Course, we wasn’t up here three years before the drought come on and never let go and the alkali started leaching up, poisoning the soil yellow so nothing would grow on it. Then you throw the Depression on top of that.
That’s when we started finding out who was who. Some up and disappeared into the night, like them Okies down south jumping the Dust Bowl for California, giving up their land to get owned body and soul for a few bucks a day. Others kept their name on the deed and went out laboring, like Harlan.
Like I say, Harlan got on at the railroad. A good job, too, working the lines across the state two weeks at a stretch. A hundred men a day down at the rail yard clamoring for that job. We all thought Harlan got lucky till we heard he took his wife Griselda along with him. She was a looker, all right. Flouncing around in skirts and makeup like she lived downtown in Omaha or some such and not on parcel of hardscrabble Wyoming dirt a hundred miles from anywhere. You could see how a man could come by a job by her, if she got left alone with the hiring man a few minutes.
Harlan would be gone two, three weeks at a time. Not many women can cope with that kind of lonesomeness and Griselda wasn’t one of em. So Jack Ryne come along to comfort her. Riding a fine Mustang, best horse in Spirit Lake.
Cora now, you couldn’t keep her to the homeplace if you strapped a plow to her back. I know we was sometimes the talk of folks, the way Cora would come strolling across someone’s place chewing on a hickory stick in her boy’s overalls, hair ragged short because she clipped it herself with sheep shears, toting along some Indian artifact she found back in the bluffs. Howdy doo, she’d say, have herself a drink of water out of the well and stroll on. I’d hear about it a couple days later and I know there was folks saying I should of reined her in.
But I couldn’t do that. It was in Cora’s blood. I remember our first harvest here, when times was still good. Cora just turned up down in the fields, right next to the reaper, pretty as you please. She wasn’t but three years old. I held her on my lap as she grabbed at the chaff floating by, her thin hair smelling like wheat and everything in the world seeming open and possible. That was the fall of ’28. Good times ain’t been seen around here since.
Cora knows this country better than anyone since the Indians, I guess. The draws and the buttes beyond the farm ground, every plant and animal and bug and fish. How many times did she show me things I never knew existed: deer beds, trout eggs, seep draws, edible berries.
“What are these even called?” I asked her once.
“Hackberry.”
“How did you know you could eat em?”
“I tried one.”
“You could of got sick to death, girl. You can’t go around eating things you don’t know what they are.”
She shrugged. “I know.”
Being with Cora the world took on a wondering glow. I noticed cows had marvelously shaped noses, like she said, how ladybugs flitted like storybook fairies, ants dancing on the sand in the wind. You don’t go restraining a creature like that. No sir.
There wasn’t no harvest that October of ’36. Some of us had known since May, when didn’t nothing come sprouting out of the alkali-killed ground. Some of us by July, when it hadn’t rained in three months and Spirit Lake got too low to pull any more irrigation water out of. Some by September when three hailstorms in four days pounded the last living crops into dust and nothing. October should of been harvest. Instead them of us that hadn’t run off to California or taken to laboring gathered at the Gleaner’s Union warehouse that we built together, talking about what was and what might of been. Pass around corn whiskey, roll another smoke.
Cora had rode with me into the Union many and many a time during harvest back in the good days, sitting proud beside me on the seat. She’d grab a Coke out of the ice chest while we unloaded, prattling on to the bookkeeper Mrs. Rubottom about the critters and the clouds and the shape of the wind. Old Mrs. Rubottom nodding along as she kept track of the spuds and corn and wheat so we’d be sure to get our fair share at the end of harvest, each family proportioned to what it’d put in, sliding some of the profit over to families with newborns and sick ones, reckoning out payments on a tractor for everyone in the Union to share out.
Now Mrs. Rubottom was dead, there wasn’t no call for bookkeeping, and I didn’t tote Cora along to the Union. Bunch of idled dirt farmers quaffing whiskey in a empty warehouse cussing at the world ain’t no place for a little girl.
I had to walk in myself. The last horse on my team gave out in September after it drank alkali-poisoned water. I wasn’t the only one walking, I’ll tell you that. Them that still had horses were more lucky than good.
A few days after me and Cora had our little talk, I was back at the Gleaner’s Union. Whiskey jugs making the rounds, some of the boys talking about hiring out when Jerry Sherrill said to hell with that. He was headed into the mountains to trap bears. Said them pelts would bring fifty dollars or better down in Casper. But you couldn’t walk the furs out. You needed a animal.
“You really think there’s still bear back there?” I asked.
“I know there is,” said Sherrill. “And wolf. Mink, even. They’re begging for pelts down in Casper. You got them rich ladies out in New York paying top dollar, you know.”
I thought about my dead team of horses. “Be damned,” I said.
Ron Weizkowski come riding up. He’d brought along another jug. He joined in the jawing and allowed that if a man had four-legged transport, there was pelts for him up in the mountains.
“You’d need that good horse both ways, though,” he said.
“You got a good horse,” said Sherrill.
“She’s all right,” said Weizkowski, eyeing his mare. “But she don’t hold no candle to that Mustang of Ryne’s. I ought to know. I just seen it.”
“Did you now?” I said.
“Over on Pumpkin Ridge,” said Weizkowski. “Asked him if he didn’t maybe want to join us. He said he had business elsewhere.”
“I know where, the son of a bitch,” I said.
We called Ryne all the names, and Harlan all the names, and Griselda all the names. The jugs kept going around and we decided we best look into this ourselves. About half a dozen of us mounted up. We didn’t have no plans. We hadn’t got that far along. Them that didn’t come cheered us as we left, holding up jugs in salute. I rode double with Weizkowski.
Righteousness kept us warm the seven-mile ride to Harlan’s, wind blowing to beat a banshee. Harlan’s place was scrimmed over in a year’s worth of weeds. He hadn’t put no crop in. Too busy getting owned for wages. Harlan’s cur set to yapping and the front door swung open and there was Griselda Harlan standing in a square of light, hands on her hips. Looking disheveled in a pretty blue dress, the kind a woman wears when she plans on getting seen.
“Hello boys,” she says to me. “Where you headed?”
They was all looking at me. I could tell if I didn’t say what was needful, no one else would.
“Right here,” I said.
She wasn’t no kind of fighter, Griselda Harlan. She backed out of the entranceway leaving the door swung open and we piled in. Crowded in that front room where a couple gas lamps hissed. Good fire going in the stove. The table laid for two, glasses and china. Ryne was in there, all right. Eyes twitching like a trapped creature. He had on a clean shirt. The only man there whose shirt was.