CHAPTER XIV

To Gulla Slogum the settling of the crash into genuine hard times was like new grass to a cow that had been tailed up through a long, bad winter. Two years she had tried to read something of the newspaper talk of the intrinsic soundness of the country’s financial structure, of the depression as a national psychosis, and what prominent industrialists had to say about the necessity of casting out fear and carrying on business as usual while with the other corner of their mouths they cut their help. She looked at the pictures of window jumpers sprawled on the pavement and police cracking the heads of food rioters, and still she left her corset in her dresser drawer.

But when she heard that the furniture man at Dumur who used to sell electric ice boxes on time demanded spot cash for his coffins, she pulled at the pale gray hairs on her lip. And when the banks in the state began to go under, the bottom to drop out of farm prices, she called for Libby to bring her kid curlers and her other shoes. She had seen the nineties and she knew that hard winters make fat coyotes. While prosperity might probably be just around the corner even now, no gray wolf waited for the stock to die before he filled his belly. She was going to Dumur.

With Libby’s help she squeezed her billowing flesh into her old corset and was ready to go. And at Dumur she flustered the harried bank officers into silly stammerings when she Came up the steps on Libby’s arm. Yes, yes, a fine, a very fine day, Mrs. Slogum, they told her, over and over, wondering what the old woman was up to now.

But for today it was only a look at their paper, with a clerk to help her. Not that Ruller girl, who was working herself gray over the books and probably did know everybody by his first name. Instead she would have the blond boy working on a high stool because he made her think of that pretty driver she used to have, Young Something, who had been too smart to go to the war.

All afternoon the boy took down the names, descriptions, amounts, and maturity dates of the land mortgages that particularly interested the woman of Slogum House. Then she was ready to go home. And tomorrow or maybe the next day she would go to Slogum City for a similar list from the bank there.

All the way home Libby was sick with pity, pity for those whose names were on the long list the mother waved to her at the bank, the soot-glassy little eyes almost lost in the gray sausage loops of her flesh. And pity for this old woman too, whose life had held so little that this was still worth the misery the long, corseted trip made for her body.

That night Gulla sat on the sagging edge of Libby’s bed in her huge gray gown and held the list from the bank before her, reading the names and their location off to Libby, mostly from memory, for her eyes were failing at last.

A few of the names were new and strange to the daughter, probably graying office workers and school-weary teachers who wanted to be gentlemen farmers and so put their savings into the high-priced land of the war period or of the brief boom of the late twenties. None of these on the list could be of the recent depression lot, driven to the land by the same starvation that had pushed the old-timers west, even Gulla and her Slogums, and the many thousands who could never make a living at the highly specialized and back-breaking business of farming. The new depression crop needed money as much as any earlier ones, but these had nothing to mortgage, no free land to plaster in a few months.

But there were many old-timers on Gulla’s list, and at each one of these she looked over to where Libby was brushing out the gray wings of her hair and making a leisurely braid of it.

“Erich Zug,” Gulla read from the rest, extra loud, “eight hundred dollars, behind in interest and taxes.”

Libby heard, and held her hand steady on the brush as she combed it clear of hair, feeling the mother’s eyes on her back, thinking that the sly old woman was making this up to torture her. But when the daughter finally had to look at the paper it was there right enough: “Erich Zug, half section, tilled, German Table, eight hundred dollars, 7%, due Feb. 1933, into & tax overdue.”

And when Gulla finally put the list away under her pillow and ordered Libby to tuck her in, she slept heavily, with mumblings and scraps of words between her blubbery snorings. All night the daughter lay awake with dark thoughts against the high mound of flesh that was her mother, such thoughts as had n’t come to her since Ward’s horse brought him to his father, broken by the Polish boots this woman set upon him.

 

And in the morning Gulla Slogum could n’t get up, could n’t speak. The day before had brought too much excitement, too much elation, and now the words that came from her were only formless throat noises and the angry gumming of a helpless tongue.

Libby called the others. Annette and Cellie gave one glance in at the door and fled, but Hab stayed to look upon his mother a long time, considering the loose mouth pulled down in one corner, set as though nailed, unmoving for all her efforts to make words, until her face purpled in anger that these sons and daughters would n’t understand her. A long time Hab leaned against the door jamb, running his fingers meditatively along the short little mustache that was enough to cover his new store teeth, and around the corners of his mouth, much as Butch used to.

So the old woman was down at last, like a range cow dying, rolling her eyes the same way, even making the same sad, lonely noises with her big mouth.

Hitching up his pants, Hab stomped away down the hall. Outside he pushed back his wide hat and looked all around the Slogum yard, from Oxbow Flat to the hogback. He’d burn the old place down, burn it to the ground, that damned windmill always pounding and squealing with the rest. Build up a fine layout, best in the country.

Now at last this eldest of Gulla’s sons saw it all in the palm of his muscular hand, the hand that could still spread a loop fast enough to forefoot a running yearling. He backed out his new car and started around the hogback toward the lower ranch to look it all over, look at all the Slogum holdings this day, almost a county, well stocked, range in fine shape, all his. Cash and the Slogum sisters were no more to him than they had been to Gulla. Libby—well, let her marry that damn Platt and get the hell off the place. The others—like the smoke of a poor man’s newspaper cigarette, a little stink and gone.

The wheels of the car threw sand from the curves that led into lower Spring Branch Canyon, but as he crossed the plank bridge Hab remembered René’s place along the road ahead of him, and the bay horsehide and the stag-handled knife that Butch used on an ambitious young lover from the Niobrara one moonlit night on a hogback.

Backing on the first flattish spot, Hab Slogum returned to Oxbow Flat.

 

Libby sent Dodie to Bartek’s to call the doctor and order a telephone put in at Slogum House immediately. They all got there about the same time, the telephone crew and the doctor. By then Gulla already seemed a little better, now that she had calmed. The doctor warned her further. She must be very quiet and careful, for where there was one stroke there might be more any time. Because the gold band on her finger was sunken deep into her flesh, stopping the circulation, he cut it off—Gulla saw even that quietly, the last of the ring she paid for with a gold piece from the comer of her handkerchief so long ago.

But Gulla would n’t die, not with money so scarce and that list of mortgages falling due. She had waited a long time for some of those men, almost forty years for Zug, that dirty preaching foreigner who helped get her county officials out of the courthouse. A long time too for Dr. Hamlin, ever since he took her to Slogum House and dumped her the time Ward got mixed up with the Polanders. But she had waited longer, much longer, for Leo Platt, whose name, with the slyness of old age, she had the clerk at Dumur leave off the list entirely. He could come and take the Slogum sons away under the nose of their mother, but he never had git-up enough to take the daughter he wanted. And when he mortgaged his place to the Farmers’ National to save one of his slack-pants old settlers he could n’t keep President Cudder from using the paper to get Slogum money to hold the doors of his bank open a little longer. Gulla had beat Cudder once, when he was county attorney, but this time he drove a hard bargain. It cost her money to get that Platt mortgage into her fingers, but it would be worth it all to see Libby’s face the day her no-’count locator and his old compass were dumped out into the road.

Oh, yes, she’d pay the girl back for all her disrespect, crossing her, encouraging that young squirt of a Ward to run away, even slapping the face of her own blood mother. But Gulla had n’t forgotten how Libby used to play with the poison fly paper, liked to mix up rat poison for the mice in Slogum House after the old black tomcat disappeared. No, Gulla decided, she better not let her know she had the mortgage on Leo Platt’s place. But she’d soon be on her feet again.

So the old woman lay still in the daughter’s bed, doing just as the doctor ordered. When Hab saw how much better she was looking he stirred around for something to tell her, something to work her up. Finally the renter on the Miller place, hard up and drinking, beat his wife into the hospital and skipped the country after he fired the corncribs, Gulla’s cribs.

But in spite of his best telling the mother barely moved her good hand on the quilt at the loss of two thousand bushels of corn. Libby saw this thing, too, and the new gentleness of the woman, and if she had n’t known about the crumpled list of names under the pillow she might have seen in this what the Grossmutter had called a timely reformation before the end.

Only in one thing was the woman on the bed the Gulla of forty years ago. Once more she must have the cards run every night, cutting them in three stacks away from herself for Libby to layout in a circle on the spread. And always there was peace ahead, peace and quiet and tranquillity, but before that time lay the ace of spades, the death card, black and unfailing.

Undisturbed, apparently certain the ace was not for her, Gulla always settled back and thanked Libby. Every day her words were more distinct, her tongue more facile. Before long she was getting around the house with a stout cane for the support of her body, cut down considerably through the doctor’s diet, still a staunch old woman in a loose bag of skin.

She picked up particularly after Libby found the shrunken little Dodie on the ground in the dusky back shed. His old mare stood over him as though guarding his sleep, and his face was calm and remote in its final release from the long burden of deformity and an awkward, stuttering tongue.

Two days later Dodie was buried. Ruedy and his friends took the little hunchback to the junction of Willow Creek and the Niobrara, to the little cemetery that was neglected all the good years for those of the towns, but filling fast again now. They put Dodie on the far side, next to the spot where the pine box of Tex Bullard was once buried and where now a Negro lay in his place.

 

Ward had long lived in an increasing asceticism of pain, becoming leaner, more bent, his cheeks sunken, his skin taking on a peculiar gray chalkiness that repelled the color of both sun and wind beyond a tingle of yellowishness—along the cheekbones. His hair stopped growing early, with something of the silky mousiness of an old man’s, and, contrasted to the indigo of his shirt collar, his pale blue eyes were opaque as milk glass.

Here and there a renter’s wife hurried to throw out the dish water, or to make other business for herself outside while Ward Slogum talked to her man at the tank or the shed. Perhaps she stood to look after him as he climbed into the old car and drove away. He sure did n’t look good. Maybe she ought to fix him a drink of wormwood tea next time he came, or get him to take a little dried chicken en trails, powdered, for the misery in his middle that seemed to be pulling him into a knot. And sometimes a mother with eyes upon the Slogum possessions told him he should be getting married.

In October, when most of his work was done for the season, he made a special trip over to Spring Branch, stopping in the wide gravel driveway between the cottonwoods. Under the bright leaves still falling Ruedy was fussing around a new brown car, advance 1932 model, small but hell-for-stout, he said proudly, letting his old tongue go in his excitement. He was learning to drive—he, a man of seventy-seven. But then the Grossmutter could have done it at almost a hundred.

The son looked at him. Seventy-seven, yes, he was that, and worn smooth as an old dime in a back pants’ pocket, but still a mighty good piece. “You’ve got a fine car—” he said. “And after all the years you plodded over that hogback at least twice a day, and working ten, twelve hours—you had it coming.”

Ruedy gave the shining hood another wipe with the rag in his hand, pleased. “You talk to me like you do your renters, Ward, like an encouraging father—”

The son inspected the upholstery a little too carefully. “Yeh, maybe I do— You know, I feel sorry for the poor devils, trying to make a living these hard times. Some just kids, with a family and the drouth and all. Corn won’t be worth more than ten cents a bushel and cash rent to pay regardless.”

His cheeks flushed to an easy redness and his voice came up. “By God, you got no right to make a man skin himself and his team all summer for ten cents a bushel!”

Ruedy looked up at this son in new surprise. For a moment he was once more the boy of years ago, the boy whose dog had been turpentined, the boy who rode away from Slogum House. The only one of the sons with the guts to do it And yet it all came to nothing in the end. Everything came to nothing.

He motioned Ward down to the running board, offered him his sack of mild, sweet tobacco, but the son shook his head. “I’m not quite up to it, Dad,” he said, and stopped at the taste of the last word, considering it.

Ruedy left off tamping his pipe, his finger in the air. “I don’t believe you ever called me that before—” he said, his voice strange and a little foolish to his own ears.

The son changed the lay of his arm across his tender bowels. “No, I guess maybe not—” Then, driven to unusual confidences now, he started again. “I always thought of you as Dad—long before I got hurt—way back when I was a kid and saw you standing on top of the hogback looking at the sky and wishing there was n’t no Slogum House.”

Ruedy could not trust his voice to a reply. At last Ward broke the silence. “I came to ask you to go up to the hospital at Dumur with me to-morrow. I got an idea it’s something pretty bad—”

 

They drove the new car through the morning mist that clung white to the bluffs, the tires leaving dark lines in the frost that lay shining all around them as the sun crept up over the hills. At the hospital Ward went in alone and Ruedy hunched down in the car to wait He had brought a new book. The Coming Struggle for Power, that Old Moll could n’t read because she was having a spell with her eyes.

Slowly Ruedy began a page, moving precisely down it, and then down the other side, saying each word to himself as though reading a strange, a foreign language. Then suddenly he let the heavy book slip between his knees, and, gripping his knotted hands, sat staring straight ahead, awaiting his son’s return.

When Ward came back, looking much as before, they went into a lunchroom for a cup of coffee. With the hot liquid before them the son began to talk. It was as he had expected. A growth, probably a very old one, from the injury. Maybe more than one and very likely malignant.

Ruedy nodded, almost as of a stranger. Should they let the doctors operate? It was probably a short time either way, they said, and the operation might…

“Still, they’d know then—”

Once more Ruedy nodded, dispassionately enough. By the grip of his hand on the thick restaurant cup he held his face calm, but his forehead was shining with fine drops.

The son smiled a little into the pale old eyes across the table. “It’s not so bad after all, Dad. At least I’ll get away from Slogum House.” Then, as though ashamed of his disloyalty, he added, “Only be making extra work for Libby, cooking, and extra work for Annette, praying—”

The father tried to nod impersonally. But he could n’t forget the night the boy came to him, slumped over his saddle, bloody and cut and broken by the clubs and the cowhide boots of the angry Poles. Now he bad to see it end in this. With both hands he lifted his cup and crashed it down into the saucer, shattering the two into flying pieces, coffee splattering over them both. Then he just sat, looking stupidly at what his hands had done.

Sheepishly he helped the waitress gather the fragments into a tray, sop up the table. When he had paid the damages, trying to make a little joke of it for this last time together, they went out into the gray street. Once his father stopped. “There are the Mayos,” he said. But Ward shook his head. Why should he go away into a strange country now? So they went on to the hospital and Ruedy stood, his hat in his hand, to watch his son follow the nurse down the corridor alone.

 

With Ward in the hospital and Gulla forgetting her stroke well enough to eat much as always, she changed her whole treatment of her renters. Hab, who had been doing the collecting that the softer-hearted Ward found beyond him, now took on the overseeing of the tenants too, and rode them with the spur of his disappointment at Gulla’s recovery. The renters bore it, sullen but waiting, because they heard that Ward was out of the hospital and home.

He was out, over in Spring Branch Canyon with Ruedy, pale and bloodless, with his father taking him up to Dumur regularly for treatments. It was only stealing time, Ward admitted as he sat before the open fire, warming his hands that were always cold. Only stealing time now. The doctors did n’t hold out any hope, although they had cut out what they found. But there’d be more, in the heart, probably, or the liver or the lungs, lodged there like cottonwood seed on sandbars along the river current, to sprout, to grow.

And when it got around how it was with Ward, the renters began to get together here and there, out at the hog pens or at the manure spreaders or the walking ploughs, used again now that the tractors were gone and the extra horses needed to pull the rusting gangs. Chewing their tobacco tasteless, they talked. Ward Slogum was never coming back and that Hab sure was a son-of-a-bitch. Driving up in his big car, in his fancy boots and orange silk muffler a blowing out behind him like a cowboy at a rodeo and ordering a man, “Do this, by God,” and, “Do that,” or get the hell off the land Sees a man got a hog a fattening for his winter’s meat and he makes him dress it and haul it to Slogum House. Corn price gone to hell, but a man still pays him like in twenty-nine. If he don’t like it, he can get the hell out some more, knowing there ain’t a cent to settle with.

Yell, and if the rains was to come, the bam leaking like a sieve, and the horses got the wheezers from moldy hay, it’d be “Why don’t you put on a new roof?”—On his damned old bam that’d have to be propped up with poles before spring. Suppose that if the house was to burn down a man ’d have to build him a new one, the black ass!

By golly, yes, and maybe there’d be more burnings like up to the Miller place, a few old shacks fired to the ground, if a man could get out of them.

Hell, but they’d never get away. With no money to plunk down in advance on a new lease nowheres else, and that old heifer with her fingers in all the banks, on all the money, she had the squeezers on every pair of balls in the country—

Oh, that Hab Slogum was a bastard, all right. And now it was getting so a sproutin’ girl was just that much bitch fire for the old dog—

In Dumur County as in the rest of the hard-land region of the upper Niobrara, most of the land mortgages of the eighties and nineties had been by Eastern money. The companies had gone broke and with repopulation came more cautious mortgaging, often through local investors, at a more reasonable valuation and interest. Mortgages on good land owned by hustlers were usually renewed indefinitely, the investor avoiding the bother and loss of replacing idle money as long as he could. Foreclosure, except when spite work, became only the last expedient. It depressed the neighborhood, drove land prices down, scared out prospective borrowers, and always caused resentment against banks and bankers. Foolish as a calf’s biting the strange teat he was sucking.

In addition the foreclosure took the farmer’s risk and expense, and with crop conditions and produce prices as uncertain as they had been for the last forty years the old-timer with money considered a good mortgage at 9 or even 7 per cent much better than owning a place.

But Gulla had always taken over all the good land she could get so long as it was for next to nothing, and she saw no reason to alter the practice now, even though a relative of the cattleman-hated T. R. might be elected President on a wet ticket. Every time she thought about it Gulla had Annette in to read a temperance passage from her little Bible.

But the drunken nation she predicted if F. D. Roosevelt should be elected was after all far from the worn list of mortgages under her pillow. Some day prosperity would be coming back. She better be shaking her shoes.

So when Ward went back to the hospital she sent Hab to Dumur to talk general foreclosure to Luke Lickens, the successor to Beasley, the only lawyer in Dumur or Slogum County who would touch the business Gulla brought. Lickens was glad to get a little something again. Litigation had reverted to the primitive during the depression and two black eyes may settle a dispute, but they patched no holes in a shyster’s pants.

Lickens pulled at his dewlap instead of picking his nose as Beasley used to. After a suitable amount of consideration the lawyer said he’d handle the foreclosures. And, of course, as Mrs. Slogum suggested, there was no use taking the land in at full mortgage value. Let it come up at sheriff sale. With no loose money in the country it was a cinch. Buy it in for almost nothing and get a deficiency judgment for the rest. Most of the farmers would stay on to work the land. No weaning these old sod-busters away from the places they broke out, only now somebody else ’d be telling them what to do, eh, Mr. Slogum? And collecting cash rent come wind or drouth or hail. Cash rent on the dot and keeping an eye on the judgment, too.

 

The land-office reports of several states still listed isolated bits of waste land free for the filing, and now soft-handed people were coming in to settle on these tracts, land so poor that it was worth no man’s dollar and a quarter an acre in the easiest money days. But the dispossessed were taking it up without horse or cow or pig. Sometimes they-had to borrow a spade to dig into the earth for shelter, grateful for the roofs of willow and slough bay old-timers helped them make. Some of them gathered up hay and thistles and tamped the stuff between willows or old chicken wire for a home. Here and there someone like Ruedy or Leo Platt broke out a little sod for them and hauled it for a house.

“My God, you have no business trying to make a living for yourself on that sand patch,” Platt told an energetic young couple who had walked all the way from Ohio, and carried enough sod, turned up by spade, for a shack before he found them.

The new settler looked at the swollen and blistered hands of his girl-wife. “What do you want a man to do—stand in line and beg for a hunk of moldy bread—?”

The old locator shook his graying head and went away. Wheat rotting in the bins, hogs could hardly be given away, and strong young workers like these two with nothing to eat. Once more he sat at his table the night long, staring straight ahead, and in the morning he went to Dumur to file for the legislature again. It would cost him much of the money he was saving for the mortgage on his place. If he was defeated everything would go. But he would have tried for Congress, where the real battle must come, had he thought well enough of himself.

 

Twice during that desolate winter Ruedy had gone to Gulla to ask that she be more patient; once for the widow of Tad Green and the little place she inherited, mortgaged for the money that put the sheriff through the Keeley cure. And the other time for Louie Barlow, son of the Widow Barlow that Jackson had protected with a mortgage in his tin box. Louie, not yet twenty-five, was keeping his wife and his bedfast mother on a place she bought on time in 1927, when produce was going up a little. They had worked hard and put all their painful savings since Gulla’s foreclosure into the new place. Now it was all to go for a second time, and young Louie was talking wild about getting even, only making things harder for his mother.

To Ruedy’s plea for time, Gulla’s clumsy tongue made no answer at all, and so he went back to Spring Branch and had a little two-room shack built down the canyon half a mile, with a hen coop, a cow, and a pig, and moved in Mrs. Green and her nephew, Milt. He was nineteen, with two years of university, but his part-time job went to a man with a family. And when the Barlows were sold out and the widow buried by the county, Ruedy added a little lean-to for Louie and his wife until they could get work or a better place. In the meantime they could grow good gardens with his irrigation system, maybe trade some for a little sugar and coffee in these days when there was no money for anything. And evenings there was always a little music up in Ruedy’s living room, music and an open fire and good talk.

Around Slogum House Gulla grumbled that Tad Green’s widow living in Ruedy’s Spring Branch Canyon did n’t look right, and him with one daughter giving piano lessons in Dumur and another in church work, leading in the prayers and even preaching in the schoolhouses when the minister did n’t get there. Was n’t throwing that old mule Moll in her face enough?

But she did n’t say anything to Ruedy because he never came to Slogum House any more. Anyway, he was busy, putting up several little sod houses, with the help of Louie and Milt. A scheme to get work for nothing, he heard some say as he was loading at Dumur. But Ruedy just brushed his thin hair under his hat and did n’t let on as he piled window casings into the back of his car. He knew of Gulla’s mortgage list, and the one she got from her bank at Slogum. There would be more old-timers on the road soon.

Hab sneered at Ruedy’s paupers until he saw Meda Barlow at Cedar Crossing at the nest of mailboxes that took the place of the old Bartek post office. He watched her strong, free walk in a pair of Louie’s overalls, and the sway of her supple waist as she swung herself up on Ruedy’s old saddle horse and rode away up Spring Branch. He thought of her for several days, watching for her at the boxes, and finally made an errand to Spring Branch, the first since the day he saw René with Butch’s old stag-handled knife.

Stopping his car in the road that passed the doorway of the Greens’, he adjusted the brim of his hat, gray as his thick hair, and watched Meda hang out the wash. He was one of the Slogums, the richest family in two counties, and lean and romantic in the dark stories told and retold now that so many were losing their homes again. And so when Meda saw his dark eyes upon her she let a wet sheet slip through her hands into the dirt and was unreasonably angry when the man drove away laughing at her clumsiness—not straight on over the road that passed René’s house, but back to Oxbow Flat.

After that Hab often leaned over the wheel of his long, open car in the Green yard, flustering the young Meda with the persistent burning of his black eyes under the brim of his cowman’s Stetson, flattering her with gay silk neckerchief blowing at his throat and the recklessness of a rifle always beside him. The rifle he never explained, although he was the only one in all the country that ever carried a gun for anything more than a pheasant or a rabbit since the antelopes were gone and Roosevelt had scattered the snake killers. The muffler, as he called it, he pretended to wear because his neck was tender to sunlight, but Gulla knew it was because he liked the bright orange with his dark skin and graying hair and mustache, clipped now that his beaver teeth were gone. The mother looked upon this first-born son with pride. He was the handsome one of all the Slogums now, forgetting that he was no Slogum at all, forgetting that she never could tell which one of that rutting season he belonged to.

And as Hab came more frequently to Spring Branch Canyon the Widow Green tried to say some of the things she knew of the Slogums to Meda, but the girl only shook her short, curly hair in defiance and ran out all the more eagerly to met him, to lean against his car as they talked, until the day came when he no longer smiled that she pulled her pinkening hand away as his brown one slid over it. That day he turned and drove up over the bluff without looking back.

All the next day Meda watched, and the next too, and when he did n’t come she made an errand to Oxbow Flat. Hab saw her from his window, watched her come, riding fast, pounding Ruedy’s old horse, and leave very slowly, looking back most of the way around the hogback.

The next time he stopped he asked for Louie. A week later the young Barlows were working at Slogum House, and the Greens, and Ruedy too, knowing the spite in Louie against the Slogums, wondered what could come of this. But the Barlows never sat before the fire in Spring Branch Canyon any more.