Satan's Bushel (7 page)

“Not yet,” said Dreadwind. “First, tell me, who is that——”

“Please,” pleaded Jumper, “let me slip you this money and tear up that piece of paper.”

“I’m asking,” said Dreadwind, “who is that totem pole with the owl face in the last chair behind us?”

The person he indicated was the old man who had bullied the grain buyer at the elevator. He entered the room right after Dreadwind and had been regarding him ever since in an overt manner. With Jumper, Dreadwind was not really serious. All the time he meant to take the back money and cancel the bet. But he could not resist the impulse to stretch it a bit; and casting about for some pretext on which to prolong the bucket-shop keeper’s agony he thought of the old man, who had evidently followed him from the elevator.

Jumper screwed round in his chair.

“Him? He’s nobody,” he said. “He comes with the chinch bugs about this time of year. Never was in here before. But I’m only starting for myself, as I told you. I used to see him in the place I was work-ing.”

“What’s his name?”

“Weaver.”

“His first name?”

“Absalom. What about him? He’s queer, that’s all.”

“What’s queer about him?”

“Nothing you can say. Just the way he comes and goes. All the farmers know him.”

“Does he ever trade?”

“Not that I know of. I never saw him trade.”

“But you’ve heard of his trading?”

“I’ve heard it said he had something once and lost it trading.”

“Where does he live?”

“Not around here. I’m telling you, he comes and goes. That’s all I know. Please let me slip you this money. It’s burning a hole in me.”

Dreadwind handed him the slip of paper on which their bet was recorded and Jumper surreptitiously returned him his two one-thousand-dollar bills.

“Wait a minute,” said Jumper. He went again to the blackboard, not hurriedly this time, and spoke in a casual manner to the telegrapher. The telegrapher made no vocal response; but all at once the quotations began to go up on the board. Jumper returned to Dreadwind and sat down.

“Now, I don’t want you to think I run this place crooked,” he said. “I don’t. It’s straight. There’s no use trying to fool you. We talk the same language. What I’m saying is honest. I never stopped the quotations that way before. I wouldn’t. But you had me where I couldn’t help myself. You know yourself how that is.”

Dreadwind nodded his head. Jumper went on.

“Of course you do. I’d ‘a’ gone up the flue in
a
minute. No, sir, when I started here I made up my mind to play it on the level. Why not? They lose their money anyhow. I couldn’t do anything to quotations that would make them lose it any faster. I’m satisfied. Maybe you’re in this line yourself?”

“Not exactly,” said Dreadwind.

“I don’t quite get you yet,” said Jumper. “But I know the kind of man you are, and you know all about this game, don’t you?”

“Something,” said Dreadwind modestly.

“Well, as I see it, it’s all right,” said Jumper. “As I say, they will lose their money anyhow. They would lose it just the same if we sent their orders to Chicago to be executed regular, like they think we do. The only difference would be then that them big Chicago gamblers, them Dreadwinds and others, would get it. They don’t need it and we do. When we get it we spend it here in the town. I’ve just built
a
house here. That’s what I mean. Suppose I sent their orders to the Chicago Board of Trade instead of sticking them on a spike back of that partition. That money I built a house with would have gone to Chicago, wouldn’t it? As it is it stays here in the community. That’s better. And what difference does it make to them? Not a bit of difference. They would lose it anyhow. I’ve thought this all out because I’m honest.”

“Do farmers trade with you much?” asked Dreadwind.

“They’re my best customers.”

“And they always lose?”

“That’s what I’m telling you. Not the farmers only. I’ve never seen a man beat the game yet, not in the long run. All you have to do is keep on with him and you get his money. Maybe you can beat it. I don’t know. I think maybe you can. That’s why I was so scared. But the farmers—you were speaking of them—it’s funny. They never do but one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Buy, buy, buy. They don’t know anything else. Sometimes I feel like saying to them: ‘You make it, don’t you? You grow it, don’t you? You take all the risk to begin with. Then you come in here and buy it as a gamble.’ I don’t understand them. If I was a farmer I’d never do anything but sell, if I gambled at all, and I wouldn’t. But that would be logical, wouldn’t it? I feel like telling them sometimes. But I don’t. What’s the use? They’d lose it anyhow.”

He sighed for the foibles of mankind. Dreadwind rose. They shook hands.

“Thanks,” said Jumper for the last time. “I was never wrong about a man yet.”

The old man was gone. Dreadwind had not seen him go, and he was disappointed, for he meant to have contact with him. He strolled about the streets on the chance of finding him again; but he had vanished, and casual inquiries were of no avail. “It’s a whim only,” said Dreadwind, “not worth remembering.” Still, he did remember it and kept thinking about it as he proceeded to act on the project that had formed in his mind on leaving the grain elevator.

In the middle of the afternoon you might have seen him on the highway, made out in the rig he had furnished himself with in the town—stout shoes, leggings, khaki trousers, a flannel shirt and soft hat. He carried a stick cut from a wayside hedge and had on his back an army knapsack stenciled U. S. A. People nodded pleasantly as he passed and he nodded back at them and did not know they turned to stare.

This he placed as one of the high moments of his life. I envied him. Fancy seeing the country in that way for the first time—receiving one’s impressions of of it originally on a fresh negative, through a lens of full power, with nothing expected, nothing familiar, nothing to be taken for granted.

A breeze was stirring. The wheat was in gentle motion. It seemed always to be running toward him, eagerly, excitedly, expectantly, like a friendly dog on crouched steps with its eyes glad and its ears flat. He wished to pet it, stroke it; he heard himself talking to it. After some groping he found a word for the feeling he experienced at that moment. He was flooded, he said, with a sense of profound wisdom. Profound is mine. He said simply wisdom, but with an accent I cannot reproduce. Twice he turned back to the first great field of wheat. The original thrill was there. Almost he could not bear to part with it. Mind you, I’m filling in. A man could not talk that way about his own emotions. Dreadwind at least could not. What he said was: “Twice I went back to the first field of wheat I saw.” There he paused in the narrative, sat for a moment in reverie, and then with a little start went on.

At each turn or rise in the road he stopped. Once there was a sudden view of an old house between two great trees at the far edge of a field of wheat; beyond the house was a brook, back of that a rise of ground and then some kind of sky. Nothing unusual perhaps. It appears to have been such a glimpse as sometimes frames itself in reality, a bit of perfect natural composition that gives one a mysterious sense of self-projection. I am saying this. What it reminded him of was a woodcut of spring in the almanac his mother kept on a nail in her kitchen cupboard. That woodcut had remained vividly in his mind all these years. Always when he thought of the country he thought of that. It had been another world. And here it was, that other world, in being. He was walking in it.

When the sun was low he asked for supper at a farm-house, choosing a small one. The farmer, in his stocking feet, was rocking on the side porch. Having adjusted his mind to Dreadwind’s request he looked out over the fields instead of turning toward the open door, and called in a loud voice: “Maw! Here’s a man wants to eat supper with us.” A long silence; the farmer motionless, gazing into his fields. Then a pinched voice from the kitchen: “There ain’t much to eat. If he will be satisfied with what I can pick up. I don’t know.” Dreadwind’s satisfaction was pledged. “Well, it ain’t ready yet,” said the pinched voice. “Give him a chair.” And whereas until then indoors had been tomblike, now began suddenly a series of promissory sounds—the rattle of stove lids, a clangor of pans, a clicking of dishes, and very soon the sizzle of meat falling into hot fat.

“Wheat looks very good,” said Dreadwind at a hazard.

“Been looking at it myself,” said the farmer. “You can’t tell from the road. Sometimes you can’t tell until it’s threshed. Wheat you think’s fine threshes light. Wheat you think’s spindly and light does better, though that ain’t so often as like the other way.”

“The country looks prosperous,” said Dreadwind, after a dead pause.

“Does it?” said the farmer. “Maybe so.”

“Isn’t it?”

“That’s according to how you look at it,” said the farmer, aggressively crossing his knees the other way.

The seam was open. He began to complain. He complained of the weather, of pests, of a certain man’s luck who thought it was good management, of the price of farm implements, of the Government for never doing anything, of the trusts that controlled its do-nothingness, and of speculators who got all the profit in everything. Dreadwind noticed that the barn needed mending. The windmill, the water trough, the hog fence, the hen shed, the porch floor sagging under the rocking chair—they all wanted mending. The only mending he could see anywhere had been done to the farmer’s wool socks. A rusty reaper stood under the apple tree.

“Maybe he wants to wash,” the woman called from inside. She appeared in the door holding out a hand basin. “Supper’s most ready,” she added.

When they sat down to it the farmer asked the Lord’s blessing on the food and immediately lost himself in the partaking of it.

Now the woman began. There was no fresh meat. Only ham. Nobody was expected to come in like this at suppertime. The ham was not as good as it ought to be because just as it was ready to come out of the smokehouse her mother’s cousin who lived in the next county was seized in the night and they went over to her in haste and were gone three days and the boy didn’t know enough to take the meat out. Anyway, they hadn’t told him to. But it got smoked too much. If the stranger had come an hour earlier there might have been chicken. If it was Saturday there would be fresh bread. If it was Tuesday there would be fresh butter. And buttermilk. Or maybe he didn’t like buttermilk? Some didn’t who never knew what it was to get it fresh. The preserves were not sweet enough. Sugar had been so high. The potatoes were old because the new ones were late. She might ask him if he would have some eggs except that there wouldn’t be any eggs until tomorrow. The last one had gone to fill out a crate the expressman called for, a day ahead of his regular time, on account of the fact he was going to be married.

No matter. The food was delicious. Ham, cream gravy, fried potatoes, asparagus, buttered beets, pot cheese, chopped pickles, pears in sirup and coconut cake—delicious and plenty, all but the coffee, which was plenty only. When the meal was over Dreadwind wished to pay a dollar. The woman wanted twenty-five cents. The farmer was not interested. He seemed embarrassed at this commercial translation of an act of hospitality, and retired to the rocking-chair on the porch. A quarter it had to be. Dreadwind paid it and took his leave, conscious at the end of some slight constraint on both sides. The woman shook hands with him as he extended his, but immediately turned her back and began to rattle the dishes. The farmer’s good-bye from the rocking-chair was a little bit curt. Dreadwind did not understand it.

In the narrative he lingered over this incident. Whether it was that it touched him in some subtle way he could not explain or that he needed time for what was to come next, I leave you to guess. It was a new world, full of strange people, with shy impulses both toward and away from one. His first experiences with them would be likely to leave a vivid impress. Yet I rather think he dwelt on this episode to gain time. The beginning of the great romance was only a few miles farther on. He was coming to it.

Darkness came, seeming to rise out of the ground, and he was still walking, musing, thinking out loud, wondering a little where he should lodge for the night, or whether to sleep in the open air by the roadside, when he caught a twinkling of lights in the foliage some distance ahead; and there was no sign of a village. As he came nearer he heard a man’s voice, rhetorically pitched; and then a scene unfolded. A lawn in front of a farmhouse was dimly lighted by lanterns swung in the trees. Twenty men or more were seated there on chairs and benches, a few on the porch stoop in the background. On a box, under three lanterns on a horizontal stick nailed to a tree, stood the speaker. There were some pamphlets at his feet, some under his left arm, one open in his right hand. His theme was coöperation. He was reading from the literature of the American Farm Bureau Federation, this:

“Coöperative marketing is the golden rule of agriculture. The fever and fear are removed from the season of the harvest. The farmer who is favored by season or seedtime with an early harvet pools his crop with that of his neighbor. For like quality and grade of product they receive the same price. Their crop moves to market from their common bin in orderly fashion. There is no surplus bugaboo chasing relentlessly on their heels and breathing the scorching fire of ruinous prices. Neighbor joins with neighbor. They pool their product. They share and share alike in the new system of economic justice for agriculture. All this is precisely what the Great Teacher meant when he said: ‘Therefore, whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you do ye even so unto them.’ “

The speaker cast that pamphlet down and opened another. He would deal now with facts. Already coöperative associations were marketing more than a billion dollars’ worth of farm produce annually. Take prunes, the perfect example of successful coöperation in marketing. Everybody knew what the prune growers had done. Here, of course, the problem was wheat, and there were those who said that what the prune growers had done wheat growers couldn’t because wheat was different—that prunes were prunes and wheat was wheat. He would show them how wrong they were. He would show them there was no difference. He was there to tell them that prunes were wheat and wheat was prunes. He would prove it.