doesn’t like making relief payments, does it?] I have the contracts here with me tonight that will guarantee you a certain benefit payment next summer in addition to whatever cash you get from the acreage you leave in production. Shall we get down to business? ["Benefit payment” They do their best to make it sound like relief!]

“What happens if we sign and then wheat prices go way up? If the Kansas wheat crop is even worse next spring?” somebody asked. “Your measly checks ain’t going to look like a heck of a lot next to what we could get next fall.”

“Let me outline this program for you and then we’ll have all your questions. How’s that?” The county agent plowed ahead. “But in regard to your question, let me say that any man who signs an agreement to take a certain amount of acreage out of production and then reneges on his agreement is certainly being a poor neighbor, besides being dishonest. [Do you think we’ll fall for this grade-school sermon? Especially from a politician?] Now, first of all, for sixty or seventy years the farmers have been complaining about how the middlemen get too much of the food dollar. The railroads’ rates were always too high, their land grants were exorbitant —”

“Well they were!” somebody shouted. “They are!”

“All right, so they were. So the most important thing about this acreage-control plan is that the middleman gets soaked for it. These Triple A payments are coming out of the processing taxes the government levies on all refiners and bakers. This is so the wheat farmer can get more for his work without passing the cost on to the consumer. We all agree that the consumer cannot consume enough to keep you in business. Right?”

“Oh, George!” Lester called. “Did you bring a shovel? I clean forgot mine, and it’s gettin’ so thick in here! Do you realize the price of bread went up two months ago and this fella hasn’t heard about it yet?”

“All right, now!” Finnegan cried. “You just let me give you some estimates here. We expect to take in at least five hundred million dollars a year from these middlemen, and it’s all going to come back to you! Now just let me read you part of a bulletin I have in my hand here. I just got a shipment of these”—Lester stood up, made a few shoveling motions, and sat down—“and I hope you’ll all pick one up when we get down to the business of filling out these contracts, but I’d like to just pick out some high points here: ‘One, the total volume of wheat production in the United States must be reduced and kept within effective demand.’ And … let’s see here—‘Three, the farmers who cooperate in the program must, by reason of their cooperating, be given advantages which noncooperators would not have.’”

“There he’s got us!” George boomed out. He couldn’t see letting Lester grab the floor all the time. “Your well goes dry or your feed runs out and you either sell your stock to the government or shoot it for coyote food. So you go to your county agent, and he says, ‘You didn’t buy my acreage contract; I don’t buy your cows.’ Or you tell your kindly county agent, ‘I hear the government’s helping us fellows to dig new wells.’ ‘I don’t find your name here on my list,’ says Mr. Agent. ‘You go dig your own hole.’”

“For Christ’s sake, let’s hear the man out!” Stuart hissed.

So Rachel’s drunkard baby brother was going to act pious and embarrassed, was he? George would have to clean his clock for him one of these days. He knew it.

Finnegan went on as though there had been no interruptions at all. He had decided to pretend their unanswerable questions did not exist. What allegiance did a man owe to a government that sent him a donkey like this?

“I’m skipping along here …” said the county agent. “ ‘Five, production control should be accomplished through acreage control. Seven, the purchasing power of the United States wheat grower’s wheat must be restored to where it was in the base period, or parity period, of the prewar years of nineteen-oh-nine to nineteen-fourteen.’

“Now, there you have the outlines of the thinking and planning we’ve done since the new President took over. At least you’ll have to admit that we’ve been getting some action started. I know this has all been in the newspapers, but this bulletin pulls it together for you, and you really ought to take one. It’s your tax money that printed it. If you know a neighbor who didn’t come tonight, I wish you’d take one for him.

“Now of course you will be expected to sign a three-year contract. That’s partly to enable the government to plan ahead and not to exceed the production that will take care of our domestic needs and our export quota. But it’s also partly to encourage you to do something with the acreage you take out of wheat. If you take it out for that long, perhaps you’ll build it up for good pasture or hay. That will be good for you and good for the land.

“Supposing you averaged a hundred and thirty acres in wheat for the last three years. We’ll take the three-year average, from 1929 to 1932—be glad we don’t include this year’s bad crop—and we’ll base your payments on that. Around here, the average for those three good years is ten point five bushels to the acre—last year it was only six point eight, as you know too well. So—if you withheld thirty acres, figuring at roughly ten bushels to the acre, you’d be paid for three hundred bushels that you never lifted a finger nor spent a dime to produce. We’re going to soak the millers thirty cents a bushel and twenty-eight of that will come to you. Three hundred times twenty-eight cents is eighty-four dollars you’d get in a government check after I’d been out to verify your acreage for you. Eighty-four dollars is almost as much as some of you netted this year from your entire crop, isn’t it? And twenty-eight cents a bushel is more than you netted this year, isn’t it?”

“You know all the answers!” somebody yelled. “Tell them to my landlord!”

“We know that’s a problem. We hope we can convince you to try to show your landlords that this is the best approach for all of you.”

“You’re right down there next-door neighbor to my landlord,” George said. “You tell him! You send your little booklets on over to him.”

Finnegan was trying to shout over them all. “Now that I’ve given you this outline and this example, are we ready to get down to a real study of the contracts? I’ll pass them out to you so you can follow along with me.”

As he came down the aisle, Lester started in on him again. “I want to know how much acreage the Guardian Trust Company is going to cut and why they ought to get any tax money at all for running a bunch of farmers off their land.”

“Let’s not worry about the Cuardian Trust any more tonight,” Finnegan snapped. “The Guardian Trust is not coming to the government for relief checks and free groceries, and the Guardian Trust does not have any bologna-grade cattle it might have to sell in a hurry!”

He was letting them have it now, after he had ignored George saying the same thing. This was what the little bulletin meant by “cooperating” farmers getting “advantages” not available to “noncooperators.” This was what every man who read the newspapers already knew—and they all read the newspapers. Furthermore, they all knew that County Agent Finnegan, like every other county agent in seventeen hundred other wheat counties, had his finger in up to the elbow in the administration of practically any government money. So just who was the county agent trying to kid, anyway?

“I almost forgot,” said Finnegan. He had retreated to the stage after handing out his forms. “I wanted to mention some other important items. Maybe you can give me half an ear while you look over those papers. I have another bulletin here.” He held it up and patted a pile on the long table beside him. “It’s of interest to everybody, but particularly to the ladies. I hope you men will all take a copy home. I want to read you just a short paragraph here: ‘In far too many instances the farmhouse provides only meager facilities for sheltering and feeding the family. It contributes little toward making home life pleasant. Heretofore, farm savings have largely gone back into the farm to increase production. It would be sound economy to put an increased proportion into the home. Such a course, besides raising the farm standard of living, would harmonize with the need for controlling production.’ Now that’s why I’m sorry not to see more ladies here tonight,” he shouted over the hoots in the hall. “I’m sorry that more ladies aren’t here to pick up these bulletins I have on how to brighten up your house. There are lots of little tricks here that use relatively inexpensive materials.”

“Like flour sacks?” somebody called.

“And,” Finnegan went on, “there are some tricks here for the men, too. I especially want to point out this little three-page booklet on an economy bathroom that you can install yourself for as little as a hundred and fifty dollars.” There were more hoots.

“A hundred and fifty dollars and some labor, and you would be rid of your privy—no more of those long cold walks in your nightshirt through six feet of snow on a chilly winter’s night.” There was no laughter. No city man with nice inside plumbing had any right to make jokes about those walks. And besides, they weren’t really so funny.

He hurried on. “And a hundred and fifty dollars and the labor put into improving your house instead of producing wheat that nobody wants would help raise the price of wheat and raise the value of your property at the same time.”

“Then the taxes and rent would go up! Every time I fix up my place, the government soaks my landlord and he soaks me!” somebody said.

Another man observed, “By golly, I’d have to lay a new floor before I put in any of that heavy stuff. I can just see the old woman now, fixture and all, falling through into the storm-cellar.”

“If I had a hundred and fifty dollars to spend on a bathroom, I’d buy a car that’d run, and get out of here,” the other replied.

“Hell,” the first argued, “if you had a hundred and fifty dollars to spend on a bathroom, you’d be so rich you wouldn’t want to get out.”

Finnegan had lost his audience again—this time because they were speculating on how they would use that much cash left over after simple survival. George was digging another well and installing a windmill so he could stop pumping by hand every drop of water he used. Then with the next hundred and fifty dollars he’d put in a power pump to get the water up to the house and back to the garden. Then, when he had water flowing to the house, perhaps it would be time to think about putting in a bathroom. But the water would not flow to the house unless the fine free-enterprise power company would string a line out his road. There sat Will, with his house wired for electricity ever since he’d built it almost thirty years ago. Will was still waiting, and it looked like he was going to wait a long time yet. So perhaps the second hundred and fifty dollars had just better be applied toward a tractor, after all.

“Well,” Finnegan yelled, “maybe this is a little optimistic for this year, but it’s the sort of thing the government would like you to keep in mind and plan for. It’s the sort of thing you can look forward to, if only we can get this overproduction whittled down and the prices boosted up. In the meantime, there are these other bulletins here about things you can do. Here’s one called New Ways to Use Your Root Cellar, and here’s another—Simple Improvements for the Farm Home, which I know will interest your wives.

“Well, let’s go over these forms, now, shall we? I have a little book here with a set of tables in it to make the figuring easier. Just hold up your hand, when you’re ready, and I’ll come and read them off to you.”

“This isn’t Russia you’re in, mister,” said George. “We can all read and do simple arithmetic here. And I’ll tell you what little book of tables I’d like to see. As long as you’re going to use our money to print up so many of these little books to tell us what clodhoppers we are and how we ought to go about building bathrooms—I’d like a little book to tell me how to go bankrupt and come out of it with more than I was worth to begin with, the way these bankers and big businessmen and big farmers do. All I know is what I see. I see a little guy lose his shirt and him and his family wind up on relief with every businessman in the county still trying to get something out of his hide. I see a big man go broke and I see him start up again somewheres else, making just as much as he made before. I see a Jew banker go broke right here in this town and go off scot-free with our money and make himself nice and comfortable. Now why don’t you print up a book to tell us clodhoppers how to do that?”

Finnegan couldn’t disregard him. There were too many approving headshakes and loud agreements.

“Well, now then, sir,” he said. “I’d like to know how that’s done, myself, if it is. [Oh, it most certainly is! We all know them. We all know Harry Goodman.] And if a little book on that subject comes out, I’ll be sure to let you know. But all I have at the moment are some booklets about agriculture which I’ll be more than pleased to let you have. I’m not an expert in accounting. I came here tonight to tell you about the AAA program to get farmers back on their feet, and I’ll be glad to answer questions on that subject.”

But nobody had any more unanswerable questions for the county agent not to answer. That was the end of the meeting. “Much obliged to you folks for coming on out tonight,” Finnegan cried, “and I do hope you’ll get your neighbors to come to the next one.” He raised his voice another notch. “And talk about this between yourselves, and watch the Sun for the next meeting-time up here in Eureka, won’t you?”

“Well,” George said to Stuart as he let him out of the car at the foot of the hill, “it was just as bad as I thought it would be.

“Well, I guess that’s his job,” Stuart said.

Somebody really must teach that boy some manners, George thought as he drove home. This was what came of spoiling them when they were little. He parked the car, kicked the blocks under the front wheels, and walked the few steps to the house. The two breaths he took and exhaled made thick gleaming clouds in the light of the rising third-quarter moon.

“How was it?” Rachel held a sock stretched over a wooden darning egg.

“I brought you something so you could get in on all the fun yourself.” He handed her the pamphlet on how to install a bathroom complete with three fixtures for a hundred and fifty dollars.

“That silly little squirt!” he burst out. “I don’t need him to use my money to print up a book to show me how to dig a hole in the ground and stick a pipe into it nor how to hook up a bathroom set from Montgomery Ward’s! They send all that information with the fixtures, for God’s sake! If you can buy the fixtures and get the damn water, you don’t need any little book printed by the government! I just can’t tolerate it, I tell you! When I think of tax money paying pipsqueaks like him to come out here and spread the rich man’s propaganda for him, I get so mad I just can’t see straight! It was just the way I told you it would be—only worse!”

“Well, how about the acreage-control contracts?” Rachel ventured.

“Oh pshaw! A little guy like me just can’t get anywhere with them. A man like your father could retire seventy-five or eighty acres and not have a landlord to fight for the cash that was left. I can’t do that! A man on such a narrow margin as I am has just got to gamble on making every cent of cash he can. I know it’s not the best way to farm, but what can I do with Vick breathing down my neck?”

Then she asked what she really wanted to know. “I suppose Stuart got home all right.”

“Well, why wouldn’t he have got home all right? I let him off at his own driveway! He can’t walk up his own driveway in the dark after riding around in freight cars for two years? Rachel, what ails you these days?”

Not long after the meeting George noticed an item in the Sun. He read it to Rachel as she did the dishes. The Secretary of Agriculture was pleased, it said, by the response to the acreage-control program. A full eighty per cent of the nation’s wheat acreage had been signed up. But only half of the nation’s wheat farmers were involved in the program, which meant—said the Secretary—that it would be easier and cheaper to administer. It didn’t mean any such thing to George. What the discrepancy in those percentages meant was that the big owners were going to collect tax money for doing nothing, while the fifty per cent of farmers working twenty per cent of the land were going to go right on sweating as usual.

“You know who they’re calling ‘farmers’ in that fifty per cent that signed up, don’t you?” George said. “The Guardian Trust Company. The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. Farmers! Everybody who doesn’t know any better is going to think that the government has gone all out to help the farmer. Everything is going to be just rosy now!”

He sat in the black leather rocking chair with his feet up on the stool in front of the stove. He’d stepped in a gopher hole this morning and turned his ankle and it had hurt him all day. Even propped up next to the heat, the damn thing wouldn’t stop hurting. It made him more tired than he ought to be. He was tired and poor—as poor as ever. An inflated dollar for the farmer was an inflated dollar for everybody else, too. If he had a ten-year-old mortgage to pay off now, he might be getting a little good out of the inflation. But he’d never even got far enough to mortgage anything yet. Well, he could probably stay on the treadmill for another year. Then he’d see where he stood. He’d fight before he’d go on relief. He wasn’t going to lick the boots of a Finnegan or anybody like him, nor stand in any line for any kind of government relief. There must be countless men like him—who knew their rights and would know when they had patiently taken enough.

Those other men in their lamplit houses—far-flung dots in the prairie night—a lot of them must be getting ready, too, just like him. Those other men, whether tenants or owners with mortgaged farms, were very much in the same boat. Owners’ farms were worth a third of what they were valued at when the mortgages had been taken out, so one year of failure to meet the interest payments, and the owner was no longer an owner. In George’s case, one year of failure to pay Vick would either evict him from the farm immediately or put him so hopelessly in debt to Vick that it would be madness to go on.

He could try moving to a city and going to work for the other fellow, but the government was doing its best to move surplus city people into the country. Even in a place the size of Eureka there were always displaced men sitting on the steps of the Town Hall hoping to be hired for a few hours’ work. The city people were starving now on worn-out bits of abandoned ground instead of starving in bread lines. In short, the city people generally reacted like any other ignorantly transplanted thing. Still, George knew men who were going from the country to the city—faraway cities—to try their luck. It was a senseless mobility. If a man couldn’t live where he was, how could he possibly afford to move? Yet that was what more and more millions were doing—starving and moving, starving and moving. It seemed to him more sensible to try to ride it out in a spot where he had already invested so much of himself than to join that dislodged multitude.

On the other hand, it would be intolerable to fail in a spot where you’d lived for a long time. What would be harder than taking a relief check from the hand of a man who had once sat behind you in a fifth-grade classroom? Yes, from a man you could beat in those days sixty ways to Sunday, whether you were trying to spell him down or be the first to plug a duck in the waterline at a hundred yards. Mobility at least provided anonymity for failure, and a man was compensated for the loneliness of wandering by not having to face the grudging pity of his community. Oh, he would certainly clear out before he got into any such straits as Otto Wilkes was in.

George had always thought, after it was clear that his old man would never let him off the farm to get an education, that he would at least use the education he got on the farm. He would farm this same northern prairie as two generations before him had done, and he would make good, too, as they had.

But there had been no years in his life like the early years of free land when his grandfather had homesteaded. Nor had there been any years like those when he was a boy and his father became prosperous—those years that were so good the Roosevelt administration had chosen them for the “parity years,” to butter up the farmers.

The parity years—he was ten years old in 1909, fifteen years old in 1914. And those years had been good ones. With four boys to help him, his father was making plenty of money, expanding his farm, getting set for the killing he would make during the war. And those were good years to be a boy on the prairie, too. He had enjoyed himself. He had been old enough to be an essential part of the male brawn that it took to run a farm in those days. At twelve he had gone with his father into a blizzard he would never forget and brought back a herd of cattle that would otherwise have perished. At thirteen he had been six feet tall and could manage a ten-horse team as well as any full-grown man.

And he had been young enough not to want anything else—not to want any more schooling, not to wonder about getting married, not to worry about owning his own land some day. He had wanted only to do what he was doing—to use his strength against the strength of brutes and elements. Even when he wasn’t working, he was looking for activity that would be wild enough for him. He and his brothers would each pick a steer, run up behind him, grab his tail and jump on his back. They’d twist those ornery steers’ tails up into such knots that the critters would have all four feet off the ground for a quarter of a mile. They’d try to do it in sight of the house if they could. Then their mother would stand on the porch and add her bawling to the bawling of the steers.

They could ride standing barefoot on the back of a galloping horse as well as any circus rider—in fact, better, because they couldn’t be bothered with well-rosined white slippers. Eventually they got a three-horse team so well trained that they could stand with a foot on each outside horse and straddle the middle horse. It wasn’t nearly so hard as it looked. It was just a question of training the horses. And back at the house their mother would be screaming from the porch that they were going to kill themselves. She was as good as a circus crowd. He would never forget it.

His foot slipped off the stool and crashed to the floor. He realized that his eyes had been closed. He’d almost gone to sleep in his chair—like an old man. He was tired—even tired of his own fury. He sat staring at the hot red-black metal of the round stove till he felt as though his eyes were melting. The parity years, the parity years.

“Rachel,” he called out to the kitchen, “do you suppose a man will ever be able to buy a pair of pants with a bushel of wheat again?”

For three days Will lay in the nightmarish consolation of morphine hypos, curtained away from the rest of the men by the sheets pulled about his bed.

On the fourth morning the orderly bathed the limbs that were still connected to him by the various systems circulating through his bandaged middle. The nurse drew aside the sheets and he was greeted by Mr. Oblonsky. He had forgotten all about him.

“And how are you feeling this morning, Mr. Shepard?” asked Mr. Oblonsky.

Now that the sheets no longer hid the pain, it was necessary to hide it behind decent manners instead. “Much better,” said Will. Once he had spoken, he lay in a sweat while the sledge hammer smashing into his belly subsided into nothing more monstrous than his monstrous pulse.

“Well, it takes a while,” Mr. Oblonsky observed in a shockingly loud voice. “It takes a while. You will feel much better tomorrow. The fourth day is the dark before the dawn. I have had three fourth days myself now, and I know.”

Appalled, Will managed two syllables in reply: “Why three?”

“They never tell me. Just come in and say, ‘All right, let’s take a little ride in the morning.’ ”

In spite of what it cost, Will felt that he had to set the record straight on that point. “I’ll just tell them … to treat me … like the old gray mare … with her leg broke.”

“No you won’t,” Oblonsky said. “And the reason you won’t—that is the reason they all know.”

Will was played out. “Who?” he said.

“All the exploiters. Doctors, bankers, mine owners, factory owners—they all know we are born with the instinct that makes us totally vulnerable. The instinct to live—to exist, at any cost. If we did not care whether we existed or ceased to exist, would any man in the world choose to go down into a mine every day of his life? That man thinks he is alive, Mr. Shepard, and yet he never sees the sun!

“These men watch their babies starve when the owners shut the mines; they see their comrades murdered—murdered, Mr. Shepard, by the hundreds, because the owners will not go to the expense of installing the simplest safety devices. Yet those owners have been able to persuade these men that they are alive.… You don’t think that you can be persuaded to believe you are alive when your whole mind tells you that you are not? Wait! Wait till they come and ask you to go for another little ride. You will go!”

“No. I won’t.”

“Yes, you will—let me give you a hypothetical man—he is only hypothetical because he is two or three generations in one. First he is a proud, rugged, independent farmer—the backbone of the country, poor but free. Then the bank takes away his farm and he becomes a tenant—a sharecropper. If he is not too dazed by hunger to be able to think, he knows he is no longer free, but it never occurs to him to think that he is no longer alive. But then the soil is worn out and there is too much cotton, anyway. So the sharecropper must become a picker—wandering over ten states, picking whatever the exploiters want him to pick, for whatever wages the exploiters want to pay him. And he will fight other pickers for a job—for a chance to earn fifty cents a day. Isn’t that a funny joke? He is not alive; yet he will kill another man in order to continue his existence. We were all born to eat each other in obedience to the commands of our disgusting digestions—I imagine you do find your digestion wearisome, do you not?”

“A little,” Will whispered.

“But you will take as many rides as they tell you to take, Mr. Shepard, in order to keep your tortured digestion alive, because as long as you keep your digestion alive, you will think you are alive.”

The last hypo was wearing off. The nurse had told him he must begin to stretch the time between them, or he would become addicted to morphine. He had thought that he had got some idea of what pain was in the past six months, but now he knew that the pain going before had been only a primer. Another day, perhaps, he could tell this man that he too knew something about these laws of living and existing.

“I think I’ll have to sleep,” Will said.

“I am sorry. I did not mean to get so carried away. This battle with the exploiters—it is so much more important than you know—it is my life! … I, too,” he mused, “must still believe myself to be alive.”

Friday, October 20

The Mundane Meridian that was the road rolled southward and upward, and the latitude of a fence line that began on an eastern hill invisibly crossed the road and rolled on to the west, down around the earth into the celestial meridians of sunset color brilliantly ascending the horizon. Along the mundane meridian a point that was Lucy dogtrotted almost the whole three miles between the points that were school and her father’s farm. If she hurried, there would still be time to help her father with the corn picking before it got dark.

Changed into her overalls and play coat, she ran through the north grove to the edge of the cornfield where the rise of land lifted the long rows up to the sky. Her father was far enough on the other side of the rise so that she could not see him, but she could hear the sounds of the hard corn ears thumping against the high backboard he had attached to the side of the wagon. She knew he was trying to finish the field today.

She ran up the slope between the two rows of dead stalks, kicking into the rich litter of ripped husks and piles of silk. The yellowed husks were softer than they looked—much softer than fallen leaves—and the fine strands of red-brown silk compressed beneath her feet into a springy cushion over the hard ground. The cushion made her feel as though she must be bounding up into the sharp air like a jack rabbit. She had a picture of her long ears silhouetted against the skyline as she took her great leaps of alarm, scanning the hillside for the coyote she scented.

When she reached the top she saw her father just beginning another row, starting back toward her from the end of the field. He saw her, too, and waved a glove at her.

“Well, Pickle-puss,” he said when they met, “what’s new?”

“Don’t call me Pickle-puss!”

“Why not, Snickle-frits? You like pickles, don’t you?”

She decided not to answer. “Can I drive the team?”

“Just be sure you keep up with me.”

She walked beside the horses and led them by their bridles. Her father twisted an ear from the stalk with an echoing crack, whisked off the husk with the help of a small hook he wore over his heavy leather glove, and then, without ever looking behind him, even while he was reaching for the next ear, he tossed the husked ear squarely against the center of his backboard. Lucy couldn’t understand how his aim could be so good. He never missed once, all the way up the row.

She herself was not working hard enough, and she was getting cold for lack of exercise. If she had not been guiding the horses, she would have been running up and down the hill, ridding herself of the deadly hours of sitting at a desk and smelling chalk dust and radiators. Here was the smell for her—a blend of many smells surrounded by the cold smell of the air itself. The silk had a smell, and so did the husks, the bruised stalks, the hard ripe corn kernels, and the chaffy cobs. And there was the smell of the horses, too, and a trace of smoke from some distant outdoor wood fire—somebody perhaps was rendering lard, feasting on cracklings.

The compound fragrance meant the complex thing that excited her so much, even though she could not have said why she was excited. This fragrance signified the rush of the harvests and the sun hurrying the winter and the winter hurrying the people, and the mystifyingly close connections of so many disparate things. Here was the corn that would go to make next year’s pig, like the one they had just butchered, and the corn that would be ground for her to feed to the baby turkeys next spring. This year’s turkeys would be slaughtered in a few more days now. But even though this corn went to raise so many creatures for death, still the smell of the field was the smell of being alive.

She held Kate’s bridle up tight under her jaw. The horse’s soft nostril, lined with dewy hairs, was only a few inches from her fist and nearly as big. From where she walked beside the mare, Lucy could see only the nostril on her side, and it was so active that it almost seemed like a small separate animal. The moist breath came out of it very warm on her bare hand and wrist, and then a cold breath went back in, passing over the moisture on her hand and making it feel half frozen. Then the next breath would come out warm again, heated by all of the big body behind her. Kate’s coat was already thick and brushy for winter, and it would not be sleek again until summer.

When they reached the end of a row which was still some distance from the unfinished end of the field, her father looked up at the darkening sky and decided to quit. They climbed up on the wagon wheels and swung themselves in on top of the corn. Her father untied the reins and handed them to Lucy.

“Now take it easy. This ain’t hay! This is heavy.”

He sat back on the corn, lifting up an ear here and there and working off the kernels with his thumb to see how deep and hard it was. Considering the drought, it was a good crop. The ears were pretty well filled and they were fairly heavy. Some of the corn crops he had seen this year had ears that were kerneled only a third of the way along the dried cobs. This corn was only mildly afflicted with ear rot, which meant it would store fairly well. He had switched to the Diplodia-resistant hybrid strain a couple of years ago, and the results had been nothing short of astounding. Yet now, only two years later, there were some still better hybrids on the market. His neighbors who had not switched were not getting anywhere near the harvest he was and now they were buying seed from him. Why hadn’t the Ceres vindicated his judgment the way this hybrid corn had?

They stopped next to the corncrib between the barn and the house. “No time to unload now,” her father said. “I’ll just unhitch and leave it here till the morning. You run to the house and fetch me the milk pails.” He led the horses away.

After she had taken him the pails, Lucy stopped to look up at the wagon and try to guess how many shelled bushels there might be in it. She did love bringing in the corn. There were no bugs and snakes in it as there were in gardens and in wheat and hay fields. She was not afraid of snakes, but it startled her to have a long fat garter snake come wriggling out at her from under a haycock or a shock of wheat. If her father saw her jump, he would laugh at her and she would know that he was thinking a boy would not have jumped. She herself knew that was not true because she herself had picked up a garter snake in the schoolyard once and scared Roger Beahr half to death with it. But with a corn harvest there were no such situations that caused a person to act afraid of something when she really was not. The snakes and bugs were all gone for the winter.

Right from the start, corn was a lovely crop. Nothing was prettier than the first bright green rows of long, slender leaves arching out against the black earth. Nothing except wild prairie roses—delicious pink Dixie cups standing up along the thin, rare briars on the barren ground, passing away too soon to have been real, but leaving the memory that they had smelled like raspberries and spice—nothing except those roses had a sweeter, more delicate fragrance than young corn. And then in the summer nothing but corn gave such high shade in its long warm rows while the slender leaves tittered and shushed each other in the wind.

Corn made such a solid, definite harvest. The kernels were big enough to be significant one at a time. The yellow stream from the spout of the sheller quickly filled bushel basket after basket while the ragged cobs spewed out to be hauled away in her red wagon for fuel or fertilizer.

The corncrib itself was a satisfying edifice—so simple, so symbolic of abundance. It was a circle of the tallest snow fence wired together to make the walls that were held up by the corn inside. The dull red slats against the gold were like treasure-house bars around real gold. When she was smaller Lucy had wondered if there might not be a little elf like Rumpelstiltskin somewhere who could be captured and coaxed to turn all the corn in the corncrib into piles of gold pieces.

For some reason she did not want to go back into the house. The night was as dark now as it would get—much darker than it would be when the harvest moon rose up a little higher. Already the clear stars swarmed over the sky and flowed into the white deluge of the Milky Way. This was like so many nights accumulated in her memory—this coming in to the little warm house from a harvest field, chilled and heroic and victorious. Those other nights before this one had already massed themselves into a nebulous yet familiar structure—a vast house of time all around her, reassuring her and enchanting her and reminding her—now that she had wandered inside without knowing what she did—that she had been here before. And the little warm house with the lamp on the dining room table called her to come and shut the door on the vast heroic house, and the regret she felt at leaving the vast house was part of the memory too.

After supper that night they spread out the catalogs and began figuring out their winter order. They usually sent to Ward’s, because her father had proof that Sears Roebuck was run by Jews, but once in a while if there was a great discrepancy in price or if Sears offered a brand line not available at Ward’s, they made out a little order from the other catalog. It was necessary to compare the prices and offerings of both before committing oneself to the order blank on any particular item.

They usually sent no more than three orders during the year—one at Christmastime and one in the spring and the fall. For the last two years when the fall order went out, her parents had argued over whether to order high-topped shoes or oxfords for Lucy. She had worn the high ones until she went to school, but then her mother had told her father that girls didn’t wear that kind of shoes to school any more and that Lucy ought not to be the only girl wearing them, especially since she lived on a farm.

“How many times do I have to say that what the other fellow does shouldn’t make a particle of difference? If everybody else went barefoot all winter, would you let her, too? You’re always worrying about all the colds she gets. Why not try the proper shoes for a change?”

“Oh, you always exaggerate! You know it’s her tonsils and not her shoes that make her get these bad colds!”

Lucy sat at the edge of the table looking sideways across the two catalogs opened at the shoe pages. Would her mother desert her this time before the argument was won and order a pair of hideous black high-topped shoes? She stuck her thumbnail under a tiny raised piece of oilcloth peeling away from the sticky webbed backing.

“You’ll just spoil her silly, that’s what you’ll do.” He picked up the paper and said no more. Lucy had three or four bits of oilcloth off by then, and she was horrified when she realized how greatly she had enlarged the little hole that had started her in the first place. She looked at the newspaper shielding her from her father’s face and quickly swept the bits into her hand. It was a good thing they were going to order a new one tonight. Maybe nobody would notice.

Her mother tore out the catalog page with the children’s foot measurements marked off on it. She dusted Lucy’s bare foot with powder so it would make exactly the right imprint when she stepped down on the markings.

“Just make sure you get them big enough,” her father said, remaining behind his paper. “Let’s try to get her through the winter on one pair this year.”

“I ordered them just as big as I could last fall. Don’t you remember how they were so big they slipped up and down so she had to have her heels bandaged till her feet grew? And the toes curled up and they always were too wide for her, even when they got too short. How can I get them any bigger than that? It isn’t my fault her feet grow so fast. She takes after you and you know it!”

After the shoe ordering was done and checked and rechecked with powder on both bare feet, the wonderful noncontroversial part of ordering began. This was the year for her to get a new sleeper and a new union suit. Last year was the year to skip and by now the ankles of her underwear were nearly to the middle of her calves and her mother had had to cut the feet out of her sleepers. She took a long time to decide whether the new sleepers should be pink or blue or yellow. It was lovely to sit and imagine all that new fuzz that would soon be snuggling around her in such a friendly way.

After Lucy was taken care of, Rachel tackled the oilcloth. Only the “best” grade was shown in color and she never bought that. She always chose something from the rotogravure pictures facing the color page where the “good” quality was illustrated. She would try to imagine from studying the tiny pictures what the full-sized patterns would be like, and from reading the description what “predominantly green” might mean. They had once got a “predominantly green” that George claimed was not green at all, but blue. He despised blue. “Nobody but a Roosian could stand that color,” he would say.

Rachel sighed and shut her eyes against the two gas mantles burning two feet in front of her face. She tried to visualize a new oilcloth on the table, but all she saw were the mantles thrusting like thumbs against her eyelids. Herman had some nice oilcloth in the rolls on his rack, but he was so much more expensive; even when she figured in the cost of mailing it from Chicago, she could get just as good a grade for as much as twenty-five cents less from Ward’s.

There were other colors George did not like in excessive amounts. Red was all right for a kid’s sweater or a pair of little girl’s ankle-socks, but not to look at for three meals every day. She herself found “predominantly black” not quite cheerful enough for a winter breakfast some hours before the sun came up, and two years ago she had got a “predominantly yellow” one that had turned out to be exactly the color of squash. Maybe it was just that she had been pregnant with Cathy that year, but the very thought of that oilcloth made her sick. Whatever else she got, she wouldn’t choose “predominantly yellow.”

The oilcloth would not have been so important if it had not been almost the only thing that ever changed in the house and if the dining room table had not been the commanding piece of furniture in the main room of the house. She finally decided on “predominantly pink,” and hoped it wouldn’t turn out to be either too red or too orange.

The order added up to $27.46, plus $2.97 for postage. She was just adding those two together when George cleared his throat and said from behind his paper, “How much is it going to come to, do you think?”

“A little over thirty dollars. I don’t see how I can cut it down.”

“Well … that’s not so bad. Will that really do it?”

“Till Christmas it will. I don’t know—we may need some things then.”

“I was just thinking … maybe we ought to get Lucy’s Christmas present early this year. She might as well get the good of it all winter. Do you want some ice-skates, Lucy? Real skates? Not these clamp-ons that are always falling off, but shoe-skates? Would you rather have them now and then not have anything much at Christmas?”

“Oh, George, can we afford anything like that?”

“She’s getting big. She ought to be strengthening her ankles now, before she gets too heavy. She’s got wonderful balance. She ought to be learning to skate.”

“Yes, but here you worry about her growing out of her shoes! Shoe-skates are a huge investment for the amount of good she’ll get out of them before they’re too small.”

“We’ll save them for Cathy,” he said. He sounded mad. Lucy could hardly breathe, she was so afraid he would change his mind. “We’ll get the good out of them. If I say we can afford it, we can afford it.” He got out of his chair and turned to the skate pages. “Here. Let’s see … ‘built-in steel arch supports … lined for extra warmth… reinforced toes … hardened, tempered nickel-plated blades … hockey style.’ That looks like what we want.”

“George! That’s almost the most expensive pair!”

“Now Rachel, there’s no use getting a thing like this if it’s going to be no good. The steel in these other blades here wouldn’t hold an edge, and the shoes aren’t strong enough. Why save a dollar by getting something that you’re never satisfied with? This here is a reasonable price—that is, as reasonable as any prices are these days. If we want her to learn to skate, this is what she should have.”

Lucy could hardly wait for the next morning when they could mail the letter and she could know that the order was on its way to wherever the big store was. She said over and over to herself the fine phrases describing her skates—“built-in steel supports,” “nickel-plated blades, nickel-plated blades!” There might even be some ice in the slough by the time the skates got here if only the slough got some water and froze. But the main problem was the water, not the freezing.

The thing she couldn’t stop thinking about, as she lay in bed, too excited to sleep, was how hard it was to understand what her father wanted. One minute he was so mad that they had to buy her just a plain pair of shoes and the next minute, out of a clear blue sky, he just got up out of his chair and came over to the table and picked out the best pair of skates in the catalog.