by John Jakes
His boss was a wheat farmer named Edgar Jeter. He hadn’t a single bunkhouse or shed for the sizable crew working his four clanking rattling headers. The food Jeter’s wife laid out was slop. After two days, Joe spoke to Jeter out by his chicken coop at sundown.
“We ought to have some running water. Use of your well—”
“Well’s for the family. Try the creek.”
“It’s a mile from here, Mr. Jeter.”
“So? You’re healthy. Hike.”
“We don’t even have a privy.”
“Take care of that when you’re down at the creek.”
“Mr. Jeter, maybe the rest of your crew will put up with these conditions. But I’ve had some experience with labor organizations.”
“What are you, a red? Shut your mouth or you won’t get paid.”
“No, I won’t shut up. You have a responsibility. A duty to give your men basic decent—”
The fist big as a rock came flying out of the sunset glare. Joe Junior landed in the dust. Jeter loomed above, throwing a malevolent black shadow on him.
“Get the hell off my land or I’ll break you in two pieces. I won’t have a God damn red socialist agitator working for me.”
Joe Junior picked up his knotted bundle of belongings in the stubble field where the crew was allowed to camp and walked west in the starlight.
He found work on other farms, roundabout little towns with musical names. Mentor, Groveland, Redwing, Pretty Prairie. The harvesting season was at its height, hundreds of crews swarming in the fields.
He joined a crew working for one of the Mennonite farmers in Ellsworth County, Bruno Cherry by name. Mr. Cherry was in his late forties. He’d come to America in 1873 with his bride of three months, all the way from the Ukraine. The original family name was Chermochev.
Cherry was a strapping, talkative man. He spoke excellent, almost biblical English, with scarcely a hint of accent. His beard was as long as Joe Junior’s and nearly the same color, although gray in places. Quite without warning, his left eye would wander inward, as if to contemplate his nose for a while. He was a hard master, but honest and considerate. He had built a sturdy bunkhouse for the itinerant crews that worked his two thousand acres twice a year. Food was plentiful and good.
“Originally ours was a North German family,” Cherry said. He talked to Joe Junior and others during rest periods in the field, when Mrs. Cherry drove the water wagon out to the big headers. There was no foreman to prevent such intimacy; Cherry bossed his hired crews personally.
“Many Prussian Mennonites went to the Ukraine in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Mennonites always seek and find the richest land,” he said with a smile. “In the Ukraine our sect created large and successful farming colonies. Then, twenty-two years ago—1873—there came a decree from the Tsar. All able-bodied men were to be conscripted into the army. Mennonites will not fight wars. We hold that human life is sacred. Hundreds of young men left. I was one.”
Joe Junior liked Cherry, just as he liked Cherry’s stout wife and three daughters, all of marriageable age. None had found the right suitor; Mennonites couldn’t marry outside their religion. They were plain people. Their clothes were simple, even coarse. Their square, two-story house was devoid of ornamentation except for lightning rods and a cast iron weather vane. The exterior was a drab gray, relieved only by white shutters. Throughout the interior a great many oil lamps provided warm illumination. At night the house shone like a golden Christmas tree. Joe Junior couldn’t imagine that electric lines would ever reach this far into the wilderness.
Cherry and his Mennonite friends husbanded their land in a way that was new to most of their neighbors: they let certain sections lie fallow every second year. The fallow fields gathered a whole season of the sparse Kansas rainfall and stored it for the next year, Cherry explained. To the surprise of many, but not the Mennonites, that second-year crop was typically big.
Bruno Cherry saw that Joe Junior wasn’t like most of the other harvesters. They were either illiterate men who’d never known anything but farm work, or stuck-up college boys spending the summer earning money. The family invited Joe Junior inside their house for supper more than once. Mr. Cherry loved to discuss the past of his adopted state.
“Soon after I came here, we had more than ten years of wonderful rain. People from the East rushed to buy land. Then the great blizzard of ’87 struck. The suffering, privation—beyond description! After the snow melted, there came years of drought. People no longer saw a future here. Two hundred, three hundred thousand left the state. I saw many a wagon returning East with a slogan painted on the side. ‘In God we trusted, in Kansas we busted.’ ”
Two of Cherry’s daughters giggled effusively, an opportunity to cast admiring looks at Joe Junior.
Cherry was concerned about the welfare of families presently working the land. “We have to seize and shape our future, the big moguls in the East won’t help. That is why Kansans created the new political party.”
With a nod at the oldest daughter across the table, Joe Junior said, “How does that work? Miss Rebekah told me Mennonites won’t swear allegiance to any government, only to God.” Rebekah blushed. Her sisters stabbed her with looks of jealousy.
“True,” he said.
“So you never involve yourself with politics—”
“Not true in my case. That is the reason I’m shunned by some of my brethren. Called a damned heretic.” Mrs. Cherry averted her eyes. “They mean damned in the most literal sense, you understand. I can’t help it. A man grows and changes however he must. A man answers the voice of God that he hears inside him. I’m certain that was true of the first leader of our sect, Father Menno. He defied the very church of Rome that ordained him. Tore away from it completely, for doctrinal reasons—a damned heretic if ever I heard of one,” he said with a laugh.
“Further, the Christians from whom our sect sprang, the Anabaptists of the sixteenth century, were not so unworldly. They were in fact ardent reformers. Resisters of oppression. Righters of wrongs in the world of commerce, and in society. Following that example, I have stepped off the narrow path and engaged myself with this new movement. It grew out of the Grange, the Patrons of Husbandry. You know it?”
“No, sir.”
“A cooperative of farmers trying to solve mutual problems. We study the writings of social thinkers. Social moralists. Edward Bellamy. George’s Progress and Poverty.”
“I’ve read Henry George!”
“Splendid. But do you believe him? Do you believe wealth rightfully belongs solely to those who create it, never to any who hire the land out to others, and feed off their sweat and suffering?”
“Yes, I believe it,” Joe Junior said, enthralled. Here was a man as passionate in his way as Eugene Debs, or Benno Strauss in his less violent moments.
Cherry leaned back. “Where did you come from, Joseph? You don’t tell us anything about yourself.”
“No, sir, there isn’t much to tell. Mrs. Cherry, would you pass the biscuits, please?”
Supper was over. Mrs. Cherry and the daughters were quietly clearing dishes, washing them in a basin, drying them, with more glances at the young visitor, who was listening to Bruno Cherry explain that from the Grange had come the Kansas People’s Party, organized at Topeka five years ago. Soon it had been renamed the Populist Party, spreading like a prairie fire in a dry season. The Populists put up slates of local candidates, then state candidates; now they were thinking nationally.
“Our demands are simple and fair,” Cherry said. His eye wandered as he ticked off points on his fingers. “The eight-hour work day throughout America. For elections, the Australian ballot, which is secret. An income tax under which everyone pays in proportion to his income—the rich more, the poor less. We want full suffrage for women. We want the government to strip control of railroads, telegraph and telephone companies from the greedy sharks of the East. Above all, we want free silver at the ratio of sixteen to one.”
&n
bsp; He shook his head. “It’s easier to say than to do. We are locked in a hard and vicious fight. The Eastern papers call us mad dogs. In some quarters our candidates are jeered. Jerry Simpson, once a sailor on the Great Lakes, was a candidate for Congress in 1892. His Republican opponent laughed and pointed out that he was so poor he couldn’t afford socks. Exactly, said Jerry Simpson, it was one reason he was running for Congress. Sockless Jerry Simpson is in Washington. Sockless Jerry was reelected last year.”
“Do you plan to run anyone for President?”
“In the next election we would like to nominate Mr. William Jennings Bryan. He stands with us on free silver and many other issues.” Cherry’s eye wandered back into place. “So now you know what we do in Kansas when we aren’t breaking our backs to earn a living.”
“I’d like to hear more, Mr. Cherry.”
“Truly? That’s splendid. I will take you to the county seat on Saturday night. You will hear a speech from one of our best, Mrs. Mary Lease. ‘The Lady Orator of the West.’ Yelling Mary, some call her.” He gave a rumbling laugh. “Yelling Mary. It fits. You’ll see.”
Torches blazed in the public square of Ellsworth. All around Joe Junior were men and women with lean, worn faces. Faces hungry for honesty, starved for justice, eager to hear gospel. From the back of a farm wagon Mrs. Mary Lease gave it to them. She was a handsome woman with a ringing contralto voice.
“We no longer have a government of the people, by the people, for the people; we have a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street. The great common people of this country are slaves, and monopoly is the master!”
Yelling Mary was the wife of a Wichita apothecary and the mother of four, he’d been told on the buggy ride into town. “And she’s a lawyer, too.” Cherry was proud, as if describing a local athletic hero.
“Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honest men in rags. Two years ago we were told to go to work, raise a big crop. We went to work. We plowed and planted. The rains fell, the sun shone, nature smiled, and we raised that big crop. And what came of it? I’ll tell you what came of it. Eight-cent corn! Ten-cent oats! The politicians said we suffered from overproduction!”
A roar of rage went up in the square.
“Overproduction! When statistics tell us ten thousand little children starve to death in the United States every year! When scores of young shop girls are forced to sell their virtue on city pavements for the bread their pitiful wages deny them!”
Mary Lease raised her fists above her head.
“This is my message to you. It’s time we raised less corn. It’s time we raised less wheat. It’s time we raised more hell!”
Shouts, shrieks, whistles, Indian whoops. Someone shot off a pistol. Red-faced with excitement, Joe Junior clapped as hard as the rest. Here was a political party standing for everything he believed. A party of people armed with principled anger, not dynamite. That night he was baptized in the boiling waters of Populism. That night in Ellsworth, Kansas, he was born again.
When the harvest ended, it was time to go on toward the Rockies; the valleys of California and the Northwest; the shore of the Western ocean. He said goodbye to the Cherry family. Mrs. Cherry wept. So did two of her daughters. Bruno Cherry gave him an extra five dollars he could ill afford.
“No arguments, Joseph, you are a good worker. You’re a good young man. We can’t baptize outsiders into our faith but if we could, you could marry Rebekah or Hester or Miriam and I would be happy. I say it again, you are a fine young man. Your parents must be proud.”
A shadow seemed to float across Joe Junior’s vivid blue eyes. As if making a joke, he said, “I doubt it. They’re far away from here. They don’t know much about me anymore. They don’t even know where I am.”
“You must rectify that,” Bruno Cherry said, stern as an Old Testament prophet. “It is unjust and unkind to let them worry and wonder about you.”
Joe Junior was taken aback. Riven by guilt, he hoisted his bundle over his shoulder and set off on the sunny road winding over the prairie through the wheat fields.
In the village of Black Wolf on the Smoky Hill River in the northwestern corner of the county, his guilt grew too heavy to bear. Cherry was right, he shouldn’t punish his mother with worry. His father’s feelings didn’t enter into it.
It wasn’t hard to find an appropriate token. Three dried grains of wheat, the heads of the stalks, picked up from a roadside where they’d fallen.
He purchased an envelope at the Black Wolf general store. At the postal window in back, he borrowed a pencil and a scrap of paper on which he wrote the words Joe Jr. He put the paper inside the envelope and immediately changed his mind. He removed the paper, sealed the envelope with the wheat grains inside. He cocked his hand to the left, so that his writing slanted that way. He wrote Mrs. I. Crown on the outside, and the address, then stepped up to the wicket to buy his stamp.
65
Ilsa
ILSA LAY IN BED, feverish, felled by a severe case of summer grippe. Her flannel gown was soaked with sweat. The sheet pulled up to her waist felt as oppressively heavy as a winter duvet.
She hated sickness. She equated it with weakness, or punishment by the Almighty for some sin clearly visible to Him if not to the sick person.
Ilsa knew her sin. Failure to hold the family together. Even, possibly, her marriage. From the night the man fell to his death, drunk on Crown beer—the night she started a new argument despite the old unbreakable deadlock on the subject dividing them most deeply—she had felt Joe slipping away from her.
On a lower shelf of her bedside stand lay a book she hadn’t opened in some time. The Proceedings of the Women’s Congress of 1893. Almost tremulously, she opened it and turned the pages. Speech after speech, all on “the woman question,” as it was called.
How vividly the images of certain speakers reappeared in her imagination. She could hear their proud, fearless declarations, to which she’d given close and sympathetic attention, knowing all the while that her Joe would be angry with the speeches, and the speakers, and with her for listening to them.
She turned a page. Miss Frances Willard, the pillar of the Temperance Union. “The greatest discovery of the nineteenth century is the discovery of woman, by woman.”
Another page. Mrs. A. J. Cooper, an eloquent Negress of Washington, D.C. “Not until race, color, sex, and condition are seen as accidents, and not the substance of life—not until then is woman’s lesson taught, and woman’s cause won.”
Lucy Stone, one of the staunchest of the early crusaders. Now old, tiny, and frail. But still full of fire. “The idea that woman’s sphere is at home, and only at home, has been like a band of steel on society. But the spinning wheel and the loom, the taking care of the house and children, could not and cannot supply the needs or fill the aspirations of women.”
The next page brought her to the hottest zealot she’d heard: Laura DeForce Gordon, an attorney from California. “All through the ages there has been a system of repression, suppression, and oppression toward women. The conservative, repressive training of the home has abetted and supported it. So have the religious teachings of the various churches. It is an attitude, a pattern of behavior, that is incomprehensible, wicked, and no longer tolerable in any respect.”
Such brave words. She’d been set afire by them, convinced they marked the way of the future.
She closed the book and ran her hand over the fine leather cover stamped in gold. Perhaps the new ideas weren’t so good after all. Perhaps they were thrust forward too aggressively. They didn’t sustain her now. How could ideas, however worthy, heal the raging anxiety of her heart? Or convince her it didn’t matter? Hew could ideas compete with the love of her husband, which she felt she was losing?
A knock at the bedroom door startled her.
“Mrs. Crown?”
“I’m awake, Helga.”
“The morning mail arrived. There is a letter, addressed to you.�
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“Please, bring it in.”
Joe rushed home from the brewery in response to her telephone call. Sitting by her bedside, he turned the envelope one way and then another, studying it. Ilsa’s face glowed. “He’s alive, Joe. He sent the grains of wheat to show us. He must be out West.”
“How do you know they came from him?” Joe held up the envelope. “This isn’t his handwriting.”
“Of course it is. He tried to disguise it but he can’t fool me. I’d be a poor mother if I couldn’t recognize my own son’s hand.”
“Well, I’m not convinced.” He stood up, looking warm and uncomfortable in his wrinkled white summer suit and vest. “I don’t recognize the writing and I don’t believe you do either; you just say it because you want to believe it.”
“Of course I want to believe it! Is it wrong to want him back? I do. Is it wrong to believe he’s well and will come home someday? I do. Is it wrong to think he sent this to tell us not to worry? No.”
Joe responded to her anger impassively. He laid the envelope on the bed. “Well, if it is from Joe, he sent it to you, not to me. You must excuse me now, I still have a lot to do this afternoon.”
Bending, he kissed her briefly on her perspiring cheek. He smiled at her and waved as he went out. She wasn’t fooled, not by any of it.
She picked up the envelope with its unusual contents—its signal; its token of Joey’s survival. She pressed it against her gown, between her sagging breasts. The truth was in her husband’s eyes. A certain—distance, altogether new. A growing resentment. She had lost her son. She had lost her nephew Pauli. Now she was in danger of losing Joe, and she had no remedy for it. Being herself—kind Ilsa, dutiful Ilsa, Ilsa always prompt with the meals, Ilsa who kept the house immaculate—that was no longer good enough. That couldn’t help her any more. She associated with the wrong women. She espoused the wrong ideas. She spoke too forthrightly. She’d forgotten a wife’s proper place. She couldn’t go back even if she wanted to.