The Bones of Plenty (14 page)

Will held out an envelope. “I wrote this up for four per cent,” he said. “Keep it for as long as you need it.”

“Four per cent is not what I’d pay anywhere else, and you know it,” George said. “I’ll pay you eight.”

“Whatever you say. But don’t let it be on your mind, George. See you later.”

“You bet,” George shouted after him. “Much obliged.”

I’ll pay him
ten
per cent, he thought. “Don’t let it be on your mind.” Oh, no, of course not! Don’t let a loan from your pious father-in-law be on your mind, especially when it’s more money than you cleared on your whole damn wheat crop last year, especially when you had to borrow it because of the dirty Jew who was going scot-free at this exact instant while you were riding around a field making two furrows at a time with a four-horse team that ought to be replaced by a tractor which ate only when it worked.

No, don’t let it be on your mind. I’ll pay him
twelve
per cent, he said to himself, and he began to see how the wheat would grow around him—the good Ceres that would not rust, that would harvest maybe twenty bushels to the acre if the whole world didn’t burn up before the summer was over.

Then the wheat was pouring out of the threshing machine, making a golden-brown mountain in the truck. He was driving it to the elevator where Adolph Beahr was unusually respectful. “By God, George! You was on the right track, after all!”

The price would be up because of the drought. Down South, the papers said, more than a third of the winter wheat acreage had already been abandoned. When the wheat checks were all in, his neighbors came to buy from him the seed they were now deriding him about, for the Marquis had barely been worth harvesting because of rust. And when George repaid the loan, at a higher interest than he would have paid Harry, he would offer to sell Will some Ceres seed at a much lower price than it was worth. He would show him that the
young
men were still able to hold their own when it came to passing out big favors.

After he dropped Lucy at school the next morning, George went around to the elevator to order the seed. Adolph wasn’t even there yet. The elevators and the railroads—even after thirty, forty, fifty years of battles—they still ran the farmer. They could even afford to keep bankers’ hours. He didn’t want to wait around. He’d come back in the afternoon to hand his borrowed money to this leisurely middleman. Then he could give Lucy a lift too.

Middlemen got sixty per cent of the consumer’s food dollar. City people didn’t know that. They blamed the high food prices on the farmer. Why didn’t the newspaper editors and the trade union rabble-rousers take the trouble to come out and see just how rich the farmer was? The government had given the railroads so much land on either side of their rights-of-way that the grain elevators and flour mills had to be built on railroad property. Very simple to see what kind of schemes and monopolies this situation led to.

There were always ways to get around antitrust laws if you were big enough. But when the farmers got together and tried to build their own cooperative elevators—ah, that was a different story. The Supreme Court ruled that the farmers’ cooperatives were an illegal “combination in restraint of trade.”

As far as George was concerned, most farm organizations were not allowed to be anything more than vehicles to carry the ballyhoo of the big farmers to ignorant city people. The Farmers’ Union appeared to be on the side of the little fellow, but what did it ever accomplish?

Last summer, for example, the Union organized the first of the big farm strikes that still went on here and there. But what happened? Half of the delegates to the Farm Holiday Convention could not get to Des Moines because so many banks were already on “holiday” that the farmers couldn’t scare up cash for railroad fares. And what did those farmer delegates actually do about the crooks who were sitting on their money? Why, they wrote a catchy little song about it.

Phooey! Then these earnest delegates went on to figure out that with taxes, mortgage payments, and costs of nonfarm products at the level they were, a little man farming a cash crop of a quarter section of wheat, like George, could not continue to exist unless he got ninety-two cents a bushel for it. But even while the strike was on, farmers like George were getting twenty-six cents, and none of the road blockades, the slogans and songs, the fights, the picketing, the storming of jails and capitol buildings moved the prices one iota. No, it was going to take a much bigger, sterner outfit than the Farmers’ Union, with its fine songs and statistics, to fight the fat middlemen.

In North Dakota, where the Farmers’ Union was strong, some state and national congressmen met in Bismarck and put out a grandiose statement urging the farmers to organize and barricade themselves on their farms and refuse to submit to foreclosures. The farmers were advised “to pay no existing debts, except for taxes and the necessities of life,” unless satisfactory reductions were made to bring farm prices on a par with other prices. George remembered that one part of the statement exactly, because he had been so incensed at those inane exceptions. Why agree to pay taxes to a government that did nothing for him? Why exempt the “necessities of life”? What else did a farmer ever buy? Nobody had gone far enough yet to get George really interested. He had seen too many schemes for wild political action in the twenties and too many farmers’ cooperatives fall apart. It was going to take bloodshed to change things for the farmer.

He stopped at the mailbox and took out the
Jamestown Sun.
FARMERS ATTACK DISTRICT JUDGE was the headline. More of the same B.S. He could have written it himself. So they all signed a useless little petition to a judge who was paid by rich men for his favors. So what! In Le Mars, Iowa, the story said, a hundred farmers had tried to make a district judge promise to sign no more farm mortgage foreclosures. Yeah! You bet!

But wait a minute—when the judge said no, the farmers dragged him off his bench, socked him good, blindfolded him, hauled him in the back of a truck to a lonely spot in the road, put a rope around his neck, choked him till they nearly scared him to death, smeared his face with axle grease, and left him without any pants. A district judge without any pants.

He laughed all the way down to the house and he was still laughing while he harnessed the team and hitched up to the plow. Now that was the kind of action those boys would understand—just what he’d been advocating right along.

That Le Mars must be quite a town. He recalled reading a couple of months before how the farmers had almost hung an agent of the New York Life Insurance Company there. The agent came out from New York to foreclose on a mortgage of $30,000 and submitted the highest sale bid himself. It was the highest bid, but it was only $20,000. That was the legalized tyranny the insurance companies enjoyed these days. They took away a man’s whole farm and the farmer
still
owed them ten thousand dollars.

There must be two or three real men down at Le Mars. That was all it would take in any one place. And then when the good men got together, the revolt would begin. Not a man now old enough to run a farm could forget how a dozen years ago the insurance companies had been
begging
the farmers to borrow money from them. The moneylenders all wanted to get in on the skyrocketing land values. And now that land values had collapsed along with the farmers’ markets, the moneylenders would get their money back any way they could. Every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost. Well, that policy could work both ways, as they would find out one of these days.

The day was coming when neither the rich men in the government nor the rich men in business would dare to send their lackeys to squeeze money out of the West and take it back to Wall Street.

Around and around rode George Armstrong Custer, drawing his two furrows behind him, and the vision grew and took the shapes and sounds of life. First he would get an eviction notice from the city man. James T. Vick would be coming with the sheriff, despite the threats and proclamations of Wild Bill Langer to call out the state militia against the county sheriffs. But George would not need any militia. No man in the county was a better shot. He and his family would be fortified in his own haymow. It would be a cinch compared to fighting Indians.
Indians
would burn him out up there, but not Vick. Before George fixed the old wreck, it could hardly have been called a barn. Vick wanted that barn now. He wanted to repossess the barn with all the lumber and work that George had put into it. Vick would not burn it to get him. Very comfortable up in that mow—plenty of food and water, blankets to spread over the hay. Plenty of rifle shells. Hardly any challenge at all, for a man whose ancestors had fought their way across nearly two thousand miles of frontiers.

When Vick arrived, riding in the official car between Sheriff Richard Press and a deputy, the yard would look deserted. Vick would have a moment of feeling foolish, having brought the Law thirty miles to a place already deserted. Then the dust would explode about a foot away from Vick’s polished city shoes. It made George smile to hear the way the yellow storekeeper would scream and to see how he would dive back into the sheriff’s car. The sheriff would have to put on a show, and he would discharge his pistol in the direction of the barn. Another dust explosion would occur a few inches away from the sheriff’s boot.

The sheriff would have everything to lose and hardly anything to gain, except a campaign contribution and a little graft. He would also retreat to the official car. The deputy would never have got out from behind the wheel at all. They would confer for a moment. A bullet would ring a terrifying alarm on the front bumper. In the midst of that echo, the starter would whinny for a moment and then the engine would turn over. But before the deputy could get the car into gear, the three quaking men in the front seat would feel a front tire burst beneath them. They would turn in a wide giddy circle, thumping along on the raw rim, and waver back up the rutted lane like the scared rabbits they were. George and his family would climb down from the haymow, then, having spent exactly four bullets to defend their rights.

No, it wasn’t that George Custer was not ready to fight. It was just that he hadn’t seen any fight worth getting into yet. The
Farm Holiday News
could go right on “declaring war on the International Bankers and lesser money barons,” and never make the monopolists and the speculators bat an eyelash. It was going to take blood; they would faint dead away at the sight of a little plutocratic blood on the ground. One thing those potbellied bankers never seemed to realize was that there were a lot of men like George A. Custer who had a hell of a lot of time to think about things while they rode a plow around and around a field.

Lucy sat in the front seat of the old Ford, parked in the afternoon shadow of the elevator, while her father ordered his seed wheat. She had begun to understand that people had complex feelings about the elevator, and her own feelings about it were also mixed. She couldn’t help being excited by it because so many things happened there. On the other hand, she knew that her father did not like Adolph Beahr, and she had her own reasons for being uncomfortable around him.

She did not at all mind being left in the car while her father went up to talk to him. Often while she sat and waited, a freight train of a hundred cars or more would go by, creaking as though its weight would tip it from its wheels, slowing for the station and then lumbering on to the east or west.

But as big as the trains were, the elevator made them look very small, with its plain lines rising so much higher than any other building she had ever seen. When she went inside with her father, she was stirred by the smells and sounds of it, and the height of its ceilings, and the stairs going up and up and up, as in a great castle. At harvest time the great iron doors were pushed back and she got to ride the truck inside, couched on fragrant, dusty wheat.