Etching the anemic sky above the schoolhouse, the soaring concrete columns of the Sweetly Coop grain elevator silos filled the farmer’s sightline. The ruined towers disgorged fat streamers of white smoke boiling up from smoldering grain fires hidden deep within the recesses of the cement cylinders.
The image of the burning silos triggered a wave of nausea in the farmer, every pore on his face and hands opening and disgorging a soaking sweat, as if the sight of the violated towers were poison and the body mustered last-ditch defenses to flush itself free of the toxin. The smoking hulks were eerily familiar, akin to media footage of the World Trade Center towers burning in Lower Manhattan more than two dozen Septembers in the past.
To blot out the smoke banners above the lake, the farmer lowered his chin to his chest and clasped a hand over his eyes. Abel noticed and inched over the narrow deck to have a word with him.
“What is it, Harland?”
“Nothing,” the farmer croaked.
“Not a pleasant a sight, those towers.”
“No, they ain’t.” Harland extricated his face from his hand to reveal clenched teeth. “Those silos are my whole existence out there, going up in smoke. They’ve been a part of my days ever since I can remember. From the farm, you can see them in the distance, always there, all the time. They’ve never looked anything like that.”
Harland dug his fingernails into his scalp as if to pull the hair out by the roots. “I never once spent a summer when I wasn’t in the field, driving a tractor under those things. My earliest recollection—maybe three or four years old—is sitting on my father’s lap on his John Deere, out in full sun, wind in the face, side-dressing corn. Not talking much, no. Just sitting with my dad’s long arms around me and not wanting to be anywhere else.”
“That’s a fine memory.”
“It is. But it’s gone, mister. There’s your proof, right there, in those silos. There’ll be no more plowing Plains earth.”
The farmer craned his head about and glanced at the bluff country receding far behind the steamboat. Abel followed his eyes.
“You come along, then, and you got a whole other life up there on the bluffs.” Harland stretched an arm and pointed a finger to the north. “You’re doing some interesting things there, really. I never figured on it. But that’s not my world. Corn is my world. To raise corn is to be who I am.” Harland tapped his chest with his fingers. “We’re one and the same, you know. You can’t separate this man from the cob. Impossible! My skin is cornhusk; feels just like it. My hair is white as corn silk. You take a dry corn kernel, and, why, it’s as hard as teeth.”
Abel listened intently to Harland’s spin, nodding to encourage the man to bring his pain up from the gut and get rid of it.
“All corn ever needs is sunshine, see, a good soaking every week or two, good river bottom soil, summer heat, and it grows and grows. When there’s good growing, you just can’t believe your eyes what you’ve done. For a mile this way and that way it’s just green, green, green. There’s so much food packed in that section that you can feed a thousand people or a hundred head of cattle for a year.
“Sometimes it’s bad. Hail comes down big as a fist; a twister cuts out the south corner acreage; it don’t rain for so long the corn stalks just shrivel to tinder sticks, they’re so dry. Life’s that way, you know, good years, bad years. No different. But it’s done. Good or bad, it’s finished.”
The farmer spit in the lake and watched the wet foam recede behind the boat.
“I never seen one minute when I didn’t know what to do with myself. Walk out the front door and I knew just where to plant my feet. If it was eleven in the morning, I knew what I’d be doing; if it was late in the afternoon, same thing. Everything fit. Everything worked. Like the heart, you know. The heart knows its job, knows it so well it never pauses to consider what it’ll be doing. Same with me.”
Harland heaved and erupted in a coughing spasm, lungs sloughing fluids to their lower chambers. When the coughing seizure abated, the farmer threw his head back and gulped air. “This Yellowstone thing has me beat. It’s going to bury me.”
Abel broke his silence. “It starts getting better when this boat gets to town.”
Harland shrugged and lowered his chin to his chest once again. “I don’t see it. Can’t plow up a God-forsaken volcano.”
Throttled down, the little lake steamer slowed and drifted the final 200 feet to the lakeshore below the silo towers and the old Sweet Spring Brewery. Max pulled a rope attached to a hollow tube affixed to the funnel. Steam screamed through a whistle, reminiscent of a cannonball steam locomotive on a long lost rail mainline. Max let loose three loud toots, each echoing down the length of the lake and dying away without fanfare.
The shallow keel steamer edged the shore and the raft grounded itself in the shallows. Harland eased himself over the side of the craft, splashed down up to his boot tops and moved onshore. Circling his hands about his mouth he hollered for the coop manager, Jim Bottomly, hoping the man might be in the vicinity. The farmer received an echo in response, his voice booming off concrete and brick.
The farmer hurried away toward the Sweetly Primary School, Abel, Winnie, Max and the others watching him go. There were crates to unload and haul into the brewery. Perhaps Harland could locate a few local citizens and persuade them to help with the task of moving a short ton of produce, greenhouse fruits and cheese and distributing it to the many in need.
Chapter One Hundred-Fourteen
Sweetly’s schoolhouse lay broken, comatose in the stone dust landscape, upstaged by the animated smoke streamers rolling off the tops of the grain elevator silos. Nothing moved within. Harland yanked the entrance door wide, lunged into the hall and pulled up, the acrid smell of ammonia from decomposing urine so sharp the stench stung the eyes and sinuses.
Classroom to classroom the farmer lurched, kicking clothing, soiled bedding and children’s toys aside. Each space yawned lifeless and cold, the corn stoves set up to heat several rooms dead for lack of generator electricity to run their augers and fans. Every call for attention went unheeded.
A small flag of the United States hung from its staff on a wall-mount holder in the last classroom Harland entered, the red stripes the only remaining trace of vibrant color in the chamber. The farmer reached for it, pulled down the banner and, with care, ran his rough hands gently over the fabric, the texture pleasing to the touch. He buried his face in the stars and stripes.
“Where is everyone?” he mumbled into the nation’s symbol.
Eastbound on Main Street, Harland hustled across the Burlington Northern tracks, drifted over again with blowing ash, and trudged into the heart of Sweetly’s few downtown blocks. The door to Ester’s Café lay back against an exterior wall, giving free passage to the prairie wind so it might have its way with Sweetly’s lone eatery. Harland inched through the opening cautiously, as if not wishing to be seen. Volcanic powder infested the one business in town that Harland had frequented most winter days for thirty years to sip coffee and to catch up on local gossip and farm news. Instead of taking a seat at the counter, he stepped around behind it. Ten thousand cups of coffee over all those years and not once did he ever venture around to the business side of the counter to see what Karen, the waitress who poured her weak coffee from an endless pot, worked with every day of her working life. He could see her handiwork now, stout ceramic coffee mugs stacked and aligned, heaps of cheap place-setting silverware, well-thumbed menus and grease-stained breakfast cards, dish trays, and the rest. She had kept her workspace orderly. It was neat now, except for the ash dust overlay.