A Season of Fire and Ice

by Lloyd Zimpel

  The Widow is under siege, too, Beidermann announces; a sizeable tributary of the winged stream having descended upon her, allowing her clamorous geese to so stuff themselves, says Beidermann—the only one of us to summon a chuckle—that the gander has no honk left! He has been at the Widow’s the afternoon before—gallant though unadmitted suitor that he is—to battle the scourge with her while her two little girls, not the most sensible children in Creation, huddled in the house in terror, for they saw the voracious hordes as a sign the world was ending and they were doomed to die under a pile of clicking insects. . . . Indeed, maybe not so silly—for who can foretell the final sign He will send up at the end?

  But Beidermann has more important information: it was while burying the Widow Jenssen’s vegetables to remove them from the invaders’ predations, he tells us, that inspiration visited him. Now he points to its results: it is the awkward device he goes to unlimber from his wagon bed, brought along to me, he allows, that I may test its practical worth—and, doubtless, stand impressed by Beidermann’s genius.

  He seems inordinately proud—for the straight-forward Beidermann—of what he has fetched us. What it appears to be, as the twins rush to help him ease it off the wagon, is a large slab of sheet metal. It flops flat on the ground, sending grasshoppers spraying out from under it in all directions.

  You see, lectures Beidermann, it will scoop them up and into the coal oil you put back here, where they will die. Can we hitch one of your teams to it? He spits out his chaw, and is ready.

  I am doubtful of his proposal, but in any event my animals are far afield, except the black gelding with which Harris plows a hasty, crooked furrow around the tomatoes, the upstruck earth, I can see from the barn, more gray than black, so deep has the drouth penetrated; and into this shallow ditch Ma and August scoop what insects they can catch with their grain shovels—the insects leaping clear near as fast as they are shoveled in—and when there is a chance accumulation a few yards along, Harris lays over it a cover of straw which he sets afire, and joins his helpers in slapping at both errant flames and fleeing grasshoppers. Some few die.

  I point out my horses a half-mile off—I am not prone to fetch them for dubious purposes; and Beidermann unhesitatingly un-fastens his mammoth animals from the wagon—they seem too grand for his trivial intention—and hooks them to the chains bolted to the far ends of his invention; which, it takes no careful inspection to see, might well be a section of the metal wall pulled from off the Skiles’ saloon or livery barn: an eight- or ten-foot length, three- foot deep, which, Beidermann explains, will slide smooth and flat across the ground while being drawn by the chains he has just hooked up: and in the back, a little trough having been hammered in and the back lip folded up, he now pours a gallon or two from the tin stored under his wagon seat, and this will drown the scooped-up insects. . . . His preparation complete, Beidermann takes command of the contraption by two handles nailed to the far ends of the metal that bear in toward the center, where he walks, grasping the handles and changing direction by muscular force, as with a walking cultivator.

  Captain Beidermann orders, and his animals, having stood to their limit against the irritating insects, surge into their collars, sending asail the gouts stuck to their wet cheekpieces, and Beidermann’s invention slices like a sharply swung blade into the uneven ground of my yard, slicing off hummocks and bulges as neatly as any road scraper as it bucks its way into the garden.

  Beidermann does a lively dance to keep the thing in hand: we must admire his agility, but that is all. This apparatus of his is no more than a piece of tin, a shiny trinket to distract a two-inch bug, and more suitable to a child and ponies than the looming Beidermann and his leviathan pair.

  As if their hero is achieving something, the twins jump in delight, skipping behind, as Beidermann frantically hauls at reins and handles alike, one of each in each hand, and persuades his team past the cowhides with their crawling host, to the remnants of the potato vines, the last of their green stems no more than fibrous threads poking like nerve ends out of the boiling layer of grasshoppers, the potatoes themselves mostly out of reach underground, their stems too insubstantial for the gnawers to tunnel down through them as they do with the onions and radishes, to eat them from the inside out, leaving hollow balls in the earth. . . . Onto this quivering carpet goes Beidermann, his horses hawing in a prance, jawing their bits like circus ponies, while the twins attend the rig’s progress, having stationed themselves at either end—perhaps Beidermann has so instructed them—and leap to free the device when an edge catches, as it does, on a clod or hummock, or digs cockeyed into the soft earth. Dust rises in a cloud to obscure the mass of grasshoppers also rising—or it may be that it is the other way around and the grasshoppers do the obscuring: it is all a blur.

  From under the eaves of the barn, Cornelius and Henry look on, and at the far end of the garden I see Harris pull up the gelding, and I know without seeing it, the scorn on his face. He drops the handles of the walking plow, and with Ma and August, turns to watch Beidermann’s animated advance. The metal pan bounces high as if kicked from beneath, and whipsaws wildly as the leading edge catches here and there, flicking tongues of coal oil with each jerk until the twins are splattered head to toe as they wrestle the seesawing ends with shouts of half delight and half alarm.

  Beidermann, the sweating helmsman, yells at his team, at the twins, at the grasshoppers, at God in His Heaven, perhaps; and I wonder if he has lost command of more than just his contraption—which is moving too fast: earth springing up before and flying over behind: his horses cannot draw it slowly enough; no living horses could; and his prey in its abundance leaps with ease from out of his path, and three feet over find something else to chew.

  Behind my shoulder, Otto says: Well, I see he got two hoppers there, but looks like a million going the other way.

  Some few little beasts, to be sure, are sufficiently confounded by Beidermann’s device to jump into it. When he has made one swath, Beidermann hauls up to wipe the sweat out of his eyes; he tips his machine sideways, and a few hundred oil-coated grasshoppers slide onto a bushel-sized greasy pile of dirt, vines, rocks, and other parts of Ma’s garden: to this heap, Beidermann sets a match, and the twins dance around the sudden shiny flame, itself unseen in the bright sun, to stamp out wayward sparks; their oil-soaked trousers, shirts, and hair severely imperiled.

  Earnest at his work, Beidermann pours another dose of coal oil into his machine, and swings it about to take a new swath. He seems set to do this as long as anyone will allow him.

  He swings his horses around at the garden’s end, and I walk to meet them, the mounds of insects flickering away from their hooves like splashed water; and I wave Beidermann to a halt. He is puffing, he wipes his face—this pursuit of ephemera is a heavy business. But I do not wish to insult his efforts. I point to the meager contents of his scraper.

  It works a little, I say. But not enough.

  Beidermann studies the poverty of his haul with a squinting eye, and I cannot tell by his look if he knows the measure of his foolishness. But he is not the Beidermann we know if he cannot tell me why it is a famous triumph.

  Yaas, he slowly allows. Not so many hoppers, true, but I am scraping up the eggs these little bastards leave, and saving you from going through this again in another month.

  If they can find anything left in a month, say I, they are welcome to it. Take a look. Does this look like there will be a single growing thing for a God damned bug to eat, let alone a man and his wife and boys?

  This is more anger than I mean to show—but why should I hide it? Beidermann looks away, then curls the ends of his reins around his machine’s handles.

  Well, what I am trying to do here, he says, is give you a hand.

  Sure enough, I say. And I will say that I appreciate your intentions. But when you go to experimenting with your machines, you might think to do it on your own place. I say this knowing he has escaped the scourge. There is no need to come h
ere and play with me.

  Here, here, says Beidermann, who is not likely to misperceive that the cause of my ire is as much his good fortune as my bad. These bastards have not come down on me, at least not yet, as you well know. . . . This thing is an experiment. . . . I meant to help.

  Am I to tell him how he can finally help? Am I to say he must feel the burden of misfortunes of his own for once; that he needs a few failures under his belt and then I will shake his hand? My own pettiness galls me; begrudging another’s happy lot; but I am exasperated, too; more than that—overwhelmed by flood, fire, drouth, cattle gone down in storms, blight, a family more miserable than not, often; and now this devastation of insects. . . . And it chose to pass Beidermann by, so he comes with his toy to play with those laid to waste.

  To be sure, say I. But you might think about confining your experiments to the Widow Jenssen and do not come here with any fool devices!

  It surprises me a little, how hard these words come out; for I feel no push to reduce the proud Beidermann: he does not bring his machine to tease me, I know; he tells the truth there. But I am not Job, and when afflictions descend upon a man and he heaves to free himself, even a little, his lashing about may aggrieve others, as here Beidermann.

  But if Beidermann is stung, he is not humbled. He slaps at the grasshoppers; his horses stomp, their harness rattling, and Beidermann comes around their tossing heads, close up to me, a blackness deep in his eyes, his coarse lips drawn down, and pokes the half-finger on his right hand to my breast: yet his voice is mild enough, as if the matter he addresses, for all its consequences to others, is not so filled with importance to a man of parts such as himself.

  As I remember his words, they start like a sermon: For all the years you have lived, old man, he says, I guess you have still not learned what you should. For God-damned sure, you have not come across a fellow like myself, who if he is going to fool with you—if he is going to play with you—why, then everybody in the country is going to know it. Let me tell you: I figured this tin thing would do a job against these bugs—he bats them aside as he speaks—and if it did not turn out that way, well, I regret it, and you have my apology for it.

  The twins crowd my elbows as he speaks, as if to urge me to take Beidermann’s apology: these two know more of Beidermann than any of us. They eye him, me, Henry, Otto, Harris, uneasily: they know what in Beidermann is simple aggravation, irritation, anger, or killing rage; and what they see now, I cannot tell from their faces—and for a long time I have been uncertain whether they have come to weigh heavier on Beidermann’s side than my own.

  So you have mistaken me badly, says Beidermann. But I am not one to take it as too serious a matter, because a man has to keep in mind how hard you have been hit. All this time with no rain, and then these critters come down on you hardest of all.

  I nod my full assent. But suddenly we have another voice, and it is Harris, the last of my boys I would choose to speak for me in any dispute.

  Yes, that is true, Harris throws in loudly, having come up, shovel in hand, on Beidermann’s other side, and while more than a match for him in scowls, he altogether lacks our neighbor’s mild tone of reason. On his neck the strawberry mark is redder than usual—a bad sign.

  He says: You bet the bastards have damn well hit us hardest of all, sure. But there is some they have not hit at all, and a suspicious man might want to know why that is, eh? A suspicious man and a dumb enough one, might be persuaded to ask himself a stupid question: What’s this? Old Bittermilk did not shoo them over here, did he, eh? We can all have a good laugh at that dumb idea, can we not, eh?

  Harris reaches out that big hand—they are all big-handed, these boys of mine, the grown ones, and now the twins that way too, big of body: the worst of it being that Harris, while biggest of any but Otto, is smallest in well-balanced judgment, even as he is biggest of all in temper; and far too big a complainer, too much a grumbler, a dour man, grown from a heavy-hearted boy; for all that when he ran bare-footed, Ma prodded him toward the cheerful ways of his brothers; her joking and stories the others prized, while he stared down and kicked at the dirt. . . . His big hand sweeps out and plucks up one of the mass of passing grasshoppers: this he holds pinched by its wings at arm’s length toward Beidermann.

  Recognize this feller, do ye? he says: he could be addressing the insect or the man.

  With a flick of his hand Beidermann slaps the thing away: to him it is not the insult Harris intended, and he says: That little insect has more brains than you do.

  It is this, I suspect, something rotten like this, that Harris hankers after, by way of proving up his sneering view of Beidermann, and also to fill his need to run a course counter to his brothers’. There is a black streak in him, as Ma has always said, laying it to a spooked element in her Klaus bloodlines; in that her grandfather, dead before she knew him, left a legacy of bloody wildness across the south of Indiana: the cause of it, as her relatives tell the story, pure inborn cussedness: a singular man with a singular appearance: three-inch strawberry mark on his cheek—not on his neck—upon which the whiskers he grew abundantly elsewhere would not take: mean to man and beast equally, it is said, he died murdered after long misuse of his wife and children and relatives of all description: knifed to death, he was; with praise and no reckoning for the murderer, his young son. . . .

  But these are different times and a man must show some judgment in the way he lives his life among others; for he encounters too many in every aspect of living not to take into account their sensibilities; as Harris is not willing, or able, to do. . . . And perhaps a little of that lack is in Beidermann too, for all that he can better accommodate his inward self than can my reckless son; Beidermann, the sweating outward hulk of him, shoulders sloped; and grasshoppers flitting past with the sound of crystals in an ice storm.

  We are all in this picture. The twins turn in agony, and Otto yells to Harris to put down the shovel; and Ma calls him back to finish his furrow as if he had simply tarried to get a drink: And my own school-marmish admonition, no more suitable to the circumstance:

  You lay off this rough talk, you two. . . .

  Beidermann looks at me down his grand nose, as though to say: Old man, it is late in the game to be teaching your son manners: while Harris, drawn by rage down his own blind path, hears not so much as a mouse’s squeak of caution, as he steps up to raise his shovel.

  He has more brains than me, does he, then? he says into Beidermann’s face. Well, he God-damned well has more b---s than you, you sorry excuse for a dog’s p---k!

  Ah! Beidermann must be given this: he does not appear to have been called names by enough men for it to be commonplace, but he does not flinch or blink; although I cannot say the same for myself; and Ma utters a throaty sigh; while Beidermann stands cool as a man without fear or concern. . . . Indeed, he can see there is call for neither—for Otto steps forward and in one big motion wraps Harris around from behind, long arms clamping down like a vise; so there will be no swinging shovel, indeed, no hostile move at all, no move of any sort; for, straining only slightly, Otto removes his younger brother an inch off the ground and swivels around so the two face away from Beidermann; Harris puffing and blustering the while over his shoulder as I step up to loosen the shovel from his pinned hand. He is purple with choler, and kicks back at his brother, who shows us a nimble dance among the grasshoppers to keep his shins undamaged: but Otto is much the stronger boy, and all Harris’ inflamed exertion is unavailing, for he is soundly snared. Indeed, there is enough in him still sensible, so that he does not struggle to the degree that Otto need hurt him, as he hops him like a frog some yards away, close to the plow’s handles, saying: I am going to tie you down to this plow, if you do not stop this horses--t behavior!

  Yaas! calls Beidermann. Hitch the bugger to it and let him plow a few acres, to work some sense into him!

  Harris, I would think, in his heightened state could almost do it. But there is no fight now, nor promise of one, and no call
for taunts and jibes from either party. I step into Beidermann’s way.

  This is a sorry business, I say to him. I would never want to see it, and I know you are man enough to recognize it all as a mistake on my boy’s part. It is not the way we do business with our neighbors, but this is a time when we are badly pushed, as you know.

  Beidermann sizes me up. Yes, you can say that if you want to, old man, he says, calling me that again, which he has not done before today, this uncommon day, so his mockery is clear. But I am bound to see it my own way, and I will say this: your boy there knows where my fence lines are, and all he has to do is cross them one time, and I will show him the ways I do business with my neighbors when they do not show any more sense than he does.

  He unhooks his team’s traces from his device and backs the team to the singletrees of his wagon, hitches up, and heaves the tin sheet onto it—dirt and oil and the few grasshoppers still in it sail off in a ribbon, the greasiness of the mess catching a brief rainbow glimmer of sun.

  We watch that, and we watch Beidermann. It is our tableau in the yard under the ugly noon sun: the grasshoppers form a landscape, and out of the dust of it arise their stridulations, a gibing chorus to the slap of our hands. The twins watch tormented as the pillar Beidermann is carried from them by their brother’s foolish enmity; and as Beidermann yanks the fly-screens off his horses’ heads, they look to Harris as if he may have it in him to offer a decent word and set things right; and they look to Ma as if she might smooth the rough business over with a piece of pie and cup of coffee; and they look to me . . . how? Perhaps as if I might haul myself up like Moses and deliver a pronouncement so wise, so profound, so all-embracing in the comfort it laves over all, that the sweaty lot of us will stagger into each other’s arms, crying out our folly. . . . and the twins will be off trapping weasels with Beidermann tomorrow. . . .