PrairyErth

by William Least Heat-Moon

  This is Blanche Schwilling. She was outside late last night to watch the comet again, and she says, It isn’t much now, not what it was in 1910. Maybe the stargazing has thrown her off today, she is saying, because an hour ago she had to drop down on the aluminum chaise in the middle room to try to gather herself, and then she got up to write from memory a few lines from a childhood reader: Keep plodding—’tis wiser than standing aside, and so on; but she still felt, she says, dizzy as a pet coon. She is small and lightly boned like a finch, has an enlarged heart, has buried two husbands and one son, and now she works to keep the times from burying Bazaar, the oldest village in the county. For twenty-eight years she was postmaster—never she a postmistress, that irksome word—the last one before the government soon closed down the p.o., took away the stamps, canceled the zip code, and said by its action that Bazaar was no longer a real town; and some people agreed, since the school also had been closed, because rural people know that those two elements constitute a village even more than a grocery and filling station. But there remained the Methodist church against the west hill, and when they tried to close it Blanche rallied the citizens, a victory made easy because of the quaintness of the building that still lures city people to be married here. Yet countians understood that it wasn’t a frame building keeping together Bazaar—population twelve if you count those in the near hills—it was little Blanche. A woman said to me, When Missus Schwilling goes, so will Bazaar. She holds things together with her own two hands. Between the alternate-Sunday visits of a circuit preacher, it’s up to Blanche to conduct a devotional, and every Sabbath she rings the bell, but, she says, Nobody hears it except those of us already there, but I guess that’s who it’s for.

  At the turn of the century Bazaar was the terminus of a Santa Fe spur and one of the largest cattle-shipping points in Kansas. From its pens—now also gone—grass-fat steers went down the line to end up on dinner plates in Kansas City, Chicago, New York. The village sits nearly at the juncture of Rock Creek and the South Fork of the Cottonwood in the southeast corner of the quadrangle; six miles north is the Falls, near where highway 177 leaves its course through creek and river bottoms to rise onto the hills almost at the center of Chase, bypassing Bazaar and then dropping into the vale of the South Fork and heading toward the southern county line. The river and large streams here—Rock, Buck, Spring—and the roads that follow them strike similar southwest-northeast courses; only Den Creek runs counter. Sharp’s Creek also comes in contrary, but just the mouth of it nips into the quad; with no other village near, inhabitants along the farther reaches of the stream belong to Bazaar. To it, then called Frank’s Creek, in 1860 came John and Nancy Sharp of Tennessee, who had freed their slaves and headed west only to be driven eastward again by the great drought and subsequent starvation that forced out thirty thousand other Kansas immigrants; but the Sharps held on near Missouri and returned to the Flint Hills with the rain. A year later John died and left Nancy with their thirteen children. She raised sheep and planted cotton and made herself a small gin, spun wool and cotton together, concocted dyes from oak and walnut bark, and sold the cloth in Lawrence and thereby kept the children alive, and some of their descent today live along the creek. People say that before she died in 1884 Nancy, who had learned to extract essences and life from the rocky land, cut a goose quill and with ink made from pokeberries put her X to her last testament.

  In the kitchen Blanche is setting out a tray of chocolate chip cookies, dried apricots, pumpkin seeds, white mints, and a pot of hot water for Scripture tea. I ask what that is, she hands me a baglet, and at the end of the string is a paper octagon and this: As cold waters to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far country. Proverbs 25:25. I read it aloud, and she smiles so that I know she selected it, and I ask her about the sign above the faucet: NOT FOR DRINKING ONLY FOR WASHING, and she says, It’s from the cistern. Drinking water she hand pumps each day from her well, ten strokes this morning, but twenty in dry weather.

  We are in the small middle room with its seven doors. Blanche tells me about things: one of the doors leads to the old sitting room, which in 1944 she turned into the post office, and behind that door the p.o. is as it was on its last day: the photograph of President Richard Nixon, the 1974 calendar stopped on April, the rates still posted, the watermark (four feet up on the wall) from the ’51 flood that unglued the stamps, the glass-front boxes, the scales, the little bell of Sarna that customers jingled to summon her to the counter—all still in place. Behind the counter, in the linoleum, two worn ellipses that give proof of her days standing and sorting and counting that never earned even the minimum wage for what the postmaster general considered a part-time job: for her those ellipses are ten thousand days when first-class postage rose only seven pennies. (She speaks of hearing old grassmen tell about the earliest post office here, a mound east of town where lay rocks inscribed with family names: anyone returning from Emporia left neighbors’ letters under a stone.) Beneath her counter is a small box of glass shards from the site, a few miles west, of the plane crash that killed Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne in 1931; and there’s also a glass bottle turned to opalescence and embossed WONDERFUL EIGHT (once containing who knows what elixir) that she dug from her little vegetable garden in the backyard near the old cyclone cave, which she refuses to enter, preferring to take shelter in the ninety-first Psalm: Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night, nor for the arrow that flieth by day.

  Just beyond this storm cellar near the tracks lies the path to the depot she walked ten thousand mornings at six to wait for the Doodlebug, the one-car “train” carrying only mail, passengers, and cream. On the crossing at the corner of her yard, two years after Rockne crashed, Postmaster John Mitchell died lugging his laundry over the tracks when he stepped in front of an engine one January night; but, she wonders, how do you accidentally walk into a whistling locomotive? They found the frozen body the next morning. His wife was an ignorant woman, they say, smoked a corncob pipe, and John hid away his education: in his toolbox he kept a cardboard tube and in it were his postal commission and another paper; one afternoon when a federal inspector examined Mitchell’s certification, he saw a rolled-up diploma with John’s name on it and, in surprise, he asked why a Yale graduate would be in this godforsaken place, and Mitchell grabbed the papers and threw them back among the tools and said, Forget it. Neighbors suspect a link between that sheepskin and John’s death on the tracks, but the only explanation now has to be what you invent.

  Blanche: Martha Leonard came here with her husband and two sons in 1857 from Pennsylvania, and she died the next year, the first white death recorded in the county, but they say she named the town after her shop back east where she sold fancywork and infants’ clothes. Later a postmaster changed the town name to Mary, but it didn’t stick. By the way Blanche phrases that, she means, We’re too eccentric for that name to fit.

  She says, Bazaar began up on the old trail a half mile west, where our last schoolhouse is, up next to the cemetery. The first stone school was up there too, one room. It was the heart and we were the blood of Bazaar. They did everything in the building: voting, ciphering matches, spelldowns, cotillion dances, singing lessons, moot courts, magic-lantern shows, literary societies. (She doesn’t say it, but I’ve read about the Utile Dulce Society that met there: on one occasion, the dulce was an interpretation of “Hiawatha’s Wooing,” and on another the utile was a demonstration of a sausage grinder.) They held church in the room, and grange meetings. The schoolhouse record book states the building was to be open for anything from a political meeting to a monkey show—sometimes probably about the same thing. Funerals too: the teacher would gather the children in the back of the room during the service, and later they’d see the coffin carried out the door and across the schoolyard to the cemetery.

  She is pausing now and watching the misted morning press on the windowpanes, the day seeming to have not enough light in it to give to the room, and she says, with vigor, So what did we do
with that rock schoolhouse? We tore it down. We only left one step. But they didn’t get our last building when they consolidated the district. We kept it for a community center. They didn’t get it. And I’m thinking how the highway department did get the massive triple-arch bridge over the South Fork a mile east, among the finest stone spans in the Middle West; largely because of one nonresident’s complaints, the county bosses refused to let its beauty and history stand alongside the new bridge.

  Blanche says, The railroad built to here in 1885 to reach the pastures, then stopped. We were the end of things and boomed up to seventy-five people. Then in 1923 the tracks were laid on through, and we were soon on the main line, but it wasn’t enough, especially when trucks started hauling the cattle—that was about it. So, what remains is the inertia of existence, Blanche Schwilling’s will not to let go, and the few women of the village who continue collecting rags and gathering to tear them to make rugs to sell at their annual benefit called the Bazaar Bazaar.

  I ask to see the upstairs, and she lets me lead: one room piled and the doorway labeled DISASTER AREA and pasted to the wall is a newspaper clipping about Zebulon Pike passing nearby and another with a photograph of her in a tiara when she was the centennial queen of the courthouse; a second room for her diaries she’s kept for seventy years and her hobby collections: I’ve labeled them from A to Z: N is napkins, H is handkerchiefs. P is my favorite, my potpourri of prayers. I ask what Z is, and she says, Zip code cancellations. And her bedroom under the roof-sloped ceiling, the walls close: tidy, sparse, only a chair and steel bed with a white coverlet over the little concavity in the mattress where she sleeps in the fetal position, a string from the pull chain on the naked bulb in the ceiling to the bedstead, and an old mirror with the silver mostly gone as if all its reflections had worn it through.

  We are again in the middle room. When Carrie Chandler lived down here, she jumped when she had a chance to move to Cottonwood, and someone asked, “But you’ll be buried in Bazaar, won’t you?” and she said, “I’ve been buried here long enough.” It’s a story I’ve heard several times because it so encapsulates for the citizens the challenge of living in the old hamlet. Blanche, as she has for the last couple of hours, sporadically taps her small right shoe on the floor as if counting time, and she says, I could never be buried here long enough unless I missed the Resurrection, and she speaks of her two years teaching school on Osage Hill where she taught as many as five students, of the greeting cards she sells although she ends up using most of them herself, of her late-hours tatting in front of Johnny Carson, of how she’ll doze off in the aluminum chaise until two A.M. She rises from her chair and crosses the dim room, puts on her hearing aid as if to listen for the mist against the windows or some ethereal footfall on the porch. She takes a page from an envelope and passes it to me: a typed sheet, her obituary.

  In Ecstasy

  The pink polish is chipped on the sixteen-year-old girl’s fingernails, and dried blood is caked around the cuticles: she grasps the scrotum gently and pulls it taut and with a scalpel cuts off the tufted base and throws it down, reaches deep into the sac to find the testicular cords, jerks them loose, and drops the testes into the clouded water of a gallon jar holding another three dozen. The whole operation is nearly bloodless. Cheryl will cut calves but she refuses to brand them—that she leaves to the others. In my nostrils is the smell of burnt Hereford hair, an odor that takes getting accustomed to, and white smoke from the electric branding iron swirls up for a few moments, then blows clear; on the little bull’s haunch is a flying , the raw skin shining brown like new harness leather. Linda leans and thrusts a hypodermic needle into the haunch.

  Through all of this the four-month-old bull has lain silent, but when Arlene puts the electric iron to its skull to burn off the buttons that would grow into horns, and smoke swirls again, the animal bawls keenly. Then it’s all over, and the calf table—a hinged chute that clamps and lays out the Hereford—swings back upright and opens, and the little fellow shoots across the corral and looks around in confusion, and somebody calls out in falsetto, Welcome to steerdom! The five women move the next animal toward the calf table, but this one is recalcitrant, and Jane says, Come on, sugar, and it takes a step or two and then throws its heavy little skull against Cheryl’s head, and she drops to the dust, and it’s a few minutes before she can continue. When she does there is no vengeance in her work. Throughout the hot June morning none of the all-woman crew has cussed or kicked the animals. If you’ve ever watched men castrating, branding, dehorning, and inoculating cattle, you know it just isn’t done this way.

  Jane Beedle Roger owns these calves and the land they graze on; she is thirty-five, dark blond, about a thumb’s length taller than five feet, and she often does things the way they aren’t done. Consider her corral attire: a pink pith helmet, high-top pink sneakers, an emblazoned T-shirt, WE’RE OUT TO WIN OUR SPURS. Earlier she said seriously to me, My views aren’t always in tune in here, so I keep them turned down. While she usually hires only women to work cattle, she does employ one man to help with her two hundred acres of feeder crops, but now that the last little bull has been cut I’m the only intact male in six miles, and one of the women has just flashed the knife toward where I sit watching above the calf table and says, Next? and another says, Forget it—he’s a canner, meaning an animal too old to bring a good price, the kind Roger believes goes into most franchise burgers, and somebody says, Couldn’t even get a Little Mac out of him.

  Jane Roger has awakened feminism in her employees as Linda Thurston helped awaken hers, and this morning she said, Agricultural knowledge doesn’t pass on a Y chromosome—it’s learned behavior, and if a cowboy can learn to work cattle, anybody can. I mean, his idea is, “If it don’t fit, get a goddamn hammer.” When a woman is around animals, her nurturing instinct comes out. Jane knows that any cowboy who didn’t scorn such talk would be ridiculed, and she also knows that, in spite of her early success, men here still say an all-woman operation can’t last long; her response is to quote native son William Allen White: My advice to the Women’s Clubs of America is to raise more hell and fewer dahlias. She raises only a little of the first and none of the other, but she does raise three hundred crossbred Herefords. She can see no reason for rodeos that only perpetuate adolescent male myths about cowboys and encourage a moronic masculine desire for dominance over dumb animals: Some of these guys are so bright they can’t even see when they’re running a pasture calf to death.

  When the cattle are again on the grass, we climb into her Jeep, and she hands me the jar of ballocks rolling sluggishly in the thick water as we bounce back to the ranch, where she will clean the little creamy ovoids, heavily veined with purple and looking like nothing so much as nighthawk eggs, and to her friends she will dole them out like Godiva chocolates. As for herself, she’s never eaten one.

  I’ve known Jane for a year or so, occasionally seeing her along the desolate roads near her pastures in the southeast part of the county, but it was only a couple of weeks ago that I went to her home in Bazaar after I heard her crew was going to cut and brand. That evening we stood and talked on her back porch, and she said abruptly, Do you eat red meat? and I thought she was setting me up as she likes to do, and I said, if it’s brown, and she said, I just got some steaks today. We went inside and she began fixing two mail-order strips. Jane doesn’t eat her own animals; about that she said, Inconsistency is just great, and she put the cuts on the grill and said, I grew up eating beef twice a day. Now maybe it’s once a week. Jane Roger’s six-thousand-acre Homestead Ranch, a third of which she leases for transient grazing, goes mostly to her year-round cow and calf operation where she allows eight acres to each animal, twice the transient ratio.

  She grew up in Cottonwood Falls. Her father, Evan, a Yale graduate in English literature, is an heir to one of the big ranching operations in the state, a place partly comprising land bought from the New York Rockefellers by her great-uncle, the son of a Kansas immigrant from Con
necticut in 1883 who became wealthy in banking and realty speculation. On that ranch in the Gypsum Hills of southwest Kansas, Jane and her sisters used to spend summers working cattle. Her mother is a native countian and a descendant of the Norton Ranch family. When Jane went off to the first of several colleges, she vowed never to return to Kansas; she studied some religion but never graduated, although she did earn her pilot’s license. At a tiny Nazarene college in Idaho she realized the Flint Hills still held her even after eight years, and a novel gave her the final urging: Evan challenged me to read Atlas Shrugged, so I did, and Dagny Taggart became my mentor. I thought if she could run a railroad and succeed while playing by men’s rules, I could operate some outfit. She woke up in me the importance of ethics in business and the dangers of compromise. So I came home to run my railroad, which turned out to be a ranch, and I’ve been motivated—like Dagny—by anger at people saying, “You can’t.”

  Evan Koger saw several reasons for not buying Chase pastureland at more than the fifty dollars an acre he had last paid years earlier, and he refused to help Jane buy back land once in her mother’s family. She said to me, I figured it was better to buy it and lose it than never to try. Evan antagonized me to success. He’d say, “fane, you can’t do it. There are things you just can’t do.” But I knew that, because we’re not as strong as men, we don’t have to be as dumb, so instead of muscle we use a come-along to pull a calf from the uterus, or we get a front-end loader to move a chute. Gears and ratchets and hydraulics are great equalizers. The upshot of all this was that, with my sister Kay, I committed to a quaiter-of-a-million-dollar debt to the Federal Land Bank. I was twenty-five then. Evan gave some seed stock. Later I bought out Kay’s interest—she and her husband run a ranch up at Hymer. After my grandmother died I bought her home, this house, and remodeled it a little, and now I’ve reassembled a lot of family land. When I’d proved a few things—had succeeded almost in spite of Evan—then he contributed some more land. I’ve taken a rancher’s short course at Kansas State—my family calls it a short rancher’s course—and I’ve attended a stockmen’s school in Texas, and I read. Still, people here think I’ve had it all handed to me. They say Evan Koger was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but his kids have left him with a plastic fork.