Satan's Bushel

by Garet Garrett

  Why? I did not ask him. It was his impulse. Undoubtedly he sensed the fact that she was humiliated at his finding them in this vulgar environment.

  What she had received from him in a little satin case turned out to be an exact and exquisite reproduction, in jewels, precious metal and enamel, of that wheat spikelet in flower he had once received from her in an uninscribed envelope. With it was a slip of paper bearing his address and telephone number. Nothing else.

  When he came the next day she was in the same place. He went directly to her. She was wearing the jewel at her throat. The first thing she did with a naïve gesture was to hand him a slip of paper on which their address was written. She had it ready and was therefore expecting him.

  “When may I come there?” he asked.

  “We used to come from there straight here,” she said, “and go from here straight home again. Never anywhere else. Lately on leaving here we’ve been walking a good deal, just to go out of our way. That takes a little time.”

  “To avoid the people who follow you?” he asked.

  She nodded. “They’re beginning to do that,” she said. “Father doesn’t like it to be known where we live.”

  “Why not a cab?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “We tried that. But we had to keep giving the driver directions without knowing any place to go. It’s better to walk.”

  Dreadwind was wondering how they lived—in what circumstances. The address was a number in Wabash Avenue, far down; it would be in the press of the city, where no one lived any more.

  “We have some rooms there, over a store,” she said, answering his thoughts. “Three. It’s very simple.”

  She regarded him again with that wondering expression.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  For a moment she hesitated, then reddened and asked: “Do you do this too?”

  By this she obviously meant what her father was doing over there in the pit. Did Dreadwind do a similar thing in another place? That was what she was asking.

  “Once I did,” he said. “Not any more.” She seemed relieved and looked away; and he became distressed. “I think I know why your father does it,” he added. “His reason is better than mine was.”

  This was delicate ground. First, his answer to her question implied a reflection on her father; then what he added in defence of him to mend that effect seemed clearly to imply that she had cast a reflection upon him to begin with.

  “I was thinking of you,” she said.

  What he said next was utterly stupid. Still, it was the kind of stupidity that does not matter.

  “Did you know I tried all summer to find you?” he asked.

  She looked at him gravely for a moment, the trace of a smile appeared, and she made no answer.

  CHAPTER IX

  THAT evening Dreadwind called.

  Their rooms were on the top floor of one of those very old brick-wall buildings that have still enough economic life left to pay taxes while the land continues to increase in value for the steel structures that will ultimately dispossess them. The entrance lay between haberdashery and musical instruments. The character of the tenantry above was indicated by tin signs and placards on the walls of the hallway and on the stair risers—a painless dental parlor, a manufacturer of sporting novelties, a banjo teacher, a job printer, Prof. Ranjit, presumably a vender of bottled darkness, and so on. At the top of each stairway was a low-burning gas jet. The place was very still. The uppermost floor, which was the fourth, had the appearance of being unoccupied until Dreadwind saw far back a light showing through a transom. There he knocked.

  The response was not immediate. After several moments of silence light footsteps approached the door. The bolt clicked and Cordelia looked out. Seeing who it was she opened the door wide and said good evening.

  What Dreadwind entered was evidently their kitchen, dining room and living room all in one. It was lighted by gas, burning in a single jet at the end of a pipe that came straight down from the ceiling and terminated in a snakish curve. A black iron sink in one corner. Some pieces of crockery on a painted shelf. On a box by the window a one-burner gas stove, the flame at low duty under a kettle of water. On the window ledge outside milk bottles and food parcels. That was the larder. They had just dined on milk, bread, cheese and stewed prunes. The things had not been cleared off the table, which was covered with checkered oilcloth. Two wooden chairs were a little pushed back from it. The walls were decorated in a startling way with three-color advertising posters, fine half-tone impressions in black and white, and innumerable miscellany of the printing art—pasted to the wall with no thought of symmetry, order or agreement. Once this had been a job pressroom. There was an odor of printer’s ink, chemicals, strange incense, dried paste and closed plumbing.

  Under the gas light in a folding canvas chair sat Weaver. A dish of coffee was on the floor beside him. His knees were as high as his face. Open on one knee, as it were a pulpit-stand, lay the book he was reading—Paracelsus Theophrastus Bombastus in Latin.

  “Even to his habitation will ye seek and come,” he said, looking at Dreadwind. That was his salutation.

  “I have an errand with you,” said Dreadwind.

  “He has an errand,” the old man retorted. “No doubt he has an errand. That which is smoke is the mercurial principle. That which burns is the sulphurous principle. What remains is the ash.” He was so pleased with this delphic saying that he remembered the uses of hospitality. “Will you break bread with us?” he asked.

  Cordelia gave Dreadwind an expectant look and stood poised, with an arm already reached out toward the things she would prepare if he should say yes.

  “Another time, if you will ask me,” he said.

  “Some coffee, then. Bring him a dish of coffee, ye mercurial principle.”

  She moved to do this; but Dreadwind declined again.

  “My errand is with you alone,” he said to Weaver.

  “Leave us, Cordelia,” said the old man.

  He put his book face down on his knee, brought his ten finger tips together and gazed over them fixedly at Dreadwind, who, when Cordelia was gone, sat on one of the wooden chairs, facing him.

  “So you are the evil spirit one hears of in the wheat fields,” said Dreadwind in a low tone. “Father Rust himself. The killer of wheat.”

  There was a hardening of Weaver’s expression from a change in his eyes; nothing else. He did not move, but continued to gaze steadily at his acuser.

  “That bag you dropped the morning I surprised you by the roadside—I know what was in it,” said Dreadwind. “The seed of rust. Enough to have killed half the wheat in Kansas.”

  The old man’s eyes did not flinch.

  “I might deliver you to the law,” said Dreadwind, and waited.

  “You might,” said Weaver thoughtfully. “You might do that very thing. If it worries thee thou shouldst.”

  “I don’t intend to,” said Dreadwind.

  “I know you don’t intend to,” said Weaver.

  “However,” said Dreadwind, “I’m not the only person who knows what you’ve been sowing on the wind. I couldn’t have found out without letting others know. I mean that no matter what I intend to do the law may find you out.”

  “It may,” said the old man. “That is quite possible. Even so.”

  His voice was calm, quite level, with a note of taunting in it. Dreadwind was baffled. He regarded the old man with wonder. Could he be blind to the enormity of his offense? Was he a monster then? Or had he in him some deformed, fanatical conviction by which he justified his acts? In any respect, what a fatalist he was!

  “You must see the implications,” said Dreadwind. “They are damning. In one personality you go about the country casting death upon the wheat, pretending all the time to love and cherish it. In another personality you are a gambler in Chicago betting on the price to rise. First, you destroy the food itself; then you seek to profit by that wickedness. The more you kill with rust the scarcer
wheat will be and the higher it will rise. That’s how any jury on earth would see it. I can’t help seeing it that way myself.”

  There it was all naked. They looked at each other for a whole minute. Then in a low tone Weaver said: “Pretend is a strong word. A heinous word. I cannot forgive it.”

  That one word he seized upon. Evidently nothing else in the accusation had hurt at all.

  “You have been doing this now for a long time,” said Dreadwind, as if he knew it. There was no denial. “For years,” he added. Still no sign or gesture of denial. He continued relentlessly. “Each year the new wheat runs to meet you. Do you remember? Silly wheat! How easily you deceive it! Or perhaps it cannot imagine treachery. Is that it? And yet it knows. When you come with your sack of plague it knows. I saw that too. I saw it turn and run from you in terror.”

  He had touched the thing at last.

  With a singular continuous effort Weaver rose. For a moment he stood poised in a menacing attitude, looking down at Dreadwind. Then he put his hands behind him and began to walk, in a blind, trampling way, precisely as he had walked through the wheat that morning. The chair capsized and was propelled aside as if it were invisible and without weight. His book was trodden underfoot. The dish of coffee overturned and he did not see it. These sounds brought Cordelia to the door. He did not see her, either. She stood looking from one to the other with a curious, unfrightened expression. Dreadwind now was standing. Suddenly the old man stopped and faced him.

  “What will you have of me?” he asked.

  “Your reasons,” said Dreadwind.

  “You spoke of the farmers,” said Weaver.

  “I did not,” said Dreadwind.

  “You said they would hang me.”

  “I did not,” said Dreadwind.

  “You said what was true. They would,” said Weaver. “They would hang me with a hempen rope. But they hang themselves, they hang each other, with a rope they cannot see, a rope that does not exist. It’s name is surplus. Reasons—what? Reasons? There is only one. I did not make it. Nor do I understand it. Tell me if you do. Tell me why less brings more than plenty. Why do seven bushels profit the farmer more than ten? If you know why that is then everything else is clear. You don’t know. Nobody knows. And why will the farmer grow ten instead of seven? The surplus, what is called the surplus—the rope that hangs him—it is in the last three bushels. Yet he will produce them. He cannot help it. He must keep that bargain I spoke of—his side of it—which is to defend wheat from its enemies and give it space; and wheat in its boundless gratitude hath overwhelmed him. Now what? Shall the farmer who produces plenty be destroyed by his own industry? Or——”

  He paused, gazing all the time at Dreadwind, and when he spoke again his voice was altered.

  “The wheat,” he said. “The wheat itself. You spoke of that.”

  “I did,” said Dreadwind. “I spoke of that.”

  “That I stretched forth my hand against it.”

  “Yes,” said Dreadwind.

  “Thou didst,” said Weaver, extending his arm and pointing his finger. At a certain intensity of personal feeling he went naturally to the archaic pronouns and his tones became sepulchral. Does it sound theatrical? But it was effective because the emotion required that mode of expression. “Abominably thou didst,” he continued. “And that of all things was the one thou shouldst not have spoken of—to me. I say again, if it troubles thee in thy mind thou shouldst tell it to the law. Sooner do that than speak of it again—to me.”

  That was his period. It required an exit. There was always the possibility that he consciously dramatized such moments; but even if he did there was never anything false about the action. It expressed the deep and permanent phantasy of his being. That one has invented one’s own phantasy does not stultify the acting of it provided the invention to begin with was true to one’s nature. Weaver’s was. He lived a made-up tragedy, acted a self-assigned rôle, and yet it was all true.

  Having made the period he groped his way to the door through imaginary darkness—toward the outer door through which Dreadwind had entered, the door in which Cordelia was standing. She moved to let him pass, turning her back to the jamb. For a while he paced the hallway, Cordelia watching him from the doorway. His steps gradually diminished. Then a door opened and closed and all was still. He had gone into his room, which opened off the hall separately, as all the rooms did.

  With a glance at Dreadwind, Cordelia disappeared. He heard the same door open and close again. She was gone for perhaps fifteen minutes; and when she returned she made coffee and placed it before him in a yellow bowl, together with bread in the whole loaf and a large segment of cheese. He was to help himself. She did this all without speaking, as if she had done it before. Then she sat down at the end of the table and regarded him in a slow, musing manner, with no guise of defense or shyness.

  “Will anything happen?” she asked.

  “From what you heard us talking about just now?”

  She nodded.

  “No,” he answered. “I don’t think so. Do you remember I said I believed your father’s motive was better than mine had been? That was when you asked me, there by the wheat pit, if I did that too.”

  “I remember,” she said.

  “Well, I’m sure of it now,” he said. “Shall I tell you why?”

  She shook her head. “A woman to her own understanding,” she said. “He taught me that,” she added with a sober smile.

  “Your father is not looking so well,” said Dreadwind.

  “He never does here,” she said. “And this time it’s worse with him. You see, always before he has lost—in the first week or ten days everything there was, only just enough to keep us through the winter. That made the winters very long for him. But this is different. Now he is winning. He doesn’t tell me. But I know it.”

  “It doesn’t change your way of living,” said Dreadwind.

  “No,” she said. “It isn’t that. We should not know how to live in any other way. He is different. I hardly know him.”

  “How has he changed?” Dreadwind asked. “Does he talk of getting rich?”

  “Rich?” she repeated. It was a strange word. “No,” she said, “I’m sure he never thinks of that. It’s something he will do to wheat. In the night he thinks he is still there—in that dreadful place—calling for wheat—buying it higher and higher——” She stopped her ears. “Then something happens. I don’t know what that is. He is breathless for a moment and then he cries, ‘Ten dollars a bushel for all you’ve got!’ Do you understand it?”

  “It comes together,” he said. “Yes, I think I do.”

  They talked like this for hours. The fact of themselves they took for granted in some extraordinary sense that neither of them paused to consider. They asked and answered questions in an artless, unreserved manner, exactly as if all these things had happened to them during a long separation.

  She told him of her life with Weaver from the beginning, with apparently no thought of how preposterous the pattern of it was. Initio, that early winter night when she ran out of the door after him with her arctics flapping, a child of ten. He did not hear her; when she caught him by the coat, he picked her up, kissed her, set her down again and turned away, walking faster than before. She was puzzled for a moment and very desolate. She had made her choice. Everything in her little world she had cast away to follow him and apparently he did not want her.

  She looked back at the house. Someone had closed the door. No one was calling. The light burned brightly in the kitchen window, as if nothing had happened. How often it had beckoned her home, saying, “Hurry! Hurry! Nothing will catch you, but do hurry!” And now it seemed not to know her. It had cut her off; and the house was strange. It did not occur to her to go back. She ran after her father again, a terror of loneliness clutching her heart. Overtaking him a second time she put her hand in his. He neither spoke nor looked at her; but she knew he wanted her; and thus they walked a long way without resting. For
many days they walked when it was not too cold; when it was they lodged with strangers who treated them with aloof curiosity and called her little girl. Then they stopped for the winter at a place where he taught a country school.

  In the spring they set out again, walking south to meet the harvest. This was the beginning of a tryst which they kept annually thereafter. In Texas they faced about and followed the sickle bar all the way to the Red River of the North. He worked as a harvest hand. She was too small to do anything. He took her education in hand. She could already read and write; but they had only two books. One was that volume of Paracelsus, the other was a small Bible; and these were of equal value. More had been luggage; and it was their way to live without impedimenta of any sort. There was never anything to carry. The clothes they wore and what they had in their pockets—that was all. At any moment they were free to rise and go.

  He taught her in the rabbinical manner, through her ears. This method had notable merits. Classes had neither time nor place, no beginning and no end. They were continuous, opportune and always interesting. You got your Latin verbs with whatever it was you were doing, astronomy on starry nights, history on rainy days, literature to relieve the tedium of a day’s journey; botany, biology, chemistry and physics where and however the true phenomenon occurred in nature’s laboratory. Everything was explained as it happened and then related to all that was known before. And just as one began to think the garden of knowledge had been explored, then suddenly new vistas were opened, extending to the mysteries. He had been himself trained for the church and had, besides, a fine gift for teaching. Surely never before had a woman been so educated, and wholly to a man’s liking. Of the things women teach each other she knew very little, for she had few friendships and no intimacies among members of her own sex. And of the things a lover teaches she knew nothing at all.

  So passed the three enchanted seasons—spring, summer, autumn—in a state of idyllic vagabondage. But the winter was a horrible nightmare. Then her world fell to pieces.