Centennial (133 page)

If the Grebes’ soddy was one of the most congenial homes at Line Camp, it was primarily because Alice made it so. She seemed to grow taller and thinner as the years passed, and more determined to make her family’s western venture a success. She had a tenseness which she never lost, but she had learned to control it and directed her energy to problems in the community when her work at home was finished.

Mervin Wendell had worked diligently to sell his lots in the town of Line Camp, and the settlement flourished, with dwellings for more than three hundred people. In addition to the two stone buildings, there was a church, a bank, a newspaper, a fine hardware store and a commodious hotel with a wide veranda containing six rocking chairs.

What Alice Grebe wanted for her community was a library and a larger church, and she became, as the banker complained, “quite pestilential” in pressing these needs upon her neighbors. She organized suppers, started a summer fair, made the plowing committee give a portion of the prize money for books, and in time watched both the library and the church grow.

Across America women like her goaded their communities into attaining the goals which distinguish a civilized society from an uncivilized. It was always women who insisted upon libraries, and parks, and public nurses, and better schools, and newer churches, and paved roads. It was women with nervous energy, like Alice Grebe, who argued with bankers and merchants and came away with funds to do the good things that were required. One of the conspicuous differences between small towns in the United States and those in less-concerned nations was that American women insisted upon improvements, upon charitable works and upon the proliferation of cultural activities. How bleak Line Camp would have been without the proddings of Alice Grebe, how lonely and austere—an accidental cluster of buildings lost in the great plains. With her efforts it became a civilized little town whose signboard at the western entrance was not ridiculous:

BIGGEST LITTLE TOWN IN THE WEST

WATCH US GROW
!

Potato Brumbaugh was wearing out. It was the year 1915 and he was eighty-eight. The body he had used so unstintingly was showing signs of protest, and recently he had suffered a stroke which paralyzed the left side of his body. It was pathetic and in a way indecent to see this stocky old man with uncontrollable tears in his left eye, for he had never been a man to tolerate weakness. And to watch him unable to walk was a reminder of the ultimate failure of all men.

Every day he would ask Serafina Marquez to place him on the lawn in front of his house, where he could watch the river with which he had wrestled for so long, and it became apparent to her that whereas he could scarcely speak, his mind was not impaired. It was obvious that he was deep in thought. He liked to have visitors, especially Jim Lloyd, to whom he felt deeply attached. They would sit together and watch hawks perform over the river, those magnificent birds that flew so differently from all others. If one of the hawks uttered his peculiar cry, Jim would see by the change in Brumbaugh’s face that the old man had heard. He was much like a hawk himself, Jim thought, a man off on his own individual course, a man always fighting for the upper air.

Several times Jim wheeled the old cripple down to the river itself, where they watched avocets probing among the rushes, and Brumbaugh indicated that he had never known that shy bird well. Now he found amusement in the way the stilt-legged creature shoved his inquisitive upturned beak into hidden places, coming up with surprising treats.

Once, with the fingers of his right hand, Potato made dancing little movements, mimicking the avocet, and Jim suspected that he was wishing he could move about as easily as this bird. He saw tears come into Brumbaugh’s right eye, matching the permanent ones in his left.

Brumbaugh was much distressed that his friend Tranquilino still lingered in Mexico, and often he summoned Serafina and her two children to sit with him. He had increasing respect for Triunfador, for the boy had labored hard to take his father’s place and was a strong hand in the field. But he loved Serafina, this stately, quiet woman who bore the accidents of life with such dignity. For three years she had worked the beets with her two children and saved her money. She was thirty-one years old now and growing more beautiful as the years passed. She moved, Brumbaugh thought, with the grace of a young antelope.

More than once Brumbaugh had pointed at Triunfador, managing to say, “School,” but Serafina told him in Spanish, “He’s needed on the farm. School is for Anglos.” With some impatience Brumbaugh indicated that the Takemoto children were going to school, but Serafina said, “They have different customs,” and she refused to allow her son to get mixed up with such matters.

The girl Soledad was four now, old enough to help with the beets, and she gave promise of being even more graceful than her mother. She had dark, luminous eyes and very black hair which hung down her back in two pigtails. Brumbaugh often invited her to sit on his lap, but he was unable to control his leg muscles and she kept sliding off. She preferred to sit on the ground at his feet, watching him intently and now and then rewarding him with a grave smile. Pointing to her, he mouthed with great difficulty the word “School,” but Serafina laughed and said, “She’s a girl!” Again Brumbaugh noted that the Takemoto girl was going to school, and Serafina dismissed such foolishness by retreating to her former remark, “They have different customs.”

Like all original thinkers who approach the end of their lives, Brumbaugh was forced to acknowledge that he had never thought radically enough. The really bold ideas, those which form the foundations of concepts, had frightened him, and he had backed away from them. Now, in the warm summer of 1915, his mind leaped from one construct to the next. Immobilized physically, he ranged the world intellectually, and at the end of one probing day he said to himself, I’m like an old apple tree, too worn out to produce fruit. Hammer a few spikes into the trunk and the tree begins to yield like a four-year-old. It’s been reminded that this might be the last season.

He was irritated that men like him had not yet produced a beet seed which would grow not five seedling, four of them useless, but only one. With such a seed, the stoop-work of thinning would be eliminated, because any plant which survived could be depended upon to grow its one beet without competition from its four useless neighbors.

It’s possible to find such a seed, he thought. You look at a field of sugar beets, here and there you find a clump with only one plant. That seed did it. The problem is to conserve that seed and breed thousands more like it.

He had been much impressed by what this man Warren Gammon in Des Moines had been able to accomplish. This was the sort of thing men ought to be doing in all fields, for it required only imagination. Gammon had recognized the Hereford as a noble animal; however, it had long, sharp horns which looked fine on bulls—very masculine and powerful—but which had two drawbacks: they made the animal difficult to handle, and during shipment the horns of one steer often gouged the flanks of another, which damaged the meat, producing a lower price at slaughter. Of course, the horns could be sawed off, but what the rancher really needed was a polled Hereford, one born without the ability to grow horns, and this fellow Gammon had made up his mind to produce it.

Brilliant man, Brumbaugh mused as he looked across the field at his own hornless stock. How had Gammon produced this new breed of cattle? By the penny postal card! Patiently he had mailed printed cards to every Hereford grower in the United States, asking if the recipient happened to have in his stock any bull or cow which lacked horns genetically.

Brumbaugh could remember the day in 1903 when he had received his card of inquiry. He had appreciated immediately what Gammon was trying to do and had inspected his own cattle; finding no hornless animals, he had taken the trouble to visit all other herds in the district, and at Roggen he had found one such Hereford and in Wyoming another. He had bought them with his own money and shipped them off to Des Moines. Gammon was able to locate only fourteen polled Herefords throughout the United States, but from them he succeeded in creating a whole new breed of animal, one that saved millions of dollars for farmers.

There must be seeds like that, the old man told himself. We were just too damned lazy to find them.

He wanted very much to share his ideas with someone, so he sent for Takemoto, and the proper little Japanese came into the yard and bowed. Despite Brumbaugh’s in ability to speak, the two farmers nevertheless managed to converse. “Children?” Brumbaugh asked, and from his pocket Takemoto produced report cards for his first three children, and while he could not read them himself, he knew what they showed. Brumbaugh, who remembered his own pride when his son Kurt did well in school, could see the high grades when Takemoto held the cards before him.

“Seed,” he said painfully, and with his right hand he indicated that somehow seed must be developed which would produce only one plant.

“Shinningu no,” Takemoto said. Shinningu was his pronunciation of
thinning
and the two men nodded: with proper seed the stoop-work of thinning would be no longer necessary.

“You are the only man who respects farming,” Brumbaugh wanted to say. The words refused to form themselves but the idea did, and Takemoto nodded. If he did understand farming, Colorado-style, it was only because he had emulated Brumbaugh.

“Eighth ... section,” Brumbaugh mumbled. “Arroyo ... I give.”

This good news Takemoto understood instantly, and that afternoon he returned to the yard with a lawyer and his oldest son to serve as translator. “This fellow tells me, Potato, that you want to give him that eighth-section by the arroyo,” the lawyer said.

If Brumbaugh could have moved, he would have embraced the little Japanese. If a dying man says he’s going to give you some land, get it in writing. He thought back to his father’s days along the Volga when the Czarist forces were stealing land from the Volgadeutsch. How terrible the loss of land could be to a farmer, how joyous its reception.

“Yes,” Brumbaugh said painfully, and the paper was drawn, with two neighbors called in to witness. At the conclusion of the transfer the Takemoto boy bowed and said formally, “You have been so generous to my family, Mr. Brumbaugh, that my father insists upon paying the fees.” Brumbaugh understood, for he was a proud man too.

But his main concern was always with the river. Day after day he studied the Platte, seeing it for the thing it was: the canal that brought water from the mountains into the hands of men who knew how to use it. How beautiful that river was! In the course of his travels to London he had seen four great rivers—Missouri, Mississippi, Hudson, Thames—and he had comprehended the peculiar qualities of each. All rivers, he supposed, had special responsibilities, but there was none quite like the Platte.

Look at it now, in midsummer! A duck had a hard job finding enough water to light on. An avocet scarcely found worms. For at this stage the Platte was out of its channel. It was inland, working ... irrigating beets. The river itself was nothing but a dry, empty line on the map, all of its water having been appropriated by crafty men like Brumbaugh. Never did the Platte look so useful as when it left its channel, entered the canals and worked up on the benches.

But in recent years it had been going dry too soon in the summer. It was not receiving enough water, and Brumbaugh wanted to correct this. How?

He had diverted from Wyoming and Nebraska every drop of water they would allow, and those states were castigating him in the Supreme Court. He had tapped rivers that normally went elsewhere, and still the water was insufficient.

How infuriating it was! Land which looked like baked sand became the Garden of Eden if only it could get water. You could draw a line with a pencil on one side, a waterless barren; on the other, an irrigated luxuriance.

This man Creevey was all wrong. He was destroying the land with his fatuous notion that crops could be grown without water. The last three years had been lucky years. The settlers were producing good crops, but they’d had above-normal rainfall, and sooner or later the averages must reassert themselves. Years would come with lower than normal rain, and the dry-land farms would produce nothing.

Get my record book, Brumbaugh indicated to Jim Lloyd when the latter paid one of his regular visits, and when the book was in his lap, with Jim turning the pages, Brumbaugh proved what he was talking about. The established average for Centennial was thirteen inches of rain a year, yet here was a year in which twenty-three had fallen.

“Good, good!” Brumbaugh grunted. He could remember the twenty-one-inch year too, and the nineteen. But then his face clouded and he pointed to the dreadful years: seven inches and crops burned; six inches and nothing growing; five inches and a Sahara.

At this point the old man made a
whooshing
sound, and “Jim feared he was suffering a new attack. Not at all. He was merely trying to indicate windstorms. How they had blown in those dry years, whipping the world before them, raising tall pillars of dust.

“Sooner or later we’ll have the winds again,” he assured Brumbaugh.

“Only ... one ... thing ...” The words formed with terrible effort as Brumbaugh pointed to the mountains standing so clear and beautiful in the west. The two men paused to stare at those great sentinels which pinned down the western edges of the plains, and they saw them in radically different ways. Jim Lloyd recognized them as distant entities which he had never really known. He had visited them occasionally, and he had climbed into their heart that night he and Brumbaugh had gone after the Pettis boys, but they formed no real part of his life.