Big Wheat

by Richard A. Thompson

  He assembled a traveling pack, including all the military gear his brother had sent him that he had never expected to need. He had a folding field compass and a fine, canvas-covered quart canteen and a real bayonet in a belt sheath and a new kind of mechanical cigar lighter, for which he had not yet been able to buy fuel. Kerosene, he had found, did not work well at all. He also packed a seven-millimeter Luger pistol. He didn’t know if his brother had taken it off a dead German officer whom he had personally killed, or merely picked it up on the field of battle. If the stories he had heard about the carnage were true, it might have been hard to tell the difference. In any case, soldiers were allowed to ship packages back home free of charge, and a small tidal wave of war souvenirs was the result.

  Lugers were highly prized. There were sevens and nines, his brother had written him, and they had opposite magazine sizes. The seven millimeters held nine bullets and the nine millimeters only held seven. Plus one in the chamber, of course. But he didn’t have an extra bullet, only a single loaded magazine. It would have to be enough. How dangerous could the high prairie be, anyway?

  All this and more, Charlie assembled into the makeshift backpack, including a shovel with a broken handle. The next day, he rose even earlier than usual to feed the livestock and milk the family’s four cows. After the milking, he put out a battered pie pan full of milk and stale bread crusts for the pack of semi-feral cats who lived somewhere in the barn and kept it free of rodents. He always smiled as he put down the pan, because his father had sternly forbidden the practice. He put the rest of the milk in a galvanized steel can and put the can in a tank of cool water in the well house, where a windmill kept it full. Then he harnessed the horses. It was the start of threshing, and the day would be a long one.

  He did his part to bring in the annual Krueger harvest, driving a team of horses pulling a reaper/binder, and the next day sacking the clean grain that was coming out of the Red River Special separator and hauling it away with a different team. It was a duty he felt he owed, even though he knew he would not share in the bounty. You weren’t much of a son if you didn’t help with the harvest.

  “Was it a good harvest, Robert?” said Charlie’s mother at supper that night.

  “Pot liquor,” said his father, with sneering venom. “Can’t make no money off a piddling hundred acres. If Bob, Junior, hadn’t a got his self killed in that damn war, I could buy some more land and raise enough wheat to make some real money. But with just Charlie? Ptah! Now if Charlie’d been the one to die—”

  “Then you still couldn’t get rich,” said Charlie, “because you’d still be out in the barn getting drunk half the time.”

  His mother and sister gasped. No one ever dared raise that topic.

  “What did you say to me?” He rose from his chair, slowly, seething with rage and radiating menace. “You don’t talk to me like that, you young snot. Not now and not ever. I’ll take my belt and whip you into next month, is what. First, though, you gotta know you ain’t having no supper in this house.”

  They had played this exact scene before, many times, sometimes for some trivial reason and sometimes for no reason at all. Charlie remembered the beatings out in the barn, starting in early childhood, and how he had felt belittled and somehow cheated as much as physically hurt. And suddenly he realized that all of the beatings, whatever their stated excuses, had a single purpose: to make his father feel important by making Charlie permanently afraid of him. But this time, he felt no fear.

  His father reached across the table and wrapped his fingers around the rim of Charlie’s plate, dragging it toward him. Time stood still, and Charlie stepped outside himself. As if from a vantage point somewhere at ceiling height, he saw himself pick up the carving knife from the meat platter and stab it viciously down on the fleeting plate of food. Meat and potatoes flew in every direction, the heavy plate snapped in two, and the knife pinned his father’s hand solidly to the wooden table. He let out a cry that was not quite a word and looked at his son in astonishment. He trembled as he tried to pull the knife out. It didn’t budge.

  Nobody was more shocked than Charlie. But fate and reflex and a whole ocean of pent up anger had taken charge, and he didn’t see any way he could retreat. Might as well be hanged for a goat as a lamb.

  “You’re all done taking things away from me, Pa. And you’re all done beating me, too.” He came around the end of the table and wrapped his own belt around his knuckles.

  “I’ll kill you, you worthless piece of—”

  “Just as soon as you get your hand free? Then I’d be stupid to wait, wouldn’t I?” He stepped behind his father and hit him on the ear, so hard it snapped his head down onto his shoulder. Charlie drew back his arm to do it again.

  “No! Please, Charlie! No more! I didn’t mean none of that stuff, I swear.”

  “Swear to somebody else. I’m leaving.” He was amazed at how easy it was to say that. For years, he thought he’d never be able to stand up to his father’s bullying. But now that he had done so, he couldn’t imagine what had taken him so long. He put his belt back in his trouser loops. To his mother, he said, “I don’t suppose you could go to the trouble to make me some sandwiches?” She fled to the kitchen with obvious relief.

  He collected his pack from his room, then came back to the dining room to say goodbye to his sister.

  “I’m afraid, Charlie.”

  “You’ll be all right, Ruthie. I put a slide bolt on the outside of the barn door last night. Next time pa goes out there and starts drinking, lock him in. In the morning, if he comes out screaming bloody murder, hit him in the head with a number ten skillet, right off.”

  “I don’t know if I can—”

  “Don’t think about it, just do it. Bullies are all cowards when you stand up to them. You just saw that. Anyway, you need to do it for ma, if not for yourself. If the old man starts getting after either of you anyway, send me a letter to general delivery in Minot. I don’t know where I’ll wind up spending the winter, but I’ll check there before I head farther north. If he’s not treating you decent, I’ll come back and kill him, I promise.” He said it loud enough that his father could not have failed to hear, and he punctuated it with a hard look in that direction.

  “Oh, Charlie, do you really have to go? You said it yourself; now that you stood up to Pa, things will be different.”

  “I have to go, Ruthie. There’s a big hole in my heart that I can’t talk about, and I have to go see if I can find a way to heal it.”

  “Then be careful out there.” She gave him a tight hug.

  “For you, I’ll try.”

  His father had freed his bleeding hand by then and wrapped it in a kerchief, but he was still sitting at the table, whimpering quietly.

  “You ain’t ever been out of this county, Charlie boy. You think life is easy out there? You think people are just dying to help out a worthless sum bitch, hits his own father? You’ll see. You’ll wind up eating out of somebody’s hog trough and sleeping in a ditch.”

  His own thoughts were not so very different, but he gave them no voice. There was no backing out now, and no return.

  He collected a pile of sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper from his mother, kissed her and his sister on the cheeks, and left. He decided he would walk a while before he looked for a convenient haymow to sleep in. His mind was a jumble of worry and hurt and anger, but under it all, also a sort of quiet exhilaration. Something very important was about to happen.

  He didn’t know how far he had gone when he encountered the strange, scarecrow figure in loose clothes and slouch hat, pitching straw in the moonlight.

  The man’s movements were jerky and even in the dim light he could see that his eyes were wild, set wide apart from a beaked nose that looked as if it had been broken more than once. Charlie wondered if the whole world was full of crazy people on that night, himself included. But then the fellow just sort of melted into the darkness, limping, and soon Charlie had forgo
tten all about him. He had enough on his mind.

  ***

  The next day, Mabel Boysen’s parents missed her when she didn’t come in the house from her morning chores of feeding the chickens and picking the eggs. They finished breakfast first, then looked in the farm buildings for her. Then her father, Djelmar, hitched his draft team to a buggy and began searching the fields. Finally becoming alarmed, he drove to all the nearby farms to ask about her. At the Krueger farm, he was met by a hung over Bob, Senior, with his hand wrapped in a blood-soaked rag.

  “My boy Charlie run off last night, too,” he said. “Maybe they went together. He always was sweet on her.”

  “If she eloped with him, I’ll whip them both with a knotted plow line.”

  “Amen to that. I’ll help hold them.”

  “You’ll mind your own beeswax, is what you’ll do.” Djelmar had never liked old man Krueger. He got back on the buggy, clucked to the horses, and drove all the way to the town of Beulah, where he told everything to Sheriff Amos Hollander. Hazen, which was ten miles closer to his farm, didn’t have a sheriff. The Sheriff told his deputy to get the official Model T pickup gassed up, greased, and ready to travel. He apologized to the panic-stricken father for not having any budget to send out telegrams to notify other lawmen around the state. For his part, Djelmar Boysen apologized for not having a picture of his daughter to give to him. But he provided some cash for the sheriff to give to Western Union.

  Hollander said he didn’t need a picture of Mabel Boysen. He knew her well. And although he did not know Charlie Krueger, he could damn sure find him, all the same. He sounded mad. Boysen wasn’t sure what to make of his little rant, but he said nothing. He was glad for all the help he could get.

  Two hours later, the sheriff and his deputy set off, swearing to stop at every farmstead to enquire about the path of the threshing crews and the possible appearance of a beautiful young woman. The sheriff did a lot of swearing of other kinds, as well.

  The moving harvest, at least in the mind of Djelmar Boysen, was a bit like the circus: sometimes people ran away to join it. Especially young people. A lot of them were not seriously missed for quite a long time, and some of them never at all. Wayward daughters, the ones who “always had a bit of a wild streak,” were assumed to have become cooks for custom threshers. If they had less savory reputations, they were assumed to have become camp followers, “soiled doves,” his wife would say, servicing the needs of the small army of men moving across the continent. But he didn’t believe Mabel belonged in any of those categories. And he didn’t believe she would have run off with that Krueger kid without telling him, either. He believed she must have come to harm.

  Young men who went missing, on the other hand, like the Krueger kid, didn’t require much explanation. They were supposed to be daring, footloose, pining for adventure, and eager to see the world. And they were expected to be more than a bit foolish. The story was of the prodigal son, after all, not the prodigal daughter.

  But besides being prodigal, was young Krueger in trouble? The sheriff seemed to think so, even though he had said he didn’t know the kid. And he also seemed to be mad at him. It was all very bewildering. And he had the sinking feeling that it was also about to become tragic.

  Chapter 3

  Bringing in the Sheaves

  More and more, Charlie felt like a fool for hitting his father and walking out, but he would rather die than go back and apologize. He had walked all night, finding that he couldn’t even think about sleep. At dawn, he hired on with a custom threshing operation that was getting ready to harvest a four-hundred-acre field. The crew was already set by the time he got there, but the separator operator, the man who stood on top of the threshing machine and controlled the flow of wheat through it, was badly hung over. The steam engineer didn’t want him near any machinery, so he asked Charlie if he could do the job.

  “Well, to be honest, I never ran a Case before.” Which was true. It was also true that he had never run any other kind of threshing machine, either, but he didn’t feel obliged to tell the engineer that. He knew everything about how they worked; he just didn’t know how they felt yet. But he had never met a machine he couldn’t run or repair.

  “You’ll find that the concaves won’t clear themselves as fast as on a Nichols, so you want to watch you don’t overload them. Other than that, it’s about like any of the others. You keep her running smooth, I’ll pay you eight dollars for the day.”

  “Let’s go to work,” said Charlie.

  They shook hands and he climbed up on the machine, using the angle-iron frames on its side for steps. It had always struck him as odd that nobody built a machine with an attached ladder, even though operators always ran them from up top. He looked over his control levers, frantically reviewing what he knew about them. There was one for the belt feed, one for both the concaves and shaker trays, and one for the auger that unloaded clean grain from the machine’s internal bin. They all took their power from a central shaft with a huge pulley on the end that connected to the steam engine by a fat rubber belt. The Windstacker, which blew the cleaned straw as much as eighty feet away from them, was started and stopped with a chain that had a spade handle on the end.

  Charlie made sure all the levers were disengaged and then waved at the engineer, who was back on his own machine. He took a deep breath. Lordy, lordy, can I really pull this off? The engineer engaged the power takeoff, the belt pulled, and his own flywheel cranked up to speed.

  The machine shook a little at first and then settled into a smooth machinery hum. He let the main shaft get up to what he hoped was its proper speed and engaged the concaves, then the Windstacker, and finally the belts that fed the raw wheat into the gaping mechanical mouth. On the machine’s metal top, he found a small panel, which he could remove to look into the inner works. He didn’t know what the concaves should look like when they were working right, but he assumed that he shouldn’t let the space above them get totally jammed up with stalks. He stopped the feed belt now and then to keep that from happening. After ten minutes of cleaning wheat, he heard a bell behind him. It was attached to the discharge pipe of the grain auger, and drivers rang it to get his attention when they pulled up with a wagon to be loaded. He pulled the lever for the auger and watched with pure joy as a solid stream of golden treasure poured into the empty wagon. My God, this is really going to work!

  After an hour or so, he found that he didn’t need the panel anymore. He could tell by the vibrations coming through his feet if the feed was working right. Soon the sheaf pickers couldn’t bring him the raw wheat fast enough, and while he waited for them, he jumped down and oiled the bearing journals or hauled water or wood to the steam engine. At the morning lunch break, around 9:00, two of the muleskinners talked about him as if he weren’t there.

  “What the hell’s the matter with the new separator man?”

  Charlie’s heart fell into his boots.

  “I don’t know, but the way he’s going, we’re probably going to get our wages cut, on account of we didn’t have to put in a full day.”

  “Yeah,” said the first one, “what is he, anti-labor? I never seen a separator put out that fast.”

  The tone was deadpan, but when Charlie looked at the man, he saw that he was grinning. His pulse went back to normal.

  “You leave my new man alone,” said the engineer, “or I’ll find plenty of work for you, trying to pull my one-inch wrench out of your ass.”

  “Ah, we didn’t mean nothing.”

  “I did.”

  After hot corn fritters, apple pie and coffee, the farmer had all the wagon drivers line up their rigs in a single row with the steam engine and the threshing machine in the center, to pose for a picture. Fifty yards to the east, with the midmorning sun behind him, a man with a three-piece suit and a straw hat with a huge, floppy brim was fussing with a wooden box on a tripod.

  “When I hold up my hand like this,” he said, reaching as high as h
e could, “nobody move until I put it down again. You got it?”

  Everybody nodded eagerly. Wagon drivers stood up on their rigs, reins in hand, Charlie and the steam engineer stood on top of their machines, and the farmer proudly stood in front of everybody, fists on hips. The photographer took a last look under a black cloth on the back of his box. Then he grabbed a black rubber bulb attached to the camera by a small tube and looked up and down the row.

  “Aaaand…” He held up his hand again and squeezed the bulb. The box made a mechanical whirring sound for a while, then a clunk. “Got it!”

  He changed the plate in the camera and took one more shot “just to be sure,” then quickly went around the crew, showing them a print of an earlier threshing bee and taking orders. The print was about three feet wide and eight inches high, and it showed the entire operation in great detail, strangely transported to a brown and white world that he called sepia.

  “Give me three dollars now and your mailing address, and I’ll send you a print of the picture I just took.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “I’ve got a lot more threshing crews to shoot, and then I have to take the film back to my studio in Sioux Falls. It’ll be a few months.”

  “Will it be as good as that one?”

  “It’ll be better. This one has been out in the sun, and it’s faded some. I guarantee you will be able to see everybody’s faces, or your money back. It’ll be something to hand down to your grandchildren.”

  “It will be,” said the farmer. “I buy one from him every year.” People reached into their pockets. Charlie would have loved a picture of himself standing proudly atop the Case, but he had no idea where to tell the man to send it. And he didn’t have three dollars, anyway. He went back to his machine.

  The rest of the day flew by in a blur of dust, heat and noise, sweat and food. Besides the morning and afternoon snacks, the job included the traditional threshermen’s noon lunch, a huge bounty of meats, potatoes, gravy, fresh breads, pickles, deviled eggs, assorted vegetables, and fruit pies, all washed down with gallons of steaming coffee. It was served on a makeshift table of long planks laid over sawhorses, and the planks groaned and sagged under the weight. But as was the custom, there was no evening meal for anyone but the farmer and his family. Those who were neighbors or relatives simply made their way back home, frequently laughing and walking with arms over each other’s shoulders, proud of the day’s work. Most of the crew of hired day-laborers carried sandwiches and cakes that they had saved from the noon lunch. They ate them while they made their way to the next day’s job. But Charlie knew that he would have no place on the crew the following day, if the regular separator man sobered up, so he offered fifty cents of his newly earned money to the farmer for an evening meal and a place to sleep in the hayloft.