Big Wheat (5 page)

“Yeah, I understand you, sir. But we got no body and no witnesses to any foul play, and you got chow wagons and whorehouses, even traveling gospel shows that she could have run off and joined. And that book I sent away for on modern crime detection methods says—”

“Son, you try to tell me my job just once more, and I promise you’re going to regret it for a long time.”

“I was just thinking—”

“That’s the last warning you get.”

“Yes, sir.”

On the plains below, the smoke flumes got thicker and closer together, and soon a hundred roaring, shaking machines were spewing straw, chaff, and dust into the crisp morning air. Sheriff Hollander scanned it all with great care, missing nothing. When he looked straight east, into the rising sun, he used his hat to shade the lenses. He stared in that direction for a long time, then turned his eyes north again. Finally he put the glasses down and sighed.

“Finish your coffee, boy. You get your way, after all. Time to go back. They all look the same.”

***

Elsewhere, another man looked over the prairie, from the top of a Sears Roebuck deluxe seventy-five-foot steel windmill tower. He looked at the land that used to be covered with prairie grasses so tough, their roots so deep, that no storm God ever made could wash them away, no drought kill them off. He looked at the plains that were once dark with the moving seas of buffalo herds. He looked at the plains where once a man could wander free, breathe in the pristine air, be at peace. He looked at the plains and shook his head.

They raped this land, they did. Raped it bad, all the way from the middle of Texas to the middle of Canada, ripped it open and messed it up something awful. And for that, there has to be blood. Folks tear open every tiny patch of land in sight, just to make money they can’t use, and the universe can’t ever be right until somebody pays in blood.

It was the government’s fault, of course, as much as anyone’s. At the start of the war in Europe it had decided America should be the bread basket of the western allies, or some such rubbish, and had guaranteed a market price of two dollars a bushel for wheat. The number was preposterous, and he fumed with rage every time he thought about it. At that price, a farmer could make thirty dollars an acre growing wheat, while any other crop wouldn’t earn more than a tenth that much. He had done the math many times, and it still got him mad. Farmers with a whole section of land could make a profit of eighteen thousand dollars for a single crop, at a time when an ordinary laborer didn’t see a thousand dollars a year. It was obscene. But he couldn’t make the government pay in blood, so he had to settle for somebody else.

Young women are the best, since they will also be missed. Maybe they will even make people study on the error of their ways. And of course, pretty young women are evil from the ground up, anyway, so hurting them is a moral duty all its own. The hurt they can cause without even thinking about it is worse than anything that happens in a war. But if no young women are handy, others will do. Lots of kinds of others. Yes. It’s a sacred calling.

Fortunately for the good of an orderly universe and the great, cosmic reckoning of things, he was able to take care of that calling all by himself. He scanned the horizon to the north and east, deciding which direction needed his attention the most.

He had another agenda, as well. He had decided that he had to find the young man who had seen him covering Mabel Boysen’s grave, though he didn’t know the man’s name or which way he was headed. He would never again be sure of his own safety until he had found him. The more he thought about that fact, the more he began to be afraid. And he did not like, would not tolerate, anybody making him afraid. Sooner or later, the man had to die.

Perhaps fifteen or twenty miles to the northeast, he could barely make out the spire of a church. That, he decided, would be his next viewing perch, though he always thought of himself as a windmill man. Harnessing the dark winds of the injured prairie; that was his role.

Far below him, some dumb hayseed of a farmer was hollering at him about what the gosh darned hell was he doing up in
his
windmill tower and he better get his ass down while it was still in one piece.

Blasphemy. Vulgarity. And worst of all, pride. He hated those things.

Unfortunately, the farmer also had a double-barreled shotgun that he looked ready to use. Pity.

As he climbed down, he began to rehearse his story. He would say he was looking for some sign of the crew that had left him two days earlier, when he had taken sick. He would talk about how worried he was about getting his job back, even though he didn’t really feel well enough to work yet. He would be pleasant and humble and self-effacing and would say not a single word of truth. And it would work like a charm. It always did. If he told the right lie, he could call the birds down from the sky. In the end, he would not only get invited to breakfast, he would also find something to steal from the farmer’s house.

Chapter 6

In the Land of the Bindlestiffs

Charlie headed south, away from the mountains and back toward the harvest. He didn’t hear the truck come up behind him. In fact, he usually didn’t hear much of anything when he walked. He had been on the road for a week now, though three days of that had been spent in one spot, working for day wages. He found that he could easily walk twenty or twenty-five miles a day and still have time enough to set up an orderly campsite for the night and find some fresh water. He could do thirty if he pushed it, but he seldom had a reason to push it.

Whatever it was he was after, all he knew for sure was that he hadn’t seen it yet. He slipped into his long-legged, loping stride and drifted into a world of his own, almost a trance state. Sometimes he would suddenly snap out of it, wondering where he was, and he would chide himself for missing out on seeing new sights, new parts of the country, though in truth, most of what he had seen so far had looked the same. Rolling prairie, oceans of grain or stubble patterned with header stacks or standing shocks of cut wheat, waiting for the threshers.

The truck approaching from behind blew its horn, shaking him out of his reverie. He looked over his shoulder and recognized a Reo single-axle flatbed, apparently running unloaded, and he moved farther over on the left shoulder to let it pass. But instead, the driver stopped as he came alongside.

“Need a lift?”

“I wouldn’t mind,” he said, looking the man and the rig over. On the battered green door of the truck was a professionally painted sign that read:

James Avery
Wheelwright Machinist Blacksmith

Suddenly he found the prospect of a ride with this man a lot more interesting.

He threw his gear on the truck bed, and climbed around to the passenger seat. The driver was not a big man, but he had something of a presence, not least because of his heavy, brooding brows and a thick mustache of the sort Charlie had always thought was only worn by Mexican bandits. Well, maybe them and Theodore Roosevelt. He wore a blue striped shirt and a black necktie, common enough among artisan workers but not farmers, and a black leather vest that was shiny with wear. He released the hand brake and shifted into super low, and the truck chugged down the road again, slow but probably very hard to stop. The Reo was a hell of a truck, and Charlie looked over the instrument panel and the interior finish, which wasn’t much, with great interest.

“You wouldn’t mind a ride, huh? I’d hate to think you were doing me a big favor. I don’t like having debts.”

“I wasn’t looking to be rude, sir.”

“You call everybody ‘sir?’”

“Everybody older than me.” Which was a lot of people. “I was raised to respect my elders.”

“Well, keep it up and sooner or later you’re bound to meet one who deserves it. I’m Jim Avery.” He took one hand off the wheel and extended it. “And I’m not a ‘sir,’ just Jim.”

“Charlie Bacon,” said Charlie. The words came out of his mouth so quickly, he didn’t even have time to think about them.
So I guess my new identity starts now.

“Pleased to meet you sir. I mean Jim. Are you really all those things that it says on the door?”

“Pretty much. I’m not sure there’s a name for what I am, but that string of words was about as close as I could come.”

“What’s a wheelwright?”

“An anachronism is what it is.”

“Excuse me? I had all the education I could get back home, but I’m afraid that wasn’t much. I don’t know that word.”

“The word means it belongs to another time, not our own. Used to be, people could make a living just building wheels, so they were called wheelwrights. Then there were wainwrights, who built nothing but wagons. Hell, there were probably buggy wrights, for all I know. People who built stuff out of metals were mostly smiths of some kind, though, instead of wrights. Blacksmiths, coppersmiths, silversmiths, and so on. Anyway, all that’s just about gone. Anymore, people still need their horses shod, but wheels are made in factories, and people buy factory hardware and make their own wagons, too. You work on a farm, you’ve probably made a wagon or two.”

“A binder wagon, yes sir.”

“There you go with the sir again. Relax, kid. You from around here?”

“Not exactly.”

“Not exactly from around here and wouldn’t mind a ride. You’re kind of a foggy character, Charlie Bacon.”

“Maybe I got confused, being taught all that respect.”

He laughed. It was an easy, likeable laugh, with no trace of sarcasm in it. “I like that. Anyway, factories make all the tricky stuff now, and folks stick it together themselves, is the thing, except for the really complicated machines. But when the tricky stuff breaks, that’s when they need somebody like me. If it’s got gears or wheels or chains or belts, I can fix it. You give me the right materials, I can even make a new one. Anything mechanical.”

“Steam engines?”

“Sure, why not? They’re just another machine, only hotter and heavier than most. More ways to get hurt on them, too, and more ways for them to hurt themselves.”

“Wow. I mean, that sounds like a fine thing to be. How does somebody get to be something like that?”

“It’s a fine thing to be if people pay their bills like they should and if you don’t get burned or cut or crushed or crippled and maimed in any of a hundred ways. Yeah, it’s good stuff. I hate the money end of it, though. Farmers are tighter than a mouse’s asshole.”

“Just some of them, I think. The big ones, mostly. They think having a big spread and some machinery gives them the right to talk down to everybody else while they rob them.”

“Sounds like you know the type, all right. What does it mean, that you’re not exactly from around here? You following the harvest?”

“Well, the north half of it, anyways. I just started, about a hundred miles south of here. My brother says I’m on a vision quest.” That, also, came out of his mouth with no conscious volition at all. Had he referred to his brother just because he didn’t know how else to describe George Ravenwing? Whatever the reason, just as the Indian had predicted, he felt as if he had just stepped over a threshold, into a world where things were not what he had grown up with. And it felt as irreversible as it was exciting. He decided he had better say something else, quick, before he had to explain a vision quest.

“What’s a vision quest? That anything like a holy grail?”

Too late.

“I think it’s a lot like it. But I don’t understand it all that well, so I don’t talk about it.”

“Except to me.”

“Yeah, well, that sort of surprised me, too.”

“How old are you, Charlie?”

“How old should an apprentice machinist be?” He was twenty-three. But he thought that might be too old for an apprentice, and he suddenly found that he wanted to be one. Could he pass for eighteen? Twenty?

“You can forget that apprentice idea. I have a hard enough time feeding the people I got now. I’m on my way to the Bjorkland spread, to put a planetary gear I welded up into a Case separator. You’re welcome to tag along and watch, but after that, you’re on your own.”

“Fair enough.” More than fair, in fact
. The people he’s got now? What might that mean
? Did the man have sons who would inherit the trade? He decided not to ask. Not yet, anyway.

They rode in silence for another half hour, then turned into a driveway by a hand-painted sign nailed to a fence post. The top of the post also had a planter box with daisies growing out of it. “Oleanna Farm,” the sign proclaimed. Charlie had a silent chuckle at that.

They pulled into the middle of a circular gravel area that had all the farm buildings arrayed around it —house, barn, granary, chicken coop, hog house, corncrib, and a three-bay machine shed. Beyond the barn, acres and acres of shocked wheat marched off to the horizon, and in front of it, sitting idle, stood a new dark green Case threshing machine and a black Minneapolis overmounted steam traction engine. The engine looked as if it had steam up, but nothing was moving. The thresher had a big flat panel removed on the side where the huge belt-pulley stuck out. Nearby, half a dozen wagons with two-horse teams hitched to them also sat idle, and at least twenty men were milling about. Charlie’s mental arithmetic told him that meant at least a thousand acres of wheat to be threshed, as the usual ratio was fifty acres per worker. That was, if the farmer hired enough men.

A couple of the threshermen saw Avery’s truck and began motioning him to drive over to the Case. But Avery stopped in the main yard, got out, and pulled a circular gear and a toolbox from behind the seat. Then he made a show of taking his time walking over to the eager group.

The farmer, Bjorkland, was easy to spot. He was the man with the best, newest-looking work clothes, the biggest belly, and the loudest mouth. By the time Charlie caught up, Avery was crawling into the guts of the Case and Bjorkland was in the middle of a major tirade.

“Who you think is going to pay all these men for standing around with their thumbs up their asses? Me? It’s after eight o’clock already. We should have gotten fifty acres gleaned by now.” He held up his pocket watch and pointed to it importantly, and Charlie wondered if he really cared about the time, or if he just wanted to be sure everybody knew he had a fancy watch. He also wondered if Mr. Bjorkland was really going to pay anybody, whether they worked or not. He looked an awful lot like the man whose bacon was in Charlie’s backpack.

“I seem to recall asking if you wanted to pay the extra cost for having me work all night to fix your gear, Mr. Bjorkland. You didn’t like that idea much.”

“An extra two dollars, just for a little lamp oil? I’ll see you in hell first.”

“No, you see me at eight o’clock, which is exactly what I promised you. Charlie, bring me that crescent wrench, will you?”

Charlie was stunned at being asked to help. He ran with the wrench over to the disabled machine and poked his head inside the main chassis, where Avery had taken a very uncomfortable-looking position. It was a thrilling view, much better than he had gotten from the tiny panel on the top of the Case. He had seen plenty of threshing machines before, but he had never had a close look at the inside. All the parts he had read about or seen drawings of —the concaves, the shaker trays, the main cylinders, the transfer gears—were there for him to see, more wonderful than he had imagined but also somehow simpler, less mystical. Not hard to understand at all, once you knew the basic logic of it.

“You must be replacing the auxiliary gear that drives the Windstacker,” he said.

“I’m impressed. How did you figure that out?”

“It’s the only subassembly that isn’t coated with chaff and dust, so it must have just been worked on. And nothing in that assembly but the drive gear ever breaks. I think Case didn’t use good enough steel in the original casting.”

“You seem to know quite a lot. Do you know where the power takeoff for the whole machine comes out?”

“Sure, it’s right—”

“Go make sure this eager, oh-so-important, hot shot farmer doesn’t engage it before I’m out of here, okay?”

“Absolutely.” He left the wrench where it was, jerked his body back out of the wonderful innards, and climbed up on top of the machine, where a nervous-looking separator operator was already gripping the main clutch lever.

“I don’t need anybody else up here, kid.”

“Yes, you do. You have a man inside your machine, and I’m here to see that you don’t jump the gun and get him killed. You want to fight me over that, we might as well start now. But either way, you’re going to take your hand off that lever.”

The man gave Charlie a hard stare and made no move of any kind. He was a good bit smaller than Charlie, and he looked like he realized that. When Charlie crouched down in a sort of linebacker position, arms wide and hands ready to grab, the man let go of the lever and settled into a defensive pout.

“Thank you,” said Charlie.

“Go suck on a horseradish.”

Below them, there was a lot of clanking and pounding, and finally Jim Avery emerged from the machine and began to bolt the cover back on.

“All right men, get to work!” Bjorkland made a broad circular motion with his arm, as if he were trying to dry off a towel, and people began to move. The steam engineer threw a lever and opened a valve, and the big reinforced rubber belt began to turn the idler pulley on the thresher. The separator man made a gesture toward the big lever but looked at Charlie first, to get permission. Charlie held up a hand in a gesture that said, “Just one minute.”

“You all clear down there, boss?” It was obvious that he was.

“As soon as Bjorkland pays me, I am.”

Well, there was that, yes. And Charlie saw an expression on the farmer’s face that he knew altogether too well by now. He jumped down off the separator and quickly did some adjustments to the exposed gear and chain mechanisms on the far side of the box. “We don’t want to forget to re-engage the swivett,” he said. Nobody paid any attention to him.

“Crank her up,” shouted Bjorkland.

“You owe me ten bucks,” said Avery.

“Was I talking to you?” To the man on the separator, he yelled again. “Crank her up, you want to keep your job!”

The man looked at Charlie, who shook his head, no.

“Now, damnit!”

The man gave a shrug of helplessness and threw the lever. The machine shook, clattered, and clanked to life. A wagon pulled up alongside the apron and men began to pitch wheat bundles into it.

“Ten bucks,” said Avery, holding out his hand.

“Are you crazy? You come here late, hold up my crew, and now you want to charge me enough money to buy a whole new gear, too? Highway robbery! I’ll give you two dollars, take it or leave it. But either way, get off my farm.”

So much for Oleanna and the land of good times
, thought Charlie.

“Listen, you ten-cent chiseler, I can—”

“Take the two bucks,” said Charlie in his ear. “Trust me, it’ll be okay.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Avery held out his hand again, Bjorkland triumphantly dropped two silver dollars into it, and Avery and Charlie strolled back to the truck.