There was talk of rationing if the people did not co-operate. A week later an emergency was declared, and the people were warned that those driving for pleasure over the country would be penalized “… until rubber and gasoline, needed now for defense, are again in ample supply.”
The warehouses of wheat were rapidly being emptied. Only canned or hothouse vegetables appeared on the market, and the people complained of the prices. They did not complain too much, however, for butter was very cheap. Milk had become exorbitant, and mothers wrote tens of thousands of letters to Washington, and received no reply. “The farmers are greedy; they are holding back the milk for higher prices!” cried the city mothers, looking at their pale children. The farm mothers were silent. They knew there was little or no milk. The Government urged the women to use the millions of cans of evaporated milk on the shelves of their grocery stores “until milk is in good supply again,” it pleaded. There had been a drought all over the country, Washington explained, and cattle were not producing the product “adequately.”
“And when the evaporated milk is gone—what then?” asked my father. But we did not answer.
The newspapers reported that the rains had “come just in time to save the crops.” The fact that there were no crops was kept a secret. The newspapers filled their pages with accounts of the United Nations. “There seems to be emerging a new calm and a faint sign of a willingness to co-operate on the part of Russia.” A Communist Polish delegate stood up and announced that there were no problems in the world which could not be settled by “peaceful negotiation.” He was applauded even by the Russian delegates, who had lately lost their scowls.
We saw that all the photographed faces around the crowded diplomatic tables were singularly subdued, that delegates played with pencils and papers and looked about them with haggard glances. Only a few of us detected fear in their eyes; only a few saw the mute questions in those eyes which asked if other nations were enduring the same plague. No one, of course, answered.
One day a Russian delegate rose to his feet to express “the People’s Democracies’” sympathy for the suffering of India, “which has experienced the worst drought in its history.” The People’s Democracies would ship to India millions of tons of wheat in the immediate future. In fact, ships were already on their way. The Ukraine, said the Russian delegate, with a happy smile, was bursting with new wheat. Crops would be the largest in history.
“Liar! Liar!” said my father, grimly. “There will be some wheat shipped, yes. Russia wants the world to believe that only she has not been struck down. Some wheat—but only a little—from their warehouses. After that, nothing.”
He was right, of course. Later we heard that the farmers on the collective farms were fighting government agents in a frantic attempt to keep some of their corn for themselves, and some of their cattle. But that was much later.
In the middle of April a new stench added itself to the awful one which was always with us. The wild creatures in the woods were dying rapidly, poisoned by the weeds. Deer and rabbits and squirrels and woodchucks and mice littered the floor of the forests, decaying.
Then the birds began to die.
It was about that time that my father told us what he had seen in January. We listened to him intently. Then he read to us from Matthew 24.
We did not know at that time that millions of Bibles were being opened all over the world, and that churches were beginning to burst with new members. But the ministers did not speak of what was happening all over the country. They, too, had been given their orders.
Fear hung over the world like a vast cloud.
CHAPTER FIVE
My mother was a very amiable, gentle woman, round and pink as an apple, with warm brown eyes and pretty chestnut hair which curled all about her face in tiny ringlets. She was a great favorite in our part of the country, for she was completely without malice or smallness of character. She could silence an outburst of my father’s with a slight glance or a faint smile, and I cannot remember that she was ever impatient. Lucy and Jean loved her, and her little grandsons followed her everywhere. She was never too tired to listen to anyone, and her calmness had the quality of the earth in it.
It was some time before we noticed that her color had faded and that her hair was whitening about the temples and that she was silent now, rather than calm. One night in May she said to my father: “We used to have so many visitors on Saturdays and Sundays. No one comes any more.”
We had lived with fear for so many weeks that we were all startled into this new awareness of the absence of friends. The telephone hardly rang these days. The roads were empty, and the matted weeds were running their tentacles across them. Our driveway was snarled with them; they grew together, piled up on themselves and in many places they reached a height of three feet. There was no place now which was not infested with them. But though in furious red and yellow bloom, no bee approached them. They strangled my mother’s flower garden, crawled up fences and tree trunks, wound themselves about posts. We kept our stock in the barns, huddled together, and the doors shut to keep out that silent rage of death. They darkened our windows and gushed across our porch. Sometimes at night, when a strong wind blew, we could hear them rustle harshly.
There were no school children in our house, but we heard that the schools in the county had been closed. A few children’s legs had been pierced by the thorns and they had almost died of the poisoning.
We had heard nothing as yet about the cities, and it was not until summer that we did hear from friends who had visited there that the city parks were overrun with the horror which could not be exterminated. But the streets themselves remained clear because of the traffic.
We were a reserved family, not given to hysteria or panic. The women might sit, white-faced, with the children on their knees, but when they spoke it was with their usual quietness. It was very difficult for them, for the children could not be allowed out and they were restless as well as half sick from the want of sunshine and milk.
At first only my father believed that we had been condemned to death with all our fellows. Edward and I sometimes laughed wearily together about his dream of the moon and the stopping of time. But as the endless days went by, our laughter faded and we did not speak of that “dream.”
One night my mother suddenly cried out in a strange voice: “George, what can we do? The children—the children—”
“We can do nothing,” answered my father bitterly. He went to her and put his arms about her and we heard her sobbing against his chest. “The children have been condemned with us.”
“But they’re so innocent,” wept my mother.
“But so many millions of innocents have already been murdered,” my father said. He looked at us over my mother’s head and quoted again from the Bible: “The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground. And now thou art cursed from the earth.…”
I thought of Korea, and Edward, sitting near me in his blindness, turned toward my father. He said, quietly, “Yes, I killed men. I had no choice.”
“And I had no choice,” I added.
Edward put his hands over his face and for the first time I heard him quote the Bible too: “My punishment is greater than I can bear.”
My mother lifted her head from my father’s chest and looked at us aghast, her eyes swollen with tears. “But it was Cain who said that, Edward!”
My brother and I did not answer her.
My mother turned to my father, exclaiming: “What could our boys do? Did they make those wars?”
“Yes,” said my father. “We all did.”
I got up abruptly and left the room, for suddenly I hated my father for what I believed to be his cruelty. I stood in the hall, trembling, and Jean came out to me and put her arms around me. I had no comfort for her. I could only stand there with my hands clenched. A sense of impotent rage came over me, a hatred and disgust for all the world, for my father, and then, strangely, for myself. I was swamped in my emot
ions, my feeling of helplessness and despair.
And then, like a tolling in my inner ear, came the awful words: It repented the Lord that He had made man on the earth … The earth mourneth and fadeth away … The earth also is defiled under the inhabitants thereof; because they have transgressed the laws … Therefore hath the curse devoured the earth.…
I pushed Jean away from me roughly. “Surely to God there must be something we can do!” I cried. “Why doesn’t the government send out armies of men to kill the damned things?”
I walked away from Jean and went upstairs to our room and looked at our sleeping baby.…
When Jean followed me later I pretended to be asleep. She moved about quietly by the light of one small lamp. She sank onto the bed beside me and I could feel her sobbing silently to herself again. I turned and took her in my arms and kissed her, and for a little while, in our love, we forgot that we had been condemned to die.
Jean slept, but I could not. I saw the blanched white face of the moon peering in the window, and I thought of its barrenness. I hated it. I got up and pulled the curtains across it. The room was stifling in the June heat, but we dared not open the windows because of the choking stench outside. As the hours passed I thought of the cities and the land, and wondered how long it would be before every sign of man had been smothered in death.
I turned and tossed in the heat of the room and the thought of the weeds, the dreadful weeds, became an obsession. They were no longer a vegetable manifestation of some unknown evil or judgment, but a sinister purpose, animated, directed. I wanted to fight that purpose; I wanted to show that I could combat it.
When the first signs of dawn turned the windows gray I got up and dressed. I crept down the dark staircase and listened to the monotonous song of the old clock. Then I was outside, my legs protected by high leather boots. I passed through the weeds and they snatched at me with their long barbs and ripped at my clothing. I held my arms high from them, and they seethed about my legs, hungrily. They crackled under my feet, and I breathed shallowly through my nose to keep from being stifled by their stench. I could not see them in the darkness, but I could feel their baleful life, their awareness of me, their hatred for me.
Above me, the eastern sky streamed with pale magenta light, streaked with cold green. I reached the barns and had to wrench open the doors with all my strength, for in a single night the weeds had overrun the hinges. The barns were very warm, for our animals were huddled there—those which remained of the flocks we had once owned. The cows did not stamp or complain; even when I lit a lantern they merely looked at me with the mute eyes of despair. “Quiet, quiet,” I murmured to them, and they lowered their heads. The three horses sighed gustily. I went from stall to stall, offering comfort to these poor creatures, touching them. Our two remaining bulls nuzzled me, young fellows who only a month ago would have bellowed and tossed their horns. “It’s all right, boys,” I said to them, stroking their broad shoulders. They moved nearer to me, and. I knew that never again would I regard any poor beast as a mere commodity to be fattened and sent to the market.
My hatred for the weeds reached a frantic pitch in my mind, for now I finally understood how they would stifle the innocent as well as the guilty. I must do something! I went outdoors and stood irresolute. The hills in the distance, which should have been a soft lavender in the dawn light, were venomous in color.
I moved toward another building. The weeds tried to seize me and pull me down. I tore among them, crushing my heels into them savagely, but they sprang up behind me as I hurried. I reached the building where we kept our farm machinery, and the fury in me grew wilder. I climbed onto the seat of our huge disk harrow, whose edges were as sharp as knives. I drove out through the weeds. The disks cut them; I could hear the edges tearing through the monstrous growth. Now it was light enough to see that they were bleeding, a green, noxious blood which spewed up about me like a deathly water. The smell was overpowering, but there was a sort of mad rejoicing in me. Surely I was killing them with the harrow!
And then I looked behind me. The path of crushed weeds I expected to see had been obliterated. I had made no impression on the weeds at all. Where I had killed, or cut, others now swarmed. I could actually see the movement of them, and it was like a nightmare. The embracing tentacles meshed together visibly.
But I could not stop myself. I drove far into a field, choking on the stench, and the weeds closed eagerly after me. Then, as the first red edge of the sun appeared over the matted hills, I stopped and sat motionless, overcome with futility and anguish.
I was all alone in that monstrous sea. In the distance our house and outbuildings were emerging like faint mirages. Soon my father and the tenant farmers would be going to the barns to set the milking machines hopelessly, and to feed the stock. I sat in the wilderness and began to sob dryly. I put my head on my knees. What was there to do? There was nothing to do. Except to pray.
I sat very still. Pray. I had not prayed since I was a child. I had not been in a church more than three times since I was sixteen.
Surely, I thought, millions must be praying for deliverance from the weeds. What had those prayers accomplished? I looked up at the sky which had become opalescent like the inside of a shell, and I thought bitterly, Where was God that He had permitted this frightful thing to come upon His children? Why, if there was a God—
At least, I thought with infuriated cynicism, I could try prayer. But I could not remember the Our Father beyond the first few words. Now my mind tumbled with meaningless words. I remembered a phrase my father had quoted a few nights ago: The land shall be utterly emptied, and utterly spoiled. I lifted my fists to the sky and shouted. “Why, You up there? Why?”
Then I remembered that the prophecy that had been made because of the evil of all men: I have spoken unto them, but they have not heard … “I’m listening!” I shouted at the sky. “Answer me!”
The weeds rustled harshly in the morning wind. Now there were tears on my face, and anger and hopelessness in my heart. “All right,” I said aloud, “there is no—” I heard a voice in my inner ear, saying: The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.
I was overcome. I crouched on the seat and covered my eyes so that I could not see the weeds. Something was stirring in me. Memories were flooding back. I had not been exactly a bad man, only a heedless one, concerned exclusively with my family and the farm, driving hard bargains when I could, killing when I had to, hating when directed. All at once I loathed myself, loathed the meaningless life I had led, loathed my casual obedience to the laws of war.
I too had a share in the crimes against humanity. I looked at the sky again, not with rage, but with despairing humility. I cried out: “Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner!”
The sky, flaming now, was silent; the wind had dropped. The weeds no longer rustled their poisonous song of vengeance. I listened for the birds, but there was never such a silence. I repeated over and over from the very depths of my soul: “Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner.”
My hands dropped wearily on the wheel. I must go back to help my father in his useless work. And then, as I turned the wheel, I stopped, incredulous. For the space of about ten yards around the harrow the weeds had retreated. The bare earth lay there, exposed to the first sun, not baked or brown or dry, but warm and crumbling with fertility. “No!” I shouted. I forced myself down to the ground and picked up a handful of soil, still disbelieving. It filtered through my fingers, alive and vital. And I saw that it was meshed with the roots of living grass.
“Oh, God!” I sobbed. “Oh, God!”
What had I said in my jumbled prayers to cause this miracle? I stood, numbed, and tried to remember. It escaped me. There had been a whole torrent of angry prayers. Which one, God, which one? If there had been a special one—
A voice called to me in the silence: “Hey! Hey, you there, Pete!”
I turned slowly toward the fence which separated our land from our neighbor’s. It was Johnny Carr, a tall and
lanky man of fifty, who had been my father’s one and only enemy. He was a jaunty man with a derisive laugh, a thin, dark face and little cunning eyes. Years ago, he and my father had had a bitter boundary dispute, and Carr had won. There had been hostility between the two men ever since, and it had spread to his two sons and to Edward and me.
He stood there now, leaning on the fence, high boots on his long legs, his hat pushed back on his head. He was not grinning, as usual; he was very pale and sober. He was so changed I hardly recognized him. I could not speak, and he vaulted over the fence and came toward me, smiling almost humbly. “These weeds are hell, aren’t they, Pete?” he said. His voice was hoarse and friendly, and he peered at me, as if pleading. “What’re we going to do? I tried burning them, but it was no good.”
Then he saw the empty patch all around the tractor. I heard him take a sharp breath and his face turned as gray as old linen. I watched him in silence. As I had done, he bent and picked up a handful of earth, and examined it lovingly. He looked at me, and his eyes were full of tears. “Oh, Lord,” he whispered. “What did you do, Pete?”
“I don’t know, Johnny,” I said, and my voice was soft. “I think I prayed.”
He looked at me dumbly, the fresh warm earth sifting through his fingers. “You prayed?” he stammered at last.
“Yes.”
He picked up another handful of earth, and I thought to myself that I no longer resented him. I was sorry for him, sorry for his greed and his cruelty and his hatred for my father. He was suffering as we were all suffering. He might have been a friend, if we had tried to make him one.
He was swallowing painfully. He stared at the weeds, which had been driven back in that wide circle. “Prayed,” he muttered. “I never prayed in my life. Never learned how. Nobody taught me.” He turned and said: “I was an orphan kid in the county home. Guess there was just too many of us, and then there was the depression. The county just hardly kept us alive. Then I got a job in a machine shop in the city, and when I had a little cash I put it down on my farm—hell of a lot of years before I paid for it. Nobody ever taught me to pray. Never went to church. What for? Kind of foolish, it seemed to me.”
Your Sins and Mine Page 3
