The Bones of Plenty. Lois Phillips Hudson
North Dakota, proclaimed a moratorium on payments of farm mortgages and decreed that there must be no more forced sales of premises or personal property used for agriculture.
George thought about that decree while he rode behind his team, round and round an eighty-acre field, turning two furrows at a time. The governor swore he would call out the state militia to restrain the county sheriffs from carrying out sales. They were already having battles over the Minnesota governor’s proclamation to the same effect. George wondered if Langer would really follow through on what he’d said. Above all, he wondered if what Langer had said would carry any weight with Vick. According to Wild Bill Langer, Mr. James T. Vick would not be able to attach George Custer’s stock and equipment in order to collect rent. George did not propose to try to beat Vick out of his rent, but on the other hand, if Vick did not loan him the money to get in the crop, Vick would have everything to lose and nothing to gain, the way George saw it. After all, there were always just two ways for Vick ever to get his rent—out of a crop or out of George’s own possessions. Now there was supposedly only one—out of a crop. The more George thought about it, the more reasonable it was to expect that Vick would let him have the money.
Every day he plowed and figured. With his four-horse team and a two-bottom plow he could turn over four acres in a twelve-hour day. He could get by without plowing the other wheat field because he had plowed it last spring and it was loose enough just to disk and drag and seed. Even so, he had oats and corn and barley and hay to get in. He might have to get Ralph Sundquist over for a week or so with his team, and he would have to pay Ralph in cash because he didn’t have either goods or labor to trade for Ralph’s work.
On the last day of March the weather was unseasonably warm. This early in the year they were already falling behind their normal seasonal total of moisture. If it was going to be another drought year, he should get the crops in as soon as it was humanly possible in order to take advantage of what little moisture the winter had left behind. He decided he could no longer put off going to bargain with James T. Vick.
Will had been watching and hoping to catch George driving by alone in the car. He was just coming from the barn when he spotted the old Ford below on the road and he jogged down his driveway and flagged George to a stop. George did not turn off the engine; he couldn’t bear to be interrupted in a project—especially one that was so unpleasant to think about. Will found it even harder than usual to talk to him.
“Have you got a minute, George?” he asked.
“Just about that,” George said.
“Rachel’s mother and I—that is—I don’t know whether you lost money in the bank or not,” Will began, “but if you did, we’d like to let you have whatever you lost for as long as you need it. We’ve always kept an account in Jimtown. That is, I wish you’d ask us if you need help this spring, regardless … we … Rachel—might not need to know.” He saw that George was already angry and he wondered miserably what he had done wrong, besides telling a lie about a sizable Jamestown account.
His first four words had been wrong. George took them as an affront to him as a son-in-law. Why hadn’t Will said, “Rose and I”? Why “Rachel’s mother and I,” as though Rachel still belonged in her father’s tall house on the hill, not in his own?
“We’ll get the crops in, I reckon,” George said. “Much obliged.”
He shifted into gear and pretended not to hear Will shouting, “Well, now, you know where to come if you change your mind!”
Will walked back up the hill. His legs seemed uncommonly heavy. They made his toes come scudging into the ground at each step just an instant before he expected them to. He glanced up at the orchard, at the dead crab-apple tree over the box of money. He wondered if it was the pain in his belly that made his legs so heavy.
The thirty miles to Jamestown were gone before George had even begun to exhaust the choice words he might have said to Will or that he would like to say to James T. Vick. He had, in fact, spent the entire time assembling choice words, so that he found himself parking the car down the street from Vick’s store without any clear idea of what he was actually going to say.
He made his way past the disgusting counters, wondering if Vick was watching him from the balcony. He flinched as one of the little change carriers whizzed over his head, so close that he could feel its breeze parting his hair. A damned store for women.
He stood in the door of Vick’s office, holding his light summer cap in one hand, shaking Vick’s hand with the other.
“How’s the farm, Custer?” Vick shouted above the noise of the little cash carriers coming home.
“Still there, Mr. Vick,” George said.
He decided to make an oblique approach. He began while Vick cleared papers off a chair for him. “They say it’s going to be a bad grasshopper year, and the drought’s going to be bad, too, maybe. I think I ought to put in more hay this year—hay and pasture. No rust and smut to worry about; not so much pest damage; drought don’t hurt it so much; good for the land. If the hay don’t bring any price, maybe I could feed a couple-three more cows through the winter. Cream prices are going up a little.”
“Oh, no, Custer!” Vick burst in. “This is just the year for wheat. Government says the drought’ll have the prices way up—better than they’ve been for years. No, this is the year to plant wheat and get whatever we can.”
George had learned that an argument inevitably and quickly led to the same conclusion. Vick always confronted George with the same simple alternatives—George could obey or lose his lease. If George lost his lease, he would also lose all the improvements he had made. George knew that if Vick even got around to offering him those alternatives today, he would hit him. He started over. “I want to plant a new kind of seed this year. The money for it was in the bank. I never saved back any seed last fall. If I don’t put in a crop, I guess you don’t get any rent, do you? That is, if Langer sticks to his guns.” His hand was being forced too early in the game. With Vick he always found himself having to bet his chips before the draw.
Vick tilted back his swivel chair and smiled. He had big, oddly flat lips. When he stretched them to smile, George thought of the ragged strip of dull red rubber tied to a boy’s slingshot.
“Always burning your bridges, aren’t you, Custer? That’s no way to do business. Why didn’t you save some seed?”
“It’s useless to keep on planting Marquis year after year! The rust takes more of it every year. I figured last fall I might as well make the switch to Ceres this spring or—or just get out! The rust don’t bother Ceres and the smut couldn’t be any worse than it is in the Marquis, and the Ceres is supposed to take the drought better. I didn’t burn my bridges! I saved every dime I could toward this seed.”
“Did you actually have enough in the bank to see you through?”
God, how he hated the impertinent way the man had of pinning him down! Landlords! Vick was so lucky that nobody had killed him yet.
“I figured on a very small loan.” George never could lie.
“Well,” Vick said. He let his chair fall forward and bounce him out toward the file where he kept his claims on the sweat of men. “I think we can arrange for the seed.”
He pulled out George’s papers. He figured on scratch paper for a moment and then laid the paper on the edge of his desk, inclining a shoulder toward George to indicate that he should move his chair closer. George did not move his chair, but he leaned forward. Vick pointed with his pencil to his scattered bits of arithmetic, as though George would have trouble following him. George gritted his teeth.
“Here’s the way the deal works,” Vick said, in a tone he might have used in explaining the store’s policies to a new clerk. “Another sixty acres in wheat—that will still leave you a hundred for pasture and corn and hay.”