In the dank motel, I pour out a sourmash on the Chase rocks, get into bed, and I have this question: did I manage at last to enter Homestead, to slip through an interstice, to find the quad through subtraction? I don’t know, but I’m thinking that I got into someplace far enough at least to find absurdity, and that too is a destination.
And so.
The next morning, Wednesday, the trap untouched, I truly began to wonder whether I hadn’t hallucinated (from the Latin, hallucinari, to dream). I drove to a car wash and vacuumed up sandwich crumbs and left the trap set. That evening it was still cocked. Thursday morning I got into the car and headed out to meet Lloyd Soyez, who farms in the west county, and when I reached over to the passenger side for a pencil, I saw the trap: there it was, upside down, and protruding from beneath it two small, stiff legs and a hairless tail.
Beyond the Teeth of the Dragon
This can never be known for sure: a farm boy of French descent from up on Middle Creek may have changed postwar Europe beyond calculating. In late August of 1944, Lloyd Soyez drove his M-24 light tank (his crew named it Falstaff after he bought them a keg of beer as an apology for throwing a track) down the Champs-Elysées as the first Americans entered Paris to secure bridges and streets, and he remembers grinding past Notre-Dame. On his second or third day in the city, he took up a strategic position near the Grand Palais as part of the guard protecting a parade celebrating the eviction of the Nazis. He and four other men were seated on Falstaff to watch Charles de Gaulle come down the boulevard. From the top floor of the palace, where some German soldiers were temporarily imprisoned, came a crackling cough of machine-gun fire. Lloyd says: They were trying to shoot down General de Gaulle, so us guys in the tank jerked back the bolts on our machine guns—thirty calibers—and opened fire on them palace windows. That put an end to it. We probably done the right thing, but we didn’t have orders to fire. Word come down real fast to pull them gun barrels out and put clean ones in, and that’s what I done, so when they come around and inspected they couldn’t find anything because we had slick barrels—that’s how we avoided a court-martial.
Lloyd Soyez is seventy years old now, and he lives near Cedar Point on the uplands a couple of miles west of the northwest corner of the Homestead quad, but he has farmed many locations in western Chase. We are standing in front of his home, a double-wide, and strewn around it are forty-two pieces of farm machinery—tractors, planters, disks, hay rakes, five-bottom plows, balers—and there are another forty things behind the house; many of these eighty-two machines still function. Lloyd is retired but he occasionally helps the two of his sons who farm with plowing and harvesting. He is a big man, although not so big as he was a few years ago when a physician told him, Lose weight or you’ll become a cripple. In eighteen months he lost seventy-five pounds, and now he weighs just under two hundred. He also quit smoking: I told everybody, “Next time I catch a good winter cold, I’ll quit.” I finally caught one and I quit. He has two gold-capped front teeth, and he is wearing a spotless Resistol XXX Beaver (a sixty-dollar hat, forty less than a comparable Stetson) and clean coveralls, a mix of clothing that reveals his days as both a cowhand and a farmer. He’s a man of immediate friendliness who is pleased to talk, and, as is common in the county, he won’t try to answer questions he doesn’t know the answer to.
The wind strikes across the uplands, and we get into his pickup and drive to the Town and Country Café in Florence, just west of the county line. I ask him how German prisoners happened to have machine guns in their cells, and he says, The windows of the top floor of the Grand Palace had bars on them, and the Nazis saw the time when they might be locked in there, so they hid the guns in the walls before we come in.
Lloyd is neither a braggart nor a liar, and he speaks of his action with diffidence but also with pleasure. After Omaha Beach, we had fun going into Pans because the Free French had run out most of the Germans by then. We spent a week in Paris, and then the fun was over. We headed off toward Germany at twenty-two miles an hour in the tank. Then we come to the Dragon’s Teeth—concrete tank-barriers along the border, part of the old Maginot Line. We pulled up to wait for bulldozers to mound dirt roads across them, and then we drove right on over the Teeth like they were just furrows. But from that time on, things were hard. Now, you’ve seen pictures of people running out to wave little American flags at our troops rolling in, but in Germany, when we passed through, they waved swastikas at us—I never saw any pictures of that.
Finally, we got behind the lines. One night near Aachen I was on a foot patrol. I spotted a German infantryman aiming his rifle at somebody behind me. He had his weapon angled way up, so I got down and took a shot and missed, and then here come from him a rifle grenade bouncing in against my chest and rolling away and then exploding. He had that gun up to arc the grenade in on me—he was aiming at me the whole time. That explosion lifted me off the ground and shrapnel hit me in the hands and chest. The next thing I knew, the lieutenant was saying, “Jump up and get in the timber! You’re on your own now!” I crawled several hundred yards back to our post. I had to sneak around our sentry so he wouldn’t shoot me by mistake.
When a man has a chest wound, they taught us in first aid to prop him up so he can breathe, and you never give him water. The sentry and two others come to help me, and he told them to keep me down and give me water—now there was a boy who didn’t pay attention in class. They were drowning me. I was shaking my head, and I tried to say, “Prop me up!” but the sentry—he’d won a Silver Star the week before and figured he knew everything now—he said, “Don’t pay any attention! The man don’t know what he’s saying.” The medics got there and set me up against a tree to keep the blood out of my chest. I had a punctured lung. Right now, in this very café, there’s a piece of a German grenade next to my heart. I’ve seen it on x-rays. And here’s another one. Lloyd holds up his right thumb, and in it is something black like a peppercorn. I ask about the missing index and middle fingers on his left hand, and he says, smiling now, That wasn’t the Germans’ work. An old combine took them, and it would’ve got my arm if I hadn’t had the strength to jerk my hand out. I was stout as a bull then.
After the grenade explosion, Lloyd was in an army field hospital four months, then returned to his unit; from there he went unscathed all the way to Berlin. He sustained his most severe army injury not in battle but in basic training when he damaged a knee on the obstacle course. A couple of years ago he had the joint replaced, and for a year received a hundred-percent-disability check. To his dismay, he hasn’t been able to ride a horse since. I could’ve got a discharge after basic and come back and farmed with my brother, but I was young and ready for the army, so I hung on and made it through the war. I say, so did Charles de Gaulle.
Lloyd Soyez pronounces his name the army way, as if it were Spanish, Soy-YEZZ, and ignores the French, Swah-YAY. (As he talks about it, I imagine the young sergeant seeing Parisian girls holding up signs: SOYEZ LE BIENVENU À LA FRANCE! and Lloyd taking personally the common welcome.) Because it creates confusion, he doesn’t like the Chase County pronunciation of his name: Sawyer. Mother was Scotch-Irish or Dutch, but Dad was straight French. His parents homesteaded here—my people come from Paris and Alsace-Lorraine. My great-grandfather come out here to work as a freighter on the Santa Fe Trail. My dad spoke French, but none of us kids do, except for counting to ten and a few words like couteau—that’s pocketknife. We tried to get Dad to teach us a little, but my folks was against it—even the schools were against it, and that’s hard to believe now, but people then wanted to be American. I could have used some French when I was over there.
He returned to Kansas in 1945 after driving his M-24 nearly two thousand miles. That tank had twin Cadillac V-8 engines, but when I come home I was afoot. Then I bought an old cavalry horse from up at Fort Riley, and that was my civilian transportation until I got a Model A truck. I did a little cowboying for a couple of years, and I helped Dad farm. Things changed fast after the w
ar. I was born in 1918, and I grew up riding behind a team of horses, although Dad made us walk when we’d harrow: he wanted to make it easy on the animals, but when we’d get tired we’d jump on the harrow and ride a ways. We raised wheat, corn, kafir corn, and oats—lots of oats. Dad used to say, “You can always get a crop of oats.” If we had rain we could get ten bushels of wheat to an acre, but with oats we’d get thirty or forty—it was a pretty sure crop even in dry weather. We fed it to our horses, cows, hogs, and chickens. Oats was the power that broke out this country.
He stops, measures his words: Of course, there was some land that should’ve never been broke out—a lot of uplands where the topsoil is only three or four inches deep and sitting on rock to start with: it’d give you a good crop for a few years, but the wind and rain took its toll, and there wasn’t floods on the uplands to leave soil behind, so they went to pot and the valleys stayed good: they’ve been farmed better than a hundred years. These days, we fertilize even in the bottoms—nitrogen, phosphate, and some lime. We didn’t do that when I was a boy, and we didn’t spray for weeds or bugs. We didn’t do nothing—we just raised crops, and it was generally a poor crop. In the thirties we had our wheat blow out, and in one of them dry years the grasshoppers took our corn.
Lloyd now owns about four hundred acres, all of it uplands, and he raises wheat, prairie hay, and some brome. This year, about a quarter of his land is in the federal Conservation Reserve Program, called CRP or, more commonly here, set-aside (emphasis on the first word). The purpose of CRP is to take highly erodible land out of production and put it into a protective cover like clover or native grass. County farmers make caustic remarks about being paid not to farm, but most of them participate in the plan. Lloyd says, With government programs and an outside job in the family, you might survive as a small farmer. Dolly May, his wife, teaches music in grammar school.
When it does come up for sale, bottomland has always been too expensive for many independent farmers like him to buy, so most of his life he has rented acreage and done custom farming as his sons do now. A few years ago the arrangements for a bottomland field was fifty-fifty: half of the profit to the landowner. That wasn’t really right, but that’s the way it was. Most of the land in here rich people own—city people. I hate to say this, but some of them are kind of greedy and they want a lot of money out of their acreage. They say the land is expensive today and they have to get more, but some of them bought it when it was thirteen dollars an acre instead of eight hundred like today. But one of these days I’ll be renting my land and I’ll be the same way I guess, although I know one piece of bottom I farmed for ten years—I had it in wheat—and my net worth went down two thousand dollars a year. I was worth twenty thousand dollars less after farming it because I just never got good enough crops off it even with fertilizer and spraying. Of course, I had to pay for all that and half the thrashing bill and all the seed cleaning—weevils belong to the farmer, not the landowner—so fifty-fifty wasn’t enough. Things are set up so that the risk is just about all with the man on the tractor. But today it’s gotten harder for a landowner to find somebody to take that risk, and my boys work with better contracts, usually sixty-forty. They’ve got to have at least that to cover the big machinery they run.
All the time we’re talking in the café, people pass the table and speak to Lloyd, many of them knowing him from his third of a century on the county school board. When the waitress drops butter and steps in it and grumbles as she wipes it up, Lloyd says, When I was a bachelor I used to put the Wichita Beacon on the kitchen floor to keep it clean; when the floor got dirty, I’d turn the pages. The waitress wipes and mumbles, I like it, I like it. Lloyd says, In those days, every winter we’d butcher one beef and five to six hogs for eight kids and the teacher we boarded. If there was ten of us at the table, she would fix eleven pieces of steak, always just one extra. I thought I had to do more work than the others—bring butter out of the well or haul in a pail, or do something—so I figured I was a privileged character, and I’d take the smallest piece of meat on the platter and eat it right quick, and then I’d get to that extra piece. Nobody contested me for a long time, then they finally caught on.
I ask him a question I’ve asked dozens of people here: how was it then? When I graduated from high school in ’36, a farmhand made two dollars a day, so I went out to Idaho, working the potato harvest and topping beets. Hard hours, but I made five dollars a day. I come back with seventy bucks in my pocket—well, no, I come home a quart of wine short of seventy: you couldn ’t buy wine in Kansas then, so in Nebraska I bought a bottle to bring Dad—he was straight French, you see. He made his own wine out of wild grapes he picked up along Middle Creek, and he aged it in our cave. He always preferred wild grapes to tame ones. It’s been some time since I heard of anyone here making wine out of wild grapes, but then we fed off the land pretty good. Other things we needed, we traded for: every Saturday we took our eggs and a ten-gallon can of cream—we milked our beef cattle—and took it all to Ellumdale and sold it to the grocer and turned right around and bought groceries. We didn’t have any cash to speak of. Along with the farming, Dad worked part of most every day on the roads. He was a township road boss. Back then every man had to spend one day a year working on the roads free or pay a two-dollar poll tax.
In ’39 and ’40, before I went overseas, I helped build highway one-fifty. It was all shovel and wheelbarrow work for thirty cents an hour. I made two-forty a day, and I’d take my road money and help the folks out: buy a sack of apples or a case of pork and beans. I wasn’t married so I was only allowed to work two weeks out of four, but a family man could work every week. I had some wheat in the ground too and we got along all right.
If there’s a crop I love to raise, it’s wheat: you plant it in the fall and just about forget it over the winter, and with good rain you can pasture on it till early spring, then top-dress it, and in June take your crop off. At harvest time everybody is excited. It’s special for us. I like to run a combine too. And I like to plant corn and cultivate, but I hate to fix fences. I’m a very poor fence mender.
I ask him how farming has changed since he walked behind the harrow, and he says, Kafir corn’s disappeared—now it’s milo. No beans then, soy. Fifty bushels of corn to the acre—now it’s two hundred. Silos are about gone—silage is put in trenches these days. Barns are nothing but metal equipment sheds. Big round bales in the fields—no more haymows. Gasoline instead of oats. We didn’t used to fertilize or spray. We’d cultivate the weeds out, pulled a curler—called it a snake killer—behind our lister and turned dirt up over little weeds, but we still had a terrible problem with them. These days we put a herbicide on right when we plant: I can show you big fields of corn or beans almost perfectly clean. We never had that before. And another thing: we all don’t visit around much anymore. We just watch TV.
I ask whether organic farming has a future here, and he says, If I was a young man and could make the same profit as regular farming, I’d go the organic route. I wouldn’t even mind using a team again instead of this machinery that’s got so big my boys can’t hardly haul it down the road. I don’t know whether you could get them behind a team. He thinks awhile, then, We’re hurting the soil every year. Nobody has patience anymore to grow clover and let it improve the ground. Farmers want all their fields making profit immediately these days to pay for their big machinery, so you don’t come across much good land in clover.
After a rain now, I see big piles of foam on the Cottonwood from field chemicals. We never used to have that. My boys got to wear gloves and goggles to handle some of these fertilizers and sprays. My dad’s worry was plowing into a bungle-bee nest.
I ask how he visualizes Chase farming in fifty years. It’ll be like today, I guess. Maybe different chemicals, safer ones. I don’t know—I don’t have much vision of it. I can tell you that when I look back, a farmer’s lot is better today—a smart one can become a millionaire, or at least close to it. Maybe, of course, some o
f that comes at the expense of people on down the line.
You can find some good changes too. We’re getting away from moldboard plows, ones that go down half a foot or more to turn the mulch under, and we’re using chisel plows that just scratch along like a harrow and leave stalks on the surface to give protection against wind. I think we probably should rotate our crops more than we do, but this system of government subsidies works against it. Now, machinery: I was twenty before we had our first tractor and twenty-three when we got a combine, but my boys grew up in a tractor seat. John cut his first wheat with a big, self-propelled combine when he was six years old, and the younger boy, Frank, when he turned six, used to get on a tractor and follow behind me when I’d plow: he’d drive around and around the field. A neighbor one day asked me what he was doing using up all that gas, and I told him I was just like Casey Stengel getting a relief pitcher ready in the bullpen, and the neighbor said, “But the boy ain’t pulling anything!” and I said, “No, but he’ll know how when it’s time to hitch him up to an implement.”
People told me my boys would never stay on the farm because they couldn’t make a living on it. Well, four of them are still here, but I think they’d have gone to the city if I hadn’t put them on them tractors and later loaned them machinery to get them started. They’re paying me back now for raising them to be farmers by making me help them. I know I should’ve learned more about all of it myself, but I was in the army. The best I could do was send our kids to college.
When Dolly was on the way to the hospital with the first child, she said, “What do you want, a boy or girl?” and I said, “Soon as you raise me three boys you can have all the girls you want.” And that’s how it turned out: the first three were boys, and I said, “Well, we’re through,” and she said, “No, I’m going to raise me a girl,” and she did, two of them. And then come along the youngest boy, and I said, “We got to quit raising kids so we don’t get more than we can educate.” It’s a good thing a couple of them helped by getting scholarships.