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.”
