Julie showered again, but this second shower wasn’t the extravaganza of cleaning and scrubbing of the night before. Yesterday’s clothes rested in a heap on the bathroom floor, and she left them there yet again, promising to do her laundry later. Fortunately, her bedroom closet door had been closed during the storm; all she needed to do was shake out the skirt and blouse she selected for church.
Services at the Coldwater Church were held at 9:30 and 11:30 on Sundays. The most heavily attended was the early service, and many of the ranchers and farmers considered even that hour to be terribly late.
Julie pulled into the parking lot and noticed that there were fewer cars and trucks than normal. The congregation was generally a happy one, friendly and open, but this day many of the people Julie saw looked frazzled, obviously tired and worn out. The temperature had reached ninety-three degrees by 8:30, she knew from her truck radio. The sun seemed to be maliciously focused on the frame building of the church, and although the stained glass windows filtered the brassy sunlight, the air inside was heavy.
Still, the peace of the place seemed to raise spirits a bit. The light buzz of conversation during the pre-service time was that of people sharing—and somehow lightening—their difficulties. Hushed laughter occurred sporadically, and it sounded good to Julie.
These are strong people, she thought. It’ll take more than a drought to step on their spirit.
Cyrus, Wylie, James, and Otis Huller were seated in their usual pew, about midway to the altar. Each wore a navy blue suit, a stiffly starched white shirt, and a somber, almost funereal, dark tie. The family sat arranged from oldest to youngest with Cyrus, the patriarch, at the aisle, staring straight ahead. The men sat as still as a line of meticulously arranged toy soldiers.
Julie remembered that Sunday almost three years ago when the Hullers had a flat tire in their old station wagon and were late to service. A family—a young business owner, his wife, and their three young children—had settled into the Huller’s customary pew. Cyrus stood in the aisle, his sons in perfect single file behind him, and glared at the young man. At first the young fellow didn’t want to move—there were, after all, other pews open. But he and his family were new to the church, and his wife was red faced and elbowing him, and the old man’s eyes were like searchlights focused on him. So he got up and moved his family, and that was the last time anyone tried to usurp the Huller pew at the 9:30 service.
Ian Lane had talked to old Cyrus a few days after the incident, Maggie had told Julie. “You know, Cyrus, we don’t have assigned pews at Coldwater Church. Those folks had every right to be where they were.”
Huller considered that for a moment and then said, “That’s where me an’ my boys always sit at church.” He turned away, ending the conversation.
Julie stopped next to Cyrus Huller and touched his shoulder. “Hi, Mr. Huller—Julie Downs. I called you a few days ago about an interview. OK if I stop by your farm this afternoon to talk?”
The old gentleman cleared his throat. He rarely spoke in church, and when he did, he used the same loud, no-nonsense voice he used elsewhere. “Like I said when you called, I don’t know that I got much to tell you, but sure. You stop on by. Ain’t much else to do around home lately. I’d just as soon jaw with a pretty lady as not.”
Julie’s face reddened as heads turned toward her and Mr. Huller. She settled into the next pew. She looked around the church, trying to appear as casual as possible.
This Sunday Rev. Lane talked about the storm and the drought and how his congregation was being tried by the conditions around them. Then he paused for a long moment and shifted gears precipitously. A smile played on his lips.
“One of our farmers and his wife were out looking at the sky,” Ian told the congregation. “The wife said, ‘Look, honey—rain clouds!’
“The farmer looked at the sky more closely. ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘Those aren’t rain clouds—they’re just empties coming back from somewhere else.’ ”
A rather profound silence settled over the room. Then, chuckles erupted from various parts of the congregation—which led to more chuckles and then to laughter.
There was a perceptible stirring inside the church, as if the congregation was awakening from a light doze. A silly joke delivered at a dark moment wouldn’t change the situations the people faced, but it lightened the burden they carried for a moment.
The sermon—and some of those present weren’t quite sure that it actually was a sermon—was short. Rev. Lane talked about the bits of joy that are always present in life if people look for them. When he concluded with a prayer, there were more smiles in the group than worry-creased foreheads.
The fellowship hour following the service wasn’t well attended. Most of the church members still had storm cleanup work to do. Julie and Maggie stood near the long table that held juice, coffee, bagels, and sweet rolls and discussed the storm.
“So,” Maggie said after telling her own cleanup tale, “what’s on your schedule today?”
“I’m going to run the vacuum over to Danny, and then I’m going to talk with Cyrus Huller for a story I’ve got planned. Kind of a historical perspective piece.”
“Sounds interesting. He’s a crusty ol’ fellow, though. Think he’ll give you much of what you need?”
Julie smiled. “I can be kind of crusty myself, when I have to be. Anyway, he agreed to talk with me, so I’ll see what happens.”
A pair of teens stepped up to talk with Maggie, and Julie tossed her empty Styrofoam cup into a trash basket and drifted toward the door. As she walked across the parking lot to her truck, the asphalt surface radiated heat in shimmering curtains that reminded her once again that whatever problems she was having in her life, the drought remained the biggest concern for all those who were living under its oppression.
Julie was glad that she hadn’t changed out of the clothes she’d worn to church that morning when she pulled in next to the Huller’s truck and glanced at the front porch of the one-hundred-year-old home in which the father and three sons lived. Cyrus was in his Sunday clothes, tie snug, sitting in a rocking chair. Next to him was a small table with a pitcher of iced tea. One glass was in his hand, the other waiting for Julie.
Three hounds, each a long, long way from puppyhood, dragged themselves out from under the porch, bayed a couple of times without much enthusiasm at Julie, and then walked over to her, tails beginning to wag.
“Get on away from the lady, ya useless fleabags!” Cyrus called out. The animals paid no attention to him. Julie rubbed and scratched each old dog for a moment and then climbed the few stairs to the porch.
“Thanks for seeing me, Mr. Huller. I appreciate it. As I mentioned, what I’m trying to do is put a story together that kind of compares and contrasts what you’ve seen in the past with what’s going on now. I’m not at all sure my readers—the younger ones, anyhow—know much about the Great Depression of the 1930s. I’ve researched the time and found out how hard things were with drought and dust storms and people’s farms being foreclosed on by banks, and how a crop wouldn’t bring even the money it cost to grow it. I reread John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath too. I wanted to at least understand the basics when we talked.”
“Yeah. Well, the thing is that my stories are old an’ tired, Miss Julie. I’m not any John Steinbeck either. My stories are things that most folks—if they aren’t in the ground already—wanna forget about.”
Julie reached for her glass of iced tea, took a long drink, and put it down on the table. “Aren’t we seeing the same thing now?” she asked.
Cyrus settled back in his chair. “No,” he said quite strongly. He locked eyes with her, and his gaze was close to a glare. “Your research wasn’t like being there and living it.”
Julie stopped her rocker so she could stare directly into the old man’s eyes. “I know a little about the Dust Bowl, at least from books. You’re right—I didn’t live through it, but you did, sir. That’s why I’m here.”
Huller tho
ught about that for a moment. “Feisty, ain’t you?”
“I don’t know about that. I’m just asking you to tell me what you remember so that I can turn it into a story for the News-Express.”
“I had a girlfriend once who was feisty,” Cyrus said. “You kinda remind me of her.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Julie said, smiling.
“That’s how I meant it. All right, let’s talk.”
Julie settled more comfortably in her rocker. “How about starting with what’s happening around here, Mr. Huller—on your farm?”
Cyrus waved his arm, taking in the barns and acres that spread out before them. Julie heard the man’s stiffly starched shirt rub against his arm as he made the sweeping motion.
“Looks like me an’ the boys are gonna lose a good part of our land. We borrowed heavy against it, got us a new combine, new tractor, some other things.” He paused. “You have any idea what a new combine big enough for this place costs, Miss Julie?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Not many people do ’cept the folks who sell them and those who buy them. I got almost a million dollars worth of machinery and nothin’ to harvest with it. Nothin’. Couple thousand acres of brush, tumbleweeds, and dead corn spikes.”
Julie nodded but said nothing. Mr. Huller was staring off at his main barn, his head moving slowly side to side.
“You ever hear ’bout Black Sunday, Miss Julie?”
“You mean the stock market crash? Back in 1929, when—”
“That was Black Thursday,” Cyrus interrupted. “Black Sunday, you see, happened in ’35, all ’cross Oklahoma. I was eight years old, but I remember that day. First thing that happened was this huge swarm of birds, all kinds of birds, was flyin’ hard as they could to the east. The cloud of birds filled the sky like a huge black front movin’ in on us, and the racket they made, why, it hurt a person’s ears. You never heard such a thing, this high-pitched shriek that didn’t sound at all like birds should sound. And lots of them was droppin’ outta the sky like rain, thunkin’ down on our roof an’ fields an’ everywhere. Scared me real bad. Scared my ma and sister too.”
Huller poured more iced tea into Julie’s glass and topped off his own. “We had to shovel those birds up into baskets an’ bury them afterward. What was happening was that the poor birds was tryin’ to outfly the storm that was so big and carried so much soil in it that it blocked out the sun and turned that nice, sunny Sunday dark as night. My ma, she hauled me and my brothers and sisters down into the root cellar, and we listened to the wind howl an’ glass break an’ what sounded like big steam locomotives racin’ by. My ma thought maybe it was the end of the world, an’ we all prayed that day, down there in the dark. We’d clapped the big doors shut, and they were good, tight doors my pa built, but the wind just found every little crack an’ opening, and there was a mist of dirt in the air down in that little cellar, and we all took to coughin’ an’ gaspin’, an’ Ma ripped pieces outta our shirts an’ her dress to put over our mouths and noses. My littlest sister never did get over it. She died before she was sixteen, wheezin’ an’ chokin’ for breath, jus’ like a winded horse.”
“I’m so sorry, Mr. Huller,” Julie said. After a minute passed, she asked, “Where was your father, sir?”
“He’d gone off the Friday before to Toole City—’bout eighty miles away—to see if he could borrow some money from the bank there. See, the crop was already gone for the year, choked out by the drought that’d settled in 1932 an’ 1933. Pa didn’t get back until the Tuesday after Black Sunday. I recall he had tears all down his face when he finally rode up to the house. There was waves of soil alongside the barn and in the fields an’ across the roads. Wasn’t really soil, though. It was more like powder—all gritty an’ dry.”
Julie attempted to speak and found her mouth too dry to form words. She took a long drink of her tepid iced tea. “How did people react?”
The old man snorted. “React? Just like they always do, I guess. Some got angry an’ took it out on their animals or their families, some jus’ plain gave up, an’ some made some money from it. I guess most of us, though, lived with it and did the best we could. It was then that all the flyers about the easy work an’ good money in California started showin’ up. An what was called labor contractors too, who promised good work and nice homes to folks who’d go to California an’ pick fruit an’ vegetables. These contractors would charge whatever they could gouge outta a family an’ send ’em off on a train to California.” He paused. “Wasn’t any work there that paid enough to feed a man an’ his family—none at all. Even with whole families pickin’ all day long, dawn to dark. A man’d be lucky to walk off with a whole dollar at the end of the day.”
“What did your family do?” Julie asked.
“Well, we lasted a couple more months. We sold or slaughtered the cattle we had, an’ the pigs an’ chickens too. Pa wrote to his cousin here in Montana. Jeremy Shiftler was his name. Ma called him Jeremy Shiftless, ’cause he was a lazy no-account who’d lucked into a bunch of land—this farm—his folks left him. Jeremy didn’t know nor care any more about farming than a duck does, but Pa, he made the place make money. We were lucky, Miss Julie. Finally, Pa bought the farm from Jeremy an’, well, here we are. Like I said, we were awful lucky.”
“But now this,” Julie said quietly.
“Thing is, I seen this once in my life. Seems like that’d be enough for a man. Havin’ to sell off parts of my land kinda tears the heart right outta me. I always planned to leave the farm to my boys intact, just like I got it.” His voice trailed off.
“But you lived through it, Mr. Huller. You and your sons have a wonderful farm here—even if you have to sell some acreage . . .”
“Isn’t any ‘if’ about it. You’re right about the farm. It’s been real good to us. But I’ll be long in the ground by the time anything worth harvestin’ comes out of it again, I guess.”
Julie felt the old man’s weariness. “One more thing, Mr. Huller,” she said, standing up from her rocker. “What can I tell my readers about how to get through this? What advice can you give them?”
The old man stood too. Julie offered him her right hand, and he took it slowly, as if he wasn’t quite sure about this woman shaking hands like a man. In Julie’s palm Huller’s hand was hard with years of calluses, and very dry, but quite gentle against her own.
“Hope is about all I can say. That an’ pray. I don’t know that we have any more options than that, Miss Julie. But I’ll tell you what—after we sell off a piece we’ll have more land left than most families have. We’re grateful for that.”
Julie smiled at him and said good-bye. As she eased down the driveway in her truck, Otis Huller rode across a field that should have been tall and green with corn. He sat atop a fancy bay mare with the grace of a longtime horseman. Julie stopped and lowered her window.
“Hi, Julie. You and Pa have a good talk?” He slid down from the Quarter Horse, reins in his left hand. Julie looked up at him. Otis, shaggy-haired and muscular with a flinty face and a tan so deep that he could never lose it, met her gaze.
“I learned a lot from him, and I feel for him.”
“He’s seen some hard times,” Otis said. “I think he’s tired. Not physically—the man’s still a bull, no doubt about that. He’s a little tired in spirit is what I mean. He doesn’t want to fight with the heat and the drought and the crops.”
“Is it possible that he’s not going to farm anymore?”
A smile spread slowly across Otis’s face; his teeth were straight and almost startlingly white against the darkness of his skin. “Nope. That’s not possible. And I’ll tell you what, Julie—my pa will quit farming on the same day Lulu here”—he nodded toward his mare—“learns to play the fiddle. My pa has more Montana soil in his veins than he does blood. He’s down, is all, but he isn’t a quitter, no matter what. There aren’t any quitters in the Huller family—there never were and never will be.”
&
nbsp; Julie smiled at Otis. “I guess I knew that.”
She had her story.
Julie smiled as her fingers moved over the keyboard. She wasn’t fast—barely a touch typist with perhaps too many peeks at the keys—but the words seemed to flow from her heart through her fingers this evening. At times, in previous stories, she’d had to dredge words and images from their hiding places somewhere inside herself, but the Huller story and its broader message of hope flowed as smoothly as cream from a pitcher.
She pushed back her chair from her desk and let her shoulders sag. A glance at the clock surprised her; she’d been working nonstop for over four hours, yet her mind was still clicking, and sentences seemed to appear on her monitor almost on their own. She picked up the pages she’d printed out with the photos scanned into them. The story headline was bold and stark, juxtaposing its powerful statement, “No Quitters in This Family,” with a picture of the dead and dying corn spikes.
Mr. Huller’s history of Black Sunday and the other events that had taken place in Oklahoma during the course of his childhood was just that—history. But even more than that, it was proof that families could and did prevail against drought and crop failure even more dire than the drought strangling Montana now. “We’re having hard times,” Julie’s article said between its lines, “but we’ll beat this thing.”
She reread her pages and determined that the final word count was 2,291, slightly over her space allocation, which allowed for some editing by in-house staff. Julie placed the pages and the originals of the photos—along with Cyrus Huller’s permission to quote—in a file folder.
The walls of her office seemed to draw in on her now, and her throat was parched and dry. She took a deep breath, feeling a nagging ache in her shoulders and a burgeoning throbbing at her temples. She felt like she’d just plowed forty acres of rocky land.
The fatigue was a good feeling in a way—the sensation of a job well done. Still, Julie knew that if she didn’t get outside her office and her house, she’d scream. She shut down her computer and hustled down the stairs, boots only grinding on missed grit a few times as she left her home and stood outside her kitchen door.
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