Big Wheat

by Richard A. Thompson

  “So you want to be a mechanical man?”

  “I guess you could put it that way, all right.”

  “Most young men who know farming find a good woman and settle down to screw up the land. Aren’t there any good women where you are from?”

  Charlie sighed, said nothing. He looked at the ground.

  “That bad?”

  “I don’t have a woman back home. I also don’t have any land of my own, which means that I can’t get a woman.”

  “Ah.”

  “What’s that mean, that ‘ah?’”

  “That means white people are stupid, is what it means. The woman you want will only go with you if you own some land? Then you don’t want her. You people worry too much about owning things. I have had two fine women in my time, and we lived off the land without ever owning any, except that all the people owned all the land. It was a good life.”

  “Yeah, maybe. But it’s gone now for you and never was there for me. There are a lot of kinds of life possible, but not every kind. You can’t hunt buffalo any more and I can’t ask a woman to go with me if I don’t have any land, and that’s just the way things are.”

  “I guess that’s true. Because the white man is in charge and that’s the way he thinks. And that’s the kind of thinking that took away our land and gave us some hardscrabble dogshit place to live that no sane person would want.”

  “It was good sharing breakfast with you, sir. I hope we aren’t going to argue now.” And he really did hope it. He was finding himself liking this man.

  “No, we will not argue. This is not a place for arguing”

  “It isn’t?” What on earth was he talking about now? “Tell me why that is.”

  “You didn’t know?” He raised both eyebrows and dropped his jaw a notch. “Then why did you pick this spot to camp?”

  “It has trees,” said Charlie. “Big, old ones. I brought some straw with me for the fire, but straw is no good unless you have a ton of the stuff. If you have old trees, there will be dead branches around for a fire, and you don’t have to hurt the trees to get it.”

  “That’s good,” said George Ravenwing, nodding with his whole torso. “Good enough that I will tell you some things. This is a place of great power. Besides the small stuff, there are five great trees, of much age, and each one is a different race, do you see? Cottonwood, oak, hackberry, maple, and elm. Five is an important number, the biggest number that can be remembered for what it is, without putting a name on it. It is a sacred number. This might have been a holy place once. When you are done with your quest, you should come back here, to restore your soul and make yourself ready to reenter the real world. You could ask Wakan Tanka for some guidance. He would hear you, in a place like this.”

  “I was sure I told you I’m not on a quest. And I am damn sure not going anywhere that isn’t in the real world.”

  “You told me that. You told yourself that, too, I think, but it is not exactly true. There are a lot of kinds of quests and a lot of worlds. Yours just doesn’t have a name yet. But I’ll let that pass for now. Tell me then, you who have no land and can’t get the woman you want without any, what do you think to find out there that will speak to your soul and change who you are?” He made a broad gesture to encompass the whole of the plains that were finally beginning to emerge in the light of the first false dawn.

  Charlie shrugged. “Steam.”

  “Steam,” he repeated, but not as a question. “You answer very quickly when I ask you that. The big steam engines, you mean?”

  “They’re a start,” said Charlie. “Big machines of other kinds, too. I get The Farmer and Popular Mechanics in the mail, and I look at the ads for machines and memorize the features and figure out what’s what from the drawings. I understand them, is the thing. Not just what lever makes what happen. I mean I really understand them. Like they were people.”

  “Who you don’t understand?”

  “Well, I’ll sure admit I don’t understand women, anyway. Not my old man, either. He’s scared to death, seems like, that I might become better at something than he is. In fact, he’s scared that I might even be as good. And for some reason I can’t figure out, he blames me for my brother’s death. Rob died in the big war. He was set in his mind to go, and it’s not even like I could have gone in his place. But my father blames me and hates me for it. Sometimes I think he hates me just because he can, but that’s just plain crazy.”

  It suddenly occurred to him that he was telling an awful lot of details about his personal life to a total stranger, and one of a different race and maybe attitudes, at that. He shut his mouth and busied himself with cleaning up the campsite and getting ready to move out.

  “Never mind about the people,” said George Ravenwing. “When your heart is ready, the understanding will come. Tell me about the steam.”

  “Steam is power, of course,” Charlie said, pausing in the middle of making up his pack, eager to tell somebody about his secret passion. “It’s a lot of power. Hardly anybody realizes how much. It takes the huge energy of fire and stores it up and uses it to make things move. Big things. I don’t know if there’s any limit to how big a steam engine you could make, as long as you get the jewelry right.”

  “The jewelry? You mean like beads?”

  “No. Jewelry is what steam engineers call the fine parts, the valves and regulators and such that control the big, heavy stuff. They’re like the clockwork, you see? But they’re better than that, even. They’re the only parts that can’t be made or fixed without a machine shop, and nothing will work without them. They’re the brains. They’re almost like the…well, I mean…

  “The soul?”

  “Are you making fun of me, sir?”

  The Indian shook his head gently. “I could believe that steam could have a soul. Maybe it could even be a god, who knows? And the machines that use it, too. Why not?’

  “It doesn’t make a lot of sense to most folks, but I believe it. Sometimes I believe that a steam engine is a living thing. And it’s a thing full of mystery and magic, too. Someday I mean to understand the magic.” He blushed, realizing that once again, he had gotten carried away, talking to a total stranger, though the man seemed less and less strange. “But I guess I don’t really know how to do that.”

  “Sure you do. You just told me. Every chance you get, you learn more about it. You drink it in as if it were life itself. Didn’t you just tell me that?”

  “Well, I might have hinted at something like that.” Charlie grinned.

  The Indian drained his coffee cup, wrapped his arms around himself and stared into the dying fire, rocking back and forth.

  “Can I give you some advice, Charlie Krueger?”

  “Nothing has stopped you from doing that, up ‘til now.”

  “Take a new name.”

  “Huh?”

  “You say you’re not on a vision quest, so I believe you. But you’re on a quest of some kind, anyhow. You said so. You need to leave your old self behind, learn a new world, be a new person. A new name is a good way to start. I will give you one, since you will not know how to choose.”

  “Did I ask you to?”

  “No.”

  “I sort of like being Charlie.”

  “Then just change your last name.”

  “I don’t want to be named after some part of an animal. No offense.”

  “Who said you would?” He looked over at the remains of their breakfast. “From now on, you will be named Charles Bacon. It is a good name, and it will remind you of how you started your journey, here in the place of the five trees. You should also have a secret name, which you tell to nobody.”

  He tried Charles Bacon out a few times, repeating it in his mind, and he found to his surprise that he liked it. Charlie Bacon was okay, too. He decided his secret name would be C. B. “I feel like I should thank you,” he said.

  “Thank me by completing your journey, Charles Bacon. But for now, tel
l me something. When you have followed the wheat berries all the way up to the frozen lands in the north and the iron wheels freeze solid to the ground as you work the last crop, where will you go then?”

  “You mean for the winter?”

  “I mean for any time, winter or later.”

  “I guess I’ll know that when the time comes.”

  “Well, if you don’t know when the time comes, come back here.”

  “Here? You mean right here, this very campsite? Why would I do that?”

  “This exact spot. Bring tobacco next time, as a gift to the land and to me. I told you, this is a place of great power. You can summon me from here, just as you did today.”

  “Hey, wait a minute, I didn’t—”

  “Be quiet and listen. I have a cabin not far away. It’s not in the Indian Nations, of course, but what are they going to do to me for leaving? Take my land? They already did that. You can stay in the cabin if you want. Or you can camp in one of the deep ravines close to there. You will find your way there, if you have lost it. The earth will make you whole. That won’t happen on those ‘owned acres’ you want so bad.”

  “That’s a mighty fine sounding offer, but I don’t know if I—”

  “Trust me. When the time comes, you will know. Carry the offer with you in your heart, along with your new name, and you will know.”

  The sun was now pushing above the horizon, huge, molten and fiery red-orange. In the downslope fields the rosy light showed smoke rising from cook shacks and dust clouds billowing around the threshermen who were doing the first trial runs of the day on their Advance-Rumley or Case Junior Red River Special separators. The horses that would spend a long day pulling the sheaf wagons or the grain gondolas were also getting their breakfast and water, and in a thousand other large and small ways, the high plains were coming to life.

  The Indian turned and walked back up the gentle slopes, toward some rocky scrub forest riddled with small ravines. He did not say goodbye. He was gone rather quickly. If Charlie had been watching, he might have seen him disappear.

  Charlie, or C. B., or now Charles Bacon, packed up all his gear, making it into a backpack with a bedroll, which his brother had taught him to do when he was home on boot leave. He also packed a smaller bag that the migrant workers called a “bindle.” He tied that to the center tine of a pitchfork, to be carried on one shoulder. He was a bindlestiff now, and for the first time since he had hit his father and walked out, he began to feel good about it.

  He picked out the biggest steam and smoke flume that he could see, selected an appropriate road, and headed that way. As he walked along on his brisk three mile per hour pace, he found himself singing a half remembered song from his brother’s war.

  Over there, over there. Dum de dum, dum de dum, over there. The Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming. And we won’t come back ‘til it’s over, over there. He guessed it must still not be over, since he didn’t know anybody who had come back.

  ***

  Some thirty miles south and east of Charles Bacon’s campsite, Sheriff Amos Hollander and his deputy, Tom, looked out over the same ocean, more or less, of animated wheat fields. They stood in the bell tower of a Lutheran church in the tiny town of Ruso, not far from Cottonwood Lake, which had never seen a cottonwood tree gracing its muddy banks and probably never would. They had steaming mugs of strong coffee in front of them on the unglazed sill of the tower arch, courtesy of the pastor’s hospitable wife. The sheriff had a large pair of binoculars with which he swept the scene below. He was a day and a half out of his jurisdiction, which was Mercer County. His office was in the town of Beulah, on the Knife River. He could justify one more day and then, unless he uncovered a major crime that had something to do with Beulah, he would have to go back.

  “How you going to pick which one to go after?” The young deputy slurped his coffee noisily and looked as if he really didn’t care.

  “When they crank up the threshers to full bore, we should be able to see them. The farm that the girl disappeared from was custom threshed by an outfit with the new, bigger version of the Windstacker. Makes a pile of straw fifty feet high. You ought to be able to spot that kind of spewing from twenty miles away.”

  “And if we do see it, then what? You ain’t thinking she’s going to be there, are you?”

  “Probably not, but most of the same crew will be. We go talk to them, find out what they saw, that’s all. What’s the matter, you starting to miss your mama?”

  “You got no call to say things like that, Sheriff.” In point of fact, the sheriff could plainly see him getting very homesick indeed. Tom had never been outside his home county before. “You need me, I’m here; you know that. It just seems like we’re gettin’ awful far out of our jurisdiction, for just a missing person case. I mean, how’s the County Board going to feel about all this expense over what’s probably just a runaway girl?”

  “What makes you so sure she’s just a runaway? Her pa thinks she wouldn’t leave of her own free will, and so does her girlfriend.”

  What the sheriff thought, though he didn’t bother to tell his deputy, was that Mabel Boysen, whom Hollander himself had fully intended to marry, had either gone off with or been abducted by that kid from the Krueger farm, just down from the Boysen spread. It was just too much of a coincidence for both of them to have disappeared at the same time. If they had eloped, well there was nothing he could do about that. He would grind his teeth and quietly drop the matter. But if that Krueger boy had taken her off to have his way with her and then abandoned her or hurt her, then he would hunt the son of a bitch down if it took the rest of his life.

  “If she was abducted,” Hollander went on, “ she was most likely murdered, too, or she would have run back by now. And nobody, I mean nobody, murders somebody from my county and gets away with it. Are you understanding me okay here?”

  “Yeah, I understand you, sir. But we got no body and no witnesses to any foul play, and you got chow wagons and whorehouses, even traveling gospel shows that she could have run off and joined. And that book I sent away for on modern crime detection methods says—”

  “Son, you try to tell me my job just once more, and I promise you’re going to regret it for a long time.”

  “I was just thinking—”

  “That’s the last warning you get.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  On the plains below, the smoke flumes got thicker and closer together, and soon a hundred roaring, shaking machines were spewing straw, chaff, and dust into the crisp morning air. Sheriff Hollander scanned it all with great care, missing nothing. When he looked straight east, into the rising sun, he used his hat to shade the lenses. He stared in that direction for a long time, then turned his eyes north again. Finally he put the glasses down and sighed.

  “Finish your coffee, boy. You get your way, after all. Time to go back. They all look the same.”

  ***

  Elsewhere, another man looked over the prairie, from the top of a Sears Roebuck deluxe seventy-five-foot steel windmill tower. He looked at the land that used to be covered with prairie grasses so tough, their roots so deep, that no storm God ever made could wash them away, no drought kill them off. He looked at the plains that were once dark with the moving seas of buffalo herds. He looked at the plains where once a man could wander free, breathe in the pristine air, be at peace. He looked at the plains and shook his head.

  They raped this land, they did. Raped it bad, all the way from the middle of Texas to the middle of Canada, ripped it open and messed it up something awful. And for that, there has to be blood. Folks tear open every tiny patch of land in sight, just to make money they can’t use, and the universe can’t ever be right until somebody pays in blood.

  It was the government’s fault, of course, as much as anyone’s. At the start of the war in Europe it had decided America should be the bread basket of the western allies, or some such rubbish, and had guaranteed a market price of two dollar
s a bushel for wheat. The number was preposterous, and he fumed with rage every time he thought about it. At that price, a farmer could make thirty dollars an acre growing wheat, while any other crop wouldn’t earn more than a tenth that much. He had done the math many times, and it still got him mad. Farmers with a whole section of land could make a profit of eighteen thousand dollars for a single crop, at a time when an ordinary laborer didn’t see a thousand dollars a year. It was obscene. But he couldn’t make the government pay in blood, so he had to settle for somebody else.

  Young women are the best, since they will also be missed. Maybe they will even make people study on the error of their ways. And of course, pretty young women are evil from the ground up, anyway, so hurting them is a moral duty all its own. The hurt they can cause without even thinking about it is worse than anything that happens in a war. But if no young women are handy, others will do. Lots of kinds of others. Yes. It’s a sacred calling.

  Fortunately for the good of an orderly universe and the great, cosmic reckoning of things, he was able to take care of that calling all by himself. He scanned the horizon to the north and east, deciding which direction needed his attention the most.

  He had another agenda, as well. He had decided that he had to find the young man who had seen him covering Mabel Boysen’s grave, though he didn’t know the man’s name or which way he was headed. He would never again be sure of his own safety until he had found him. The more he thought about that fact, the more he began to be afraid. And he did not like, would not tolerate, anybody making him afraid. Sooner or later, the man had to die.

  Perhaps fifteen or twenty miles to the northeast, he could barely make out the spire of a church. That, he decided, would be his next viewing perch, though he always thought of himself as a windmill man. Harnessing the dark winds of the injured prairie; that was his role.

  Far below him, some dumb hayseed of a farmer was hollering at him about what the gosh darned hell was he doing up in his windmill tower and he better get his ass down while it was still in one piece.

  Blasphemy. Vulgarity. And worst of all, pride. He hated those things.