Centennial

by James A. Michener

  That night Earl Grebe assembled his family and spoke to them in harsh, grave words. His wife Alice was thirty-five years old that autumn and seemed prepared for whatever trials might lie ahead. She was still a tense woman and her energy had not flagged. Their son Ethan, an intelligent boy who duplicated many of the virtues of Mrs. Wharton’s hero, was twelve years old and eager to work. Their daughter Victoria was a tall, quiet girl like her mother, but their son Tim, two years old, was a boisterous little fellow. He sat on his mother’s lap as the discussion began.

  “He means to take this farm from us,” Grebe said. “I could see it in his eye. In everything he did.”

  “Was he so harsh?” Alice asked.

  “He’s already foreclosed on three farms, Alice, and he intends making us the fourth.”

  “He wouldn’t transfer the mortgage to the land?”

  “He looked me in the eye, never blinking, and said he was sure his father never made such a mistake.”

  “We should have had a lawyer,” Alice said, biting her lip to keep from whimpering.

  “I did not think you required a lawyer when dealing with an honest man.” He was sweating, and Alice said, “Victoria, make us some lemonade.”

  “Sit still! There will be no more lemonade. This family is going to eat grass if necessary, but we’re going to accumulate that thousand dollars and pay him off. Our life depends on it. Alice, you start. Tell us right now how you can save money.”

  “Oh, dear!” she said falteringly. For some time now she had been conducting her home as frugally as possible. She was about to say that no further savings could be effected, but then she saw her husband’s stern visage, the goodness of his character shining through, and she knew that she must do even more.

  So she began to enumerate the little things that could be done: “We’ll buy no clothes for anyone. No toys for Christmas. No candy. We’ll eat a lot of mush, the way we did in the soddy. And we don’t need curtains or brooms or anything like that. I’d feel happier, Earl, if you gave me no money at all, because I do grow careless. You buy the things and handle the accounts.”

  Each of the two older children stated what he or she would surrender, and when Earl’s turn came he said harshly, “I’ll sell the two bay horses ...”

  “Oh, no!” his wife protested “They’re the heart of the farm.”

  “I must sell them,” he said

  The prospect of Earl’s selling the two bays was more than Alice could face, and she broke into tears, dropping her head onto the table and shuddering as she had done years ago. Her shoulders contracted for some moments, and Earl said to Victoria, “Comfort her,” and he continued with his account of what expenditures he would eliminate. When he finished, his wife said weakly, “Earl, for God’s sake, don’t sell the horses. We don’t have to give at church. Victoria can ...”

  “We will all bear down, Alice. We will pay back this unjust debt. The fault is mine, but we must all share it.”

  So the Grebes went onto a regimen so spartan that only their neighbors who were in similar straits could comprehend. They were encouraged by two unexpected events. Vesta and Magnes Volkema, who had never allowed a mortgage on anything they owned, came voluntarily, and Vesta said, “We have some savings. If that miserable bastard tries to sheriff you out for the mortgage money, we’ll pay your interest.”

  “I’m glad to see you’re cutting back expenses, Earl,” Magnes said. “If we get any rain at all, you’ll get out from under.”

  The other appreciated visitor was Dr. Thomas Dole Creevey. At his own expense he was visiting the dry-land acres hit hardest by the two-year drought, and he was not even close to surrender. At the school auditorium he said in his low, powerful voice, “Don’t lose heart! Don’t listen to the ranchers when they gloat ‘We told you so.’ Never in the history of this state have we had three bad years in a row. Men! Look at the statistics! In region after region across this nation two bad years have always been followed by five good ones. Look at the facts!”

  He became his old evangelical self as he scribbled the reassuring figures on a board. Montana, two bad years followed by six good ones. North Dakota, two very bad years followed by five excellent ones. Utah, where they kept careful records, the same. “Five years from now,” he promised them, “I’ll be lecturing somewhere in Kansas, and I’ll write on the blackboard, ‘Colorado, two bad years in 1923-24, followed by five excellent ones.’ It’s the law of nature.”

  He visited Earl Grebe’s farm, making numerous borings with the earth auger, and he proved that down deep a residue of moisture existed. “This soil is ready for snow, Earl. You have your surface well prepared to accept it. For God’s sake, when it comes, disk it at once and trap the moisture in here. You’ve a great farm, Earl, and you’ll see thirty-bushel wheat again. On that I give you my solemn promise.”

  And two days after he left, snow came, and then more snow, and then more, until it was clear that the drought had ended. Vesta Volkema, who was becoming quite rowdy as she grew older, told the Grebes during a family dinner, “Our little bastard Creevey warned God to get off his ass and get some snow moving,” but before the two families started to eat, Alice Grebe asked if she might open the meal with grace, and the other five bowed their heads as she began, “Dear Lord, from the depths of our hearts we thank ...” She could go no further, for she fell into a fit of weeping and Vesta had to take her from the room for a while.

  The moisture came and the crops were saved, but in the late spring of 1925 something happened which went unnoticed by everyone in town except Walter Bellamy, who was now the town postmaster, the land commissioner’s office having had to close down. It was in May, on a cold, blustery day such as spring often brought to Colorado, and he was looking toward the mountains when he noticed an unusually heavy gust of wind sweep eastward across the prairie. It came from such a direction that its path lay along furrowed fields, with never a windbreak or a strip of unplowed land to temper its force, and as it moved, it began to catch up from the earth small grains of soil and collections of tumbleweeds and shreds of Russian thistle which had come in with the Turkey Red, and as it whipped through Line Camp, Bellamy thought that if such winds became frequent, especially during years with little snow, they might do real damage.

  Increasingly apprehensive, Bellamy convened a meeting of the district farmers and invited an expert from the Agricultural College in Fort Collins to explain how they might protect their fields from either wind or rushing summer rains by plowing a different pattern, but fifteen inches of rain had already fallen this year, with more expected, so no one paid much attention to what the professor said. Bellamy did insist, however, that the new tenant who was farming the land he had acquired east of Line Camp start to plow in the new way, and although they grumbled at “fancy-pants ideas of men who never farmed,” they did agree to plow along the contours, but since there was neither wind nor flood, they accomplished nothing, and in the fall of 1925 Bellamy saw to his disgust that they had reverted to long, straight furrows, uphill and down. Any force left in his argument vanished that October when his tenant won the plowing contest with a set of the straightest, evenest furrows a judge ever saw.

  On December 31 Earl Grebe had the satisfaction of carrying seven hundred dollars in cash into the office of Philip Wendell. “That leaves only three hundred dollars on the mortgage,” he said with a certain grimness.

  “I told you last year we’d get rain,” Wendell said evenly. “Next year looks just as good.”

  “If it is, we’ll burn the mortgage.”

  “I’m sure you will,” Philip said. “My father had great respect for you and Alice.”

  Why the Grebes and families like them now fought to stay on the land was a mystery. They could see that Line Camp had reached its peak and was beginning to die. In 1924 the local newspaper had folded, and even in the good year of 1925 two major businesses closed down. The tall white grain elevator stood half empty and the railroad which was supposed to have reached the tow
n went into bankruptcy without laying a yard of track.

  Alice Grebe, who had done so much to make the town habitable, was among the first to realize it was doomed, and twice she begged her husband to pull up stakes now, sell out and move to California. But men like Grebe could not bring themselves to admit defeat. “Look, Alice!” he pleaded. “I own more than a thousand acres. We have this good house. When things turn around ...”

  Alice suspected they might never turn around. For reasons she could not have explained she saw that prairie towns such as Line Camp must become vacated ghosts populated only by gusts of wind, yet she was powerless to act. “We’ll make the best of it,” she said with little hope, for she saw that the Grebes and the Volkemas had, through vanity and hope, locked themselves onto a land that was dying and to a town that was vanishing. At the end of 1925 two more stores shut down, and the population fell below one hundred.

  Imprisonment at Line Camp proved especially bitter to Vesta Volkema, who watched her vision of California vanish in dust. Once at the Grebes’ she came close to tears, confessing, “Magnes was right that time when he wanted to sell our damned acres for twenty-five cents each. Hell, we’d have been better off it we’d given them away.”

  “You still could,” Alice said excitedly. “We all could: Just give them away and get out.”

  “No,” Magnes said. “You get trapped on the land. It reaches out and holds you.”

  Then, as though to test the courage of the immigrants, the years 1926 and 1927 turned even more brutal, and farm income dropped so low that sometimes it seemed as if the Grebes would starve on the rich land they owned. For two long years they went to not one picture show in Greeley, nor to any church supper, for they were too poor to contribute a covered dish. They were paupers, worse off than the meanest family in Little Mexico, and Alice sometimes wondered if the providential years they had known when they first broke the sod would ever return.

  Yet even during these painful years her love for her husband increased, and she bore him two more children, a third son and a second daughter, and the burden of providing them with a reasonable start in life fell solely upon her. She went days without food to ensure their getting the nourishment they required. She dressed them well, too, making over the clothes which had been worn by their brothers and sisters. She did much sewing, often working until her eyes were heavy, and she spent hours playing with the youngest three in the old soddy, telling them of former days and of how the family had worked together.

  Her only consolation was the church, and it was a powerful support. Sometimes when the minister brought in a speaker from the college at Greeley, and Earl was too dead-tired to attend, she would walk by herself along the back path to Line Camp, and ask pertinent questions, and then return home alone, carrying only a small flashlight. Occasionally Mr. Bellamy arranged meetings, like the one in which an actress from Denver reported on the New York plays, and on the very special one, The Great God Brown, in which she had played a role. By popular demand, she recited some of the scenes from that play, a bright, lovely young woman, and Alice thought how proper it would be if Mr. Bellamy were to marry such a girl.

  And then in 1928 everything conspired to help the Grebes: there was ample rain, much snow and a warm spring. Earl made an astonishing forty bushels to the acre, and it sold at $1.32 a bushel. The mortgage was paid off and every Grebe child received a new outfit, with Ethan, now sixteen, getting his first long trousers.

  One evening that autumn, the Volkemas and the Larsens came over to dinner, and after the meat was taken away but before the dessert was brought in by Victoria, Earl Grebe cleared his throat, rose and asked his wife to produce the bottle of champagne. When the glasses were filled he asked Ethan to bring in a bucket, and when it was placed before him on the table, he brought from his pocket the mortgage paper and a box of matches.

  “The Grebe family has been through a dangerous time,” Earl said. “We might have lost our farm except for the support our neighbors gave us, but all that’s past.” Striking a match, he held the flame to the bottom edge of the mortgage, and everyone at the table watched with fascination as the dangerous paper burned.

  When it was ashes, Alice Grebe lifted her glass and said, “From here on out ... only good times ... for all of us.

  Early spring on the great plains is the most hellish season known in the United States. Wet snow falls and for days the thermometer growls at the freezing point, now down, now up. No blossoms grace the roadside and such birds as do brave the weather huddle in the grass, their feathers ruffled, for April and May can often be fifteen or twenty degrees colder than February and March.

  It was a miserable time, and the woman from Utah who wrote the song about springtime in the Rockies obviously lived on the western slope. Only the red-winged blackbird gives the period any distinction; even the hawks try to avoid the cold. There is much truth in the saying, “Colorado has only three seasons—July, August and winter.”

  In 1931 in Colorado a new misery was added. During the last week in March a strong wind began blowing from the northwest, and it continued for five days. There had been winds before, but this one was ominous, for it kept low, hugging the earth, as if it intended to suck from the soil what little moisture had been deposited by the inadequate snows that year. Walter Bellamy, studying the direction and force of the wind, predicted, “If this keeps up another week, it’ll be like losing seven inches of rainfall.”

  It did keep up. What was worse, it started a howling sound which echoed across the empty plains. It was low and mournful, like the wailing of a wounded coyote, and it persisted day and night. The decibel strength was never high; it was not a roaring wind that deafened, but it had a penetrating quality that set the nerves on edge, so that at some unexpected moment a farmer, or more often his wife, would suddenly shout, “Damn the wind! Doesn’t it ever let up?”

  In June the howling subsided, and residents of the lonely homes across the prairie looked back with wry amusement at the way they had responded to it. It really set my nerves jangling,” Jenny Larsen confessed. “Wasn’t it strange the way it kept up, day after day?” Alice Grebe, to whom this question was directed, said nothing, for there had been days in May when she thought she might go out of her senses, and she was afraid.

  The men spent June in drilling their augers into the soil to calculate just how much damage the wind had done, and their conclusions were pessimistic. “If we don’t get one more good gully-washer,” Magnes Volkema predicted, “we’re going to be in real trouble.”

  None came. Instead, in late June the wind returned, this time with terrible consequences.

  Alice Grebe was working in the yard, trying to ignore the whistling when she happened to look west toward the mountains, and there, coming directly at her, was a monstrous cloud forty thousand feet high and so wide it filled the sky.

  “Earl!” she cried, but he was in the far fields turning a mulch in case rains came.

  As she watched the onslaught, she felt happy on the one hand, for the rain would drench the fields, but on the other, she was afraid, for the winds might be violent. “Don’t let it do much damage,” she prayed.

  Her prayer was unnecessary, for this was not a damaging storm. There was no rain, no wrecking winds, but it did bring something Alice Grebe had never seen before: a universe of swirling dust, a blackness that blotted out the sun, a choking, all-pervading silt that would seep through every wall and window.

  When the mighty duststorm, silent and terrifying, first engulfed her, she thought she would choke. Spitting dust from her dry lips, she ran indoors to protect her children, and found them coughing. She sat with them for two hours, two of the strangest hours she had ever spent, for although it was midday, the sky was dark as night, and a weird gloom covered the earth.

  Then the storm passed, leaving piles of dust everywhere, and after a while Earl returned to the house, spitting and stamping his feet. “That was a wild one!” he said as he entered the kitchen.

  “W
hat was it?” Alice asked in real perplexity.

  “Just a duststorm.”

  “It was terrifying, Like a tornado with no wind.”

  “There wasn’t much wind, was there?”

  That night the neighbors gathered to discuss this phenomenon, and Walter Bellamy drove out to meet with them. “We may be in for some real trouble,” he said. “I received a newspaper from Montana yesterday. They’ve had a succession of such storms.”

  “Oh, dear, no!” Alice cried involuntarily.

  “Now, Alice,” her husband said. “If it’s not hail and it’s not a tornado, I guess we can survive.”

  That became questionable when the next towering storm rolled in, vast black clouds of dust sweeping even the redwings and the hawks from the sky. It was a paralyzing storm—no wind, no moaning, no rainfall, just the terrible presence of dust seeping into every crevice, irritating every membrane.

  “I cannot tolerate this,” Alice whispered to herself but she refrained, from showing her fear lest she frighten the children.