by Elmer Kelton
He became aware of two men walking slowly up the street toward him, a grave Emil Deutscher and a harried March Nicholson. Emil had been to the funeral; he wore an inexpensive blue suit from Montgomery Ward, one whose coat had never quite fit his broad, bony shoulders. He always looked ill at ease in a suit ... in anything but his blue cotton work shirt and overalls. They stopped when they came up to Charlie, and Emil woodenly stuck out his hand. “Sad day, Charlie.”
Charlie nodded. “Awful sad. You boys like some coffee? I need somethin’, and that’s the strongest we can buy here.”
He expected Nicholson to excuse himself, but Nicholson held the drugstore door open for them and followed them in. Emil dropped heavily into a chair, his face deeply furrowed. Charlie thought at first his melancholy mood was a carryover from the funeral, but he changed his mind. “Emil, you been sick?”
The cotton farmer grimaced. “You could say that, I suppose.”
Yancy Pike was sitting at the marble counter. At the sound of Emil’s voice he turned, saw who was at the table and strode over toward Charlie with a studied belligerence. No one invited Yancy to sit down, and he gave no sign that he wanted to.
“Well,” he said, “ol’ Page is no bigger than anybody else now. Just six feet of dirt, that’s all he’s got.”
Charlie stiffened. “Somethin’ eatin’ you, Yancy?”
“Damn right somethin’s eatin’ me. Your friend Page Mauldin—the big man—he wrecked everything. On account of him they went and bore down on us little people too. They oughtn’t to’ve ever let a big man like him in the program in the first place. That was for us poor folks.”
Charlie thought angrily, A man with no soul will always be a poor man, one way or another. But he saw no gain in saying it.
Nicholson’s voice was brittle. “You know why they cut you off, Yancy.”
Yancy glared at Emil and Nicholson. “Somebody told them a bunch of lies about me. I got a pretty good notion who it was.”
Nicholson glared back. “Any quarrel you’ve got, Yancy, you take it up with the state committee.”
Yancy Pike pounded his fist into his palm. “I say if they’re goin’ to cut anybody off they ought to cut everybody off. Ain’t fair, pickin’ on some of us and lettin’ the rest go on. I bet if somebody was to go and look into it they’d find there was a bunch of Communists at the foot of the whole mess.” He stood in red-faced challenge, as if hoping somebody would stand up and contest him. Nobody did, but Charlie was tempted. Charlie simply said, “Best I remember, Yancy, you was the first one in. You didn’t see no Communists then.”
Yancy turned and stamped out, trying to slam the door behind him. He was foiled by its hydraulic closer.
Charlie stared after him. “There’s always somethin’ wrong with Yancy, but what is it this time?”
Nicholson said, “He’s been cut off of the feed program. He reported livestock he didn’t own and got more drouth feed than he was entitled to.” He scowled. “Why is it that a man who abuses everything he touches is always the maddest when it catches up with him?”
Emil Deutscher sat in brooding silence, not listening. He blurted, “Word is come today from the state office, Charlie. They fired me off of the county committee.”
“I thought the local farmers elected you.”
“They elected me, but the state office fired me.”
Charlie’s face twisted. “It’s a thankless job anyway. Was I you, I’d call it good news.”
Nicholson put in, “It’s not just being fired, Mister Flagg. It’s the way it was done, and the reason. They threw him overboard.”
Emil’s eyes were bleak. “Charlie, they make out like something crooked we done, us on the committee.”
“We all know better than that.”
“We tried to do right. When we asked them for advice, they said it was for us to decide. Now they say we decided wrong. Why didn’t they tell us then?”
Nicholson said acidly, “It’s the system. An individual is always expendable to protect the system. When the drouth program started, we couldn’t get the people higher up to make up their minds. We’d telephone and ask their opinion. Most of the time they wouldn’t commit themselves. They dumped the responsibility back on us.
“Now comes some Eastern senator up for re-election. He wants to make a name with the homefolks as a watchdog over the people’s tax money. It’s dangerous to dig around in his own state, so he reaches off out here into something he knows nothing about. Who gives a damn if he hurts a few Texas clodhoppers and sheepherders, anyway? They don’t count for much. Sure, some people cheated in the drouth deal. Some people would cheat in a church bingo game. But most of what has turned up here hasn’t been dishonesty—it’s been confusion—and it’s been the fault of the brass who couldn’t get off of their butts and make up their minds about anything. Now there’s a rhubarb, and they’ve got to protect the system. So they throw a few Christians to the lions and go on about their business. The senator gets re-elected, and the auditors get a bigger appropriation.”
Charlie’s eyebrows arched. “March,” he said, and realized he had never called the man by his first name before, “you’re beginnin’ to sound like me.”
Nicholson pondered that proposition a moment. “No, not really. We still don’t think alike. I still think the idea is good ... it’s the system that’s at fault. You’d throw out the idea and the system.”
“I damn sure would.”
“There are lots of honest, dedicated men in the government service, Mister Flagg, trying to do what’s right. They’re usually defeated by the system. The idea is sound, but the ship goes aground on a reef of petty politics.”
Charlie studied Emil’s worried eyes and asked Nicholson, “Ain’t there somethin’ you can do for Emil?”
Nicholson shook his head. “I can’t even do anything for myself. I’m in trouble for talking too much, and for being in the county where Page Mauldin headquartered. They’ll transfer me now, or maybe fire me. I’m an embarrassment to them as long as I stay here.”
Charlie said, “I’ll hate to see you go, March. All of a sudden I think I’m beginnin’ to like you.”
Emil traced a meaningless pattern on the tabletop. Hopelessness was a dark shadow across his face. “Charlie, I am sellin’ the farm.”
“Emil!”
The farmer nodded painfully. “Too long already I’ve fought it.”
“Stand up to them, Emil. They’re sacrificin’ you to keep their own ox out of the ditch. Tell them to go to hell.”
“What happened today, that is not the only reason. It’s just extra. For months now I have worked on a deal the farm to sell.”
“But it’s been in your family for sixty years!”
“That is time enough . . . and pain enough. You know, Charlie, how many years it is since we made a real crop, one to pay expenses? Now there’s nothin’ left to hold on to.”
“It’ll rain, Emil. Hang on a little longer.”
“Always it is goin’ to rain, and always it doesn’t. What if it does rain? My cotton allotment is too small any more. Could I pay for a new tractor with the acres I am allowed? Cotton is the money crop here, and cotton only. One hope I’d have: to lease or buy enough extra land to build up a bigger allotment. But I got no money, Charlie. And even if I did get extra land, some other farmer I’d crowd out. He would move to town instead of me. The difference is the same.” Emil brought the cup to his lips, but the coffee had gone cold. He grimaced. “What good is a high price support if always they cut your acres? From the start the little man is whipped. He can’t get credit to expand. The big outfits, they can. You know who buys my land? A corporation called the Prairie Farm Development Company. It’s not just my place they buy, either; they have bought many more. They buy up the good land and the bad land both, to get the cotton allotments. Then they will let the poor land go and plant cotton on the best. They will grow more cotton than we did, and always the government told us we grew too much.
&n
bsp; “They will punch holes in the ground to find irrigation water. We have been too poor for that, us dirt farmers. They can get credit because with irrigation they know they can make a crop. The government will guarantee them a high price. With irrigation they will make four or five bales where we used to make one. For every acre they put in, some little dryland farmer will lose four or five.” He made a bitter face. “A great big merry-go-round with lots of music. But it goes in a circle only, and when it stops you are still where you started. The wrong man gets the brass ring. And I helped make it so.”
Charlie asked sadly, “Where’ll you go, Emil?”
“I wish I knew. Farmin’ is all ever I did. Maybe a job somewhere as a mechanic, or a carpenter. I don’t know.”
“We’ll miss you.”,
“And we’ll miss you, Charlie, you and Mary. But that old farm we won’t miss. No sir, I’ll never want to see that place again.”
Tears welled into the farmer’s eyes.
Chapter Seventeen
THREE DAYS AFTER THE FUNERAL CHARLIE RECEIVED A call from Big Emmett Rodale. “Come in as soon as you can, Charlie. I’ve got to talk to you.”
His voice was grim, and Charlie felt a chill as he hung up the receiver, a chill not brought on by the north wind which whistled under the eaves.
Walking into the bank, he passed the free scale without even looking at it. He had a sense of dread, and he found himself hoping Big would be tied up with somebody else so Charlie had to sit awhile and wait. But Big had no one. He was sitting at his desk, watching the door. Charlie paused a moment, saw there was no excuse for stalling and walked slowly across the small lobby. Big’s round face was deeply creased, and Charlie knew this frown was not feigned or exaggerated. It was real. Big stood up and silently shook hands with him, then motioned for Charlie to seat himself.
Big looked at him a minute, his eyes troubled. He picked up a box of cigars like the one he had clamped in his teeth, unlighted and cold. “Have one?” In all the years Charlie had known him, he could not remember Big ever offering him a cigar. He took this as a bad omen.
“I never smoke them, Big. Lately I even been rollin’ my own cigarettes.”
“I know,” Big nodded. “It’s been rough on everybody.” He stared across the room, obviously doing some stalling himself. When he looked back, Charlie saw sadness in the banker’s eyes. Big said, “It’s fixin’ to get rougher, Charlie. A whole lot rougher. This Page Mauldin bustup has raised hell and put a chunk under it.”
Charlie murmured something to the effect that he was sure it had.
Big said, “All these years I ran this bank the way I wanted to, and nobody ever gave me any argument. If I wanted to make a loan a certain way, there wasn’t nobody asked me any questions. If I didn’t want to, nobody ever called me to account. But it’s different now. This drouth has beaten us to the ground. We’re a correspondent bank to one of the big ones in Fort Worth; you knew that. We could always farm out paper when it got to where we couldn’t handle it all ourselves. They’re lookin’ a lot harder at us these days. Then there’s the bank examiners. You think the Internal Revenue is rough? Try them examiners on for size. They been goin’ over things with a fine-tooth comb since Page’s deal turned sour. They been raisin’ hell about a lot of our livestock accounts. It’s been all I could do lately to keep the directors from foreclosin’ on some of them.”
He turned his eyes away from Charlie and shifted his cold cigar to the other side of his mouth. “Yours is one of them.”
That hit Charlie like a kick in the stomach. He slumped in the hard, straight chair and clasped his hands together, tight. He took a long, deep breath and asked, “What can I do, Big? Or can I do anything?”
“Knowin’ how you feel about things, I’d sooner take a whippin’ with a wet rope than tell you, Charlie. Yancy Pike was agitatin’ the board over it even before the bank examiners picked it up. Now they’re all after me. They say you’re a fool for not buyin’ your feed through the government so you can get it cheaper; they say I’m a fool for backin’ you.”
“The feed would be a heap sight cheaper today if nobody had ever gone into the program.”
“I won’t argue that with you. But the graveyard is full of people who wouldn’t of died if . . .” Big took out the cigar and used it for a pointer. “We got to live with what is, and not what might’ve been. There is a program, and you can get your feed cheaper through it than outside of it. Now I’ve got to put this thing to you the way they put it to me. Either you go into the program with everybody else, Charlie, or this bank will have to shut off your line of credit.”
Charlie felt that kick in the stomach again, harder this time. He tried to say something, but no words came. He clasped his hands again, staring at them. Seemed he hadn’t noticed how rough they had become, and how some of the cracks in the hard skin were so deep they must reach almost to the blood.
He managed the words, finally, but they came soft and strained. “No line of credit means no feed atall. My goats might get by without any bought feed, but the sheep would never make it.”
Big didn’t look at him. He had sagged in his chair and was staring across the room at nothing in particular. “This hurts me as bad as it hurts you, Charlie.”
“Big, I find that hard to believe.”
“Believe me, it does hurt. I wouldn’t of thrown this at you if they hadn’t forced me. If it was just me, the way it used to be, I’d back you till hell froze solid.”
Charlie considered awhile. “I know you would, Big. I didn’t go to job you none.” He pulled a sack of Bull Durham from his shirt pocket and rolled a cigarette, his shaking hands spilling much of the tobacco on the floor. “I could sell some of the sheep to buy feed for the rest.”
Big shook his head. “No you can’t. They’re already mortgaged for more than they’ll bring. The only way you can sell them is if you turn all the proceeds over to this bank.”
The thought had been a quick one on Charlie’s part, and he realized now it was fallacious. He said, “All right, so I got no equity left in my sheep. Or in the goats either, because I’ve hocked them to buy sheep feed. But I still got equity in my sections of deeded land.”
“Damn little, Charlie. You got enough left to borrow livin’ expenses for a while yet, but not enough to buy feed. What’s more, you got a lease comin’ due on the land you’re still operatin’ outside of those three deeded sections. You can’t do it, Charlie; there’s just no way you can do it.”
Charlie sat in silence, letting his mind run over all the possibilities he could think of. When he analyzed them, none worked. He felt like a rabbit trapped in the corner of a netwire fence; he couldn’t go over, under, or through.
At length he cried, “God, Big, what am I goin’ to do?” “Give in, Charlie. It ain’t no big thing, really. You’ve stood it off longer than almost anybody; you’ve made your point. There finally came a time Lee had to give in to Grant. He kept his dignity; so can you. Give in.”
Charlie said, “If I’d done it right from the first, like most of the others, maybe it wouldn’t of been so bad. But it was a thing that kind of built as it went along. The longer I stayed out, the more important it was to keep stayin’ out ... to show them I could ... to show myself I could.”
“You’ve showed them, Charlie. Now let it go.”
“There’s a big rain comin’, just around the corner. I can feel it. Just give me a little more time.”
“I been hearin’ that for six years. There’s already been many a good man gone under, waitin’ for that big rain just around the corner. Face up to it, Charlie. It’s whipped you; it’s whipped us all.”
Charlie’s eyes burned like they had at Page Mauldin’s funeral. He tried to blink away the sting. “If I did give in, what would you do?”
“I couldn’t be generous; I’d have to cut you to the bone. But at least I could give you whatever you couldn’t do without. Maybe I could see you through till that big rain does get here.”
&
nbsp; Charlie remembered his dignity and pulled himself up in the chair. He cleared his throat. “Can you give a few days to make up my mind?”
“I don’t see where you got any choice. A few days won’t help you.”
“I got a few days’ sheep feed in the barn. That’ll buy me time to do some thinkin’.”
Big seemed disappointed. He had probably wanted to get the decision over with and the trauma done; this left it hanging. “Anybody else, Charlie, I’d tell them no. But hell, go ahead and think about it.”
Charlie nodded and pushed to his feet. He turned to go and was stunned by a sudden shortness of breath, a tightness in his chest. He sat back down, heavily.
Big got up and leaned over him. “You all right, Charlie?”
Charlie waved him away with his big hand. “I’m all right. Just got up a little sudden. Damn leg went to sleep.”
It was a lie, but Rodale seemed to accept it. Charlie pushed to his feet again, slower this time. His breath was still labored, and he felt a burning in his chest. The shock of what Big had told him, he guessed.
Big said, “Old age, Charlie. Your circulation is slowin’ down. Maybe that’s a sign you better slow down with it.”
“I’ll still be ridin’ rough horses when they’ve salted you away in a box.” Charlie turned and walked deliberately to the door, trying to hide the fact that it hurt him to move. He thought about stopping to weigh himself, to show Big he was all right, but he decided it would be better to get the hell out of here and out of sight. He didn’t stop until he reached his pickup and crawled in. He sat awhile, shivering a little in the cold, taking long and studied breaths until his lungs seemed to fill and the burning eased in his chest. He felt himself shaking, and not altogether from the chill. Alarm tingled through him.
What was that? he asked himself.
