Centennial

by James A. Michener

  “It wouldn’t be so bad,” Brumbaugh growled, “if they didn’t harrow it at the end. If they left the clods unbroken, maybe the land could save itself. But this way! Good God, all they’re doing is manufacturing dust.” He kicked at the offending soil and sent its pulverized fragments spinning in the sunlight.

  “We had a good system here,” Jim said, “and they couldn’t recognize it. They had to tear the sod apart.”

  “One thing I’m glad about,” Brumbaugh said with resignation, “I won’t be here to see the reckoning. I’ve worked harder than those horses to till this earth, the right way. I’ll be glad to be in my grave when the wrong way comes to grief.”

  His lament was not heard by those who should have listened, for they were all now at the Railway Arms, discussing the victors and the good fortune that had come to wheat farmers generally. As Ole Swenson, the winner, proclaimed in his toast, “If them Germans and others keep fightin’ in Europe, sure as hell we’re gonna see two-dollar wheat. So come November, I’m gonna break an additional 640 and plant it in Turkey Red. If the war keeps on long enough, we’ll all be rich.”

  Toward the end of November 1914 the Grebes became eligible to prove-up their half-section, for they had complied with the three major requirements: they had lived on the land for three years; they had built a house twelve by fourteen; and they had cultivated the soil. For five dollars Walter Bellamy would advertise in the local paper his intention of awarding the Grebes title to their farm, and in due time they would receive from Washington a legal paper, signed by President Wilson himself.

  “You understand,” Bellamy told them when they gave him the five dollars, “that President Wilson himself doesn’t do the signing. It looks as if he did, but I’m sure he has a girl in the White House who can imitate his signature. Stands to reason, he’d wear out his fingers.”

  On proving-up day the law required the applicant to bring to the land commissioner’s office two trusted friends who would testify that to their certain knowledge the said Earl Grebe had lived on his land and cultivated it. Grebe chose Magnes and Vesta Volkema, and when the three stood before Commissioner Bellamy, he warned them, “I shall interrogate each of you in private. You will be sworn on the Bible, and what you say will be recorded.” He pointed to Grebe and told the others to wait outside.

  Bellamy took his job seriously and made the transfer of government land an impressive ritual, one that conferred dignity as well as title.

  “What crops did you raise?”

  “Wheat, milo, lucerne and a little speltz for the cows.”

  “During 1913 what months were you in residence on your claim?”

  “Not a day off it.”

  “In 1912 what other members of your family resided there?”

  “My wife, Alice. My son Ethan. But he was there only the last two months.”

  “Where had he been previously?”

  “Not born yet.”

  “Have you a house at least twelve by fourteen?”

  “Bigger.”

  “You may stand aside, Mr. Grebe.”

  Bellamy then summoned the witnesses, each by himself, and probed into this history of the Grebe holdings, and after a while he called all three before him. “I find that Earl Grebe did stake out a legal claim on his half-section, did occupy it, did cultivate it and did erect thereon a residence. If you have twenty-two dollars, Mr. Grebe, I will give you a receipt and the land is yours, fee simple and forever.”

  “When do I get the deed?”

  “That will be sent you by President Wilson. The land is yours.”

  It was the custom in Colorado for a successful claimant, on the day his ownership was affirmed, to invite his witnesses to the local hotel for dinner, but Grebe was so relieved at gaining actual title to his land that he felt expansive. “Mr. Bellamy,” he said, “I’d be proud if you’d join us.” Bellamy, a bachelor who usually ate alone, accepted eagerly, and this inspired Mrs. Volkema to whisper to him during dinner, “You know I have a daughter with 320 acres in her own name. One of these days Magnes and I will be heading for California, and who knows? She may inherit our land. too.” Mr. Bellamy chewed away on his fried steak and appeared not to have heard.

  The dinner was made memorable when the waitress interrupted to inform the guests that it was snowing outside, the first real moisture of the new planting season. The farmers left their drinks to gather at the window and watch with approval as flakes covered the earth and accumulated in drifts. “It’s going to be a good year,” Magnes Volkema said. “Maybe the best we ever had.” The two families now owned their farms and were prepared for the good fortune that the war was bringing them. This snow, enriching the earth, was an augury.

  As soon as Earl Grebe had legal title to his land, he became an inviting target for Mervin Wendell’s real estate manipulations. The gracious, elderly man with the exquisite manners started to frequent Line Camp making judicious but not secret inquiries about the Grebes: “Is a refined lady like Alice Grebe satisfied to live in a soddy?” “Mrs. Grebe seems the nervous sort. Maybe she’d like to sell the place and move to some town where life would be easier?” “Is this fellow Grebe adequate as a farmer? What I mean is, should he continue on the land or is he merely wasting his effort?”

  So he watched for those times when Earl was plowing in the far corners; then he would stop by the soddy to ask Alice if she missed Ottumwa and whether she wouldn’t prefer to live in a place like Centennial, with real houses and where she could walk to the store.

  “I like it here, and besides, it was you who encouraged us to take this land in the first place,” she said

  “But if you came to town, you wouldn’t have to live in a soddy.”

  “Are many farmhouses you visit cleaner than this?”

  “Oh, Mrs. Grebe! You misunderstand. I have the greatest respect for women like you. Backbone of the nation, I always say.”

  Getting nowhere with her, he turned his attention to Earl. pointing out that if he cared to sell his half-section, there were houses in Centennial which he, Wendell, owned and which could be rented for a nice figure.

  “Matter of fact,” Grebe replied, “what I’d like to do is homestead another half-section.”

  “That might be possible.” Wendell said blandly.

  “But I thought the law won’t allow it.”

  “There could be ways,” Wendell said quietly as he drove off.

  When it became obvious that the war in Europe would expand and possibly involve the United States. the urge to break new land became irresistible. Even the weather cooperated. sixteen inches of rain in 1914, seventeen inches in 1915. Yield rose from a normal eighteen bushels an acre to a phenomenal thirty-one. As Ole Swenson had predicted, “If the war keeps on long enough, we’ll all be rich.”

  For the Grebes such prosperity posed problems more perplexing than those of adversity. They now had money, but Alice wanted to spend it in building a real house: Earl wanted to buy more land. In this he was encouraged by Mervin Wendell, who now returned with the second half of his attack.

  He drove up early one morning, smiling and affable, to congratulate Mrs. Grebe on the fine job she and her husband were doing. “You’ve made this place a little haven in the wilderness,” he said approvingly. “No wonder you wish to stay.”

  “We aim to keep it neat,” she conceded.

  “Where’s Earl?”

  “Breaking new sod at the far end.”

  “He’s a prudent man.” Picking his way carefully, Wendell started to cross the fields already plowed, but he had not gone far when Earl saw him and came down one of the long, straight rows he had turned earlier that day.

  “Morning, Mr. Wendell. What brings you out?”

  “Opportunity, Earl. It always strikes for a worthy man.”

  Grebe could make no sense of this, but like the other farmers, he had grown accustomed to Wendell’s flamboyancies, and nodded. “What opportunity?” he asked.

  “Right up there.”

&
nbsp; Grebe looked in the direction indicated and saw nothing. Empty land stretched unimpeded in low sweeps and rises, none of it yet touched by the plow. It had once belonged to the Arlingtons, but like so many others, they had quit homesteading.

  “It’s my land,” Wendell said. “A whole section. Young Arlington had his own 320. You know. ‘Do you swear by Almighty God that you are over age twenty-one?’ ‘I swear I am over twenty-one.’ ” He broke into a deep, reverberating laugh. “So right here, adjacent to your holding, we have 640 acres of the choicest drylands.”

  “And you propose to sell it?”

  “I do. In the hands of the right man, this land could produce thirty bushels.” Placing his right arm about Grebe’s shoulder, he indicated that he considered Grebe just the man to achieve it.

  “How much?”

  “You’re looking at five dollars an acre.”

  “Too much.”

  “It does sound high, Earl, but with wheat the way it is, this land can make your fortune. Talk it over with Alice.”

  “It’s too much,” Grebe said flatly.

  “Now, Earl,” the older man said persuasively, “you’re caught in what I always call ‘the trap of knowledge.’ ” When Grebe looked bewildered, Wendell explained: “You know too much. You know the Arlingtons commuted their land after fourteen months by paying Mr. Bellamy a dollar twenty-five an acre. And you know that I bought it from them at one seventy-five an acre, showing them a neat profit. Yes indeed, a very neat profit. And you think I ought to restrict my profit and sell you the land for something like three dollars and twenty-five cents an acre. But, Earl! The value of this land ... your land ... Larsen’s land ... it’s gone up, what with the war and the prospect that we’ll soon be involved. Earl, this land is worth a fortune!”

  “Too much,” Grebe reiterated, but Wendell, before he drove off, stopped to warn Alice: “Your husband has a chance to make real money—to move you onto the finest avenue in Centennial, into the biggest mansion. All he has to do is plant another section in wheat. Right now. I’m offering him the land very cheap, Mrs. Grebe, very cheap indeed.”

  When Earl returned to the soddy, she asked, “How much did he want?”

  “Five dollars an acre.”

  “Too much.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “How much could we afford to go?” she asked.

  “No. We’re going to build you that house you’ve been wanting.”

  “Earl, if you have a real chance to better yourself, grab it. I can wait. What kind of figure would be reasonable?”

  “About three dollars and forty cents.”

  “Have we the money?”

  “We could put down fifteen hundred. I think Wendell would carry our mortgage for the rest.”

  So they discussed all aspects of the deal: the benefit from farming not 320 acres but a sprawling 960, the possibility of allowing fields to lie fallow for two years, the certainty that with rain the yield could go as high as thirty-six bushels an acre, the certainty that with a continuing war, prices must rise.

  They convinced themselves, and when Mr. Wendell returned a few days later to check on their intentions, he cut his price to $3.60 an acre and they bought. He gave them a mortgage for one thousand dollars, which he volunteered to carry himself.

  Earl Grebe now had a farm many times larger than he could reasonably have hoped for; from the northwest corner to the southeast it was a distance of two and a half miles, and he could plow his straight furrows so far that when Alice stood at one end she could scarcely see him when he turned his team at the other. All the farmers were plowing these deep, continuous furrows, and there were places in northern Colorado where one field blended in with the next, with scarcely any break intervening, for a distance of forty miles. And when these fields were disked and harrowed, the land presented the appearance of an endless table, flat and uniform, the surface of the soil consisting of fine dust. When rains fell, this silvery silt was locked to the soil, making a splendid soft surface in which to plant wheat. No fields were flatter or more uniformly pulverized than Earl Grebe’s.

  Walter Bellamy, working in his land commissioner’s office, was beginning to raise irritating questions about the practices of the farmers in his district. He had been reading books which argued that if a man plowed not in one unbroken line—“Up hill and down dale,” as he phrased it—but in wavering lines which followed the contour of the land, leaving strips of unplowed land, more water would be trapped, there would be less likelihood of soil blowing if a high wind came and there would be much less erosion.

  “What’s erosion?” Grebe asked.

  “It’s when a stream starts running downhill and picks up speed. You know, it eats away the soil and forms a gully.”

  “I learned how to stop that when I was a boy.” He knew the problem but not the word. “We placed rocks in the path and slowed down the water.”

  “Yes, but the water still escaped. If you’d plow around the hills and not down them ...”

  Grebe could not help being impatient with someone who had never farmed, and when Bellamy persuaded a man named Rumson to plow the new way, Grebe and the other farmers in the area journeyed to Rumson’s farm and saw for themselves how ridiculous the whole thing was. The man’s furrows went this way and that and were so uneven that no self-respecting plowman would have owned them. And in that year’s contest Rumson didn’t even bother to enter, and a good thing, for the judges would have disqualified him. Furthermore, with nineteen inches of rain, who needed the extra catchment, provided there was any?

  It was during the winter of 1917 that Alice Grebe came at last to accept prairie life. As she told Vesta Volkema, “People around here speak of a soddy as if it were despicable or fit only for animals. It’s really adobe, nothing more or less, and Spanish people have been living in it for centuries. In Arizona, I’m told, they prefer it.”

  Their soddy was comfortable—cool in summer, warm in winter—and the charge that it bred lice and bedbugs was a lie. “If you keep after the corners,” she told Vesta, who had never lived in a soddy, “it breeds nothing. And the walls don’t sweat.”

  In February she and Earl bought a load of lumber and added a lean-to to the eastern end of the house, and with thin slats, partitioned it into a large kitchen and a small room for the two children, Ethan and Victoria. It was a snug, comfortable house, and in summer flowers grew on the sod roof, where birds gathered to pick the seeds.

  If the Grebes’ soddy was one of the most congenial homes at Line Camp, it was primarily because Alice made it so. She seemed to grow taller and thinner as the years passed, and more determined to make her family’s western venture a success. She had a tenseness which she never lost, but she had learned to control it and directed her energy to problems in the community when her work at home was finished.

  Mervin Wendell had worked diligently to sell his lots in the town of Line Camp, and the settlement flourished, with dwellings for more than three hundred people. In addition to the two stone buildings, there was a church, a bank, a newspaper, a fine hardware store and a commodious hotel with a wide veranda containing six rocking chairs.

  What Alice Grebe wanted for her community was a library and a larger church, and she became, as the banker complained, “quite pestilential” in pressing these needs upon her neighbors. She organized suppers, started a summer fair, made the plowing committee give a portion of the prize money for books, and in time watched both the library and the church grow.

  Across America women like her goaded their communities into attaining the goals which distinguish a civilized society from an uncivilized. It was always women who insisted upon libraries, and parks, and public nurses, and better schools, and newer churches, and paved roads. It was women with nervous energy, like Alice Grebe, who argued with bankers and merchants and came away with funds to do the good things that were required. One of the conspicuous differences between small towns in the United States and those in less-concerned nations was
that American women insisted upon improvements, upon charitable works and upon the proliferation of cultural activities. How bleak Line Camp would have been without the proddings of Alice Grebe, how lonely and austere—an accidental cluster of buildings lost in the great plains. With her efforts it became a civilized little town whose signboard at the western entrance was not ridiculous:

  BIGGEST LITTLE TOWN IN THE WEST

  WATCH US GROW!

  Potato Brumbaugh was wearing out. It was the year 1915 and he was eighty-eight. The body he had used so unstintingly was showing signs of protest, and recently he had suffered a stroke which paralyzed the left side of his body. It was pathetic and in a way indecent to see this stocky old man with uncontrollable tears in his left eye, for he had never been a man to tolerate weakness. And to watch him unable to walk was a reminder of the ultimate failure of all men.

  Every day he would ask Serafina Marquez to place him on the lawn in front of his house, where he could watch the river with which he had wrestled for so long, and it became apparent to her that whereas he could scarcely speak, his mind was not impaired. It was obvious that he was deep in thought. He liked to have visitors, especially Jim Lloyd, to whom he felt deeply attached. They would sit together and watch hawks perform over the river, those magnificent birds that flew so differently from all others. If one of the hawks uttered his peculiar cry, Jim would see by the change in Brumbaugh’s face that the old man had heard. He was much like a hawk himself, Jim thought, a man off on his own individual course, a man always fighting for the upper air.