As the hostler got the paint mare to the rails and Longarm calmed her with a bandana blindfold and a horsehair hackamore or soft hitless bridle, he felt obliged to observe, “Sappa Creek’s a good ride from here, and I understand you call them Mennonites. I know that much because I’m headed for Sappa Crossing, Lord willing and the creeks don’t rise. I understand I got more than one to cross betwixt here and yonder.”
The hostler thought and decided, “Mostly bitty draws and, like Lem just said, it’s been dry all month. Only one you’ll likely find with enough flowing water to matter will be Beaver Creek, this side of the somewhat wetter Sappa. You’re right about wells. Most every natural homesteader out this way prays for rain and drills for water. Save for them peculiar Anabaptists south of Sappa Creek.”
As he and the hostler got a hired empty packsaddle on the paint Longarm resisted the impulse to ask what was so peculiar about the Mennonite nesters to the south. The loafer called Lem volunteered. “They do everything bass-ackwards. They wait till their kids are full growed and out of most dangerous stages before they baptize ‘em to insure their souls. And they plow and plant in the fall, when all the sensible folk are reaping. So damned if they don’t pray for snow instead of rain, just as that crazy red wheat is commencing to sprout!”
Longarm knew better. He still said quietly, “That’s how come they call it winter wheat. The Mennonites met up with it on the back steps of Russia where the growing season’s even shorter than out our way. It sprouts before Yuletide, like you said, but as soon as the wolf winds nip, winter wheat dies above ground, goes dormant underground, and the process repeats through all the frosts and thaws until the stuff really gets to growing in the first real thaws in April, when nobody but a fool would try to plow shin-deep prairie muck.”
The hostler cracked the gate open. As they led the two ponies out, a couple of old boys with nothing better to do dropped down off the rails to shoo the other livery stock back with their hats. Country gents weren’t really as mean as they talked when they didn’t know you.
Lem, who hadn’t pitched in to help, spat and said, “It ain’t so smart to bust this sod at any time of the year. Most of the time it’s dried to ‘dobe hard as chalk, and on the rare occasions it’s wet, it turns to gumbo, like you said. There’s barely enough time in a good year to grow a cash crop of barley for piss-poor cash. That’s why I grow cows, like most of the other real Americans in these parts!”
There came a rumble of agreement as Longarm settled up with the hostler, ticked his hat brim to all concerned, and led the two ponies away afoot. He wasn’t ready to ride just yet.
He passed the saloon just up the street, and tethered his livery stock to the hitching rail of a nearby general store. He had a few cans of beans and tomato preserves in one saddlebag. But seeing he had some riding ahead through nester country in tenser times than old Billy Vail had warned him about, he figured some extra private fodder for the ponies might save discussion on possibly disputed range.
As the fatherly old storekeeper and a colored kid filled his order for cracked corn and rolled oats, the kid getting to carry the sacks out and load them aboard the paint, Longarm stocked up on some extra tobacco, canned coffee, and rock candy. You couldn’t just hand out smokes to the menfolk as you rode through farming country.
He settled up with the storekeeper. But the older gent followed him out front, nodded with approval at the stock of Longarm’s saddle gun, and suggested, “Don’t take no guff off them Anabaptist bastards down Kansas way. They act big. But none of ‘em stand ready to fight a grown man or, hell, a tough Christian girl!”
Longarm tipped the kid helper a whole dime to show he wasn’t in a huff as he mounted up and rode out of town to the south. Nobody had told him things were that tense in these parts, and a High Dutch-talking killer made more sense when you considered nobody had much respect for the fighting ability of those High Dutch newcomers. The prophet, Menno, had preached against fighting and advised the Brethren to turn the other cheek. Longarm had heard much the same in his own Sunday School, in times that now seemed long ago and far more peaceful. But he’d noticed, out West, that that was a swell way to get slapped twice.
As he left the last outhouse in McCook behind, he saw newly sprouted corn and what had to be either rye or barley behind the three-strand fencing to either side of the dusty wagon trace. Corn called for a heap of optimism west of Longitude 100’ between the Arkansas and Republican, while spring wheat was just plain impossible. If that old Lem had been right about cows in these parts as well, those three strands weren’t enough. It took at least five strands of barb-wire, stapled to solid posts, to stop a determined cow.
He had no call to tell anybody any of these things, so he kept on riding. He’d been raised country enough to know most country folks got smart about the sort of country they were used to, making them scornful of book learning and resentful of strangers offering advice about their own damned business.
Left to their druthers and doing things their own ways, country folks tended to get along just fine on the folklore handed down and slowly modified when anything wasn’t exactly as the grandfolks had said it ought to be. Old country tales about Cock Robin showing up just before the spring thaw worked just as well if the robins of a new land were a different bird entirely, and it still rained, sooner or later, after you stomped on a spider.
It was throwing together all sorts of country folks from different countries, with different ways, that led to so much feuding and failures in the postwar West. Some, like Longarm, had soon learned the earth would not gape open and swallow them if they listened to odd-sounding advice from folks who’d been out West longer, or even paid attention to a Mexican or full-blown Indian. The old ways your grandfolks taught you could lead to heartbreak or worse in totally different country.
The first pioneers who’d jeered at Indian warnings about what seemed to be wild parsley, free for the taking near camp, had wound up deader than the ones who’d kept more open minds.
Texas stockmen had lost cows left and right to agues and weeds no Anglo had ever met up with before, until some few had been politer to those outlandish Mex vaqueros and learned to be Texas buckaroos almost overnight.
That Homestead Act of old Abe Lincoln had killed far more folks than all the hostile Indians combined, and busted far more folks than it killed. But Longarm had learned in his travels how tough it could be to convince farmers from the wet side of the Mississippi that a hundred sixty acres and pure sweat alone weren’t always going to be enough, that an old hand worried more about grasshoppers than Cheyenne raids and that your stove did better on dry cowshit than almost worthless cottonwood a couple of draws over.
He knew the resentment at the way this new country could treat a willing worker added fuel to the fire when some outlandish stranger sneered at you for doing things the wrong way. it was easier to sneer back or perhaps peg a shot at the bastard than it was to allow you’d been dumb to follow the ways of your elders that had always worked before.
As he lit a cheroot with a passing nod at a scarecrow pointing the way to the nearby state line, Longarm reflected on the many American-born homesteaders who had started switching from regular spring wheat to red Russian or other winter wheats of late. For the Mennonites had been growing wheat west of where wheat was supposed to grow for close to five summers by now. It was the stubborn old-timers who refused to consider changing who could be your most surly neighbors.
Longarm, who’d taken up reading as a secret vice in recent years, had read how country folks in olden times had charged neighbors more prosperous with witchcraft. A poor Ohio Valley sodbuster watching a funny-talking cuss reaping bumper crops of red wheat after he’d tried, and failed, more than once, could almost be forgiven for feeling moody and suspicious, if willful ignorance had been an excuse. It wasn’t, but it still had to hurt like fire to plant the same wheat your ever-so-great grandad had planted, once the prairie was dry enough for spring planting, only to see the dry winds of a high plains summer turn half of it to straw before the early fall frosts finished it off before it was ripe enough to reap.