The finished bundles were stacked as high as the barn roof next to the thresher, which Darcy called the “groundhog”: a long and hideously noisy machine much less pleasant than the binders. The purpose of the thresher was to separate the wheat from the straw, and somewhere in its grinding mechanism of belts and pulleys this task was accomplished: Bone did not know how. The thing was, the groundhog had to be fed; the straw bales needed to be pitched into the thresher. This was a gargantuan task and could not be postponed, and this year there were not the usual hired men because the Darcys could not afford them. Bone and Deacon and Archie and the occasional neighbor did the pitching, feeding the maw of the thresher each day as it roared and coughed out blue clouds of noxious smoke.
Bone worked from breakfast until dusk, pausing only for a huge noon meal of fried chicken Mrs. Darcy would bring out wearily, as depleted from her labors as the men from theirs, and spread on a long pineboard trestle. Deacon and Archie did their share; but Bone, working at his own pace, levering the big pitchfork silently until his hands were raw and his outsized wrists were trembling with exhaustion, did what Paul Darcy said was the work of two men—if not more. Darcy was so grateful that he took Bone and Archie and Deacon into the farmhouse kitchen one evening and fed them at the family table; there was chocolate cake that night to follow the fried chicken.
Over coffee, Darcy asked each of them how they had come to be wandering the countryside.
Deacon spoke of the work he had done in the Chicago Stockyards, how he had been married once and had a child—“but that broke up even before the Crash”—and how riding the boxcars was not a new thing for him. He had hopped his first freight when he’d come back from the war, he said, and had ridden them periodically since. “Now, of course, everybody’s doing it.” He spoke cheerfully and at length, but Bone saw the way his eyes wandered about the Darcys’ farmstead kitchen, lingering thoughtfully on the wooden shelves, the black belly of the coal stove, the rifle suspended on ornate J-hooks against one wall.
Then it was Archie’s turn. Archie spoke haltingly of a childhood in Louisiana and his family’s unsuccessful migration to New York. Before the hard times he had worked as a delivery driver, cabbie, salesman, “anything that, you know, brings in a little money. Never been married or any of that. Only myself to look out for”
Then Darcy turned to Bone. Sweating under the concerted gaze of the farmer and his wife, Bone said haltingly that he kept to himself, had pretty much always kept to himself, had been riding the trains as long as he could remember. …
“But surely,” Mrs. Darcy said, “There was something before that? I mean, nobody’s born a tramp—are they?”
Paul Darcy quickly hushed his wife. “Meg, it’s none of our business. Bone helped save the harvest. That’s what matters.”
“But I was,” Bone protested. “I was born that way. I was.”
He thought about it that night, sleepless in the bunk bed that was too short to contain his outstretched legs and too narrow to support him unless he lay on his side. Where had he come from? Everything had an origin. He had learned that. Birds from eggs, leaves from trees, wheat from wheat, spiraling back to an unimaginable infinity. The only exception to this universal law, apparently, was Bone himself. Birds from eggs, he thought, leaves from trees, Bone from—what?
Drifting out of consciousness he dreamed of a place that was not like any place he had ever seen, bright colors and shapes that made only dreamsense, creatures of unbearable wholeness and purity adrift in a jeweled landscape. No such place existed, of course, but the dream of it made him inexplicably sad,- he wanted to weep, although he could not.
When he woke he felt soiled, ugly, inadequate. He thought, I am less than half of what I should be—and felt the Calling, that sweet high voice inside him, as achingly compulsive as the night cry of a train whistle, more insistent now but quieter, too, now easily buried beneath the quotidian sounds of the machinery, the farm animals, the hot far-traveling wind.
By the end of that week they had finished the last of the threshing; the grain was ready to be trucked to the elevator in town and offered up for what the farmer Darcy said were “foreclosure prices”— twenty-four cents a bushel. The workload had eased and Deacon and Archie spent more time together, playing cards after dark by lantern-light, the sound of Deacon’s voice as relentless and oddly comforting as the ticking of a clock. Deacon talked about the Darcys more often. And Archie, often, was sullen and silent.
“They’re childless,” Deacon said, “and with the harvest over there’s nobody within miles of here. The opportunity is perfect.”
“No,” Archie said. “What you have in mind, that’s courting the worst sort of danger.”
“In hard times,” Deacon said sagely, “taking risks is the only way to get ahead. You want to be a bindlestiff forever? Live out your life in some pasteboard Hoovertown? By God. How else do people get rich, if not by taking money from some other person? It’s cruel—of course it’s cruel—but it’s how the world operates, and you can’t argue with it, you might as well argue with rocks or water.”
“But if we take the money,” Archie began without real hope, and Deacon interrupted:
“They have land. They own this spread. We’re not hurting them as much by taking it as we are hurting ourselves by leaving it. Darcy could not have made his harvest without us—you heard him say so. We did the work and we deserve payment for it. In a way it is our money”
Bone listened with a pained incomprehension. He did not understand about money. The money came from the wheat, somehow, and the wheat was Darcy’s, wasn’t it? He guessed Deacon knew what he was talking about… but there was a bad feeling in the air, the steely odor of Archie’s fear and Deacon’s imperious needs.
“People have seen us,” Archie said. “They know what we look like. We’ll get caught.”
“Do they?” Deacon said. “Will we?”
“The sheriff who brought us over,” Archie said, “the men Darcy had in for the wheat harvest—”
“Look at yourself. Look at me! Think about it. We could be anybody. Any redball freight, there’s fifty guys who look just like us.”
“But Bone—”
“They see Bone. Exactly! Who was at the farm? Well, there was two guys—hoboes—and this geek. If they look for anybody, it won’t be for us.”
Bone understood that Deacon was plotting a theft, that the Darcys would be the victims of it. The idea disturbed him, but he turned on his side and closed his eyes. Whatever was imminent, it could not be helped. He had parceled out his loyalty; he could not retrieve it now.
“But the Darcys,” Archie said patiently, “they’ll know it wasn’t Bone who took the money.”
“That,” Deacon said softly, “is another problem.”
Archie took him aside the next evening at sunset. It had been a hot blue day, the wind stirring dust in the stubbled fields. The denuded earth was like scar tissue. The binders had done all their work, Bone knew; Darcy had cleaned them and oiled them and stored them under tarps, their sleek angles hidden for a season.
“You have to understand about Deacon,” Archie said. “The kind of guy he is.”
Bone liked Archie. He was fascinated by Archie’s wisp of beard and by the way he held Deacon’s mirror for him. Now, though, Archie was frowning, and Bone smelled the fear that had in recent days begun to cling to him. They leaned against a rail fence, Archie’s eyes furtive in his small face.