Horse of a Different Color (12 page)

In mid-afternoon George and I took the receipt copies to the bank and V P gave me another sheaf of orders, most of them on the more prosperous tenant farmers on the divides. Before bedtime every one of them had phoned to say he’d bring in his stock, and to ask if he might keep a milch cow or two for me until spring. By Thursday all the foreclosed stock had been delivered, and we had eleven carloads of it in the feed lot and sorting pens. Thirty-seven excellent milch cows had been lent to their former owners, and nineteen equally good bulls and boars had been traded for one fat steer and nearly ten tons of bacon hogs for future delivery. In addition, I’d taken the feed and two cows that Bob had signed over to the bank, fifteen calves, and ten pigs too small to ship.

George had placed a value barely under two thousand dollars on the stock and feed I’d taken, and my fees amounted to a shade less than seventeen hundred, so I gave V P a check for the difference before leaving for Kansas City. I’d also paid the farmers nearly four hundred for bringing in their stock, but instead of their holding resentment I had a township full of friends. No man to whom I’d lent a cow, or traded a bull or boar, failed to come and help us load the shipment.

12

Bankruptcy

J
UST BEFORE
I left for Kansas City with the stock, Marguerite discovered that Bob hadn’t paid anything on the grocery bill for months, and she was worried sick about it. When I got back I found him as restless as a hound with fleas and no hunting to do. Unbelievably, he seemed to have fallen into the habit of working again, and to like it. “Why don’t we butcher that steer I got for the Hereford bull?” I said. “One steer would be a nuisance around the place, and with conditions as they are he wouldn’t bring much on the hoof. But I’ll bet we could trade beef for butter and eggs to turn in on the grocery bill, and chickens to make up for the ones I’ve eaten from Marguerite’s flock.”

Bob was all for it, so right after dinner we tackled the job of converting a steer into a beef. For me it was a new and nauseating experience, but Bob was very evidently an old hand at it. He wasn’t a good workman with most tools, but had the knack of handling a skinning knife so deftly that he could strip the hide off a carcass as cleanly as if it were a glove. My contribution was little more than disposing of the offal and sawing down the center of the backbone to separate the halves. By dusk we had them hung from a cottonwood limb ten feet above the ground, safe from coyotes and where the meat would chill thoroughly during the night.

After a good supper of fresh liver, I went up to Joe’s store for wrapping paper, and took Effie a box of candy I’d brought her from the city. I mentioned that we’d butchered a steer, and said, “We don’t plan to sell the beef, but if any of the folks want some we’ll trade a pound of steak for a dozen eggs, two for a pound of butter, or three for a good roasting chicken.” She seemed as happy about it as she’d been about the milch cows, shooed me out of her office, and had made line calls before I got home.

Right after breakfast next morning, Bob and I stacked my furniture and radio materials tightly into one end of the bunkhouse. Then we planed the bench top smooth and clean, swept and scrubbed the floor, hung up meat hooks, and made ourselves a little butcher’s shop. We’d taken one side of beef down from the tree, cut it into fore and hind quarters, and were carrying them to the shop when our first customer drove into the dooryard. The heads of several chickens were sticking up through holes in a gunny sack on the floor of the buckboard, and there was a basket of eggs on the seat beside her. From then till the meat was gone there were seldom less than six or eight jalopies, carriages, or wagons in the dooryard, and a cluster of men and women waited at the bunkhouse door.

I didn’t know any more than a jackrabbit about meat cutting, but Bob was pretty good at it. He could cut steaks and roasts as fast as I could weigh the meat and take in whatever the people had brought to trade for it. Some of them had come ten miles or more; I don’t believe anyone took less than five pounds of meat, and some took as much as twenty-five. No one was a bit fussy, and when all the steak was gone they were glad to take stew meat and shortribs at the same rate of exchange. Every scrap of meat was gone by eleven o’clock, the bunkhouse floor was packed solidly with baskets, buckets, and boxes of butter and eggs, and the heads of more than a hundred bewildered chickens stuck through holes in a row of gunny sacks outside. All we could do was to tell the folks who had come too late that we’d butcher beef again within a few days.

We’d put the chickens in the hen yard and were packing boxes of butter and eggs when Marguerite called that I was wanted at the bank right away. I went in, washed, put on a clean shirt, and had just come out when George Miner drove into the yard. He asked if I’d been called to the bank, and when I said I had he told me, “Come ride with me. I have a notion that we’re goin’ to be busier’n horseflies in harvest time for a spell.”

“What’s up, now?” I asked as we started out the driveway.

“Well,” he said, “I’d guess they’ve a’ready got all the foreclosures they can, and are still over the barrel for cash. V P’s been phonin’ up everybody with a livestock-secured note fallin’ due in the next month or two, tellin’ ’em that if they’ll pay off now he’ll let ’em turn in cattle and hogs at Kansas City stockyard prices. That’s where you and I come in. The stock’s to be delivered here, and I’m to do the gradin’.”

“When did V P tell you about it?” I asked.

“To come right down to it, he ain’t told me yet. I reckon that’s what he’s called us in for. But you know how women are. Irene, she happened to have the receiver down when some of the talk was goin’ over the wire.”

“Do you think many of them will bring stock in?” I asked.

“Most of ’em, I’d guess, and pretty quick, too,” he said. “They’re scairt that prices will keep right on goin’ down, and they’re even more scairt that the bank’ll foreclose on ’em if they leave their notes run till the due date.”

V P was even more ill-tempered, nervous, and jumpy than usual, and told us nothing that we didn’t already know. When he demanded roughly that every head of stock brought in be shipped the following Saturday, I said, “I’ll do the best I can, and at the same feeding and shipping rates as before. But if I’m to be paid in livestock it will have to be at two dollars a hundred under the prices you’re allowing the farmers. My shipping costs are a dollar and a half, and I won’t risk this falling market without a fifty-cent margin.” He was ugly and disagreeable about it, but George told him it was only reasonable, and he finally agreed to it.

V P’s behavior annoyed George, and when we came out of the bank he told me, “Like Bones says, these new men are scairt and desperate, and there’s no tellin’ where they’ll stop. This kind of monkey business will do the bank more harm than good, and the senseless foreclosures they put through will blight this township worse than the grasshoppers did in the eighties. It would have been better if they’d taken everything away from the poor devils—horses, machinery, and everything else.”

“I can’t see how,” I said. “A farmer can’t make a living without horses and machinery.”

“That’s right, and that’s the reason it would have been better,” he told me. “The boys that bought places on the benches along the valley paid upwards of a hundred dollars an acre for that land at the start of the war. I doubt me there’s one in ten with a mortgage balance under seventy dollars an acre, but that land wouldn’t bring fifty now, because the price of land in Kansas follows the price of grain. The way it is, those boys will work their hearts out, tryin’ to keep up their mortgage payments and interest, and go deeper and deeper into the hole.

“If the bank had taken their horses and machinery, there’d be only one thing those boys could do: declare bankruptcy. Then they’d be able to make a fresh start and hope to raise their youngsters with full bellies, and give ’em an education so they’d know enough not to make the mistakes their daddies made. I’m dead against any man runnin’ out from under his debts because he’s too lazy to work his way out. But when a man has worked his best and saved every dollar he can, then gets caught in a bind like the one we’re in now, the best thing for him to do is go through the wringer. That’s what the bankruptcy laws were made for.”

“How about the man who hasn’t tried his best, and never saved a dollar in his life, but seems to be trying to make up for it this past week or two?” I asked.

“Well now,” he said, “that’s a horse of a little different color. Lazy and squanderin’ as Bob has been, it don’t seem right to leave him off scot-free, and if he was a single man I’d be against it. But his wife and children shouldn’t have to suffer for his sins all the rest of their lives. Then again, how would he have come out if the farm economy in this country hadn’t been left to go all to blazes while you boys had that last bunch of cattle and hogs on feed?”

“If the market at the end of the year had been anywhere near the September level he could have paid off every cent he owed and had at least ten thousand dollars left over,” I said.

“Then if I was in his boots I’d go to see Jake Noble—he’s the best lawyer over to Oberlin—and have him file me a petition in bankruptcy. According to my understanding there’s not much to it, just that a man has to swear that he owns so much and owes so much, and who he owes it to. Then if I recollect right, it has to be advertised. Anyways, when the court declares him bankrupt all the debts he’s listed in his petition are wiped out forever. Do you have any idea what Bob owes and owns?”

“I’d make a bet that he owes almost everybody who ever gave him credit,” I said, “and that he himself has no idea how much or who he owes. Until this past week I don’t believe he ever worried about a debt in his life. But all that I actually know of his owing is about twenty-two thousand to the bank here, and a few hundred to John Bivans on his grocery bill. He owns nothing but the place and his furniture, the old Buick, three horses, harness and saddle, and maybe a hundred dollars’ worth of odds and ends—all mortgaged to this bank.”

“Well,” George said, “the furniture and the place ought to be left out. I don’t believe a judge would let the bank foreclose on a family man’s furniture, and the mortgage on the place is held by a widow woman over to Oberlin. It’s way more than what the place is worth now. When you come right down to it, that big team of Bob’s is all he’s got that’s worth a tinker, but it’s the best one anywheres around, and you’ll need a good team if you aim to farm that place next summer. If I was in your boots I’d go have a talk with Bones. He takes care of all the widow’s business, and if Bob was to sign title to the place back to her, I have a notion you could lease it for less than what the mortgage interest amounts to now.”

I went to Bones’s house right after noon, and before I’d been there two minutes it became apparent that George had already told him about the talk we’d had. Bones agreed that the best thing for Bob to do was to file a petition in bankruptcy, but said that he should first sign title to the place back to the mortgage holder, and all his other assets except the furniture over to the bank. He told me that if the title were signed over the widow would lease me the place for a year, and he finally agreed to a rental of nine hundred dollars, but insisted that it be paid in advance. I disliked cutting into my trading funds so deeply, but we had to have the place, and Bones wouldn’t rent it otherwise for less than a hundred dollars a month.

“You’re making no mistake,” he told me. “That’s a fine place and you ought to buy it as soon as the economy in this country and land values in this valley become stabilized again. If you buy it before your lease is up I’ll see to it that you get credit for your nine hundred as a down payment. I suppose Bob has told you that I’m holding the deed. You bring him up at three o’clock this afternoon and I’ll have the mortgage holder here. Then we can do the whole thing at one lick.”

Before going home I stopped in at the bank and told V P, “If you’d like him to, I think Bob would sign everything he has except his furniture over to the bank, and I’d agree to take it in on my shipping bill at five hundred dollars. Or if the bill doesn’t run that much I’ll pay the difference in cash.” He fairly jumped at the offer, and had me wait while the cashier typed out the agreement for Bob and me to sign.

It seemed to me that it would be best if Marguerite could be kept from knowing the situation Bob was in. So as soon as I got home I asked him to come out to the stackyard where we wouldn’t be overheard, then repeated in detail all three conversations I’d had. “If you want to do it,” I told him, “I’ll lease the place and buy the rest of your stuff back from the bank. Then, after you’ve been through the wringer and can make a fresh start I’ll return the stuff as your share of the profit on handling and shipping stock for the bank. There’s just one more thing: before you have a petition filed—if you decide to do it—I think you should go in to see Bivans and tell him you’re going to pay his bill in full, regardless of the bankruptcy. What do you think about the whole thing?”

Bob knew nothing about bankruptcy, and at first he was as afraid of going into it as a child would be of going into a pitch-black cave. But when I’d explained it to him he told me, “I’ll do anything you and George say is right, and I’ll sign anything you tell me to if it’ll leave me have a clean start. I’d sure like to get the stuff around here back free and clear, and I’ll work the best I can for it.”

At three o’clock Bob and I left the signed agreement at the bank and went on to the Kennedy house. The widow and George Miner were there, and Bones had the deed, a quitclaim, and a lease in my name laid out on the table. The lease was less than half a page long, simply giving the legal description of the place, stating that it was leased to me for the calendar year 1921 in consideration of nine hundred dollars, the receipt of which was acknowledged, and that the full amount would be applied against the purchase price in the event of my buying the place within the lease term. The signing required no more than fifteen or twenty minutes, and by three-thirty Bob was on his way to lawyer Noble’s office—the old Buick loaded to the door tops with butter and eggs for John Bivans.

During the rest of January, Bob and I butchered five fat young cows, four hogs, at least two hundred chickens, and shipped more than six hundred animals for the bank. To do it we had to be up before five o’clock every morning and were seldom in bed before eleven at night. Marguerite was fully as busy as Bob and I, taking care of the house and children, cooking meals, and waiting on customers who came to trade butter, eggs, and chickens for beef and pork. During the evenings she packed cases of eggs and boxes of butter to be turned in on the grocery bill, while I picked chickens to be sold to a shipper at McCook, and Bob cut meat for the next day’s trade.

All month the cattle market continued steadily downward, and corn dropped another dime, but hogs held fairly steady. As the market declined V P became more irritable, disagreeable, and difficult to deal with, but he had cause for it. As near as George and I could estimate, the bank had lost five thousand dollars on stock that he had taken in at Kansas City prices.

In spite of the falling market and the huge loss on our last feeding venture, January thirty-first was as happy a day at the Wilson place as December thirty-first had been sad and worrisome. Our earnings from feeding and shipping stock for the bank had been enough to redeem Bob’s assets, pay for the cattle and hogs we’d butchered, and leave us fully four hundred dollars’ worth of trading, butchering, and shipping stock. Bob had been adjudged bankrupt, and the load of butter and eggs taken to Bivans that day cleaned up the grocery bill. When Bob got home I gave him a bill of sale for everything he’d signed over to the bank, and told him that he had a half interest in all the other stock on the place—excepting only Kitten.