Bucking the Sun, page 2
“Smarts a little, is all,” Neil replied shortly. A burn the size of a dime was eating at his shin where the top of his sock would normally reach. Yesterday the grasshopper bait somehow had splashed once and soaked through his pantleg, the poison inflicting itself there overnight. Nothing serious, Neil figured, although you probably would not want to make a habit of spilling arsenic on yourself.
“You want to know what I really like about this?” Bruce provided as they poured the mushlike mix into the spreading machine. “All this free banana-oil cologne. Women’ll be able to smell us a mile off.”
As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he knew he’d laid himself open. All Neil would have to put in on him was something like In your case, what’s new about that much stinkum? Nothing came, though. Bruce checked across the barrel of mix, saw the little grin on Neil, and realized with a flush that the silence had been the retort. It was as good as said, and that was good enough for Neil.
• • •
There. This is what it takes, the woman waiting behind the steering wheel of the pickup, watching the fenceline tableau of Hugh and the government man, told herself fixedly. There were times, and this was one, when Hugh had to be absolutely hit between the eyes with a fact. For a moment, seeing the car come, she had wished the news could deliver itself some more gentle way; then decided no, she didn’t either. Let it get over with all at once, bango.
For waging war against grasshoppers, Meg Duff wore one of Hugh’s old workshirts, bib overalls, and a scarf tightly tied, despite the heat in the pickup cab, to keep stray hoppers from flying into her hair. Under each edge of the bib of her overalls a neat roundness showed, as if she had an apple in each shirt pocket. With her hair tucked up under the scarf, only the little vee of origin at the back of her neck showed the interesting color of honeyed brunette. Her skin was not the sort that sun and wind are kind to. Her eyes, though, were the memorable blue of a Wedgwood piece (the sons produced by her and Hugh were copies of his tall spare Duff build, but their eyes and hair color fetchingly took after her side) and she had a little nock in her chin, a tiny divided place like a mark of character. Long years of practice at holding herself together, otherwise known as marriage to Hugh, had made Meg her own best judge, and this minute of back and forth in herself bothered her, even scared her some. Don’t be afraid of being scared, she bolstered herself. This is a family that can use some sense scared into it just now.
“Ready again, Mother,” Neil came up to the cab of the pickup and told her. “Let’s murder some more bugs.”
“We’re becoming all too practiced at it,” she took the moment to tell him, “but still, Neil, be careful how you go.” Her edge-of-the-bed voice, more deep and dramatic than a woman’s generally reached, had the assumption that it could steer these sons of hers past casual poison as handily as it had carried them through every childhood ailment.
She put the pickup in low gear and began driving at as much speed as possible along the outside edge of the alfalfa. As she did, Bruce piled into the back of the pickup to mind the five-gallon cans of extra water, and Neil stood virtually beside her on the running board of the driver’s side, an arm up inside the cab to hold him in place, and watched behind to see that the spreader was working. In sporadic sweeps, the bait spewed out the way grain falls when scattered by the panful: the watered sawdust mush, the amyl acetate “banana oil” mixed in to act as attractant, the adhering arsenic.
In the field of alfalfa beside the swath of poison, the grasshoppers amounted to a creeping acid. When the pickup wasn’t running, they could be heard making a meal of everything that grew; that undersound of millions of minuscule mouths each biting through a leaf, a stem, a stalk.
Every year the same surprise, Meg silently cried the thought across the infested field to Hugh. This had been a wet year until spring seemed fully launched, no hint of the hot dry previous turns of weather that made grasshopper eggs hatch in profusion. But then came rainless days for the last of April and then May and then on into June, and the clouds of grasshoppers rose from the ground one more time. Stubborn against the evidence as usual, Hugh still maintained that the grasshoppers could not keep on being annual, just as he’d kept saying the price for a coveted seed crop such as alfalfa could not continue going down and down. Out we climbed, and found ourselves in deeper. The ragged chant of riddle from their schooldays in Inverley pertained exactly to this situation of them and the place, Meg was convinced, although Hugh would never admit so. Nor let himself see ahead in the family, for that matter. Of these two sons of theirs here working themselves blue in the face against grasshoppers, Neil might have stayed with the place, but Bruce already was as good as gone. What seemed to be coming over him were runaway impulses, in more ways than one. Men never pay attention to how their voices carry, so Meg had heard the news through her open kitchen window one haul day. Bruce had taken a pickup load all the way over to the seed warehouse in Glasgow—the offer price was pennies better there—and when he drove back into the yard just before supper, there came the slam of the pickup door, Neil’s offhand asking of “How was town?” and Bruce’s proud report, “Got laid and everything.”
In certain circumstances you would just as soon not know the behavior of your offspring, Meg reflected at the time, if for no other reason than it sets up unwelcome comparisons. For all her surge of motherly shock at Bruce, part of her already could not help but be amused by that everything. It played in her mind, stayed with her like a teasing tune as she contemplated Hugh and herself and their long tug-of-war over what was love and what was lure and where lay the confusing ground between. Did the everything of her and Hugh have to forever include the portion she would sometimes like to bat out of him with a broom, as well as the share of him that she would not have traded for all the silk in China?
By now not only was the afternoon boiling, so was the engine of the pickup. Roaring along in low gear was necessary for spreading the grasshopper bait as thoroughly as possible, but it meant she had to stop often for Bruce and Neil to hop down and put water in the radiator. This was everybody’s least favorite chore, unscrewing the cap of a hot radiator. All they could do, though, was for one or the other to wrap his right arm in a coat and with a gloved hand cautiously loosen that cap a little at a time until the pressure, and the chance of being scalded, went down. Watching, Meg always held her breath a little.
Not today. She never even looked as Bruce fought the radiator cap and compared it to the temperature of the doorknob of Hell. Across the field, she saw Hugh drop his arm from that affectionate rest on the fencepost, saw him stand differently.
• • •
“Let me get my feet under me, a minute,” Hugh was saying slowly, there at the fenceline. “Land like this, taken for a dam halfway across Montana from here? You’re sure you’re on the reach of the river that you think you are, are you?”
Siderius compressed his lips and simply nodded yes.
“I can’t believe you,” Hugh spoke as if telling him the time of day. “A dam that’d—why would they do such a thing?”
“It’s kind of beyond me,” Siderius was forced to admit, “but they’re about gonna do it.” In spite of himself he shook his head at what was even harder to swallow. “With dirt, no less.”
Hugh Duff’s face changed radically.
Watching the man, Siderius warily got back to the part he knew by heart, “appraisal involved . . . so-much per acre . . . fair deal as possible but . . . ” But none of it made a dent in the stricken look that had come over the farmer. The growl of the pickup from the far side of the field, the yelps of the two young men whenever the spreader clogged or the radiator spewed, all seemed as lost on this man Duff as Siderius’s spiel.
Perplexed, Siderius decided to jump ahead of himself again and offer:
“You’ll get preference.”
“What’s that supposed to mean, preference.”
“In getting hired. At the dam project.”
Hugh let out an alarming chuckle, a sound of mirth gone dry and bitter. “Man, do I look anything like a skilled hand at that sort of work?”
You look about like any other sad sonofabitch of a honyocker who needs a job, of whatever the hell kind, Siderius thought. About like me.
“Listen,” he told the other. “I don’t know if this helps any at all, but I been through this myself. The dam’s going in right on top of me. I had a hundred and sixty acres of the best seed alfalfa you ever saw, just this side of Fort Peck.”
Duff didn’t even blink at him.
Siderius shrugged. “At least there’s jobs with the dam, we anyway ought to be thankful for that.”
Hugh studied him bleakly. “And you’re right there at the head of the sugar-tit line. No wonder you puke at the sight of yourself.”
“I’m at least doing something besides the grasshopper quickstep,” Siderius shot back. “How many summers now you been walking that way? Three? Four?”
“I’m stepping on my own ground,” Hugh said in the coldest tone Siderius had ever heard, “not on the necks of my neighbors.”
Afterward, in the years of the Fort Peck Dam project, Chick Siderius stayed leery of the Duffs. By then he couldn’t see that they had any gripe coming, they’d been paid the exact damn same for their land as everybody else. And they did end up with jobs, the whole slew of them, didn’t they? But even when Siderius spotted one of their women—good God, their women—he would cross the street to stay out of their way. He never forgot how treacherous the exchange with that old bearcat Hugh suddenly turned, there at the fenceline, and the final flub he’d made in trying to calm things down. All Siderius had said was:
“At least you and the wife aren’t up against this alone. If I know family resemblance when I see it, you’ve got a couple of sons helping you out, right?”
“We’ve three,” Hugh Duff had given the government hiree that terrible corroded chuckle again, then swung around as if to hurl the next sentence across the field. Haven’t we, Meg. When it came, the words practically spat from him. “But one’s a dirt dam engineer.”
• • •
The sheriff later dug up the fact that, back there in ’33 when the alfalfa farmers were being cleared out of the Missouri River bottomland and in turn hired to clear the dam site of brush and cottonwoods, the name Duff was already part of the Fort Peck vocabulary. It gave Sheriff Kinnick something more to think about, that this dogfight bunch amounted to, what would you have to say, the first family of the dam? As well as being the authors of that truck in the river. Where the Duff record was concerned, the sheriff spent immense time trying to get his mind around the size of all the contradiction. But then, he would remind himself bitterly, that was always the thing about the cockeyed dam. From day one, everything about Fort Peck was going to set a record.
W. abutment: layer cake—
glac’l till
on
alluv’l silt etc.
on
Bearpaw shale
The Eversharp pencil paused on the pocket notebook, then rapidly jotted down:
E. abutment: badlands—
B’paw shale up the gigi
“So what do you think of her, Duff? You ready to make mudpies with Miz Missouri?”
Day one at Fort Peck for Owen Duff had come in early May of 1933, in company with a handful of other first hires specked across a bald knob on the bluff overlooking one particular crimp of the river.
The wind was up, naturally, and Owen could have kicked himself for not wearing his wool-collared short mackinaw instead of trying to appear climateproof for the Army Corps of Engineers big shots. The other civilian engineers looked equally chilblained, but Owen alone had grown up in this northern Montana wind, was so habited to it that even in the High Line Hotel in Glasgow he would catch himself slanting ahead into a braced position when he felt the start of a breeze through an opened window.
Never mind with the weather, he instructed himself. This is the damnedest chance anybody ever dreamed of. Charlene will see. This is something we’ll be able to hang our hats on for the rest of our lives. Tucking his notebook and mechanical pencil into their accustomed pocket of his garbardine jacket, he turned and answered Sangster:
“I’m ready for any sonofabitching thing that constitutes construction.”
“Uh huh,” the shorter man agreed. “If the railroad cut back any more, I’d have had to figure out how to teach trains to jump creeks.”
From Owen’s own line of engineering there was a similar stock of standard wisecracks he could have chosen from, about trying to underbid gophers on tunnelwork, or the difficulty Montana dogs were having in burying their bones with so many unemployed dirt engineers eager to do it for them, and so on; but he didn’t trouble to. Not now, not here, not worth interrupting this chance at absolutely kicking aside the Depression and its lame jokes. Instead, arms crossed and hands tucked in his armpits for warmth’s sake, he walked the same few strides back and forth as he kept studying the course of the Missouri below. Owen was an even six feet tall, and thin except in the head. There, a strong forehead and brunette eyebrows and china-blue eyes oversaw a surprisingly wide-cut mouth where the usual expression was partly quizzical, partly provocative. When that mouth was set seriously, as now, he looked a lot like a bothered Will Rogers.
“Enjoying the sights of Fort Peck?” he abstractedly asked Sangster. There was no fort to Fort Peck anymore, or for that matter, anything except the matching benches of land and the flat floor of the river valley that had beckoned up from the Corps of Engineers map as a dam site. A stockaded trading post briefly propped up by sternwheel steamboat traffic, the last of Fort Peck had been swept off its ledge at the base of this bluff by high water sometime in the 1890s; the name, though, had the lives of a cat, attaching itself to the nearby Indian reservation and now to the dam notion that had these engineers by the eyes. In this first hundred days of the New Deal, as the Roosevelt administration wheeled laws, funds, money, and projects into being, the senior senator from Montana—fortuitously named Wheeler—had been right at the head of the line for a dam and ten thousand jobs here.
Owen and Sangster and the other fresh civvie engineers had been briefed half to death about this project already, but a good long stare at this remote stretch of the Missouri had things to tell them, too. The first of which was, on this river that scrawled from west to east for hundreds of miles across upper Montana, the axis of the dam was not going to be crosswise to that, north-south as every fiber of logic said it had to be. The river hadn’t heard the logic, and as if bored with the oxbow bends it had been scrolling all the way across Valley County, here it shot out of its writhings with a notion to keep going north. It was the midpoint of this northward veer, the Fort Peck speck of geography, that presented the dam site, a narrower and higher set of benchlands than where the lazy curves were.
A west-east dam on a west-east river; you just had to adjust. Owen Duff thought ahead to more than a thousand days of sunrise at one end of the dam, sunset at the other, sun in the eyes of his dredgeline crews; it would make a difference in where he laid those lines.
“Bastardish big open country out here, isn’t it,” Sangster said. “Anything between here and the North Pole, come winter?”
“What,” Owen now grinned fully and joined the formula of weather complaint, “you want the wind cut with something besides a barbwire fence?”
“Any more of a breeze than this,” Sangster squinted against the persistent blast of air, “and this is one sissybritches engineer you’ll find hunkered down behind those cottonwoods.”
“That’s all going to go, first thing.”
“The whole works?” Sangster glanced at him, then back to the winding thicket of cottonwood trees and diamond willows that hedged the west riverbank of the Missouri as far as could be seen.
“Mmhmm. Clearing out the bottomland will help with the dredging, the idea is. Besides causing gobs of jobs.” Owen was thinking out loud now. “If I was you, I’d make sure that cottonwood doesn’t get consigned toward your bridging. These Corps guys—they know how to push a project until it squeals, but we don’t want them doing it through shortcuts in procurement.”
“Jesus no,” said Sangster, realizing that Owen was seeing around bends besides the river’s. “I’ll goose up my specifications on all bridge timbering.”
“Wouldn’t hurt,” Owen approved, but was already back to gazing at the bluff across the river, the distant shoulder that his dam would rest against. His own tall order of engineering, so big that it needed imagining in segments.
Think of a mile, and pile its entire length with a pyramid of earth as high as a twenty-five-story building.
Think of another mile, do the fill again.
Think of a third such distance, same.
A fourth and final mile, equally level.
The mountainous amount of gravel needed for the downstream toe of a dam that size? Bring it in from the big pit at Cole, eighty miles. That wasn’t so hot, Owen thought. The glacier-size quantity of rock for the upstream face? Bring it in from the Snake Butte quarry, one hundred and fifty miles. That definitely wasn’t so hot. But hauling the staggering tonnages of gravel and stone into here from Hell and gone was not Owen Duff’s given job. Heaping those materials correctly once they got here, along with more than a hundred million cubic yards of material dredged from these riverbanks down there, into a firm gentle berm across those four miles, pervious edges married onto impervious core; handling the Fort Peck earthfill, the biggest earthen dam ever tried: that was going to be his.
Soon came a shout from the top of the knob, time to be briefed by the colonel. The Corps seemed to be big on briefing, all right. “Guess we better get used to it,” Sangster said, “or marry money.”
He stopped, embarrassed. He had let that out before remembering that Owen Duff was a married man.
Owen threw him a look, but with it a fleeting expression that Sangster didn’t know how to construe.
“Sometimes it can be worth it,” Owen told him, “even if only small change is involved.”
