The Bones of Plenty (44 page)

Now she thought perhaps she knew why he had wanted to go to the Fair so much. She held the paper up close to her face and bent over it so no one would notice her. Why should reading about the Chicago Exposition make her lose control when she had held together through all the rest of it?

The county agent had scheduled a meeting in the Town Hall for farmers of the Eureka area. He wanted to get them all to sign up for the production control campaign that was part of the Agricultural Adjustment Act. The USDA preliminary estimates of the 1933 harvest were in and formulas had been all worked out.

George had planned to boycott the whole silly affair, but Rachel begged him to go.

“
I
know what this guy is going to say, Rachel!” he argued. “I’ve been keeping track of all this stuff in the papers. I know this is just another scheme to get tax money out of the little fellow and into the hands of the big man—because the big man is the only man that can afford to let his ground lay idle. This damned county agent is not going to be any more good to me than the
last
man that came up here from Jimtown to talk to me! If I’d known what
that
little weasel had in his hands, I’d have torn him limb from limb and scattered him for fertilizer. No, I can’t say much for the government men they send me up from the county seat!”

“Oh, George, you always complain about how the government helps the big farmer instead of the little farmer, but what do you do to find out if you’re right? Why don’t you go tonight and find out exactly what the government
will
offer you?”

“I
know
what the government will offer me—a chance to retire a few acres and get paid twenty-five cents a bushel for what I could have raised on them. If I was a
big
man, and I could retire a couple thousand acres and cut down my overhead by firing two or three hired men to go on relief—why then it would pay me to go along with the government. The big men came in and
caused
the surplus in the first place, and now the government is going to pay them to cut down! I tell you, it burns me!”

“I still wish you’d go.”

“I’ll go, I’ll
go!
But that county agent is nothing but a stooge for the rich men in the Farm Bureau.
You
know that as well as
I
do. The government has been using tax money for fifteen years to pay those extension agents to go around and wait on the big boys.
You
haven’t forgotten what happened when we first came here any more than
I
have! We wanted some soil tests made—but the county agent just somehow never could get around to us, could he? But if we’d owned four or five sections of land and ten thousand dollars’ worth of machinery, what then? ‘Oh, yes, Mr. Custer. And just how can we be of service to you today, Mr. Custer!’ They make me sick!”

“How do you know things aren’t different now? Go and find out. What have you got to lose?”

“Two hours of my time and my pleasant disposition!” he said loudly.

Rachel did not reply. It was enough that he had consented to go. A little later she would suggest that he stop by and pick up Stuart. Her mother wanted Stuart to go because she thought if Stuart attended the meeting and was in at the beginning of their plans for the coming year, he might feel more like the future owner of the farm. But they didn’t want to send him into town alone at night—that was a little too much like tempting the Devil.

Rachel couldn’t recall trying to manipulate George for private reasons in all the years she had been married to him. She had asked him forthrightly to do things, yes, but she had never asked him to do
one
thing because she really wanted him to do
another
thing.

But she had never felt so desperate about her family, either. What would become of the farm, of her mother and father, if Stuart did not stay? What would become of Stuart if he ran away again? He had been home for six weeks now, and he had been perfectly steady for the whole time. The longer he was steady, the more reason there was, surely, to believe that he was finally ready to settle down. Yet the longer he was steady, the more reason to fear that his inscrutable tensions were bringing him nearer and nearer to another outbreak.

It didn’t seem from the cars outside the Town Hall that twenty people would be there. One car in front of the hall was nearly as shiny as Clarence Egger’s new six-cylinder Chrysler. Small letters under the driver’s window read “United States Government County Extension Service.” George had noticed how clever the government—Republican or Democratic—was at picking words to make the people think they were getting something. “Service!” he snorted to Stuart as they walked up the steps of the hall.

There was nobody whose official job it was to introduce Jim Finnegan and so he introduced himself, standing alone on the stage, looking out over his audience scattered around the floor. A covey of bare bulbs hung from the ceiling and no matter where he stood, at least one of them struck squarely into his glasses.

He smiled at them. “You all know me,” he said. “Like hell,” George murmured to Stuart.

“Jim Finnegan—just one of the Finnegan boys. I’m sure glad to see all you folks here tonight, but I’m sorry you didn’t bring along your better halfs.… I have one or two things for the ladies tonight. Well, I’ll just have to trust you menfolks to pass the word along, and tell them I sure hope they can make it next time. You’ll do that, now, won’t you?”

“Oh, you betcha,” George whispered.

“The
Sun
has been pretty good about printing the releases I’ve passed on from Washington.” There was a tinge of importance in his voice. “But I know how it is, when you’re getting in a harvest.”

You do, do you? thought George.

“You sometimes can’t keep up with the paper when you’re working sixteen hours a day [
Oh, you know all about it, don’t you, down there in your little easy chair?
], and if you’ll bear with me I’d like to summarize for you, as briefly as I can, some things that have happened in the last couple of months that concern you and your plans for the future. [
My plans for the future are to stay alive, damn you.
]

George thought it, but somebody else said it—“Just tell me what to pay my rent with, will you? I can’t seem to plan no further ahead than that!”

Finnegan trotted out a chuckle from somewhere. “That’s all right, we want it nice and informal,” he said, “and if you’ll just go along with me I think I can show you how you’ll have a better chance to pay your rent
next
year, anyhow. The government wants to help you get a fair price for your wheat but we can’t help you unless you’ll do something about planning ahead. Now you know this summer at the meeting in London all the big wheat-producing countries agreed on export allotments.”

“All except the Roosians,” George said to Stuart.

“The allotment for this country is forty-seven million bushels for this year and ninety million for the next two years combined. Now let me remind you that in 1920, which certainly was a golden year for a lot of you men, we exported three hundred and seventy million bushels. Last year we exported forty-one million. In other words, last year we exported less than thirteen per cent of what we exported twelve years ago. For over a decade, now, wheat has been building up into more and more of a surplus problem—by far the biggest surplus problem of any farm item—or any other item, for that matter. [
Except for the item of hungry people, you jackass.
] Now it stands to reason you’ll never get a decent price for wheat with more than half a year’s supply in storage. It’s just common sense that the millers aren’t going to pay you anything for your crops so long as that extra wheat is just sitting there. And we can’t sell it abroad, that’s all there is to it. Nobody has any dollars over there.”

[
Nobody has any dollars over in Europe because big business won’t let any imports in over here, you hypocritical son-of-a-bitch.
]

“We simply have way too much acreage in wheat,” Finnegan repeated. “During the war all you heard was ‘Wheat Will Win the War,’ and we admit it, the government did everything it could to get you to expand your operations. And you sure did. Do you realize that wheat acreage went from fifty-three million acres in 1914 to
seventy-three
million in 1919? That’s almost a forty per cent increase in five years. Now the main reason that the parity years of 1910 through 1914 were such good years for farmers is that we didn’t have so many acres in wheat and there was no surplus to contend with. Europe wanted everything we could produce and the prices were good. Then during the war, of course, we actually had a scarcity. Now it’s true that acreage has dropped again since 1920, but not enough. The government wants to help you cut back enough so that you’ll get a fair price.”

“A fair price from
who
?” somebody said loudly. “Even if wheat
was
scarce again, what difference would it make? Who’s got any money? You just said yourself there’s no dollars over there in Europe any more.”

Finnegan had no answer, of course, but that didn’t stop him from talking. “Well, things are going to pick up a lot. There’ll be money in circulation again. [
That’s not what fourteen million men out of a job think.
] And when there’s money, there’ll be money for you, too, if we can just empty the elevators and storage bins and barges so the millers won’t be able to offer whatever price they want and know that somebody will sell. And this brings me to the business for tonight.” He stopped and read his notes and when he spoke again, he sounded just like another newspaper release from the mass of publications flowing from Washington desks to country mailboxes.

“This is a matter which requires the cooperation of every single one of you—and not only the cooperation, but the good faith and the solemn promises. This country was built on the words and deeds of honorable men like you, and it will endure on those same words and deeds. Now you know I’ve been to see some of you individually, but tonight I wanted to get you all together. I want you to look around at your neighbors and realize that you’ve got to work together if you want to save your own skins. I know you can say competition is what made this country great—but so did
cooperation.
And now you’ve got to work together or the competition between you will ruin all of you. Six million farmers are competing against each other. How are you going to get anywhere that way? I brought you together so you could look around at each other and see just who it is that’s ruining you at the markets in Chicago and Minneapolis and Liverpool.”

“B.S.!” A red-faced man jumped up and began to talk. It was Lester Zimmerman, and he could make quite a speech if he felt like it. “We all know damn well who’s wrecking those markets. For one thing it’s the Guardian Trust Company in Jimtown that’s foreclosed on at least ten thousand acres in this county and plants every last one of them to wheat with great big tractors. And I’ll bet you that the damned Guardian Trust Company owns
six
combines—that’s what I’ll bet! And
that’s
the kind of outfit that’s wrecking the wheat markets, mister! Don’t you try and tell me it’s
my
little two hundred acres that’s doing it!”

“Yeah,” said somebody else, “what’s the government going to do about these banks and insurance companies?”

“Everything will be done on a percentage basis. There’s no other fair way to do it,” Finnegan argued.
“Everybody
has got to cut down. A lot of people thought the crops would be poor enough this year so as to eliminate the wheat surplus. But it just hasn’t worked out that way, has it? A third of the Kansas winter wheat acreage was abandoned at harvest time last May and the rest of the acreage yielded very poorly too. Kansas this year produced only forty-seven per cent of what they produced last year, and—listen to this—only
twenty-three
per cent of what they produced in 1931 when the moisture was anywhere near normal. And you don’t have to be told what happened in South Dakota this summer, because we got enough of it ourselves up here. The worst damage came from the hoppers, but what with the drought and rust and smut, South Dakota harvested
ten
per cent of what they got last year. And
still
we have a surplus that’s ruining your prices. You’ve
got
to see that it
is
the two-hundred acre farms that have to cut back. It’s
everybody.”