III

Monday, February 12

There was a wide gate on the south side of Highway Number 10, and attached to the gate was a fence that went along the highway and then around the base of an unusually steep hill that was dotted thickly with big square stones. The gray-white lintel of the gate was scarcely distinguishable from the dusty snow on the hill behind it, but the black letters—CALVARY—stood out upon it. Near the top of the hill, several crouching men leapt to their feet and scattered across the snow, dodging or jumping the few headstones that protruded into their random flights. They dropped to their knees just as the spot near the top of the hill exploded in flying chunks of snow and black earth.

In a moment they ventured back, sniffing the burnt powder. One of them was limping, and he rubbed his leg while he studied the hole. “Thunderation,” he said. “Prit-near broke my leg and it still ain’t deep enough. I oughta get paid by the hour on this job.”

He was a drifter they called Tiny Tim. Every once in a while he sneaked off a boxcar and over to the Town Hall to try to get hired for some piecework. He hit every town along the main line often enough to be familiar to most men who dealt out piecework.

“Don’t make me laugh,” said the man who had hired him. “If I was paying you by the hour, you’d of got some jack outa me and hiked in to the saloon by now.”

“Sure I would,” Tiny Tim agreed. “I’m too cold to work any more. What do you wanta bury a man when it’s this cold for? No need to. Sixty below, two-three nights ago. I ain’t been warm since—just thinking about it. All you need to do is let him freeze good and stiff and pound him in the ground.”

“Haven’t you got no feelings at all!” the boss cried. “You say anything more like that and I don’t care how you beg me, I’ll never give you no more jobs out here!”

“Ya, I got feelings! Cold feelings!”

“Go back down to the truck and fetch some more sticks!” the boss told him.

Tiny Tim stumped away down the hill, moving as though he didn’t dare to bend his toes for fear they would snap off.

“Shake a leg! Move a little and maybe you’ll get warmed up! We haven’t got all day! They’ll be here in another three hours or so. Come on, get a move on,” the boss urged the men preparing the holes for the next charge. “We gotta clean it up too before they come.” He looked around at the strewing of clods over the snow. “We can’t let ’em see it like this. They shouldn’t know about it. Anyway, they shouldn’t think about it.”

Once more the spot near the top of the hill erupted and finally it was deep enough. The men squared off the corners as neatly as they could. Their picks rebounded as though they were striking solid rock, but with every jolt to elbows and shoulders a few crumbs broke loose and dribbled down into the hole.

Finally they piled the frozen chunks of dirt in one big mound beside the hole. They did their best to make it look as though the grave might have been dug. They raked up the smaller dirt chunks and rocks, and they separated the larger lumps of snow from the lumps of dirt so the dirt would settle down better.

The boss untied the strings of his ear flaps and pushed his cap back to cool his forehead. “Well,” he said, “I don’t see how it’s possible to work up a sweat on a day like this, but I done it.”

He’d had this job for a long time, but he’d never got over being nervous about it. He still had nightmares about not getting the grave dug in time, or about mistaking the day and having the preacher and the whole funeral procession arrive with the casket and no hole to put the casket in.

“Let’s get out of here. I need a beer. Thank God a man can go get a beer now after he digs a grave.”

By the time they got back to town, the two men who had had to sit out in the truck bed could barely move their lips to speak, even though they had wrapped scarves around their faces. They trailed the boss into Gebhardt’s.

Tiny Tim worked his jaw to limber up his mouth. “Let me have my money. Gotta warm up.”

The boss pulled a dollar out of his back pocket. “That’s more than you’re worth.”

“Aw—for a day like this!”

“I’ll buy you a beer, but that’s all the cash money you get. You know you loafed as much as you could stand to without freezing to death.”

Tiny Tim drained the mug. “Much obliged for the orderve,” he said. He headed for the back room.

“Takes a fool to drink that stuff back there,” the boss said. “I ain’t going to touch a drop that ain’t legal. Now don’t get too warmed up in here. We gotta go back out there and fill it in again.”

Lucy felt the tickle of tears on her cheeks, then the salt running over her lips. Then the hymn book in the rack swam away out of sight, after she had managed to keep looking at it for this whole time. She wiped her eyes with her clenched fists, wiped the fists on her coat, and then wiped her eyes again. She stopped presently, and nobody had even noticed that she cried. She was glad that she had not been able to keep from crying, even if it was so embarrassing. She even wished that somebody had noticed, because it was lonely not to have anybody know that she too had cried for him.

There were a great many flowers, and more people even than there were for the Christmas program. That was because they all liked her grandfather so much. But not as much as she did, not as much as she did.

They sang the hymn he liked best. It was “Abide with Me.” Then the men closed the casket and carried it down the aisle. Lucy saw them lift him into the long black car. The people walked past the car to their own cars, bending their heads toward each other and holding each other by the elbows. They seemed as though they could not stand up alone—as though they had to help each other to walk against a strong wind.

The long car started down the street toward the highway and the other cars followed behind. They went very slowly because a few of the people were driving buggies.

He’s not in there, Lucy said to herself. I don’t believe he’s even in there at all.

The pallbearers, shaking with cold, lowered the casket into the grave. Reverend Brant drew from his pocket a handful of dust. It was an old trick of the trade—keeping a little unfrozen dirt in the house. While he was still speaking, the diggers got out of their truck and came in to wait by the gate.

George looked down the hill and saw that one of the diggers kept coming on up toward them and that he wasn’t a digger at all. He was Stuart. George could tell, even from this distance, where Stuart had been during his father’s funeral. A little man ran up and took Stuart by the arm, trying to hold him back.

“They had to dynamite it!” Stuart shouted. “He worked his whole life in the damned dirt, and then it wouldn’t even let him in! They had to dynamite it! Took twenty sticks to make him a little hole in the ground! It wouldn’t even let him in! This fella here—he knows! He helped ’em do it. He told me and he knows!”

Tiny Tim fled to the truck.

Nobody wanted to be the one to keep a son from his last sight of the box with his father’s body in it—no matter what the son’s condition was. Stuart forced his way through the mourners to the side of the grave. He lunged at the mound of frozen clods and straightened up with a chunk of earth the size of his head.

“Dust to dust!” he cried.

He stood with his feet wide apart like an executioner, raised the earthen missile between his hands, and hurled it down into the hole. There was a crash on metal—a gong sounding in Hell.

George was probably the only man there strong enough to handle Stuart without any help. He grabbed him from behind and jerked him from the edge of the grave. Stuart stumbled and lurched as though he could no longer keep his balance. George kept it for him all the way down the hill, scarcely feeling the effort it required. So this was the boy who pretended to be embarrassed when George had his say at the county agent’s meeting, was it? But this boy didn’t mind that the whole county would hear about this scene, and that of course the whole county would never forget it.

“If you’re looking for a fight, you found just the right man,” George told him. “But if you lift a finger to me, you’d just better kill me the first time!”

“I don’t wanna fight you! I’m too drunk to fight…. I never feel like fightin’ when I’m drunk. You know, George, you need a drink. Let’s go on back and get a drink. I just thought you oughta know about what this fella here told me.” He looked around for Tiny Tim. “Well he told me all about it. He’ll have a drink with us!”

“Shut up!”

“Twenty sticks!” Stuart twisted away from George and shouted his words back up the hill.

The graveside group watched, almost as motionless as the man they had come to bury, while the man’s son-in-law struck the man’s son on the jaw.

The minister beckoned to the gravediggers and they moved forward with their shovels. They juggled the clods like teacups on saucer-edges and lowered them into the grave as far as they could before letting them fall. Even so, the gong sounded again and again.

Reverend Brant was accustomed to graveside hysterics of one kind or another, and Prohibition or no Prohibition, there always seemed to be about the same incidence of drunks at funerals. People just couldn’t seem to really believe that the person they loved was not in the casket at all, but far away in a blessed place. He finished reading the short service and sprinkled the dust he had been holding in his hand. Then he waited for the diggers to finish and arrange the flowers over the broken earth.

George pushed Stuart behind the funeral parlor car. Here at last was somebody who needed to be hit.

“Stand up and fight, you bastard! Somebody should have straightened you out a long time ago. Dirty shiftless bastard! Roam around the country—bring the god-damned smut from Texas. Fight, you bastard!”

Stuart was laughing harder and harder. “That’s what I call respect for the dead! They haven’t even got him in the ground yet and you call me a bastard!”

George hit him again with everything he had, and Stuart stretched out on the highway without a whimper.

He’d be out for a while but he wasn’t really hurt. George looked over the roof of the hearse and up the hill to see what the crowd was doing. It was scattering and heading down toward him. He grabbed the limp ankles and dragged Stuart to the delivery end of the hearse. He flung open the doors and hauled the unconscious body inside, head first. It smelled strongly in there of the bouquets that had been riding beside the coffin. That flower smell so cooped up and intensified was like the smell of death itself.

“Just wait till you come to!” George told the body.

The funeral parlor owner came hopping ahead of the crowd. “I saw that! Have you gone out of your mind? Get him out of there! Have you killed him?”

“You mewling little shrimp! You mincing little butcher! No, I didn’t kill him! You haven’t got another customer yet! Leave him be! It’ll sober him right up when he wakes up in there. Just give him a ride back to town, you bloodsucking chiseler!” George was aware that he didn’t really want to be shouting.

“I said get him out of there!” The little ghoul dressed all in black was so overwhelmed by ordinary human rage that his white face was turning to an ordinary crimson. “Get him out!”

“You bugger! You sawed-off little vampire! You’ve got enough of his cash so you can afford to give him a lift back to town. I won’t touch him again!”

The embalmer grabbed Stuart under the arms and pulled him out the end of the hearse. Stuart opened his eyes when his feet hit the ground. He stayed on his legs long enough to stumble to the second black car and he sat down on the bumper.

It was necessary to remove him as quickly as possible. Reverend Brant had ridden in that car and he took Stuart’s arm. “Can we give you a ride?” he asked.

Stuart looked around. He distinctly remembered coming out in a truck, but he couldn’t see one now. “Much obliged,” he said, and crawled into the car. He leaned back against the seat and looked up the hill. The bouquets made a last discordant explosion against the colorless snow and sky. It was an explosion that hurt his eyes.

“Why’d you do that?” Stuart said. “What makes you think he’d want all those flowers out there just to freeze? ‘When It’s Springtime in the Rockies’—that was his favorite song—‘Springtime in the Rockies.’ How come you did that?”

“We always do it,” the preacher said. “It doesn’t make any difference what time of year it is, does it?”

Stuart did not come home that afternoon, but Rose would not let anybody else stay with her. And since there was no one to see her cry, she cried.

She sat at the little black desk trying to get through the papers in it. They went back thirty years and more—back into the last century. Looking at so many of them all at once made her weep for his life even more than for his death.

He had been carrying much more insurance than she had thought he was. He had always been so much more generous with her than she had been with him. She knew that he had lived his life without some of the things a man ought to have with his wife. But she couldn’t see how she herself could ever have been any different. For thirty-six years she had known well enough what she did. She had held him away from herself and tried to make up for it by working too hard. He had seen what she was doing—he always saw—and she had pushed him farther away because she was afraid to have him see.

I never wanted him to know what was in my mind. But I loved him. But if he knew what was in my mind, I wanted to run away. I never wanted anybody to know what was in my mind. But I loved him. But I loved him. But I loved him. But I hide what is in my mind even from God. Even from God.

Here are so many papers about the fire and the barn. What did I do? What did I do? What did I do when I came from the house just in time to see it blow up? I ran around. I remember running around like a chicken with its head chopped off but I don’t remember what I did. That’s how much good I was to him then. How long was it before I went in to get him? How long did he lie there with the smoke in his lungs and the cinders falling and burning him? Would he be here now if he hadn’t almost died then? What did I do?

It was Monday we buried him and now it is Wednesday, I believe. Yes, it must be Wednesday and I must get into this empty bed tonight or else somebody will find me asleep somewhere else and they will wonder why it is that I didn’t go to bed—they will think about what could have been in my mind. This empty bed here where I held him off so often—not by anything I even said or hinted—but I held him off. But I loved him. I loved him. Did I ever say it to him? I can’t remember, I can’t remember—stop, God, stop trying to find out if I said it—I won’t let it be in my mind and then You won’t know and I won’t know—nobody will ever know.

She pulled off her clothes and crept under the blankets. But it was too dark. She got out of the bed and felt on the chiffonier for matches. She lit the kerosene lamp and lay down again, but she could not close her eyes.

The useless black electrical wire stuck down at her from the very center of the ceiling. How many times had she pointed out to him what a waste of money it had been to wire the house and how much nicer the ceiling would have looked without that hole?

“You just wait, now, Rosie,” he would say. (Oh, the sound of his voice!) “They’ll string a line out here one of these days. Then won’t you be the queen? Lights, incubators, washing machine, sewing machine, water pump!”

The lamp was going dry. The oily smoke of the burning wick billowed up inside the glass chimney and coated it with an ever-thickening layer of furry soot. The lamp base was very fancy—an elegant wedding present. The painted flowers and butterflies on the milky white china were all gay and innocent of the murky storm above them. A week ago, and for all the part of her life that preceded that week, she would have run through the whole house to get to a lamp if she smelled it going dry. She could hardly believe that she was lying here watching a lamp burn dry and not even getting out of bed to blow if out; neither could she imagine why she had run through the whole house because of smoking lamps for so many years.

From the Shepards’ new barn George saw that the bedroom had the only light in the house. He wondered if Rose was sick. But he was certainly not going to go in to find out. He had been instructed by Rachel not even to take the milk inside the house. He was to feed some of it to the pigs and bring the rest home. Rachel had said that she couldn’t imagine when her mother would ever be able to look at him again after what he had done. Then she had stopped speaking to him or looking at him herself.

George knew he had done an awful thing. What infuriated him, as he went about doing Stuart’s chores, was that Stuart was not considered to be half so culpable as he was himself. He could tell by Rachel’s attitude that she had already forgiven her brother. That is, she had forgiven him as much as she ever had since the night he took his first drink. A drunkard was never completely forgiven; on the other hand, a drunkard rarely got put in the kind of doghouse he was in, either. No matter what things made a man forget himself, alcohol was the only thing that would give him a kind of excuse with even the most bug-eyed teetotaler.

So here he was—the strong steady one—doing the work of the weak one while the weak one slept off a binge somewhere. The weak were cared for by the strong, covered up for and apologized for by the strong, and forgiven by the strong. But the strong never forgave each other, did they? In the two days he’d been plugging over here and taking care of his wife’s brother’s work for him, had his wife softened up one iota? Not on your life!

The weak might not be respected, but by God they got taken care of! Hell, hell, hell! he said to himself as he dumped the last pail of whole milk into the pigs’ trough and closed the barn door.

The house was dark now. Should he go in and see if everything was all right? To hell with it. He struck off across the field for home, swinging his lantern and treading on the ends of the shadow legs that skipped so freely back and forth in the yellow light on the snow.

Stuart had gone some place to clean up before he came home. Rose had been trying to prepare herself for the two most probable alternatives—either that he would never come back again after what George had done to him and after what he had done to himself, or that he would come home as he always had before, looking so unlike himself, filthy and unshaven. Having him come home sober and normal-looking was the one thing she was not prepared for, and perhaps that was why, in a way, she was more disturbed than if he had come the way she had been expecting him to. He spoke even less frequently than he had before, as if he wished her to understand that she would never know where he went, what he did, or why he came back.

When he did speak, it was often in such a low voice that she was sure, despite the way her ears had been behaving, that he was speaking in an abnormally low voice. Did his manner indicate that as soon as he could decently do so he would leave forever? Or perhaps he would leave before he could decently do so.

Every day there seemed to be less to talk about. They worked together to keep up with the jobs that never let up, even for death. One day she asked him if he planned to go to school in the fall. It would be necessary to start making applications.

“I’ll see,” was all he said.

Tuesday, March 13

It had been exactly one year and a day since the new President made the broadcast telling the people to take their money back to the banks, assuring them that everything was going to get much better very soon, and that the money situation, in particular, would be improved in a peacefully revolutionary way.

“And I told you then, didn’t I, Rachel, that Roosevelt was just another rich man talking through his hat? A few more people believe me now, too.

“Now here he reduces the amount of gold in the dollar to sixty per cent of what they set it at in nineteen hundred. So now the dollars are ‘cheaper’ and he claims the U. S. Treasury is worth three billion dollars more than it was yesterday! What nonsense! Just some more playing around with numbers on paper—that’s all it is.

“Says here that Panama bounced a check for a quarter of a million dollars back to the U. S. Treasury. Can’t fool them either. They want the rent for the Canal Zone in gold. Uncle Sam can’t even pay his rent with his paper money any more! On the other hand, who says gold means anything?”

“Well, something has to mean something, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah, but why does the something always have to be decided on by the guys who already have a lot of it?”

He noticed a filler of interest. “Sixty-five million Chinese made homeless last year by wars, famines, droughts, and floods. That’s a lot of Chinamen. But they just keep right on breeding, don’t they? I tell you, in another hundred years there isn’t going to be room to turn around without stepping on somebody.”

No matter how dry this prairie got, at least there was still some air to breathe and a man had a decent amount of privacy. There were a lot of things to be said in favor of living here, even in the very worst of conditions. But still the box on the front page concerned George a good deal. Normal Moisture to date, 1.29 inches; Received to date this year, .36 inches. Last year the box had given normal figures up to this time in March. Yet last year his well had almost gone out on him.

Stuart had spent the afternoon in town, and after he had done the chores and eaten his supper, he stood up, pushed in his chair, and said, “I’m going to get married.”

They talked so little to each other that Rose assumed this was simply another sentence of the conversation that was taking place over a period of weeks instead of minutes. She had been living in a world where time was changed, along with almost everything else. Only work was the same, and so she worked—worked so hard that the unreality of the slow-motion communication, or lack of it, between Stuart and herself was almost superseded by the reality of the accomplishments she could believe in as she fell into bed at night.

“Well, of course you’ll get married,” she said, getting up and starting to clear the table. They couldn’t talk at all to each other unless the talk was only an ostensibly unimportant accompaniment to action. It was as though they both spoke into some neutral space between the gigantic crags of their private agonies. They let a few words go out to that space from time to time, but each let the other choose whether or not he would reach out into the space and have anything to do with the words.

“I mean I’m going to get married right now—you don’t need to look like that. I’m the same age as Dad was when he got married, and I’m older than you were when you got married.”

It was the first time since the funeral that he had sent out any words into the space which appeared to ask for reaction from her.

“You don’t know the girl yet, do you?”

“She says I know her plenty well. I want to know if I should bring her here to the farm.”

“What girl would be in such a hurry to marry you that she can’t wait till your father is cold in his grave? What kind of wife would she be? Think how people would talk!”

“That’s just what she said. ‘Think how people will talk!’ ”

“Stuart, what’s happened?”

“Women!” he cried.

“I asked you what happened!”

“I told you! Do you want me to bring her here to the farm or not? I mean, do you want me to stay here to run the farm—to help run it—or do you want me to get out? I have to support her now, one way or another.”

“What do you mean, you have to support her!”

“Because she says I did it, that’s why.”

His words out in the neutral space were perfectly understandable. She couldn’t pretend they were not there; she couldn’t pretend they did not describe the sort of thing that happened every day in a doomed and filthy world. Nor did she try to pretend that the words she set beside his in the neutral space were consistent with the things she had tried all his life to teach him. The words were atrocities of contradiction; she recognized each word as an atrocity with which she would answer the world’s atrocities.

“It happened after the funeral, didn’t it? You know you aren’t responsible for anything you did then. Whoever the girl is, she’s a tramp, and you’re not beholden to her.” Rose was hardly even surprised at herself for being so calm—so clear-headed. She felt just the way she felt watching the lamp burn dry.

“I asked you a question,” Stuart said. “Do you want me to stay around here or not?”

“Who is it?”

“Annie Finley.”

“Stuart! Whatever you’ve done, you couldn’t owe that girl a thing! Annie Finley! She’s a tramp. She’s from a family of tramps. She’s nothing but scum! No decent girl would work in a place like Gebhardt’s. You don’t owe her a thing!”

“A decent girl might work at Gebhardt’s if she made twice as much money there as she could make anywhere else. A decent girl might work there if she was watching her family starve! She gives everything she earns to her mother!”

“Yes, but how does she earn it!”

“She gets big tips in Gebhardt’s. She’s just a kid!”

“And what do you think you are?”

He didn’t offer any words in answer. He only looked at her, and the look made her remember that he had been a man for a long time.

“Do whatever you want,” she said. “If you bring her here, you can have the upstairs. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter.”

“I better go back in town and tell her,” Stuart said. “She just told her mother and her mother’s all worked up…. It’s terrible, Mom, how they live! And they try! You’ll see how clean she is —”

“How CLEAN she is!”

Finally what he said was so preposterous that she understood how preposterous it was even to be wasting their breath talking about something so irreversible and so insane. She was sane again and now she could see that he was out of his mind. He even thought he cared about this girl. That was why he had said what he just said. If it pleased him to be insane, then there was nothing she could do about it, except to try to remain sane herself. Nor could she forbid him to bring his wife, any legitimate wife, to the farm that would be half his in a few more years. She could not tell Will’s son to keep off the farm his father had left him.

He had turned away when she cried out at him—turned away as though he had been expecting her to make a show of sympathy for a whore. He was going out the door now, and everything that would ever need to be said had been said. He had passed his twenty-first birthday. He was free to come or go as he pleased. Every soul in this world lived by some kind of order. Each person chose how he would live. Stuart had thought he was escaping from order, if he thought anything at all, when he began to drink. But there was the tightest of all orders in apparent disorder. When a man gave himself to it, he gave himself to only one path, only one end. Why should she even be surprised at his next step down that path? After all, he had taken the first step three years ago. Now it was time for the second.

For a little while she hated him.

She even let God see that she hated her son. She went to bed before he came back from town. She didn’t even wonder about what he was doing for so long. What difference did it make?

He had always surprised her. He surprised her even by being born so long after she and Will had thought that Rachel would be their only child. And he had been so different from Rachel. Boy babies were more different from girl babies than she had supposed they were. Their chests were so wide, their hips so narrow, their feet and hands and heads so big. By the time they were three or four years old, their bodies were so much harder than the bodies of little girls. She remembered how hard his little legs had felt when she pulled his stockings over them, how hard his little buttocks had been when he sat on her lap.

She remembered how she had prayed and how she had nursed him when he got blood poisoning. She remembered how he looked when he began losing his milk teeth. She remembered how he had run about the house on winter days making his lips buzz like the sound of a tractor. She remembered how he would say his own prayer before a meal, the way she and Will did. He was about three then, and the prayer was a loud, rapid “Clarence-shut-the-ice!” It had taken them a long time to figure out that there must be a little boy in his Sunday-school class who was named Clarence and who would not shut his eyes when the teacher had them pray.

Oh, God, how could a boy raised so decently do a thing like this? I know now how much I loved him—before he turned his back on me. Go ahead and see, God, how much I loved him. Nobody else will ever see. I raised him to be decent and now his decency is his downfall. Nobody but a decent boy marries a slut because she’s pregnant. Was he born only to wander, God? Should we not have raised him to obey the rules that civilized people live by? Then he would not marry this girl, God. Yet what sort of a world would we have if the same rules were not supposed to apply to everybody?

And I know, God, I know that it is unthinkable for a man raised by these rules not to marry a girl of whom he has carnal knowledge—no matter who the girl is. I should be proud that my son finally seems to understand that he must be responsible for his acts.

I can’t help it, I can’t help it—I want him to run away again. Just until it all blows over. I can’t help it, God. Make him run away again, God. Do this one thing for me now. Make him run away.

All through the night she couldn’t make the one blasphemous thought leave her alone. The thought had a will of its own, stronger than hers: By raising her boy to be decent, she had only made him more vulnerable to the evil of the world. What chance did a boy like him have in this shameless generation?

Stuart got away from Annie and her mother as soon as he could, but it was nearly ten o’clock when he went out and climbed into the truck. Mrs. Finley wanted them to have a regular marriage in her house. She wanted all his family there. He himself just couldn’t quite see George there—or his mother either, for that matter.

In fact, whenever he tried to see himself doing anything in the future, he felt a queer numb blankness in his head. It was like having the whole empty prairie sky inside his head—and the trouble was that he himself was nowhere at all in that sky.

From the time he could remember, people had said he didn’t have any ambition. He’d never been mad when they said that—only when they hinted that he was lazy along with it. There was a difference between having no ambition and being lazy. He’d never been lazy; he liked to work. He just didn’t like to work in order to get a perfect score on an examination. Nobody had ever proved to him that it made any difference whether he got a perfect score or not.

Sometimes people told him he didn’t have any self-respect. He’d never been able to figure out what self-respect was. Did it mean being willing to fight a bum who called you a bum? Did it mean sweating all day and worrying all night to try to get hold of some land you could call yours? Did it mean being able to see yourself somewhere in that blank sky in your head that people called the future?

If it meant doing something you said you’d do, then he at least tried to have self-respect. If there was something in the future he knew he had to do, he didn’t try to imagine it; he just tried to keep himself from running away.

It was only the time at hand—the solitary present—that was unendurable. Like this time right now, when the truck kept slowing and slowing as it came nearer and nearer to Gebhardt’s. He knew that if he could get past Gebhardt’s for the next few days, he would find himself doing what he’d said he’d do—standing beside Annie Finley and promising Reverend Brant that he would join his whole empty future with hers. And what difference would it make? It was just the present that he couldn’t get through.

Rose didn’t know, till she heard Stuart come downstairs in the morning and go out to milk, how much she had been wanting him to run away.

There were some more things she would like to say this morning. There were some questions she would have liked answers to, but they were the kind of questions she could not ask him. Had he even done what that girl apparently said he did on the day his father was buried? Did he remember what he had done? Was he so innocent that he didn’t know that one time rarely caused a pregnancy? Did he think humans bred like cows in heat? Or had it been more than one time?

A dozen times that day she reversed herself. The girl could not come here. The girl would have to come here, or Stuart would have to leave the farm, and what would become of him then?

One could not see the girl’s mother in the store or on the sidewalk and not feel pity for her. Rose understood that the Finleys belonged to a class of people that could not be said to have had any real chance in the world, and therefore the whole world was to blame for their condition and nobody in the world was blameless. On the other hand, did she and Will owe their one son to that doomed clan, to make up for the way the world had used them? How could it help the Finleys for her boy to be sacrificed to them?

When Abraham had piled the wood for the burnt offering and taken the knife in his hand, the Lord intervened for the sake of Isaac, the long-promised son of the aged Sarah—the one boy born to sow the seed of Abraham. The Lord intervened between Abraham and his obedience. But where now was the ram caught in the thicket, the substitution for the human sacrifice? Will You not find some way now, Lord, to save me and my son from our obedience?

But still no way had been found when she got into the car with George and Rachel and the children to drive into town for the wedding. Every time she looked at George she could not help hating him. It was the fight that had done it. Otherwise they would have got Stuart home after the funeral.

When they passed Gebhardt’s, Rose knew that either she must be insane or that the world must be insane. Otherwise, how could she be hoping that Stuart was inside Gebhardt’s right now?

But he wasn’t. The car he had borrowed from a friend for a trip to Bismarck was parked on the road in front of the house.

They parked behind it and walked up the path. Pearl Finley met them at the door.

“Come right in, folks!”

The day was unseasonably warm for the last of March and they sent all the children out to the yard till the ceremony was over.

Annie had not come downstairs yet. They sat in the parlor without speaking. All of them wondered how much everybody else knew. All of them knew that what anybody else didn’t know he could probably guess. George tapped his feet and looked around the room. He wondered what rent Harry Goodman had charged them. They might not be paying rent to anybody at all, now that Harry was gone. The mortgage he’d taken on the place had probably been tossed out with the other worthless scraps of paper that Harry had been calling assets. From the condition of the parlor ceiling a man might suppose that there was no roof on the house at all, but George knew he had seen the facsimile of a roof from the outside.

Lucy wondered what they were doing at the house. She had never been to a wedding. She understood that something happened when people got married, so that afterwards the man had the right to boss the woman around. There were other, less forthright things about marriage which she sensed were even more significant, and though she had no idea of what they were, she felt terribly embarrassed about them.

Getting married seemed like just about the dumbest thing a person could do. As far as she could tell, people always regretted it. She couldn’t understand why people went right on doing something that they ought to know they were going to be sorry for. Whenever she had to stand around in the store waiting for her father to finish a conversation, she never heard the men call their wives anything but “the old lady” or “the old woman,” and they always sounded as though they hated the wives they were married to. It was the same when she listened to the women talk, when it was too cold to play outside on a Sunday afternoon and the men were all out in the barn. Women always said things like, “No matter what I do, I can’t please him,” or “They’re all alike. They’re all alike.”

“Hey, let’s play tag!” Audley yelled. He rushed at her, socked her on the arm, and veered away. “You’re It. Lucy’s It and had a fit and couldn’t get over it!”

“No, I’m not! I don’t want to play!”

“You have to play! Ma said you’re related to me now! You’re just like my sister, and you have to do what I say!”

He danced up close to her and squatted, daring her to tag him while he was at a disadvantage. “Oh, ho, ho! Lucy couldn’t catch a flea!”

He began to sing, jumping from one squat to another like a frog:

“I haven’t got a feller!” Lucy screamed.

“Oh, ho, ho! Blue and yeller, got a feller!”

“I’m not blue and yellow!” she screamed again.

“Oh yes, you are!” He was delighted at how easy it was to get her goat. All those days last summer when he was herding her father’s cows she wouldn’t even talk to him, she was so highfalutin. But it was all different now. They were related! “Your jacket’s blue and your hair’s light yellow,” he told her.

“Hair doesn’t count!”

“Lucy’s It and had a fit and couldn’t get over it.”

“Leave me alone! I don’t have to play with you if I don’t want to!”

His excitement turned to fury when he saw that he might not win after all. If he didn’t win now, he would look silly. He had to make her mad enough to chase him. Besides, he had to prove that she had to play with him. He picked up a rope lying on the ground and tied a loop in the end of it.

“Okay,” he said. “If you’re just going to stand there and never move, I’ll lasso you. I’ll show you how a Texas cowboy ropes himself a steer.”

Lucy stood her ground. He tried to get the heavy rope to twirl, but he couldn’t manage it.

“Ho, ho yourself. What a cowboy!”

“I’ll show you!” he shouted. “Come here, Sandy! That’s a boy!” The big mongrel collie bounded up to him and he put the lasso around its neck. The dog pulled back and the rope tightened, making his thick winter hair bulge out in a ruff.

“You’re hurting him,” Lucy cried. “You’re choking his neck!”

“So what. He’s my dog, ain’t he? Come here, you!” Audley dragged him across the yard to a tree. He held the end of the rope in one hand and climbed to the first big branch and sat there, still holding the rope.

“What do you think you’re going to do now?” Lucy jeered. His little sister was standing beside Lucy, looking up at him. Two females down there—to be shown something.

“Just you wait and see!” He had no idea himself of what he could do. It had to be something to make them respect him, that was all.

He jumped off the branch, landing lightly in his black tennis shoes. He saw that Lucy was looking at the big frayed holes around his ankle bones and toes. The rope dangled over the branch, and he gave a yank on it that brought the dog sliding up to him. He yanked again and the dog’s front legs pawed the air and he started to cough for breath. His tongue hung out. It was turning purple.

“Let him down!” Lucy begged. “You’re choking him! He’ll die!”

“I don’t have to do nothing a girl tells me to do! Sissy!”

He hauled on the rope once more and the dog’s hind legs barely touched the ground. Thin foam lay along his black lips, and his kicks spun him around so that he kept losing his footing entirely.

“Let him down!”

“Sissy!”

The dog hung limply. His legs twitched.

“You’ve killed him!”

“I have not! I’ll show you!” He let go of the rope and the dog fell to the ground.

Audley felt for the rope through the dog’s hair and loosened it. A great gulp of air tore down the bruised throat and the dog started to pant weakly.

Lucy put her hand down to touch the matted hair of his neck, but he made a snarling sound and drew his lips even farther back from his teeth.

“See! He doesn’t want you! Girls! Sissies!” Audley reached his own hand down to Sandy and the dog snapped his jaws shut over the hand.

“You fucker!” Audley shrieked. He jumped up and swung the toe of his tennis shoe into the dog’s heaving ribs.

Lucy rushed away from him. She had never heard anyone say that word before. She didn’t suppose it was ever said—only written and thought. She couldn’t stop hearing it and seeing it in her head. Where could she go? Where could she escape from this boy and that word he had spoken?

Audley had won. He had won after all.

George hated getting cleaned up in the middle of a workday for some damn fool reason. And nobody had told him he was going to be expected to eat food coming out of the Finley kitchen, either. He was exasperated at being blamed for this whole rotten mess, and he was damned if he’d hang around and be polite. He took a few bites of the cake and then he caught Rachel’s eye and gave her the signal.

They could see the signs all over the honeymoon car as soon as they walked out on the porch. Somebody had done a quick job with white calcimine. Lucy was already down at the road reading them, and she was waiting to ask about some of them. They said, “Bismarck or Bust,” “Just Married,” “Whooopee!” “Watch Our Dust,” and “Hot Springs Tonight!”

“What does that one mean, Mamma?” she asked.

“Why, I don’t know, dear,” Rachel said. “Maybe whoever painted it thought they were going to go to Hot Springs.”

George looked at the sign and at Rachel and began to laugh.

Lucy said, “But it says Bismarck too, so whoever did it must know they’re going to Bismarck.”

George laughed some more and Rachel felt the blood in her face.

“Well, what does it mean?” Lucy asked again. “I just want to know.”

“Nothing!” Rachel said.

George said, “Come on, hurry along here. If we don’t get back home right away, there won’t be enough time to bother hitching up the plow again.” He stopped laughing. Stuart had a lot to learn—about the beans in the bottle and such things.

It was the final mortification as far as Rachel was concerned. Of course it was one or several of Annie’s admirers who had written such a thing. A trollop from this filthy world the mother of Will Shepard’s grandchild? Annie Finley the mother of Lucy’s cousin? Unthinkable!

“Am I related to them now?” Lucy asked.

Rachel had never seen a child who had such a knack for startling a person who was thinking private thoughts. “Related to who?” she stalled.

“Them! Audley and all the rest of those kids.”

It was preposterous. It couldn’t be true. “No,” Rachel said.

“Now, Rachel, what good does it do to lie about it!” George said. “Yes, Lucy, you are.”

“In a very distant way that doesn’t count at all,” Rachel said.

Rose did not speak. They took her home and left her.

Rachel hurried to change her clothes and do the dinner dishes she had had to leave. Lucy trailed her nervously. Finally she brought it out. “He said a terrible word.”

“Who? Audley?”

“Yes.”

“What did he say?”

Lucy looked up at her. She would never speak that word to anybody, and especially not to her mother, because she knew that her mother would certainly never have heard of it.

“Well, what did he say?” Rachel asked again. One never knew what little boys and girls might do together. It was always a worry.

“A very terrible word.”

The whole thing became steadily more preposterous. “Well,” Rachel told her, “you must always be polite to him, but you don’t need to play with him. After all, he’s more than two years older than you. If he ever says another terrible word to you, you just walk away and tell him you weren’t brought up that way.”

Being related to the Finleys was beyond the power of Rachel’s imagination. They were of a different world, a different species. She could never forget how Audley had come and gone so bleakly day after day when he was herding the cows. She had been repelled by his accent and by his strange ways. He represented to her everything in human existence that was rootless and meaningless, and therefore degrading. The one thing she could not bear to think of was to be rootless, to be without well-defined positions, both human and geographical. The Finleys were of that mass of human creatures in the world who were so unbelievably numerous and so unbelievably miserable that one could think of them only in statistics—hordes of Indians excreting, bathing, and worshiping in the Ganges, with a certain percentage of them dying each year from several kinds of plagues; hordes of Chinese in rice paddies along the Yellow River being swept away or made homeless by floods. Plagues, floods, earthquakes, and similar catastrophes—they always seemed to kill such people. One never even knew how they died, there were so many of them. They were simply approximate numbers in the aftermath of calamity.

The Finleys had been flooded out several times. Once his mother had whimsically remarked that Audley had almost been born in a rowboat. Rachel could not imagine the sort of people who could feel no more concern than that over the birth of a new descendant—an heir. To be connected to such a family? Unthinkable. Stuart married to a girl who had been serving beer in a saloon before she was seventeen years old? Unthinkable …

All afternoon Lucy marveled over hearing that word said aloud. She had seen it chalked on a culvert and inked on the gray paint of the long corridor leading from the schoolrooms out to the toilets in the shed. The corridor smelled of the toilets and the lime they put down the holes, and she connected the word with those smells, but she really knew that the word Audley said did not stand for either kind of thing that the toilets were for, because she knew those two bad words, too. Whatever did this one mean, anyway?

Rose was as polite as she could be to Annie. She did not speak much because now there was less to say than there had ever been. Part of the reason she felt so little inclination or need to talk to Annie was that most of the time she could not really believe that Annie was there.

The girl had certain habits that were distasteful. Every morning upstairs she curled her orangish hair with a curling iron she heated by suspending the handles across the top of a lamp chimney and letting the tongs hang down toward the flaming wick. Every morning a faint smell of burning hair floated down to the kitchen while Rose was cooking breakfast and Stuart was out milking. That was the only time of day when Rose deeply felt Annie’s inescapable presence—perhaps because it was morning and one tended to look for some relief from the new day and there never was any.

But the girl worked very hard, and she was surprisingly clean. Rose wished, in fact, that Annie would not work so hard, because it left her with less to do herself at a time when she needed more to do. She was already planning on a much bigger garden than they had had last year. That would keep her busy all summer. And next winter there would presumably be a child to keep Annie busy. But the next month or so was going to be difficult, with Annie constantly rushing to usurp tasks that she had set out for herself. If Rose was planning to peel the potatoes at five-fifteen and went into the kitchen only to find that Annie had peeled them at five o’clock, then what was there to do at five-fifteen? However, since it still did not seem plausible that Annie could belong there permanently, the girl seemed more like a misguided helpful elf in the house than anything else. She would inexplicably disappear some night the way helpful elves eventually did.

One afternoon the Eggers stopped in for a minute. Not many people came to call these days because not many people knew how to act toward a widow whose son had married six weeks after his father died. But Clarence was his effusive self in his congratulations to Stuart, and Elsie was her presumptuous self in her speculations on what a help it was to have Annie in the house.

It was a kind of relief to see somebody like the Eggers—people who were brassy and unabashed and who could ask, “Well, how are you making out, Rose?” with so little evident awareness of the depth of her griefs that the griefs were not really touched and her self-control was not even tried.

But from the moment they arrived, Annie behaved strangely. Rose became more and more embarrassed. This was a situation she had not even thought of—how a girl from such a background would embarrass her every time there was company at the house.

When they were gone, she couldn’t keep from saying, “You seem tired, Annie. Why don’t you rest till suppertime? I wasn’t going to have anything fancy tonight, anyway, and it won’t take a minute to get it.” She thought she would go out of her mind if she had to spend two hours in the kitchen with that girl.

But Annie stood there staring at her from two round eyes in a freckled face, two freckled arms akimbo, two freckled hands over round hips—looking exactly like a saloon waitress.

“They’re good enough for you because they’ve got a nice new Chrysler, aren’t they?” the girl said.

“Why, they brought Will home from Jamestown in that car. It was very nice of them. Of course, they’re ‘good enough.’ We’ve known them all our lives.”

“Oh yes! You’ve known them all your lives! Well how do you think they bought that car?”

“What are you getting at? They just have to cut down somewhere else so Clarence can have a car that’s easy to drive, I suppose—it’s hard to drive with one arm.”

Why was the girl all upset? After the way that girl had been acting all afternoon, she herself was the one who had a right to be upset!

“All right! I’ll tell you what I mean! Ma said not to, but she didn’t know … how it was going to be out here! If you wasn’t such teetotalers, you’d know where Stuart gets his booze. You’d know!”

There were tears falling down the girl’s cheeks—tears!—tears on the face of the harlot whose hand had held the golden cup full of the abominations and filthiness of all the world—tears on the face of the Devil’s own cupbearer, whose hands had given Hell into the hands of a ruined boy.

Rose felt the explosion in her chest, the flames coming out of her mouth.

“You! Annie Finley! You ask me whose hands gave it to him! Your hands gave it to him! Slut! The mark of the Beast is on you—all of you—you and Jake Gebhardt—all of you will go down to Hell together!”

The face of the purple and scarlet whore looked down at her from the stairway and the mouth shrieked, “Then why is Clarence Egger your friend? Don’t you know? Don’t you know he always made it? He makes it! He makes all of it for Jake and for anybody that comes to his door!”

Rose sat down at the kitchen table. After a while the fire in her chest was gone, but it felt now as though her lungs might be made of cinders. She was not going to die—nothing essential to her body had exploded after all. No, she was going to have to go on for a while because her body was going to go on.

Presently she could even think again. Where did the Eggers get the money for the car? The Eggers lived several miles away; they and the Shepards were friendly but not intimate by any means. Certainly not intimate enough so that Rose had ever even slightly concerned herself with the way they managed their money. But where did he get the money? The Eggers had always had new cars, even during this last dozen years when farmers did not buy new cars.

And the liquor did have to come from somewhere, didn’t it? She herself had asked the question a thousand times. “Where does the boy get it? Where did he get it that first night?” But she had never conceived of a specific answer to the question. She herself had no more idea of what liquor looked like than what the Devil looked like. They were both intangible. She saw the effects of the Devil’s machinations everywhere around her but she had not seen the Devil. She saw the effects of liquor but she had never seen it. But she had smelled liquor; the boy had drunk it. Yes, liquor was tangible, even if the Devil was not. Yes, the liquor did have to come from some specific place, didn’t it?

The girl must know what she was talking about. For one thing, she was certainly in a position to know. And Rose knew she must have been telling the truth. That strumpet with tears on her cheeks—she was telling the truth.

Thank God Will didn’t know. Thank God Will wouldn’t ever have to know that a man he had always thought of as a friend was manufacturing Evil and selling it to his son. Was there no limit to what people would do to each other in order to survive? Were the new cars so important to Clarence Egger’s one-armed survival? Would all the little members of the human race go on betraying each other until no one was left?

The world was sunk even deeper in filth than she had believed it to be, and the filth was so much nearer and more deceptive than she had thought it was. Not an hour before, her son had sat in this house and eaten cake and drunk coffee with the man who bought new cars from the profits of his service to the Devil. Her son had politely accepted the man’s congratulations on his marriage. No one even seemed surprised at how closely Evil surrounded them all.

She would have to learn how not to be so surprised, too, or else she would never be able to be in the same room with Clarence Egger again. When she was alone she would pray that some day she might be able to forgive him.

And the weeping harlot upstairs—what was surprising about her? She was only another child grimy with the world’s dirt—no less at home in this house than in any other. Rose even had a brief impulse to go up to her. But she knew that such impulses were never followed by other impulses telling her what to say or do, so she did not go.

Monday, April 16

George was disking his south eighty acres when the northwest horizon began to go black. He had a clean white handkerchief in each hip pocket and when he had filled both handkerchiefs with dust, he headed in. He unhitched and put the team in the barn, letting them stay in harness until after he had run in the cows. By the time he was through in the barn he could not really see the house at all. He sensed its small, buffeted presence on the hill above him.

It was only when he stepped into the kitchen out of the wind that he realized how raw it had made him. He was eroding, like the land itself. The tears torn out of his eyes made rings of mud around his eyelids. His nose smarted. It seemed always full of dust, no matter how hard he blew it. Dust was the only thing he could smell.

Rachel was stuffing wet rags around the window. By now she had a special set of gray rags for catching dust. She washed out the rags after the storms and used them over and over. She held one up, wrung out enough to keep it from dripping. “Are you going out again, or shall I put this under the door now?”

“Go ahead,” he said from his gritty mouth. “I’m not going out in that again till I have to. We should have kept Lucy home from school today. It’s going to be quite a trip.”

Rachel waited for him to begin railing against the guilty ones, especially the immigrant Russians and the absentee landlords who mismanaged the land through selfishness, stupidity, and greed, and made it behave this way. She waited for him to point out that even the government experts were advocating fall plowing up till a year ago, when they finally realized that fall plowing was a major factor causing the land to blow. She waited for him to tell her how if they would get a few men who really knew the land back there in those soft jobs instead of getting men who knew somebody’s brother-in-law….

But he said nothing more at all. He went into the dining room and slumped into his chair. He stared out the window into the darkness, thumping the chair arms with his fingers, making each fingertip follow the next, like soldiers marching over a cliff. He made no other movement for at least five minutes. Then he leaned forward and unlaced his shoes. His socks were black with dust and his toes were lined with it.

“Reckon I’ll wash my feet,” he said.

After he’d got his feet clean he went into the bedroom to get a pair of fresh socks. There was already a film of dust on the wooden drawer knobs, and the starched white dresser scarf was almost the color of the socks he had taken off.

“For God’s sake, Rachel! This window in here is open at the top! What a mess! If I can round up all the stock and get them into the barn, can’t you even see that the windows get closed?”

“I did close it! Sometimes it falls back down again. See how it slants to one side? It never would lock. It’s the outside window. All I can do is go outside and prop it up from the bottom with a stick just the right length, and I had a stick but the wind blew it away.”

She walked in to face him while she talked, bringing a pan full of wet rags to put around it. “You know it needs fixing! Why don’t you ever fix it? I notice you always get around to fixing up things outside! There was dust at the corners of her eyes even though she had not been out of the house since the storm began.

“And what are you complaining about, anyway!” she continued. “I’m the one who’ll have to clean it all up and haul water and wash the sheets and take the quilts outside and beat the dust out of them. Just what are you complaining about!”

George went into the dining room, lit the gas lamp, and sat down to read the Sun. There were the usual kidnappings and lynchings, and a story about the big blow to the south of them which had dusted South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, and more states below them. The twenty-five million dollars worth of Texas dirt which blew into Nebraska a year ago was blown back into Texas again, but the Texans did not welcome it. There was a filler beneath the story that he must have read a dozen times in the last year, but still he counted the commas and the zeros to see if they always came out the same. They always did, but that didn’t make them right. There was no way to prove they were right as far as he could see.

The filler was credited to the United States Department of Agriculture. These experts who were so foolish as to make such unprovable statements. Of course he could not prove they were wrong, any more than they could prove they were right. He had reason to know that a lot of dirt could be moved in a mighty short time, but even so, how could anybody know whether it was billions or trillions or millions? And wasn’t it ridiculous to say it was not twelve, or fourteen, or sixteen, billion, but fifteen and a half billion? Were they trying to scare every prairie farmer off his farm with their pigheaded assurance that there would soon be no soil left to farm?

If they were so concerned back there in Washington, with their fat rear ends in cushioned chairs and their feet on their desks, monkeying around with slide rules and statistics from the other side of the world, why did they do nothing better for him than to send out guys like Finnegan to tell him to build an inside bathroom in his house? Why didn’t they get some laws with teeth in them to get rid of all the barberry bushes so there wouldn’t be any host to get the damned rust spores through the winter? Why didn’t they scrape up some Federal money to get rid of the grasshoppers?

No, they’d rather sit back there and play with their numbers and send out their millions of fillers and press releases, whether it was the Treasury Department, the Department of Agriculture, or any of the other departments. He opened his mouth to call out to Rachel about the hard-working statisticians the farmer had plugging for him in Washington, but he decided not to talk to her after all. She was acting so peculiar, what was the use? He scratched his head. His scalp crawled as if it was full of vermin, but there was no use washing the dust out of his hair till the storm was over.

This was the third storm they had had since plowing began. He had sat idle for three days while the tops of the acres he intended to plant in wheat blew away before he even got them planted.

Rachel kept making noises in the kitchen. What in the world could she be so busy about? What was there to do, with the land blowing out from under them? He went out to see what she was doing. She had the whole set of glass dishes down from the top shelf of the cupboard and she was teetering on the kitchen stool, wiping the dust from the shelf.

“What on earth are you doing? What good will that do? You’ll just have to do it all over again. I wish to God you’d quit acting like the south end of a northbound horse!”

“What do you care what I do! What should I be doing? This is the second time in two weeks I’ve had to wash every dish in the house and all the pieces of the separator and all the sheets on the beds, besides the stove and the windows and the cupboards and the woodwork. Now just what should I be doing?”

“Rachel! There’s no use flying off the handle at me just because I ask you a civil question! It just looks to me like you’re wasting energy, that’s all. Now just calm down a little and don’t jump at people like that!”

“Just go and read your paper and don’t provoke me then!”

He kept coming to things in the newspaper he wanted to read to her, but he knew she wouldn’t talk, anyhow. He came to one thing he didn’t want to read to her. They were having another so-called “wheat conference” in Rome—this world wheat conference seemed to meet in a different foreign country every month—and they had just adopted another United States motion for more curtailing of wheat production. It was nice to be told every other day that you were superfluous. It was nice to sit down and read in the paper how you were paying your taxes so a bunch of politicians could joy-ride around the world and send back statements from Rome about how superfluous you were.

And speaking of politicians, Governor Langer had got himself indicted by a Federal grand jury in Fargo for misuse of Federal relief funds. He must have thought up all his baloney just to cover up his real uses of his office. At least none of his baloney had accomplished anything—not the moratorium on foreclosure sales, not the embargo on wheat shipments (pressure from the railroads had got him on that one in less than three months), not, in short, any of his proclamations and proposals.

The Sun could always make a story out of the weather. His newspaper explained to George, as he sat in the noon darkness, that his worst problem was being so far behind in moisture. Last year, for instance, they had got only ten inches of precipitation, whereas sixteen was normal. This year to date they had received .89 of an inch, whereas 2.69 inches was normal. This year, the experts with the slide rules said, George’s fields probably would get even less moisture than they got last year. But last year the well had almost gone dry.

George had made up his mind long ago that he was never going to plant a crop he didn’t harvest. He got up and went out to the kitchen again and lifted his account books down from the cupboard. The books were black with dust and he borrowed Rachel’s rag to clean them off. He tried to open the drawer where the pencils were kept, but it stuck. He squatted down and yanked at it.

“Why don’t you put some soap along the bottom of this drawer?” he asked.

“I did. The soap is full of dust.”

He spread out his books on the dining room table and opened the first one at random. Turkeys—thirty-five cents a pound in 1930, thirty cents in 1931, twenty-eight in 1932, nineteen for one batch last fall—the New York outfit had slickered him. But every year it cost him just as much labor and feed to raise them and get them to market. And every year the railroad charged as much or more for hauling them and every year the middleman took a little more for getting them to the consumer. The farmer was the only man who bore the shock of the dropping prices.

He looked out the window toward the barn, but all he could see was flying topsoil. Speak of unimaginable numbers—of billions of tons of dust, of galaxies a hundred thousand light-years away, of the number of atoms in the universe—just try to imagine how many particles of dust passing between him and the barn it took to blot that barn completely out of sight at a quarter of one in the afternoon. He couldn’t even make out the clothesline posts a few yards from the house. There was nothing out there but screaming blackness.

It was hard for a man to shake off the feeling of being buried alive when he had to sit out a dust storm in a little trembling, groaning house, with the wet rags at the windows growing blacker and blacker, and the air ever heavier to breathe. If he blew his smarting nose, plain mud was deposited into his handkerchief. How far back into his head and how far down into his lungs could it go, anyway?

The drought was commencing its tenth year now, and the deep root-systems were long dead. There was nothing to hold the land against the wind. Until a few years ago he and Rachel had always subscribed to the National Geographic, and he remembered all too clearly the articles it had run on various places in Asia and Africa—places that had once been rich in trees and grassland and now were deserts. Hundreds of years before Christ, the deforested and overgrazed hills drained by the Tigris-Euphrates river system had lost so much soil that the silt from the rivers had filled in the Persian Gulf for a hundred and eighty miles. A fellow named Woolley had been digging around way out there in the desert and discovered a buried seacoast town—a seaport one hundred and eighty miles from water. And now that whole stretch of land between the ancient and modern mouths of the rivers was mostly dunes made of sand from the ruined hinterland. What had happened there could happen here too. Maybe the professors would be excavating what was left of this house from a sand dune some day. Maybe this house would have to be excavated after this one storm, if it got much worse and lasted much longer.

He didn’t need to look at the wheat records in his books—he knew by heart how the wheat disappeared into smut, rust, drought, grasshopper gizzards, middlemen’s pockets, and the vast bank account of James T. Vick. He was a little better off than he was last year at this time, with all his savings suddenly gone, but he was afraid this year was going to bring him more expenses than last year had.

Rachel was probably right about Lucy’s tonsils, and Lucy ought to go to the dentist this summer, too. And he had to fix up the car a little and make some machinery repairs that should have been done last year. If he had to sink another well this summer, the cost of that alone could wipe him out. Talk about the “cost-price squeeze” that was doing in the farmer! There had been plenty of talk about it all right—fifty years of talk—centuries of talk—but he noticed the squeeze got worse every year, just the same.

There was no use at all in planting wheat if he wasn’t going to be able to pay to have it threshed and still have a little left over to get through the winter. There was nobody to borrow from this spring except Vick. He would have to go now and make the arrangements or he might very well find himself next fall without a roof over his head. Vick thought he was a good farmer, and if Vick had any sense at all, he would surely want to see him through this one unprecedented year in order to keep him on the property and keep on profiting from his work. Wouldn’t he? And Vick ought to agree to be responsible for providing water on land he owned himself, oughtn’t he?

It was time to go and fetch Lucy from school. He buttoned up his clothes as tightly as he could and Rachel tied a mask over his nose and mouth. He opened the door and stepped into a foot of dust drifted across the porch. He had never seen so much dirt moved so swiftly. He wondered if he would be able to make it to town.

In the barn he made dust masks of gunny sacks to put over the wide, unguarded nostrils of the horses. Then he led the team out to the wagon. Dust was banked high over the rims of the wagon wheels and built up in cones around the spokes. The wagon looked embedded, as though it had been sitting there from ancient times and was now being exhumed by the wind. Its wheels might have been those of an abandoned chariot belonging to a driver who had himself long since turned to dust.

George had no visibility at all, and he could feel the team wandering back and forth across the road. Once another team arose out of the blackness into sudden existence and nearly collided with his own horses. He never even saw whose team it was, he was so busy hanging on to his own. It could have been a team created from the furious dust itself, for the horses abruptly ceased to exist as his own went on trying to make some headway into the wind. Nobody drove automobiles in something like this, so he wasn’t afraid of being struck by a car. Once he had been caught in the Ford when it got like this, and when he couldn’t see the radiator cap any more he finally had pulled over and sat it out. But he could at least trust the horses to stay on the road.

He made it before school was out and he walked into the building to get Lucy.

“You better bring along your arithmetic book,” he told her. “If this keeps up, we won’t be able to bring you in tomorrow.”

He put the book in his denim jacket pocket, which seemed half full of dust, and he tied a scarf over her nose and mouth. “There, now, can you breathe through that?”

She looked up at him. Her blue eyes, isolated from the childish parts of her face by the scarf, were disturbingly mature. He felt as though a strange woman was sizing him up. Then she nodded her head like any little child.

Once they were on the road leading through the open fields, they might as well have been lost in the swirling shrieking Sahara, with the wind flogging their backs, whipping the breath from their mouths, lifting at their elbows, even lifting at the wagon, tipping it, gathering strength to spill them into the blackness and blow them away. They could not have heard each other even if they had shouted into each other’s ears. They lowered their heads and shut their eyes against the flaying sand and let the wind blow them to shelter or to the deaths of whatever worlds they kept inside their heads while the desert’s dry convulsion annihilated the world outside.

This road that Lucy knew by heart was now the deep rumbling hole which led down to the golden palace of King Pluto, and she herself was the poor little sobbing Proserpina, swept down the tunnel in the golden chariot behind the two black horses with smoke coming out of their nostrils. And far away in the sunlight Mother Ceres was wandering over the earth, refusing to make the seeds grow because of her grief over her little stolen daughter. All the starving sheep and cattle were following Ceres, bleating and mooing and begging her to feed them. But Mother Ceres had made a rule that until Pluto gave Proserpina back, nothing would ever grow again anywhere on the earth. So the whole black earth was waiting for little Proserpina to come smiling back into the sun.

Lucy stayed home the next morning because it was still gusty and dirty outside. She did two pages of arithmetic and then some more problems her mother made up for her to do, but she finished them quickly and did not know what to do next. She began bouncing a ball in the dining room. Presently it got away from her and bounced into the kitchen.

“Must you do that?” her mother asked.

“Can I go outside?”

“No! Of course not! If you could go outside, you could have gone to school. What’s the matter with you, anyhow? Why don’t you read?”

“I’ve read everything that’s interesting. Can I go over to Gramma’s?”

“Maybe Daddy can take you over this afternoon if it lets up some more.”

“Well, can I bounce the ball carefully for a while?”

“All right. Carefully!”

She bounced it higher and higher because the game was getting more and more monotonous. She was just doing it because she’d won the argument about it and now she had to pretend it was what she wanted to do. Then the ball escaped again and she ran after it, to recapture it quickly and show that she really was in control of it. But instead she kicked it and it rose into the air as though it was possessed. It traveled in a long, unswerving arc straight for the kitchen window and slammed against it with a conclusive sound.

Her mother was peeling potatoes. She dropped her hands into the pan of water. “You’ve broken it!” She began to cry. Finally she sat down on the kitchen stool and covered her face with her apron and shook and shook. Lucy had never seen her cry like that. She went close enough to the window to look at the long slivers of glass and the hole in the pane. She couldn’t really believe it was there; she would shut her eyes very tightly—so tightly that she saw the little designs of color in the dark—and then open them again and the window would be all right.

“Oh, how will we ever pay for another one!” her mother cried. “We’ll just have to board it up the way we did the car window, and then we won’t have any light at all in this awful little place!”

She raised her face from her apron and let the rumpled cloth fall back over her dress. She stood up and went back to the potatoes. She would not look at Lucy.

“You’ll just have to tell Daddy yourself. I’m not going to do it. You’ll just have to take your spanking when he comes in.”

She put the potatoes on and swept up the glass. Then she took a heavy flour sack that she had still not ripped apart or washed out and tacked it at the four corners of the window frame to stop the dust and wind. It did make the room much darker, with the floury, dauntless Dakota Maid there, shivering and smiling in the wind. And it made the house drafty. They would have to patch it right away.

Her father would not be in for another hour. He was out tearing the wildly rolling Russian thistles away from the barbed-wire fences. The thistles would stop the dust and then the dust would stop more thistles, and the dust bank would get so high in places that the stock could walk right up it and out of the pasture.

It was an hour that Lucy thought would never end. Yet what would she do when it ended? Her mother had never before been too mad at her even to spank her. She sat at the dining room table with a book open before her, too terrified to look at it, wondering why she hadn’t wanted to get a book when her mother had first asked her to, because it seemed that if only she had wanted to read then, she would now be the happiest little girl in the whole world.

When her father came, black-faced and exhausted, she went to stand in the corner behind the stove. She leaned against the wall, wondering if some Gobble-uns could be good enough to snatch her through the ceiling, and wondering if her mother and father would care or if they would be glad because, like the mother and father of Hansel and Gretel, they were too poor to take care of her anyhow. She could hear nothing except the wind, but she could feel her mother waiting in the kitchen. This was the first time her mother had ever refused to stand up for her with her father. Lucy could not even guess how badly it might go with her. She watched him pulling off his shoes. At last she said, “Daddy?”

He looked up from his feet. “Well?”

“I have to tell you something.”

“Shoot.”

“I broke a window.”

She had expected, the instant the words were out, to have him upon her as if he were the black wind itself, to feel his hand holding her arm and the razor strop falling again and again and again. She stood pressing herself harder and harder into the corner, watching him. Sometimes she dreamed that when she was trapped like this she miraculously learned to fly, and she went straight up and past his clutching hands and out the door, like Peter Pan.

He did not leap up from his chair. He only lifted his head so he could look straight at her. His eyes were all red and black. “Well, how did you do that, anyhow?”

“I was playing with my ball,” she whispered. Now he would come—now that he knew for sure there was no excuse at all for such an accident.

He finished emptying the dirt out of his shoes and socks and whisking it out from under his toes. He put the socks and shoes back on and got to his feet. He seemed too tall for the ceiling.

“I’ve told you never to play ball in the house, haven’t I?” he said. He always made it clear to her why she would have to be beaten.

She nodded her head once, feeling her hair brush back and forth against the wallpaper.

“Well, let’s see what we can do about it. What window?”

“Kitchen.”

He went and looked at the flour sack window curtained by dyed flour sacks. He took the tacks out of the flour sack and looked at the hole. “Pretty far gone for patching,” he said. He got some adhesive tape from the medicine cabinet and taped the cracks running back from the break. Her mother moved about putting dinner on the table, saying nothing.

Her father cut a rounded piece of cardboard to fit the hole and taped it on the outside of the glass so the wind would help to hold it in place. He was making her wait, so she could think about what a terrible thing she had done before she got her beating for it.

When he came back into the kitchen, he said, “I have to go to Jimtown in the morning. I’ll stop off at the junk yard and get a piece of glass.”

Neither her mother nor her father said a word while they ate dinner. They had never acted like this before. That meant that she must have done a much worse thing than she had ever done before. So bad that she couldn’t even understand how bad it was. So bad that it wouldn’t even do any good to beat her for it. If it wouldn’t do any good to beat her for it, then what would do any good? Nothing. The answer was very clear. Nothing she could ever do could make up for what she had already done. How much better it would have been to get a beating.

Wednesday, April 18

George stopped at the junk yard along the highway outside Jamestown. It was noon and he figured he might as well give Vick time to get back from lunch. He nearly had a fight with the junkman. The chiseler wanted almost as much for a piece of glass from a wrecked car as George would have paid for it new, cut to his own specifications. He was furious at having wasted his time with a chiseler. That was the way it was when you were poor. You frittered your time away, trying to save a nickel here, a dime there.

He hadn’t been in Vick’s store since the year before. He had been to Jamestown a couple of times, but he never went near that store for any of his buying.

He walked down the jammed aisles under the busy little funiculars flying money up to Vick. Every time he went there he thought he hated that store as much as he could possibly hate it, yet every time he went he knew he was hating it more than he had the time before. He climbed the twisted stairs and ducked under the little door.

“Well, Mr. Custer!” Vick said with his businessman benevolence—J. T. Vick and J. P. Morgan.

His heartiness was a noisome patronization. He was rubbing in his forgiveness. He was showing how he could afford to forget the way his tenant had tramped out of his office a year ago. He had just sat and waited for his tenant to come back, knowing that he would have to come back. He knew, too, that his tenant would have to shake the hand he stuck out.

“Well,” Vick said, “shall we renew the lease on the same terms as last year?”

“That’s what I came to see you about, Mr. Vick,” George said.

“Things look kind of bad this year, don’t they?” J. T. Vick was so sympathetic!

And Vick always took the offensive away from him before he knew what was happening. It gave him the feeling that Vick had been through the whole conversation and had all his counter-arguments already figured out.

“Too dry. Too windy,” George said. “Hard to say what kind of crop I can get this year. Could be so bad it would make last year look good.”

“And last year was plenty bad,” Vick agreed.

It was easier to fight orneriness than this agreeableness, because the agreeableness seemed to convey not a willingness to negotiate but an intransigent decision not to negotiate.

“Well, I’ve done some figuring,” said George, “and I think we’re just going to have to work out something different for this year.”

He plunged in before Vick could stop him. “I’ve got some extra expenses coming up—doctor bills and the like—and I’ve got to be able to count on at least three hundred dollars clear after the crop is in next fall. I just can’t get through the winter and get the crop in a year from now without that much. So, I propose that for this one year we work out some sort of flexible deal that will get me through till next spring.”

Vick said nothing at all; he just sat and looked sympathetic. He said nothing about what he owed George Custer, morally if not legally, for taking over that farm ten years ago and making it worth twice what it was worth when he moved on to it. Worth twice as much, anyway, if the bottom hadn’t fallen out of farm real estate. Worth twice as much, surely, if it had a good dependable well.

“And there’s another thing, too,” George said. “The well might give out on me this summer. I don’t think we’d have too much trouble finding water on the place. I know one spot where there used to be a well—I damn near lost a good mare in it! We could try around there again. But I don’t have the cash to dig a well. That’s one of the things I think you ought to be responsible for anyway. I want some assurance from you that you’ll dig a well if I need one.”

“Just a minute, Custer. I’m not responsible for any well. Your water is your problem. I lease you the land and I pay the taxes on it.”

George hung on to himself. He had to hang on. “Look, Mr. Vick. None of these troubles may come up. I may not need a well; the doctor might decide the kid’s tonsils can wait; the dentist might decide her teeth can wait; there’s still time to get some moisture before summer comes; the grasshoppers and smut might not be so bad this year—the only thing I’m getting at is that I have to know there’ll be some place I can lay my hands on a reasonable loan if I have to get a loan at all. I figured we could write up some kind of terms this spring that would get me through this year, and if that means you take less than your usual share this fall, we can make it up when things get better.”

“What makes you think things are going to get better?” Vick asked.

“Why … they’ve just got to, that’s all.”

“Maybe they’ll get worse.”

“How could they? It just isn’t in the cards. Sooner or later we’ve got to get some rain again.”

“So we get rain. So the crops get better and prices go way down again. Looks to me like you’re going to make about the same every year, whether the crops are good or bad. Good crops, no price. Bad crops, fair price. Either way, you’ve made about the same for the last few years, haven’t you, Custer?” The way he said “Custer” made it sound as though he thought another farmer could have done better on that farm.

Still George hung on. He mustn’t lose his temper again, the way he had before. This was not the time to start the big fight. He’d only end up in jail, along with the other farmers here and there around the country who’d been walking into city men’s offices and blowing heads off landlords and bankers.

“Look at the prices we got before the war,” George said. “The parity years, when a man could buy a pair of overalls for a bushel of wheat. When those times come back again, we’ll be on our feet in a year or so.”

“Custer, you know as well as I do that those ‘parity years’ are nothing but politicians’ ballyhoo. Those years are never coming back for the farmer. They didn’t have unions back in those days, for one thing. The people that worked in the mills and made the denim for your overalls—why, they got paid the price of two or three bushels of wheat for working a seventy-hour week. I know something about this kind of stuff. This is my business. Those strikers are fighting this out right now and they’re going to win, because Roosevelt is on their side. And you’re not ever going to buy a pair of overalls with a bushel of wheat again! And a lot of other things have changed, too. But there’s one thing that’s been the same for a long time. I was born in eighteen seventy-seven, and ever since I can remember, every so often there’d be talk about a wheat surplus.

“Back around the time you were born, Custer, I remember a year when they couldn’t move it out of Kansas fast enough. They had a bumper crop that filled all the elevators and all the railroad cars, and finally they had to just dump it in piles alongside the tracks. You want me to hope the parity years are going to come back—the way you hope they will. A man doesn’t do business on hope. There’s no reason to expect wheat to be a bonanza kind of deal again. There’s never going to be the kind of export market again that we had before the war. I have to look at things the way they are.”

“All right,” George said, “Look at things the way they are. If I can’t count on three hundred dollars clear from this crop, I just can’t make it, that’s all.”

“Go on relief.”

“There are a lot of things I’ll do before I’ll go on relief!”

“Suit yourself. I can’t guarantee you any such thing as three hundred dollars cash. That’s no way to do business. Put up or get out, that’s all. I can’t afford to carry you without getting a decent share of the crop money.”

“Carry me! You paid twenty-seven cents an acre taxes on that land last year. All right, I’ll pay that big forty-three-dollar tax bill, how’s that? It won’t cost you a cent to own that land next year.”

“What do you mean, it won’t cost me to own that land? I have to have a return on my investment. That’s the only way to do business!”

“What kind of a return do you think I’m getting on my investment, Mr. Vick? On my sweat? I’ve got to get a return on my investment, too!”

“I can find people to lease that farm on my terms.”

“Yeah, and whoever you find might just put it right in the hole for you the first year they’re there, too! What if the well goes dry this summer?”

“My terms don’t include well-digging. Maybe I’ll lease it to somebody that won’t even live there. Then they won’t need a well at all.”

“Look, Mr. Vick, you can certainly afford to risk a return on your investment for one year, after the returns you’ve been getting.”

“How do I know it’ll be for one year? How do I know you won’t be back here begging for the same deal next year?”

“Mr. Vick, I did not come here to beg! I’m here to offer you a deal that you ought to be able to see is to your advantage. If I don’t farm it, you won’t make anything at all from it this year.”

“I don’t see that you have a thing to offer me, Mr. Custer, besides signing a lease on our usual terms.”

George managed to remind himself once again that the stakes were higher than they had ever been before. “Mr. Vick, I’ve put enough improvements on that farm in the last ten years to pay you two or three years’ rent, and you know it!”

“That’s your business, Custer. I never told you to do them, did I?”

“But the place was unlivable without them! I couldn’t keep stock in a barn like that! It could have collapsed on them in a high wind. You know that!”

Vick shrugged again. “You knew it too, when you rented it. So you fixed up the place because you thought you’d be able to buy it from me. Your option is still good.”

“But it’s worth so much more now than it was!”

“All the more reason it seems to me you’d want to hang on to your lease, Mr. Custer.”

“All the more reason it seems to me, Mr. Vick, that I ought to wring your neck! Right now!”

“Sit down, Custer! Don’t make a fool of yourself again!”

“What if I just sit there on your half section and don’t pay you a god-damned thing next fall? The Supreme Court says Langer’s moratorium is legal, you know. No forced chattel sale to collect your god-damned rent if I don’t want to pay it!”

Vick laughed. “Langer’s got other things to worry about, I’d say! I reckon he’s a little too busy with the Federal grand jury to worry about you, wouldn’t you say? Besides, there are some other people a lot closer to home to worry about me! Dick Press would just love to have a little sale over at your place. He’d just love it!”

“You stinking storekeeper! You think you can always get a crooked potbellied sheriff to do your dirty work for you! You can’t bluff me with that big bag of wind!”

“Well, wouldn’t he just love a sale at your place?” Vick held up his lease. “Sit down, Custer! You’re making a fool of yourself! You know you’re going to wind up signing this paper here, because you always do, don’t you? There’s no place else for you to go, is there? This is no way to do business. You’re making it tough for yourself.”

“There are lots of other places for me to go, Mr. Vick. In fact, I’d just as soon go to Hell, so long as I took you there with me!”

“Oh, cut it out, Custer! I’m not a bit worried by you! You’re not crazy enough to lift a finger to me, and I know it. I know you walked out of Press’s office just like a little red-haired lamb. And that’s the way you’re going to walk out of this office, too. You’re going to sign this lease or I’ll come up there on the first of June and throw you off the property. And you better sign it quick, too, because I’m a busy man and I’m losing my patience.”

He was holding the paper up to George. “There’s no place else for you to go, is there, Custer?”

George’s fingertips began to act without any orders from him. They tightened on the sheets of stiff paper he had accepted from the hands of his landlord and shredded them with rending salvos that reverberated over the clackings of the little cash carriers coming home to Mr. Vick….

The clacking was still inside his head—the little cash carriers were still shuttling back and forth in there, always thumping out the same message from a spot above his right eyebrow. He reached up and felt a great knot hardening on his forehead. He must have finally forgotten to duck when he went out that little low door. It must have almost knocked him out because here he was on the street without any memory of the last trip he would ever make between those disgusting counters.

Rachel did not look up from the pan she was stirring over the stove. “Did you get the glass?” she asked.

“What glass!”

She nodded toward the round-bodied patch clinging to the kitchen window with its adhesive-tape legs.

“The United States Treasury hasn’t got enough money to pay me to pound down another loose shingle nail on this place!”

She looked from the window to him and saw his head. “George! What happened! Were you in a fight? Oh my God! What did you do? Did you kill him?”

“No I didn’t hit him! I didn’t touch him! Because if I’d ever once started on him, there wouldn’t have been anything left of him at all—just a grease-spot here and there.”

“George, what did you do!” He had gone off to sign the lease, the way he always did in the spring. He had come back with a purple lump on his head—out of his mind. “What did you do!”

“I gave him back his lease. I gave back his jacked-up barn and his new chicken house and his new fences and his wheat fields with the rocks hauled out of them and his soil full of manure I spread on it for nine years and his granary with new bins and a new roof on it and his pasture I reseeded for him after the way it was all wore out by sheep when I came here and his new trees I planted in the windbreaks and his god-damned house with a broken window in it!”

Lucy hid in the bedroom while they talked, still hardly able to believe that she had done something so bad when she had never in this world meant to do it at all.

Lucy could hardly wait to get to school. For the first time in her life, she was going to do something important. This would be the morning she’d be so late she barely had time to whisper to Marilyn in the cloakroom before the bell rang.

“We’re going to move!” she said.

“Into town?” Marilyn asked.

“No! Way out West. Maybe to Alaska, even, if they’ll give us a farm up there. Maybe we can even live in an igloo!”

At noon she was so excited she ran outside without her lunch bucket, but she didn’t care because she wasn’t hungry. For the very first time since she had started to school, the town kids were jealous of her. Polar bears, Eskimos, getting to stay up all night in the summertime because the sun never went down, rides on dog sleds, icebergs, whales, walruses. Sure, her father said, there’d be all those things in Alaska if they went. Plus a homestead in wonderful virgin soil. Well, no, he hadn’t promised about staying up all night, but all the rest he had promised.

Nobody thought up any little jokes to play on her today, like when some of the town kids—even Marilyn—would get together and say, “Let’s play hide and seek. Lucy’s It!” Then they would all sneak into the building and leave her to look and look and not find anybody. But no, there wasn’t anything like that today.

Irene Wilkes hovered around the bunch of town kids that were asking Lucy about moving. Lucy knew that if she didn’t have to go home with Irene so much, the town kids would like her better—or at least they wouldn’t always be making jokes about how dumb the farm kids were. It didn’t matter that Lucy herself could always spell them down and read better than they could. There was her next-door neighbor they could always tease her about.

“Go and find your brothers,” Lucy said to Irene.

“They didn’t come today,” she said in her silly voice.

Lucy got an idea—it was just like the ideas the town kids got about things to do to her!

“Well, then, Irene,” she said, “I guess you’ll just have to walk home by yourself.”

Irene looked around and her bewildered face grew even more bewildered.

“What are you waiting around for?” Lucy demanded. “It’s time to go home. I’m going to stay all overnight with Marilyn, so you’ll have to walk home by yourself.”

“But it’s lunchtime, isn’t it?” Irene took the tin lid off her lunch bucket. “Here’s my lunch!”

“My goodness, but you must be hungry,” Lucy said. “You forgot to eat your lunch!”

“Yes, Irene!” Marilyn hurried to join the game as soon as she understood it. “You must be just starving! How come you forgot to eat your lunch, anyway?”

It was so good that Lucy could hardly believe it. Here was Marilyn in with her on a trick she had thought up, instead of being in on a trick against her with the rest of the town kids. How was it that she had never gotten an idea like this before, anyway? All you had to do to keep the town kids from thinking up a trick on you was to think up another trick first to play on another farm kid. She really couldn’t imagine why it had taken her so long to figure it out. It was such an important thing to find out that it made her stomach feel funny, the way it felt on Christmas Eve.

“Oh, you’re always losing track of the time, Irene,” Lucy said. “You know that’s what your mother is always saying. You better hurry up now, so you can help take care of Toady. You can eat your lunch on the way home.”

“Yes, but everybody’s still here,” Irene protested.

“That’s because if you live in town, you can stay after school and play,” Marilyn said. “And Lucy is going to stay with me tonight on account of moving.”

“Go on now,” Lucy said again. They had maneuvered Irene toward the gate of the schoolyard. Irene took another backward step and jarred the elbow that was looped through the bail of her gallon bucket. The lid of it fell off and rolled away, wobbling and glinting in the sun. She darted awkwardly after it and two cold, limp pancakes fell out of the pail. They had been stuck together with butter for a sandwich, and they split apart in the dirt. She picked them up and skinned off the dusty butter with her finger. She looked about in her helpless way and then wiped the grease along the inside of her skirt hem.

“Oh, you sloppy slop!” Marilyn cried. “Look at your dress! “Hurry home and change it! Your mother’s going to be mad.”

“Here’s your top,” Lucy said. “Put it on now, before you drop the rest of your lunch.”

“There isn’t any more,” Irene said humbly.

“What’s the matter? Didn’t the relief give you any more apples?” Lucy demanded.

“We only got one box,” Irene said.

“Aw, phooey! My father said you got a whole lot of boxes!”

“I can’t remember,” Irene admitted.

“Ya, you can’t remember anything, Irene!” Marilyn said. “You can’t even remember what time of day it is. It’s time to go home! School is out!”

“We haven’t had arithmetic yet,” Irene said.

“Oh, you have too! Besides, you couldn’t remember! What’s eight times seven!”

“Sixty-three!”

“Oh, dumbbell! That’s nine times seven! Dumb ox!”

“Your mother’s already going to be mad because of your dress. You don’t want her to be mad because you’re late, too, do you?” Marilyn asked.

“No, I don’t,” Irene said. “Well … goodby.”

“Goodby! Goodby!”

Irene smiled her foolish smile, showing her big buck teeth and all of her pale gums below her wet lips. “Goodby,” she said again, in her high sharp voice.

She turned and walked a few steps. “Goodby!” cried Lucy and Marilyn.

“Goodby!” Irene responded, looking back and waving her skinny arm.

“Goodby!” They imitated her silly wave. She kept on walking, occasionally turning to wave and smile. They could tell how happy she was to see that they were always there to wave back at her. She had never been treated so well.

They watched until she was hardly more than two specks of light in the distance—swinging lunch bucket and golden hair under the noon sun straight overhead. Mostly by the way the light spots moved, they could tell she was still turning and waving.

Now that it was over, Lucy did not feel the way she had expected to feel. It had really only been fun while they were doing it—the way Christmas Day was the most fun only till all the packages were opened. All this time she had wanted to be in on a joke with Marilyn, and now this time she had not only been in on it—she had even thought it up. But now it was over.

It was over, and what if they should be caught? What if Miss Liljeqvist found out? What if her mother found out? How awful to have only two pancakes for a lunch. But now Irene did not even have them. They were too dirty. “I know how silly she is,” Lucy could hear her mother saying, “but she likes you so much, and since you both live out in the country, I think you ought to be nice to each other. It won’t hurt so much to play with her now and then, will it? After all, you know how it is to come from a farm too, and the town kids don’t.” Yes, her mother had said things like that a great number of times. Lucy knew she was going to have to tell her mother what she had done. She might not be able to do it tonight or tomorrow night—sometimes she saved up her terrible things for about a week and told them all at once—but sooner or later she would have to tell, because she would feel sicker every day until she did.

“Hey, we have to eat our lunch now,” Marilyn said. “Come on back to the lavatory with me.”

“But I don’t need to go,” Lucy said.

“If you don’t come with me, I won’t teeter with you at recess. And I won’t tell you a secret, either.”

“What’s the secret?”

“Come with me. I’ll tell you when we get to the lavatory.”

“Tell me now.” Lucy didn’t even care much about the secret. The town kids would torment her for days over a secret they got together and thought up when she was at home. Then when they finally told her, it wouldn’t turn out to be much of anything at all—that is, if they really told her the secret they’d been teasing her about.

“You know what Audley Finley told my sister?”

“No. How should I know?”

“Well, you should, because he says he’s related to you now!”

“He is not!”

“Well, you don’t have to get mad at me! You just wait and see if I teeter with you!”

“You just wait and see if I care!” Lucy told her. She felt a hundred times worse than she had ever felt at the end of a disappointing Christmas Day. She had thought for a little while that perhaps she really would get a chance to stay overnight with Marilyn, the way the town kids stayed back and forth with each other and played together every night. Now she wouldn’t even have anybody to teeter with at recess. It was just the way her father always said—city people picked on farm people every chance they got. Even Audley won out over her just by living in town and telling the other town kids whatever he wanted to tell them.

And another thing her father always said was true, too. It was stupid to trust anybody. “Most people will do anything in order to get ahead,” he would say. “They’ll bamboozle their best friend if there’s a dime in it. They’d murder their own grandmother for a few dollars.”

They’d all be your friends as long as they could get you to do something they wanted you to do, or as long as they wanted to get into a game you started, or as long as they didn’t have anybody else to play with.

Friday, May 25

The sale was going to be the next day, and the Custers all went to town to get some canned things and bacon and other provisions for their trip West. Everywhere they went there was a poster about their auction sale. Lucy saw her last name in all the windows, printed in real printing, and smiled to herself to think how much more attention their name was getting than the names of Marilyn or Audley or Douglas or even Roger Beahr had ever gotten. She could hardly wait till the town kids all came out tomorrow so they could see how much money she was going to get and so she could tell them some more about Alaska.

In the hardware store even Mr. Hoefener started talking about all the places a person could see their name.

“Well!” he said. “Looks like Custer’s Last Stand around here, don’t it? Especially over at the bank. Did you see how Churchill plastered them posters all over Harry’s bank?”

“That’s fair enough, I guess,” George said. “Bank might as well be good for something. I wouldn’t be selling out if that bastard hadn’t stole all my money, so we might as well use his building for a few posters, I reckon.”

“Well what I want to know is, where’s the war? Couldn’t of been six months ago you were telling me, ‘Look out, Hoefener. There’s gonna be blood! Well, here it is! Custer’s Last Stand! Where’s the war, George!” Zack kneaded his goiter and smirked up at George.

“And what I want to know, Zack, is do you want to sell me a piece for my trailer hitch, or shall I go to Jimtown for it? And if a few more men like me clear out, I still want to know who you’re gonna sell anything to. I won’t have to let any blood out of you. You’re gonna sit here in this little burg till you dry right up. There won’t be nothing left of you but that nanny-goat’s bag around your damned useless neck.”

After supper, Rachel didn’t have anything to do. There was not so much as a seed flat to weed and water, and since there hadn’t been any of the usual spring rush of work to keep her busy outside, she didn’t even have any patching or darning to catch up on. She sat down to play her piano for the last time. It was the piano her father had bought years ago when they first began giving her lessons, and it was a very good one. She had always expected to give lessons to her own children on it.

She had packed her music even though the piano was going to be sold. Perhaps at some unforeseeable time there would be another piano—not one as good as this, not one her father had given her and listened to her play—but another piano to go with the boxes of music. She played by ear now—the songs that had been popular when she was in college. She’d always liked Irving Berlin and she stayed with him for a while.

George sat listening and reading the Sun. Three hundred million tons of topsoil had been blown off the prairies and across the Atlantic seaboard since the first of April—or so the experts said. Drought and dust were destroying winter wheat at the rate of a million bushels every day. Textile workers, steel workers, coal miners, auto workers, longshoremen, teamsters, bakers, butchers, and candlestick makers—they all were striking by the tens of thousands, by whole areas of the country at a time. All the unions on the Pacific Coast were striking in sympathy with the longshoremen, and so it went. The Federal Government was supporting sixteen million people on relief.

The county agents and the preachers were setting aside official prayer days for people to go to church and pray for rain. Farmers were moving their stock by railroad, truck, and hoof to try to find pasture and water or to sell the animals before they became so emaciated that they would be condemned for use as human food. Minnesota, North Dakota, and Wisconsin had all banned shipment of livestock across their borders, and National Guardsmen were out patrolling state lines.

In honor of the fine state of the Union, the Century of Progress Exposition was slated to reopen tomorrow in Chicago.

Rachel had gone from “Red Sails in the Sunset” and “The Isle of Capri” to some old tunes he began to see he wasn’t going to be able to take tonight. When she started on “Red River Valley,” he got up and went down to the barn, but the farther he went from the house, the better he seemed to hear the piano. He stood near the smoke of this last smudge he’d built for his horses to help them through the mosquito-filled night. He rubbed Kate’s nose, and she moved her big soft lips in the most delicate of nibbling kisses across his palm. He’d taught her to do that with sugar; now she did it even when she knew there wasn’t any sugar.

“Hey, Kate,” he said to her. “Remember when I pulled you out of the well by your tail? Remember that, Kate? If Ralph Sundquist buys you and he don’t keep a decent collar on you, Kate, you kick the living daylights out of him. You hear? Kick the living daylights out of him!”

Where were the god-damned ENEMIES, anyway!

He’d been thinking all the rest of the day about what that foul-mouthed German storekeeper had said, and he’d been thinking about what he’d said himself, too. He’d blamed everything on losing a measly two hundred and fifty bucks in Harry’s bank, but he’d known when he said it that he was talking through his hat.

He hadn’t lost the war in that one disaster—it was millions of disasters everywhere that had caught up with him while he had been telling himself that nothing could ruin him so long as he was in the top fifty per cent of farmers. The top fifty per cent—that didn’t mean any more than the moratoriums and the embargoes and the processing taxes and the prayer days.

And the damned storekeeper was right: Custer wasn’t making any stand at all. Custer had been waiting and watching for the chance to strike at his destroyers, but he hadn’t so much as reconnoitered the battlefield before he was down. Somebody had hit him from behind. Hundreds of men had hit him from behind. Middlemen all over the country, plus the monopolists, speculators, bankers—they had done him in and they didn’t even have to get close enough to see the color of his hair—any more than he had ever got close enough to them to see the faces that should be smashed in.

In any last stand he had ever had in mind, he got at least one of his enemies before his enemies got him. If he could only have got his hands on one! He had not struck a man once during all the time he was going down to defeat—no, he had struck one man—a boy not dry behind the ears yet, who couldn’t hold his liquor.

But God knew he’d been fighting all this time! Who the hell had he been fighting, if he hadn’t struck one single blow at a real enemy?

What was it that silly county agent had said? Something about “I wanted to get you all together so you could look around at your neighbors and see who you’re competing with. I want you to see just who it is that’s ruining you at the markets in Chicago and Liverpool.” Well, he was dead wrong in the second statement and dead right in the first one, wasn’t he? It was Custer’s own neighbors he’d been fighting, all right. They’d been climbing all over each other—competing, trying to get into that meaningless top fifty per cent.

And all the different kinds of big men—the ones who owned the huge farms, the ones who speculated in farm products and never set foot outside of a commodities exchange, the ones who ran the railroads and the elevator organizations and the chain stores—they were the ones who were ruining him in Chicago and Liverpool, and none of them had ever even noticed him so far away below them down there, entangled with the other bitter little men in the mortal struggle. All those little men could have been wrestling together in a bog of quicksand. They could have sunk from sight and perished, and none of the big men would have noticed that they were gone. Custer had never once been in a position to compete with the men who had ruined him.

But his real competitors—they would come tomorrow and buy his horses and his cattle and his machinery for a song, because that was the way competition worked among little men like himself. They all ought to be marching in ranks together tomorrow, not picking over each others’ bones. Couldn’t they see that everybody was in the same boat? When would little men stop slitting each others’ throats? What was the difference between competing with a man and slitting his throat? George had slit throats himself, probably, while he struggled to stay in his top fifty per cent. But he hadn’t ever really wanted to slit another little farmer’s throat, had he? Who had put the razor in his hands and who had maneuvered it when he wasn’t looking?

It was the betrayal in the ranks that kept the world from getting better. Clarence Egger getting rich on that rotgut booze, Otto turning him in to Press. What was the difference between competition and betrayal? With one arm Egger could never survive on farming alone. Otto could not survive without his Percheron stud fees. Anything that helped them survive they wrote down as competition. Was that how they thought? No—Otto didn’t think about such things at all, and Egger was just a one-armed man who liked to stand on the sidelines leering and giggling over other men’s fights. There must be those in the ranks who could draw a line between competition and betrayal, but where were they?

The whole world went to the defense of a deadbeat like Wilkes. The world gave Otto relief; the world took care of his runny-nosed brats and his doomed wife; yes, he himself, even Custer himself had made his only stand of the war when he broke up Otto’s sale.

But the man who still had any self-respect took it on the chin alone. He couldn’t understand why it always worked out that way. Tomorrow at his own sale the work of the prime decade of his life would be wiped out, peacefully and legally. What kind of a last stand was that?

Rachel’s music had stopped. He had thought he did not want to hear it on this night, but as soon as it stopped he realized how much he must have been listening, because now it was so quiet he noticed the million needling voices of the mosquitoes following him even into the sharp smoke. He wondered listlessly how much the piano was going to bring.

Saturday, May 26

They got up very early because they had to take things apart. They were going to sell the beds, except for the mattresses on the big bed and the cot. They did not make a fire, and Rachel heated coffee water on the little alcohol stove that left the kitchen smelling of the cool blue sweet flame in the blackened can. It was a curiously evocative smell—a smell that went with sitting in the quiet darkness and holding a tiny baby in her arms while she gave it a bottle in the middle of a hot summer night—a bottle she had warmed over canned heat because there was no fire.

Now the smell of the sweet flame meant that she was leaving the house where she had raised her babies; the smell meant that she was not going to have a place for a regular stove with a regular fire in it for a long time—not till they found a place to settle where a farmer still had a chance. What if such a place no longer existed?

George was thinking that the big Monarch was a good stove. It should bring in a little cash. He shook down the last clinkers, pulled out the drawer of ashes, and dumped it on the ash pile. He disconnected the stovepipe and took the sections of it outside to lay it beside the pipe for the heating stove which he had cleaned yesterday.

The pile accumulated rapidly in the yard—the bed frame that echoed so loudly in the house when they knocked it apart, the springs for the bed, the dining room chairs and the bare round table with its extra leaves piled on top of it, the empty bookcase and the empty dresser drawers.

Lucy put her own things all in one place. Her sled was there, with its runners nearly buried in dust, and her wagon and tricycle stood beside it.

The bigger the pile in the yard got, the less related the components of it were to each other, and the more unrelated everything was, the more everything looked like useless junk. The coal scuttle, for instance, sitting there beneath the baby’s crib. It was a perfectly serviceable scuttle with a good sturdy bottom and a strong secure handle, but it looked discredited—shabby and worn next to the baby’s crib. When it had stood by the stove it looked as good as new, but now it looked worthless. Rachel realized in panic that not one soul would bid on it at any price.

And the crib, solid enough against the blue calcimine of the bedroom, looked rickety and unsubstantial with its rusted link springs bare to the sun and its upended mattress propped against its side and everything slanting downhill to boot. She lifted the mattress and laid it back in the crib and beat the dust from it with her knuckles. But it still looked old and drab without any blankets in it. She couldn’t believe that this was the crib in which both her babies had been so marvelously beautiful.

She picked up the coal scuttle and moved it over next to the stove pipes, both for its own sake and for the sake of the crib. That helped the crib a little, but the coal scuttle still looked like a dirty useless thing.

This yard did not look like a place in which anybody would wish to buy anything. It looked like a spot where a band of refugees had paused in flight. It looked like the pictures of trashy belongings she had seen in the paper—and the people sitting beside the belonging were flooded-out sharecroppers usually—people who looked like the Finleys. The Custers would look like the Finleys now, moved out of the house where they had thought they had roots and exposed to the pitiless sky which had finally blown them out of their shelter. Everything uprooted from the dark little house was turned into junk in the glare of the sun. Why should anyone buy? She suddenly knew that they were not going to make any money at all on this sale—that George had vastly overestimated, once again, the possibilities that were open to them. And she, once again, had allowed herself to be persuaded until the moment of sense returned to her. Always she believed too long. She must have been out of her mind to have gone along with him.

It was too late to try to save themselves. The whole world had lost its operating margin, just as they had lost theirs. In a normal May they would have got two and a half inches of rain, but in this May the newspapers had to go to two decimal places in order to report any moisture at all—.09 of an inch they had received in this parched May. And the temperatures had run very high—an average of ten degrees over normal, so that it seemed as though they had already lived through another long, hot summer.

In the five months of 1934 the prairie world had received an inch of water out of a normal five inches. It was the wildest kind of speculation to put seed into the ground under such conditions. Yet what else was there for them to do in a world where there were no margins anywhere? Was it not even worse speculation for them to give up what few roots they had? Even Pearl Finley longed to go back to the South, now that Floyd had been killed and none of them would ever get to Canada. That was the human instinct, even of people like the Finleys. It was an instinct—just as much of an instinct as those more obvious instincts of breeding and of fighting for food and water.

And now this instinct demanded that they hang on to the roots they had: they must go on borrowing ever farther ahead on the irreplaceable energies of their lives, but how else would they live, no matter where they went? And roots were as irreplaceable as lives, and much less expendable. It would be better to stay here and lose her life than to leave and lose her roots. Here she stood, amid the objects that had provided the civilized necessities to her family—no matter how ridiculous they might look now in this shambles of a yard. What did one do when one no longer had a bed, a stove, or a table? When those things were gone, what did one do with the few dollars that one had got in exchange for them? What did one do for an address? Without a mailing address, how did a person even know who she was? How did her children—oh God!—how would her children know who they were? And George had thought of none of these things.

She picked up the coal scuttle and walked toward the little house that was waiting to be planted with roots again. She set the scuttle by the stove. Even though the stove no longer had a pipe connecting it to the smudged hole in the chimney, the scuttle looked proper there again—useful, valuable, perhaps even invaluable. (After all, how would a person get along without one?)

She paused on the porch on her way to get the stovepipe and looked across the prairie to the tall yellow house she could not see because of the swelling land, but which was closer to her than any other house she would ever see anywhere. The house that had been her refuge for as long as she could remember—her refuge from the snubs of the town kids when she was in school, from advances she was too shy to accept in college, from thundering words that had resounded here in this little house—in this little house where she must re-establish her roots as speedily as possible.

The strong, gentle father was not there in the tall house now, but still his hand was everywhere—feeding the lambs, pulling the cables that opened and closed the petals of the creaking windmill above his faithful salty well; and his body was everywhere—in the fields where she had run to keep up with his affirmative stride and even in the barn, though it was another barn. Even on college weekends she had still gone out there with him to the barn while he milked, to talk and help with various small chores—to feed the calves for him, as she had done all her life.

And now a strange and garish girl had come to live in that tall house, and establish her roots—her “sitting room,” as she called it was already installed in what had once been Rachel’s own bedroom. And if Rachel did not stay here in this little house, attached forever to her own roots in that big house, then indeed she must acknowledge her total kinship to this girl and her family. Yes, she would be a Finley—she would be one of that numberless mass nobody ever counted in a census, nobody mailed letters to—that mass which might as well be called Finley as Jones or Custer. Did it make any sense at all for a rootless Finley to usurp her father’s house while she was cast out of her own house to become rootless?

But there was still time to save themselves. George must rush off to the auctioneer. They must put up a sign at the mailbox reading AUCTION CANCELED. Then George could go down to Vick on Monday and say he had decided to go along on the same basis after all.

Then they would descend, unless things changed more radically than she could imagine, into that ineluctable bankruptcy that waited for them—recognizing that each swing of the hoe expended a part of the only currency left to them—their lives. But it would be a bankruptcy—a death—that was not so different from the deaths of all those who were committed to making great expenditures in order to live and die in dignity—as the father from the tall yellow house had died. For it was necessary to die beside one’s investments, borne up by one’s roots, in order to die with dignity.

She and George would stay here with their investments and die as her father had died. But if they had made this hideous mistake—if they had become wandering Finleys, then what commitments would they show to staring, disdainful people? Above all, what commitments would they give their children to live by? Lucy and Cathy would speak and think in the way Annie and Audley spoke and thought. The Custers would live out their lives in a way that would make aristocrats even of the Wilkeses in their consumptive ancestral home.

How was it that she had ever listened to George, even for a moment? She had got the stovepipe back in, for she intended to cook dinner over a regular fire. Now she was starting on the chairs, for they were never going to eat a meal that was not eaten from a table by people sitting on chairs.

George came out of the barn and saw her walking to the house with a chair in each hand. He ran up the hill to her.

“Rachel! What on earth are you doing?”

She never stopped walking toward the house—the little dark house that had always shamed her so.

He grabbed her arm. “Put those chairs down, for Pete’s sake!” It was frightening to live with a person for a decade and find out that she was totally different from what he had ever dreamed she could be.

“We’ve got to stay!” she cried. “We can’t go away. There’s nothing in the world for us anywhere, except what’s right here. We’ve worked too hard here. And besides there’s nothing anywhere else. The roots are all we’ve got left—just roots!”

Up the hill between the two fields George had plowed and never planted, they saw a car raising a half acre of dust behind it.

“It’s the auctioneer, for God’s sake! Churchill is here. Put those chairs down!”

He wrenched them from her hands, twisting her wrists savagely. She swung a smarting arm at him and slapped his face hard.

He couldn’t believe she had done it. Neither could she. It was not like anything else she had ever done in her life—except one thing. She had a memory of herself, flinging the cats away from the porch. She had a memory of her voice saying, I’m losing my mind.

“I’m losing my mind.” She was saying it aloud now. I’m losing my mind. Only Finley men and women hit and slapped and swore at each other. She was a Finley already, and they hadn’t even sold the stove and the table and the bed yet.

She walked toward the house, dazed, shaking her head, wiping the tears from her eyes with her fists like a child, streaking her cheeks with the dust of the yard. I’m losing my mind. I’m losing my mind.

She heard the men coming and she went into the bedroom. She listened to them grunting and adjusting, panting directions to each other. “A little to your left, there. Will she make it through this door?” “Sure, she will! Came in through this one—it’s the only door there is.” “Easy now, easy does it. Just let me get clear through here first.”

A prolonged clanging of a lid lifter falling and banging against the side of the stove. Then, “Might as well leave the pyana set right here?” “Ya. No sense to move it till it’s sold. They can come on in here to try it out.”

She came out after their voices had gone. There was a square discolored place on the dining room linoleum where the tin pad for the four legs of the heating stove had been. A few little rolls of lint that had been snagged in it were now liberated and wandering absently about.

She felt lightheaded—no more steadied by the pull of the earth than were the rolls of lint. There was another blackened spot on the kitchen linoleum where the range had stood. Without the big stove there to be always walking around in the tiny room, to guard babies from, to stoke and shake and clean, to bake bread in and boil washings on—without that Monarch ruling her life, she felt more weightless than ever, as though now she were not standing on this blackened rectangle of floor but hanging above it.

When they took the stove away they took the coal scuttle back to sit beside it in the yard. That seemed, somehow, to settle the course of the rest of her life.

She went out to stand on the little porch where she had scrubbed diapers for two babies. The washboard and the tubs and the washstand with its wringer were already packed in the trailer—the only parts of the porch that could go with them.

It exhausted her to contemplate even the tenth part of the work she had done on that porch—the quarts of beans and peas she had snapped and shelled there, the dishpans of tomatoes she had peeled there. And when the hardest work had not been on the porch, still there was a connection between that work and the porch. The barbarous crews of threshers lined up on its narrow little floor to wash and wait to be fed. And the iron scraper by her foot—how many thousands of times had she used it to scrape the droppings of the chicken house or the balled mud of the potato patch from the blade of her hoe and the niches of her heels?

How many times had the four of them—or the three of them, before Cathy came—stood on this porch in the darkness calling goodbys to friends as they left after spending a long Sunday afternoon and evening, or after a butchering day, or after they had come to sing to her playing?

And there had been other times when they had stood together on this porch watching a cloud spurt up over the horizon, waiting to see which way it would go. Only twice had the cloud come near enough so they could see clearly the shape of the long curved funnel swirling along, feeding the insatiable appetite above it—a black appetite even blacker than the black sky. Only once had the cloud come straight toward them, and then they had gone down the steps and closed the flat cellar doors over themselves and listened for the sound of the house being sucked away into the black appetite, but the funnel had swung away again like the aimless snout of an overfed animal, leaving them to sit in their damp unlighted cave smelling of potatoes and turnips till they could finally believe that they had been spared.

There were years of investments fixed in the paintless boards of this porch. Strangers would soon see the four of them in their car, dragging behind them a ludicrous trailer made from a wagon box, and the strangers would think they were seeing only another shiftless roving family. Strangers would think they were seeing a man and a woman who would breed without responsibility for the children they produced, a man and a woman who had never been willing to make commitments, never been willing to labor and sacrifice for roots. The strangers would never be able to know about the porch.

And all the people who had been her neighbors and her father’s neighbors, the friends whom she had greeted on this porch and sat with on this porch—they would pass by on the road, but they would never see the smoke of her fires again.

And she was leaving this porch and the people who cared about her and her family and allowing her husband to take them all where nobody wanted them. For no matter where they went, there would be no place for them. She could teach again someday, perhaps, when Cathy was bigger. But teachers constituted the largest group of unemployed professional people in the country. She could never get a job now. Thousands and thousands of teachers were already ahead of her on waiting lists that were four years long. School districts all over the country were bankrupt. The enormous Chicago school district owed months of back pay to every teacher in the city. No, there would be no place for them, no matter where they went.

She leaned against the side of the house, more tired than she had thought it possible to be, as though she was bearing in that one moment all the hours of the work of the porch and the fields.

She could hear Cathy’s abandoned baby laughter echoing in the grove where Lucy was swinging her. Lucy had been so quiet all morning, as though she understood what a terrible thing was happening, but she had been so sweet too, keeping Cathy happy and out from underfoot. And if it was going to be bad for the mother not to have a porch or a stove, how was it going to be for the children not even to have a tree of their own again—a tree to climb into and to hang a swing from? I’m losing my mind. I’m losing my mind.

She went back into the house and desperately scrubbed her face, but the ache in her throat made such a pressure that it kept squeezing the tears out of her eyes. She couldn’t understand where the tears kept coming from, but they were always there, ready to be pushed out whenever the ache got too big for the throat.

Cars were arriving now; she heard them stop and the people get out and talk to each other. The sound of a car driving into a prairie yard—Rachel had always thought that was one of the loveliest sounds in the world—until today. She looked out the window to see the people poking about in the accouterments of her life.

It felt a little like being naked before them, but it was really the opposite of being naked. Bodies were all alike without clothes, and lives, too, were all alike without their differentiating accessories. So it was more like putting out all the secrets that enclosed her nakedness. It was the uniqueness of her life that she had been obliged to lay out for all to appraise in the shadeless noon. They could all discover now what price they would put upon her uniqueness—upon the jumble of worn chattels that distinguished her from them. They would all know all her secrets now, and be so much better than she was, because she would not know all of theirs—just as millions of people could look at the pictures in their newspapers and know all about Finleys on rooftops floating over floods with all their remaining possessions piled around them, but those millions who had newspapers delivered each morning to their safe dry doors could still keep their own secrets from the Finleys.

Helen Sundquist, her face gleaming and blushing in the sun, nodded self-consciously when Rachel came out on the porch. It was hard for everybody when somebody had to sell out. People who had gone to church together, eaten Sunday dinner together, butchered together, harvested together—they found themselves unable to face each other when one had to sell out and the other had to bid. But there was no place for them to hide from each other. Everybody understood that the bidder was the survivor and that he would take the spoils that went to survivors.

Rachel began to feel that the sale would never commence. She would stand here in this naked nightmare forever, while her neighbors fingered her babies’ toys, her husband’s stock, her coal scuttle and her piano. The only thing that mattered to her now was release.

The auctioneer began with the household things. It was the only way to sell them at all, since most of the people had come for the stock or the machinery. A good auctioneer was hired to sell them things they hadn’t come to buy, but it wasn’t easy to sell people things they hadn’t planned to buy—with cash as scarce as rain.

The crib and mattress went for a dollar and a half. The Monarch went for ten before Rachel had even recovered from the shock of hearing it put up for five. The coal scuttle did sell, after all, for ten cents, and the round heating stove that had preserved them through nine winters went for seven dollars. Even George gasped over the buyer. It was Otto Wilkes.

Lucy was hiding behind a tree at the edge of the grove to watch while he sold her toys. Her father had told her she could keep the money from them to buy new toys when they got settled out West or in Alaska. If they went to Alaska, she was going to buy a sled dog.

Her tricycle went for twenty-five cents. Well, she had had it for a long time and there was no more paint on it to make it look new. Still, she had supposed that any tricycle would be worth more than that. But she couldn’t understand at all when her wagon was bought for another quarter. It was still not so very rusty on the metal around the outside. She was having a very hard time following what Mr. Churchill said, and she made up her mind not to worry about it, because she was sure that in all the confusion she had simply missed hearing what she was actually going to get. Then he held up the sled. He swung it up into the air in an effortless way that made it seem too light to be worth anything. It had always seemed much heavier than that when she dragged it up the hill after a race from the clothesline post with her mother.

First he shouted about ten cents being the tenth part of a dollar, which everybody already knew, and then he started saying, “Do I hear a nickel? Do I hear a nickel? The twentieth part of a dollar? Nickel, nickel, nickel, nickel!”

He let his hammer fall and handed her sled to a helper. Had her sled gone for a nickel? Even with a broken steering bar it must be worth more than that. So far she had fifty-five cents, if her sled had brought only a nickel. What could she buy out West for fifty-five cents?

She went over and sat down in her swing. She wished she had an ice cream cone. But she couldn’t imagine how many years it would be before she even dared ask for one. Ice cream cones were very special treats for very good little girls who never had to be asked, even once, to stop bouncing a ball inside the house.

The auctioneer moved over to the bed springs and frame. “All right! Here we have a fine, solid bed. Good tight springs.” He banged the coils with the flat of his hand. “Comfort and kicks! Who’ll start at two dollars for the works? Two dollars? Two, two, two, two, two?”

Rachel couldn’t believe he had meant that the way it sounded. She kept seeing “Hot Springs Tonight” painted on the car in front of the Finley house. An auctioneer wouldn’t make a joke like that in front of her neighbors—men and women together—not a joke like that about the bed of her marriage. But her face began to burn and burn and burn.

On the very day of the auction she had behaved like a Finley. On the very day of the auction she was publicly and lewdly joked about. It had never seemed possible that a person could become a Finley in one day.

People were packing away things they had bought and rounding up children. They came up to Rachel asking for pardon behind the words they actually spoke—pardon for the offenses they had felt obliged to commit. (For if a man needed a good cow, and a good cow was going cheap, well, after all, he couldn’t afford not to buy, could he? Not and still compete with another fellow who was going to get another good cow for a third of what she was worth.)

There had been a farewell party for the Custers, but now everyone came once more to say goodby—Going to miss you folks a lot … Your mother’s going to be lost without you, Rachel … Who’s going to play the piano for church now, and Epworth League? … Good luck … So long now … Drop us a card now and then; we’d hate to lose track of you … Take care of yourselves … So long … Let us know, now, how you make out … Stake out a claim for me, if you run across anything … So long … Good luck.

Thus lightly did each parting neighbor give a little shake to the roots that had lain dying in the sun all afternoon. The last globules of drying earth, held in the last hairy root-endings, pulverized and vanished in the wind. It took but a little time, in such a sun, for uncovered roots to perish and to pass away as though they had never been.

Everyone was eager to escape. Every time somebody sold out the rest heard the hammer knocking, as impartial as death. Still, there would be a little less competition now—perhaps a little more chance for the rest….

They were, indeed, eager to escape. They must get home as soon as possible and do their chores.

Everyone but Rachel and George had chores to do. For the first evening in almost ten years they had no chores to do—not so much as one old hen waiting for somebody to throw her a handful of corn.

Rachel had left the suitcase open in the dining room so she could add a last stray diaper or dish towel. She went in now and snapped the locks. The only other thing in the room—in the house, for that matter—was the piano. And the piano bench. Somebody she didn’t know had bought it. They would come for it tomorrow, when she was already far away.

If I go over and touch it now—just touch the middle C above the golden lock—if I should just let myself strike that middle C again and remember the day the men brought it to the house while my father stood in the wide arch between the dining room and the parlor—smiling because he loved me and because he loved music. If I should just touch that middle C above the golden lock again, I would be turned to a pillar of salt; I would never walk out of here and get into the front seat of the car beside my husband, where the world says I belong. Even my mother says I belong there. She has changed, hasn’t she, since my father died? Before, she would have said I ought to come home—that we all ought to come home—that my husband could come home or go wherever he pleased.

And now my husband and my babies and I will sleep in my home tonight and never again. And we will still have this last goodby with her tomorrow morning, though we cannot take the time to go to the grave again. How will she keep her sanity now? With my father gone and that girl in the house? How will I know about her? How she is? How she feels? How will I say goodby to her? How will I say goodbye to that only place where I was safe? How will I climb into our car and shut the door—as though we had just stopped in on our way home from town—and ride down that hill? That hill I ran down when I was little, like Lucy, to fetch the mail or to put a letter in the box or just because, at the bottom of it, where the drive joined the county road, there was a sudden small mound over the culvert that bounced me into the air?

What shall I say to my mother tomorrow, when I tell her goodby? What shall I say to my brother, who will try to make money from my father’s farm, now when the whole world is dying? He is going to send me half of the profits that aren’t essential to keep the farm going. (What will half of nothing be?) Will I think of something to say to his wife? That girl who is wholly related to me now….

Long before sunset, the last cow—lowing to her pasture and stall companions—had been loaded and jolted out over the dusty ruts between the gray-black fields.

There were several things that had not been sold—a drag, held together by wire and not much else, some household items, some parts of things that seemed so worthless, separated from their wholes, as to be a disgrace to the earth. And Lucy’s sled was still there. It hadn’t been sold for a nickel after all.

Otto Wilkes prowled the yard. Like the damned yellow jackal he was, thought George, who wondered if he’d be able to talk to him without smashing his face in for him.

“You folks aim to do anything with these here things?” Otto asked deferentially.

George looked away from him, down the hill toward the empty barn, the empty pasture. It didn’t seem possible that they had made so little. “Take it! Take it!” he said. “Take any of it and all of it!”

Lucy pulled at his pants leg. “Can’t we take the sled? I thought somebody bought it for a nickel, but it’s still here.”

“Oh, now, don’t be silly! We couldn’t pack that sled in that trailer. It isn’t worth it. Besides, there probably won’t be enough snow to bother about, where we’re going.”

“But Alaska is practically all snow! We could get a sled dog and tie him to this sled.”

“I said don’t be silly! Besides, we probably won’t get to Alaska at all. I’ve been trying to tell you that! We’ll probably just wind up on the West Coast somewheres. You gotta be somebody’s brother-in-law—you have to have some pull back in Washington to get hold of that homestead land in Alaska. They’re probably saving it all to give to the railroads.”

They put the last things in the trailer. George dropped some change into Lucy’s hand. She counted it out. Ninety-eight cents. Her ice-skates had been sold for fifty cents. “Minus commission,” he said, and he laughed. “Tie it in your handkerchief and let Mother keep it for you. You’ll have fifteen hundred miles to think about how to spend it.”

The car started slowly up the hill. Lucy could feel how her mother and father both worried about the car and how they were afraid it would never haul the trailer all the way.

The mouth of the thirsty sun fastened on the dry brow of the hill beyond the road and began to drink the dust of the late sky. The black fields of James T. Vick grew pinkish as his tenant, George Armstrong Custer, drove out over them for the very last time.

Lucy got up on her knees to look out the rear window. The house was growing smaller and smaller, but she thought she could still see, in one of the three panes of fiery glass, the round dark spot of cardboard over the hole her ball had made in the kitchen window.