Centennial (139 page)

Imprisonment at Line Camp proved especially bitter to Vesta Volkema, who watched her vision of California vanish in dust. Once at the Grebes’ she came close to tears, confessing, “Magnes was right that time when he wanted to sell our damned acres for twenty-five cents each. Hell, we’d have been better off it we’d given them away.”

“You still could,” Alice said excitedly. “We all could: Just give them away and get out.”

“No,” Magnes said. “You get trapped on the land. It reaches out and holds you.”

Then, as though to test the courage of the immigrants, the years 1926 and 1927 turned even more brutal, and farm income dropped so low that sometimes it seemed as if the Grebes would starve on the rich land they owned. For two long years they went to not one picture show in Greeley, nor to any church supper, for they were too poor to contribute a covered dish. They were paupers, worse off than the meanest family in Little Mexico, and Alice sometimes wondered if the providential years they had known when they first broke the sod would ever return.

Yet even during these painful years her love for her husband increased, and she bore him two more children, a third son and a second daughter, and the burden of providing them with a reasonable start in life fell solely upon her. She went days without food to ensure their getting the nourishment they required. She dressed them well, too, making over the clothes which had been worn by their brothers and sisters. She did much sewing, often working until her eyes were heavy, and she spent hours playing with the youngest three in the old soddy, telling them of former days and of how the family had worked together.

Her only consolation was the church, and it was a powerful support. Sometimes when the minister brought in a speaker from the college at Greeley, and Earl was too dead-tired to attend, she would walk by herself along the back path to Line Camp, and ask pertinent questions, and then return home alone, carrying only a small flashlight. Occasionally Mr. Bellamy arranged meetings, like the one in which an actress from Denver reported on the New York plays, and on the very special one,
The Great God Brown
, in which she had played a role. By popular demand, she recited some of the scenes from that play, a bright, lovely young woman, and Alice thought how proper it would be if Mr. Bellamy were to marry such a girl.

And then in 1928 everything conspired to help the Grebes: there was ample rain, much snow and a warm spring. Earl made an astonishing forty bushels to the acre, and it sold at $1.32 a bushel. The mortgage was paid off and every Grebe child received a new outfit, with Ethan, now sixteen, getting his first long trousers.

One evening that autumn, the Volkemas and the Larsens came over to dinner, and after the meat was taken away but before the dessert was brought in by Victoria, Earl Grebe cleared his throat, rose and asked his wife to produce the bottle of champagne. When the glasses were filled he asked Ethan to bring in a bucket, and when it was placed before him on the table, he brought from his pocket the mortgage paper and a box of matches.

“The Grebe family has been through a dangerous time,” Earl said. “We might have lost our farm except for the support our neighbors gave us, but all that’s past.” Striking a match, he held the flame to the bottom edge of the mortgage, and everyone at the table watched with fascination as the dangerous paper burned.

When it was ashes, Alice Grebe lifted her glass and said, “From here on out ... only good times ... for all of us.

Early spring on the great plains is the most hellish season known in the United States. Wet snow falls and for days the thermometer growls at the freezing point, now down, now up. No blossoms grace the roadside and such birds as do brave the weather huddle in the grass, their feathers ruffled, for April and May can often be fifteen or twenty degrees colder than February and March.

It was a miserable time, and the woman from Utah who wrote the song about springtime in the Rockies obviously lived on the western slope. Only the red-winged blackbird gives the period any distinction; even the hawks try to avoid the cold. There is much truth in the saying, “Colorado has only three seasons—July, August and winter.”

In 1931 in Colorado a new misery was added. During the last week in March a strong wind began blowing from the northwest, and it continued for five days. There had been winds before, but this one was ominous, for it kept low, hugging the earth, as if it intended to suck from the soil what little moisture had been deposited by the inadequate snows that year. Walter Bellamy, studying the direction and force of the wind, predicted, “If this keeps up another week, it’ll be like losing seven inches of rainfall.”

It did keep up. What was worse, it started a howling sound which echoed across the empty plains. It was low and mournful, like the wailing of a wounded coyote, and it persisted day and night. The decibel strength was never high; it was not a roaring wind that deafened, but it had a penetrating quality that set the nerves on edge, so that at some unexpected moment a farmer, or more often his wife, would suddenly shout, “Damn the wind! Doesn’t it ever let up?”

In June the howling subsided, and residents of the lonely homes across the prairie looked back with wry amusement at the way they had responded to it. It really set my nerves jangling,” Jenny Larsen confessed. “Wasn’t it strange the way it kept up, day after day?” Alice Grebe, to whom this question was directed, said nothing, for there had been days in May when she thought she might go out of her senses, and she was afraid.

The men spent June in drilling their augers into the soil to calculate just how much damage the wind had done, and their conclusions were pessimistic. “If we don’t get one more good gully-washer,” Magnes Volkema predicted, “we’re going to be in real trouble.”

None came. Instead, in late June the wind returned, this time with terrible consequences.

Alice Grebe was working in the yard, trying to ignore the whistling when she happened to look west toward the mountains, and there, coming directly at her, was a monstrous cloud forty thousand feet high and so wide it filled the sky.

“Earl!” she cried, but he was in the far fields turning a mulch in case rains came.

As she watched the onslaught, she felt happy on the one hand, for the rain would drench the fields, but on the other, she was afraid, for the winds might be violent. “Don’t let it do much damage,” she prayed.

Her prayer was unnecessary, for this was not a damaging storm. There was no rain, no wrecking winds, but it did bring something Alice Grebe had never seen before: a universe of swirling dust, a blackness that blotted out the sun, a choking, all-pervading silt that would seep through every wall and window.

When the mighty duststorm, silent and terrifying, first engulfed her, she thought she would choke. Spitting dust from her dry lips, she ran indoors to protect her children, and found them coughing. She sat with them for two hours, two of the strangest hours she had ever spent, for although it was midday, the sky was dark as night, and a weird gloom covered the earth.

Then the storm passed, leaving piles of dust everywhere, and after a while Earl returned to the house, spitting and stamping his feet. “That was a wild one!” he said as he entered the kitchen.

“What was it?” Alice asked in real perplexity.

“Just a duststorm.”

“It was terrifying, Like a tornado with no wind.”

“There wasn’t much wind, was there?”

That night the neighbors gathered to discuss this phenomenon, and Walter Bellamy drove out to meet with them. “We may be in for some real trouble,” he said. “I received a newspaper from Montana yesterday. They’ve had a succession of such storms.”

“Oh, dear, no!” Alice cried involuntarily.

“Now, Alice,” her husband said. “If it’s not hail and it’s not a tornado, I guess we can survive.”

That became questionable when the next towering storm rolled in, vast black clouds of dust sweeping even the redwings and the hawks from the sky. It was a paralyzing storm—no wind, no moaning, no rainfall, just the terrible presence of dust seeping into every crevice, irritating every membrane.

“I cannot tolerate this,” Alice whispered to herself but she refrained, from showing her fear lest she frighten the children.

“What’s happening, Mommy?” her five-year-old daughter asked as dust invaded the kitchen.

“It’s a storm, dear, and storms pass.”

This one took five hours to go by, and when it was over, the citizens of Line Camp were shocked at its consequences, for in outdoor areas as much as nine inches of dust had accumulated against walls and fences, and in the houses a film of dust perhaps an eighth of an inch thick had seeped in through walls and closed windows.

Nothing had escaped. Vesta Volkema said, “I opened my refrigerator door and there was dust on everything.”

That summer there were nine such storms at Line Camp. Never had the residents experienced such dreadful occurrences, and men began each day by looking westward. At dawn the sky would be clear. At eleven there would be a faint shadow below the mountains. By three in the afternoon the great, silent, towering form would creep through the sky, bringing the dust of Wyoming across the land, picking up the dust of Colorado and carrying it into Kansas.

It was toward the end of this year that a macabre story started circulating: if a man murders his wife during a duststorm, there will be no jury trial, because his act will be understandable.

Many farm women did find it impossible to live with the dust, and several in the Line Camp and Wendell area had to be carted off to mental institutions, for it was no easy thing to sit alone in some remote cabin and listen to the soft moaning of the wind and feel the choking dust come creeping at you, covering your shoes and your stockings and lying ever so lightly on your apron and choking your nose, and all this happening in broad daylight, except that it seemed like gloomy night.

“Save me! Save me!” the Lindenmeir woman had screamed as she ran four miles across the prairie. Like a wild woman she burst into Vesta Volkema’s kitchen, and Magnes had to tie her down and haul her in to Greeley.

In every respect the year was a disaster. Even Earl Grebe, acknowledged as the best farmer in the district, could make no more than six bushels to the acre, and he had to sell it at thirty-three cents the bushel, about half the lowest previous price in this century.

“At that price, I’m giving it away,” he told his family, but before they could comment, he added, “What else can we do? We can’t eat it all.”

In 1933 no farmer in the district harvested a single bushel of wheat, and the same applied in 1934. In farmhouse after farmhouse there was not a penny of income during these two years, and some came close to starving. Farmers killed their livestock for lack of fodder to give them, and then found no market for the meat because no one had money to buy it.

And the duststorms kept returning, one after another, in high, billowing grandeur, sweeping the world before them. Dust became a constant presence that choked and strangled. Children wore masks over their noses as they went to school, and many farm wives wore caps night and day to keep the dust from their hair.

But even in the third year of the dreadful affliction, farmers whose lives were being slowly blown away were able to make grisly jokes. Visitors to Magnes Volkema’s farm were astonished to find his plow resting upside down on top of his barn. “It’s the only way I can earn any money,” he explained. “As the fields blow out of Colorado, I plow them for their new owners in Kansas.”

Vesta said, “What little money we do get we spend on cinnamon.” This seemed so preposterous that the people to whom she said this stepped back to study her. “We mix it with the dust and make believe we’re eating cinnamon toast.”

At the store in Line Camp they told of the chickens who thought that what was covering them was snow and froze to death. Another farmer saw a hawk flying into the storm with a red-winged blackbird going ahead to brush the dust out of his eyes. When it came time for one farmer to pay his mortgage, he complained, “I don’t know where to go. The paper is in Philip Wendell’s safe in Centennial, but my farm’s in Nebraska.”

This problem of mortgages, however, was not amusing. For the lack of forty dollars to cover interest, many a farmer lost land worth thousands, and the government seemed powerless to prevent such tragedy. Nineteen farms in Line Camp were foreclosed by Philip Wendell; sixteen others were sold by the sheriff to pay back taxes, sometimes amounting to only a few dollars. By legal trickery, often of the most venal sort, some of the hardest-working men and women of America had their land stolen from them. Of the nineteen farms foreclosed by Wendell, the average price he had to pay per acre was sixteen cents.

In most respects 1934 was the year of hell. The wheat crop was zero. At the Grebe farm, that rich and wide land which had supported its people so well, a family of six children and two adults had to live on sixteen dollars a month, and there were many days when they ate only one meal. The younger children lacked milk and vitamins. The older children were in the midst of their education, and it was cut out from under them; sometimes their mother would cry herself to sleep as she contemplated the ruin of their bright young lives.

But she grieved most for her second son, Timmy, twelve years old and at that age when a boy entering adolescence discovered so many things he wanted to do. And there was not a penny he could have ... nothing ... nothing. “Oh, God!” she wept one wintry day as she watched him swinging off to school. “How can this nation allow such things to happen?”

And then, in the fall of the year, Mr. Bellamy, tall and thin as ever, heard some good news. Calling together all the deprived young boys of the area, he told them about an exciting development in Denver: in the January stock show there’s to be a new event: ‘Catch It and You Can Keep It.’”