Centennial (145 page)

Mr. Bellamy arranged for a local farmer to truck Rodeo down to Denver, and Timmy said that he would ride inside with the steer, to be sure that Rodeo did not bump against the sides, and he ran home to fetch blankets to place against the wood. When he got there he found his mother in the kitchen, rummaging among the cutlery, and be barely had time to shout, “I feel it, Mom. I’m going to win.” She looked at him in a blank way he had never seen before and said in a hollow voice, “We are past the stage of winning.” He wanted to talk with her, but the truck was waiting.

It was an exciting ride in to Denver on that cold January day. Rodeo shifted his feet to maintain balance while Timmy watched the blankets to be sure his steer did not bruise himself. The driver stopped at a diner in Brighton and asked Timmy if he’d like a Coke. When they went inside, the man announced to other stockmen who had gathered there, “I’m hauling the champion into Denver, that’s what I’m doing.”

One of the men said, “Aren’t you the kid that got the special calf last year?” and for the first time in his life Timmy had that rare joy of being remembered for something he had done, and he nodded quietly.

“I’d like to see what you’ve done with that steer,” the man said, and Timmy led them all to the rear of the truck, where they inspected Rodeo, and several said, “You know, you just might have the champion there,” and Timmy climbed back in beside his Hereford.

Judging the steers would take place at ten the next morning, and at five Timmy was in the stall with Rodeo. He gave the big steer a bath, then shampooed his coat and washed away the suds. He dried him with a pair of towels, then combed and curried for an hour. He had wax for the hoofs and a small pair of scissors to cut away stray hairs. When the bell rang at five to ten, Rodeo was in the handsomest condition possible, and when Timmy led him into the ring, the beautiful Hereford moved with weighty grace, plumping his powerful feet in stately rhythm. Several stockmen’s wives, who knew a good steer when they saw one, applauded.

The judging required almost half an hour, for other boys had done an equally good job with their calves, and some of their steers were heavier than Timmy’s but none were of such perfect conformation, and in the end the judges agreed unanimously that Rodeo was champion. If Timmy had not cried in defeat last year, he certainly was not going to do so in victory. Clenching his teeth, he stood quietly, holding the halter in his left hand, but when the official photographs were taken and the noise was over, he could no longer contain himself, and with a cry of joy he threw his arms about Rodeo’s placid neck. It was this photograph, taken accidentally by a lingering newsman, that would soon flash around the world, a compelling shot of triumph and heartbreak.

Timmy wished that his parents had a phone, because he wanted to inform them immediately of his victory. Even more, he longed to tell his mother that he would be bringing her at least one hundred dollars—that is, if the auction went as expected.

It did. When Timmy led Rodeo into the auction ring the man in charge took the loudspeaker and said, “Gentlemen, most of you were here last year when this boy Timmy Grebe put up a great fight in the Catch It, Keep It contest. He failed, but he was awarded a calf anyway, and that judgment has been justified, for here he comes with the best steer in his class.” Then he dropped his voice and added, “I don’t need to tell you that he is the brother of Ethan Grebe, our heroic bus driver.”

The audience cheered and Mr. Bellamy, who had come down for the sale, smiled proudly. The bidding was lively, a contest between the Albany Hotel, the cattlemen’s headquarters, and the Brown Palace, the place where rich people went for their steaks. In the end it was the Brown Palace that won with a bid of $145. After the auctioneer’s modest fee, Timmy would take $140 back to his family.

He rode home with Mr. Bellamy, and when they reached Brighton he insisted upon stopping at the diner where they’d had Cokes the day before. Loungers were delighted to greet the champion. When he reached Line Camp he told Mr. Bellamy, “I’ll walk home. I could never have won without your assistance.” He liked brig words but had been afraid to use them before this night, but now he was a champion, taking real money home to his mother.

Mr. Bellamy understood that on this night the boy wanted to be by himself, so he drove him to the point where the path started and watched with satisfaction as young Timmy started walking north over the prairie.

There was a moon, and the night was gentle. In all directions the great plains stretched silently and for the first time Timmy understood why his father had loved this land, this cruel yet compelling emptiness. It commanded attention, and there were still ways to control it. When the rains came back this would be mighty again, and he and his father would wrestle with it, for it was the noblest part of earth.

When he reached the slight rise from which the farmhouse first became visible, he was disturbed that no light was showing, because when one of the children was out, the Grebes always kept a lamp burning. But he remembered that his mother had been distraught that morning—the wind and the dust and the loneliness had finally worn her down—so it was not surprising if she had forgotten, but as he neared the house he saw the gate standing open, and this was something his father never allowed.

He became frightened and started to run and when he came upon the hideous scene he screamed. He just stood in the yard, screaming, and no one there to hear, and he continued screaming for timeless minutes, a boy torn out of his mind.

Then he started running again, mumbling and sobbing and striking himself with his fists, and he came at last to the Volkemas, and Magnes heard him first, thinking him to be a coyote howling in the night, but then Vesta heard him and she lit a lamp and cried, “I do think it’s a boy down there. It’s Timmy,” and she opened the window and heard his terrible wailing cry, “Oh, oh! They’re all dead.”

“What must have happened,” said Sheriff Bogardus after the bodies had been hauled away, “when Timmy seen her in the kitchen as he was driving off to the stock show, she was hunting for a butcher knife. Well, she found it, and I judge she killed her daughter Victoria first. Cut her head nearly off. Then she went for the two other girls, Eleanore and Betsy. The boy Larry must have seen some of this, because he started to run away, but she caught him in the yard and stabbed him many times. That musta been the first body that Earl saw when he came in from the fields, and when he went inside and saw the three girls and his wife still with the butcher knife ... because it was in her hands when we found her ... Well, he went sort of wild too, and he grabbed a shotgun and held it pretty close to her head and fired. Then he went back to the yard, picked up his son and laid him where we found him, then put the muzzle in his own mouth and pulled the trigger.”

There were pictures of the bodies, of course, decently covered with sheets, and they were accompanied by that chance shot of Timmy Grebe embracing his prize Hereford. To the easterner this display was a gripping contradiction: a little boy triumphing at the moment when his family was being slaughtered. But to the westerner, who had known the great winds and seeping dust, it was a self-portrait. The bad years were ending, but they had exacted a terrible cost.

Timmy went to live in the stone house with Mr. Bellamy. The Grebe place was sold to Philip Wendell, who was buying up any farmland that was being vacated by discouraged homesteaders, and he paid the going price: three thousand dollars for 1,280 acres plus the house, with the soddy thrown in.

Wendell had a clear vision of what lay ahead for this region and the courage to back his judgment with such money as his father had accumulated. He saw that in spite of the recent disasters, Dr. Creevey had been right. These apparent drylands could grow wheat, enormous quantities of it in any year when the normal thirteen inches of rain fell.

“You don’t plow this land deep,” Wendell told the farmers he employed to work his fields, “and for certain, when you do plow, you never, never harrow. We don’t want fields that look like billiard tables. We don’t want those long, straight rows. Nobody who works for me will ever again compete in those silly plowing contests. On our land we’re going to plow along the contours. And we are certainly going to leave strips of unplowed grass, big wide strips in every field to slow down the wind.”

He saw now that the Line Camp families could have survived the great drought of 1930-36 if only they could have prevented their fields from blowing away. “They might’ve had one or two years on skimpy rations, but they could’ve survived. Look at the Volkemas. Never borrowed money. Spent every cent they earned for more land. Now they have four thousand acres and they’re in great shape.” He had tried to buy the Volkema farm, and Magnes had been willing to sell, but Vesta had snapped, “If we wouldn’t sell to your crooked father in bad years, why should we sell to you when times are good?” and he had countered, “I thought you wanted to leave for California,” and Magnes had said, “California’s the land beyond the rainbow, and we haven’t had many rainbows here.”

Philip Wendell worked on one abiding principle: the rain would come back. The Grebe farm, for example, would once more produce thirty bushels to the acre. Maybe not in 1937, but in 1938 for sure. He therefore scraped together extra money to engage in one great gamble, after which he would quit and move to Florida, the way other rich people in the state were doing.

He now controlled some sixty thousand acres, most of it inherited from his father, and if two rainy years came side by side, he would plant so much wheat that the people in these parts would be stunned. He didn’t mean three hundred acres. He was thinking of thirty thousand this year, and thirty thousand the next, on land that had lain fallow.

This strategy was based on fact and intuition. It was a fact that high winds could be controlled. It was a fact that hail struck only one year in five. It was a fact that rain must return. Where his brilliance lay was in his intuition that before long the world was going to want wheat, lots of it, and that prices would have to rise to two dollars a bushel.

Figure it out, he argued with himself. If I risk thirty thousand acres and grow thirty bushels to the acre, I’m looking at nine hundred thousand bushels of wheat. And if something big happens to drive wheat up to two dollars, we’re talking about a million and a half dollars. Those people in Denver can’t even imagine such figures.

What was the “big thing” he hoped for? He never specified, but he sensed that with Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Josef Stalin and that idiot Roosevelt making fools of themselves, something was bound to happen. What it would prove to be he could not guess, but he knew that in any crisis, people needed wheat, and he would be in a position to supply it.

In the fall of 1937 he planted an incredible number of acres in wheat, being careful to keep his fields scattered and never to use the same plowman more than once. He did not want anyone to discover the great risk he was taking, for he had found that bankers and their associates liked to knock a man in the head when he was too far extended. When the seed was in the ground, he started to pray.

He told his wife, “If God will give us just twenty inches of snow, we’ll make it.” He studied the weather, watched every cloud, and by the first of April, concluded that the gamble had failed. The rainfall was below average and he was not going to make much more than nine bushels to the acre. Yet he was not discouraged, for the price of a bushel of wheat rose to a gratifying ninety-one cents and at the end of the spring harvest he said to his wife, “We got by. We may not have made much, but at least we didn’t lose.” She was relieved, for the pressures upon them had been great, and she supposed that with his lucky break he would quit the gamble. But not at all.

In the fall of 1938 he planted not thirty thousand acres, but forty. If moisture failed him this year, he might go bankrupt, and again he prayed for snow. Even the slightest flurry consoled him and when a real blizzard blew in for three hours, piling the snow deep, he ran into the midst of it, relishing the wet flakes as they struck his face.

He became almost maniacal, doing ridiculous things in the hope that they might bring rain or snow. He burned automobile tires, believing that their smoke activated clouds, and he hired an airplane to scatter grains of sand from a high altitude. Ironically, a good sixteen inches of rain did fall before the end of the growing season.

Near to collapse. he fell onto the davenport in the front room of his mansion in Centennial one day in March and told his wife, “I couldn’t stand the anxiety of another year like this. I’ve had dizzy spells. I’m a living corpse.”

“You promised this’d be the last year,” she said.

“You don’t need to remind me,” he told her. “I’d never go through this again.”

And as soon as the crop was harvested and sold, at a modest profit, he started making plans to unload his land and quit the wheat business altogether. He talked with a variety of buyers and found a banker in Denver who wanted to speculate in dry-land farming. As the gentleman explained, “I think that with enough land, I can get not only a wheat crop but substantial payments from the government—soil bank, contour plowing, things like that.”

In a way Wendell felt regrets at not being in on the killing which he knew had to come. “We’ll live to see three-dollar wheat,” he told his wife, but she replied, “No backing down,” and he assured her, “Not me. I’m willing to let someone else make the profit.”

He would be far from destitute. Take that farm he had picked up from the Grebe boy after the tragedy. He had paid three thousand for it and a banker from Chicago was offering twenty. Not all of his deals had worked so well, but he would quit Centennial with more than a million dollars, which wasn’t bad for a boy who had reached town with a traveling theatrical group.