“What’s happening, Mommy?” her five-year-old daughter asked as dust invaded the kitchen.
“It’s a storm, dear, and storms pass.”
This one took five hours to go by, and when it was over, the citizens of Line Camp were shocked at its consequences, for in outdoor areas as much as nine inches of dust had accumulated against walls and fences, and in the houses a film of dust perhaps an eighth of an inch thick had seeped in through walls and closed windows.
Nothing had escaped. Vesta Volkema said, “I opened my refrigerator door and there was dust on everything.”
That summer there were nine such storms at Line Camp. Never had the residents experienced such dreadful occurrences, and men began each day by looking westward. At dawn the sky would be clear. At eleven there would be a faint shadow below the mountains. By three in the afternoon the great, silent, towering form would creep through the sky, bringing the dust of Wyoming across the land, picking up the dust of Colorado and carrying it into Kansas.
It was toward the end of this year that a macabre story started circulating: if a man murders his wife during a duststorm, there will be no jury trial, because his act will be understandable.
Many farm women did find it impossible to live with the dust, and several in the Line Camp and Wendell area had to be carted off to mental institutions, for it was no easy thing to sit alone in some remote cabin and listen to the soft moaning of the wind and feel the choking dust come creeping at you, covering your shoes and your stockings and lying ever so lightly on your apron and choking your nose, and all this happening in broad daylight, except that it seemed like gloomy night.
“Save me! Save me!” the Lindenmeir woman had screamed as she ran four miles across the prairie. Like a wild woman she burst into Vesta Volkema’s kitchen, and Magnes had to tie her down and haul her in to Greeley.
In every respect the year was a disaster. Even Earl Grebe, acknowledged as the best farmer in the district, could make no more than six bushels to the acre, and he had to sell it at thirty-three cents the bushel, about half the lowest previous price in this century.
“At that price, I’m giving it away,” he told his family, but before they could comment, he added, “What else can we do? We can’t eat it all.”
In 1933 no farmer in the district harvested a single bushel of wheat, and the same applied in 1934. In farmhouse after farmhouse there was not a penny of income during these two years, and some came close to starving. Farmers killed their livestock for lack of fodder to give them, and then found no market for the meat because no one had money to buy it.
And the duststorms kept returning, one after another, in high, billowing grandeur, sweeping the world before them. Dust became a constant presence that choked and strangled. Children wore masks over their noses as they went to school, and many farm wives wore caps night and day to keep the dust from their hair.
But even in the third year of the dreadful affliction, farmers whose lives were being slowly blown away were able to make grisly jokes. Visitors to Magnes Volkema’s farm were astonished to find his plow resting upside down on top of his barn. “It’s the only way I can earn any money,” he explained. “As the fields blow out of Colorado, I plow them for their new owners in Kansas.”
Vesta said, “What little money we do get we spend on cinnamon.” This seemed so preposterous that the people to whom she said this stepped back to study her. “We mix it with the dust and make believe we’re eating cinnamon toast.”
At the store in Line Camp they told of the chickens who thought that what was covering them was snow and froze to death. Another farmer saw a hawk flying into the storm with a red-winged blackbird going ahead to brush the dust out of his eyes. When it came time for one farmer to pay his mortgage, he complained, “I don’t know where to go. The paper is in Philip Wendell’s safe in Centennial, but my farm’s in Nebraska.”
This problem of mortgages, however, was not amusing. For the lack of forty dollars to cover interest, many a farmer lost land worth thousands, and the government seemed powerless to prevent such tragedy. Nineteen farms in Line Camp were foreclosed by Philip Wendell; sixteen others were sold by the sheriff to pay back taxes, sometimes amounting to only a few dollars. By legal trickery, often of the most venal sort, some of the hardest-working men and women of America had their land stolen from them. Of the nineteen farms foreclosed by Wendell, the average price he had to pay per acre was sixteen cents.
In most respects 1934 was the year of hell. The wheat crop was zero. At the Grebe farm, that rich and wide land which had supported its people so well, a family of six children and two adults had to live on sixteen dollars a month, and there were many days when they ate only one meal. The younger children lacked milk and vitamins. The older children were in the midst of their education, and it was cut out from under them; sometimes their mother would cry herself to sleep as she contemplated the ruin of their bright young lives.
But she grieved most for her second son, Timmy, twelve years old and at that age when a boy entering adolescence discovered so many things he wanted to do. And there was not a penny he could have ... nothing ... nothing. “Oh, God!” she wept one wintry day as she watched him swinging off to school. “How can this nation allow such things to happen?”
And then, in the fall of the year, Mr. Bellamy, tall and thin as ever, heard some good news. Calling together all the deprived young boys of the area, he told them about an exciting development in Denver: in the January stock show there’s to be a new event: ‘Catch It and You Can Keep It.’”
“What’s that?” Timmy Grebe asked.
“It’s not for sissies,” Bellamy warned. “Twenty boys ... just like you ... you’ll go into the big arena with thousands of people watching. And all you’ll have is a halter attached to a ten-foot rope. A bugle will sound, and they’ll release ten calves. And you boys, if you’re lucky enough to make the trip, will chase those calves, and wrestle them to the ground, and the boy who fixes his halter around a calf’s head and leads it away unaided will win that calf.”
“He will?” Timmy asked.
“He’ll bring the calf home, and feed it, and next winter he’ll take it back to the stock show, and if it wins the judging, it’ll be auctioned, and the money, lots of it, will be his to keep.”
Eleven boys sat silent, dreaming of such an event, but Mr. Bellamy dampened their ardor somewhat by saying, “So the big problem is, where can we borrow some calves to practice with?”
The local families had none, but one of the boys had a logical suggestion. “Mrs. Lloyd helps people,” and all agreed to ask her for the use of some of her calves.
Six of the boys piled into Mr. Bellamy’s car and drove to Venneford, where Mrs. Lloyd met them formally in the room with the moose heads. “To what do I owe this pleasure?”
It had been agreed that Timmy Grebe would make the presentation. so he coughed, sat forward in his chair and explained about the calves. “A splendid idea!” the severe old woman said, and forthwith she summoned Henry Garrett and told him to deliver four sturdy calves to the Grebe farm. “Boys should be active,” she told her visitors as she served them sandwiches and cinnamon buns. As she watched them wolf the food she thought, My God, are they really so hungry?
With the four Crown Vee calves Bellamy taught his boys how to tackle the frisky animals, wrestle them to the ground and slap the halter over their noses. It was difficult work, and since a boy had to have a certain weight in order to keep the calf down, it began to look as if Timmy Grebe, a year younger than the others, might be too light. “He might better wait till next year,” Bellamy told Alice Grebe, but she pleaded that he be allowed to try.
“You can’t imagine what this has done for him, Mr. Bellamy.”
“I can guess. Well, if he wants to try ...”
The next night Timmy did not appear for family dinner, but his parents could guess where he was. They had seen him heading for the Volkema farm, and knew that he would be in a stall, wrestling with a you
ng steer twice the weight of the calves that would be used.
Crash! The steer slammed him against the boards, but up he rose to try again.
Slam! The steer flashed his hindquarters, sending Timmy spinning around the wall, but he regained his feet, hitched up-his pants and tried again.
The steer butted the twelve-year-old into a corner. With his right hand in the animal’s face, Timmy backed him away.
Then, with a flying tackle, Timmy wrapped himself around the steer’s head and neck, and for a wild two minutes boy and Hereford rolled and slammed around the stall. They made so much noise that Vesta Volkema came out with a lantern to see what was happening, and when she saw Timmy bleeding from several wood burns, and the astonished steer shaking its head wildly, trying to throw the boy clear, she started to laugh and jabbed the Hereford with a pitchfork, causing it to back into a comer, where the boy could safely let go.
“Get home with you!” she said, after satisfying herself that no bones had been broken.
He walked home through the November evening as content as he had ever been. Above, in the clear sky, he saw Orion, battle-bound between the Dog Star and the Bull, and as he watched, he heard geese from Canada flying south, signaling to one another as their multiple Vs wandered back and forth. When he entered the kitchen, dark spots and bruises about his face, he told his mother, “Maybe I won’t catch me a calf, but I sure ain’t gonna be scared.”
In January, Mr. Bellamy selected Timmy and the Larsen boy for the contest, and drove them to Denver in his own car. The city was magnificent, with official buildings decorated with red, green and orange lights, and stockmen clustering about the Albany Hotel, and the famous rodeo champions from states as distant as Texas and Oregon strutting through the lobbies.
There was nothing in America quite like Denver’s National Western Stock Show, for here the quality of the west’s prime industry was determined. It had a daily rodeo, of course, but it also had hard-nosed judgings of Herefords and Black Angus, and how a man’s bull did in such contests affected the success or failure of his ranch. Men would borrow their wives’ curling irons to dress their animals and use shoe polish to make hoofs glisten. Morning, afternoon and night there were shows, and races and exhibitions and judging and baking contests, but that year the thing most people wanted to see was the Catch It, Keep It contest.
As the twenty boys waited in the dark bowels of the arena, like gladiators of Rome about to face the animals, a long-time rodeo hero saw little Timmy and talked with him. “You’re the youngest and the lightest, aren’t you? I’ll bet I know what you have in mind. Run like hell for one of the smallest calves. But that’s not a good idea, because all those older boys will dive for the little calves too. And they’ll knock you galley west. So when the whistle blows, dash down there and grab the biggest, because the other kids will leave him alone.” He stared at Timmy. “You ain’t scared, are you?”
“I ain’t scared.”
“Then grab for the biggest.”
Timmy listened carefully, and it was fortunate he did, for as the rodeo hand had predicted, everyone made a jump at the smaller calves, and big boys muscled the younger away. Timmy, in the meantime, had made a flying leap at a rowdy Hereford, and to his delight, bore the surprised animal right to the ground. How much smaller the calf was than the steer he had practiced with in the Volkema barn—this was going to be easy!
But it wasn’t. No Hereford calf was ever easy to push around, not even for a grown man, and as Timmy lay with the calf’s head locked in his arms, he found to his dismay that whereas he could keep the Hereford pinned down, it required all his weight to do so, and he had no possible chance of applying the halter. Oh, Jesus! he prayed. Let me hold him.
But he felt himself growing weaker and the white-faced calf growing stronger. The other nine calves had been led away and now everyone in the auditorium focused on the gallant fight between the little boy and the rambunctious calf.
“Hold on, kid!” the crowd began to roar, and the rodeo hand slipped along the barrier and shouted, “Throw your leg over his neck! Kid! Throw your leg!”
With a titanic effort Timmy tried to get his left leg across the calf’s neck, but the sturdy Hereford was too strong. Slowly, slowly the struggling animal began to break free. Oh, Jesus! the boy pleaded. Don’t let him get away. I need him!
But the inexorable weight of the calf was too much, and to the groans of thousands of adults, Timmy felt the calf break loose and scamper free. He lay in the dust while a bigger boy tackled the rebellious white-face and led him off.
“Tough luck, kids” a man shouted as Timmy stood up, dusted himself off and started the long walk to the exit, without a calf.
He went into a corner of the waiting area and bit his lip to keep from crying. He stuck his little jaw in the air and kicked at the wooden siding. I wasn’t scared, he told himself, but in this he found no consolation. He’d had a calf, but it had escaped.
“If you want to cry,” a voice said, “let her go.” It was the rodeo hand, and be sat with Timmy and told of the many times he had been knocked against the wall and lost the prize.
They were sitting there when a roar went up from the arena. The rodeo man, fearing that one of his friends had been hurt by a Brahma bull, ran to the entrance, stood there for a while, then walked back to where Timmy sat, still biting his lip.
“It’s you, kid,” the rider said. “It’s you they want.”
“Me?”
“Yep. Get yourse’f out there.” And he led Timmy back to the arena, where another roar rose from the crowd, while he stood bewildered, still holding back tears.
Then he heard the loudspeaker booming and felt the searchlights playing in his eyes. “Because you put up, such a terrific fight, Timmy Grebe, Charlotte Lloyd of the Crown Vee Hereford ranch wants to award you a calf, anyway.” A wild cheer rose from the crowd as a spunky white-face was led in. “Take him home, Timmy. You earned him.”
As the little boy led the calf across the arena thousands of people cheered, and when he got to the exit the rodeo man was waiting to congratulate him, “I’m going to call him Rodeo,” Timmy said.
Timmy’s victory gave the trouble-stricken community of Line Camp something to talk about, but it brought no money into the Grebe household. Salvation was to come from a most unexpected quarter. The driver of the school bus was stricken with a hernia; he had been holding down three jobs to feed his family. Ethan Grebe was given the job temporarily; it paid almost nothing, but it did pay cash, and with this the family could buy more food.
It hurt Alice and Earl to have to take from their son money which should have gone for a college education, but as Earl told Alice, “The times are so mixed up, we have to adjust to everything. One of these days we’ll be growing wheat again.”
But not that year. The duststorms continued, and Timmy had to build a special lean-to in order to protect Rodeo from being smothered. Fences were especially vulnerable. The terrible force would send a horde of tumbleweeds across a field; they would be imprisoned by some fence, and when the next storm hit, the weeds would catch so much dust that the fences would vanish and cattle would roam for a score of miles.
What affected Alice Grebe the most was the constant noise—the awful moaning of the wind as it swept across the prairies. On some days its high intensity drove her to a frenzy, and Vesta proposed that she be sent to Denver, to get her off the prairie before she had a breakdown. Earl would have wanted to do this but the Grebes had no money. They literally had no money beyond the few dollars that Ethan brought in, and during the summer recess they did not even have that.
And then Alice did reach the breaking point. It was a very dry August day, with the earth parched and breaking, when she heard her youngest daughter, Betsy, making a curious sound. She ran into the yard, not able to guess what might be happening, and saw to her horror that a huge rattlesnake had come down from the buttes seeking water. He was only a few feet from the child, a monstrous snake almost six feet long
and very thick, with an evil-looking head and a black tongue which kept probing the area ahead. His skin was scarred and dark, and his rattlers were rough. As Alice watched, he moved toward the baby.
She would never be able to explain how she found the courage, but she grabbed a hoe and thrust herself in the space between her child and the rattler. With awkward chopping strokes, she hacked away at the huge serpent, driving it back and cutting it whenever it tried to attack her. With a fury she had never known before, she fought the snake for some minutes, countering its thrusts with savage swipes of the hoe, then, after one swift strike of the venomous head, which almost caught her on the leg, she cut it in two and watched in horror while the halves writhed, as if each had a life of its own, as if together they might yet attack both her and the child.
She stood leaning on the hoe, unable to move. She could hear the prattle of her child behind her, but she could not take her eyes off the dead snake. She was still standing there like a statue when Earl came in from the fields.
“What’re you doing, Alice?” he asked as he approached her.
She could not answer ... just stood there. And then he looked down and saw the severed snake, as hideous in death as it had been in life.
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