Sayre knew at once what that letter was. It was the one Mr. Kitchell had given Dad the day before, and had come from a college professor who was writing agricultural college textbooks. He asked permission to make use of Charley’s spreader story as an illustration of what vocational agriculture was actually accomplishing among farm boys.
“I’d rather be the father of a boy like that, Morgan, than own—”
“A few more kids like that on this here reclamation irrigation project and—”
As Sayre stepped back so as not to interrupt her father’s moment of triumph, her glance fell and rested upon the store’s proprietor, busy within earshot of the stove group. His expression made her uneasy.
“Dad,” she ventured at home that evening, “I’m sure Mr. Hoskins doesn’t like your talking so much to the men in the store about Charley’s spreader.”
“You’re mistaken, Sayre. No one’s spoken to me more cordially about it than Mr. Hoskins. He says the little notice that spreader’s got from the outside has had a fine influence upon his own boy. He’s always wanted Frank to be more interested in agriculture, he owns so much land, himself. But Frank’s been rather indifferent. Now he’s taking hold. Planning other things besides his five new alfalfa acres. Going to plant five acres of field peas like Charley. And raise turkeys and chickens like you. Mr. Hoskins is real grateful to Charley for the way his spreader had got Frank stirred up.”
Sayre was not convinced. Neither was Charley. They were all at the supper table. “What’s Mr. Hoskins after, Dad, handing me all that?” The boy laughed good-naturedly. “Mr. Hoskins isn’t over keen about Dad’s puffing, Sayre; but it’s Mr. Hansen’s championing me around the community as Mr. Kitchell’s pupil that really rubs him all raw under his slick skin.”
Sayre did not give the matter thought for long. Something else more upsetting happened too soon after. Sam Parsons arrived, three months earlier than he had ever mentioned coming, to pay the Morgans his promised visit. At once he made it plain that he intended to stay during the entire growing season.
Sayre, for the first time in months, fully recalled words her father had uttered on their ride home from the land office on the day after their arrival on the Pawaukee. “We’re out here to work it for him the way the Government requires a homesteader to do. It requires him to live on it, too. That’s what he’ll tell the Government he’s doing when he comes to visit us.”
5
Another Blow
Now that part-time school was over Charley often hiked part way into town in the morning, picking up rides as best he could. He left home reluctantly the day after Sam Parsons’ arrival. “Don’t you give in about anything, Sayre.” His sister was waiting outside for their guest to take him on a tour of the place and outline her own and Charley’s plans. “If he starts to kick—”
Was this really Charley? Sayre hugged the thought. “He didn’t at breakfast when we told him all about school.”
“I know. But I’m not sure that all that about plowing under the alfalfa soaked in. His skull’s pretty thick.”
“I’ll make it soak.”
Mr. Parsons appeared arrayed in his neat, shiny floorwalker clothes. How had this lady-like man ever come to think he could make a farmer, Sayre wondered as, bubbling with amusement, she noted his beautifully polished shoes.
Hitty, who had stopped going to school for the year when Sayre had, was skipping close at Mr. Parsons’ heels. That hatless, sunburned, plump youngster was certainly no longer the frail, quiet child of the time when the Morgans had come to the homestead. She danced along, prattling in a chirrupy stream as the three crossed the back yard to the alfalfa fields beyond, now fresh with the young green of early spring growth.
Mr. Parsons bestowed most of his attention upon Hitty. Still, whenever Sayre demanded it he bent toward her with his best floorwalker manner, listening so sympathetically that she did not realize at the time how little he really said.
She began pointing out fields. “Those two plowed fields are for my potatoes. Mr. Hansen’s doing our plowing whenever he can get it into his time. We’re to pay him with a percentage of the crop. We’re allowed that at school.
“Over there we’ll raise what grain we can. We’ll keep those two acres in alfalfa for our own use. On the two beyond, Charley will raise rutabagas for his sheep, since we haven’t any silage. We’ll have to enlarge the root cellar a lot.”
Hitty’s sweet, piping call broke into this recital, then Sayre went on:
“Hitty can’t wait to have you see the orphan lambs. She’s crazy about them. Funny you never raised sheep on those waste acres that aren’t good for anything but forage. These lambs are all Corriedales, that cross between Rambouillets and Leicesters and Lincolns that is so popular among the big sheep men in the mountains. If Charley’s pea project turns out well he’s going to buy some purebred ewes in the fall, and maybe a Rambouillet ram.
“Another year, with good sow litters and a full lamb crop, and perhaps a heifer or two if we can manage to buy them, we’ll really have quite a few head of stock. Livestock’s what these farms have got to have if they are ever—”
Sayre’s glib quoting of Mr. Kitchell was again interrupted by Hitty, this time with a wail. “Oh, it’s hurt.”
Two lambs had been jumping along so close at Hitty’s heels that in trying to avoid one she had stumbled over the other. Seated flat on the ground she was now gathering the upset lamb into her arms, and bending over it to mingle her motherly crooning with its squeaky little bleats. The other lamb promptly braced two stiff front legs on Hitty’s knee and looked down upon the proceeding with sober-faced curiosity. “Oh, Mr. Parsons, feel it, please. Its hind leg—”
With stiff incompetence the little man bent to comply just as the supposedly injured lamb jumped nimbly out of Hitty’s arms straight in the direction of his face. His startled leap brought Sayre a desperate struggle to control her laughter. She had to answer the question Mr. Parsons was asking to cover up the eclipse of his dignity.
“Put in new alfalfa?” Sayre managed to repeat. “I should say not, not the way we feel about Mr. Kitchell.” She outlined the story of the school alfalfa contest.
“That contest is nothing less than spite work on Mr. Hoskins’ part against Mr. Kitchell for teaching his pupils that they’ll never be anything but broke if they keep on selling all their alfalfa.
“Besides, where would we grow any new alfalfa? The only possible place is along that awfully weedy south ditch. Imagine,” the girl laughed, “a prize crop on that field.”
Mr. Parsons’ answering smile was very satisfactory. In fact so receptive did he appear throughout the entire trip that Sayre felt very triumphant as she awaited Charley’s homecoming.
That afternoon Mr. Parsons went to town with Dad. Something was different between the two men when they came home, and as they sat down to supper Mr. Parsons announced, “I’ll talk with you further, Morgan, after the young people have gone to bed.”
Sayre lay awake late that night, listening to the hum of the two men’s voices through her closed bedroom door. She could catch no word. At her first glance at her father the next morning she saw that he was back in one of his old defeated moods.
It was Saturday. Everybody was full of plans for work. Breakfast was a hurried meal and, except for Hitty’s chatter, a silent one. Mr. Parsons asked for the ‘Shake to go to town, and with relief Sayre saw him drive away before the others had finished eating.
“Well, Dad?” Charley remarked then. So he, too, realized that something was coming.
For the next few minutes brother and sister listened in numbed silence to their father’s report of the previous evening’s conversation. The substance of it was that Sam Parsons positively forbade the twins to carry out their plans. “Argument is useless, children, I’m afraid,” Dad concluded. “This is his land. At least, it isn’t ours. He’ll allow us five of the cultivated acres, he says, to use as we please. Two are already plowed under for Sayre’s potatoes
. The other three we can use as we like, harvest the alfalfa, or turn it into garden, or add to Sayre’s poultry yards. But fifteen of the alfalfa acres are his, to be irrigated, harvested, and sold as hay. And those five acres along that weedy south ditch bank, which have a little natural drainage, must be put into alfalfa again. He’s sure another planting will bring something of a crop in spite—”
“So that’s the way he keeps his agreements!” Sayre exploded. “I hope you told him straight out what we think of him. Not only about this, but about the lies he told us to get us out here. And about—”
“Sayre! Sayre! How could I? Situated as we are. On his land. Living in his house. With nowhere else to go. Besides—”
“Besides what?”
“I don’t think he can help things. He was decided. But he was apologetic, too. Said he wasn’t free. Had debts. A note.”
“More debts? I thought he paid Mr. Hoskins what he owed him with last year’s alfalfa?”
“Not entirely, it seems,” Mr. Morgan faltered, “although he certainly gave me to understand—”
“Was he in the store yesterday?”
“Yes.”
“Talking to Mr. Hoskins?”
“Yes.”
“That explains it. It’s just as Mr. Nels Hansen says. Mr. Hoskins has got to have any money owed him in unbaled hay when it’s cheap, so he can bale it and store it and ship it when the market’s high. Or else—” Sayre gave her dark head a defiant toss—“or else,” she repeated fiercely, “Mr. Frank Hoskins, Senior, is trying to keep the Morgan twins from having any chance of getting ahead of Frank Hoskins, Junior, again at this vocational agriculture game that the locality’s got so interested in lately, thanks to Charley’s spreader. He’s found his way to take his spite out on us for not biting at his alfalfa contest bait.”
“Sayre, I’m ashamed of you. Will you never learn self-control?”
“I’d rather learn how to fight.” Shoving back her chair, the girl hurried to the window and stood there, her back to the room, fearful lest her father and Charley detect how near to the surface were the tears.
Charley, meanwhile, had been listening to his father’s report and Sayre’s outbursts in a sort of stony silence. Now he, too, rose, walked across the room with an air that was almost unconcern, paused, and spoke in a firm voice that held none of the quivering anger of Sayre’s. “Right here’s where I quit.” Then he flung himself out of the kitchen door.
Sayre followed him to see him turn down the driveway which led to the outer gate. “Charley,” she demanded, “where you going?”
“To the garage. Try to get my last summer’s job back.”
“So you’re quitting? Again? Even after football, and the spreader, and everything?”
“How can I help quitting when I haven’t any land?” the boy shouted back before he stalked out of hearing.
Sayre’s quick resentment flared up at her brother. “Isn’t that just like a boy?” she muttered to herself. “All he has to do is to clear out. But I’ll have to stay here and cook good meals for that man all summer after he’s knocked the bottom all out of everything.”
She was too miserable to hold resentment against Charley long. There was work to be done and she was glad of it. She was going to venture a half-acre of early potatoes—a foolish gamble, Mr. Kitchell thought, in this land of late frosts. But these early spring days were so promisingly warm, and the prices for early potatoes so alluring.
Going out to a shed she managed with much tugging and heaving to raise one well-filled gunny-sack into a borrowed wheelbarrow. She trundled the sack out to the waiting field. At one corner of the field she dumped the gunny-sack’s contents out on the ground. They were potato seedlings already cut into pieces with two eyes at least to a piece, and already limed. How she had enjoyed the labor of preparing them! And now—would they be her crop or Sam Parsons’? Anyway, they’d have to be planted or they’d spoil. She couldn’t waste Aunt Mehitable’s money that had gone into them.
Charley had laid out the rows for her before breakfast with a marker he’d made out of a log. Now with her hoe she began cutting into the loose ground prepared for the seedlings. Opening holes a foot and a half apart, she dropped into each hole by hand two potato seedlings, eyes uppermost. Then she covered them, heaving the loose dirt into hills with her hoe. She firmed the dirt with the same implement. Occasionally, too, she even dropped on her knees to perform the task to her better satisfaction with her hands. And every little while she went back to trundle more seedlings to the spot where she happened to be working.
“But what’s the use?” she thought. “What’s the use of anything? You have a dream”—not quite a plan; too vague for that, just a dream; she could see that clearly now—“Just the same, you worked for it; and you schemed for it; and you got Charley steered where he was working for it without knowing it. And you built all your hope on it, and got things really going, and then—” The thought was too torturing to finish. Was this the sort of thing that had been happening to Dad all these years? If it was, small wonder he got disheartened.
Even with such thoughts brooding in her mind, Sayre’s hands were working competently at high speed. It was amazing how fast she could do such back-breaking work under that hot, mounting sun, nerved to high tension as she was with anger. She began milling over the things she wished she had said to Charley, plus a lot of vindictive thoughts against the man who had so upset their plans.
“And Mr. Parsons seems actually to have made Dad believe we misunderstood his agreement about our coming out here! And that after living in his house all winter we’re honor bound to work the old place for him. Irrigate and harvest all that alfalfa. Charley and I won’t do it—that’s a cinch. He’d make Dad pay for the water and ditch maintenance, too, if he could. For once it’s lucky that Dad hasn’t any money, and that the Government makes the water be paid for in advance this year before it’s turned into the ditches. None of Aunt Hitty’s money’s going to pay for water for Parsons and Hoskins alfalfa.
“I’d like to move right off his old homestead. There’re plenty of abandoned ones we could move on to. But not one that’s any good. For this year, anyway.
“And there’s all Aunt Mehitable’s money we’ve spent, and signed notes for at the bank. For my two hundred and fifty baby chicks. And my ten nice Bronze turkey hens and those expensive eggs for their settings. And there’s all the time I spent building over, out of any old lumber I could get hold of, that dirty box that Mr. Parsons had into a light, airy chicken house. Thank goodness, my new compartment turkey house is portable. And so is the hog house Charley made for Dad’s sow and her spring litter. And there’re those seed peas of Charley’s that cost so much that I had to ask Aunt Hitty for another sixty dollars.”
Sayre wiped away a tear with the back of her hand, leaving a big streak of dirt across her face. Then she crept ahead on her knees under the glaring sun. As the work grew more wearisome she used her hands less. Still she toiled doggedly on, firming the ground over her seedlings first with her hoe and then with her feet.
“I’m going straight to Mr. Kitchell about it this very afternoon, so that these potatoes and the chickens and the turkeys can be fixed some way as surely mine. I’ve got my vocational agriculture agreement papers that he and Dad and I all signed. I’ll get Mr. Kitchell to tell me about how to have Sam Parsons sign them, too. He can’t refuse when not a cent of his went into anything that’s mine.”
Comforted a little by the last idea she plodded on, though the thought of Charley still worried her. Dinner time came and went, and her brother had not come home.
Just as Sayre was putting the remains of the dinner into the oven to keep warm, she heard outside the familiar chugging of the ‘Shake. Her father stood waiting for it on the back step. A glance through the door told Sayre that the car’s lone occupant was not Sam Parsons but Charley.
A moment later the boy burst into the kitchen. “Smile, Sayre,” he cried. “Smile hard.” He caught his
sister around the waist and swung her joyfully the full length of the room.
She dropped, panting, on a chair. “What now? A new job?” Her tone was bitter.
But Charley laughed. “Yes, sir,” he triumphed. “A new job. Remember that Mr. Cowan who wanted to buy my manure spreader? Owns that peach of an eighty out the other side of Upham near the Hoskins home place? You know, where Nels Hansen got your seed potatoes?”
“Yes.”
“You’re looking at his new hired man.”
“Charley!” Sayre sprang, quivering, to her feet.
“Chores and part-time work until school’s out. Then a pretty steady job for the summer, mostly irrigating. For pay I’m to get my board and twenty cents an hour for the irrigating, and besides, the use of ten of the best acres on the eighty to farm on my own in any way I please!”
“Charley! It’s too good to be true.”
“All Mr. Kitchell’s doing and the spreader’s. Nothing like being famous. You get my rations ready; I’ll tell you about it.”
Ladling a dipperful of water from the pail into the tin basin on the wash bench, Charley proceeded vigorously to wash, his bright eyes all the while following his sister as she alternately moved about her work and paused to listen to the eager flow of his story.
“On the way to town I had to walk quite a while before I picked up a ride. And I got to thinking. Quitting began to seem like letting Mr. Kitchell and vocational Ag work down. And I just couldn’t do it, go back on a man like Mr. Kitchell.”
“Of course you couldn’t. Not after the spreader.”
“Then, too, there was that speech of yours about Frank Hoskins, Senior, and Frank Hoskins, Junior, and the Morgan twins, and about old Hoskins getting in his spite work because of our stand on his alfalfa contest. That got to sticking in my crop. And the longer it stuck, the bigger it got. My feathers began to get considerably ruffled, too, when I remembered that I’d be flapping so conveniently out of Lumpy Hoskins’ way after all this nice little rivalry we’ve been working at so hard ever since school started last fall. So I went straight to Mr. Kitchell and told him our whole mess.”
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