“Jig Morgan came in from his farm this morning with a load of the last of his storage potatoes and what’s left of his C.A. carrots,” LaPerle explained. “This is about all we’ve got. Get yourselves some boxes here and load up what you need for a few weeks. Whitey Westford, he’s been slaughtering his cows to cull his herd. He’s losing all his critters—can’t put them out on grass, of course, so he’s forced to cull them. He came down with a load of beef. No inspection, mind you, but to hell with it. He knows people are running out of food. Take a quarter-side home with you. It will last you a while.”
“Why, thank you, Elwin,” said Eda sincerely.
“What do you have to get for this, Elwin?” asked Harland.
“Never mind the money, now, Harland. When the ash started falling, we sold more food in a weekend than we do in two months. We don’t need the money. It’s useless right now anyway.”
Eda touched the old man on the shirtsleeve. “You’re too kind, Elwin.”
“Tell me, folks, where you staying?” asked the elderly gentleman.
“To home, of course,” said Harland, thinking the question odd.
“Lots of folks have set up in the school,” LaPerle instructed. “Families are running out of everything and they can’t get around. Having a real hard time of it, some of them. They need help. Lots of people sick, too. So the school’s been turned into a shelter.”
Harland pulled his tractor around the back of the store and loaded a hundred-weight of potatoes, a box of carrots and a quarter side of beef wrapped in sheet plastic into the trailer. After the last box was set down, Harland turned to address LaPerle, but the old man waved him off.
“Do me a favor, you two, will you?”
“What’s that, Elwin?”
“Stretch those victuals as far as you can. It may be a long time before help gets to Sweetly.”
Harland and Eda bid LaPerle farewell and motored away from the store and back onto Main Street. The Farmall rumbled past the deteriorating brewery and up to the office of the Sweetly Coop. Harland went in search of Jim Bottomly. He found the manager in a small back room that Bottomly used to keep equipment designed to test the moisture content of the grains and soybeans.
“That you, Jim?” Harland called out as he stepped to the half-open door to the small space. Bottomly spun around, recognized the farmer and waved to him to step into the room. The coop manager turned his attention back to a small microwave-size device, but managed a greeting. He banged the microwave with a fist. It would not come to life.
“Hello there, Harland. You made it to town, I see.”
“Somehow we did, Jim. How be ya?”
“Oh, fair.”
“Can you spare a few bushels of corn for me and Sugar, Jim?”
Bottomly turned to look over his shoulder at the farmer. It wasn’t the first time a member of a family had come through the door looking for some bulk whole grain to take home.
“You need some to hold you over, Harland?”
“I do. Can’t buy anything.”
“You’ve been over to LaPerle’s?”
“I just come from there.”
Bottomly put aside what he was doing, turned fully around to face the farmer. “Godawful, isn’t it?”
“I’ll say. You ever seen a store with nothing in it, Jim?”
“A grocery like LaPerle’s? No, sir.”
“I couldn’t believe my eyes,” Harland admitted. “You get used to something, you know, being there every day. LaPerle’s is LaPerle’s. It’s always the same. You never give it a thought. Go in today and it’s like another world.”
“I know what you’re saying, farmer.”
A manual timer sounded. Bottomly turned back around and busied himself for a few seconds. “Nothing but a whole lot of nothing,” he mumbled.
“What’d you say, Jim?”
“Oh, I was just getting a reading on the beans here. Moisture content, you know. Nothing’s working, though, not that any of this matters much anymore.” He paused for a second, pinching the bridge of his nose with his fingers. “Well, Harland, how much corn do you want?”
“Can you spare a hundred pounds?”
“A hundred? Why not take a couple hundred so you don’t have to come in any time soon? You and Eda could each eat a couple of pounds of the stuff a day if there’s no bread and cereal and such. Take a couple hundred.”
“All righty. What do you want for coin?”
Bottomly laughed. “I’ll bill you for it sometime, Harland. Do you have anything to put it in?”
“We could pipe it down into the trailer I hauled here with the old Farmall.”
Like all grain elevators, Sweetly coop was designed to load railroad hopper cars, not a farm utility trailer. But Jim Bottomly had a sixth sense when it came to operating the gravity feed offloading system. He calculated that he would trip the grain trap for just seconds and then shut it down again. That should free up a few bushels of grain, enough to get Harland what he needed. A second too long, though, and he’d swamp the trailer with a deluge of golden kernels.
At the top of his voice, Harland screamed for Bottomly to work his magic. In the cold air in the shadow of the grain elevators, a metallic thud sounded along with a noise like the rush of gravel from the back of a dump truck. The farmer looked to the spout just in time to see a snake of gold fall toward earth. A second later and the clank sounded again as thousands of corn kernels clattered into the trailer. In another moment, it was over. The little trailer squeaked and settled a bit under the weight of a tidy conical pile of grain. Harland gawked at the big feed-corn kernels heaped up in the trailer, spellbound by the color. The pile emitted the only rich tones whatsoever in the entire environment. The corn looked like the sun itself burning through a fog bank.
Back in the office of the coop, Harland thanked Bottomly for his generosity and his deft hand at loading the trailer.
“You got anything to grind that corn with?” questioned Bottomly.
“We’ve got an old hammermill in the barn, and we’ve got a few antique hand mills in the house. We should be able to make a decent corn meal.”
“Well, it will be corn bread and corn pone for a month of Sundays, Harland.”
Harland put a wry smile over his face. He had more urgent matters on his mind. All morning, seated on the cold metal seat of the Farmall, he had thought about Bottomly’s early phone call regarding the National Guard.
“Jim, you hear anything more about the Guard coming?”
“No, not since I called you this morning.”
“If they’re coming this way….”
“Hell, Harland, they’re coming, all right. They’re just north of Watertown now, on the Burlington Northern line. The ash dust bogs them down, you understand. Maybe they’re a couple of weeks away.”
“If they keep at it,” wondered Harland, “wouldn’t they go to Aberdeen and get the big town open?”
“Could, I suppose. But my guess is they’d want to meet Guard crews coming south from Fargo and Moorhead so they can get the rail open between the Dakotas.”
“That would put them on our doorstep.”
“Yes, it would, farmer. With the rail line through Sweetly, they’ll be coming through here regardless.”
“You’re certain they want the grain.”
“Positive. That’s what Ed Jorgensen down in Brookings said to me last night. The Guard told him in no uncertain terms to load the train they pushed and pulled into town.”
“And they loaded the train?”
“They did. Jorgensen had no choice. Orders are orders, you know.”