Big Wheat (6 page)

“Walk slow,” said Charlie. “It won’t take long.”

They strolled slowly back around the barn, and pretty soon they heard frantic shouts.

“Why in tarnation ain’t anything coming out?”

“The feed belt on the apron don’t move; it just shakes a bunch.”

“It’s got to be moving; it don’t have a disengager clutch. The problem is in the collector gear coupling.”

“No, it ain’t. I already looked.”

Very quietly, Avery said, “What the hell did you do?”

“Pulled a shear pin,” said Charlie. “One that never breaks, so hardly anybody knows about it. No way they’ll find it on their own.”

Soon Bjorkland was back in their faces, first demanding, then asking, and finally begging that they fix his machine. Again.

“Seems to me, last time I fixed your machine, I didn’t get paid.”

“Ah, come on. That was just a little joke, see. I wanted to show off for the crew. I was going to pay you all along, you gotta know. You can’t take a little joke?”

“Can you?” said Charlie.

“Look, here’s the other eight bucks, see? You happy now? We all square?”

“Why, sure,” said Avery.

“No way,” said Charlie.

“But I paid…”

“For the extra time and the insult, you owe my boss another ten.”

“Five,” said Bjorkland. I’ll pay the extra two you wanted for the overtime and another three to fix the new problem.”

“Ten,” said Charlie. “Up front. Or that swell Case machine of yours won’t give out any wheat berries for another week. And that’s if it doesn’t shake itself to pieces before then.”

“Okay, say seven, and I’ll—”

“Ten,” said Charlie, and began walking away. “Let’s go, boss. This hayseed wouldn’t know a good deal if it bit him.”

“All right, then!” The man reached in his pocket and pulled out a ten-dollar gold piece, which he flipped at Charlie, along with a look that would wilt mustard plants. “Now fix my goddamn machine before I kill both of you.”

“Why, I’d be happy to,” said Charlie.

***

As they were driving away, Charlie gave the gold piece to Avery.

“You get half of that, young friend. But what was that business back there with calling me ‘boss?’”

“Did I call you that? Seemed like the thing to do, I guess. Seemed to work okay, too, didn’t it?”

“Yeah. I guess it did. So. You’re looking to be an apprentice machinewright?”

“I never heard the word before today. But I’m starting to think it’s something I could like.” Did that also mean it was his vision quest? He seriously doubted it. Still, it had a strange feel of
rightness
about it.

“Well, you certainly seem to have a knack for collecting the money, anyway.”

“That’s kind of a new thing for me, to tell the truth. I’d really rather make my money by working than by tricking somebody.”

“We’ll find out how you are at that, too.”

“I won’t disappoint you, Jim.”

“The wages are horrible and the work can be terrible hard.”

“Well, that doesn’t make it a whole lot different from farm life, does it? Only it sounds more interesting.”

“Well, there you are, then. Welcome aboard, Charlie Bacon. Let’s go meet the rest of the motley crew.”

Chapter 7

The Ark

Midmorning, they rolled into the camp by a gurgling creek with willow trees and small birch groves. Avery had a traveling caravan that resembled some kind of carnival as much as a place to get machinery fixed. At one end was a wide, low-slung enclosed wagon that had rubber tires on wide steel wheel rims. It had a flywheel on the side of one wall, with a belt than ran to a shining black and red Peerless double-complex steam traction engine.

“What’s the engine set up to run?” said Charlie.

“The flywheel? I’ve got a full machine shop in that wagon. Drill press, wood and metal lathes, milling machine, and band saw. Also a generator that makes juice for all the lights.”

“Wow.”

“Over there,” he said, pointing, “is the cook shack. The big tent in front of it is a sort of café. Folks who come here to get their machines or tools or plows fixed can buy a meal while they wait, or just a cup of coffee. There’s coffee brewing all day here. If they look like they can keep their mouths shut about it, they can also get a glass of beer and a shot of booze.”

“Aren’t most of the counties around here dry?”

“Very. And once the Eighteenth Amendment takes effect, every place will be. That makes this a pretty special place, wouldn’t you say?”

“Sounds like you don’t have much time for the law.”

“It does sound that way, doesn’t it?”

Several smaller trailers or wagons were strung out in a ragged line behind the machine shop. A McCormick reaper-binder with a broken cutter bar, a couple of Deere plows, and a sagging sheaf wagon were scattered around the site in no particular order. Charlie assumed they were waiting to be repaired. Above it all, a simple yellow flag fluttered on a tall pole, steadied by makeshift rope stays. Charlie had noticed it several miles before he could see the actual camp.

“What do you call this?”

“Call what, exactly?”

“All this.” He swept his hand around in an expository gesture. “This, um
bunch
of trailers and machines and things. It’s not exactly a carnival and it damn sure isn’t a traveling salvation show, so what is it?”

“We call it the Ark,” he said.

“Because…?”

“Because it’s not the
Lusitania
. And maybe because it carries a little bit of everything. Most of the people who work in it are busy somewhere now. You’ll meet them all soon enough. They’re decent folk, mostly, but in one way or another, they are all orphans or fugitives of some kind. Fugitives from somewhere or something or maybe somebody. I won’t even ask if you are.

“Jude the Mystic is off treating a sick cow somewhere. He’s a not-quite vet, always one county line away from a charge of practicing without a license. He doesn’t hang too close to the rest of us, because he doesn’t think we’re respectable.” Avery let the Reo truck roll to a stop alongside the machine shop trailer, in the shade of a big elm.

“The women are probably cooking or doing wash right now, since we were lucky enough to find a site next to a little creek, and I never know what the hell Stump is doing. Probably off rounding up some more work for the shop. He’s my right-hand man. He scouts the territory on our motorcycle, hands out fliers in the little towns, that kind of stuff. It takes a little tact. We like customers to be able to find us, but not necessarily people like sheriffs or aldermen, since we don’t ever bother to get licensed, bonded, inspected, attached, or otherwise approved by anybody. Sometimes the unattached part is real important. It never hurts to camp close to a county line, either.

“Anyway, Stump is an ex-con from some hellhole down southeast in Dixie. Escaped from a chain gang. I don’t know why he was on it in the first place, but any fool knows why he escaped. The women here are all running away from drunken husbands or fathers or uncles or pimps or cops who would screw them first and then arrest them anyway. You’re blushing, Charlie. Does that shock you?”

“I guess I’ve led kind of a sheltered life. I always figured my own family had all the original patents on evil, and everybody else in the world was sort of normal and moral.”

“Wouldn’t that be nice, though?”

They got out of the truck and walked toward the machine shop.

“You know how to weld, Charlie?”

Charlie hesitated.

“Don’t lie to me. Don’t even think about it.”

“No. Welding is one of those things I’ve read about every chance I got, but I’ve never actually had the chance to try it. Not braising, either. I’m pretty good with solder; that’s as close as I’ve been.”

“Well at least you know the difference between welding and braising. They say it takes about twenty hours of instruction and another eighty of practice to make a competent welder. But in my experience, you can see in less than an hour whether a guy is going to be any good at it, and if he is, he will pick it up fast. It’s a knack. You either have a feel for it right off, or you never will. We’ll find out today if you have the feel, on that cracked plowshare over there.”

“I appreciate that, si…
Jim
, I really do.” He could hardly say how much. Country blacksmith shops, in towns lucky enough to have them, still had traditional forges but they were coming to be fired up much less often than the more modern welding torches. If you were going to call yourself any kind of a metal smith in the modern world, you absolutely had to be able to weld and braise. Some people thought that the newly invented electric arc welder was about to eclipse both the torch and the forge, but he had never seen one and didn’t know if he ever would. For now, it was all torch work, and he had always wanted to try it.

As they walked toward the gaping end of the shop, the screen door on the cook shack slammed against the wall and a woman came running out. She could have been anywhere from teens to early thirties. She had a long skirt that looked rough, almost like burlap, a puffed-out periwinkle blouse and a leather vest like Avery’s, and large dangly earrings. Her hair was a mousy brown, but it had luster and shape, and it hung down just far enough to brush the tops of her shoulders, the same way her bangs brushed the tops of her eyebrows. Her eyes were also brown, but large and moist, almost like a deer’s, and her mouth was wide and sensuous, too wide for her heart-shaped face.

“That’s Maggie Mae,” said Avery. “Maggie Mae Flowers.”

“She looks like a lot of woman. I mean…” Charlie blushed again.

“If you want to tell her that, you’ll have to learn to sign.”

“Excuse me?”

“Sign language. She’s a deaf mute.”

Maggie Mae threw herself at Avery, wrapping one suede-booted leg around his thigh and arching up to kiss him hungrily on the mouth. For reasons he couldn’t quite sort out, that seemed very appropriate to Charlie.

***

Welding the cracked plow turned out to be trickier than Charlie had expected. The crack had to be filled in short, scattered beads of metal along its whole length, rather than a single, long one, or else the shrinking bead would warp the blade when it cooled. The last of the beads he put in were noticeably neater than the first, but he got them all done without causing any warpage, and Avery pronounced it a success. They ground the bead down with an emery wheel and then polished it with pumice and oil. Charlie thought it was beautiful.

At the end of the day, Charlie spread his bedroll out on the dirt floor in the back of the dining tent.

“That’s all I’ve got,” said Avery. “I offered you a job, not a cozy home.”

“This will do fine, Jim.” At least it wasn’t the ditch that his father had predicted.

Chapter 8

Dark Harvest

In Mercer County, people would have been all done with fieldwork for the year, content to let the land keep itself over the winter as best it could. But a pair of local machinery salesmen did not want to leave it at that. They convinced Djelmar Boysen to let them plow up one of his stubble-covered wheat fields in the fall instead of waiting for spring, so they could stage a spectacular contest. They would pit a Garr-Scott 18-50 double-simple steam engine pulling a six-bottom John Deere plow against a Reeves undermounted complex 15-45 (said to be highly underrated) pulling an eight-bottom plow of Reeves manufacture, made for the specific tractor.

The advantage to Boysen, besides getting a huge field plowed free, was that both the new plows cut deeper and did a better job of rolling over the soil than the more common models. At least, that was the claim, and he had no argument for it.

Nobody had ever seen an eight-bottom plow before. There were none anywhere this far east of the vast wheat fields on the banks of the Columbia River. The Dakota farmers had seen a few six-bottom Deeres, and they were a wonder and a monster at the same time. An eight-bottom was beyond imagining.

With the heavy work of the season over and the Mercer County Fair still two weeks away, people were ready for a party, and the event drew a huge crowd. The Ladies Auxiliary of the Lutheran church set up a table to sell pies and cakes and ham sandwiches, with a tent thoughtfully rigged over them to keep the sun from melting the cake frosting. At another tent, a café owner from Hazen sold cider and beer and quietly took bets on the outcome of the contest. Many people brought chairs from their homes, while others perched on the rail fence at the edge of the field, eventually breaking most of it. Sheriff Hollander and his deputy, Tom, were there, just in case the beer drinking led to something ugly, and the county’s only doctor, Henry Curtin, was also there, just because in that size crowd,
somebody
was going to get sick or injured. The doctor and the lawman got their sandwiches and beer free.

The promoters let the crowd build through most of the morning, inviting people to look over the competing machines at their leisure. Finally, around eleven o’clock, Sheriff Hollander strode into the center of the field and fired his gun into the air, and the race was officially underway.

The two engines started out on opposite sides of an eighty-acre field, and the crowd was thrilled as the Reeves rig began turning over a swath of plowed land more than sixteen feet wide, laying back the stubbled sod in thick, rolling waves. It also plowed deeper than the rack of Deere bottoms. The Aultman & Taylor only cleared twelve feet at a time, but it was noticeably faster than the Reeves. It was all heavy and exciting stuff, and people cheered, gawked, and placed more bets.

The Reeves ultimately stole the show, but not for the amount that it could plow. The operator found it amusing at first, when the big, unstoppable plowshare turned over a buried shoe. A girl’s shoe, possibly. But his amusement turned to something else when he noticed on his next pass by the area that the shoe still had a foot in it, attached to a comely young ankle and leg. Or at least to something that used to be comely.

That was the end of the plowing contest. Technically, the Reeves was making considerably more progress than the smaller Aultman & Taylor, but the operator stopped it adjacent to the makeshift grave. The Aultman & Taylor perator made one more pass down his own row and back, and then also stopped, to see what the problem was. He thought the other engine might have broken down, which would give him a victory by default, and he walked over to the Reeves. When he saw the real problem, he froze, too horrified to move.

Soon, nobody cared about the plowing. The crowd became completely absorbed with the body, and the men jostled each other for the privilege of helping to uncover it completely. It took six men with shovels an hour to carefully excavate the body. When the face was exposed, Djelmar Boysen clutched his chest and keeled over. Four men carried him to a shady grove at the edge of the field, where Dr. Curtin elevated his feet, gave him part of a glass of lemonade with some cocaine powder mixed in it, and unbuttoned his shirt.

Mabel’s body was taken into the dining room of the Boysen farmhouse and laid out on the table. As soon as he was sure that his patient, Djelmar, was recovering, Dr. Curtin went there to do a preliminary examination. The actual autopsy, required by state law, would be done later, in the barn.

It was an increase in business that the doctor did not relish. Most harvest seasons, he had a lot of major trauma cases, mostly from injuries involving harvesting machinery. It was a busy time for him, and the money he took in would pay for many of his charity cases over the coming winter. Acting as the County Coroner also improved his revenues, of course. But he had not become a doctor to get rich. Sometimes he wished he could be a bit less prosperous. And like most of the residents of the county, he had known and liked Mabel Boysen. He wept quietly as he wrote in his report that she had been sexually violated and then bled to death.

When Sheriff Amos Hollander read the report, he did not weep. He boiled with silent rage and told his deputy to get the pickup ready to travel again.

“You going to ask the County Board to authorize you to go out of your jurisdiction, Sheriff?”

“I’ll ask. But if they can’t come up with the right answer on the spot, we’re going without waiting for it. Tomorrow morning, before first light. You don’t have to come, if it worries you.”

“I’ll come. Don’t I always back you up?”

“All right, then. Pack the tent and camp gear; we don’t know where this is likely to take us. And be sure you pack both shotguns.”

“Sheriff, we are figuring on taking this guy alive, aren’t we?”

“Both of them, you hear?”