Big Wheat (14 page)

He went back to the Ford, had a last wistful look at the bakery, and cranked up the trusty four-cylinder. Then he got in and took a leisurely cruise through the town. It was the biggest town he had been in since he had started the harvest season just outside of Enid.

In what looked like the middle of Main Street lay a formal town square featuring a large green area in front of an ornate brick and copper and stone courthouse, a Civil War cannon on a pedestal, a small bandstand gazebo, and a couple of poor-quality statues of people the Windmill Man had never heard of. A crowd had gathered in front of the bandstand where a speaker with a megaphone was standing on a box, shouting and gesturing. The crowd was all made up of men in work clothes, and over by the cannon, there was a bunch of bindles stacked up. The speaker was waving a red card in the air, and now and then somebody in the crowd would wave one, too.

Wobblies
, he thought,
honest-to-god, card-carrying members of the International Workers of the World, or IWW
. They claimed to be a labor union, and some of their slogans and philosophy actually seemed very practical and reasonable. But underneath all that, they weren’t really unionists at all, they were communists, with the occasional anarchist in the mix as well. They would sometimes pretend to be striking for better wages, but they didn’t really want their demands to be met because at the core, they didn’t believe in wages in the first place. A lot of people thought they didn’t believe in work, either. Shopkeepers, bankers, businessmen, public officials, cops, and even farmers hated them. In fact, just about everybody who didn’t have a red membership card hated them. The Windmill Man found them pathetic. Secret saboteurs who advertised the fact in advance and even carried distinctive red identity cards. What a bunch of complete idiots.

He took his time, scanning the crowd, looking for a tall young man with a shock of near-white hair. Nobody came close.

As he watched, a group of three uniformed law officers and four or five men in suits came out of the courthouse and moved purposefully toward the bandstand. They had some kind of armor on their shins and forearms, and they carried sidearms, billy clubs, and stern looks.

This ought to be good.

The center invader was almost certainly the local sheriff, and as he moved into the crowd, leading the others, he repeated the simple command, “Disperse!” His followers were more elaborate.

“Get out of here, you red bastards!”

“We’re good Americans here. We don’t need your kind!”

“Go back to Bohemia, you worthless bums!”

“See how your rights are trampled on?” said Mr. Megaphone. “See how they ignore
your
constitution?”

But the crowd was, indeed, dispersing, running away from swinging billy clubs, shielding their heads with their arms, scrambling to get their packs and get themselves elsewhere. Only the man with the megaphone stood his ground.

“I am a native born American!” he proclaimed. “I have the right to free speech. I have the right to organize a peaceful assembly. I have the constitutional right to disagree!”

He was a forceful speaker, but his audience was running away, and the cops and their suited friends weren’t listening. They stormed the bandstand and pummeled Megaphone, who went down in a defensive fetal posture. They took turns kicking him for a while, and then the sheriff pulled him back up and leaned him against one of the columns of the gazebo. He held out a pair of handcuffs.

“Put your hands out,” he ordered.

The man stuck his hands in his pockets and spat at the sheriff. There was more blood than spit, and it stained the crisp uniform shirt with an obscene-looking splotch. The sheriff looked down at it, then back at the agitator, who seemed to have no more spit left, or at least none that he could propel. His face was a bloody mess.

“You know what a new uniform shirt costs?”

“Damn right I do. It costs you your soul.”

“Goddamn commie traitor.”

“Capitalist goon. Where’s your dog collar and your leash?”

The sheriff smiled slightly and pulled his straw cowboy hat down a notch on his forehead. Then he drew his sidearm and calmly shot the agitator through the head.

Jesus H. Assassin. And I thought I was cool and remorseless. I had no idea being a sheriff had so many possibilities.
He really would have to meet this man. First, though, he would see about a place to stay, in case the kid at Western Union didn’t come through right away. And even if he did, the Windmill Man was starting to think he had more than one day’s work in this town.

Chapter 22

So Shall Ye Reap

Something changed in the pattern of sunlight on his eyelids, and Charlie woke with a start. When he opened his eyes, he saw a red-tailed hawk soaring far above him, a stark silhouette against the wispy cirrus clouds. He turned his gaze back down and looked around to find himself utterly alone, floating in the stock tank with a warm and flowing sense of well being. He couldn’t believe he had gone to sleep there, but all things considered, he couldn’t think of a reason in the world to regret it. As the sleep cleared slowly from the corners of his mind, he thought of Emily and her smooth, white body that was soft and firm at the same time, the loins that yielded but enclosed. A thing of many mysteries was a woman. Had he dreamt the whole incident? Unlikely. He had never had a dream in his life that was that fine.

He pulled himself up to a standing position, flicked water off his chest and belly and legs, and stepped out of the tank. His clothes had been replaced by a stack of different ones, clean and neatly folded, with a couple of towels on top of the stack. He spread one of them out to stand on and dried himself with the other, sitting on the first one when it was time to put on his socks.

The clothes seemed fairly new, and they were a reasonable fit. He assumed they must have belonged to one of the Wick boys who had gone off to the terrible, tragic foreign war. They were also good quality, for work clothes: the wool union suit that everybody wore, year around, crisply ironed denim trousers, a blue chambray shirt and a leather vest. He liked that vest.

He wondered fleetingly if their paths might have crossed with that of his own brother, before they all met their solitary rendezvous with death.
Why should they have? There were five million men in that war.
Because he wanted them to meet, that was why. He wanted some kind of a connection with this fine farm and even with crazy Annie Praise God. He would never, he knew, be part of a loving and settled couple like Annie and Joe, looking out upon their homestead with its memories. But maybe he could be somehow connected, all the same. He could fix their thresher and he could bring in their harvest and he could even wear their son’s clothes. Maybe that was as much as he could hope for. He pulled on his shoes and went off to see how much of the day he had slept away.

Something caught his eye over at the barn. Up on top of the high ridge sat a wrought iron black weather vane in the shape of a rooster. He had noticed it when they first came to that place. But now there was a long yellow pennant trailing from its base, coiling and looping lazily in the light breeze. And that, he assumed, was how Stump would find the Ark again. If he found it, that is. He had been gone far too long.

As he walked toward the barn, he heard a screen door slam and looked over at the house, where Annie Wick was emerging with a tray. He stopped and let her intercept him, and saw that the tray carried sandwiches and another steaming mug of coffee.

“No brandy this time,” she said. “Time to sweat out the demons and make the straw fly. You missed the regular lunch, so I made you some leftovers. You have a good sleep?” And to his utter amazement, she gave him an exaggerated wink.

“I had a wonderful sleep,” he said. “What time is it?”

“Around two.”

“Oh, lordy. How could you let me sleep so long?”

“You seemed to be pretty dead to the world, so we all let you be. The others can do a few things without you, you know.”

He didn’t know. “Are they threshing yet?” he said.

“Only for a couple of hours. I don’t think the machine is working real good. The wheat’s maybe too wet yet. Anyway, there’ll be plenty of work left when you get there. Eat your sandwiches.”

He took one off the tray and took a big bite, tasting coarse bread, butter, roast beef, and pantry pickles. And despite his big breakfast, his body seemed to want it all.

“She’s a lovely young woman.”

“Yes, she is.” He didn’t insult her or play coy by asking whom she meant.

“You gonna settle down with her?”

“I wish I could. I don’t have any land. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to afford anything called settling down.”

“That’s too bad.” She shook her head slowly, looking down. “It surely is. But land can be had or lost, you know. It’s just a thing. Love, now that’s something else. You don’t need land for that, you just need a heart.”

He stopped chewing and smiled. “That’s nice,” he said. “I’ll always remember you said that.”

“You do that, Charlie Krueger.”

“I will, and—what did you call me?”

She held up one of Hollander’s fliers.

“The hair job is good,” she said, “but I have an eye for faces, and I figured it out. You’ll be harder to spot when your real moustache grows out. It’s okay. Nobody here’s looking to turn you in. We’re grateful you came, praise be to God. I’m just telling you, the word is out. Keep in the habit of looking over your shoulder. And if you got to run, you take that sweet young woman with you.”

“How could I ask her to do that?”

“You can ask. And she will go. And I will pray for both of you. Trust me on this. You ain’t much of a man if you leave her. The course of true love didn’t never run around the rocks. It’s in the good book.”

“Well then, I guess it must be true.”

***

When he got over to the threshing operation, the Peerless was spinning the flywheel on the Aultman & Taylor smooth and fast, but the straw was coming out of the rear hood in uneven clumps and a couple of the pitchmen were leaning on their pitchforks and looking at it dejectedly.

“What’s the story, boss?”

“I think the old green rooster ain’t what she used to be,” he said, “and maybe never was. No reflection on all your good work, but she keeps wanting to jam up.”

Charlie nodded. “The Aultman is known for getting every last kernel out of the wheat. That’s why they have the rooster for their label. You know, no dropped kernels left for the starving bird? But that also means it’s sort of like a cow. Every now and then, you have to stop and just let it chew. Who’s running the separator?”

“Nobody. I figured it could run by itself until you got here.”

“Not if you want it to put out fifteen bushels a minute, it can’t.” He couldn’t believe a smart man like Avery didn’t know that. “She’ll put out that much and more, but only if you’ve got an operator who understands how to control the feed.”

“Well, there you go, then. Take your position, Mr. Operator.”

Charlie climbed up on top of the Aultman & Taylor, grabbed a lever in each hand, and proceeded to make grain. When the sun began to set, he was still making grain. He had no way of telling for sure, but he thought they must be putting out something close to fifteen bushels a minute, or one every four seconds. They had moved to another header stack by then, and the operation was going so smoothly that they had to shift one worker away from pitching raw wheat and set him to bagging cleaned grain.

At sundown they broke for supper, then cranked up the operation again and threshed by lantern and moonlight. Avery had somebody put a lantern up on the barn roof, too, to light up the wrought iron rooster.

Sometime near midnight, Charlie looked up and noticed a rocket flare off on the northern horizon. Then he saw Avery take a Very pistol out of a toolbox on the engine and fire one off in reply. Charlie left the separator to talk to him about it.

“Stump?”

Avery nodded.

“What does a flare from him mean?”

“It means he is in very, very deep shit.”

Chapter 23

The Missing Man

Charlie ran back to the Rooster and shut down all its functions. Back at the engine, Avery disengaged the main power takeoff, and the wide, heavy drive belt coasted to a stop. Then he ran the water pump and refilled the boiler to its regular startup level, closed the draft on the firebox, and blew the main pressure relief valve. A huge cloud of live steam gushed out of the side of the engine and floated upward until it became lost in the black night sky. He held the valve open until the pressure gauge showed something less than five pounds, where the readings were no longer accurate. All that done, he climbed onto the catwalk on top of the boiler.

“Shut it all down, people!” said Avery. “Shut down everything. We’re done here for the night. Go get some sleep.”

On top of what was left of the header stack, where he had been doing the very unaccustomed job of pitching wheat, Jude the Mystic said, “Well that just makes me want to weep, let me tell you. I was having
such
a good time here.”

“No rest for you, doc,” said Avery. “We’re going to need you, your bike, and your little black bag, pronto.”

“I saw the flare. Stump?”

Avery nodded. “He’s in trouble, maybe hurt. We’re going out to find him.”

“Oh, shit.”

“Very likely. Charlie, go tell whichever Wick you can find that we’re going to need to borrow their pickup. Then meet me with it over by the barn. If they have a gun you can borrow, that would be good, too.”

***

Charlie was back at the barn in less than ten minutes, with the Model T pickup and Joe Wick’s double-barreled shotgun. He left the motor running for a minute while he dashed into the barn and up into the haymow, where he fumbled frantically through the loose straw, looking for his pack.

“What are you doing up there, Charlie? We need you, now!”

“On my way, boss.” The pack was buried farther down than he had expected, but he found it at last, pulled it up quickly, and rummaged inside it for the Luger.

It wasn’t there.

He knew he was looking in an agitated and inefficient state, but even so, the familiar odd-shaped lump of heavy metal wrapped in cloth, the item that had been such a bother to carry, simply wasn’t there. He dropped the pack and hurried to join the others.

Avery did not chide him for the delay. Charlie had noticed that he never wasted time talking about things that couldn’t be helped,. They hurried back outside, where Jude the Mystic now had the Indian sitting up on the kick stand, next to the Model T, its engine pop-popping irregularly.

“Did you see the flare, Charlie?”

“The last of it, anyway.”

“What bearing would you say it was?”

“A little west of due north, I thought. Not much.”

“Jude?”

“I agree. North by northwest plus another five degrees north.”

“That’s what I thought, too. That’s the way we will go. Let’s hope he still has the truck. If he’s lost on foot, or worse yet, if he
was
on foot and now he’s down, he’s going to be damned hard to find in the dark. I have a compass, so I’ll hold our main course in the pickup. Doc, you zig zag around both my flanks, so we get your headlight swept back and forth. Charlie, you take my shotgun and ride in the passenger seat, with me. Major alert here, crew.”

Major force, too
, Charlie thought, noticing that Avery now had a holster on his belt with some kind of big semiautomatic pistol in it.

“You’ll need blankets.” Emily emerged from the dark jumble of shapes and people in the barn. “If he’s hurt, he could be in shock. You should take these blankets.”

“Good thinking,” said Jude the Mystic. “Don’t know why I didn’t think of it. I guess it’s been a long time since I thought like a real doctor.”

“Riding a bicycle, and all that,” said Avery. “Throw the blankets in the back.”

“I’m going along,” said Emily. “You can use every set of eyes you can get.”

“Absolutely not.”

But Charlie remembered, suddenly, what Annie Praise God had said about him running off without her. He fully expected to be coming back to the Wick farm, but who really knew? Who really knew anything about what life held in store?

“Let her come,” he said. “If it comes to that, I’ll be responsible for her.”

Avery looked into his face, hard and long, and apparently read something there that was convincing.

“All right, then. Let’s move. If she gets hurt, Charlie, it’s on your head.”

“That’s exactly where it is, all right.”

They drove through the main farmyard, found the remnants of the trail they had made when first coming there, and steered off into the darkness, over the rocky, stubbled fields. Avery held the Ford in low gear to give Jude plenty of time to make his sweeps, and all eyes pressed hungrily into the night, trying desperately to see what might not be there at all. The man called Stump was out there somewhere, they knew, one speck on the huge ocean of prairie. And God help both them and him if they missed him by not paying close enough attention.

“Not much left of our original tracks,” said Charlie. “Just interrupted bits here and there.”

Avery nodded. “That’s good and that’s bad. It’s good if you’re hiding from somebody. But if you are Stump trying to get back to the Ark, that’s horseshit.”

“Why would he be trying to find us at night?” said Emily. She was riding in the back, kneeling on the folded blankets she had brought, leaning into the passenger cab through the opening of the missing window.

“I’m thinking because he couldn’t wait until first light.”

“That doesn’t sound good.”

“No. That, it does not.”

When they came at last to the gravel County road, they stopped to confer and consider.

“Could he have missed our tracks completely and turned north off the road?”

“Seems unlikely,” said Avery. “He knows how to track. Stump once told me that he could follow a careless man across ledge rock or sheet ice.”

“That’s good for him, but we’ve got prairie.”

“And we’re not Stump.”

“You had to remind me.”

“Let’s assume for a minute that he got this far on the main road and then saw a bit of our track headed south,” said Emily. “How does that help?”

“Try this,” said Charlie. “When we were following Annie, we were going a bit east of south. If Stump lost the trail, he would have tried instead for a direction that at least made some kind of sense.”

“Which is?”

“A right angle to the road. Due south.”

“Let’s try it out,” said Avery.

***

Fifteen minutes later, Emily spotted the Reo truck, a quarter of a mile off to their right. Avery turned, motioned to Jude to take his motorcycle off on a wide flank to the left with his lights off, and headed for the Reo. He stopped fifty yards out, left the lights on, and jumped out, drawing his pistol.

“Charlie, you take my right flank,” he said. “Emily, you stay here for now. Get behind the wheel and be ready to come in hot and fast, to rescue us.”

Hot and fast, in a Model T?
But somehow, Charlie could see her doing exactly that. He cocked the shotgun and ran out wide to the right, while Avery approached from just to the left of the headlight beams. They couldn’t tell where Jude was, but they could hear his bike in the darkness, purring smoothly now. Soon they also heard his voice.

“It’s just him. Come on up. Bring some light and my bag.”

Charlie walked warily up to the darkened truck, while Emily drove the Model T up to join him. In its feeble yellow headlamp beams, they could see a figure, slumped in the driver’s seat, clutching the steering wheel with one hand. His hand was covered with blood, and on closer inspection, so was he.

“Hey Stump.”

He looked up through eyes that were starting to glaze over.

“Thanks for finding me. I really didn’t want to die alone. Now it’ll be okay.”

“You can quit that kind of talk right now,” said Avery. “Jude the Mystic is here. You’re going to be okay. Let’s get you out where he can work on you.”

Stump shook his head, grimacing from the pain of the effort.

“He can’t do nothing, skipper. I ain’t never going to be okay again.”

“Sure, you will,” said Jude. “Do you know your blood type, by the way? I could try to rig up a field transfusion, but I have to know the type of blood.” He was gently peeling back the front of Stump’s jacket, trying to get a better look at his wounds.

“Won’t matter,” said Stump. “I’m gut shot, see? That lousy little rat shit, Stringbean had a gun. You believe that? A goddamn German pistol. What do you call them?”

“Luger,” said Charlie, his heart in his boots.

“Yeah, them. Funny-looking thing. I can’t believe I didn’t check him for that. Took his razor and thought he was disarmed. How could I be so damned stupid?”

“Will you please shut up and let me do some work on you?”

“Won’t matter. Won’t matter at all.”

Jude finally managed to pull open the jacket and saw that Stump’s lap was full of dark, purplish blood and gore.

“Hard to drive this damn Reo when you got to keep one hand on a gut wound all the time, you know? Got another wound in the back of the shoulder, too, but I mostly been ignoring that one. Damned unforgiving truck though, that Reo is.”

Quietly and off to one side, Avery said to Jude, “What can you do?”

“Damn near nothing. Both wounds are hours old, he’s lost an ocean of blood, and either one of the shots would probably be fatal by itself. Do
you
know his blood type?”

“No. Could we try a transfusion anyway?”

“Bad idea. Really bad. And anyway, he’s most likely going to be dead before I could get it set up.”

“I’m really cold,” said Stump. “You got anything for cold?”

Emily was weeping bitterly, but she controlled herself well enough to wrap him in the blankets she had brought. Jude got a syringe out of his bag and gave him a shot of something.

“That’s better. Thanks, doc, Emmy. Thanks to you, too, skipper. It’s been a hell of a ride, it really has. If you find that little ratfink turncoat, though, kill him for me, will you?”

“Count on it,” said Avery.

“Okay then, I will. Gonna sleep a little now, okay?”

If it wasn’t okay, it would have to do. He closed his eyes, gripped the steering wheel convulsively one last time, and slumped into death. Charlie reflexively pulled Emily to him and wrapped his arms around her, as if he could shield her from death by keeping her from the sight of it.

***

The sky was the color of slate, undulating and boiling with streaks of fire where the dawning sun tried to break through. They wrapped Stump in a rough canvas shroud, stitched it closed, and buried him in Annie Wick’s tiny flower garden, alongside her prematurely departed children. The Wicks produced a bible, and to Charlie’s surprise, Jim Avery read from it, the Twenty-third Psalm and another passage that Charlie hadn’t ever heard before, something that sounded as if it were written for a burial at sea. And he added some words of his own.

“On an ocean of troubles, across a sea of wheat, a vessel called the Ark carries its lost souls toward an elusive and distant safe harbor. Today she has lost a faithful crewman and a constant friend. Into the darkness of the rich earth we commit his body. His soul sails on with us.” He picked up a handful of dirt from the side of the hole, the dark black loam that loomed just under the familiar gravelly clay, and tossed it onto the shroud.

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” said Joe Wick, and did the same.

“Safe Harbor, Stump,” said Jude the mystic.

“God speed,” said Emily.

“Amen,” said Charlie, and a chorus of amens followed. As he turned away from the grave, Emily took his arm. It made him feel proud, and he wondered if he should thank her.

“Would he be wanting a marker?” said Joe Wick.

“If there’s a flower bed over him, I think he would have liked that,” said Avery. “Something short.”

“Nasturtiums?”

“Perfect.”

Away from the others, Emily said to Charlie, “You’ll be taking over the operation now.”

“Me? We just lost Stump, not Avery.”

“He’ll be going after Stringbean. He never abandons his own people, even in death. You should have figured that out by now.”

“Well, he damn sure stood by me, all right.”

“And he always will. If he wasn’t going to, he wouldn’t have taken you on.”

He nodded his understanding, his acceptance of a contract that was only then becoming clear to him. He left Emily and the others who were covering the grave and walked off toward the threshing field, surprised to find that he had tears running down his cheeks.

***

Everybody else slept for about four hours after that. Annie Wick and the other women woke them with a huge meal that could have been breakfast or lunch or both. By then, the sky had turned, if anything, even darker than at dawn, and the northwest wind had a distinct bite to it. There was a bit of clear sky to the south and east, but it was an eerie, green color.

“Tornado weather,” said Joe Wick. “I seen it too many times not to know.”

“Where do you go if a tornado hits around here?” said Charlie.

“Straight to hell.”

There wasn’t much to say to that.

Charlie walked over to the Peerless and lit off the boiler. If a tornado hit the farm, it wouldn’t matter much if they had finished the threshing first or not. But if what they had coming was merely a big storm, it would matter tremendously. People manned their pitchforks.

Avery climbed on top of the catwalk again, blew the whistle, and announced to the crew that Charlie would be in charge of the Ark in his absence. Then he stepped down for some final words of advice.

“You figure you can handle the engine and the separator both at the same time?”

“Well, it won’t leave me very much time for scratching my ass or sneezing, but it’s not like I have a whole lot of choice, either.”

“Atta boy. Today is Tuesday. Put all of our rigs and gear out of sight after the crop is in, and wait for me here, until the end of the day Saturday. If I’m not back by then, take the Ark west, into the Indian nations. Find something to fly a yellow flag on.”