The Bruiser (11 page)

Completely conscious in the railroad station at South Bend, Indiana, he tried to recall what had happened. Vaguely the fight with Sully returned to him.

He bathed his eyes in cold water, and looked at himself in the mirror. His cheeks were sunken. He felt for his watch. It was gone.

He found a crumpled card in his pocket.

He remembered the girl and his leaving the cab.

A Negro attendant applied a whiskbroom to his clothes. Shane fumbled in his pocket. “Here, Mate.” He flipped a twenty-five cent piece.

“I doan guess you got no moah.” The Negro advanced with the quarter.

“That's all right,” remarked Shane. “I've got a few dollars.”

“No, you ain't—you's all in, down an' out. I can tell.”

“Who, me?” Shane smiled slowly.

“Yes suh— I let's you sleep heah all night— Fly cop he come in an' looks at yuh an' I says you's my frien' so he goes on out an' you keeps talkin' ‘bout a fahm in No'th Dakota an' fightin' somebody.”

He put the quarter in Shane's hand. Shane tried to hand it back. The Negro repeated, “No suh, no suh,” and ambled away.

He found his way to the Midland Labor Agency in Chicago.

Men jostled each other in a large room on West Madison Street. Some had blankets tied to sticks slung across their backs. They were the familiar “bindle stiffs” or men who carried bundles in a wandering world. Old “jungle buzzards,” the parasites of tramps, loitered about in the throng—the poor begging of the poor.

Written in chalk on a huge blackboard were the words:

“
400 MEN WANTED FOR NORTH DAKOTA—GRAINSVILLE AND ADJACENT POINTS—CHARGES $2.00—FULL SHIPMENT MUST BE HAD IMMEDIATELY—”

A “man-catcher” touched Shane's arm. “You look like you could do a day's work. Go get a valise to show good faith.”

When he returned, the man said, “All right—two dollars, please—over to one side—North Dakota-Rolling River Farm—first gang—Red River Valley next—get in line there, boys.”

They were marched to the depot, and put in a once gaudy but now old-fashioned passenger car.

On Sunday morning they were in the Red River Valley of North Dakota.

Wonder at what had happened since he left brought surcease from more hectic memories.

He gazed out of the dusty window as the train rumbled through small, flat towns. Combining a red railroad station, a listless flagman at a crossing, a short main street, a cattle pen, and a tall grain elevator, they
were as much alike as knots in a string he remembered. Small school buildings and fantastic frame houses, with lightning rods gleaming above turrets and cupolas, were scattered over the level land.

From Grainsville, they were taken to the four thousand acre Rolling River Farm.

A graveled road went directly to the house. Of faded brick, with green shutters, it was a huge, sixteen-room box, half hidden by trees. It had been built by a farmer for whom Peter Lund, the present owner, had worked as a hired hand.

Red buildings, with slate roofs, and larger than his house, were all about. An office, built of logs, was at the edge of his barnyard, two hundred feet from the house. A large map of the world and a larger one of the United States was on the wall. Magazines and books were everywhere in the office.

A Danish peasant, and silent as falling snow, Lund left his land but seldom.

He had married the girl on the next farm. A country school teacher, she taught him to read and write.

Slow of speech and movement, and sturdy and wind-beaten as the maples about the house, he was very tall. Though seventy, he was the equal in strength of any man who worked for him. His shoulders were bent with labor. He was, in his every action, the master of four thousand acres—and himself.

The same migratory laborers had come to his farm for years. He paid them every week, and allowed them to draw money each day for anything needed.

He would listen to their tales with a slight glint of humor.

All on the large farm, including his wife, called him “the Boss.” Lyndal, his daughter, called him “Daddy Denmark.” She now joined him. Two Great Danes followed. He had given them to her years ago when Shane was on the farm. She called them Norway and Sweden.

Lund watched the caravan coming from the door of his office. There was a quizzical expression about his eyes as if he were wondering for a moment about these mysterious men who came and went indifferently as the seasons, without regret, without hope, and as seemingly carefree as the wind across his fields.

Shane was the last of the group. Lyndal watched them all, smiling, until he came.

Startled, her eyes met his. How powerful he had grown.

“It's nice to see you again, Shane.”

“I'm glad to be back—it's like home,” he replied bashfully, in a half daze, and moved away.

Now above six feet, with heavy drooping shoulders, his jaws were sharp and protruding.

Peter Lund turned to his daughter, as a rift of wind blew a wisp of brown hair, the color of her eyes. Her figure was curved and slender, her lips full and red; her heart beating fast, her eyes followed him.

“He's back again, eh, daughter?”

“Yes, Daddy—I'm glad.”

“A fine-looking fellow like that driftin' around like a cloud.” Her father's eyes went upward.

“It's what I'd do if I were a man.”

“Be glad you're not a man,” he said, as, outwardly calm, she went to the house.

She had often wondered what had become of him.

He had stayed from the beginning of the harvest until she had gone to college. A letter she had written to him had been returned by her mother with the news that he had left suddenly. She was so used to him that it did not seem possible he would leave as suddenly as he came.

He was everywhere on the farm. If someone were needed to go on an errand to Grainsville, Shane went. She often went along. Those were happy hours. She was proud of his reverence for her.

She remembered him saying, “I'm a road kid—some morning I'll be gone.”

She did not dare show concern.

With Shane and her father, she felt secure. She thought how much alike they were.

The years had given her time to compare. His silence had been more to her than the talk of other boys. He had asked her questions about everything. She had caressed him slightly in leaving for college.

She gazed out of the window across the waving fields. In the distance was the red brick schoolhouse she had attended as a child.

Pupils and teachers returned to her. Irvin Rogers had taught her two seasons. He had lived at her house. She would have married him had “the boy” not come to the farm. Unconsciously he had filled her with un
rest, uncertainty. She had been more contented with “the boy.”

He stood alone now, near the windmill.

She went to him.

A stillness that comes now and then in the wheat country followed. Everything stopped moving at once. Horses stood, their heads down, their eyes half closed. Hens did not cackle. Roosters did not crow. Over the ground passed a long wave of shadow.

“Isn't it wonderful?” She looked at the young giant before her.

“Yes—it is,” Shane replied.

“Where have you been so long?”

“Every place,” was the answer.

“Didn't you ever think of us here? We wondered about you.”

She wore a form-fitting brown sweater, a bright yellow scarf, and white flannel skirt.

“You look beautiful.”

“Thank you—but my question.”

“Yes, a lot of times. I started a letter to you once.”

Pleased, “Did you? Why didn't you finish it. I'd have loved it.”

“I don't know,” at a loss for words. “You're growing up.”

“So are you.” She smiled, looking up at him.

“How's your grandmother?” he asked.

“Didn't you know? How could you? She died a few months after you left.”

Lyndal's grandmother was a Sioux Indian. She died
on a windy January morning, her clay pipe clutched in her hand. The funeral stretched for a mile over the frozen ground. Lyndal was more drawn to the old lady than to her own mother. She had inherited a slender body, a lithe, graceful walk, and a love of Indian lore from her grandmother. Mrs. Lund had put aside all things Indian in girlhood.

The stern, unyielding old woman, and her equally determined father had influenced Lyndal's life. For hours she would form a trinity of silence with them. As close to them as the soil, she loved the ripple of wheat, the patter of rain, and the primitive sweep that made up their lives.

Her mother was never quite of the group.

As Peter's lands and money grew, his wife became more and more fastidious. She abhorred the sweating bodies of the harvesters and their salt-streaked clothing. A slight, dark woman, she was a contrast to her immense husband.

The mood of nature lifted. Everything stirred.

The farm was more vivid in color. Birds flew with more graceful motion through the bright, blue weather.

Fleecy white clouds sailed before the sun and dappled the ground with shadow.

Her mother called.

Lyndal went to her.

“Well, he's back,” she said.

“Yes,” returned Lyndal.

“He's changed, hasn't he?”

“And not for the better, I'm afraid,” returned her
mother. She glanced at Lyndal. “He was such a nice-looking boy—he's harder now.”

“He's stronger and bigger—more of a man,” said Lyndal.

Work began at dawn. The sun was soon shining, yellow and hot as a furnace blaze through the whirling dust of the cloudless sky. Hitched to a large machine, twelve horses plodded slowly through the clank and roar of the field.

The grain fell in wide sheets, on a long apron that carried it into a machine. The straw was dropped on the ground, the grain into sacks from a tube at the side.

Because of his strength, Shane was put to loading the heavy sacks of wheat. He tossed them into the waiting wagons that hauled them from the field. It was the hardest work of the harvest.

Tireless and cheerful, the men worked early and late. There would be “get-togethers” as Peter Lund called them, after supper. Knowing the strain of labor, he liked to see the men relax—when sixteen hours of the day had gone. If he was a driver of men, nature drove him. His thousands of acres ripened quickly.

There was a respite of twenty minutes in mid-afternoon. Lyndal took lunch to the men. Friendly to all, she did not forget that her father had once been a hired man.

He was well known in the Red River Valley.

The prey of nature for years, he had seen hot winds
burn his fields in an hour—the labor and hope of months. He accepted ill or good fortune without change of expression. His eyes would follow a bobolink darting up and down with the undulating waves of his yellow fields with the same satisfaction that he gazed at a copper sun that betokened good weather. The chinch bug, the Hessian fly, the locust of old, he fought all in turn with the same determined calm. A fatalist, he fretted neither against nature nor events.

Each spring he would walk for miles across his fields to discover where the snowdrifts of winter had washed away his wheat. Later, he would watch the green coloring turn to a lighter shade and then to yellow until his wheat was ready for the harvest.

One morning, after a rain, the wheat was too wet to handle. A whirring noise was heard above the barnyard.

“Sounds like locusts,” an old laborer said to Shane. “They used to be a lot of 'em around. I'll never forget my first year here. They came like so many clouds— the sun shining on their wings so they looked like a million specks of glass moving. The wheat was just getting ripe. There was nothing the boss could do but let them come. The sun was about two hours up in the sky. The boss watched them settle down—and I watched him. I thought I'd rather be a bum than have what was in his heart when he saw another swarm coming up in front of the sun and making it dark as a horse's mouth.

“The boss looked at them, hoping they wouldn't light on his fields—nor any other fields nearby—for
whatever else you can say about the old man, he's not mean. They flew above the farm for three days. There were whole hours when you couldn't see the sun. Old Peter knew if they ever lit, they'd clean his fields like a starving man would a platter of meat. They traveled in long waves like the pictures of a comet's tail. A bunch of them took a notion to light on old Peter's far field the third day. He took it standing up. His little girl looked up at him and said, ‘Brave Daddy.' I can see her yet—she was a cute little shaver. He held her close against his right leg, his big paw covering her whole right shoulder—and he never said a word. I've never quit liking him since that day. It was a hundred acre field—they might eat up his farm and they might leave in an hour—you could see them going down in front of the sun, bent like rainbows, their wings all aglisten. Some of the women started beating a tin tub to scare them away. They might just as well have whistled ‘Yankee Doodle' for all the good it did—

“‘Don't play any music for them—they can eat without that,' the boss said.

“We all sat around in the yard and listened to the whirring of locust wings until the sun went down. The next morning early, we rushed down to the field. There was a billion of them up in the sky already flying like a lot of wild geese. They'd stripped that field like a fire'd gone over it. It was bare as a cow's nose. There was an old wagon at the edge of the field that had hickory shafts. They cut a furrow in them like you would with a corn knife. All of a sudden, those on the ground shot up and bunched with the others. We
could hear their wings droning like electric fans going at high speed. They didn't light for over thirty miles, and then they ate up a poor devil's farm along the Red River.

“The boss' wife had prayers said in church the next Sunday, thanking God for steering the locusts away.

“The boss said, ‘I wonder why He steered 'em to Lars Anderson's farm?'“

Two laborers sparred good naturedly.

“I wonder how the fight came out,” the teller of the tale said.

“I don't know,” answered another, “Who's fightin'?”

“Bangor Lang and Harry Sully.”

“Funny how people like fights,” the man who told of the locusts looked at Shane. “I used to work on a ship that hit Alaska every ten months. It was after Jeffries fought Johnson. We were going about a half mile from shore when an old trader came out in a whale boat with some Eskimos in it. He begun to hail us, and we thought maybe he thought we were his supply ship that brought him mail and stuff once a year. We slowed down until he got within yelling distance. Then he put his hands to his mouth and yelled, ‘Who won the fight?'

“‘What fight?' we all yelled at once.

“‘Jeffries and Johnson,' he yelled back.

“‘Jack Johnson,' we all shouted.

“He sat down in the boat and hung his head. Soon
he motioned the Eskimos to row him back to shore. It must have been ten months after the fight.”

The tale ended, a pause followed.

“Neither of them could lick Harry Sully,” was a laborer's comment.

Shane might have been a giant statue with shoulders wide as a granary door. Soon his powerful hand opened and closed.

He did not speak.