The Bones of Plenty. Lois Phillips Hudson
saw how well the Ceres was going to do for him. It took a little guts to be first to try something, that was all.
For a long time Marquis had been the favorite of hard red spring wheat growers, but stem rust did more damage every year, as the rust spores became ensconced in a wider and wider area, and new varieties, traveling north on the rigs and clothing of the threshing crews, mixed with the old spores and grew strong through hybridization.
Rust and smut were the two ravaging diseases. Smutty wheat brought less from the millers because cleaning it was an expensive proposition, but at least there was some wheat to cut with the binder; smutty wheat wasn’t collapsed on the ground in red-brown broken stalks devoid of kernels. Seed wheat could be treated for smut, but nothing could stop rust except the kind of state-wide effort to wipe out its winter host—the barberry bushes—that the government would not make. So Ceres was George’s last hope. It was rust resistant and more drought resistant than Marquis. It had been developed at the North Dakota Experimental Station just a couple of years ago, and it ought to be right for North Dakota if any wheat was any more.
No brand of wheat was immune to wheat midges, sawflies, pink maggots, cutworms, leaf hoppers, plant lice, billbugs, army worms, black chaff, Hessian fly, chinch bugs, true wireworms, false wireworms, strawworms, jointworms, white grubs, or grain moths. And if the grasshoppers were bad enough they could strip the fields, as they had done a couple of times within his father’s memory, and the brand of wheat would not make any difference at all to them, either. Moreover, Ceres and Marquis were equally vulnerable to dust storms and wind. Hail, or even a hard rain, would dislodge the hardening kernels during their maturing weeks, and the kind of seed he had planted wouldn’t make any difference at all.
But after the way his Marquis had surrendered to rust last summer, George had made up his mind never to plant it again. He had simply sold every bushel he harvested and decided that one way or another he would find the money for the new seed when the spring came. Now spring had come, and he was left with exactly one place to get the money. He squeezed hard on the shovel handle again. The man he had sworn never to go to for help—the man he had cut off this very morning.
He pushed the wheelbarrow down the aisle and laid a row of planks from the barn door to the manure pile across the slushy barnyard. That morning the ground had been hard with thickly frosted ridges outlining the hoof prints in the mud of yesterday’s thawing, and water had been frozen in the deeper tracks. Tomorrow morning it would be the same. Spring came reluctantly to this northern place, but it was here, nevertheless.
Ceres, goddess of growing things, was the name that had been in his mind all winter long. No more Marquis, that debilitated aristocrat which bled so easily that he could lose up to fifty per cent of his crop in a bad rust year. Ceres, after all, was of the family of aristocrats also, as far as wheat went. Hard spring wheat was bread wheat—the best in the world. All the soft wheats and the winter wheats grown farther south and west were used for inferior products—restaurant pies and crackers and abominable new kinds of cereals to be eaten cold. Durum wheat was used for macaroni and spaghetti and other foreign things. But the bakers had to have hard spring wheat for bread, even when they mixed it with winter wheat. When there was an American surplus of the softer wheats, they still would have to import Canadian spring wheat in the years when North Dakota did not produce enough. It took an austere climate to create that kind of wheat—wheat that grew hard and full of protein under the withering semidesert sky. It was the kind of durable, determined grain that could survive and flourish on the smallest possible margin—very much like the men who grew it. Like George’s ancestors, who had fought for and built the state that men like James T. Vick were now taking away from them. Half the farmers in the state were tenants now, like George.
Nevertheless, George was still proud to have been born in a state that created distinction from hardship. It pleased his Scottish blood. If ever there was a one-crop state, it was the one he lived in.
The trouble was that a state with such extreme dedication to one crop—bread—was so helpless when something went askew with the market for bread. When the world was lean with war and could buy bread, North Dakota fattened; when the world was lean with peace and could not buy bread, North Dakota starved—through drought and bumper crops. A North Dakota farmer ought to be able to lay up enough cash and own enough livestock so that he didn’t have to plant wheat at all in such a bad year as this one promised to be. But half the farmers in the state had to do what a city man told them to do. The economy needed radical changes that were long overdue. The absentee landlords must be stripped of the absolute power they had over their tenants, the railroads and elevators must be forced to abandon their monopolies, and the Wall Street and Chicago speculators must be outlawed. Until these changes were made, George Armstrong Custer must go on obediently plowing up a hundred and sixty acres of dry blowing land and trying to get a wheat crop out of it.
That night he sat down after supper with his books and figured out how much money he would have to borrow. He needed a little over two hundred bushels of seed, for he always planted the optimum amount—roughly a bushel and a half to the acre. It would be around a hundred and fifty dollars for seed alone. Considering all the other things he would need cash for, including the biggest expense—paying the threshers—he didn’t see how he could possibly get by on less than three hundred dollars cash between now and September.
He must not count on more than forty dollars from cream between now and then, for the prices always dropped in the summer when the market was glutted from all the freshening cows. His five-year record book showed that the year before the Wall Street crash a decent cow, producing around a hundred and fifty pounds of butterfat a year, had brought in sixty-nine dollars cash just for her cream, not counting the skim that had gone to pigs, calves, and chickens. But last year, just four years later, a herd of six cows had netted him less than a hundred and fifty. Last year, of course, had been the worst year in history, but even so, when he put the two sets of figures together, they were hard to take.
“Rachel!” he called out to the kitchen. “Do you realize that a man could make as much money with two cows in 1928 as he can make with six now? It just works out almost to the last penny. A man sweats just as hard and grows just as much feed and cleans out just as much manure and he makes a third as much money. It just don’t figure, does it?”
“Nothing makes sense,” she said.
“What did you say?”
“Nothing makes sense!”
It bothered him to have her agree with him. “Yes it does make sense! It’s just the same old story. Just the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. Just Jay Gould and J. P. Morgan and Jim Hill and all the rest of them getting crookeder and richer every day. Why, these senators are proving it on them every day—what they all did on the stock market, and the way they got their monopolies on the railroads! They’re the only ones to blame for the crash—all those birds on Wall Street. They’re the fellows we have to thank for getting twenty-six cents a bushel last fall. But you don’t see any of those big guys losing their shirts, do you? No. Only the little guy.”
But even with the farmer’s market ruined, cream prices were a little better this spring because of the drought. George thought he was safe in counting on forty dollars cash from cream between now and when the wheat checks came in. He would ask Will for two hundred and fifty dollars. Four years ago that much money would not have looked like the fortune of half a lifetime.
He wouldn’t have been quite so reluctant to borrow if he could have done it a little later in the season—June or July, with a stand of growing wheat as security. But this way he was borrowing against ground that still froze every night—ground that wasn’t even his—ground that he was utterly committed to, though it was in no way committed to him. His operating margin had narrowed into a wedge that was threatening to pinch him to death. Everything and everybody had a hold on him, and he had a hold on nothing. So long as rich men wrote the laws, what could a little man do?
Wednesday, April 12
George awoke in the prairie dawn at four in the morning, too hot under the quilts that had been just