distance behind them trailed a tall figure, limping his way toward the fire. When he came from the shadow of the trees and fully into the evening light, I realized I’d seen him before. He’d been the man with the megaphone exhorting the other veterans in the crowd to rise up and demand the bonuses that had been promised them for their military service. A dark bruise spread across the side of his face, and I remembered watching the cop clobber him with a billy club. But that didn’t explain his limp.
“Lost it in the Argonne,” he said, tapping his right pant leg, which produced a wooden sound.
We were eating by then, and that’s when I learned much of the history of the Schofields and Captain Bob Gray. Maybeth sat with the twins on the other side of the fire. Her hair was the color of her mother’s, the soft gold of the alfalfa after it had sun-dried in Bledsoe’s fields, but softer looking and cleaner than her mother’s. Whenever I caught her looking at me, she would quickly look away. For a reason I couldn’t have explained then, that simple, demure gesture captured my heart.
“The rain didn’t come the way it was supposed to,” Mr. Schofield said. He’d finished his soup—a tasty concoction of chicken broth and vegetables—and threw a stick angrily on the fire. “Last two years, the corn just didn’t come up. Had nothing to feed my livestock. They was all skin and bones. Bank told me to go to hell when I asked for more credit. Then they took the farm. The bastards.”
“There was a little more to it than that,” Mother Beal said.
“Yeah, well, that was the crux.” He stood abruptly. “I got things to see to.” And he strode off into the dark under the trees.
Mother Beal watched him go. “Drought, he says.”
“Mama,” Mrs. Schofield cautioned her.
“I’m just saying there were farmers around us who found a way.”
Captain Gray—that’s what he preferred to be called—was on a mission of his own making, attempting to recruit men to travel with him to Washington, D.C., to join the thousands of other veterans gathering there to demand payment of the promised bonuses.
“There are plenty of us here in Minnesota desperate for that money. It’s no handout we’re asking for. It’s what was promised. A government should keep its promises.”
“I don’t know why a government would behave any differently from the people who comprise it,” Mother Beal said around the stem of her pipe. “When it comes to money, people often behave in ungracious and ungrateful ways.”
After the meal was finished, Mother Beal said, “Children, help us clean up. Buck, you promised us a tune on that mouth organ of yours.”
“You play the harmonica?” Captain Gray asked. “Got me a squeeze box back at my shack. Mind if I play along?”
“That’d be all right,” I said. “Can I help clean up?” I asked Sarah Schofield.
“Obliged, Buck, but we can handle this. You figure what you’re going to play.”
I watched Maybeth help her mother. She gave instructions to the littler ones with a maternal patience, and she moved with a catlike grace, and for some reason I couldn’t name, her bare feet, slender and brown from the sun and from the dirt, seemed especially beautiful. I tried to think of a song that might impress her. I wanted something lovely and lyrical, but also a little sad and lonely, because that’s what I’d been feeling, and I wanted her to understand. I finally settled on “Shenandoah.”
When Captain Gray returned, he brought not only his concertina but also a large scrap of white wood on which HOOVERVILLE had been painted in large black letters. That word had been crossed out with red paint and below it was now the word HOPERSVILLE.
“This sign’s been hanging on the tree next to my shack for way too long,” Captain Gray said. “I thought it was time we called this place something brighter. What do you think, Mother Beal?”
“I think it’s perfect, Captain Gray,” she replied.
We played some tunes together. My repertoire was broader than his, but we knew a few of the same melodies, and as we played, folks came away from their own little places and gathered around the fire. And a kind of miracle happened, or what I thought of then as a miracle. One man brought out a sack of ginger cookies and passed them around to the children who were there. Someone else offered up a jug of cider.