Lucy and Jean sat with her constantly, their children in their arms. Mother became delirious, our doctor did not reply to our frenzied calls. We pleaded with other doctors to come, but they could take no more patients. Besides, they assured us, nothing could be done; only careful nursing held out any hope for those stricken. We did not find our until much later that our own doctor had died on the day my mother became ill.
But my mother did not die. After two weeks of tortured illness she began to mend. My father, that night, knelt down among us and offered up his thanks to God, and one by one we knelt with him.
We who lived in the country did not know that the first food riots broke out in the cities in early December.
The small towns, situated, as Arbourville is situated, in the middle of a rural township, did not riot until much later than the cities, for they knew that the farmers could not farm and that their existence was tied up with our own. Their lavish suburban lawns were overgrown with weeds, and they had no gardens now, and they understood that the farms had no vegetable gardens either. Moreover, they were closer to us, had relatives and friends among us, and knew of our daily struggle to survive.
My father had taken, recently, to buying a newspaper again. Our mail deliveries had sunk to almost nothing now, and my father had to wait for his newspapers until the local post office could send out its mailmen on borrowed tractors. Upon receiving them, he read them thoroughly. Out of curiosity, I read them too, automatically noticing that “food supplies, because of the nation-wide drought, are not in the best of supply; fruit and vegetables not of the best quality nor plentiful.” The packing companies were “seriously concerned about the shortage of vegetables and fruit for commercial canning.” We would not this year, be able to ship “our usual large quota of wheat to nations suffering from famine.” However, the papers concluded optimistically, the “good weather, the prolonged growing season” would certainly result in excellent crops next year.
It is doubtful if one city man in a million had read even these slight straws blowing in the wind of disaster. He was probably more interested in the announcement of the Government that “scientists had succeeded in cultivating superior vegetables in water by scientifically controlled administration of necessary chemicals.” The man in the city did not know that the few vegetables he saw in his markets these days resulted from such artificial cultivation.
It was about the first or second day of December that my father suddenly exclaimed: “Well, here it is, at last!” He read to us an editorial dated nearly ten days before.
“We are at a loss to understand the apparent hoarding or withholding by the farmer of his products from the city markets. There can be no other explanation for the current shortage in our cities, and for the high prices demanded for such necessities as meat and milk and flour. True, there has been a wide drought in various areas of the country, but surely not serious enough to account for the slender supplies on the shelves of our shops. The Administration should immediately take steps to show the farmer that he is demanding prices beyond the ability of the average man to pay; that he is pricing himself out of the market and will ultimately be the loser. The Administration should enforce immediate application of emergency laws to force the farmer … hoarding—”
My father threw aside the paper and stared at us somberly. “Well, there it is,” he said. “We’re hoarding.” He stood up and stamped around the room. “Why doesn’t the Government give the facts of life to the cities? Are they afraid they’ll riot?”
They were already rioting, not in full panic as yet, but in isolated instances. Mobs were angrily overthrowing market stalls filled with the artificially cultivated vegetables, threatening the owners of shops, furiously demanding milk for their children, and carrying off armloads of the canned meats and fruits and defiantly resisting the pleas of shopkeepers to “ration” themselves.
But this the newspapers did not report, on orders from Washington. They only began to berate the farmer for his selfishness, some in measured tones, some in raucous headlines. We did not know of these unorganized riots for some time. We had some slight suspicion when the Farm Bureau sent us an apologetic but alarming leaflet. “The President has issued an emergency act because of the drought, and the Army has been commissioned to inspect the fanners’ private stocks of meats and other foods. We ask our members to cooperate completely.”
“So they’re going to take our food,” said Father bitterly. He held the leaflet in his hand. “And if we die,” he continued, “who, then, if the earth ever yields again, will produce the food to save the world?” He threw the leaflet on the table. “The Army,” he muttered. “It must be even worse than I thought. The Army!”
The Army, represented by two khaki-colored bulldozers filled with boys in uniform, arrived three days later. We heard their amazed shouts, their curses, their wonder at the devouring weeds long before we saw them. We went out onto the porch, this ominously warm day in December, and watched the bulldozers skidding and slipping toward us through the rank undergrowth. “What the hell’s wrong here?” yelled one soldier, looking down with horror. “Raisin’ these things for somethin’?”
My father just stood there, his big legs solidly planted on the ripples of weeds on the porch, smoking in silence. My mother and the girls looked out fearfully from the door, but Edward and I flanked my father.
“It’s all over the damn country,” said another soldier. They peered at us, empty-faced and bewildered. The yellow sky loomed behind the bulldozers, lending an eerie ochre tint to the huge-thorned leaves of the weeds and to the soldiers’ faces. The smoke from their cigarettes rose idly in the still and poisoned air.
Then a young officer, brisker and older than the others, prepared to get down from the bulldozer. My father called to him sharply: “Haven’t they told you yet? The thorns on these things will pierce through your clothing, and there are creatures like scorpions hidden in them which can kill you with one sting. If you must get down, all of you, pull those machines closer to the porch where the weeds aren’t so thick, and step carefully.”
The officer shrank back, after one incredulous stare at my father. Then he gave a muttered order and one bulldozer wheeled and grunted to the steps of the porch. The officer gingerly stepped down, and my father grasped his arm and pulled him to the shallowest place. “Come into the house. We’ve still got some cider, and you look as if you need it.” The boy made the door in one long leap, and then in our parlor he said, panting a little: “Damnedest thing I ever saw! Is it all over here?”
“It’s all over the world,” said my father, quietly.
“I don’t believe it!”
“You will, son, you will. Why don’t you sit down?”
The officer sat down. He fumbled for a cigarette, and he seemed very sober. “We were sent by train from Camp Upton last night, and the bulldozers were shipped with us. We didn’t know why. We were told to interview every fanner in this area and see what he’s got—hoarded.” He tried to smile at us, then produced a notebook and pencil.
“Any of these weeds at Camp Upton?” asked my father with interest.
“Well, sir, there must have been. The camp’s all concrete and steel, and we wondered for a long time why we were confined to the grounds. I didn’t see any of these—things—until we got to Arbourville this morning. And you’re the first farmer we’ve found at home. Every other place was deserted.” He frowned. “Where are the rest of them?”
My father sat on the edge of his chair and leaned toward the boy. “They were probably out burying their dead. Haven’t you heard about the dysentery yet, and the dying children? Or have they kept this from you, too?”
Very slowly the boy paled. “You mean there’s an epidemic? I thought so! You keep missing some of the fellows at camp. We thought it was flu, or something. And I haven’t heard from home for over a week. Maybe someone there is sick—”
My father did not comment. The officer’s hand was trembling, though he attempted to appear
efficient. “Look, sir, let’s make it brief and honest. What meat do you have stored, how much in the way of vegetables and corn and canned goods?”
My mother, who was sitting at a distance, started to her feet, tears in her eyes. “We have almost nothing to live on ourselves. We’re eating old potatoes and dried-out apples from last year, and canned milk we bought a few months ago. I’m saving my own canned goods for the children—we have two of them here, just babies. And we slaughtered almost all our pigs and the bigger part of the cattle which hadn’t been killed already.”
The boy sat there and looked at her. He kept moistening his lips for a long time, his eyes roving from face to face. He whispered finally: “Is it that way with all the farmers?” My father nodded. The boy stared for another long moment. Then he cried: “It can’t be! They told us you were all hoarding your goods for higher prices, and that you’d have to be forced to give them up!”
“I know,” my father said. “I’ve been reading the newspapers, too.” He glanced at the officer’s shoes. “I suppose you’ll want to investigate for yourself. Pete, find a pair of high boots this kid can wear. We don’t want another death on our hands.”
I brought a pair of boots, and the soldier put them on, his hands shaking. My father and I led him outside, through the rear door facing the barns.
My father stepped down and the officer followed nervously. I brought up the rear. The boy was terrified of the weeds; they crunched under his boots; they lifted their tentacles and snatched at his clothing. He shrank, when he heard the vile scuttling in the depths. “Keep your hands high,” warned my father. “Shoulder-high.” He led the way, probing into the nauseous thickets with the pitchfork he always carried. By the time we reached our almost empty barns the officer’s face was sick and pale with fear.
He looked about the shadowy reaches of the barn. “Four cows, three hogs, about fifty chickens,” he wrote down in his book. He inspected the fruit bins, and my father lighted a lantern so that he could see the little mounds of shriveled apples and pears, the few bags of our remaining potatoes. He wrote down what he had found, his hands trembling more and more. My father showed him the silos. “Enough to feed the stock for about four months more,” he said. He opened the freezers. “Meat for us and the children for about five months, if we’re careful. Want to look down in our cellar and inspect our canned goods, too?”
He did. He went up and down the rows of my mother’s preserves, and what Mrs. Carr had given us. “Seems a lot,” he said with relief. “Fifty cans of tomatoes; sixty-five cans of peaches; forty cans of pears; seventy of com and peas and beans, and one hundred cans of milk! Why a city family could live on all this for a year or more!”
“And when that’s gone?” prodded my father.
The boy grinned. “Why, you’ll have another big crop, won’t you?”
It was useless. He became very brisk now. “Sorry, but there’ll be a truck along in about three days and you’ll have to give up half of what you’ve got. Orders. You’d better set a fair market price on it, and you’ll get a check from Washington, eventually.”
We were back in the parlor again. The officer started to take off the borrowed boots, but my father said: “No. Keep them; you’ll need them. And maybe you won’t find other farmers as co-operative as we are. They might just let you go out into the weeds and among the poisonous things. You see, when a man has a family to feed and he’s threatened with starvation, he gets angry.”
The boy was grateful. He became very serious. “In emergencies we all have to share with each other. You learn that in the Army. And we’re a Christian people, aren’t we?”
“No,” said my father compassionately. “What gave you that idea?”
He went outside with the young man, who seemed to be thinking very deeply. Father waved as the bulldozers lumbered off in the awful yellow light.
The huge pickup truck came the next day, wallowing and swaying through the weeds. It took away half of our food. My father did not protest or interfere, nor did our immediate neighbors, though they were enraged and wild with fear. We did not hear, for a long time, that thousands of farmers in other parts of the country had wrecked the trucks and attacked the drivers. In many places the National Guard and the Army were called out to enforce the new law and to subdue the desperate farmers. The cities had one small last reprieve.
CHAPTER NINE
In our township there had always been the usual number of enemies and friends, just as in every other community, but during these past months the enmity had slowly decreased in the face of the universal threat of death. The last hostility between any farmer and his neighbor disappeared entirely in December. What children still lived had to be saved, to make the earth fruitful again; the farmer, the sower, had to be saved, too, to plant crops and breed cattle and pigs and chickens and beget children. We operated by instinct; we had to preserve each other. There was something atavistic in the way we all took stock of our remaining food, something mysteriously dedicated. We got out our tractors, all of us, lumbered through the weeds to the highways, and met at the Grange Hall. We reported what canned goods and meats we had left and we reported the number of children in our families and the number of those young adults who could be expected to marry and produce children. And then we apportioned the food among ourselves—so much canned milk for so many babies, so much meat for vigorous young adults, so much corn, so much wheat and flour. The feed for the stock was apportioned, too. The cows had to be fed, the bulls preserved. No man was coerced; it was not necessary to appeal even to those who in the past had been noted for their greed. The law of life was more important in these terrible days than the security of an individual.
It was my father, rather than our wasted president, who managed the whole affair—my father who stood like an oak among that large assembly of farmers and justly divided what we all had for common survival. The stocks were so low that no child over eighteen months was to be permitted any canned milk; no adult over fifty was to be permitted more than one pound of meat a week. A large room in the Grange was set aside for the reception of the goods, and two armed guards were to be constantly on watch.
Our president, Lester Hartwick, expressed some alarm over this arrangement. He lived in Arbourville, though he had a large farm operated by tenant fanners, and he was aware of the temper of the town, and of the other towns in the vicinity. “I don’t know, George,” he said, in his newly feeble voice. “I’ve seen something recently, something I don’t like. There are strangers, young men and women, in town. City people, from the looks of them. They look hungry, like they were being eaten up inside, and they scuttle around asking questions. I thought at first they were Government agents, but they’re not. I hear they meet almost every night, each time in a different place. The Wittmer Hotel swarms with them.”
He shook his head. “They’re here for no good purpose. I’ve seen them get into conversations with the town people, and I’ve heard them talk about ‘greedy, hoarding farmers,’ and why don’t the farmers share all their stored goods, and why don’t the town folks do something about it. The farmer knows that the Government’s already confiscated half his supplies, and sometimes more, but the town people don’t know it. I’ve tried to tell them, at our Elks Meeting—and they’ve laughed at me. It’s ugly, I tell you. And that’s why I’m afraid of keeping the food in the Grange hall. Sure we can bring it in at night, but I tell you these strangers have eyes in the backs of their heads. One of them’d see us.”
My father considered this, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. “That’s true,” he said. “But we have to have a point of distribution. And even if we picked out some remote barn they’d find out. Arbourville is the logical center, so we’ll have to take a chance. We’ll have to keep a watch, all the time.”
The best guns were selected for the guards, who were all young veterans and sharpshooters. “Remember,” said my father with some sadness, “that you aren’t to shoot at sight, or even threaten to shoot. You are to shoo
t, and then only to wound, if our food is attacked. If they see we are determined to protect ourselves perhaps they won’t try anything.”
We brought in our trucks at night. And each truck, as we rolled into Arbourville, was guarded by keen-eyed young men who held their guns ready, hoping they would not have to use them. We came—sweltering in the heat, though this was the middle of December—under hot moons and brittle stars. And we stored the canned goods neatly, prepared our rationing papers, and put the meat into freezers donated for that purpose. The streets were empty, for we usually arrived around midnight, yet I had the eerie sense that we were watched from behind dark windows and from shadowy corners. It was impossible to keep the operation secret, and we knew it.
Government rationing was already established in town and city stores, and the people there were eating much better than the farmers. But they, too, were hungry, if not as hungry as we. We could feel their wrath like a fog in the air. We could feel their panic, their blind determination to survive.
We heard, later, that every farming community had done just what we had done.
No newspaper reported what the Grangers had arranged so that the cultivators of the earth could live. But their silence, their merciful silence, was not to help us in the long run. What the newspapers did not print the people discovered, through their enemies, and ours. They did not understand until almost the last that in assuring our own survival we were attempting to assure theirs, too. Only our mutual enemies knew it, and they were plotting that as few of us as possible should live.
The city newspapers reported that turkeys were in “short supply” this year, and that few of them would appear in the markets for Christmas. “But, under rationing, there will be ample meat and pork, if the people are careful and do not resort to black markets.”
“Black markets!” exclaimed my father, appalled. “Is it possible that our confiscated food is actually finding its way, in the cities, to black markets? Haven’t the people yet learned that money is without value now?”