Mr. Bewley talked about growing up in Oklahoma, about his career as a prizefighter, as a lawyer, as a prospector in Alaska and how he had returned to Oklahoma out of love for his wife, and he said this with the same courtly irony as when he had bent over Helen’s hand, nudging her with his thigh as though in complicity. She shifted slightly toward Hi.
He told them how he had come to Denver to write for The Great Divide. He knew and admired Mr. Bonfils, one of the owners of The Denver Post, a powerful friend of “the little people.” Helen wished he would not refer to the little people so often. She felt it diminished them, for she and Hi were undoubtedly classed among the lowly peasants. It also seemed unfair to Helen that ordinary men—Hi, for example—had great trouble finding an occupation, while Mr. Antip Bewley had enjoyed so many and cast them all to one side.
They spent the day driving from one homestead site to another, horned larks running before them on the roads, flying up only at the last moment. They walked over acres of level ground that seemed much the same to Helen. Around three o’clock they stopped and rested in the shade of the car. Bewley took a dripping basket from the back. Inside were three apples, chunks of melting ice, six bottles of beer and two of sarsaparilla. Bewley and Hi each drank two beers. Helen walked to a draw out of sight of the car to relieve herself, and as she started back she saw the two men were doing the same, standing side by side, separated by a polite distance of eight or ten feet.
“I’ll tell you what,” said Antip Bewley, speaking to Hi in a confidential tone as though beer and urination had moved them to another level of intimacy, “there’s a kind a special site I been saving for some special people, and I think you are the ones. It’s got a real valuable feature. Wait’ll you see it.”
Helen thought the site looked very much the same as the others and stayed in the car, but Bewley led Hi to a small draw where the vegetation appeared different. Birds flew up as they approached it, and the hoofprints of wild horses showed on the damp soil.
“There,” said Bewley. “What do you think of that?”
That was a wet seep at the head of the little draw, hardly more than a slanting crease in the otherwise level ground. “Nice little spring. Never goes dry. Dig it out, put in a springhouse and you’re set for life.”
Right then, Helen, watching from the car, saw that Hi decided this was their place. He tossed his head a little as he always did when he had made up his mind about something.
“Didn’t you say we was going to have trees?” Her voice was so light she seemed to have inhaled a ribbon of cloud and to float out her words on its gauzy remnants. But her face was pinched and yellow and she kept her hands under the buffalo robe. He thought she had taken on a Chinese look.
“You saw the place last spring. Did you think trees was goin a grow up by now? We got to plant them. I’ll plant them. By the gods, first thing I do soon as the ground thaws, I’ll get out here with a load of lumber and some trees and rosebushes. That suit you?” There was in his voice some asperity, as though she had asked for a cobblestone drive and a perpetual fountain.
She nodded, wanting to preserve the peace of the day.
His voice mellowed. “All right, then. Come on, get out and I’ll show you the best part.”
Slowly, for her joints were half-frozen, Helen got out of the car, slapping dust from her sleeves, and walked into the sharp air. She was very cold and she wished she had worn her brown merino wool skirt. She followed Hi’s striding legs, both of them hurrying now because the first few flakes of snow were gliding down. Last spring the land had been rich green starred with wildflowers, for Antip Bewley had shrewdly showed them around when the season was most promising. When, in late summer, they came for the picnic, they had stayed on the east side. The landscape there was sere, the grass a dry brown color like a coffee stain, and she was glad they were to live on the flowery west side. Now it resembled a wasteland.
“Cold!” she gasped, fumbling with the neck button of her light jacket and wishing she had brought a woolen scarf, wishing she had a heavy duster or an overcoat.
“Take a look at this,” Hi cried in a joyful voice, spreading his arms wide to encompass the two acres he had plowed and disked with the hired help of a Craig farmer. “Just a second disking in the spring and we’ll plant. And how about this?” He pointed to the springhouse he had built a few weeks before. He had cleared out the muddy spring, surrounded it with a cedar box, covered the bottom with clean river gravel and water-smoothed stones, then built a small structure to protect it from range horses, livestock and silt-laden wind. He opened the small door and she could see the black water reflect the square of light that had fallen on it.
She grimaced, and he caught the expression.
“What’s the matter with it,” he said.
“Nothing! It’s swell! It’s just that the baby kicked,” and she put her hand on her belly as actresses did when they wanted to indicate that they were pregnant.
“Well,” he said. “That’s fine. Isn’t it? Isn’t it, honey?”
“Yes.”
“That’s fine, new land, new springhouse, new big house coming, one baby coming. And we’ll name him Joe. Joe is a good name for a boy.”
“Yes. Or Jim or Frank.” This was old ground. She knew his horror of burdensome names, for the three Alcorn brothers, Hiawatha, Hamilcar and Seneca, had suffered, and their names had been abbreviated to Hi, Ham and Sen by the end of each boy’s respective first day in school. Helen teased him sometimes, chanting in a low voice such as she thought an Indian reciter would use
By the shores of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,
Wherein dwelt young Hiawatha…
“That’s not how it goes,” he said in a tight voice, for he did not stand teasing, and he took up a tin cup fastened to the cedar spring casing by a strip of rawhide, dipped it full, handed it, dripping, to her.
“You did a lot of work,” she said to mollify him.
“You tell em, kid.”
She drank the ice-cold water, pure and sweet and with the faintest taste of cedar, and thought, This is our water, my water, for her father had given them one hundred dollars toward the place. The war years had been good for farmers. Corn had gone to two dollars a bushel and it seemed wheat prices would keep rising. The money had helped, for every homestead family, Mr. Bewley said, should have two thousand dollars, six cows, three horses. Hi explained to her on the way to the picnic when the established settlers showed off their squash and corn, that the Great Divide Colony was not a setup for people who were flat busted. It was more for people who had a little something and wanted to get back to the land.
Later, in the pushing crowd, he said “all these people”—waving in the direction of the crowd watching the bathing beauty contest—“have some money, so the colony is a surefire success.” Helen and Hi had only six hundred dollars and one cow, but Hi was confident they’d make up for it within five years. He had managed to buy three horses, all of them cheap and half-wild as they were fresh off the Red Desert to the northwest.
“I’ll have them gentled down pretty quick,” he said. But he was not good with horses and after a few months he sold them, using the money for a down payment on a tractor. He was going to plant corn and wheat.
“Pay the tractor off with what we make on the crops,” he’d said.
Now, standing shirtsleeved in the freezing autumn wind he remarked, “Quite a few houses already over on the east side. If it wasn’t set for snow we could run over there. You could see.” He looked at the churning clouds and the sparse flakes whirling down. She shuddered, said nothing.
“Better idea, hustle back to Craig and get warm. We’ll hop right in the bed and get warm.” He rapidly raised and lowered his eyebrows communicating a coarse intention. This eyebrow wriggling was something she thought nastily comic.
Both of them came from Tabletop, Iowa. Hi’s father was a strong-minded farmer, and her own par
ents, Rolfe and Netitia Short, owned a small dairy farm. She was the middle child of nine. Her brothers were dairy farmers as well, and Helen, who had developed a dislike of milk cows and their endless care, had married, in part, to escape cows. She had married, too, to escape the household’s obsession with bird eggs. Every surface of the house bore blown bird eggs which Rolfe Short and his sons collected. They often took long trips to distant places to gather more eggs. Her father’s climbing paraphernalia hung from hooks in the milk room, and even there, among the dust and hen feathers, wild bird eggs rolled in small arcs whenever the door opened. Three of her brothers collected eggs as well, and at the dinner table there was no end to the talk of tree-climbing adventures and perilous forays onto cliffs to seize coveted clutches.
The trip back to Craig was terrifying, the storm suddenly upon them, Hi cursing as he wrestled the car along the slippery ruts, losing the track in the flying snow. It took them five hours to cover twenty-two miles and Helen thought it a miracle they had survived. Hi was white and exhausted but he said the Essex was a peach of a car.
She had met Hi, then only a few months home from the Great War, at the funeral of her older brother, Ned. It was a sultry day, unrelieved by breeze or cloud cover. The mourners cooled themselves with little round fans bearing the name of the undertaker, Farrow’s Funerals. Hi’s brother Sen had been a friend of Ned’s and with him on the ill-fated egg-collecting trip. Ned had climbed a hollow tree stub in a black-water swamp to get the egg of a great blue heron while Sen waited in the boat below, and as Ned came even with the nest, the violent bird, defending her egg, had pierced his eye and brain with her beak.
The first thing Hi said to Helen as they walked away from the fresh grave in the sweating company of the mourners was “If they piled up all the birds’ eggs in the world in front a me I would turn the other way.” That put it flat. Her mother overheard the remark and took it as oblique blame for their son’s death. From that moment she disliked Hi.
Hi was nine years older than Helen. In the war he had suffered a whiff of gas and a wound in his right thigh. He came home with a limp, brusquely unwilling to farm with his father and brothers. The family did not know what to make of him, and his father sang in a sarcastic voice the new song that every farmer knew—“How you gonna keep em down on the farm, after they seen Paree?”
But of course he had not gone to Paris.
“I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction,” he said, as though his refusal to visit the City of Light somehow punished the French, whom he called “the Froggies,” in a jocular, insulting tone. Hi’s life now seemed to him a valuable gift that must not be wasted when so many had died in French mud for reasons he still did not understand. He knew he had to get away from his family, from Tabletop with its relentless corn and quivering horizon. He wanted a frontier, though it seemed to him that the frontiers had all disappeared in his grandfather’s time. He was, without knowing it, searching for a purpose that his spared body might carry out. Helen, nineteen years old and with long wood-brown hair, came into view as an island to the shipwrecked. They would make their own frontier.
Hi was counting on the corn and wheat prices staying up, and when corn dropped to forty-two cents and wheat plunged from three dollars fifty to a dollar, he was stunned.
“I don’t understand how it could slide like that,” he said, for he had been too busy for many months to read The Great Divide. Now Helen pointed out an article warning that wartime demand had ended and that too many farmers, counting on continuing high prices, had overplanted.
“That don’t make sense,” he said. “There’s still the same bunch a people in the world. They got to eat.”
Even if the prices had remained steady, they had to face the fact that neither the wheat nor corn had done well. Only the potatoes had thrived, but potatoes were a cheap crop; anyone could grow them. In November of 1921, Hi went back to Iowa to see his father, not out of family sentiment, but to learn how to make potato whiskey.
They had, of course, to visit her family when they were in Iowa. They spent a bare half hour in the dismal house, then fled.
“See you are in the family way again,” her mother said coldly, went silent.
“How can they live that way,” mourned Helen on the way home. William had taken up egg collecting once more, not to align in rows in cabinets and on tabletops, but to sell to city collectors who did not have the time or location for egg forays. Soon he was making more money than any dairy farmer, such was the longing of fanciers in New York City and Philadelphia for the eggs of bald eagles, meadowlarks and trumpeter swans. His mother had made him move everything associated with eggs out to the old henhouse, now empty, as she would have nothing in the place that brought back memories of poor Ned. Rather than put up with his mother’s icy hatred of what he was doing, William began to live in the henhouse himself, ripping the nest boxes off their support planks and throwing down his dirty blankets. Soon he smelled like a chicken, and looked like one, his clothes festooned with stray feathers.
“My poor brother,” Helen said and sighed.
“Huh,” said Hi. “He’s gone simple. Just a dirty gristle-heel chicken lover.”
The potato whiskey didn’t work out. Hi was the kind of man who couldn’t keep something quiet and within six months the revenuers were onto him. He had picked one of the old Indian caves under the ledges as his place of manufacture, throwing out the Indian corpse wrapped in deerskin and beads. He was cooking mash on a day of clouds smeared by thumbs of wind when the sheriff came in. The judge made him an example—six months in jail and a two-hundred-dollar fine. Helen had to borrow from William to pay the fine. She lied to Hi and told him she had raised the money selling the tractor. She had sold the tractor, but got only fifty dollars for it.
After he got out they moved over the state line to Wyoming in a region of steep pointed hills separated by deep gorges. The desert wilderness lay to the west; to the east the Sierra Madre rose like a great black wave. Helen’s curly-headed sister Verla and her husband, Fenk Fipps, lived on one of the highest farms. Antip Bewley had showed and sold them the place.
“That man again,” said Helen. It seemed to her that Mr. Bewley had manipulated many lives; no doubt he thought of them as the little people and himself as the puppeteer. All the settlers, dreaming the war prices would come again, grew wheat on the tops of the hills. The local ranchers were against them and there were rumors that two families had been burned out while they were up in Rawlins buying supplies. Helen thought it was a hard country with hard people and longed for their old place west of Great Divide although she had been glad to leave it.
1932
The children were making a tremendous racket, jumping on the beds it sounded like, and after a particularly violent crash a dead silence fell, followed by whispering. Helen went to the door and looked in. One of the beds had collapsed at one end and now resembled a cow getting up.
“For pity’s sake,” she said. “Your father will be here any time and what do you do? Smash up the furniture.” She looked wildly around as though for the stick with which she beat them.
“Listen! That’s him!” said Mina, eleven years old and big in the same way Hi was big. The twins, Henry and Buster, were nine, slender and on the short side. Hi often teased them about their heights, urging them to eat plenty and put some meat on their bones. Little Riffie was the spoiled baby, the favorite.
They could all hear the chugging of the car engine as it drew near the porch, and then Hi’s feet on the steps, the door opening.
The boys raced for him, Henry already asking if he had brought them anything.
“Alls I could get was a roll a Life Savers. You got to share.” He held it out on his palm. Buster grabbed it and ran outside, the others snatching at his shirt.
Helen looked at him. He shook his head. “I go in to Sharps, see, and say I heard he wanted a man. He didn’t say a word, just pointed to where that big half-wit Church Davis was throwin bags a grain onto a wagon. His
way of saying he already hired Church. Makes you blue to know a half-wit gets a job over you.”
Helen’s stomach ached. What could they do? She didn’t understand why the Depression was harming men who wanted to work. There had to be a way to get money.
From the front window Mina could see a throbbing plume of dust laboring up the hill through the heat. She knew it was going to turn in by the way it slowed.
“Ma! There’s a car coming.”
Helen wiped her hands on her apron, slipped it off and went to the porch door. A heavy sedan crept up the drive. It was so dusty she could not see the color. Kind of maroon, she thought. The vehicle parked under the cottonwood tree in the only piece of shade. The passenger window rolled down and a face appeared.
“Verla!” she cried and rushed down the steps. To the girls she called “It’s your aunt Verla!” The girls advanced, mincing across the gravel on bare feet. A half-grown puppy followed, biting at dress hems. Henry and Buster were a mile distant shooting prairie dogs with slingshots. Verla and Fenk stayed in their seats but rolled the windows down. Fenk’s tight-jawed face displayed blackheads mixed with stubble. He had a low smile and dark, staring eyes like those of a marionette. Helen knew he beat his children with a strap and that he had slapped Verla around a few times. She shuddered to think of those wooden eyes painted with malice fastening on her sister.
“Out this way and thought we’d see if you was home,” whispered Fenk who had something wrong with his voice that threw it in a high womanish register. Whispering suited him better. Fenk generally let Verla do most of the talking. The story was that he had tried to hang himself as a boy and damaged his voice box. “They get awful moody at a certain age,” his mother had offered as explanation, but his old father knew it was probably something else on the other edge of the great divide that separated men’s and women’s knowledge of sexual matters. He had caught the tail of some sniggered comment about coming or maybe going when he went into the metalwork shop, the informal meeting place for local farmers. Ray Gapes, who owned the smithy, had a large coffeepot and some stage of inky java was always on tap for anyone who could drink it.