Centennial

by James A. Michener

  Several times Jim wheeled the old cripple down to the river itself, where they watched avocets probing among the rushes, and Brumbaugh indicated that he had never known that shy bird well. Now he found amusement in the way the stilt-legged creature shoved his inquisitive upturned beak into hidden places, coming up with surprising treats.

  Once, with the fingers of his right hand, Potato made dancing little movements, mimicking the avocet, and Jim suspected that he was wishing he could move about as easily as this bird. He saw tears come into Brumbaugh’s right eye, matching the permanent ones in his left.

  Brumbaugh was much distressed that his friend Tranquilino still lingered in Mexico, and often he summoned Serafina and her two children to sit with him. He had increasing respect for Triunfador, for the boy had labored hard to take his father’s place and was a strong hand in the field. But he loved Serafina, this stately, quiet woman who bore the accidents of life with such dignity. For three years she had worked the beets with her two children and saved her money. She was thirty-one years old now and growing more beautiful as the years passed. She moved, Brumbaugh thought, with the grace of a young antelope.

  More than once Brumbaugh had pointed at Triunfador, managing to say, “School,” but Serafina told him in Spanish, “He’s needed on the farm. School is for Anglos.” With some impatience Brumbaugh indicated that the Takemoto children were going to school, but Serafina said, “They have different customs,” and she refused to allow her son to get mixed up with such matters.

  The girl Soledad was four now, old enough to help with the beets, and she gave promise of being even more graceful than her mother. She had dark, luminous eyes and very black hair which hung down her back in two pigtails. Brumbaugh often invited her to sit on his lap, but he was unable to control his leg muscles and she kept sliding off. She preferred to sit on the ground at his feet, watching him intently and now and then rewarding him with a grave smile. Pointing to her, he mouthed with great difficulty the word “School,” but Serafina laughed and said, “She’s a girl!” Again Brumbaugh noted that the Takemoto girl was going to school, and Serafina dismissed such foolishness by retreating to her former remark, “They have different customs.”

  Like all original thinkers who approach the end of their lives, Brumbaugh was forced to acknowledge that he had never thought radically enough. The really bold ideas, those which form the foundations of concepts, had frightened him, and he had backed away from them. Now, in the warm summer of 1915, his mind leaped from one construct to the next. Immobilized physically, he ranged the world intellectually, and at the end of one probing day he said to himself, I’m like an old apple tree, too worn out to produce fruit. Hammer a few spikes into the trunk and the tree begins to yield like a four-year-old. It’s been reminded that this might be the last season.

  He was irritated that men like him had not yet produced a beet seed which would grow not five seedling, four of them useless, but only one. With such a seed, the stoop-work of thinning would be eliminated, because any plant which survived could be depended upon to grow its one beet without competition from its four useless neighbors.

  It’s possible to find such a seed, he thought. You look at a field of sugar beets, here and there you find a clump with only one plant. That seed did it. The problem is to conserve that seed and breed thousands more like it.

  He had been much impressed by what this man Warren Gammon in Des Moines had been able to accomplish. This was the sort of thing men ought to be doing in all fields, for it required only imagination. Gammon had recognized the Hereford as a noble animal; however, it had long, sharp horns which looked fine on bulls—very masculine and powerful—but which had two drawbacks: they made the animal difficult to handle, and during shipment the horns of one steer often gouged the flanks of another, which damaged the meat, producing a lower price at slaughter. Of course, the horns could be sawed off, but what the rancher really needed was a polled Hereford, one born without the ability to grow horns, and this fellow Gammon had made up his mind to produce it.

  Brilliant man, Brumbaugh mused as he looked across the field at his own hornless stock. How had Gammon produced this new breed of cattle? By the penny postal card! Patiently he had mailed printed cards to every Hereford grower in the United States, asking if the recipient happened to have in his stock any bull or cow which lacked horns genetically.

  Brumbaugh could remember the day in 1903 when he had received his card of inquiry. He had appreciated immediately what Gammon was trying to do and had inspected his own cattle; finding no hornless animals, he had taken the trouble to visit all other herds in the district, and at Roggen he had found one such Hereford and in Wyoming another. He had bought them with his own money and shipped them off to Des Moines. Gammon was able to locate only fourteen polled Herefords throughout the United States, but from them he succeeded in creating a whole new breed of animal, one that saved millions of dollars for farmers.

  There must be seeds like that, the old man told himself. We were just too damned lazy to find them.

  He wanted very much to share his ideas with someone, so he sent for Takemoto, and the proper little Japanese came into the yard and bowed. Despite Brumbaugh’s in ability to speak, the two farmers nevertheless managed to converse. “Children?” Brumbaugh asked, and from his pocket Takemoto produced report cards for his first three children, and while he could not read them himself, he knew what they showed. Brumbaugh, who remembered his own pride when his son Kurt did well in school, could see the high grades when Takemoto held the cards before him.

  “Seed,” he said painfully, and with his right hand he indicated that somehow seed must be developed which would produce only one plant.

  “Shinningu no,” Takemoto said. Shinningu was his pronunciation of thinning and the two men nodded: with proper seed the stoop-work of thinning would be no longer necessary.

  “You are the only man who respects farming,” Brumbaugh wanted to say. The words refused to form themselves but the idea did, and Takemoto nodded. If he did understand farming, Colorado-style, it was only because he had emulated Brumbaugh.

  “Eighth ... section,” Brumbaugh mumbled. “Arroyo ... I give.”

  This good news Takemoto understood instantly, and that afternoon he returned to the yard with a lawyer and his oldest son to serve as translator. “This fellow tells me, Potato, that you want to give him that eighth-section by the arroyo,” the lawyer said.

  If Brumbaugh could have moved, he would have embraced the little Japanese. If a dying man says he’s going to give you some land, get it in writing. He thought back to his father’s days along the Volga when the Czarist forces were stealing land from the Volgadeutsch. How terrible the loss of land could be to a farmer, how joyous its reception.

  “Yes,” Brumbaugh said painfully, and the paper was drawn, with two neighbors called in to witness. At the conclusion of the transfer the Takemoto boy bowed and said formally, “You have been so generous to my family, Mr. Brumbaugh, that my father insists upon paying the fees.” Brumbaugh understood, for he was a proud man too.

  But his main concern was always with the river. Day after day he studied the Platte, seeing it for the thing it was: the canal that brought water from the mountains into the hands of men who knew how to use it. How beautiful that river was! In the course of his travels to London he had seen four great rivers—Missouri, Mississippi, Hudson, Thames—and he had comprehended the peculiar qualities of each. All rivers, he supposed, had special responsibilities, but there was none quite like the Platte.

  Look at it now, in midsummer! A duck had a hard job finding enough water to light on. An avocet scarcely found worms. For at this stage the Platte was out of its channel. It was inland, working ... irrigating beets. The river itself was nothing but a dry, empty line on the map, all of its water having been appropriated by crafty men like Brumbaugh. Never did the Platte look so useful as when it left its channel, entered the canals and worked up on the benches.

  But in recent years
it had been going dry too soon in the summer. It was not receiving enough water, and Brumbaugh wanted to correct this. How?

  He had diverted from Wyoming and Nebraska every drop of water they would allow, and those states were castigating him in the Supreme Court. He had tapped rivers that normally went elsewhere, and still the water was insufficient.

  How infuriating it was! Land which looked like baked sand became the Garden of Eden if only it could get water. You could draw a line with a pencil on one side, a waterless barren; on the other, an irrigated luxuriance.

  This man Creevey was all wrong. He was destroying the land with his fatuous notion that crops could be grown without water. The last three years had been lucky years. The settlers were producing good crops, but they’d had above-normal rainfall, and sooner or later the averages must reassert themselves. Years would come with lower than normal rain, and the dry-land farms would produce nothing.

  Get my record book, Brumbaugh indicated to Jim Lloyd when the latter paid one of his regular visits, and when the book was in his lap, with Jim turning the pages, Brumbaugh proved what he was talking about. The established average for Centennial was thirteen inches of rain a year, yet here was a year in which twenty-three had fallen.

  “Good, good!” Brumbaugh grunted. He could remember the twenty-one-inch year too, and the nineteen. But then his face clouded and he pointed to the dreadful years: seven inches and crops burned; six inches and nothing growing; five inches and a Sahara.

  At this point the old man made a whooshing sound, and “Jim feared he was suffering a new attack. Not at all. He was merely trying to indicate windstorms. How they had blown in those dry years, whipping the world before them, raising tall pillars of dust.

  “Sooner or later we’ll have the winds again,” he assured Brumbaugh.

  “Only ... one ... thing ...” The words formed with terrible effort as Brumbaugh pointed to the mountains standing so clear and beautiful in the west. The two men paused to stare at those great sentinels which pinned down the western edges of the plains, and they saw them in radically different ways. Jim Lloyd recognized them as distant entities which he had never really known. He had visited them occasionally, and he had climbed into their heart that night he and Brumbaugh had gone after the Pettis boys, but they formed no real part of his life.

  “Remember the Pettis boys?” he asked the old man.

  The old Russian’s thoughts were far from such irrelevancies. He was staring at the mountains in a bold new way, seeing them for what they really were, a barrier thrusting itself into the heavens, impeding the natural circulation of clouds and knocking water from them before it could cross their crests and fall upon the eastern slope. It was the Rockies that had caused The Great American Desert; it was the Rockies that kept Potato Brumbaugh from getting as much water into the Platte as he wanted.

  Now, at the very close of his life, he understood them for the implacable enemy they had always been. They were not the exquisite sculpture they seemed to be when a traveler first saw them from far out on the plains. They were the barrier, hard and rocky and almost impermeable. But they could be subdued.

  Pointing with his right forefinger, Brumbaugh declared war. “What ... we ... do ... tunnel.”

  Jim considered these strange words and repeated the crucial one: “Tunnel?” Brumbaugh blinked his eyes. “They’re already working on a tunnel,” Jim said. “The trains will go .”

  “Water,” Brumbaugh said.

  There was a long silence, at the end of which Jim rose and walked down to the edge of the river. He watched the avocets for some time, and after a while he came back and pushed the old man’s chair to a spot from which he could watch the birds too.

  “You’re saying that we should build a tunnel underneath those mountains, bring the water that falls on the western slope—the water that isn’t needed on that side—through the heart of the mountains and ...”

  Brumbaugh’s right eye flashed with youthful exuberance. Lloyd had understood. With considerable excitement the old man pointed at the dry bed of the Platte.

  “And you want the water we get that way to be thrown into the Platte?”

  With a sweep of his right arm Brumbaugh indicated to the east the great prairie that could be brought into cultivation by such a scheme. It was a vision that had been maturing in his mind for the past half century, but he had been unable to formulate it. Now he saw the whole intricate system: water—water through the heart of the mountain—untold quantities of water to feed the thirsty plains.

  “But to dig a tunnel through the heart of those mountains,” Jim protested. “It would have to be ... how long? Fourteen miles? Twenty?” The very thought of the task frightened him.

  It did not frighten Brumbaugh. Trying frantically to express himself in words that would not come, the old man was able to utter just one, but it explained everything: “Boom!”

  If a man had enough dynamite, and enough brains, no tunnel in the world was impossible.

  Jim was so impressed with Brumbaugh’s vision that he reported it to a writer at the Clarion, and that young man wrote a long article, with maps and photographs explaining how Potato Brumbaugh proposed diverting from the other side of the mountain all the water Centennial would ever need. The Denver papers caught Brumbaugh’s heroic image of a new agriculture on the plains, and they reported the theory, adding four learned explanations as to why it wouldn’t work. Most telling was the argument that mountains were porous, as every miner learned to his sorrow when water collected in his dig, which meant that whereas the water could be led into them from the west, it would seep away before it reached the eastern end of the tunnel. When Jim read this negative report, Brumbaugh merely brushed his right hand back and forth as if to dismiss it, but when Jim laughed, the old man brushed his hand more firmly, and finally Jim understood: “If there are holes in the mountain, cement them.”

  So during the last days of his life the stubborn Russian kept his eyes fixed on the mountains. In his long years he had encountered many powerful opponents Cossacks, land thieves, the Pettis boys, those heart-tearing years of five-inch rain, the governors of Wyoming and Nebraska, and now the mountains. They could be conquered. The water the mountains held back from the Platte could be recovered through the tunnel.

  And as he looked at those majestic heights he experienced the sensation that overcomes most fighters. He was pleased that his adversary was a worthy one. He had a feeling that the great masses of granite pushing their heads into the clouds would be gratified if he did penetrate them and bend them to his purpose.

  But one day toward the end of August, as he sat facing the sunset, congratulating himself that he had at last solved the problem of the Platte, he discovered that he had missed the major point. The river was part of a totally different system from the one he had imagined, and to understand how that system functioned required a whole new set of constructs.

  He made this shattering discovery while reflecting on a line from a poem his minister had quoted at a funeral some years before: “Even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea.” It had been offered as consolation, a reminder that even the most pain-racked life finds ultimate release, and the image it presented had appealed to Brumbaugh. He had imagined himself as that portion of the Platte which had been induced to run through his farm, irrigating his fields and then returning to the Platte—which ran into the Missouri, which ran into the Mississippi, which emptied into the Gulf of Mexico, which returned safely to the greater sea.

  “Rubbish!” he cried, forming the word painfully. It wasn’t like that at all. Neither the poet nor the minister had had a glimmering of what it was all about.

  What happens, he told himself, is that from the Pacific Ocean a wandering drop of water is drawn upward into a cloud, and that cloud rises and the water is frozen into a flake of snow, and the cloud moves east away from the ocean and across California, and when it reaches the Rockies their peaks clutch at it and the snowflake falls on a slope, where it melts
and runs into the Poudre, and it tumbles into the Platte and I draw it off for my irrigation, and it goes back to the Platte, and then into the Mississippi and into the Atlantic, and somehow at the southern end of South America the two oceans balance out their water and my drop comes back into the center of the Pacific and it rises into another cloud and again it freezes into a snowflake and once more the flake falls on the Poudre. And this goes on forever and ever. There is no rest, neither for the river nor for the man. And the man is entitled only to as much water as he can borrow from this endless cycle. And when he has finished his work of struggling with the river, he does not go to some eternal rest. His body becomes the dust upon which the next snowflake fails, and he finds himself part of the endless cycle.

  Toward five, when Serafina came to wheel him back into the farmhouse, she saw that he was dead. She was not given to excessive lamentation, for she had seen much death, and from the satisfied look on Brumbaugh’s face she concluded that he had died neither in pain nor in disappointment. She and Triunfador laid the body out, after which the boy went in to town to inform the police that the old man was gone.