A Season of Fire and Ice

by Lloyd Zimpel

  AUG. 3. God gives no quarter, sending nary a cloud, nor one the size of a baby’s hand, against the fearsome sun, which shortly murders any beneath it that turn for a moment careless. Henry, coming home from the north section with the hides off two calves gone under from this onslaught, rides in himself dizzied and half-addled; and here it is well into the still-hot night and he has watered himself thoroughly, inside and out, and only now does he come weakly into my lamp’s light, and sighing heavily takes a little of the meat and potato Ma left out for him.

  AUG. 4. Even as he stands and watches, vows Otto, he can discern the measure of decline of the water in our well. It is nearly so; against the fading wetness of the stone wall, it descends the width of a girl’s finger each day; and the rope paid out today to fetch a bucketful exceeds by my arm’s length the amount required to do the job after the spring thaw. Much of what we take from it goes to keep Ma’s garden decent; and she begrudges more of it than I would to her damned geraniums, which flaunt their health while the grass six feet from them is dead, and the leaves on the box elder by the porch are gray, not green.

  The twins return late from a day helping Beidermann scrape up a dam at a trickle of a spring he has lately, most providentially, discovered, and they report the pool sufficient to provide the stock consigned thereabouts; even as Beidermann’s home-place well, which they assisted in digging, is no less full than when they dug it, say they: and they express puzzlement, then, why our own should drop, as if there is some flaw in my placement of it, done before they or any of the boys, excepting Otto, were even born; but my explanation that our bachelor neighbor draws from a different reserve, appears to fade away unheard. There is this too, left unsaid, for it would seem sour: that Beidermann’s good fortune does not waver much, however the destinies of others are jarred and twisted as God sees fit to do so often; and if such blessings result from our staunch neighbor’s close attention to his land and animals, why, then, those of us who labor no less strenuously have cause to ponder how even-handedly the destinies of men on Earth are administered from on High, and to ask in a whisper behind closed doors, whether some are not being dealt a shorter hand than others.

  AUG. 8. Beidermann arrives today for the loan of our rake, as if to impress upon us that he has hay to use it on while we do not. His massive team is in empty harness, himself astride the mare, and swinging off that broad back, he says: I come along the bluff to the south, and I see your stock there are mostly skin and bones. God-damn this heat!

  You have that wrong, say I. God is not likely to damn it, as it is Him who sends it.

  From under the wide brim of his cloth hat, Beidermann’s cool squint rests upon me. Another time he might laugh. The two of us have had our words before on Providence and the workings of Nature, and Mister Beidermann makes it clear that he sets no store in help nor hindrance by way of Heaven.

  So you have the right to think, says our philosopher neighbor, but I will tell you this: it is just a turn of the big wheel we are up against, and when it turns more we will get better times. There are rewards due us all.

  Yes, say I. Rewards in the Hereafter . . . and I ask you, sir, who is it that spins that big wheel of yours?

  As always, Beidermann has his answer ready: From the looks of your animals, I would say it is the Devil, eh, boys? He nods to the twins with a wink; and the two of them look to me, reluctant to say: Beidermann is right, look at how he prospers. I know that in the several years spent at his heels they have been persuaded by the able Beidermann and his ways; in this easy trust being the very opposite of my older boys, who stand warily aside and watch.

  Beidermann backs his team over the rake’s tongue and says: If I get two-thirds of what I made last year, I will count myself a lucky man.

  Count yourself that, then, say I, for I have not put up nearly half a crop, and there is nothing for another cutting.

  Beidermann grunts, a half-angry sound that means no commiseration with my lot, but is instead a noise of displeasure at his unturning wheel, that it is stuck in this rut.

  . . .

  AUG. 10.

  We dropped the seed o’er the hill and plain

  Beneath the sun of May. . . .

  It is now the sun of August and another story, for the wheat we have seen so far is all we shall see: a stunted lot, indeed, not half-grown, kernels small as lice and hard as stone, and we will cut it for straw for want of another choice; Otto sensibly declaring that it is a few weeks’ winter fodder not otherwise come by and which we will badly need: and there is abundant time to carry out the bleak reaping chore, for we are freed from all labor of a normal harvest in this sun-struck country: among us all, only Beidermann needs extra hands to put up his so-called two-thirds. Cornelius and the twins will take a team and rack over; and doubtless he also has the exchange of help from Krupp and all the others as well. . . .

  AUG. 11. Ma looks over my shoulder just now, having read her night’s piece, this from the book of Jeremiah, that I must hear. He tells us, says Ma, that we are brought

  to a plentiful country to eat the fruit thereof, but now we have forsaken the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water; and then, we hast polluted the land with our whoredoms and wickedness. Therefore the showers have been with-holden and there hath been no latter rain.

  Well, Ma, say I, that is Jeremiah and this is us. But it is something to chew on, all right. There is no question about the broken cisterns and no rain—but what is this whoredom and wickedness? Unless we have been missing something big, the only thing that comes close to that in this country is Beidermann and the Widow Jenssen.

  Oh, shhh, says Ma, piqued. It is not them. It is the sinfulness of us all.

  That may be so, say I, and Beidermann is sure one of the sinners, but still his cistern did not break, did it?

  AUG. 12. Henry reports that Krupp, whom he encounters on the west section setting out poison baits for a prairie wolf he thinks chewed up one of his calves, now favors us with rumors of grasshoppers twenty miles south of Skiles. But that is Krupp; and these are rumors in a country where hope goes under often, so that a man learns to expect disaster: as a full moon is certain in its time, so is Krupp known to adumbrate catastrophe: when matters are grim, they will grow worse before getting better; it will become hotter before it cools; drier before it rains; colder before it warms; a deeper freeze before thaw; hail before harvest, &tc., &tc.—the promise of calamity swiftly seen, so that one’s guard may be raised against even harder times, and the heart prepare itself to bear the harder event, which is sure to occur. . . .

  But as for Krupp’s grasshoppers we must wait and see, although without happy anticipation. I have seen them more than once, and it is another kind of world they bring. Fire is no worse, for flames can be fought and sometimes quelled.

  But we shall see. It is thus every August—rumors of the dread plague. So has it been since Biblical times when it was the dread locust; which old Gaustad calls them still—locusts; as if he can, in all his tottering years, remember them from that very time.

  AUG. 14. What is it we are meant to do, then? The sun will soon take all. The hot wind punishes without a moment’s surcease. We all grow uglier, nor do we give a thought to it that we do. Otto, the oldest, always steadfast, comes from the dinner table, turns on the porch step, and abruptly vows that he will leave this God-damned place, saying he should have done so long ago, it being an unfit place for white men; and here he has wasted a life of thirty-five years upon it. . . . And for all that there is the land that I chose—while not my first choice, given the railroad’s gluttony, but my choice still—Otto in his torment puts my judgment into question, although I feel no call to answer, for the boy has no malice in him; it is all despair.

  But it is something other than despair in his younger brother, Harris; who shows such a constant agitation of discontent, barely contained, that his own mother, with her heart open to all her seven sons equally, looks on him with doubts, a
s if he is visited upon us as a family test, with his cruel, black moods and sour way overall.

  Now he mocks Otto, saying: Oh, yes, maybe you should pull out for the sand country, where all the pickings are rich, eh? Cook yourself up a nice batch of burrs and nettles for your supper, eh?

  Long past taking issue with his peevish brother, Otto says: Only a God-damned fool would try to hang on here year after year. . . . He adds bitterly: And it looks like I am one of them.

  But I know that among them all he is one who will not go, for as the poet knows,

  Not what we would, but what we must,

  Makes up the sum of living. . . .

  AUG. 15. In the creek in our north pasture—but there is no creek: tiny, bitter pools, a trickle sometimes, the foul water insufficient for a man to wash his feet. This, reports Henry, as if he has come up with some jarring news, is the worst he has ever seen it.

  For some, any new affliction is the worst. I have seen it worse.

  AUG. 16. The twins report that the busy Beidermann has cut a good crop of hay off his most southern acreage, so good that he has traded a portion of it to Reinhardt for a hog, which the old man cannot feed, but Beidermann can. . . . Our Beidermann does his business as if conditions of the drouth impose no more hardship on him than would any sunny day, and therefore the rest of us, in our complaining, are spineless as chickens: surely, this rubs the most easy-going among us the wrong way. For me, or Krupp, or Reinhardt, this Beidermann is little more than a visitor: hardly five seasons in this territory—whatever part of the world he has graced in his undisclosed past—so his high-horse manner cannot derive from special knowledge of what prevails here, among us, for he is innocent of that. . . . How many others have I seen set themselves up in full confidence one year, and the next, when from sun or fire, hail or storm, for all that man and wife and every child works dawn to dusk, they get so far behind that they must crawl with their tails between their legs back to the wife’s folks back East? I can hardly count their number.

  And still Beidermann does more than well, given these grim times, where the rest of us do not, as if such lordly assurance generates its own success, even at a time when failure is in the wind itself; and if that wind bears the rumored grasshoppers to us, it is more than failure and even the valiant Beidermann’s certitude will shrink to the size of a grain of my wheat.

  AUG. 17. Early, the day has some body to it, but with the rising of the sun, there is only the singular dimension of Old Sol. Heat, heat, and more of it; the air is thinned by it and even the wind lacks heft; so that two breaths are needed to do the work of one; and birds flying through seem weakly borne, though few birds fly: a single crow flaps high, another soon follows, both silent where usually they are the noisiest of creatures.

  AUG. 18. So, it is no rumor but a prophecy—or possibly a grand prank, that grasshoppers come in a season where there is so little for them to destroy: but come they do, in dread abundance. . . . At noon, August hastens across the yard and calls through the screen door in the porch where I am washing up for dinner: They are here!

  Over his shoulder in the western sky comes one small, dark cloud, their cruel vanguard; which as I watch twists somewhat to the north to reveal broadside the tail of itself; that small cloud being only the head of a long stream in the shape of a great tad-pole, rising up from some hidden place, miles off, while its tail reaches to the horizon.

  They are headed more north, I say.

  No, says August. You are fooling yourself. They are coming to us, for certain.

  His words are their invitation. That thickening cloud swerves again, enlarging itself somehow, once, twice. Ma, coming to the door, quilts in hand, cries: Cover the garden! They will have it all!

  It is little enough, her garden, but the last healthy green left for us to look on.

  With what? says August. Those quilts? What is it they will not eat?

  My prayer is that they will still pass us by, at least in the main; but I hasten to the shed, August following, and the twins coming up on their ponies, from wherever they have been, and Otto and Cornelius coming from the barn; and from the shed we drag forth the cowhides stored there.

  They will eat these, too, says Otto, flattening bean vines, to lay the stiff hides across; but we cover what we can, while Ma spreads her quilts over her geraniums and the new strawberry plants.

  The first of our visitors descend, no more than we might see on a normal summer’s day. They gaily leap, not so much flying as gliding for great distance: another leap, another glide. But behind these few scouts, the cloud unfolds, expands, becomes black as prairie smoke, as massive as the throngs of pigeons I have seen back East, spreads itself down on us; a crashing deluge, like buckets of hail crackling down. We have not finished tying cords around our sleeves and pants cuffs before they seethe over us, clinging for an instant and dropping away. The cowhides go thick with them, in overlapping layers, those on top covering those beneath, and another layer smothering those. Ma’s quilts seem to change colors as the insects swarm across.

  The twins, in awe and amazement, seeing this phenomenon for the first time with other than infant eyes, cease work and stand staring at the mounds crawling at their feet, and kick at them; until Ma calls and they run, looking back at the sheet of insects settling at their heels, to the kitchen to help her renew her rag seals around windows and doors.

  Around my legs the chickens flutter and hop with whimpering chirps, startled by the thin, dry buzz all around; and all the while peck away in a frenzy, scarcely moving from one spot, engorging themselves.

  At the barn, Cornelius hollers for help to haul in the harness left draped on the fence, before it is eaten; the sweat-salted collars and breeching already clotted to double their size with the thronging insects: Cornelius scrapes them away in handfuls as he drags the harness to the safety of the barn; and they are thick as snow about my face as I go to help him: a crisp sting as one strikes skin, clinging until knocked away to make room for another; and a carpet of them underfoot—dozens crushed with the sound of crusted snow beneath each footfall.

  From the barn door, above the windy sound of the besieging creatures, I hear the swine set up a contented snuffling as they suck up their rich supper in slobbering mouthfuls, hardly moving their long snouts to take up another pintful, so thickly do the insects clog their trough.

  And still there come more, although there is no room for more. Miles away west, a new wide sheen veers across the horizon, nearing us; the sun glints on the membranes of their wings; a jewel-like sparkle all throughout their mass. The newcomers tumble in fist-sized lumps onto their brothers already thickly here, locust upon locust, a half-dozen deep, now a dozen, as if they would eat through each other to get at the ground beneath that is already gnawed bare. By the chicken coop, they come up to the hens’ thighs; some of the fowls already so overstuffed they can barely move; and some foolish ones, filled to bursting, with beaks open gasp for air as they squat and tip to their sides: some are goners, and given time to butcher them now, before their feathers are chewed away and their meat polluted, they will be edible; but by tomorrow the tenderest portions of their flesh, having absorbed what they eat today, will taste vile.

  I have forgotten the horses: I call to Otto, and he waves a hand toward the upper pasture where they stand nervously in a turning string, looking back with heads high; then their hind-ends swivel about and they look again. . . . Out in the pasture there are no birds. Where are the birds that rescued the Mormons? Every lark, every robin, every bold crow, is gone to hide. . . .

  AUG. 19. Midmorning, as the twins and Cornelius and Henry and I caulk the walls of the barn loft with dampened rags, that we might preserve such hay as we have rescued from the weather, I hear Henry mutter and I look up to see a wagon coming up our road through shallow drifts of grasshoppers; and if I did not recognize Beidermann, I would know his handsome team.

  The Great Man cometh, says Henry.

  The twins run ahead, batting grasshoppers left
and right from their faces: no less beleaguered, I come out of the barn as Beidermann pulls up his grand Percherons, which stand unsure against the invading insects, planting and unplanting each plate-sized hoof and killing grasshoppers each time; ears and eyes atwitch, hides shivering.

  Beidermann gives me a sprightly hallo. I will tell you something, he says. These sons of bitches will eat anything. Look here.

  He lifts the mare’s right front leg and runs the dirty fetlock through his fingers. Look! he says. They et it! Et the God-damned hair, they did. They will eat the hide right off your animals, you bet!

  To my eye, the hair, dirty and ragged as it would naturally be, could have been chewed on or could not have been—there was no telling. But his horses stood like set-out meals here, and I sent the twins to fetch fly-bags for them, that they did not breathe in a suffocating dosage of grasshopper.

  Thus far, Beidermann is happy to tell us, thus far his own land has been spared—providentially so, says he—and tells us he watched from a mile’s distance a plume like a flying serpent flow across the prairie and settle like smoke on his neighbors’ fields, bypassing his own, toward which it at first seemed headed for certain. He does not ask what turned it, but makes his report as he busily twists a little bow into the cuff of each shirt sleeve, then tucks it tightly under itself to secure his sleeves against invasion: his pants he has already tied off with twine over the boot tops, his shirt’s top button fastened tight, so the reddish flesh of his neck puckers over the sweaty collar.