On the twentieth of December I took my turn, with my friend Sam Mosler, at guarding the food in Arbourville. My father decided to accompany me. We parked our tractor on a side street, and walked, our footsteps ringing, through the dark empty town. Above our heads the jaundiced moon rolled without shedding any light, and we could not bear to look at it. But we were thankful that the sulphurous air was a little less warm than usual. And here in town, at least the stench of the weeds was not quite so pronounced. The bleak faces of the houses and shops were not engulfed in a green and deathly tide, as our own homes and barns were.
We reached the locked doors of the Grange and gave the signal for the day. The great doors were opened cautiously, and we saw the young guards we were to relieve, their fingers tight on their guns. The doors closed behind us. My father inspected the stocks of canned goods and meat, and shook his head in silence. They were dangerously low. While Sam and I talked, my father went over the rationing papers. Some had been cancelled; too many had been cancelled. The children were still dying, and so were their parents. When a farm family dwindled the survivors immediately cancelled their papers, and sent back goods previously taken under voluntary rationing. The food of the dead was keeping our stocks from running out too soon.
My father rustled the papers with sorrow, sometimes exclaiming aloud in grief. He sat under the shallow light overhead, his hair almost white now, his big frame emaciated, his strong face gaunt. Yet he still exuded strength and calm power. Sam and I moved about with our guns, listening intently at the doors, pausing for a moment or two beside barred and shuttered windows. We were restless; we were hungry and very tired. We perched, at two o’clock in the morning, on the long table which held the papers, and we ate our meager sandwiches and shared a withered apple, and drank a little whisky. We checked our guns and our ammunition, and leafed through magazines and newspapers, yawning, stretching, waiting for the yellow dawn when we would be relieved.
Sam was a little, wiry fellow, full of funny stories, and a wonderful mimic. He entertained us with considerable animation, and soon he had my father and me laughing.
But by three o’clock I was numb with fatigue. Sam’s stories began to lag, and even he would break off and stare before him with strange, fixed eyes. We were both again sitting on the edge of the table when we heard a sound outside. We sprang to our feet, seizing our guns. The sound was repeated, and we knew it was a peremptory knock. This was immediately followed by a hoarse shout set up by many voices. “Let us in! Damn you, let us in! We want the food! Give us the food, you damned, greedy farmers!”
My father caught me back, and he was as gray as old ash. “They may be armed,” he muttered. “Wait, let me talk to them.” He went to the door and called through it: “Who are you? Any Arbourville men there?”
There was a silence, followed by a vague muttering. Then a man replied in a voice none of us recognized: “Yes, ten of them. And we all want the food.” It was a strange voice, hard and metallic.
“I don’t know you,” said my father. “But I think I know what you are. If any of our own people are there, let them speak.”
There was a short pause. Sam and I flanked my father, our hands firm on our guns. Then another voice spoke, rough and almost sheepish: “You there, George? This is Joe Schultz. You know, I got that market on High Street. My market’s almost empty. The town people got to live, too, you know that, George. You farmers have lots of food hidden away. We got a right to this, and you better let us take it.” Another familiar voice echoed: “We don’t want no trouble, George. I’ve got five kids, and the ration isn’t enough. Let us in.”
My father said: “Look here, boys, if we had food at home would we be storing some it here for the other farmers? And if we had food why should we put it here? Be sensible, boys. Stop and think. We had half our food taken away from us by the Government early this month, and now it’s on your shelves, what there was of it, and you’re eating better than we are—”
The metallic voice interrupted him harshly: “Lies, lies! The farmers have always exploited labor and the masses in the cities. They believe in the material welfare of the greedy few.”
“I’ve heard that song and dance before,” said my father, “and so have a lot of you boys out there. ‘The material welfare of the greedy few,’ the man says. And who are they? Men like him. Not you fellows with shops, and your friends and neighbors, people trying to earn a decent living. Boys, go home, and before you go run these rascals out of town. They’re the enemies of all of us.”
Still another familiar voice said uncertainly: “I know old George; he never told nobody a lie in his life.”
“Your friend is lying now, Mr. Baldwin. Honest, peaceful men don’t hoard food needed by the desperate, and arm themselves to guard it from their neighbors.”
“George is no liar!” shouted Joe Schultz. “The man that says he is is going to get his teeth pounded down his throat!”
“Good,” muttered my father. There was a confused uproar. “Kick them out, boys!” my father shouted. “Ride them out on a rail.”
I allowed myself to hope a little. But then a third voice we knew joined in: “George, maybe these men don’t mean us any good; I’ve had my doubts about them for the past two weeks. But you got meat in there and I’ve only had four pounds this week, for me and my wife and my two kids. Is that Christian? Is that neighborly?”
“I’ve had less than one pound in two weeks,” replied my father. “And my wife has had none, and my boys have had less than I’ve had. And we have two children at home, too. Listen, boys, listen carefully: though some of you are town-born you know the farmer’s lingo, you know his life. And you know you don’t eat your seed corn. The farm children are our seed corn, to work on the farm to feed you. If your seed corn dies, you’ll die, right here on your streets. You have a chance to live, when the drought and the weeds go, and we get back to working for you.”
“You want to live at the expense of the lives of the exploited people,” shouted another strange voice.
My father’s pale face turned crimson. “You go, dog, with your lies and your plots of disruption. Go home and leave us alone. But be sure we won’t forget you.”
There came a furious pounding on the door, and my father smiled grimly. He went to the gun rack on the wall, selected a good rifle and examined it. In spite of our desperate situation I could not help smiling at this man of peace who despised violence as the mark of a barbarian.
“We’re armed!” cried the leader of the strange voices. “Let us in, or we’ll shoot off the locks!”
“No, you won’t!” said Joe Schultz, and a wavering chorus of our friends echoed him.
“Are you sheep?” asked the stranger with contempt. “Aren’t you entitled to the fruits of the earth, in return for your labor?”
“How many of the swine are they, Joe?” my father called. There was a muttering again, and Joe answered unwillingly: “Three of them, George. And they got pistols. We don’t. We don’t go around shooting anybody.”
“You might try shooting them,” said my father, and I smiled again. He said over his shoulder at me, “Call Sheriff Black; tell him professional troublemakers are trying to incite a riot.”
I went to the telephone but it was dead. The line must have been cut outside. I told my father. He examined his gun again, and said: “Open the door, Pete. We’re going to have a showdown.”
But first he tried one last appeal to the people at the doors. “Go home, boys. Go back to your beds. You don’t know what you’re doing, letting these murderers lie to you and get you out on the streets like hoodlums and gangsters. They just want us all to die, you and me, or to follow them to destruction. Go home.”
There was a short, deep silence outside. Then a bullet ripped through our strong door and my father screamed an oath and caught at his left shoulder. I almost dropped my gun in my dread, but he pushed me aside, and with his right hand, he took the heavy iron bolt and pulled it fiercely back. He tore open the d
oor and stood in the doorway, gasping a little, his gun grasped strongly.
The street outside was spectral in the street lights; the yellow moon glimmered in the sky. The townsmen we knew, aghast at the voice of the gun, had drawn back in a knot near the curb. But the three strangers confronted my father with set faces and the leader raised his gun again.
But my father swung his own rifle and knocked the gun out of the other’s hand, and then, moving so fast that I could hardly follow him, he grasped the man and pulled him into the warm room, and I slammed the door and shot the bolt. My father flung the stranger onto the floor and set his big foot on his lean belly. “Kill him George,” said Sam, in a casual tone. “Shoot his head off.”
I put my gun on the table and examined my father’s arm. His shoulder was bleeding badly but again he pushed me aside. He pointed the rifle down at the stranger, who was lying still and rigid, staring up into the bole with black, frightened eyes. He was tall and lanky, not more than thirty, with a thin shine of dark hair on his round head. His hands, as they clenched on the floor, were as white as flour.
“Afraid, eh?” asked my father softly. “You’d rather be on my end of the gun wouldn’t you? How does it look, son, to stare into the face of death?”
“If you kill me, a defenseless, unarmed man, you’ll hang for it,” said the stranger harshly.
“Oh, you speak of the law now, do you? And what law permitted you to get those decent men out of bed and lead them to violence? What law told you you could create a riot?”
“I still say, kill him,” said Sam, kicking the stranger in the thigh. “Self-defense, George; upholding the law against inciters. The sheriff wouldn’t hold you an hour.”
“What can you do with such monsters, except kill them?” asked my father. “But when you kill one, a hundred rise up in his place. Don’t move, son. What’s your name, and where do you come from?”
The man had taken a little courage from what my father had said. He replied in a clear, hard voice: “My name is Will Dowson, an American name, and I come from St. Louis. I’m no farmer, or foreigner, if that’s what you want to know.” He stared up at my father defiantly.
My father asked in a mild tone: “What made you think I thought you must be a foreigner, son? Don’t you think I know that tens of thousands of good Americans are traitors? I see you have a scar on your cheek? Europe? Korea?”
“I was an officer in the American Army, in Korea,” the stranger answered. His smile was ugly. “I’m not armed, and you three are. Do you mind if I get up? Unless, of course, you intend to kill me after all, in your brutal, savage way.”
My father stepped back and said: “Get up. I don’t like to see any man on his back—even a man like you.” He put his gun on the table and sat down heavily in his chair. I did not like his color, and this time I insisted on examining his shoulder. It was a flesh wound, but it was bleeding freely. I did what I could with it, pressing my handkerchief, rolled into a ball, against the wound. My father hardly noticed me. He was studying our guest, who had seated himself insolently in the one other chair. Watching my father intently, he lit a cigarette.
“I spared your life, boy,” my father said. “That won’t make you grateful. You think I’m a weakling. In my place, you being so superior and so disciplined and so dedicated, you’d have killed me as you would have killed a dog. Did it ever occur to you that a man might refrain from killing from a moral principle, from a respect of life, even a life like yours?”
Will Dowson sneered. “The future is not for the weak,” he said, “nor for superstitious fools who talk about moral law, or principle. Such luxuries have no place in the new order.”
“The new order of Russia.” My father nodded. I inspected the wound again; it was beginning to clot. I pressed the handkerchief down, hard. “You see, we farmers aren’t ignorant peasants, though you people like to think so. You despise us, just as you despise what you call ‘the proletariat.’ You want to rule us or destroy us, make slaves of us, don’t you? You won’t; we aren’t war-broken Poles or frightened Chinese. We have a tradition of freedom, no matter what we are, or how we work. We might fight among ourselves, but when it comes right down to it, we close ranks as Americans. You can plot and infiltrate, and conspire secretly, and try to undermine our Constitution but you won’t get anywhere. We won’t let you, no matter what happens.”
Again Dowson sneered. His assurance was returning. I took the handkerchief from my father’s shoulder and tied the bloody cloth about it carefully. My father was looking steadily at Dowson. “I can’t argue with you, I can’t convince you. I can’t even reach you. And that’s a terrible thing, for there are millions like you, everywhere in the world—shut out from reason or mercy or justice.”
My father sighed: “The worst part of it is that you believe in your insane religion. And that’s where our own guilt comes in. We older people were indifferent about teaching you religion, when you were young. We left a spiritual vacuum, and some kind of perverted religion had to take its place to command your devotion. A man has to have some kind of devotion in his life, some frame of reference, some surety outside himself. That instinct is born in us. Pervert that instinct, deny it, and hell will step in to fill the emptiness that should have been filled with God.”
“You gave us a heritage of capitalistic exploitation of the defenseless,” said Dowson. He was no longer sneering; a kind of exalted light shone in his black eyes. “You gave us a heritage of superstition and pious lies; you gave us the crisis of all history; you gave us war.”
“Yes,” said my father, his face devastated. “We gave you war.”
“I still say, in spite of this fine talk, that we should kill him,” said Sam grimly. “He’ll be out of wherever we take him today, doing the same thing in a few hours. Can’t you see he hates you, George?”
“Yes,” said my father. “And that’s why I ask him to forgive me. He has no reason for his hate.” He added gravely: “The earth is cursed in him, and in us.”
CHAPTER TEN
Sheriff Black booked Dowson on a charge of assault with intent to kill. Joe Schultz and his town friends, shocked almost into illness, cooperated with the sheriff, and the two other strangers were quickly arrested on the same charge, including a charge of incitement to riot. Then the sheriff issued an order—which under other circumstances and in another day would have been immediately upset by the lawyers—that all strangers who had been in Arbourville for less than three months should leave within twenty-four hours. “We want no outsiders here to stir up trouble,” said the sheriff. “We have enough of it ourselves.”
My father pleaded for Dowson. He said: “Shelton, it’s all of one piece—these Communist fellows, wars, drought, the weeds, famine, the ‘scorpions,’ this damn queer sun and moon, the earthquakes, the showers of meteors, the dying children, the sick adults—everything. They’re all a visitation, and every man in the world is responsible for them.”
Shelton Black said he thought this reasoning somewhat strange. My father explained patiently; the sheriff listened as patiently, and with compassion. He said: “George, I kind of get your idea in a way; after all, I teach a Sunday-school class, don’t I? Maybe we all are responsible, as you say, and when I read the Bible to myself at night I get to wondering, too. But I’m a law officer; we’ve got a man here in jail who tried to kill you and tried to incite a riot. That’s the one fact I’m hanging onto; if we start abandoning facts, especially in these days, we’re going to have chaos.”
My father pointed out that we already had chaos, and that the Government was contributing to it by refusing to admit that the whole nation was in a plight similar to ours here in Arbourville. It, too, was abandoning facts, and so was responsible for the unrest and the terror in the cities, and the belief of the city people that the fanner was hoarding his food for higher prices. The sheriff smiled wryly. “But if we let all the cities know the truth, then we’ll see real catastrophe; at least they’re being kept in some kind of control n
ow by lies. Perhaps you’re right, George, but we still have the fact that a man tried to kill you. I’m sticking to facts. I’ve got to.”
We had no more trouble from the town people after the incident of the Communist-led riot. They were ashamed, and contrite, and Joe Schultz and other grocers and butchers even offered to augment our stock of goods with food from their own shelves. The people approved it with a generosity that was touching. But the farmers refused, saying that in the event their own stocks dwindled to nothing they would call upon the town for help. An air of friendship and kindness developed among all the people, a comradeship in distress.
We noticed that there were no more reports in the press of explosions of atomic or hydrogen bombs anywhere in the world. We did hear that Russia had had “an extremely fine harvest” of wheat this year, and that she was shipping her huge surpluses to her satellites. The report had a pathetic sound to it, in spite of the jubilant ring reported in the columns of Pravda. It was curious that Pravda did not mention any “rumors” that the rest of the world was engulfed in a mysterious and deadly vegetation, that famine and plague had broken out everywhere, and that the cities of “the free world” were in a panic. Pravda also ignored the strange sun and moon, the earthquakes and the brilliant cataracts of meteors each night. It was oddly unaware that the desperate Russian farmers, and the farmers in the satellites, were dying by the tens of thousands of starvation and plague and the poisonous creatures in the universal weeds, and that city men and women were being rushed to the land to try to stave off death a little longer.
The great cities of “the free world” celebrated Christmas, of course, though there was a strange absence of metallic toys for the children. Passenger travel between cities for the holiday was extremely light. Even the planes carried very few passengers; it seemed that there were increased movements of the military these days, and the detested word “priority” again crept into the news.