Heed the Thunder

by Jim Thompson

  “I’ve got to have more, Ma. I’ve got to have two dollars.”

  “But, I—”

  “Well, I’ll tell you what, then,” said Grant, suddenly amiable. “Just give me a dollar sixty. That’ll still leave you a dollar. That’s enough to give to that—to him.”

  “I—I just don’t feel like I ought to,” said Mrs. Fargo miserably.

  “Aw, come on, Ma,” her son pleaded, smiling. “Remember that cameo I sent you from Dallas? And that Christmas I sent you the five dollars?”

  Mrs. Fargo nodded, remembering.

  “Well, all right,” she said.

  Grant left, whistling, for town and Bella; and Mrs. Fargo, after administering a few final pats and pulls to her person, went out into the living room.

  It was only dusky-dark, but Mrs. Dillon and her son were seated at the table with the lamp burning. They were playing some kind of game with crosses and zeros. The boy looked at his grandmother incuriously. He was aware of her dislike for him, and accepted it just as he accepted his mother’s affection. He supposed that all grandmas disliked little boys.

  Mrs. Dillon simpered nervously. “My, my! How nice you look, Ma!”

  “Do you need that lamp burnin’?” said Mrs. Fargo. “When Pa and me are here alone, we don’t light a lamp once a month.”

  “Oh, no! We don’t really need it,” said Mrs. Dillon.

  “We do, too! We do need it!” her son cried.

  But his mother had already extinguished the lamp.

  Mrs. Fargo went on through the living room to the kitchen and out the door. Her husband, ensconced on the porch as usual, rolled his eyes at her in doggish humor.

  “Feeling pretty frisky, hey?” he chuckled savagely. “Too goddam stingy to let your own kin have a light. Rather have ’em put their eyes out, I ’spect.”

  “They can see all right,” said Mrs. Fargo. “I don’t use no lamp myself.”

  “The reverend takin’ you to tent-meeting again?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t be too surprised if he didn’t show up. There’s talk around town. He’s got just a mite too grabby for his own good.”

  “He’s—what do you mean?” quavered Mrs. Fargo.

  “You ain’t heard? Hell, I was hopin’ you were getting part of it! Why, it’s all over town the way he’s bamboozled and bulldozed a lot of these light-wits into signing over their property to him!”

  “Oh,” said Mrs. Fargo. “But he’s not taking it for himself, Pa. He just aims to take care of it for the Lord until He comes after it.”

  “Umm,” said Link; then, “What!” and, finally, very finally, “Well, by God!”

  He snorted, coughed, and brought his feet down from the pillar with a clump. He stood up. One of the inevitable chickens was passing by, and he swung at it bitterly with the crook of his cane. Then, he sat down again, returned his feet to their former elevation, and closed his eyes. He reopened them after a moment and rolled them yellowly at his wife. Following that, they snapped shut firmly, and he jammed his big black hat over his forehead.

  Bewildered, Mrs. Fargo proceeded down the walk to the gate.

  Unlike her husband, she did not deem life to be the slow losing of a gift. It was merely a long trail of hardship which led to a better hereafter. Toward the end, if you had done as you should have, you were permitted to rest in peace and comfort while waiting for the gates to open. But that was all.

  She was innately a kind and patient woman. She had borne four children to a man who was quick-tempered, harsh-spoken, and away from home as much as he could be. She had reared those children, with reasonably good educations, into healthy maturity. She had supported them over a period of years, seen that they had the little comforts and pleasures that other children had. And not for her own glory, any of this. As wife and mother, she had no individuality; nothing for glory to attach to. She had done it almost mechanically.

  Now, she was tired, tired and puzzled. She had entered the last ten years of her three-score and ten, and the pause of peace and quiet was not there. She did not know who was to blame, and, childishly, she did not care. But she knew that she was not; and she was tired.

  She wondered—wondering if the thought were blasphemy—if relatives came to live with you in heaven.

  The Reverend-Parson Silas Whitcomb was late in coming. It was almost true-dark when he drove up with his nag and rattly gig.

  A man of about fifty, he was dressed in rusty black broadcloth, half-boots, and a grayish-white shirt with a string tie. He wore no hat over his mass of unkempt black hair. His eyes were small and deep-set in his cadaverous face. His voice was rich and convincing. He was far from being a snide.

  It was his plan—later to be brought to fruition by others (at Franklin, Nebraska, for example)—to establish a community of the holy in which all would work for the glory of God. Those who were saved, now, could thus be assured of remaining saved until they were “taken.” And such a community might well serve as a base of operations for the Lord, should He decide to remake the earth instead of destroying it.

  He had the trait, characteristic of fanatics, of believing that whatever was done to obtain his objectives was not only entirely justifiable but praiseworthy. He could not get the property he needed on the merits of his plan. He was getting it by convincing the gullible and pious that the day of reckoning was at hand, and that they would save dangerous confusion for themselves by the immediate return of the fiefs they held from God.

  He drew up to the hitching block in front of the Fargo place, and the old woman, after several false starts, managed to scramble into the rig. It would have been unseemly, of course, for a man of the cloth to have boosted her in, and he did not feel physically equal to it anyway. There was the Lord’s work to be done; he could not risk a sprained back at this juncture.

  They drove back toward town, the buggy dipping and swaying with the wobbly wheels.

  “Do you have it, Sister Fargo?”

  “I have it,” said Mrs. Fargo, her voice trembling with a strange ecstasy.

  “Give it to me.”

  She opened the reticule, produced some ancient sheets of thick folded paper, and passed them across to him. He held them almost against his eyes, flipping the pages with his thumb, nodding with grim satisfaction.

  “Um-hmm,” he said. “Quite right. The deed seems to be in order, and”—he turned to the back of the last page—“you’ve quitclaimed in my—”

  The Reverend-Parson Whitcomb did not finish the sentence. He said something which sounded like an oath, and which was.

  “Oh, Sister Fargo,” he whined in exasperation, “why did you make it like that?”

  “Ain’t it all right?” said Mrs. Fargo. “I made it over to God.”

  “No, it ain’t all right! I told you it was to be made over to me. I told you that a dozen times!”

  “But God’s goin’ to get it, anyway,” said Mrs. Fargo. “I thought it would save trouble.”

  “But God da—God ain’t got time to fool with such things. That’s why He sent me here. I’m supposed to handle His business for Him.”

  “Well…”

  “Now I got to copy this whole thing over so you can quitclaim it right. I tell you, Sister Fargo, the Lord loveth not those who abuse the patience of His servants!”

  “Well, I’m sure sorry,” said Mrs. Fargo, humbly.

  The parson said nothing.

  The moon had not yet risen, and the night was almost totally dark. The only sound was the whispering of the wheels and the suck of the nag’s hoofs in the sand. Mrs. Fargo felt embarrassed and put out. She tried to make conversation.

  “Looks like a fire over there through the grove,” she said.

  “Umm,” said the reverend.

  “Looks like there’s a bunch of men around it.”

  “Umm.”

  “Couldn’t be burnin’ off corn stubble,” Mrs. Fargo persisted. “The corn ain’t in yet.”

  “Umm.”

 
“Anyway, it ain’t a cornfield.”

  Whitcomb ran his hand through his hair and narrowed his thin lips. He was on the point of saying something anent the idle chatter of women when the horse shied, throwing him back against the seat. The next instant there was a weird whistle, the rattle and crash of horses in the underbrush, and the gig was surrounded.

  “Who are you?” Whitcomb demanded, standing up. “What’s the meaning of this?”

  “You’ll find out,” said a voice. “Is that you in there, Mrs. Fargo?”

  “Y-yes,” said Mrs. Fargo. “It’s Jake Phillips, ain’t it?”

  “No, it ain’t,” said Jake Phillips, the sheriff, firmly. “We’re just a bunch o’ citizens that’s goin’ to give this humbug his deserts. But don’t you mind. You just sit tight and you’ll be all right.”

  Whitcomb suddenly shouted and swung at the horse with the reins. But someone was holding the bridle and the animal only reared dispiritedly.

  “Let us pass!” the reverend-parson demanded. “Beware, lest the Lord strike you down! I demand—”

  There was a swish of rope, and the parson leaped backward over the seat and landed heavily in the dust. Breathless and bruised, he was nevertheless on his feet instantly, gouging, kicking, and swinging his flail-like arms as they closed in on him. It was not a new experience for him, and he was certain of the outcome. But he had never learned how to give up.

  Cursing and praying, fighting with his last ounce of strength, he was caught by the arms by two of the masked band. They swung him between them, cut their horses, and rode back through the underbrush.

  There was a moment of comparative quiet as they dragged him across the field. The fire flamed bright, and it was still quiet. Then a piercing scream crashed and rocked against the night. It came again and again, so swiftly upon its echoes that it was as though Mrs. Fargo was listening to a chorus of agony. The chorus ended abruptly, turned into a vast choked sobbing. The fire disappeared. The horses broke back through the underbrush.

  One of the riders headed the nag back toward her home and gave it a swish with his hat for encouragement. So Mrs. Fargo did not see all that ensued, but she knew. She knew, and a sick terror filled her. It was not so much because of the mob and its deed, for mobs were more or less commonplace, and the reverend, assisted by the Lord, was probably better able to bear up under their brutality than most. In fact, she almost envied him. She wished that she was in his place and he in hers. As it was…

  She sobbed dryly, dreading the inevitable day of reckoning.

  …As it was, she had deeded her place to God, and His agent had just been tarred-and-feathered and ridden out of town on a rail.

  6

  Winter fell like a harlot upon the valley. One day there was only the musky odor of her, the rustle of her skirts; the next, she lay sprawled across the land in all her white and undulant opulence, and the valley groaned and shivered uxoriously.

  It was an early winter, and it would be a harsh one. The corn crop would be short, and, inevitably, feeder cattle would be high. The question was: would they be sufficiently high to allow a profit after being fed on high-priced grain?

  All up and down the valley men discussed the subject—around the pot-bellied stoves in the general store, in the saloon, the livery stable. They stood in little groups in the post office, arguing, worrying, studying the white blanket which lay beyond the steamed-over windows. The Daily Drover was read and reread, then hurled into the trash container or thoughtfully stuffed in mackinaw pockets. The Omaha Bee with its livestock quotations was similarly treasured or scorned. Every man—well, almost every man—calling for his mail was obliged to render an opinion.

  The exceptions to this last were Grant Fargo and the “foreigners”—the Russians, Poles, and Bohemians (Germans and Swedes were not considered “real foreigners”). No one asked the dandy young ex-printer whether he thought it would pay to feed, although he would have given his opinion gladly and it probably would have been as good as any. No one asked the bohunks and Rooshans. The foreigners did not feed except what they needed for their own use. Possibly, probably, because of the ancient fear of having any movable and valuable possessions commandeered, they owned little more than the land they farmed. They maintained almost the same poverty in their corrals that they did in their homes. No one understood the foreigners or cared to. They meant little to the banker, the storekeeper, or implement dealer. They were merely farmers who did nothing but farm.

  Sherman Fargo believed that it would be a good year for cattle, and he already had the stock on his farm; but he lacked the money to feed them through the winter. He had done well with the thresher, much better than he had hoped to, actually. But he had had a number of expensive repairs to make on the machine, and he was little more ahead at the end of the season than he had been at the beginning.

  He would not say that the thresher was no good, being ever reluctant to admit that he had made a bad bargain in anything. Neither would he admit that the breakdowns were due to his failure to keep oil in the machine. Sherman felt that the damned thing should get along without oil, seeing how much it had cost him. He was inclined to believe that much of this oil talk was foolishness, anyway. Hell, next thing they’d be telling him to buy a fly net for the contraption and build a box stall for it!

  He didn’t know why the thing had broken down, and he didn’t care. But he did want to feed, and he lacked the money.

  “I figure I could swing it on maybe twelve or fifteen hundred,” he told his father. “Maybe a little more, maybe a little less. I figure on profiting two or three thousand.”

  “I’d say a thousand would be plenty good,” said Lincoln.

  “Well, that’s what you’d say,” said his son, mildly. “I figure I probably know more about the business than you do.”

  Lincoln did not dispute the facts of the remark, nor did he take offense at it. There was none intended, he knew, and Sherman, as a man, had a right to say what he thought.

  They were at Lincoln’s house, seated on the porch that was now snugly closed in. Both men were smoking, Sherman a cob pipe, Lincoln a stogie. A box filled with ashes, which served as a cuspidor, stood on the floor between them. Robert Dillon sat back against the wall of the house, intensely interested in the conversation. He could not see why anyone would want to pay money to feed cattle. It seemed to him that it ought to be the other way around.

  “Bobbie,” said Lincoln Fargo, turning his head slightly.

  “Uh-huh,” said the boy.

  “Do you suppose you could get downstairs and back without tearin’ the house down?”

  “Sure, I could. I can do it, Pa.”

  “Well, I doubt it like hell,” said the old man. “But go on. Fetch me and Sherman one of them quart bottles of cider.”

  Titles such as “Uncle,” “Aunt,” and so on were not used in the Fargo family; they were omitted in many families of that day.

  The boy entered the kitchen, and a moment later they heard him raising the trap door to the cellar.

  “Well, Edie got off for her school today,” said Lincoln, his voice low. “Rode in-country with the mailman.”

  “How’d Bobbie take it?” asked Sherman.

  “He don’t know where she’s gone yet. He thinks she’s just downtown.”

  “He’ll get over it,” said Sherman, knocking out his pipe in the ash-box. “He’ll be staying with us tonight, and he can start to school with my kids in the morning. By tomorrow night he’ll be sort of used to his mother being gone.”

  “I hope so,” said Lincoln. “Now, how soon do you want this money? I figure I can borrow fifteen hundred on the place easy enough. It’s all clear.”

  “Well, we ought to get started within the next thirty days,” said Sherman.

  “We can make it by then,” the old man nodded. “Ma will sure be over her ailin’ spell by then. She’ll have to go down to the bank with me.”

  “Yeah, I know,” said Sherman. “Well, here’s the way it stands, t
hen: you buy the feed, I furnish the cattle, and we split the profits and the work.”

  “That’s it,” Lincoln agreed. “O’course, I can’t work like I used to.…”

  “Maybe,” drawled Sherman, “you can get Grant to help. You an’ him together ought to make one fairly good man.”

  Lincoln chuckled, spanking the cigar ashes from his vest; and Sherman grinned in modest self-appreciation.

  The cellar door slammed and Robert Dillon came in from the kitchen. The sleeves of his blouse were dripping, and his clothes and face were flecked with bits of yellow matter. Lincoln almost howled at the sight of him.

  “Now, what in the name of God have you been doing to yourself?”

  “Nothing,” the boy grinned. “I just stopped to look in the egg jar for a minute.”

  “And I suppose the eggs jumped up and threw themselves at you! What the hell was you trying to do, anyway?”

  “Looks like you’d been having an egg fight with yourself,” Sherman remarked. “Pa, do you remember that time in Kansas City when you was running the saloon and I took those settin’ eggs of Ma’s and slipped ’em into your free lunch?”

  “Seems like I do remember something about it,” said the old man.

  “Hell, you ought to! Your arm must’ve been lame for a week after the hiding you gave me.”

  “Why, now,” said Lincoln defensively, “I don’t know as I was ever so hard on you kids. Can’t recollect that I ever gave you a real trouncing.”

  “Well, maybe not.” His son shrugged. “Bob, you’d better run and get yourself cleaned up. We’re going to have to be on our way as soon as I have a drink or two of this cider.”

  “All right, Sherman,” said Bob, and he left the porch meekly.

  He had had the idea for a long time that eggs could be made to bounce, but he was willing to concede now that they would not. Previously he had experimented with fresh eggs stolen from the hens’ nests. And he had tried bouncing eggs that were hard-boiled. But today had been his first opportunity to use eggs put-down in lime water. He had used about a dozen of them, he guessed, and Ma would be mad at him when she found out. But she would be mad, anyway, so it didn’t matter much.