In the Midwest where Amos had spent most of the last five years he could buy cheap plastic explosives with fuses and blasting caps at hardware stores. The farmers out there used them to clear their land of trees and stumps for pasture. He had carried a length of detonating cord across the country rolled in his bindle. Anyone who found it among his possessions would take it for a spool of rope. Amos had spent a longer time in Nebraska than he did in most places. He had a woman there. He’d seen her son first, bringing in water from a well. He remembered that day with fondness, moving between seas of pale witchgrass on an old wagon road underneath a wide blue sky. A hawk had swooped down to snatch up a blacksnake stretched basking across the road not a yard ahead of him. He had watched it rise and soar out of sight with the snake dangling from its clutches, the only witness. The only human being for miles, he’d assumed. A little farther on he’d come to a stretch where a path was mown through the grasses out to an oak tree. Beneath its shade, aged stones marked what Amos had supposed to be graves. He’d lowered himself down and sat looking ahead at the cloud shadows on the swells of the cedar hills at the end of the plains for most of an afternoon, until he saw the boy’s towhead moving above the high weeds and got up to follow. He had hung back unnoticed watching the boy lug the bucket home, sloshing water onto his legs, until he came at last into the yard of a run-down farmhouse. The woman had been on her knees bent over a washtub. She’d looked up startled when Amos asked for a drink. He’d thought then she must have been comely as a child. Her hair was something like her son’s but dulled by years of field work. She’d stared at Amos with fevered brown eyes as he drained the dipper. Then she’d asked if he wanted to come in where it was cooler. There was only her and the boy. Her husband had abandoned them and the land had gone to seed. She grew a garden and took in washing to feed her son. She made no demands of Amos. It was enough to have him sometimes in her bed. She was the one who told him about the man from the county Farmers’ Holiday Association. He had knocked on her door and invited her to a meeting.
Later that week Amos went down the old wagon road to a library basement in the nearest town where the meeting was held. He had read of the national association in the newspapers. They had formed to protest their land being auctioned off by the government. They had named themselves after the nationwide bank holiday, saying if bankers could take time off to reorder their business then farmers could do the same. Farm prices were so low they were dumping milk and burning corn for fuel. They thought if they reduced the supply by cutting off delivery of their goods the demand and the prices would rise. They had been blockading roads and highways to cut off milk deliveries, picketing cheese factories and creameries. Amos thought they were going about it wrong. Their protests had done nothing so far, their petitions had fallen on deaf ears. Thousands had marched on the capitol building in Lincoln demanding a moratorium on farm foreclosures. Chanting, “We’ll eat our wheat and ham and eggs, and let them eat their gold.” The legislature had halted foreclosure sales but still let district judges decide how long a foreclosure could be postponed. They could still order the proceedings to go forward anyway if they chose.
Over the year that Amos stayed with the woman and her son he made himself a presence among the farmers until they got used to him. He began speaking up, not during their meetings but before them, as they milled around with coffee gossiping and complaining. He told them it wasn’t reform they were after, not gradual change. It would take a revolt to see relief in their lifetimes and they were too hungry to wait. He whispered into their ears that they had to fight in defense of their homes and families. He made suggestions in such a subtle way that they thought his ideas were their own. In Bedford they dragged a judge out of his courtroom and put a noose around his neck, threatening to hang him if he didn’t stop approving farm foreclosures. In Brainard they burned down a milk bottling plant. In Falls City they rigged explosives on a switch track to go off when a boxcar hauling livestock crossed the state line. But the charge didn’t explode, as cheap dynamite bought over hardware store counters was harder to detonate. Then things took a turn when they tried to storm a butter creamery in Madison County. The gatekeeper called the sheriff and when he came the strikers pelted him and his deputies with rocks. A brawl broke out, blackjacks made from bars of soap in stockings knocking men down at Amos’s feet. He crossed the road and stood on a knoll in a wildflower meadow as a mob rocked the sheriff’s car until it turned over. One deputy hit a striker with his pistol butt. The sheriff sent off a tear gas canister. Most of the gas went into the crowd but some blew back on the deputies. In the confusion they started firing. Amos took up his bindle and headed east. The satisfaction he felt as he walked away had nothing to do with the farmers he’d spent the past year among. He had no real ideology. He had no set convictions. He had only his loathing for the men who ran everything. He left Nebraska without seeing the woman and her towheaded son again. But he thought about them often, and still carried in his inner coat pocket one of the boy’s toy soldiers.
Amos had brought that soldier out of the Midwest along with the length of detonating cord, reaching in sometimes to rub it with the ball of his thumb like a charm against the images that followed him. Children wearing masks to school in towns so covered with dust that he spat brown clots for days after passing through. Starving jackrabbits coming down from the hills in multitudes, fathers and their young sons herding the animals into pens and clubbing them to death. On a country road in Iowa he came upon a man changing a flat on his DeSoto. As he approached the jack slipped and the weight of the car came down on the man, whose face Amos never saw. Amos pried at the front fender but in the end he could only stand in the road and watch the man die, legs jerking as the DeSoto crushed the life out of him. When the man’s legs were still, Amos moved on. Not long after that he passed through Kansas as a dust storm was coming. It had seemed like the end of everything, a wall of swarming cloud stretched across the horizon, blotting out the sun. Amos stood still at first, rooted in place. Then the wind began to stir the roadside trees and an oppressive silence descended, every other living soul in hiding. When the first of the grit pelted his face he took off running until he came at last to an outhouse, the only shelter he could find, and shut himself in with the stink as the blackness drew down.
Now as he stood on the dam’s spillway before its chinked seam, there was not enough light to burn off the fog so it lingered. Amos thought it would be safe to head for Beulah’s cabin if he kept to the trees. He waded back across the river, took his bindle and went up the slope again, following the hillside deeper into the hardwoods until he came at last to a roadside bluff. He descended the stepped ledges then crossed the road and climbed another bank. The going was slick with waterfalls trickling down from the mountains. After gaining the top of the bank he disappeared into the hollow, copper needles muting his footfalls. It was in those woods away from the roar of the dam that he began to hear voices. At first he pushed on, thinking it might be the rush of the outflow down the spillway impressed on his eardrums. But when he grew certain that he wasn’t imagining things he stopped on the crest of a rise, the edge ragged with hanging roots, overlooking the leafy ground where it dropped off below. Amos listened. There were a number of them. They must have come from other counties, or some of the townspeople must have returned. It was plain to Amos that they were searching for someone. If they had been making less noise he would have assumed they were looking for him. It was hard to tell what direction the voices were coming from but the searchers sounded far enough away that he wouldn’t encounter them. He stood still awhile longer in the mist among the alder trunks, soaked sleek and tall like one of them. He tilted his ear until at last he made out the name they were calling. It was Gracie, the same name he had heard in the cornfield yesterday morning.