Big Wheat (12 page)

Chapter 19

The Wine Dark Prairie

The Ark continued on through the moonless night, the lanterns on the roofs like a wobbly string of fireflies following each other to some mystical safe haven. Around seven in the morning, the sky behind them began to lighten with the first false dawn. Avery let the caravan roll to a slow stop, stretched his back and arms, and climbed up on the catwalk on top of the boiler. He motioned to Charlie and Maggie Mae to come and join him.

“That’s far enough for now,” he said. “Time to look for a likely place to stop for a long rest.”

They scanned the horizon in all directions. They were still in wheat country, but they had climbed up into more rugged terrain. Already, the land was hard and barren looking, with large areas so gravelly that it was hard to tell the difference between the fields and the road. Mainly, the fields had some stubble from cut wheat. There were no sheaves, though. This was rough, uneven ground, and rough ground was invariably header country. In the dim distance they could see a few of the monstrously big loaf-shaped stacks of cut wheat, drying and ripening and waiting to be threshed.

“Where are we?” said Charlie.

“If you have to ask, that’s a good sign. Generally, if you’re lost, that means nobody else can find you, either.”

“And are we lost?”

“Only sort of. I haven’t got a map that goes this far west, but I think we’re within a dozen miles of the Indian nations. Lakota, most likely, as if that mattered.”

Maggie Mae shook Avery’s arm, and when she had his attention, she pointed off to the south, where a cloud of dust was coming their way.

“Should I kill the lanterns?” said Charlie.

“Not much point anymore. We’ve probably already been seen, and if we haven’t, we will be. There’s no place to hide out here.”

“No cover on the rocky road to Canaan,” said Jude the Mystic, who had pulled his bike back by the engine after they stopped. “Want me to go check them out?”

“They’ll come to us, soon enough.”

“Then maybe I should go break out the artillery and be ready to give some cover while you folks parlay?”

“I didn’t hear that, Jude.”

“Right you are. You didn’t hear it.” He disappeared toward the back of the train.

As they watched, the cloud of dust got closer and eventually revealed a dark rectangle at the bottom. The rectangle grew until it turned into a Model T pickup truck with a flatbed box on the back. A man and a woman sat in the front seat. The truck came to a squeaking stop ahead of the big Peerless engine, and the dust cloud continued to move, enveloping it. Ignoring that, the two figures jumped out and went over to the engine.

“Glory be to God,” said the man.

“It’s a miracle,” said the woman. “Just like you said, Pa. It surely is.”

“Would either of you folks care to let me in on this conversation,” said Avery, “seeing as how this is my machine you seem to be so excited about?”

“You folks been sent here to us by God,” said the man.

“In answer to our prayers,” said the woman.

“Jesus Christ,” said Avery.

“That seems to be who we’re talking about, all right,” said Charlie.

Maggie Mae made a series of gestures that clearly indicated she thought the new arrivals were crazy.

“I’m Jonas Wick,” said the man from the dust cloud, “and this here’s my wife, Annie. She’s a little goofy with all the God stuff, but don’t pay that too much mind. Most of the time, she knows which way is up pretty good.”

“I’m Jim Avery, and this is my traveling city. We call it the Ark. Good to meet you, Mr. and Mrs. Wick. I’m afraid you’re mistaken about me being sent here by God, though. We have a long trip ahead of us yet. Right now, we’re just looking for a place to stop for a day or so. Out of the traffic, if you get my drift.” He climbed down off the engine and shook Jonas Wick’s hand. When he offered his hand to Mrs. Wick, she crossed herself before taking it.

“Oh ya, ya. I get lots of drifts, not like my crazy wife. You could stay right where you are, on the road, as far as that goes, and you wouldn’t see enough
traffic
to wake you up. But better you come to my farm.”

“I’m afraid we really can’t.”

“Oh sure, you can. I got a big barn and two big corncribs with wagon alleys in the middle. You can put all your wagons inside, out of the rain, if you get
my
drift. And they can stay there as long as you want; only then you got to use your big steam engine there to help me get in my crop. I used to have two sons and two daughters, God bless me, and I built up a big spread with them, enough for all of them to take over some day. We used to bring in the whole harvest by hand.”

“So why do you need me, then?”

“The two of my boys was damn fools enough to go off to the big war, thought they could look out for each other. One of them’s in a hospital, out east. He can breathe okay, long as they don’t take the tubes out of him. The other one is buried in the mud in some damn French place called Ye Pray, or something. And then this year, both our daughters died of the influenza. I told Annie she should birth stronger children, but she don’t listen to nothing, don’t you know?”

“I’m very sorry for you, Mr. Wick.”

“Call me Joe. Be sorry some other time. Right now I got five hundred acres of wheat all made up into header stacks, but I got nobody to help me thresh it. My banker, old man Puckett, owns the only steam engine in thirty miles, and he decided not to let me use it this year. He says it’s too busy, but it’s really because he wants to foreclose on my place.”

“That’s quite a story, Joe. Can I offer you something to drink before you go?”

“Nope. No time. You and me got to get back.”

“Do we, now? Look, your offer sounds just fine, except for one thing: this is not a traveling custom threshing operation. I have a steam engine all right, but I don’t have a threshing machine.”

“Oh, I got one of them. I got one of the first Aultman & Taylors ever made. Puckett wanted to foreclose on that one time, too, had a contract deputy come and impound it in a big machine shed. But we fooled him. My boys and me snuck over in the dead of the night with a team of six horses, and we stole the thing back. Then we brought in a bumper crop, even though it was a dry year. We could do that, see, because we got a lot of good bottom land.”

“Sounds like you also have a lot of scorn for authority.”

“It’s okay in its place, I guess.”

“And where might that be?”

“Back in some town.”

Avery smiled. “I might have enough people here to handle that size crop. What’s the yield around here, something like fifteen or twenty bushels to the acre?”

“Fifteen for sure, sometimes more. Eight or nine thousand bushels altogether. I’ll give you nine cents a bushel for the use of the machine and another hundred or so to split up amongst your crew. That’s a nice chunk of money for you. And a good place to hide out, too.”

“Not that I said I was looking for one.”

“Nope. And not that I heard it, neither.”

“Sounds to me like we can work something out,” said Avery. “Just exactly where are this big barn and the corn cribs?”

“You just follow Annie in the pickup.”

“I can only make about three miles an hour on this kind of ground.”

“That’s okay. I tell Annie, keep it in low.”

“You’re not going with her?’

“No, I ride up with you, I think.”

“The hell, you say. And why would you do that, exactly?”

“Cause I ain’t never rode on a big honker of a steam engine before. Is that okey-dokey?”

“We’ll try it that way, anyway.”

“Ya, sure, then!” He shook everybody’s hand enthusiastically, ran over to talk to his wife who had already gotten back in the pickup, and then ran back to the engine, grinning broadly.

“Here we goes, then!”

“Praise God,” said Jude the Mystic. He headed back toward the Indian.

“Ah, you don’t gotta say that stuff. That’s just for when I’m in front of the old woman.”

The dawn was still nothing to brag on, but the Model T had newly wiped-off headlights, and they could see it easily as it turned south. Avery cranked the steel steering wheel into a fifteen-degree turn, and the whole chain of rigs headed around into a broad left arc, finally straightening out on a heading roughly south by southeast. They drove for an hour and ten minutes before the rising sun lit up a cluster of buildings on the horizon.

“Looks like a mountain pretending to be a barn,” said Charlie.

“Looks like just what the doctor ordered,” said Avery.

“Hey, I’m the only thing resembling a doctor here, and I say it looks like heaven,” said Jude the Mystic, now riding his bike alongside the engine.

Maggie Mae gave an unequivocal thumbs-up.

***

Later that day, the Windmill Man looked with dismay at the abandoned campsite of the Ark. He had decided not to look for it on the same day he killed Amos Hollander. Instead, he disposed of Hollander’s body in the church cistern, where it joined Pastor Ned’s, cleaned the floor of the reading room with a rag mop, and spent the rest of the evening altering Hollander’s spare uniforms to fit himself and moving provisions from the church pantry to the Mercer County pickup.

How could he have been so stupid?

Even on the hard, dry, autumn ground, the tracks from the big, cleated steel wheels of the traction engine were easy to spot. But there was one set going east and one set going west, and no way to tell which was newer. Which one should he follow? Would Providence forgive his moment of pride and show him the way? He had been given a perfect setup and had frittered it away. Surely, he would be punished for that.

He followed the tracks to the west for a while. They turned north and then went straight into wheat land. The first barbed wire fence they ran under was still intact. Or intact again. That seemed to argue for this being the older set of tracks, since the farmer had had time to repair the fence, which would certainly have been smashed down.

He reversed his course, going back to the campsite by the creek and then east for a few miles. But the tracks in that direction didn’t encounter any fences, so he couldn’t draw any new conclusions.

He decided to find out just how angry Providence was. He took an empty bottle from the back of the pickup, laid it down on a bit of hard, smooth ground, and spun it, saying, “Show me the way.” The bottle whirled, wobbled, and finally came to rest pointing straight south. Damn, damn, damn!

He got back behind the wheel and continued east, cursing himself and fuming with impotent rage.

Chapter 20

The Starving Rooster

Annie Wick led the procession past the house and the other farm buildings, straight to the barn, which now had one side bathed in golden morning sunlight. It wasn’t quite the size of a mountain, but it was big. She pulled her own vehicle off to one side, got out, and swung open the twelve-foot high doors.

“You could cut up one of those doors and build three chicken houses,” said Charlie. Looking at the looming gable, he thought of a picture he had seen in one of his
Popular Mechanics
, of a Zeppelin hanger.

The barn was built in the classic Midwest manner, with a shed-roofed section on either side of a center bay that had double doors on both ends. Above all that rose a hayloft big enough to put most farmers’ houses inside and still have room left over for a flower garden. The open center was a throwback to the pre-machine harvest days, oriented to the prevailing wind.

Before the machines, workers like Charlie and his brother would use the hard floor to flail the wheat, to get it to let go of its wheat berries. Then they would pitch the cleaned straw up into the loft and would open both sets of big doors, letting the wind blow through while they tossed the grain into the air with canvas tarps. Unless it was a dead still day, the chaff would blow away and the clean grain would land back on the tarp, where it could be scooped up and bagged. Then they would bring in a fresh pile of wheat from outside and start all over again. It was backbreaking, unnatural labor, for an output of about a bushel per hour per worker. Charlie had done it many times, and the thought of it made his muscles sore. The changeover to machine threshing made it easy to believe in progress.

“If that barn had a bottom,” said Avery, “it could be a real ark.”

“I think it could be several of them.”

The farmyard was also big, and the maneuvering was smooth and easy. Avery made a wide, shallow turn to straighten out the caravan in the right direction, and then pulled right into the center of the barn and out the other side. He stopped with only the small supply trailer poking out the back end. Completely inside were three other trailers. Jude the Mystic undid some hitches at that point, and the engine and cook shack proceeded to follow Annie Wick around to an open-centered corncrib.

A couple of roustabouts unhitched the small trailer, pushed it by hand into the barn alongside the others, and closed both sets of doors. At the corncrib, they left enough of the cook shack poking out for the smoke stack to clear the building. Then they unhooked the last of the hitches and Jude stowed his bike alongside a sheltered crib of new corn. The Peerless engine was now free to do what it did best: run other big machines. As a long-distance, cross-country vehicle, it was not likely to have a big future.

They followed the pickup back out into the fields, to a pile of unthreshed wheat that was the shape of a loaf of bread, fifty feet long and twenty feet high. A ladder leaned up against one end, for the pitchmen to climb up on top. The next time any of them did so, they would not have to climb back down, as the pile would have all been fed into the thresher before they needed to.

Around the back side of the pile, looking dusty and old and very much in need of a coat of paint stood a threshing machine.

It was one of the early wood-bodied machines with a steel angle-iron frame. Most of the drive mechanisms were chains or belts, rather than gears or shafts, many of them with no guards of any kind. All the transporting runs were canvas conveyor belts. It did not have a Windstacker. The body was painted dark green, or used to be, and on the side was a faded picture of a rooster, the trademark of the company, and the painted legend:

The Starving Rooster
Aultman & Taylor
Number 14

“I think they might have built that to harvest grain for the Civil War,” said Charlie.

“Well, you know,” said Avery, “that’s one of the great things about heavy machinery: you can always fix it. If it was worth a tinker’s damn when it was brand new, it still is. We can make it run, if it doesn’t now. We have power, we have a repair shop, and we have talent and expertise.”

Maggie Mae grabbed his shoulders from behind and did a quick, deep massage, working up to his knotted neck muscles and finally giving him a little kiss on the back of the neck.

“What Maggie Mae is telling me at the moment, though, is that we do not currently have the stamina. And she’s right. God, do I need a rest.”

“Then take one,” said Charlie. “I’ll get the engine secured. I know how. You can’t make an engineer out of me one day and then the next day pretend it never happened.”

“Best offer I’ve had in ages. She’s all yours.”

He and Maggie Mae climbed down the operator’s ladder, and Charlie began to tend to all the simple but terribly important things that an engine needs to have done to keep it from destroying itself. He decided to top off the water in the boiler and let the fire burn itself out for the time being. This could be the last chance they would get for a while to empty out the ash pans.

Once he was satisfied that the engine could be left alone, he climbed down to take a better look at the thresher. Annie Wick came walking across the field to join him.

“You figure she’ll work? It wasn’t new when we bought it, you know.”

“To look at it now, you wouldn’t know it was ever new. Listen, Mrs. Wick…”

“Annie, praise God.”

“Yeah, listen, Annie Praise God, I need some strong coffee and something to eat before I bring this thing back to life.”

“You see, how the Lord provides? I can’t make that machine run, but I can make you a breakfast you’ll remember in your prayers and then you can make it run.”

“Could you bring it out here? I want to get started on this monster.”

“Could Moses lead his people out of Egypt?”

“I guess.”

“Well then, how can we do less? Coffee first, then food?”

“That would be great.”

Annie Wick went scurrying off toward the farmhouse, and Charlie walked the rest of the way to the threshing machine. He pulled a small Crescent wrench out of his back pocket and took off the lug nuts that held on the main side panel. Inside, there were nests from small animals, cracked and frayed canvas belts that had holes eaten in them, and quite literally a ton of old straw that could be fossilized by now, for all he knew.

“Rooster, you and I have got a lot of work to do.”

He found a pitchfork leaning against the nearest wheat header, and he used it to pull the dried, brittle straw out of the maw of the Rooster. He got as much out as he could from the outside and then lifted one leg to climb inside the main drum. He stopped when he felt a tug at his sleeve. When he turned his head to look, Annie Wick was pushing the biggest coffee mug he had ever seen into his hand.

“Praise God,” she said, beaming at him.

He took a sip of the steaming brew. It was hot enough to scald his tonsils, and it contained thick cream, a lot of sugar, and quite probably some brandy. It went down his pipes like liquid fire and blew the cobwebs out of his soul.

“Praise God,” he said. “Absolutely too damn right.”

He was still looking over the inside of the machine, organizing his plan of attack, when Annie Wick brought him ham and eggs and fried potatoes on a blue and white china plate, with utensils he thought must be the good family silver. He stuffed his mouth shamelessly, savoring the flavors that mixed on his tongue. Quite a lot of the food simply seemed to evaporate, though. He had been awake for about twenty-six hours, a lot of it spent working, and he was at a point where food and drink didn’t go to his stomach at all. They were simply
absorbed
somewhere south of the esophagus. But as tired as he was, after another cup of coffee and the short rest that eating gave him, his interest in making the machine work overcame his need for sleep. He had slept many times. He had never before been inside the guts of a Aultman & Taylor threshing machine.

He went to the machine shop trailer and got canvas, heavy thread and a sail maker’s needle, a grease gun, an oil can, and some assorted wrenches and screwdrivers. He threw the tools in a bucket, took everything back to the Aultman & Taylor, and went to work.

There were a lot of grease zerks inside the machine, which didn’t seem like a very good idea, and they were all totally dry. The outside ones were dry, too. But generally, the machine was not in bad shape. He cleaned out the rest of the straw and the leaves and animal nests, greased everything that had a zerk and oiled everything that didn’t. Then he went over to the two-foot pulley that would take the belt from the steam engine, put a wrench on its center hub, and twisted. And gasped. It moved! With the clutches all engaged, he was actually running the internal machinery of the whole thresher with nothing but his own muscle power and a little leverage. Furthermore, he found it really not very hard to do.
This is one hell of a well-designed machine
, he decided. He thought of all the seemingly unnecessary counterweights and over-center pivot points he had seen on the interior, and he vowed to remember them, for some day when he might be designing machines. Whoever Aultman and Taylor were, they were some damned smart cookies.

He turned his attention to fixing the canvas belts. The sail maker’s needle was an unfamiliar tool for him, and he found that he was clumsy and slow with it. The internal belts took him two hours to patch and mend He didn’t want to think about how long the main feed belts would take. He remembered an itinerant master carpenter telling him once, “You never, never count the number of boards in the pile that you still have to nail up.” That seemed like good advice.

He bolted the main side panel back on, stood up, and stretched his aching back muscles. He suddenly felt tired almost to the point of delirium.

“How are you getting on, Charlie?” Emily. Maybe he was delirious, at that.

“Hello, Emily. How come you aren’t sleeping, with the others?”

“I’m slept out. I slept some on the trip, and besides, it’s dark and stuffy in that big barn. So I thought I’d go out and take a chance on finding you.”

“Take a chance?”

“Mmm. I’ve been thinking a lot about that.”

“I’m not sure I know what that means.”

“It means I’m a little scared, but don’t worry about it. How’s the work going?”

He shook his head. “I’ve got the machinery in pretty good shape, but some of the canvas still needs to be mended. I don’t know if I can get that done before Jim wakes up.”

“He won’t expect you to. If you’ve got the metal guts basically ready to run, you’ve done quite enough.”

“How would you know that?”

“I heard him say so before he and the Silent Princess went off to hibernate. He’ll be surprised. In fact, he’ll be delighted. Leave the canvas and the needle and thread out where anybody can see it, and he’ll know that part still needs to be done. You go have a bit of a lie down. You’ve earned it, as much as anybody here.”

“A bit of a lie down? I’ve never heard it called that before.”

“That’s my mother tongue sneaking up on me, actually.”

“That’s an English way of saying ‘nap?’ You know, I’ve never known an Englishwoman before. It’s a pretty accent for a woman, sort of soft but ringing.”

“Hah. And you must be Irish, from the way you dish out the blarney.”

“I don’t think so. My mother’s people were Poles, and my father’s were German and Danish, I think.”

“It was a joke, Charlie.”

“Oh. I’m not very good with those, I guess.”

“Jokes?”

“With women, anyway.” He looked away and set to work cleaning the grease from his hands with a rag.

“You’re a mess, Charlie. Dirty, I mean, not any other way.”

“Yeah, well, greasing machines will do that to you. And I don’t think we have a creek here to wash in.”

“Tough luck for you. You won’t get to steal any peeks at my naked bum anymore. I found something else, though, just as good.”

“Really?”
What else could be as good as your naked bum?

“Come.” She held out her hand, and he took it and followed. She led him behind the barn, where a windmill ran a well pump and dumped water into a cascading series of big galvanized metal tanks.

“This one’s for cooling down the cans of milk, you see,” she said, pointing. “And this big one is for watering the horses. The last one is just overflow, for when somebody forgets to shut down the windmill. It’s been sitting here, full of water, soaking up heat from the sun all morning.”

“Nice,” he said.

“Nice for you. Get your dirty clothes off and get in.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“I already asked Mrs. Wick about it. She gave me a bar of soap and a towel for you. You’ve made a pretty big impression on her, somehow or other.”

“I called her Annie Praise God. That was probably it.”

“Well, that would do it, wouldn’t it? This time, I stand guard for you. Strip and get in there, before I start tearing your clothes off.”

He was way too tired to argue with her and didn’t want to, in any case. He looked to be sure her back was turned and then took off everything, laying it in a neat pile on a spot where he thought he wouldn’t be likely to splash on it. Then he vaulted over the side of the tank, making a huge splash. It wasn’t exactly hot, but it was a lot warmer than the creek.

“You said something about soap, as I recall.”

“Just relax there a bit, and I’ll bring it to you.”

He put one hand on each side of the tank and lowered his torso into the water, as far down as he could get, willing his fatigue to flow out into the water. It felt like floating to paradise. He closed his eyes. Soon he felt Emily’s hands soaping his neck and shoulders, and he sat back up. Then her hands were smearing soapsuds down his chest and around his torso and farther down still. He was amazed at his own lack of shyness, and he made no effort to hide his nakedness from her. She rinsed him with a big cooking pot and then, to his utter astonishment, he felt her mouth on the back of his neck, just the way he had seen Maggie Mae kissing Avery.

“My God, Emily, are you—?” Her small hand closed his mouth.