Big Wheat (3 page)

Charlie hoped Walter was right about the best way to farm. He really wanted him and his wife to prosper.

Chapter 4

Bringing in the Bacon

Charlie’s next job didn’t go so well. After a day and a half of walking, he caught up with the same Nichols and Shepard Red River Special machine that had done his own family’s threshing, and he hired on for the following day. He agreed to work as a spike pitcher, feeding forkfuls of grain from the constant line of hayrack wagons into the vee-shaped conveyor belts of the separator apron. It was the hardest job on the crew, the job that nobody else wanted, and the only job where there was never a moment’s letup. The farmer agreed to pay him five and a half dollars plus his meals. The pay was to come directly from the farmer, since the custom thresher operator, who owned the machines, had only a fireman, steam engineer, and separator man for a crew. It was a common enough arrangement.

For Charlie, the worst part of any heavy labor was the anticipation of it. He had never been afraid of hard work, but he always wondered if this would be the day when his body betrayed him with muscle spasms or cramps or heat exhaustion. He didn’t worry about pain or even injury, but he would rather die than look as if he wasn’t holding up his end of the work. He never had, even in that autumn of his thirteenth year, when he had wielded a scythe for twelve hours. But he always thought it was possible.

He ate breakfast with the other hired help at 5:00 and then filed out into the dim predawn light. The sky was mercilessly clear and there was no wind. He walked over to the well pump and filled his canteen, plus a two-quart Mason jar the farmer’s wife had loaned him, with cool water. He made sure the jar had a tight-fitting lid, to keep out the dust. Then he put on three bandanas, one on his head, one rolled tightly under the collar of his shirt, and one tied more loosely around his neck, from where it could be pulled up to cover his nose and mouth. He buttoned all the buttons on his chambray shirt and kept the sleeves rolled down, protecting as much of his flesh as possible from the irritating chaff and dust. It would be hot, but he would be working in the dirtiest area of the whole site, and he knew from hard experience that nobody but a complete fool took his shirt off there.

Finally, he put on a pair of soft leather gloves. That was a tradeoff. His grip on the pitchfork wouldn’t be as good as with bare hands, so his arm muscles were more likely to cramp up, but he would also be less prone to single or multi-layer blisters. He had worked with blisters so deep they bled, both on his hands and on his feet, and he never wanted to do it again.

He walked over to the apron of the threshing machine, passing another stiff, who looked up at the sky and said, “She’s going to be a bitch.” There was nothing to be said to that.

As the sun was still barely edging above the horizon, the steam engineer set the big belt in motion, and the work of the day began.

The fields in that county were uneven and rocky, so the sheaf-binding attachments on the McCormick reapers didn’t work reliably. Instead, the farmers used the “headering” method. Huge wagons with high frames on one side only were heaped as high as possible with the new mown wheat, straight from the reaper. When the threshing machine arrived, two men on each wagon pitched the load into a pile next to it, called a header. The spike pitcher, Charlie, would fork it up from there and throw it into the feed belts. He made it a point of pride never to let the belts get empty.

After half an hour, his shirt was plastered to his back, and his own sweat would have poured in his eyes and blinded him, but for the bandana on his head. But then he slipped into the peculiar mental and physical state that he expected and welcomed but could not have easily described. Sometimes he thought of it simply as “getting oiled up.” It was a form of intense concentration and indifference to discomfort. He saw the piles of wheat, and his hands and arms found exactly the best way to pick them up and move them, but nothing passed through his conscious mind at all. Everything was reflex and instinct, blind speed and easy power. He became a machine, an automated spike pitcher that never tired or slowed down. Now and then he would pause to pour some water on the bandana around his neck and to take a carefully measured drink from his canteen, but most of the time, he was locked in an unbroken rhythm. His mind, not being needed for the task at hand, drifted.

He thought about that first, endless field that he had scythed. The handle of the scythe was cleverly curved so the blade balanced from side to side. But it was still very heavy for his young muscles to hold up. So after the first day, he thought he would try putting a counterbalance on the end of the handle away from the blade. He rummaged around in his father’s tool shed and found a big monkey wrench that seemed about the right weight, and he fastened it to the scythe handle with wrappings of heavy twine.

It did exactly what he wanted it to. He finished mowing the rest of the field with far less effort than the first half. But when his father saw what he had done, he accused him of stealing tools he didn’t need. He broke the scythe handle, saying it was ruined, stuck the blade in a tree trunk, and beat Charlie within an inch of his life. The following year, he bought a McCormick reaper, so a scythe was never needed again. As far as Charley knew, the blade was still stuck in the tree trunk.

“What a horse’s ass,” he said aloud. Then he laughed, out of pure joy at being able to say it. In the roar of the machines, nobody heard him. His body continued to pitch wheat while his mind floated. He pondered over what his mother had ever seen in that man. Had they once been a loving couple? It was hard to imagine.

The popular story was that his mother, Hanna Clayton, had gone on a date with young Bob Krueger to the Mercer County Fair, one Saturday night in September. Knowing that when it came to demon rum, he could resist anything but temptation, she had taken a pint of whiskey along, hidden in her purse. As the night wore on, she freely plied him with the liquor. Late in the evening, when he was so drunk he couldn’t find his head with both hands, she pulled him up onto the stage of a carnival sideshow, where the barker offered a ten dollar gold piece to any couple who would get married as part of the show. It was a common stunt, and a guaranteed crowd pleaser. A minister, by prior arrangement, was recruited from the crowd, the notary public who traveled with the carnival produced a license, and after three or four prompts, Bob Krueger said, “I do.” And Hanna Clayton Krueger was a married woman with a mortgage-free quarter-section farm. The only problem was that her new husband never sobered up. And even that would not have been so much of a problem, but about twelve years later, he turned into a mean drunk. Charlie couldn’t remember if he had been a decent human being before that.

The day wore on. At the morning coffee break, Charlie was too tired to eat, so he stretched out on a feed belt and grabbed a short nap. He had found, many times, that he didn’t have the endurance of the older men, but a short rest let him almost completely regain his energy. An old man, he knew, could work much, much longer, but when he finally got tired, there was no quick or easy recovery. He wondered if there was a crossover age, when he would have the best of both abilities. Or the worst. He was sure he would find out.

Finally, after fourteen hours of gleaning the wheat berries, the threshing machine emptied its storage bin for the last time. The steam engineer blew a long blast on his whistle to signal the end of the day, and people all around began laying down their tools. Horses and mules still had to be watered and fed and put away, and the threshing machine made ready to travel, but that wasn’t Charlie’s problem. He pulled his filthy bandana down from his nose, stuck his gloves in his back pocket, and went back over to the pump where he had started the day. He bent down and ran water over his head and hands for a long time, then rinsed out his bandanas, blew his nose, and went to look for the farmer, to get paid.

But instead of paying him, the fat, moonfaced farmer got a funny smirk on his face, stuffed his hands in the pockets of his new bib overalls, and stared off into space. Charlie knew that look. As poor as he was at reading people, he knew all the looks that led up to some kind of meanness. That was the look his father used to wear when he was thinking up some excuse to beat him or take something away from him.

“I said, ‘sir, you owe me five-fifty.’ Now would be a good time to settle up, I think.”

“How was that lunch, boy? That roast beef was straight from heaven, wasn’t it?”

“The lunch was fine, but it doesn’t spend at the general store, sir.”

“And that cherry pie? You have more than one piece of that pie? Somebody did, because we run all out of it.”

“Are you going to pay me what I honestly earned, or not?”

The farmer drew himself up to his full height and hooked his thumbs in the straps of his overalls, as if he were about to deliver a sermon. He jutted his several chins out aggressively and scowled.

“What the hell are you accusing me of, boy? You better watch your tongue, you know what’s good for you. I’m a respected member of the community here. And you’re nobody but a drifter, if you get
my
drift. Show a little respect. I always pay my bills.”

“That’s good, sir. When?”

“Now there you go again. You are aggravating me something terrible, you are. I ought to just cut you off, send you packing. But because I’m a fair man, I’ll tell you what: you get your money the same as all the folks here, after I get my money for selling the crop. But first, of course, we got to get it to the railroad at Willow City and then off to the market in Minneapolis or Fargo. That’ll take about a month.” He grinned again, pulled a toothpick out of his pocket and stuck it in his mouth. “Maybe you’d like to do another job, meantimes, helping with the hauling.”

Charlie could see there was no point arguing, even less point calling the man a horse’s ass and a crook, which he obviously was. Instead, he turned away and walked to the curing shed, which was attached to the granary, which in turn was next to the hog run. He went inside and picked out a nice-looking side of bacon that was hanging from a hook on a rafter. Then he went to the chicken coop and helped himself to a dozen eggs, making a point of taking all the time he needed to pack them away carefully.

“You listen to me, you damn snot-nosed kid. You steal from me, you’ll answer to the sheriff, and that’s after I get done giving you a good whipping. You better just—”

“I’m not stealing, mister. I’m just taking a little security deposit. I’ll bring it back when I come to collect my five and a half dollars. A month, you say? But if you want, we can go see this sheriff you talk about, and tell him the whole story, just so’s he doesn’t get the wrong impression. Like of exactly who the thief is around here. Should we do that?”

Charlie didn’t say anything about the threatened whipping, but he let his coat fall open so the farmer could see the bayonet sheathed at his belt. If it came to a fight, though, what he actually planned to do was get up from gathering the eggs and knee the man in the groin. If that wasn’t enough to take the wind out of his sails, he would also hit him on the side of the head with his broken shovel. He was not fond of fighting, as a rule. He even hated people who beat their livestock. But when he had to fight, he followed his brother’s advice. “Don’t mess around trying to look like a gentleman exhibition boxer or following any stupid rules. Hit the other guy first with the worst, because that’s what he’ll try to do to you. Go for the throat or the balls or the kidneys, whatever target he gives you. And if you can’t stand the idea of hurting him, you had better not get in the fight in the first place.”

As it happened, he didn’t have to do any of that, or draw his weapon. The man sputtered a bit about thieves and tramps and threatened to go get his shotgun. But when he stormed into the farmhouse, slamming the door behind him, Charlie knew he wasn’t coming back out.

Bullies and crooks are always cowards
, said the voice of Charlie’s brother in the back of his mind.
He won’t come back
. The man had already lost one battle, without injuries or witnesses. If he started it up again, he might not be so lucky.

Charlie finished wrapping up his eggs in a flannel shirt and then realized he needed something to sling the bundle on without crushing it. So he went back over to where the Red River Special was sitting quietly in the twilight now, the dust of the day slowly settling on it, and he took the pitchfork that he had used all day. It made a good staff.

As he was walking away, the farmer yelled at him from behind the closed screen door.

“What’s your name, boy?”

“Charlie Krueger. You need me to spell it for you?”

“I’m gonna remember you. I’m an important man hereabouts. You ain’t never gonna find work in this county again, nor not even a place to lay down your head for the night.”

“Break my heart, why don’t you?” He did not turn around, and he did not hurry.

To the west, the sky had clouded up and exploded in a riot of color. Layered clouds from horizon to horizon lit up in golds and subtle pink-purples and rich oranges, backlit by the setting sun. Still farther west, maybe as far as Montana, towering cumulus clouds massed like a dark mountain range.
We might not have much in the way of scenery around here
, he thought,
but we sure as hell have sky
.

To the north lay the foothills of the Turtle Mountains. He thought they would have trees and creeks and rugged landscape, as different from the flat prairie of the Red River Valley as it could be. He suddenly felt a powerful need to see those things.

Chapter 5

High Prairie

He woke at 4:00, dreaming of his brother. Rob was standing on a small knoll, looking manly and smart in his uniform, carrying the Winchester thirty-ought-six that Charlie had bought and sent to him, because the French-made rifles the troops were issued were no good. Rob wore his familiar easy smile, and he was waving to Charlie to go with him. But the landscape behind him was thick with muzzle flashes and billowing, orange explosions. Nothing could survive there. Charlie tried to shout, even scream to him not to go, but when he opened his mouth, no sound came out. He waved his arms and tried harder, but still he couldn’t speak, and he wept in frustration. His brother just smiled and beckoned one last time, then turned and walked into the inferno.

Charlie sat up and breathed in the cold air. It was still only August, but in the foothills of the mountains, the brief, blazing summer was clearly over. He was just as glad. It seemed to fit with his dream, somehow.

Back home, the standing joke was that Charlie got up and fed the rooster that would later crow to wake everybody else. But by now, the joke was on his hate-filled father. And if he had to feed the rooster and the rest of the livestock and do the morning milking with a hangover from hell, well, he had earned it. Charlie wasn’t that happy about having stabbed and hit him, if only because he was ashamed of losing his self-control. But he no longer had either pity or love for the man who already seemed more like a distant, unwelcome uncle than a father.

He threw back the rough blanket and the canvas barn coat that he had slept under, crawled out from under the battered tarp that served as a crude tent, and looked out at the still black predawn.

Overhead, the moon was down, but the night sky was luminous with stars. The Milky Way was so thick that it was almost like a single light, and he half expected to see it swirl and flow, like white scum on the top of a meandering black river. To the southwest, he could see Betelgeuse outshining the rest of Orion’s shoulder and indeed most of the rest of the sky, even Venus to the west. It was low in the sky now. And to the north, both the big and little dippers were laughably simple to spot.
Follow the drinkin’ gourd
flashed into his head, the instructional song of the Underground Railroad, shepherding runaway slaves north, back before the Civil War. The only schoolteacher he had ever known, Miss DeKuyper, had told his class about it. She was the daughter of a Pennsylvania farmer who had been part of the secret organization, and was clearly proud of it.

Was Charlie a runaway slave? Should he follow the North Star, too? Yes to both questions, he thought. But at some point, he would veer to the west, toward the North Dakota Badlands, to the city of Minot, to keep his promise to his sister. Then, if all was well with her, he would move on north, over the 49th parallel to Winnipeg and Moose Jaw and into upper Saskatchewan, as much because he had never been to any of those strange places as because that’s where the harvest was.

To the east and south, where the predawn light had still not appeared, the black landscape was suddenly defined and given depth by first dozens, then hundreds of flickering orange points of light. At first, Charlie didn’t recognize them as boiler fires. There were so many, and they stretched to the horizon, as far as he could see. The steam engineers of the plains were lighting off their fireboxes for the day, warming up the big boilers to make steam for a day of hard and unstopping work.

It took a good half hour of steady fire to get a main boiler up to temperature, with enough actual steam in the top of the barrel-shaped tank to make the machine able to move itself. By the time the rest of the threshing crews rose and breakfasted, there had to be more, much more steam, all ready to go at the touch of a brass valve. The fires twinkled like a mirror image of the starry sky above.

In other spots on the darkened plain, larger but less intense fires still smoldered and sparked, where monumental piles of straw had been burned off the previous day. A few farmers, like Walt Christian and Charlie’s own father, still practiced balanced systems of farming, with livestock and crops complimenting each other. These people had a lot of uses for straw. But most of the Dakota farmers had converted to pure cash-crop farming. With no livestock to need the straw, it was simply blown or pitched into the biggest piles possible and then torched. A few gloomy souls said the farms had lost their souls in the blind pursuit of money, and the huge straw fires were beacons on the road to perdition. Others said that there was never a boom that wasn’t followed by a bust. Charlie knew all the arguments, but they, too, were questions for another day. For now, he needed the boom economy, for better or worse.

A hundred miles north and fifty miles south of him, and two hundred miles east and west, the scene was the same. Still farther south, the harvest was over. On the plains of northern Nebraska, the fieldwork was done for the year, and people left the stubble as it had been cut and prayed for early snow cover and late winds. Farther south yet, beyond the Nebraska Sand Hills, through Oklahoma and all the way to the Texas Panhandle, where people raised winter wheat, the earth had already been plowed again and replanted with the seeds of next year’s crops. Now millions of acres had nothing to anchor the soil except frost and snow and some seedlings that wouldn’t emerge for months. In a dry year, they wouldn’t emerge at all. And more people prayed for early snow cover and late winds, and just a bit more moisture than the Farmers Almanac said they ought to have.

Charlie didn’t pray for anything. His mother, who constantly prayed for a sober husband, was proof enough that it didn’t work. Sometimes he thought that God, if he existed at all, had a lot to answer for.

He pulled on a pair of cotton socks that he had pointedly not slept in, added wool socks over them, and then pulled on his heavy work boots and laced them up. Then he put on the leather jacket that had been his brother’s, beat his arms to get his circulation going, and started to make his own fire.

He had hauled a few bundles of dry straw with him to get things started, but straw was a poor fuel for a cook fire or one that had to last any length of time. It flared up hot and then blew away so suddenly it would break your heart. He had chosen his campsite partly because the little grove was one of the few places around that was not under cultivation, even in the foothills of the mountains, and also because it had mature trees that had dropped some dead branches. He had laid a cone-style fire with these the previous night, with crossed bundles of straw on the inside. Now he opened his precious box of Diamond safety matches, struck one on the emery strip, and touched it to the tinder. After a slight fluttering in the wind, it caught nicely, and the chill of the night on the ground retreated to a more tolerable distance. Charlie’s nose quit running and he didn’t have to suppress any more shivers.

He took a drink of icy water from his canteen and felt the chill return. It damn sure wasn’t hot coffee. But unfortunately, he did not have a full mess kit or anything to heat water in, even had he had any coffee grounds.

“That’s probably why they call it, ‘living rough,’” he said out loud.

His brother would have laughed at that, he thought, and it was good that he thought it. Since Rob would never laugh again in the real world, it was important that Charlie carry the image inside himself, give it a tiny life there. That was one of the many things his father would seek to deny him, and he was damned if he was going to let that happen.

He lowered his crude pack from the tree branch where it had spent the night, secure from raccoons and bears. Charlie had never seen a bear and wouldn’t know what to do if he did, but he had seen too many coons for his taste and had on occasion shot a few. He unrolled the pack carefully, since it still contained a half dozen fresh eggs, lovingly packed in soft cloth. He laid them out on the grass for the time being and cut several thick slices of bacon from the slab he carried in waxed paper left over from the sandwiches his mother had given him. These he spread on the inside face of the square-nosed shovel with the broken handle, the one item he had with him that he could be accused of stealing from his father. That, too, might have made his brother laugh. He tossed a few rocks into the fire that was now nicely roaring, for later cooking supports, then held the shovel over the fire and waited for the bacon to start sizzling. When it puckered and curled and smelled almost irresistible, he used his bayonet to turn it over. Then he settled back to let the rashers crisp up, sitting down on a large round rock and taking another swig of the cold water.

“You need some coffee with that.”

He almost dropped his shovel into the fire.

“Relax, white boy. We quit making war on you people a long time ago.” A large man drifted into the firelight, dressed in dark leather and canvas and a crumpled hat that might have started its life as a Stetson. He had coal black pigtails and a necklace made of bones and beads. Charlie had no idea if the fact that he was an Indian should alarm him or not. His father despised Indians, but what didn’t he despise? That was almost a recommendation.

“Hello, there. I didn’t hear you come up.”

“Of course you didn’t. You’re not supposed to hear Indians come up. That’s unless they’re bent out of shape, of course. They’re bent out of shape a lot these days.”

Charlie hadn’t heard that term before, but he assumed it meant drunk. He couldn’t think of anything to say about it, so he changed the subject. “I got plenty of bacon, if you want some, and some fresh eggs, too.”

“You need coffee.”

“You said that already.”

“That’s because it’s true.”

“It’s also just too damn bad. I don’t have any coffee, and if I did have, I don’t have anything to brew it in.”

“You want some?”

“Are you serious? I’d kill for a cup of coffee. You got some?”

“You got any tobacco to trade?”

“No.”

“Dogshit. You need a lot of help, you know that? But you offered to share what you have, so I guess I can afford to spot you some good will.” He raised one finger in a gesture that said, “Wait here.” As if Charlie were going to go anywhere while the bacon was cooking. The Indian disappeared outside the circle of the firelight. A short time later, still without making a sound, he returned with a blue-enameled coffee pot, two matching cups, and a cloth bag, presumably containing coffee grounds. He put the pot, which apparently already had water in it, onto some of the rocks Charlie had laid in the fire.

“I’m Injun Joe,” he said, solemnly extending his hand.

“Now I think you’re trying to shit me up a pound,” said Charlie. “Nobody has a name like that.”

“Except in the mind of Mark Twain,” he said. “Damn good writer, for a white boy.”

“I’ll take your word for it. We don’t have a library back home.”

“We don’t have them in the Nations, either, but once I hopped freight trains all the way to Chicago and worked in the stockyards for a while, herding cows into a slaughterhouse. Not a place you want to be, Chicago, but you could get books there. Would you believe I am Ten Bears?” He was grinning now.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I seem to remember that Ten Bears was some kind of warrior chief who died out in Arizona or New Mexico in the Plains Indian Wars.”

“You’re pretty smart.”

“I went to school.”

“It was New Mexico,” the man said, nodding. “He was a Comanche.”

“I’m afraid I can’t tell one from another.”

“Comanches look mad all the time. Always did. I am Lakota.” He held out his hand again. “George,” he said. “You couldn’t pronounce my other name, but it means raven wing.”

“I’m glad to meet you, George Ravenwing.” He shifted the shovel handle into his left hand and offered his right one to shake. “I’m Charlie Krueger.”

“We have boiling water, Charlie Krueger. Now you will see how an Indian makes coffee.”

“If it’s coffee, I’ll like it, no matter how you do it. I’ll fix us some eggs.”

Charlie used his knife to slide the bacon rashers off the shovel and onto a piece of waxed paper, being careful not to spill the grease. Then he carefully propped the hot shovel level on a patch of bare ground and began breaking eggs into the grease. He couldn’t see the rest of the eggs surviving another day in his pack, so he cooked them all. “I haven’t got any bread left,” he said. “Sorry.”

“I have some. It’s Indian bread, though. You ever have any?”

“No, but it’s got to be better than grass or straw.”

“And they say white folks are stupid.”

“Who says?”

“All the real people.”

He couldn’t think of anything to say to that, so he concentrated on the eggs. When the whites had turned completely opaque, he did a quick flipping motion with the shovel, tossing them neatly into the air like birds in formation and catching all but one in the properly inverted position. One was crumpled on its own edge, the yolk broken and running into the hot grease. “I’ll eat that one,” he said.

“Not unless you want to fight me for it.” George Ravenwing laid out roughly sliced rounds of coarse white bread on the grass and motioned Charlie to slide the eggs onto them. Then he poured coffee for both of them. Charlie hadn’t realized how badly he wanted some until the smell hit him from the rim of his cup. He made a small gesture of salute and thanks, and George nodded approvingly. The bacon was cool enough to handle with their fingers now, and they ate it that way. If he had been on his own, Charlie would have had a bit of trouble figuring out how to eat the eggs, with neither bread to make a sandwich nor a plate to put them on.

“Seems to me if you’re planning to camp out for a long time, Charlie Krueger, you need a lot better bunch of gear. Or maybe you’re on a vision quest?”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“Young Cheyenne braves, sometimes Lakota, too, go out to starve a little and to hear the voices of the wilderness and learn the truth of their souls. They don’t take any gear with them, except a knife and maybe a water bag.”

“I don’t want to hear the truth of my soul, and I damn sure don’t want to starve. I’m just looking for a job.”