The Unplowed Sky (21 page)

“If Chuck Martin's wife wasn't such a nice lady, I'd wish it would rain enough to lay the dust he's raisin' even if it ruined some of his crop!”

“Shaft, you don't mean that!” The thought of wasted grain was terrible to Hallie, especially when she remembered the multitudes of starving during the war.

He shook dust out of his beard. “Guess I don't. But I'm glad Garth didn't let him bribe his way in front of the folks we're promised to.”

“Will there be enough of them to make a worthwhile season?”

“I'd reckon so. As we head out of this country where Raford holds mortgages and can make farmers use him, what'll count more than his cheap threshing is who gets to a farm first.”

Hallie nodded. No farmer breathed easy till his crop was threshed and hauled to the granary. Virtually the whole year's cash income came from that.

“Farmers need more cash, what with easy-payment plans and advertisements that make 'em want stuff they don't need,” Shaft rumbled. “Used to be they grew nearly all of their food and could eat, whatever happened to the crop. Now there's a sight of 'em buying the cream, butter, and eggs they used to sell.”

Even after Hallie's father warned her that the bank was in perilous condition and they needed to economize, Felicity was an ardent user of easy-payment plans. Unless it was a home or auto, Hallie didn't intend to ever buy anything she couldn't pay cash for.

Shaft allowed himself a little gloat. “If that kerosene engine keeps breaking down, no one'll let Raford thresh 'em. Word like that gets around fast.”

“I wouldn't feel one bit sorry for him.”

“No. But if Raford can't wreck Garth one way, I'm scared he'll try another.”

“Like what?”

“I don't know.” Shaft frowned. “And I hope we don't find out.”

Contending with Raford for jobs, sometimes ahead of him, sometimes behind, they threshed their way east and then north. Several times on Saturday night, Hallie went to town with the crew and attended a movie and bought groceries for the outfit. A few times when there were barn dances in the neighborhood, Shaft insisted that she go, but she was flatteringly looked after by all the crew who went.

Henry's religion barred dancing, Rusty wouldn't go without his wife, Luke didn't go because he was Indian, and Garth didn't because—because he didn't! After such occasions, he eyed her more grimly than usual. For his brother's benefit, Rory teased her in ways that implied they had more than simply danced together, and trying to squelch him made him flirt more outrageously. At dances, she never went outside “to get a breath of air” with Rory and avoided sitting next to him in the flivvers, but he was irrepressible.

The roads were still more suited to horses and wagons, of which there were many, than to cars and machinery. Perspiring owners of autos, mostly Model Ts, fixed flat tires, cleaned spark plugs, or waited for boiling radiators to cool.

Even main roads were unmarked, except for an occasional telephone post bearing the number of the highway. The only stretches of graveled road were those with a natural sandy bottom. Still, bad as dry roads could be, they were nothing compared to the muddy lakes, stretching from field to field, that low places of the road became during and after a thunderstorm.

“We've been lucky with rain,” Shaft assured Hallie while they waited for one of these impromptu lakes to subside. “What we've had was just enough to give the boys a rest, but not enough to sprout the grain on the stacks. That plumb ruins it. It's a mighty sad thing to watch a family lose their crop after all the seedin', cultivatin', harvestin', and shockin' or stackin'.”

Sad as it was for the family, it was also bad for the threshers, who weren't paid while they waited for the rain to stop and the grain to dry out. It was especially bad for the outfit's owner, who had to keep feeding his men if he didn't want to lose them. So far, though, by the time the men were tired of pitching horseshoes, playing cards and checkers, telling yarns, and listening to Shaft's fiddle, the sun dried the wheat, and the crew was threshing while a relieved farmer hauled the grain to the elevator or his granary.

Sometimes, climbing a hill, the steam engine's wheels would slip in the crumbly rock and sand, and the cleats would start digging holes. Then the men had to unhitch the engine from the rest of the caravan. Usually Rory could steer it to the top and pull the separator and wagons up by a long cable, but twice grinning farmers had to be summoned to bring their horses to rescue the iron monster that was steadily displacing them.

Near the Smoky Hill River, Jan Voltav, a prosperous Czech farmer whose wheat they had just threshed, smiled broadly as he hitched his great Clydesdales to the stalled engine.

“Them Clydesdales weigh a ton apiece,” Shaft told Hallie, hoisting Jackie to his shoulder so he could see better. “Each can pull a ton at a trot. Mr. Voltav uses his for heavy hauling. Ain't they somethin'? All that power, yet they're kind of dainty. They don't have that heavy jowl most large breeds do.”

“They have beautiful heads,” Hallie agreed.

“Look at the little manes on their legs!” cried Jackie.

Silky long white hair or feathering did indeed ran down the backs of the legs to flirt around large hoofs. The blue roans—black with so many white hairs that they had a gray blue sheen—had dramatically muscled hindquarters and deep, broad chests to contain the mighty lungs and hearts.

“Out in Oregon and California,” said Jim Wyatt, “I've seen twenty-six horse teams pulling those giant combines that cut grain and thresh it at the same time. It's really something! When gas and kerosene-powered combines come cheap enough for lots of farmers to afford them, it'll sure cut into the custom-threshing business.”

At Mr. Voltav's command, the horses leaned into their collars. Their haunches bunched. The massive shoulders thrust forward. It was a hushed, straining contest between splendid animals of muscle and flesh and the weight of a machine of steel and iron.

Hallie's heart strove with the horses'. It seemed an hour—though it could have been only seconds—till the engine's wide front wheels rose from the hollows they had churned. When the engine was well beyond its place of defeat, Mr. Voltav stopped his horses. Sweat darkened them to the shade of gunmetal.

“There, my pretties!” He stroked and praised them, beaming with pride. “You showed the steam engine, didn't you? No one ever had to pull
you
out of a hole!” As Garth approached, the farmer added graciously, “Not but what the engine has its good points. With luck, it can make it to the top now.” He waved a hand toward the rest of the outfit. “Shall I haul them up the hill, Mr. MacLeod?”

Garth estimated the distance. “Reckon you better. We don't have a cable long enough.”

When the caravan was reassembled, Garth handed over a five-dollar bill, which Mr. Voltav smoothed carefully and tucked into an ancient wallet. “Must be a pretty good sideline, hauling cars and trucks and machinery up that hill,” Garth said dryly.

Voltav's grin spread from ear to ear, and his china-blue eyes twinkled. “Yes. And when it rains, there is much hauling out of ditches and flooded places. But it isn't just the money.” He tucked the wallet in his hip pocket and cupped the soft muzzle of the nearest horse in his hand. The horse pricked his ears forward attentively and nuzzled Voltav's palm.

“There's not an engine made can do that or run one minute on heart when it's out of fuel.” The farmer caressed the horse's shoulder. “Anyway, I like to see the animals win.”

Garth smiled. “Grand beasts they are, Mr. Voltav. My great-grandfather brought many from Scotland to sell in America. If this outfit has to be dragged out of its predicaments, I'd rather it was by some Clydes.”

The farmer went down one side of the hill and the threshing outfit proceeded down the other. They were in the post-rock country, so called because early settlers had used the easily quarried limestone for fence posts.

“They used it for everything else, too,” Shaft said. “Telephone poles, hitchin' posts, gateposts, tombstones, walls, and churches! Not many trees out here, and milled lumber costs money. Stone don't cost anything but work less'n you hire a stonemason.”

The two-story Voltav farmhouse was of creamy stone, as were the barn, smokehouse, granary, and chicken house. Large hollowed-out slabs served as feed and water troughs. Even the privy was stone.

From her school history, Hallie knew that much of central Kansas extending north to the Nebraska line had been settled in the 1870s by Europeans escaping starvation or religious oppression. Settlers from the British Isles ranged from starving Irish and Highland crofters to younger sons of the nobility who gathered in towns like Victoria and Runnymede and coursed coyotes instead of foxes. There were Czechs, Scandinavians, and both Lutheran and Catholic Volga Germans, enticed to Russia by Catherine the Great with guarantees of religious freedom, then expelled by her grandson a hundred years later when they refused to become Russified.

None of these people, peasants or princely, chose to live in dugouts when quantities of stone could be crafted into anything from simple cottages and shops to cathedrals and three-storied turreted mansions. Hallie saw them all as the crew moved north.

Scot, Norwegian, British, German, Czech, these folk raised buildings varied and shaped by their heritage and means from the same limestone, the vast layers that formed benches and these flat-topped Blue Hills bounded on the west by the chalk cliffs and bastions of the Fort Hays escarpment.

“This was a huge shallow sea that at times stretched from Mexico to north Alaska,” Rich Mondell explained one night at supper. “These shales and limestones were deposited when dinosaurs still roamed.”

Jackie's eyes rounded and Rich grinned at him. “Can you imagine big reptiles flying around, hunting the fish and clams that were here then?”

Jackie moved closer to Hallie. “When—when was that, Mr. Mondell?”

“Oh, a good long time ago, son, ages before there were people; though scientists have found the proof of insects in fossils—rocks that hold the shape of something after it decays. Seventy million years, give or take a few million.”

Henry Lowen turned red, but he spoke firmly. “I am sorry to dispute with you, Rich. You are an educated man, a professor, while I attended only primary school. But I think your scientists are puffed up with vainglory, and I do not believe them. The Bible teaches that God created the heavens and the earth in six days and rested on the seventh day.”

“That's good enough for me,” Rusty said. “Bring scientists into it, and they start arguin' that we descended from apes!”

“I think we probably did,” said Rich gently, with a smile that robbed the words of any sting. “But I think apes might have more reason to complain of the relationship than we do.”

Jim Wyatt laughed. “I knew an old Irishman who said he'd rather think we're a little improvement on monkeys instead of a dismal fall from the angels.”

Henry frowned but, after a moment, a smile spread over his boyish face, making it seem even younger. “How good it is that we may talk this way—disagree without trying to make one another think as we do, or go to prison, or leave the country!”

They all stared at him. Then Hallie saw the connection. “Your people came from Russia, just like the Volga Germans!”

“Yes.” Henry's clear blue eyes shone with the pleasure of discovering something wonderful. “But you see, Mennonites, who began in Holland and Switzerland, were persecuted till many fled. Those who went to Pennsylvania are now known as the Amish. Others found refuge of a sort in Germany, but were highly taxed and subject to rulers' whims. Being German herself, Catherine the Great knew Mennonites were excellent farmers. She needed reliable settlers in the wild borderlands. To us, as well as to other Germans, she offered tax-free land, exemption from military service, and freedom to practice our religions and have our own schools and language.”

“So,” Rich reflected, “over there on the vast plains of southern Russia, Mennonites were equal with Catholic and Lutheran Germans who had, in their own country, made life bitter for Mennonites.”

The blond young man nodded. “Truly, we were equal in distress when Czar Alexander II revoked our privileges.”

“And here you are in Kansas,” Jim drawled. “Where, thank goodness, in spite of the KKK and such idjits, you can attend your churches and be full citizens.”

Jim nodded. “Even if most of us don't believe a nation can last without making war, it's good for us to know people who believe in peace so strongly they'll go to prison for it, or even die.” He considered for a moment. “Someday maybe enough folks everywhere will feel like that and wars will go out of fashion like a lot of other fine old customs—burning widows on their husbands' pyres, cannibalism, slavery, burning heretics and witches at the stake—all inventions that would put any honest monkey to shame.”

“Amen!” Shaft left Hallie to cut and pass the pie. He got out his fiddle, tuned it, and the grandson of a Czech emigrant launched into a song they all knew, even Mennonite Henry and Cherokee Luke, for gradually everyone joined in.

“
Goin' to lay down my sword and shield
,

Down by the riverside
,

Ain't goin' to study war no more
…”

As the crew traveled on toward Volga German country, little blue-stem thrived beyond the more arid region of buffalo grass and grama. Burnished tufts of its rich bronze set off the beginning of autumn's gentians and goldenrod along the road and in pastures that had not been broken to the plow where sleek cattle grazed.

Many of these were Aberdeen Angus, imported in the 1870s by the wealthy Scot, George Grant, who bought 70,000 acres of land from the railroad and founded Victoria as a center for what he dreamed of being a colony of aristocratic cattle breeders and gentlemen farmers.