The Bones of Plenty (10 page)

“Oh, no, Custer!” Vick burst in. “This is just the year for wheat. Government says the drought’ll have the prices way up—better than they’ve been for years. No, this is the year to plant wheat and get whatever we can.”

George had learned that an argument inevitably and quickly led to the same conclusion. Vick always confronted George with the same simple alternatives—George could obey or lose his lease. If George lost his lease, he would also lose all the improvements he had made. George knew that if Vick even got around to offering him those alternatives today, he would hit him. He started over. “I want to plant a new kind of seed this year. The money for it was in the bank. I never saved back any seed last fall. If I don’t put in a crop, I guess you don’t get any rent, do you? That is, if Langer sticks to his guns.” His hand was being forced too early in the game. With Vick he always found himself having to bet his chips before the draw.

Vick tilted back his swivel chair and smiled. He had big, oddly flat lips. When he stretched them to smile, George thought of the ragged strip of dull red rubber tied to a boy’s slingshot.

“Always burning your bridges, aren’t you, Custer? That’s no way to do business. Why didn’t you save some seed?”

“It’s
useless
to keep on planting Marquis year after year! The rust takes more of it every year. I figured last fall I might as well make the switch to Ceres this spring or—or just get out! The rust don’t bother Ceres and the smut
couldn’t
be any worse than it is in the Marquis, and the Ceres is supposed to take the drought better. I
didn’t
burn my bridges! I saved every dime I could toward this seed.”

“Did you actually have enough in the bank to see you through?”

God, how he hated the impertinent way the man had of pinning him down! Landlords! Vick was so lucky that nobody had killed him yet.

“I figured on a very small loan.” George never could lie.

“Well,” Vick said. He let his chair fall forward and bounce him out toward the file where he kept his claims on the sweat of men. “I think we can arrange for the seed.”

He pulled out George’s papers. He figured on scratch paper for a moment and then laid the paper on the edge of his desk, inclining a shoulder toward George to indicate that he should move his chair closer. George did not move his chair, but he leaned forward. Vick pointed with his pencil to his scattered bits of arithmetic, as though George would have trouble following him. George gritted his teeth.

“Here’s the way the deal works,” Vick said, in a tone he might have used in explaining the store’s policies to a new clerk. “Another sixty acres in wheat—that will still leave you a hundred for pasture and corn and hay.”

“How do
you
know how much hay and pasture I’ll need?” George cried. “It depends on how
dry
it is, for Christ’s sake! It depends on how soon I have to start feeding hay when the pastures give out!”

“Get rid of some stock.”

“I
told
you, the cream is what’s keeping us going! And I’ve got to have
horses,
for Pete’s sake. You want me to hitch my
wife
to the plow, maybe, like them Roosians used to do?”

“The
hell
with cream,” Vick said. “You and I don’t have any agreement about cream. I don’t care how much cream you sell. It’s wheat I care about. That’s the deal. Take it or leave it.”

George’s heart shook his great chest under the denim jacket he had worn as an insult to Vick. He was very hot. His hands were slippery on the varnished arms of his chair. His hands were hungry, pleading to wrap themselves around a neck. He stood up.

“I can get along without your money, Mr. Vick,” he said. “I’ll put the crops in the way the lease stands now. A hundred and sixty acres of wheat. A third of the net to you. Good morning.”

He strode from the office and before he had taken three steps he knew he had got out just in time. A minute longer and he might have killed him.

On the way home he thought about Will’s offer. He would have to take him up on it now, or else get out. He would have to go to the one man he had vowed never to go to. And even after he had borrowed from his wife’s father, he still had to put up with the same galling agreement with Vick. Before, he had been running to stand still; now he was going in debt to stand still. Now he would be entirely dependent on what the Ceres and the fall prices did. If they let him down he would be hopelessly ensnared by two old men—James T. Vick and Will Shepard. It wasn’t right that the accident of birth should place one generation in a position of such power over another—just because they had been around to get when the getting was good. Will had cashed in on every good year since the beginning of the century. He had bought a section of choice land that had increased in value more than three hundred per cent in a decade, so that the original mortgage, which had once been so huge, had decreased to an almost insignificant percentage of the value of the farm. And then Will had paid off that mortgage with war-inflated dollars and with wheat prices five times what they had been when he bought the farm and a dozen times what they were again now, a dozen years later.

And where had
he,
George Armstrong Custer, been during those good years? Working for nothing on his father’s farm, that’s where. A boy in his late teens, already stronger than most men, doing more work than most men, thirsting to go to war, kept home by his father to raise the wheat that would win the war. Oh, yes, win the war, and make so much money for his father that the old man had felt rich enough to speculate with it and finally lose his shirt. He managed to lose it even before the crash, and then he managed to die from drinking a little too much Indiana Red Eye and leave a farm, mortgaged in inflated dollars, to the boys who had earned him the money that had made him feel so rich.

Then a very young schoolteacher had come to take the one-room school where he had gone himself. She had not the vaguest notion of how to make the big boys behave, and he had been amused by her helplessness. In fact, he had been infatuated by it. He had wanted to protect her, even though he had enjoyed teasing her himself.

He had married her, and moved off his father’s farm, leaving the financial wreck to his brothers. The next thing he knew, he was leasing a half section conveniently adjacent to the farm of his father-in-law. That was his life in a nutshell, he thought.

Yet all it took to succeed, if a man had been born at the right time, was a good piece of property, the strength to farm it profitably, and the sense to hang on to it, to get it free and clear, and to keep it that way. Then a man could get through the drought years; he could farm the way he wanted to. What did a man’s good farming sense count for if a city man made all the rules? But his father-in-law and his own father had been born at the right time. His own father had been a fool. His father-in-law had been a hard-working, conservative farmer. It was all that simple. And now Will Shepard was in a position to make loans to his son-in-law even when millions of solid citizens all over the country were finding themselves entirely wiped out.

When George got home it was nearly two in the afternoon. Rachel had just finished draining some soured curds from their thin pale yellow water.

“You haven’t eaten yet, have you?” she asked. “I’ll have this Dutch cheese ready in a minute. I can fry you some bread if you want it. I’m ready to bake this batch and the last of the old loaf is pretty dry.”

He looked at her standing before her cupboard, adding another dollop of cream, getting a clean teaspoon, tasting the cheese, sprinkling on a bit more salt, mashing it into the cheese. Her short, durable figure, built like her father’s, was clothed in a cotton print dress and an apron she had made herself. Her arms, bare below the short sleeves, were still tan from last summer. She never burned. He, on the other hand, never seemed to stop burning. And every winter he became white and vulnerable again. She did not look at him, pretending that the cottage cheese took all her attention. She was letting him choose exactly what and when to tell her, and her delicacy defeated him. It neutralized him, just as Vick had succeeded in neutralizing him. There was never anything to strike at.

He sat alone at the round table, looking down the hill toward the barn and chewing the food she put before him. The day was shot as far as accomplishing anything in the field went. He might as well let the horses rest for the afternoon. They needed it. If he hustled he could clean the barn in the time left before evening chores.

He mopped his plate with the last piece of bread until it was polished free of cheese and potatoes. He changed into his old overalls, put his rubber boots back on, pulled his cap hard on his head, and paused, with his cotton work glove on the doorknob. He opened his mouth again, but when he spoke it was only to bring up a small question concerning their daily existence.

“You can go over to fetch Lucy from school, can’t you?” he asked. “This job’ll take me right up to milking time.”

Why don’t you ask me now, he thought. Why don’t you say, “Well, how did it go? What luck did you have?”

Her failure to ask was another indication that she no longer cared what became of their future together. Her lack of curiosity was another sign of her lack of commitment to him. She did not ever ask to know what he was thinking.

“All right,” she said. “I need a few things at the store anyway, so I might as well go after her.”

He tipped her chin roughly in his glove and made her look at him. “I sure picked a swell time to get born, didn’t I? Twenty-five years sooner and I’d have cleaned up on wheat. Twenty-five years later and I’d have been chauffeured back and forth from school like Little Lord Fauntleroy.”

He banged the door against the weatherstripping and walked down to the barn. He did the cows’ stalls first because they were the most offensive to him. He never liked to put off a distasteful job, because he could not stop thinking about it till it was done. He didn’t mind the droppings in the horse stalls, for unless the smell became too concentrated, it was actually pleasant to him—rather like a faintly decaying hayfield, much distilled.

As he squeezed the handle of the shovel and lifted the mushy loads out of the cows’ trench he said over and over to himself, “That liver-lipped swindler will
never
know how close he came today. He’ll
never
know.”

How could an ignorant dime-store owner be expected to know anything about a new kind of wheat, anyhow? He was too busy buying celluloid dolls from Japan for a penny each and selling them for a dime. And then the Japs were using every American dollar they could get their hands on to buy guns to kill the Chinese. If nobody else on earth made a thing George needed, he would get along without it rather than buy anything that said “Made in Japan.” But a man who made his money selling celluloid dolls and supported Japanese aggressors who were slaughtering Chinese farmers and their families—
that
man was going to twit
him
about burning his bridges when he decided he had to change the seed he was planting.

Nobody in the vicinity was planting it yet, but they all would. He knew they would just as soon as they all saw how well the Ceres was going to do for him. It took a little guts to be first to try something, that was all.

For a long time Marquis had been the favorite of hard red spring wheat growers, but stem rust did more damage every year, as the rust spores became ensconced in a wider and wider area, and new varieties, traveling north on the rigs and clothing of the threshing crews, mixed with the old spores and grew strong through hybridization.

Rust and smut were the two ravaging diseases. Smutty wheat brought less from the millers because cleaning it was an expensive proposition, but at least there was some wheat to cut with the binder; smutty wheat wasn’t collapsed on the ground in red-brown broken stalks devoid of kernels. Seed wheat could be treated for smut, but nothing could stop rust except the kind of state-wide effort to wipe out its winter host—the barberry bushes—that the government would not make. So Ceres was George’s last hope. It was rust resistant and more drought resistant than Marquis. It had been developed at the North Dakota Experimental Station just a couple of years ago, and it ought to be right for North Dakota if any wheat was any more.

No brand of wheat was immune to wheat midges, sawflies, pink maggots, cutworms, leaf hoppers, plant lice, billbugs, army worms, black chaff, Hessian fly, chinch bugs, true wireworms, false wireworms, strawworms, jointworms, white grubs, or grain moths. And if the grasshoppers were bad enough they could strip the fields, as they had done a couple of times within his father’s memory, and the brand of wheat would not make any difference at all to them, either. Moreover, Ceres and Marquis were equally vulnerable to dust storms and wind. Hail, or even a hard rain, would dislodge the hardening kernels during their maturing weeks, and the kind of seed he had planted wouldn’t make any difference at all.

But after the way his Marquis had surrendered to rust last summer, George had made up his mind never to plant it again. He had simply sold every bushel he harvested and decided that one way or another he would find the money for the new seed when the spring came. Now spring had come, and he was left with exactly one place to get the money. He squeezed hard on the shovel handle again. The man he had sworn never to go to for help—the man he had cut off this very morning.

He pushed the wheelbarrow down the aisle and laid a row of planks from the barn door to the manure pile across the slushy barnyard. That morning the ground had been hard with thickly frosted ridges outlining the hoof prints in the mud of yesterday’s thawing, and water had been frozen in the deeper tracks. Tomorrow morning it would be the same. Spring came reluctantly to this northern place, but it was here, nevertheless.

Ceres, goddess of growing things, was the name that had been in his mind all winter long. No more Marquis, that debilitated aristocrat which bled so easily that he could lose up to fifty per cent of his crop in a bad rust year. Ceres, after all, was of the family of aristocrats also, as far as wheat went. Hard spring wheat was bread wheat—the best in the world. All the soft wheats and the winter wheats grown farther south and west were used for inferior products—restaurant pies and crackers and abominable new kinds of cereals to be eaten cold. Durum wheat was used for macaroni and spaghetti and other foreign things. But the bakers had to have hard spring wheat for bread, even when they mixed it with winter wheat. When there was an American surplus of the softer wheats, they still would have to import Canadian spring wheat in the years when North Dakota did not produce enough. It took an austere climate to create that kind of wheat—wheat that grew hard and full of protein under the withering semidesert sky. It was the kind of durable, determined grain that could survive and flourish on the smallest possible margin—very much like the men who grew it. Like George’s ancestors, who had fought for and built the state that men like James T. Vick were now taking away from them. Half the farmers in the state were tenants now, like George.