Big Wheat

by Richard A. Thompson

  The brakes on the Peerless were almost a joke, really only usable for parking, rather than maneuvering. Stopping was done by simply cutting off the power to the wheels. And since all the speeds involved were slow, it worked well enough. It took Charlie three tries to get the engine in just the right spot for hooking up the main hitch, which had a short-coupled chain winch for making the final adjustment. He did it without help or supervision. And just like that, he became a steam engineer. Easier to learn than sex. Well, easy anyway.

  In an hour and a half, the whole complicated string of people and trailers was ready to roll. Jude the Mystic, the almost vet, usually plied his trade on the Indian bike, but he had it lashed to the side of the cook shack now, and he rode inside with all his medical implements and bottles of potions, making sure they didn’t get tossed around. Avery and Maggie Mae climbed up onto the engine platform, and she made a playful tough guy face as he put a striped railroad engineer’s cap on her head.

  “You did all right, your first time as an engineer, Charlie.”

  “Thanks. It was—”

  “Even if it did take you three tries.”

  “Um…”

  “But now you’re demoted to fireman.”

  “Sure.” He grabbed a shovel. “Seems to me everybody is going to an awful lot of trouble on my account.”

  “Trust me, they like it. It reminds them of when we did it for them. My people are my people, and the Ark is the Ark, and nobody, lawman or anybody else, comes and snatches them. Lest you get to feeling too important, though, it was about time to move anyway.”

  “Do we know where we’re going?”

  “I go wherever Maggie Mae tells me.”

  “And how does she know?”

  “I have no idea.”

  He eased the Peerless ahead slowly, taking up all the slack in the complicated tow. Behind him, wheels groaned, hitches clunked into new positions, and a few items that hadn’t been properly secured came crashing down inside trailers. Finally everything was moving at the same speed and in the same direction, and Avery eased open the main throttle.

  “Tell me something about this woman who was murdered. Was she your girl?”

  “I thought so for a while. Turns out somebody else thought so too, and I’m starting to see that it was maybe a good thing she dropped me when she did. But she’s a real charmer, let me tell you. Or was, I guess. She was a woman who was so special that I think even if you had cause to hate her, you’d still love her a little. I think she must have been killed by a total stranger. Nobody who knew her could do it.”

  “A bindle, you think? A drifter?”

  “Who knows?”

  “Well, at least one person does. And if it wasn’t somebody who knew her, then it’s somebody who’s still out here, floating around just like we are. I’m thinking we ought to try to find him. Too bad we don’t know who to watch for.”

  “I’d tell you if I knew.”

  “Maybe you’ll think of something. For now, let’s settle for making some tracks.”

  “Well put.”

  “Shovel some coal, Longfellow.”

  Avery leaned over the right-hand cleated wheel and looked back along the string of odd shapes lined up behind the engine. At the far end of the string, the woman named Nadine swung a lantern, exactly like the conductor on a train. Avery waved a kerchief in response, and as the Ark picked up speed, she climbed into one of the trailers. Charlie noticed that even though it was still broad daylight, lanterns had been attached to the roofs of all the trailers, as well. Not yet lit, but ready.

  Avery checked the same gauges and valves that Charlie had, then opened the throttle still farther and took the train across the land, ignoring all roads. A mile later, he made a sweeping left turn and headed north.

  “I notice Stump didn’t make it back from his errand with Stringbean yet. How will he know where to find us?”

  “He’ll know. He always does.”

  The Peerless could make as much as nine miles an hour, but with such a long string of unsprung carriages behind it, that wasn’t a very good idea. They dropped into a steady pace of just over four miles an hour, and they ran for over six hours at that rate. Then they stopped for a meal and a rest break, lit the lanterns, and set out again. This time, they only ran at about three miles an hour. Or so they thought. The Peerless was not designed for road travel and therefore had no speedometer.

  Charlie and Maggie Mae led the way, walking out in front with lanterns, thirty yards ahead and on either side of the engine. They picked a route with subtle but important maneuvers around the few rare trees and the somewhat more common ravines, through the endless landscape of wheat stubble and shocked crop.

  They had started out on government land, a place where the soil was so poor, nobody had ever applied to own it, even as free homestead property. But soon they were back in working farmland, and they were careful to respect the crops that were mowed and headered or shocked, waiting for the threshers. When they came to a barbed wire fence, they pulled the staples and laid the wire down, then put it back behind themselves. Their trail would still be easy enough to spot, but at least they weren’t leaving behind a string of angry farmers.

  Sometime after midnight they intersected an east-west gravel road, and Maggie Mae signaled Avery to stop.

  “What’s she telling you?” said Charlie, back at the engine.

  “She’s thinking we should turn here, and so am I. The road already has plenty of tracks on it, so ours wouldn’t stand out. And the fields are hard packed here, too. If we make a really wide turn, we should be able to get up on the road without leaving much of a trace. As far as anybody can tell, we went north from our last camp and then we vanished. I like it.”

  “So now we go east or west?”

  “West. Toward the Indian nations.”

  “And into them?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Is that legal?”

  “Maybe.”

  They took half a mile to make the turn onto the road, overshooting first, and then doubling back. On the high, hard surface, they expected few or no obstacles. Jude the Mystic untied the motorcycle and replaced Charlie and Maggie Mae as pathfinder, with an extra lantern strapped to his rear fender. Avery looked back at the trailers from time to time, and once they were tracking smoothly, he took the Peerless up to seven miles an hour. All through the night, the bizarre, oddly lit string of shapes rolled steadily across the black prairie. Charlie shoveled coal into the firebox and wondered if somewhere behind their own swaying lanterns was a pair of dim headlights attached to a brown Model T pickup.

  Chapter 19

  The Wine Dark Prairie

  The Ark continued on through the moonless night, the lanterns on the roofs like a wobbly string of fireflies following each other to some mystical safe haven. Around seven in the morning, the sky behind them began to lighten with the first false dawn. Avery let the caravan roll to a slow stop, stretched his back and arms, and climbed up on the catwalk on top of the boiler. He motioned to Charlie and Maggie Mae to come and join him.

  “That’s far enough for now,” he said. “Time to look for a likely place to stop for a long rest.”

  They scanned the horizon in all directions. They were still in wheat country, but they had climbed up into more rugged terrain. Already, the land was hard and barren looking, with large areas so gravelly that it was hard to tell the difference between the fields and the road. Mainly, the fields had some stubble from cut wheat. There were no sheaves, though. This was rough, uneven ground, and rough ground was invariably header country. In the dim distance they could see a few of the monstrously big loaf-shaped stacks of cut wheat, drying and ripening and waiting to be threshed.

  “Where are we?” said Charlie.

  “If you have to ask, that’s a good sign. Generally, if you’re lost, that means nobody else can find you, either.”

  “And are we lost?”

  “Only sort of.
I haven’t got a map that goes this far west, but I think we’re within a dozen miles of the Indian nations. Lakota, most likely, as if that mattered.”

  Maggie Mae shook Avery’s arm, and when she had his attention, she pointed off to the south, where a cloud of dust was coming their way.

  “Should I kill the lanterns?” said Charlie.

  “Not much point anymore. We’ve probably already been seen, and if we haven’t, we will be. There’s no place to hide out here.”

  “No cover on the rocky road to Canaan,” said Jude the Mystic, who had pulled his bike back by the engine after they stopped. “Want me to go check them out?”

  “They’ll come to us, soon enough.”

  “Then maybe I should go break out the artillery and be ready to give some cover while you folks parlay?”

  “I didn’t hear that, Jude.”

  “Right you are. You didn’t hear it.” He disappeared toward the back of the train.

  As they watched, the cloud of dust got closer and eventually revealed a dark rectangle at the bottom. The rectangle grew until it turned into a Model T pickup truck with a flatbed box on the back. A man and a woman sat in the front seat. The truck came to a squeaking stop ahead of the big Peerless engine, and the dust cloud continued to move, enveloping it. Ignoring that, the two figures jumped out and went over to the engine.

  “Glory be to God,” said the man.

  “It’s a miracle,” said the woman. “Just like you said, Pa. It surely is.”

  “Would either of you folks care to let me in on this conversation,” said Avery, “seeing as how this is my machine you seem to be so excited about?”

  “You folks been sent here to us by God,” said the man.

  “In answer to our prayers,” said the woman.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Avery.

  “That seems to be who we’re talking about, all right,” said Charlie.

  Maggie Mae made a series of gestures that clearly indicated she thought the new arrivals were crazy.

  “I’m Jonas Wick,” said the man from the dust cloud, “and this here’s my wife, Annie. She’s a little goofy with all the God stuff, but don’t pay that too much mind. Most of the time, she knows which way is up pretty good.”

  “I’m Jim Avery, and this is my traveling city. We call it the Ark. Good to meet you, Mr. and Mrs. Wick. I’m afraid you’re mistaken about me being sent here by God, though. We have a long trip ahead of us yet. Right now, we’re just looking for a place to stop for a day or so. Out of the traffic, if you get my drift.” He climbed down off the engine and shook Jonas Wick’s hand. When he offered his hand to Mrs. Wick, she crossed herself before taking it.

  “Oh ya, ya. I get lots of drifts, not like my crazy wife. You could stay right where you are, on the road, as far as that goes, and you wouldn’t see enough traffic to wake you up. But better you come to my farm.”

  “I’m afraid we really can’t.”

  “Oh sure, you can. I got a big barn and two big corncribs with wagon alleys in the middle. You can put all your wagons inside, out of the rain, if you get my drift. And they can stay there as long as you want; only then you got to use your big steam engine there to help me get in my crop. I used to have two sons and two daughters, God bless me, and I built up a big spread with them, enough for all of them to take over some day. We used to bring in the whole harvest by hand.”

  “So why do you need me, then?”

  “The two of my boys was damn fools enough to go off to the big war, thought they could look out for each other. One of them’s in a hospital, out east. He can breathe okay, long as they don’t take the tubes out of him. The other one is buried in the mud in some damn French place called Ye Pray, or something. And then this year, both our daughters died of the influenza. I told Annie she should birth stronger children, but she don’t listen to nothing, don’t you know?”

  “I’m very sorry for you, Mr. Wick.”

  “Call me Joe. Be sorry some other time. Right now I got five hundred acres of wheat all made up into header stacks, but I got nobody to help me thresh it. My banker, old man Puckett, owns the only steam engine in thirty miles, and he decided not to let me use it this year. He says it’s too busy, but it’s really because he wants to foreclose on my place.”

  “That’s quite a story, Joe. Can I offer you something to drink before you go?”

  “Nope. No time. You and me got to get back.”

  “Do we, now? Look, your offer sounds just fine, except for one thing: this is not a traveling custom threshing operation. I have a steam engine all right, but I don’t have a threshing machine.”

  “Oh, I got one of them. I got one of the first Aultman & Taylors ever made. Puckett wanted to foreclose on that one time, too, had a contract deputy come and impound it in a big machine shed. But we fooled him. My boys and me snuck over in the dead of the night with a team of six horses, and we stole the thing back. Then we brought in a bumper crop, even though it was a dry year. We could do that, see, because we got a lot of good bottom land.”

  “Sounds like you also have a lot of scorn for authority.”

  “It’s okay in its place, I guess.”

  “And where might that be?”

  “Back in some town.”

  Avery smiled. “I might have enough people here to handle that size crop. What’s the yield around here, something like fifteen or twenty bushels to the acre?”

  “Fifteen for sure, sometimes more. Eight or nine thousand bushels altogether. I’ll give you nine cents a bushel for the use of the machine and another hundred or so to split up amongst your crew. That’s a nice chunk of money for you. And a good place to hide out, too.”

  “Not that I said I was looking for one.”

  “Nope. And not that I heard it, neither.”

  “Sounds to me like we can work something out,” said Avery. “Just exactly where are this big barn and the corn cribs?”

  “You just follow Annie in the pickup.”

  “I can only make about three miles an hour on this kind of ground.”

  “That’s okay. I tell Annie, keep it in low.”

  “You’re not going with her?’

  “No, I ride up with you, I think.”

  “The hell, you say. And why would you do that, exactly?”

  “Cause I ain’t never rode on a big honker of a steam engine before. Is that okey-dokey?”

  “We’ll try it that way, anyway.”

  “Ya, sure, then!” He shook everybody’s hand enthusiastically, ran over to talk to his wife who had already gotten back in the pickup, and then ran back to the engine, grinning broadly.

  “Here we goes, then!”

  “Praise God,” said Jude the Mystic. He headed back toward the Indian.

  “Ah, you don’t gotta say that stuff. That’s just for when I’m in front of the old woman.”

  The dawn was still nothing to brag on, but the Model T had newly wiped-off headlights, and they could see it easily as it turned south. Avery cranked the steel steering wheel into a fifteen-degree turn, and the whole chain of rigs headed around into a broad left arc, finally straightening out on a heading roughly south by southeast. They drove for an hour and ten minutes before the rising sun lit up a cluster of buildings on the horizon.

  “Looks like a mountain pretending to be a barn,” said Charlie.

  “Looks like just what the doctor ordered,” said Avery.

  “Hey, I’m the only thing resembling a doctor here, and I say it looks like heaven,” said Jude the Mystic, now riding his bike alongside the engine.

  Maggie Mae gave an unequivocal thumbs-up.

  ***

  Later that day, the Windmill Man looked with dismay at the abandoned campsite of the Ark. He had decided not to look for it on the same day he killed Amos Hollander. Instead, he disposed of Hollander’s body in the church cistern, where it joined Pastor Ned’s, cleaned the floor of the reading room with a rag mop, and spent th
e rest of the evening altering Hollander’s spare uniforms to fit himself and moving provisions from the church pantry to the Mercer County pickup.

  How could he have been so stupid?

  Even on the hard, dry, autumn ground, the tracks from the big, cleated steel wheels of the traction engine were easy to spot. But there was one set going east and one set going west, and no way to tell which was newer. Which one should he follow? Would Providence forgive his moment of pride and show him the way? He had been given a perfect setup and had frittered it away. Surely, he would be punished for that.

  He followed the tracks to the west for a while. They turned north and then went straight into wheat land. The first barbed wire fence they ran under was still intact. Or intact again. That seemed to argue for this being the older set of tracks, since the farmer had had time to repair the fence, which would certainly have been smashed down.

  He reversed his course, going back to the campsite by the creek and then east for a few miles. But the tracks in that direction didn’t encounter any fences, so he couldn’t draw any new conclusions.

  He decided to find out just how angry Providence was. He took an empty bottle from the back of the pickup, laid it down on a bit of hard, smooth ground, and spun it, saying, “Show me the way.” The bottle whirled, wobbled, and finally came to rest pointing straight south. Damn, damn, damn!

  He got back behind the wheel and continued east, cursing himself and fuming with impotent rage.