Page 20

The heat of the prairie summer was oppressive and relentless.

By day, the land shimmered in the heat haze and the afternoons saw thunderheads roll in on huge cotton wool clouds.

Emily watched the sky closely, her gaze constantly drawn to its soaring immensity and the ever-shifting story she was learning to read.

She recognized the sun dogs that foretold of rain, the thick flat clouds that carried a short heavy downpour, others that brought the early summer hailstorms and the hailstones as big as apples that flattened a crop in minutes, ruining a year’s work in the time it took to scatter a single sack of seed.

She learned how to track a thunderstorm, to check if it was moving away from them or toward them.

When Henry put a thermometer in the ground, the mercury shot up the scale, reading well over a hundred regularly.

Beads of perspiration bubbled up on Emily’s skin as she completed her chores, the chirping songs of ’hoppers and frogs a constant background accompaniment as she took shelter on the porch and fanned her face with whatever she could find—a spatula, a newspaper, a phonograph grabbed from the old Victrola—while Henry studied his ledgers, tabulating his expenses and profits for that month.

Yields were reaching record highs as more and more acres of good grain were harvested.

“Hank Miller was telling me the elevators in Dalhart are full,” he said as they sat together on the porch at sundown.

“Grain sitting in great towers waiting to be transported. We’ll have enough to feed all of Europe again if they keep bringing more folk in to farm.

Land developers are offering forty-year loans at six percent interest. Almost anyone can afford the repayments of thirty-five dollars a month on a five-thousand-dollar loan. ”

And almost anyone did, it seemed. Like many other towns across the Great Plains, Liberal was heaving as the railroads delivered carriage after carriage of folk eager to grab an opportunity to make money from the land.

Prairie farming was producing a new breed of businessmen, and once-empty towns were now thriving communities.

“Laurie was telling me some woman out Haskell County way is boasting of profits reaching some seventy-five thousand dollars,” Emily said. “Ida Watkins. Have you heard of her? The so-called Wheat Queen of Kansas.”

Henry shrugged. “Wheat Queen! Silly headlines to sell their newspapers. What next? Prairie Princes. Kansas Kings.”

Emily smiled. “Henry Gale, Wheat King of Kansas. It has a nice ring to it!” But beyond the joking, there was a more serious concern. “You don’t worry it’s all happening too fast, do you?” she asked. “That we’re living in a wheat boom and setting up for a bust, like the California gold prospectors?”

Henry reached for her hand. “Let’s hope not. I reckon we’re about at the peak of it now. There can hardly be anyone else left to come here.”

But there was.

The great influx continued all summer. Reports reached them of millions more acres of ancient prairie grassland being torn up across New Mexico, and from the southern swathe of the Texas panhandle all the way to the unforgiving dugout-littered no-man’s-land of Dalhart, on through Kansas and Colorado and up into Nebraska.

Emily watched the men and their machines in the fields and remembered Ike West’s words.

The prairie ain’t s’posed to be farmed this way.

For her part, Emily continued to educate herself with renewed fervor.

She turned to Campbell’s Soil Culture Manual , the much-revered Bible of dry farming.

She read whatever she could find about the Comanche and other Native Americans who’d once inhabited this great land along with their buffalo.

She learned about the reservations and allotments and the last buffalo hunt organized by Charlie Goodnight from his ranch in Palo Duro Canyon.

She wept as she learned the terrible history of the Lakota people at the Battle of Wounded Knee.

She felt that she shared something of their pain in Ireland’s history of oppression, and felt a pang of guilt to be on these ancient native lands at all.

As she and Henry walked to the creek together that evening, Emily listened to the cry of the eagles and Cooper’s hawks that wheeled above.

“Native Americans believe the great birds of prey represent the spirits of their ancestors,” she said as she looped her arm through Henry’s.

“I like that idea.” She tipped her head back to look up.

“They’re so magnificent, aren’t they. They remind me of the buzzards and kestrels I used to hear in Ireland. ”

They walked on, enjoying the golden light of early evening.

“I’ve been reading about the people who lived here before the white settlers,” Emily continued. “Does it ever make you feel guilty to know we are on their land? I sometimes worry that we shouldn’t be here. That the land doesn’t want us here.”

“Crosses my mind now and then,” Henry said, “but the government isn’t going to return the land to them, no matter how folk feel about it.

If we don’t farm here, it’ll only be farmed by some other white folk.

Things change, Em. We can’t always correct the mistakes of the past, or be responsible for them.

We work hard and we’re making a good life here.

Let’s not spoil it by worrying about things in the past that we can’t undo. ”

Emily knew he was right, but still the thought nagged at the back of her mind that they were now profiting from these past atrocities.

She felt for the piece of Connemara marble in her skirt pocket and felt the pull of her ancestors.

The Irish knew well what it was like to be chased from your land and your home, stripped of your language and culture.

As the birds wheeled and cried above, she felt them watching her, making sure she was being respectful to this place their ancestors had called home. She asked them to guide her, to show her the way.

That night, she took the pamphlet from her mother’s Bible.

“?‘Come to the great free country, where you may soon grow rich and independent as a farmer, with yellow corn waving upon the breasts of the prairies, and cattle grazing upon the hills, and no master over you but the Great Lord of heaven and earth.’?” She could hear her mother reading the words out loud, her voice carrying through the thin walls.

“?‘Sounds like heaven, doesn’t it, Joe.’?”

Emily had terrible dreams that night, haunting visions of Native American mothers screaming as they watched their children being slaughtered.

She woke to a crack of lightning as a thunderstorm rumbled over the house.

As raindrops fell like hammer blows on the roof, she felt the tears of a thousand women fall with them and resolved to do her best here, to honor their memory, to atone for the past.