Big Wheat by Richard A. Thompson Read Free Book Online Page B

added, “I apologize.”
    “Accepted. Are you a farmer, Charlie?”
    “That’s what I mostly know how to do, but I don’t seem to have much of a future there. I’m good with machines. I’m thinking maybe I can make some kind of life out of that.”
    “So you want to be a mechanical man?”
    “I guess you could put it that way, all right.”
    “Most young men who know farming find a good woman and settle down to screw up the land. Aren’t there any good women where you are from?”
    Charlie sighed, said nothing. He looked at the ground.
    “That bad?”
    “I don’t have a woman back home. I also don’t have any land of my own, which means that I can’t get a woman.”
    “Ah.”
    “What’s that mean, that ‘ah?’”
    “That means white people are stupid, is what it means. The woman you want will only go with you if you own some land? Then you don’t want her. You people worry too much about owning things. I have had two fine women in my time, and we lived off the land without ever owning any, except that all the people owned all the land. It was a good life.”
    “Yeah, maybe. But it’s gone now for you and never was there for me. There are a lot of kinds of life possible, but not every kind. You can’t hunt buffalo any more and I can’t ask a woman to go with me if I don’t have any land, and that’s just the way things are.”
    “I guess that’s true. Because the white man is in charge and that’s the way he thinks. And that’s the kind of thinking that took away our land and gave us some hardscrabble dogshit place to live that no sane person would want.”
    “It was good sharing breakfast with you, sir. I hope we aren’t going to argue now.” And he really did hope it. He was finding himself liking this man.
    “No, we will not argue. This is not a place for arguing”
    “It isn’t?” What on earth was he talking about now? “Tell me why that is.”
    “You didn’t know?” He raised both eyebrows and dropped his jaw a notch. “Then why did you pick this spot to camp?”
    “It has trees,” said Charlie. “Big, old ones. I brought some straw with me for the fire, but straw is no good unless you have a ton of the stuff. If you have old trees, there will be dead branches around for a fire, and you don’t have to hurt the trees to get it.”
    “That’s good,” said George Ravenwing, nodding with his whole torso. “Good enough that I will tell you some things. This is a place of great power. Besides the small stuff, there are five great trees, of much age, and each one is a different race, do you see? Cottonwood, oak, hackberry, maple, and elm. Five is an important number, the biggest number that can be remembered for what it is, without putting a name on it. It is a sacred number. This might have been a holy place once. When you are done with your quest, you should come back here, to restore your soul and make yourself ready to reenter the real world. You could ask Wakan Tanka for some guidance. He would hear you, in a place like this.”
    “I was sure I told you I’m not on a quest. And I am damn sure not going anywhere that isn’t in the real world.”
    “You told me that. You told yourself that, too, I think, but it is not exactly true. There are a lot of kinds of quests and a lot of worlds. Yours just doesn’t have a name yet. But I’ll let that pass for now. Tell me then, you who have no land and can’t get the woman you want without any, what do you think to find out there that will speak to your soul and change who you are?” He made a broad gesture to encompass the whole of the plains that were finally beginning to emerge in the light of the first false dawn.
    Charlie shrugged. “Steam.”
    “Steam,” he repeated, but not as a question. “You answer very quickly when I ask you that. The big steam engines, you mean?”
    “They’re a start,” said Charlie. “Big machines of other kinds, too. I get
The Farmer
and
Popular Mechanics
in the mail, and I look at the