Big Wheat (2 page)

His own thoughts were not so very different, but he gave them no voice. There was no backing out now, and no return.

He collected a pile of sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper from his mother, kissed her and his sister on the cheeks, and left. He decided he would walk a while before he looked for a convenient haymow to sleep in. His mind was a jumble of worry and hurt and anger, but under it all, also a sort of quiet exhilaration. Something very important was about to happen.

He didn’t know how far he had gone when he encountered the strange, scarecrow figure in loose clothes and slouch hat, pitching straw in the moonlight.

The man’s movements were jerky and even in the dim light he could see that his eyes were wild, set wide apart from a beaked nose that looked as if it had been broken more than once. Charlie wondered if the whole world was full of crazy people on that night, himself included. But then the fellow just sort of melted into the darkness, limping, and soon Charlie had forgotten all about him. He had enough on his mind.

***

The next day, Mabel Boysen’s parents missed her when she didn’t come in the house from her morning chores of feeding the chickens and picking the eggs. They finished breakfast first, then looked in the farm buildings for her. Then her father, Djelmar, hitched his draft team to a buggy and began searching the fields. Finally becoming alarmed, he drove to all the nearby farms to ask about her. At the Krueger farm, he was met by a hung over Bob, Senior, with his hand wrapped in a blood-soaked rag.

“My boy Charlie run off last night, too,” he said. “Maybe they went together. He always was sweet on her.”

“If she eloped with him, I’ll whip them both with a knotted plow line.”

“Amen to that. I’ll help hold them.”

“You’ll mind your own beeswax, is what you’ll do.” Djelmar had never liked old man Krueger. He got back on the buggy, clucked to the horses, and drove all the way to the town of Beulah, where he told everything to Sheriff Amos Hollander. Hazen, which was ten miles closer to his farm, didn’t have a sheriff. The Sheriff told his deputy to get the official Model T pickup gassed up, greased, and ready to travel. He apologized to the panic-stricken father for not having any budget to send out telegrams to notify other lawmen around the state. For his part, Djelmar Boysen apologized for not having a picture of his daughter to give to him. But he provided some cash for the sheriff to give to Western Union.

Hollander said he didn’t need a picture of Mabel Boysen. He knew her well. And although he did not know Charlie Krueger, he could damn sure find him, all the same. He sounded mad. Boysen wasn’t sure what to make of his little rant, but he said nothing. He was glad for all the help he could get.

Two hours later, the sheriff and his deputy set off, swearing to stop at every farmstead to enquire about the path of the threshing crews and the possible appearance of a beautiful young woman. The sheriff did a lot of swearing of other kinds, as well.

The moving harvest, at least in the mind of Djelmar Boysen, was a bit like the circus: sometimes people ran away to join it. Especially young people. A lot of them were not seriously missed for quite a long time, and some of them never at all. Wayward daughters, the ones who “always had a bit of a wild streak,” were assumed to have become cooks for custom threshers. If they had less savory reputations, they were assumed to have become camp followers, “soiled doves,” his wife would say, servicing the needs of the small army of men moving across the continent. But he didn’t believe Mabel belonged in any of those categories. And he didn’t believe she would have run off with that Krueger kid without telling him, either. He believed she must have come to harm.

Young men who went missing, on the other hand, like the Krueger kid, didn’t require much explanation. They were supposed to be daring, footloose, pining for adventure, and eager to see the world. And they were expected to be more than a bit foolish. The story was of the prodigal son, after all, not the prodigal daughter.

But besides being prodigal, was young Krueger in trouble? The sheriff seemed to think so, even though he had said he didn’t know the kid. And he also seemed to be mad at him. It was all very bewildering. And he had the sinking feeling that it was also about to become tragic.

Chapter 3

Bringing in the Sheaves

More and more, Charlie felt like a fool for hitting his father and walking out, but he would rather die than go back and apologize. He had walked all night, finding that he couldn’t even think about sleep. At dawn, he hired on with a custom threshing operation that was getting ready to harvest a four-hundred-acre field. The crew was already set by the time he got there, but the separator operator, the man who stood on top of the threshing machine and controlled the flow of wheat through it, was badly hung over. The steam engineer didn’t want him near any machinery, so he asked Charlie if he could do the job.

“Well, to be honest, I never ran a Case before.” Which was true. It was also true that he had never run any other kind of threshing machine, either, but he didn’t feel obliged to tell the engineer that. He knew everything about how they worked; he just didn’t know how they
felt
yet. But he had never met a machine he couldn’t run or repair.

“You’ll find that the concaves won’t clear themselves as fast as on a Nichols, so you want to watch you don’t overload them. Other than that, it’s about like any of the others. You keep her running smooth, I’ll pay you eight dollars for the day.”

“Let’s go to work,” said Charlie.

They shook hands and he climbed up on the machine, using the angle-iron frames on its side for steps. It had always struck him as odd that nobody built a machine with an attached ladder, even though operators always ran them from up top. He looked over his control levers, frantically reviewing what he knew about them. There was one for the belt feed, one for both the concaves and shaker trays, and one for the auger that unloaded clean grain from the machine’s internal bin. They all took their power from a central shaft with a huge pulley on the end that connected to the steam engine by a fat rubber belt. The Windstacker, which blew the cleaned straw as much as eighty feet away from them, was started and stopped with a chain that had a spade handle on the end.

Charlie made sure all the levers were disengaged and then waved at the engineer, who was back on his own machine. He took a deep breath.
Lordy, lordy, can I really pull this off?
The engineer engaged the power takeoff, the belt pulled, and his own flywheel cranked up to speed.

The machine shook a little at first and then settled into a smooth machinery hum. He let the main shaft get up to what he hoped was its proper speed and engaged the concaves, then the Windstacker, and finally the belts that fed the raw wheat into the gaping mechanical mouth. On the machine’s metal top, he found a small panel, which he could remove to look into the inner works. He didn’t know what the concaves should look like when they were working right, but he assumed that he shouldn’t let the space above them get totally jammed up with stalks. He stopped the feed belt now and then to keep that from happening. After ten minutes of cleaning wheat, he heard a bell behind him. It was attached to the discharge pipe of the grain auger, and drivers rang it to get his attention when they pulled up with a wagon to be loaded. He pulled the lever for the auger and watched with pure joy as a solid stream of golden treasure poured into the empty wagon.
My God, this is really going to work!

After an hour or so, he found that he didn’t need the panel anymore. He could tell by the vibrations coming through his feet if the feed was working right. Soon the sheaf pickers couldn’t bring him the raw wheat fast enough, and while he waited for them, he jumped down and oiled the bearing journals or hauled water or wood to the steam engine. At the morning lunch break, around 9:00, two of the muleskinners talked about him as if he weren’t there.

“What the hell’s the matter with the new separator man?”

Charlie’s heart fell into his boots.

“I don’t know, but the way he’s going, we’re probably going to get our wages cut, on account of we didn’t have to put in a full day.”

“Yeah,” said the first one, “what is he, anti-labor? I never seen a separator put out that fast.”

The tone was deadpan, but when Charlie looked at the man, he saw that he was grinning. His pulse went back to normal.

“You leave my new man alone,” said the engineer, “or I’ll find plenty of work for you, trying to pull my one-inch wrench out of your ass.”

“Ah, we didn’t mean nothing.”

“I did.”

After hot corn fritters, apple pie and coffee, the farmer had all the wagon drivers line up their rigs in a single row with the steam engine and the threshing machine in the center, to pose for a picture. Fifty yards to the east, with the midmorning sun behind him, a man with a three-piece suit and a straw hat with a huge, floppy brim was fussing with a wooden box on a tripod.

“When I hold up my hand like this,” he said, reaching as high as he could, “nobody move until I put it down again. You got it?”

Everybody nodded eagerly. Wagon drivers stood up on their rigs, reins in hand, Charlie and the steam engineer stood on top of their machines, and the farmer proudly stood in front of everybody, fists on hips. The photographer took a last look under a black cloth on the back of his box. Then he grabbed a black rubber bulb attached to the camera by a small tube and looked up and down the row.

“Aaaand…” He held up his hand again and squeezed the bulb. The box made a mechanical whirring sound for a while, then a clunk. “Got it!”

He changed the plate in the camera and took one more shot “just to be sure,” then quickly went around the crew, showing them a print of an earlier threshing bee and taking orders. The print was about three feet wide and eight inches high, and it showed the entire operation in great detail, strangely transported to a brown and white world that he called sepia.

“Give me three dollars now and your mailing address, and I’ll send you a print of the picture I just took.”

“How long will that take?”

“I’ve got a lot more threshing crews to shoot, and then I have to take the film back to my studio in Sioux Falls. It’ll be a few months.”

“Will it be as good as that one?”

“It’ll be better. This one has been out in the sun, and it’s faded some. I guarantee you will be able to see everybody’s faces, or your money back. It’ll be something to hand down to your grandchildren.”

“It will be,” said the farmer. “I buy one from him every year.” People reached into their pockets. Charlie would have loved a picture of himself standing proudly atop the Case, but he had no idea where to tell the man to send it. And he didn’t have three dollars, anyway. He went back to his machine.

The rest of the day flew by in a blur of dust, heat and noise, sweat and food. Besides the morning and afternoon snacks, the job included the traditional threshermen’s noon lunch, a huge bounty of meats, potatoes, gravy, fresh breads, pickles, deviled eggs, assorted vegetables, and fruit pies, all washed down with gallons of steaming coffee. It was served on a makeshift table of long planks laid over sawhorses, and the planks groaned and sagged under the weight. But as was the custom, there was no evening meal for anyone but the farmer and his family. Those who were neighbors or relatives simply made their way back home, frequently laughing and walking with arms over each other’s shoulders, proud of the day’s work. Most of the crew of hired day-laborers carried sandwiches and cakes that they had saved from the noon lunch. They ate them while they made their way to the next day’s job. But Charlie knew that he would have no place on the crew the following day, if the regular separator man sobered up, so he offered fifty cents of his newly earned money to the farmer for an evening meal and a place to sleep in the hayloft.

“Hell, son, anybody works as hard as you do can sleep in my barn for free any time. And we’d be happy to have you to supper, too.”

“Much obliged, sir.”

“Name’s Walter Christian, Walt to you.” He offered his hand and Charlie shook it, telling him his own name.

“Mr. Cody, our photographer, is also staying to supper. He’s not so good at camping out, and there aren’t a whole lot of hotels around here.”

“None, I would say.”

“That’s what you’d say, all right. You can wash up over by the pump house. It’s okay to get some dirt in the cattle tank, but mind you don’t get any soap in it. Makes the horses real sick. Supper in half an hour.”

Supper was mostly leftovers from the big noon meal—baked ham, mashed potatoes shaped into patties and fried in butter, baked beans with brown sugar and bacon, peas, and cut corn. And of course, fresh bread. During the harvest, Mrs. Christian, whose name was Violet, baked three times a day. The whole house smelled like a bakery.

“These peas are really special,” said Charlie. “Best I ever had.”

Farmer Christian smiled with obvious satisfaction. “Lots of folks nowadays don’t keep a vegetable garden, but I like my greens fresh.”

“What do your neighbors do instead?” said the photographer.

“They put every square foot of land they have into wheat, and then they buy their food in town, in them new-fangled tin cans. Ed Henkie has already got a pile of empty cans behind his granary, so high that you can’t see over it. He don’t keep chickens or milk cows or hogs anymore, either.”

“And neither should you,” said his wife. “You could make eight hundred dollars a season on that field you keep in pasture.”

“We’ve been over this before, Violet.”

“And we’ll go over it again. Ed Henkie’s wife says they made over ten thousand dollars last year, and they only have half a section of land. Cash farming is the new way. Ordinary folks just like us are getting rich.”

“Right. That’s until the government quits guaranteeing the market price or the European wheat blight finally makes it across the Mississippi River or the rains don’t come any more. Then you’ll be damn glad for those chickens and cows and a few porkers.”

“Rain follows the plow,” she said, stubbornly jutting out her chin.

“I’ve heard that before,” said the photographer. “What does it mean?”

“It means some people are damn fools.”

“I’ll thank you not to swear at the table, Walter.”

“Some people,” said Charlie, “believe that just the act of clearing more land somehow affects the weather, brings more rain.” He shrugged.

“You believe it?”

“I don’t know. No offense, Mrs. Christian, but it seems to me the place I most often see it is in advertisements for farm machinery or seed.”

Walter Christian guffawed. His wife glowered.

“You’re a smart young man, Charlie. I don’t suppose you’d be looking for a regular job? We lost a son and a daughter to the influenza, and things been real pushed around here since then.”

Mrs. Christian started to say something, but then bowed her head a bit and crossed herself.

“That’s really kind of you, sir, but I think this is a little too close to home.”

“You think your folks would have some problem with it? Hell, I can go talk to them, tell them—”

“It’s not that.”

“Well, what the hell is it, then? You don’t like my woman’s cooking?”

“This is the last time I’m going to tell you about swearing, Walter.”

“Oh, relax, Mother. Charlie’s heard it all before, and the pastor isn’t here. What do you say, Charlie?”

“Your wife is a fine cook, sir.” He looked over and saw her smile slightly. “It’s just that it took me twenty-three years to get up the nerve to leave home. Now that I finally did it, I feel like I ought to go farther, somehow. I guess that doesn’t make much sense, does it?”
And worse yet
, he thought,
if I don’t go any farther than this, I might be tempted to go back
.

“Makes sense to me, anyhow. My old man was a no-good, worthless son of a bitch.”

“Walter!”

“Well, he was. Stole from his own kids. Not worth the cost of the powder to blow him to hell or the match to touch it off with. I spat in his eye and came out here from Ohio when I was nineteen. You could still get decent homestead land back then, and I lied about my age to file a claim. It was a whole new life. Looks to me like you’re a man looking for a new life, too. I hope you find it.”

“What do you want to be?” said the photographer.

“I’m not sure. Something with machinery, I think.”

“Up in Saskatchewan last year, I saw a machine called a ‘combine.’ It was like a reaper and a threshing machine, all put together. It took twelve horses to pull it, and a gasoline engine to run all the inside works, but it could move through a field mowing a twelve-foot wide swath and threshing it, all at the same time.”

“What do they have for a crew?”

“Four men can bring in the whole harvest.”

“Good heavens,” said Mrs. Christian.

“That doesn’t seem right, somehow,” said Charlie.

“It would be the death of the threshing bee, that’s for sure,” said Walter.

“Well, it was definitely the end of my business,” said the photographer. “If everybody farmed like that, I’d be back to shooting nothing but weddings and portraits.”

“Why would anyone want to do that?” said Mrs. Christian. “The harvest is the best time of the year. There are neighbors we never see any other time. It’s better than Christmas or Easter, even. It’s the time when we’re, um… Well, I would just cry if it all came to an end.”

“Violet, my dear, I think we have finally found something we can agree on.”

It had never occurred to Charlie that he might live long enough to see the passing of an entire era. He wasn’t sure how he felt about it. He turned to the photographer.

“Can you promise delivery of one of your pictures by Christmas?”

“Sure. Everybody always wants that.”

“Then I would like you to send one to my sister. Could you also put in a note saying, ‘Merry Christmas from your loving brother?’”

“Easiest thing in the world.” He produced a notebook from inside his coat and flipped to a clear page. “You don’t figure you’ll be making it home for Christmas?”

“Maybe not for a lot of them.” He paid the man his three dollars, gave him the name and address, and got up to go to the barn to make his bed.

“Breakfast at dawn,” said Walter.

“I’ll make you some lunch to carry, too,” said his wife.