Fruits of the Earth (27 page)

“I leave the calf with her. If you milk her, she should be tied.”

“Oh,” said Jim, “but I milked with the machine.”

Abe said nothing. Since Horanski had left, he had done the milking by hand. This boy of his had the spirit of the machine.

That night, Abe lay awake for many hours, puzzling over his relation to the children. While they were little, he had been preoccupied with the farm; while they were adolescent, he had been immersed in public business. Why should he think about these things now when it was painful to do so? Why indeed, except because he had withdrawn from that material world in which alone he had felt at home? They were preparing to depart and to enter that world which he had left. At the best could he hope to meet them at a cross-roads to catch a glimpse of them as they vanished along paths of their own.

At night, the next day, Jim dressed in his town clothes. “I'll walk to town, dad. I've got a deal on with Anderson.”

“Take the pony,” Abe said.

“No, thanks. I'll walk.”

When, late at night, Jim came home, Abe was still sitting up; for though he had not objected to Jim's going to town, he yet felt that he could not go to bed before he returned. Jim entered the lighted yard with a great clatter and clanging; it sounded as though long iron rods were being dragged over cobblestone pavement. Abe rose from his chair in the dining-room where he and Ruth had been sitting.

In the yard, Jim received him with an embarrassed laugh; he was sitting on the floor of a single-seated Ford car which was stripped of everything inessential: running boards, fenders, top, cushions. So that was the deal he had had on with Anderson.

“What did you pay for the pile of junk?” Abe asked.

“Seventy-five. Fifty in cash; a note for the balance.”

“Whose note?”

“Mine.”

“You are a minor. Your note isn't worth the paper it's written on.”

“Right. But Anderson's endorsement makes it good. My credit stands high.”

Abe was silent. Then, contemptuously, “Looks like a plucked chicken.” And, indeed, the machine looked high-legged and naked.

The name stuck while Jim kept the car. He placed it in the old open implement shed between the granaries; henceforth, every rainy day, he tinkered there, tightening bolts, painting the body, disassembling and reassembling intricate parts till the whole car was transformed.

One day Abe, suspending the ploughing on the fallow, told Jim at noon to get the buggy ready. It was time to look at the hay.

“Come on, dad,” said Jim. “Be a sport. Let's go in my racer.”

The girls laughed, for Abe had never yet entered a car.

Abe did not answer; reluctantly he felt that he must indulge the boy: he half resented it that Jim should thus take the lead. When they went into the yard, the girls accompanied them; and Ruth stood at the window of the den to see them start.

Bumping about in the low body in which they reclined, they shot through the gate and turned west, with the exhaust of the engine emitting a deafening bellow. They went all over the western meadows: “All right,” Abe said at last. “We'll go ahead a week from to-morrow.”

They turned. “Say, dad,” Jim asked, “there's a chance of selling this outfit for a hundred and twenty-five. I can get a real car for three hundred from Duncan and Ferris. They'll take my note for the balance. If you pay me fifty dollars a month and time and a half for overtime, I should be able to clear that off in three months.”

“I might not have work for you on those terms.”

“That'll be all right. I can get a job elsewhere. Lots of farmers asking me in town.”

“That so?” Abe felt a pang in his heart. This boy also had the commercial spirit. He did not feel that he was debasing himself by working for the highest bidder: an effect of his stay in town. Did he not know that his father would rather give him any sum than let him go to work away from home?

The summer went by. Repeatedly Jim had criticized his father's methods; especially had he disapproved of Abe's refusal to “go into flax.” “Look here,” Abe said one day, “who's built the best farm in this district?”

“I know, dad. But this time you're wrong.”

“We'll see.”

Throughout the district excitement prevailed. Abe had only wheat, the price of which was fixed; he was in no hurry;
he
had no flax.

Everybody else had at least a few acres of his crop. Henry Topp had the largest acreage of all; it took the incentive of a gambling interest to make him work. The only thing which had prevented people from seeding more flax had been the cost of seed; now it looked as if the price of the market might run as high as that of seed in spring.

As usual, threshing started south of the Somerville Line; it had hardly begun when a new factor entered into the situation. Unheard-of wages were being offered to teamsters who had horses and tanks for hauling flax to town before the price broke; for, once the crop began to move, nobody expected that price to hold. Few threshermen, so far, would consider threshing wheat. Flax was the crop of the year. Yet, when a decline in the price level was followed by a prompt recovery, there was a retardation in the movement of the crop. A man with a hundred bushels to sell might make fifty dollars by waiting a day.

The consequence was that every farmer went to town from day to day and sat about at the elevator to listen to the announcement of the fluctuations in price which were made from hour to hour. At a given moment, when the price, having broken, stiffened again, there would be a frantic bidding for teams or a sudden rush of selling; for a few shrewd men came on top of the load which they parked to wait for a rise; when it came, they ran for their teams and drove up to the platform to sell before the next drop. Others, observing that every fall in price was made up for shortly by a rise beyond the previous level, took their loads home at night, to make an additional profit next day.

Into this excitement fell, like a bomb, the announcement that John Elliot who had only a small crop, for little was broken on his place, had been offered twenty thousand dollars for his land. Still more astounding, he declined, holding out for five thousand more. The would-be buyer, however, acquired two farms south of the Line instead. The district was drunk with the spirit of speculation.

Jim, who went often to town now, at night, brought the story home; and when farmers at last offered five, six, eight dollars, not for a day's work, but for hauling a load over a distance of four or five miles, he announced that he, too, was going to pick up easy money.

To his amazement Abe said briefly, “No. You won't.”

Jim looked at his father. “Why not, dad?”

“Because I say so.”

“But dad–” However, seeing his father's frown, he did not insist. “At any rate, I wish you'd give me the morning, dad. I'd like to see how things are going at the elevators.”

“You can have the morning. But you won't haul.”

“All right, dad.”

Jim reached the first elevator south of the track at eight o'clock. A crowd was assembled. A number of farmers were leaving to fetch their flax; the price stood at the fabulous level of five dollars and sixty cents. The situation was the more exciting since the price was expected to break any moment; once broken, it would tumble till it reached its normal level of less than two dollars.

Jim backed his second-hand touring car into the row of vehicles south of the elevator and returned to the incline. He saw Elliot, Wheeldon, Horanski, Hartley, and Nicoll, with a crowd of strangers, and excitedly nodded to them all. On the dumping platform a score of men were standing about, among
them Henry Topp. Of the two buyers, one was sitting in the engine room, next to the telephone; the other, loading a car on the track. All business except that of flax was suspended.

A farmer, who, the day before, had brought a load of wheat had met with a curious situation. His wheat had graded number two; but the buyer told him that he had only one bin with storage for wheat available; unfortunately it was partly filled with grain that had graded number five; if he would let his wheat go at that grade, he could sell; if not, he would have to take the load home again. The difference between the grades amounted to twenty-five cents or fifteen dollars the load. The farmer had tried the other elevators; and, curiously, the same situation had prevailed there. He needed money; he had come eighteen miles; his horses were tired and not of the strongest. He sold. At once a rumour sprang up that this was a put-up game to “do” the farmer; a few years later such things drove thousands into the pools.

Suddenly an announcement was made: “Five-seventy-five.”

Henry Topp jumped like a clown in a circus. “They call me the runt!” he yelled. “But I'm the guy who pays the fair price. Ten dollars a load.”

A thick-set bearded Mennonite stolidly outbade him. “Ten and a half.”

Suppose a man took seventy bushels in a load, this was fifteen cents a bushel for hauling. But nobody stirred. With flax close to six dollars a bushel, something spectacular was expected to happen. Should the price break, the scramble for teams would be even more frantic. When wages offered reached twelve dollars a load, with nobody taking the offer, Henry Topp had an inspiration. Jim, with most of the others, was sitting on the railing of the incline, his long legs drawn up
angularly, his spine bent into an arc, his cap pushed back.

“Eat my shirt!” Henry yelled. “And boots too, doggone you! I'll pay by the bushel. A quarter a bushel!” And to emphasize what he had said, he hurled his cap to the ground and trampled on it, turning his heels and grinding it into the cinders of the driveway.

His bid was followed by silence; it sobered the crowd. They were figuring out what that amounted to by the load; just as previously everybody had figured out what a bid by the load amounted to by the bushel.

But the silence was only momentary. First Elliot, then two others outbade Henry Topp. A few teams aligned at the bottom of the incline; one, a four-horse team with a hundred-bushel tank, pulled up to the platform. People's thoughts were diverted: that man was going to take home five hundred and seventy-five dollars for his load. What did it matter what was paid for hauling? Bidding rose to thirty-five cents.

Bedlam broke loose. Nobody considered the distance. What did it matter? Nobody would get more than one load per team to town before the price broke. If it broke now, so much the worse for the farmer, that was all.

Wheeldon, however, waxed indignant. “Hi there!” he shouted. “Do you call that fair play? It's robbery! That's what I call it.”

Elliot turned on him, a broad grin on his red, round face. “Forty cents,” he said, bowing to Wheeldon as if handing a bouquet to a lady.

Everybody gasped. Twenty-four dollars for a small load! An hour's work with a team of horses!

“Dammit!” Henry Topp yelled at Elliot's back, “why don't you say fifty? Are you tight?” And with a war-whoop which made the horses nodding up the incline raise startled
heads, he swung his arms, cheering, and shouted, “Half a dollar a bushel. Come on, you loafers!”

In the entrance to the platform, the buyer appeared. “Five eighty.”

This increased the commotion. Lightning-quick, deals were struck. Everybody offered half a dollar. Horanski and Nawosad, though they had flax to sell themselves, closed with Wheeldon; they had to fetch their wagons, for they had walked to town. Wheeldon would take them in his car. Hartley and Shilloe closed with Elliot; Hilmer and an outsider with Henry Topp. Nicoll had brought one of his three loads along. A man from south of the Line spoke to Jim; no settler from Spalding District would have offered Abe's son a job.

There was a rush for cars and teams. Elliot came over to Jim. “Gimme a ride?” He had a wagon but handed it over to Shilloe.

When Jim started in the wake of Wheeldon, he carried seven people, two squatting on his running boards.

Nobody knew that a townsman had also been watching developments. Before noon Anderson had a string of new Ford cars coming in from Somerville, ready to take some of the easy money.

John Elliot sat with Jim in the front seat. “By jingo,” he said. “I believe I'll buy a car to-night.”

“Unless the price breaks,” Jim added.

“Go on. That price will hold for years!”

As a matter of fact, Elliot did buy a Ford car that night; and so did Henry Topp and Wheeldon.

The road was in a poor state of repair; but Wheeldon ahead of Jim, drove with reckless expertness; and Jim, dropping his passengers at their respective destinations, followed closely in his wake.

When Wheeldon stopped to set Horanski down, it struck Jim that the Ukrainian, too, had flax; and yet he was going to haul for Wheeldon. “Horanski,” he shouted after him, “haven't you flax of your own?”

The Ukrainian did not stop in his run. “Sure,” he called back over his shoulder; “sell him to-morrow.”

When Jim got home, he found his father in the east half of the new barn, putting his binders away for the winter.

“Dad!” he called in his hoarse, loud voice, from the door. “Flax is nearly six dollars. Fifty cents for hauling a bushel.”

Abe straightened his back and looked at Jim without speaking.

“You were wrong this time!” Jim went on and plunged into a report of what he had witnessed.

Abe listened without betraying his thoughts. He was fifty years old; he felt older; but he did not mean to surrender the lead just yet. His own crop was by no means a failure; it had been seeded at small cost; it was wheat, which meant food for man. He could afford to despise easy money; he had declined to undertake what he abhorred, a speculation.

Jim went to town again next morning. Elliot had sold at five-ninety, Wheeldon at five-ninety-eight; and still the price rose. When Horanski brought his single load, he received six dollars and three cents a bushel.