War Comes to the Big Bend

by Zane Grey

  She kissed him and knelt beside his bed, grieved to see shadow return to his face, yet thrilling that the way seemed open for her to inspire. But she must never again choose to talk of war, of materialism, of anything calculated to make him look into the darkness of his soul, to ponder over the impairment of his mind. She remembered the great specialist speaking of lesions of the organic system, of a loss of brain cells. Her inspiration must be love, charm, care—a healing and building process. She would give herself in all the unutterableness and immeasurableness of her woman’s heart. She would order his life so that it would be a fulfillment of his education, of a heritage from his fathers, a passion born in him, a noble work through which surely he could be saved—the cultivation of wheat.

  “Do you love me?” she whispered.

  “Do I. Nothing could ever change my love for you.”

  “I am your wife, you know.”

  The shadow left his face. “Are you? Really? Lenore Anderson . . .”

  “Lenore Dorn. It is a beautiful name now.”

  “It does sound sweet. But you . . . my wife? Never will I believe!”

  “You will have to . . . very soon.”

  “Why?” A light, warm and glad and marveling, shone in his eyes. Indeed, Lenore felt then a break in the strange aloofness of him—in his impersonal, gentle acceptance of her relation to him.

  “Tomorrow I’m going to take you home to your wheat hills.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Lenore told her conception of the history and the romance of wheat to Dorn at this critical time when it was necessary to give a trenchant call to hope and future.

  In the beginning man’s struggle was for life and the mainstay of life was food. Perhaps the original discoverer of wheat was a meat-eating savage who, in roaming the forests and fields, forced by starvation to eat bark and plant and berry, came upon a stalk of grain that he chewed with strange satisfaction. Perhaps through that accident he became a sower of wheat.

  Who actually were the first sowers of wheat would never be known. They were older than any history, and must have been among the earliest of the human race.

  The development of grain produced wheat, and wheat was ground into flour, and flour was baked into bread, and bread had for untold centuries been the sustenance and the staff of life.

  Centuries ago an old Chaldean priest tried to ascertain if wheat had ever grown wild. That question never was settled. It was universally believed, however, that wheat had to have the cultivation of man. Nevertheless, the origin of the plant must have been analogous to that of other plants. Wheat growers must necessarily have been people who stayed long in one place. Wandering tribes could not till and sow the fields. The origin of wheat furnished a legendary theme for many races, and mythology contained tales of wheat gods favoring chosen peoples. Ancient China raised wheat twenty-seven centuries before Christ; grains of wheat had been found in prehistoric ruins; the dwellers along the Nile were not blind to the fertility of the valley. In the days of the pharaohs the old river annually inundated its low banks, enriching the soil of vast areas, where soon a green-and-gold ocean of wheat waved and shone under the hot Egyptian sun. The Arabs, on their weird beasts of burden, rode from the desert wastes down to the land of waters and of plenty. Rebekah, when she came to fill her earthen pitcher at the palm-shaded well, looked out with dusky, dreamy eyes across the golden grain toward the mysterious east. Moses, when he stood in the night, watching his flock on the starlit Arabian waste, felt borne to him on the desert wind a scent of wheat. The Bible said: “He maketh peace in thy borders and filleth thee with the finest of the wheat.”

  Black bread days of the Middle Ages, when crude grinding made impure flour, were the days of the oppressed peasant and the rich landowner; dark days of toil and poverty and war, of blight and drought and famine; when common man in his wretchedness and hunger cried out: “Bread or blood!”

  But with the spreading of wheat came the dawn of a higher civilization, and the story of wheat down to modern times showed the development of man. Wheat fields of many lands, surrounding homes of prosperous farmers—fruitful toil of happy peoples—the miller and his humming mill.

  When wheat crossed the ocean to America, it came to strange and wonderful fulfillment of its destiny. America, fresh, vast, and free, with its sturdy pioneers ever spreading the golden grain westward—with the advancing years when railroad lines kept pace with the indomitable wheat sowers—with unprecedented harvests yielding records to each succeeding year—with boundless fields tilled and planted and harvested by machines that were mechanical wonders—with enormous flour mills, humming and whirring, each grinding daily ten thousand barrels of flour, pouring like a white stream from the steel rolls, pure, clean, and sweet, the whitest and finest in the world.

  America, the new country, became in 1918 the salvation of starving Belgium, the mainstay of England, the hope of France. Wheat for the world! Wheat—that was to say food, strength, fighting life for the armies opposed to the black, hideous, medieval horde of Huns! America to succor and to save, to sacrifice and to sow, rising out of its peaceful slumber to a mighty wrath, magnificent and unquenchable, throwing its vast resources of soil, its endless streams of wheat, into the gulf of war. It was an exalted destiny for a people. Its truth was a blazing affront in the face of age-old autocracy. Fields and toil and grains of wheat, first and last, the salvation of mankind, the freedom and the food of the world!

  * * * * *

  Far up the slow-rising bulge of valley slope above the gleaming river two cars climbed leisurely and rolled on over the height into what seemed a bare and lonely land of green.

  It was a day in June, filled with a rich, thick, amber light, with a fragrant warm wind blowing out of the west.

  At a certain point on this road, where Anderson always felt compelled to halt, he stopped the car this day and awaited the other that contained Lenore and Dorn.

  Lenore’s joy in the ride was reflected in her face. Dorn rested comfortably beside her, upon an improvised couch. As he lay half propped up by pillows, he could see out across the treeless land that he knew. His eyes held a look of the returned soldier who had never expected to see his native land again. Lenore, sensitive to every phase of his feeling, watched him with her heart mounting high.

  Anderson got out of his car, followed by Kathleen, who looked glad and mischievous and pretty as a wild rose.

  “I just never can get by this place,” explained the rancher as he came and stood so that he could put a hand on Dorn’s knee. “Look, son . . . an’ Lenore, don’t you miss this.”

  “Never fear, Dad,” replied Lenore. “It was I who first told you to look here.”

  “Terrible big and bare, but grand!” exclaimed Kathleen.

  Lenore looked first at Dorn’s face as he gazed away across the length and breadth of land. Could that land mean as much to him as it did before he went to war? Infinitely more, she saw, and rejoiced. Her faith was coming home to her in verities. Then she thrilled at the wide prospect before her.

  It was a scene that she knew could not be duplicated in the world. Low, slow-sloping, billowy green hills, bare and smooth with square brown patches, stretched away to what seemed infinite distance. Valleys and hills, with less fallow ground than ever before, significant and striking, lost the meager details of clumps of trees and dots of houses in a green immensity. A million shadows out of the west came waving over the wheat. They were ripples of an ocean of grain. No dust clouds, no bleached roads, no yellow hills today. June, and the desert found its analogy only in the sweep and reach. A thousand hills billowing away toward that blue haze of mountain range where rolled the river. Acreage and mileage seemed insignificant. All was green—green, the fresh and hopeful color, strangely serene and sweet and endless under the azure sky. Beautiful and lonely hills they were, eloquent of toil, expressive with the brown squares in the green, the lowly homes of men, the long lines of roads running every whither, overwhelmingly pregnant with meaning�
��wheat—wheat—wheat—nothing but wheat, a staggering visual manifestation of vital need, of noble promise.

  “That . . . that!” rolled out Anderson, waving his big hand, as if words were useless. “Only a corner of the great old U.S. What would the Germans say if they could look out over this? What do you say, Lenore?”

  “Beautiful,” she replied softly. “Like the rainbow in the sky . . . God’s promise of life.”

  “An’, Kathie, what do you say?” went on Anderson.

  “Some wheat fields,” replied Kathleen with an air of woman’s wisdom. “Fetch on your young wheat sowers, Dad, and I’ll pick out a husband.”

  “An’ you, son?” finished Anderson as if wistfully, yet heartily playing his last card. He was remembering Jim—the wild but beloved son—the dead soldier. He was fearful for the crowning hope of his years.

  “‘As ye sow . . . so shall ye reap,’” was Dorn’s reply, strong and thrilling. And Lenore felt her father’s strange, heart-satisfying content.

  * * * * *

  Twilight crept down around the old home on the hill.

  Dorn was alone, leaning at the window. He had just strength to lean there, with uplifted head. Lenore had left him alone, divining his wish. As she left him, there came a sudden familiar happening in his brain, like a snap back, and the contending tide of gray forms—the Huns—rushed upon him. He leaned there at the window, but just the same he awaited the shock on the ramparts of the trench. A ferocious and terrible storm of brain, which used to have its reaction in outward violence, now worked inside him like a hot wind that drove his blood. During the spell he fought out his great fight—again for the thousandth time he rekilled his foes. That storm passed through him without an outward quiver.

  His Huns—charged again—bayoneted again—and he felt acute pain in the left arm that was gone. He felt the closing of the hand that was not there. His Huns lay in the shadow, stark and shapeless, with white faces upward—a line of dead foes, remorseless and abhorrent to him, forever damned by his ruthless spirit. He saw the boy slide off his bayonet, beyond recall, murdered by some evil of which Dorn had been the motion. Then the prone, gray forms vanished in the black gulf of Dorn’s brain.

  “Lenore will never know . . . how my Huns come back to me,” he whispered.

  Night with its trains of stars! Softly the darkness unfolded down over the dim hills, lonely, tranquil, sweet. A night bird caroled. The song of insects, very faint and low, came to him like a still, sad music of humanity, from over the hills, far away, in the strife-ridden world. The world of men was there and life was incessant, monstrous, and inconceivable. This old home of his—the old house seemed full of well-remembered sounds of mouse and cricket and leaf against the roof and soft night wind at the eaves—sounds that brought his boyhood back, his bare feet on the stairs, his father’s aloofness, his mother’s love.

  Then clearly floated to him a slow sweeping rustle of the wheat. Breast-high it stood down there, outside his window, a moving body, lighter than the gloom. That rustle was a voice of childhood, youth, and manhood, whispering to him, thrilling as never before. It was a growing rustle, different from that when the wheat had matured. It seemed to change and grow in volume, in meaning. The night wind bore it, but life—bursting life was behind it, and behind that seemed to come a driving and a mighty spirit. Beyond the growth of the wheat, beyond its life and perennial gift, was something measureless and obscure, infinite and universal. Suddenly Dorn saw that something as the breath and the blood and the spirit of wheat—and of man. Dust and to dust returned they might be, but this physical form was only the fleeting inscrutable moment on earth, springing up, giving birth to seed, dying out for that ever-increasing purpose that ran through the ages.

  A soft footfall sounded on the stairs. Lenore came. She leaned over him and the starlight fell upon her face, sweet, luminous, beautiful. In the sense of her compelling presence, in the tender touch of her hands, in the whisper of woman’s love, Dorn felt uplifted high above the dark pale of the present with its war and pain and clouded mind to wheat—to the fertile fields of a golden age to come.

  About the Author

  Zane Grey was born Pearl Zane Gray at Zanesville, Ohio in 1872. He was graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1896 with a degree in dentistry. He practiced in New York City while striving to make a living by writing. He married Lina Elise Roth in 1905 and with her financial assistance he published his first novel himself, Betty Zane (1903). Closing his dental office, the Greys moved into a cottage on the Delaware River, near Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania. Grey took his first trip to Arizona in 1907 and, following his return, wrote The Heritage of the Desert (1910). The profound effect that the desert had had on him was so vibrantly captured that it still comes alive for a reader. Grey couldn’t have been more fortunate in his choice of a mate. Trained in English at Hunter College, Lina Grey proofread every manuscript Grey wrote, polished his prose, and later she managed their financial affairs. Grey’s early novels were serialized in pulp magazines, but by 1918 he had graduated to the slick magazine market. Motion picture rights brought in a fortune and, with 109 films based on his work, Grey set a record yet to be equaled by any other author. Zane Grey was not a realistic writer, but rather one who charted the interiors of the soul through encounters with the wilderness. He provided characters no less memorable than one finds in Balzac, Dickens, or Thomas Mann, and they have a vital story to tell. “There was so much unexpressed feeling that could not be entirely portrayed,” Loren Grey, Grey’s younger son and a noted psychologist, once recalled, “that, in later years, he would weep when re-reading one of his own books.” Perhaps, too, closer to the mark, Zane Grey may have wept at how his attempts at being truthful to his muse had so often been essentially altered by his editors, so that no one might ever be able to read his stories as he had intended them. It may be said of Zane Grey that, more than mere adventure tales, he fashioned psycho-dramas about the odyssey of the human soul. If his stories seem not always to be of the stuff of the mundane world, without what his stories do touch, the human world has little meaning—which may go a long way to explain the hold he has had on an enraptured reading public ever since his first Western novel in 1910.