“Hoarding, eh?” Senator Jellison said. “Hoarding what?”
“All kinds of stuff, Senator. Four hundred pounds of chicken feed. Twenty bushels of seed corn. Batteries. Two cases of rifle cartridges. Probably other stuff that I don’t know about.”
Jellison looked grim. “You do it?” he demanded.
Bonar didn’t answer.
“Did he?” Jellison asked Hardy.
“Yes, sir.”
“Any point in a trial?” Jellison asked. He looked directly at Bonar. “Well?”
“Hell, he’s got no call to come out and search my place! He had no warrant!”
Jellison laughed.
“What beats me is how the hell they found out.”
Al Hardy knew that. He had agents everywhere. Hardy spent a lot of time talking to people, and it wasn’t hard. You catch someone and don’t turn him in, send him out looking, and pretty soon you get more information.
“That all you’re worried about?” Jellison demanded. “How we found out?”
“It’s my feed,” Bonar said. “All that stuff is mine. We found it, my wife and I. Found it and carried it in, in my truck, and what the hell right do you have to it? My stuff on my land.”
“Got any chickens?” Jellison asked.
“Yeah.”
“How many?” When Bonar didn’t answer, Jellison looked to the others in the room. “Well?”
“Maybe a few, Senator,” one of those waiting said. She was a forty-year-old woman who looked sixty. “Four or five hens and a rooster.”
“You don’t need any four hundred pounds of feed,” Jellison said reasonably.
“It’s my feed,” Bonar insisted.
“And seed corn. Here we’ll have people starve so we can keep enough seed corn to get in a crop next year, and you’ve got twenty bushels hidden away. That’s murder, Bonar. Murder.”
“Hey—”
“You know the rules. You make a find, you report it. Hell, we won’t take it all. We don’t discourage enterprise. But you sure as hell report it so we can plan.”
“And you grab half. Or more.”
“Sure. Hell, there’s no point in talk,” Jellison said. “Anybody want to speak for him?” There was silence. “Al?”
Hardy shrugged. “He’s got a wife and two kids, ages eleven and thirteen.”
“That complicates things,” Jellison said’ “Anybody want to speak up for them?… No?” There was an edge to his voice now.
“Hey, you can’t… what the hell, Betty don’t figure in this!”
“She knew it was there,” Jellison said.
“Well, the kids—”
“Yeah. The kids.”
“Second offense, Senator,” Hardy said. “Gasoline last time.” “My gasoline on my land—”
“You talk a lot,” Jellison said. “Too damned much. Hoarding. Last time we let you off easy. Goddammit, there’s only one way to convince people I mean what I say! George, you got anything to say?”
“No,” Christopher said.
“The road,” Jellison said. “By noon today. I’ll leave it to Hardy to decide what you can take with you. Peter Bonar, you’re for the road.”
“Jesus, you got no right to throw me off my own land!” Bonar shouted. “You leave me alone, we’ll leave you alone! We don’t need anything from you—”
“The hell you say,” George Christopher shouted. “You already took our help! Food, greenhouses, we even gave you gasoline while you were holding out on us. The gasoline we gave you ran the truck that got that stuff for you!”
“I think Brother Varley will look after the kids,” one of the women said. “Mrs. Bonar too, if she can stay.”
“She’ll come with me!” Bonar shouted. “And the kids tool You got no right to take my kids away from me!”
Jellison sighed. Bonar was trying for sympathy, gambling that they wouldn’t send his wife and kids out on the road, and since they couldn’t take the kids away from Bonar… Could he? Jellison wondered. And leave a festering sore inside the Stronghold? The kids would hate everyone here. And besides, family responsibility was important. “As you will,” Jellison said. “Let them go with him, Al.”
“Jesus, have mercy,” Bonar yelled. “Please! For God’s sake—”
Jellison sounded very tired when he said, “See to it, Al. Please. And we’ll discuss who can be settled on that farm.”
“Yes, sir.” The boss hates this, Hardy thought. But what can he do? We can’t jail people. We can’t even feed what we have.
“You rotten bastard!” Peter Bonar shouted. “You fat son of a bitch, I’ll see you in hell!”
“Take him out,” Al Hardy ordered. Two of the armed ranch-hands pushed Bonar out. The farmer was still cursing when he left. Hardy thought he heard blows when they got to the hall. He wasn’t sure, but the curses stopped abruptly. “I’ll see to the sentence, sir,” Hardy said.
“Thank you. Next?”
“Mrs. Darden. Her son arrived. From Los Angeles. Wants to stay.”
Senator Jellison saw the tight line that formed where George Christopher’s mouth had been. The Senator sat straight in his high-backed chair and he looked alert. Inside he felt tired, and defeated, but he couldn’t give up. Not until next fall, he thought. Next fall I can rest. There’ll be a good harvest next fall. There has to be. One more year, it’s all I ask. Please, Lord.
At least this next one is simple. Old lady, no one to look after her, relative arrives. Her son is one of us, and George can’t say different. That’s in the rules.
I wonder if we can feed him through the winter?
The Senator looked at the old lady, and he knew that whatever happened to her son, she would not survive until spring, and Arthur Jellison hated her for what she would eat before she died.
Ninth Week: The Organization Man
One must point out, however, that many who now deplore the oppression, injustice, and intrinsic ugliness of life in a technically advanced and congested society will decide that things were better when they were worse; and they will discover that to do without the functions proper to the great systems — without telephone, electric light, car, letters, telegrams — is all very well for a week or so, but that it is not amusing as a way of life.
Harvey Randall had never worked so hard in his life. The field was filled with rocks, and they had to be moved. Some could be picked up and carried by one, or two, or a dozen men. Others had to be split apart with sledges. Then the pieces were carried away to be built into low stone walls.
The crisscross pattern of low walls in New England and Southern Europe had always seemed charming and handsome. Until now Harvey Randall hadn’t realized just how much human misery each of those walls represented. They weren’t built to be pretty, or to mark boundaries, or even to keep cattle and swine out of the fields. They were there because it was too much work to haul those stones completely out of the fields, and the fields had to be cleared.
Most of the pastureland would be plowed for crops. Any crops, anything they had to plant. Barley, onions, wild grains that grew in ditches along the sides of the roads, anything at all. Seeds were scarce — and worse, there was the decision to be made: plant for later, or eat it now?
“Like a goddam prison,” Mark grumbled.
Harvey swung the sledge. It rang against the steel wedge, and the rock split nicely. That felt good, and Harvey almost forgot the rumbling in his stomach. Heavy work, and not enough to eat; how long could they keep it up? The Senator’s people had worked out diet schedules, so many calories for so many hours of heavy work, and all the books said they had figured correctly, but Harvey’s stomach didn’t think so.