It was for the sake of political expediency and at the irresistible request of Divine Providence that Congress officially passed the Homestead Act of 1862. The act sought to encourage settlement throughout the American West and to legalize the long-standing American tradition of squatting.
Early colonial settlers had first squatted on the territory of Native American tribes, establishing vast federal landholdings that were, in turn, squatted on by pioneering farmers of the Great Plains.
In return for neglecting the legal niceties of financial obligation, the US government awarded these intrepid deadbeats with tracts of unclaimed public land. If settlers made the necessary improvements to the farmland and paid a small fee, the head of household would gain full title to the property after five years.
Five years, for instance, had nearly passed since Rufus T. McKay, a pioneer of the tallgrass prairie, had made the long trek with his family from their home state of Pennsylvania. He was intensely aware of what constituted the necessary improvements as he surveyed the 160 acres of Nebraska he was soon to own.
“Saddle up, Gregory!” he called out. “See if your mother’s got the Window ready. The Inspector must be on the train already.”
If the Homestead Inspector hired a stagecoach, he’d be halfway to the South Platte River by one o’clock. In that case, Gregory would need to leave within the hour.
“Listen fast, boy,” said Rufus, kneeling. “Your brother’s coming…” He clasped his dirt-covered hands onto Gregory’s shoulders. “Now, I trust you on a horse. And I know you’ll tend to that Window as if it were your own life.”
“I will, sir,” said Gregory.
Gregory, the McKay runt, couldn’t grow a beard any quicker than his dad could grow wheat, but that boy could ride.
“I just got word from Buck Hannassey—you got two stops. The Inspector’s visiting the Maragons, then the Hannasseys. Let’s pray he keeps to that schedule, anyhow, because if he decides to go to the Hannasseys first…”
Gregory nodded grimly.
“You cannot fail them, Gregory.”
“I know, Pa.”
Rufus raised a hand to his beard philosophically, revealed what was known as his “settler’s scar.” It was a pink star scored into his brown leathery palm by the handle of the moldboard plow. His older son Charles had one too, behind his knuckles. Someday, when his time came, so would Gregory.
“And once they prove up, you know what to do?”
“Yes, Pa. This time I will—”
“You take the Window back. Bundle it in burlap. Get Buck’s wife to help. Then you push that Inspector’s toes into stirrups and bring that man to our door.”
“But what if the Inspector sees me reclaiming the Window from Mr. Hannassey? He’ll know we fooled him. Won’t he cancel their title?”
Rufus tapped his feet impatiently. His heels against the sun-dried earth clicked like turning gears. “You want to be a man, don’t you, Gregory?”
“Yes, sir. Very much.”
“So use your wits, son. Some sleight of hand. I can’t think of everything.”
Gregory could feel time speeding up in his chest, synchronizing with his pounding heart. A flock of cliff swallows lifted off the grassy bank of the house. His eyes flew with them into the gray light of the leaden sky.
Charles McKay, a rambunctious child of sixteen, came up from behind Gregory, galumphed through the puddled glow of the winter wheat. It came in too sparse this year to make a crop, wisping out of the ground like the thin blond hairs on Rufus’s hand.
“Hey,” said Charles, shoveling his brother’s head under his arm. “What’s the fuss?”
So Rufus had to explain that when the sun next rose on the land, it—along with the autographed title—would be theirs. Charles’s grin was as wide, handsome, and toothy as his father’s.
“Tomorrow?” asked Charles.
“Maybe even tonight,” said Rufus.
The McKay homestead was a one-room dugout in a grassy hillside. Since there was no timber on the prairie, the floor and walls and roof and stables were hardened sod. In summers, the air inside grew as thin and hot as bated breath.
Rufus used the breaking plow to sculpt the sod into six-inch slabs of what local folks referred to as Nebraska marble. He stacked these into the walls, arranging each third layer in a cross-grained pattern with the grass side down.
Just then, Gregory noticed his mother, Janet McKay, seep out of the house in her blue dress streaked with dirt. The moment she saw her boys gathered, she ran down the contours of the powdery furrow like a streaming tear.
“Inspection day,” said Rufus at her approach. “He’s on his way now.”
“Says who?” asked Janet. “Who thinks they’re proving up?”
“Buck says. And we are. Daniel Maragon, Buck, the McKays.”
Rufus leaned in to the side of her face as if to kiss her cheek, then whispered
something that made her incredulous.
“The Inspector is a rumor—he’s smoke! How long do we have to wait before you believe that?” She looked over at Gregory and her voice fell like a seed into fallow ground. “What you want to risk…”
Heavy silence settled like a dust storm over the McKay homestead. Rufus finally split it with his thundering hymn.
“How can you talk like that after we’ve lived on this land for five years? Built our home here, held out through drought and hail, through locusts, Janet!”
Charles nodded along. And Gregory slunk away, tiptoed a half-moon around his family to get to the barn. As he tacked up his horse, Marjorie, he could still hear his mother’s voice: “I hear you lying to our child—‘It’s verified.’ ”
“Buck Hannassey is no liar,” Gregory reassured Marjorie. The horse’s tail quivered. “Don’t be scared. We’ll find the Inspector.”
History suggests that profitable farming on only 160 acres of marginal semiarid land was all but impossible. And at least half of the original homesteaders abandoned their claims, voluntarily or not, before they gained title to the property.
Such defections and deaths meant that the Hannasseys, whose farm was eighteen miles away, had become the McKays’ closest neighbors. The Hannasseys had met every Homestead Act requirement save one, which Rufus called “the wink in the bureaucrats’ wall.”
Every home needed a glass window.
On the new southern railways, barbed wire and crystal lamps and precut shingles poured in on the freight trains. But in the South Platte River Settlement, a leaded pane was as yet a good of unimaginable rarity.
Yet all the South Platte settlers had left holes in the walls of their sod houses, had carved out little squares and ovals of naive optimism.
Rufus McKay had long ago christened it the South Platte River Window, had proclaimed his family its mere stewards, and had sworn it to any claimant in need. He said his walls couldn’t wear the precious, fragile Window until his family proved up. So the McKays kept it buried deep in their domestic cave like a diamond.
While Gregory saddled Marjorie, he explained the day to her. Her ears flattened at the word Inspector.
He’d been riding Marjorie since she was a two-year-old filly. She was jetblack, broody, and didn’t fit with Rufus’s team. Up on her back, Gregory felt taller than any man in the prairie, taller even than Charlie’s morning pancake stack.
Behind the stalls, Rufus was shaking Janet like a ragdoll.
“By sunrise, we’ll own our home if you can muster faith.”
“Gregory is eleven years old,” she said slowly. Her voice was shaking now too. “The Hannasseys are a half-day’s ride even for you…”
Janet McKay never yelled at her children. But lately, her voice was dreadfully hoarse as though she’d been gargling sand. She was no sicker than anybody else. It was simply the dust.
Her voice, once a timeless melody, now strained pitifully whenever she tried to sing a jaunty tune for her sons. Her yellowish eyes were sunk deep into her face, vacant as windows of abandoned textile mills. Every long note she held pushed her ribs visibly through her dress.
“Do you want to send Charles, then?” said Rufus coolly.
“Oh, he can’t. You know that.” She chewed her lip like a hungry ruminant.
A few weeks ago, when the clouds dispersed again without a drop, Charles disappeared for three days. When he rode home, his hands were wet.
“Not my blood,” he told his father.
Janet sent Gregory on a four-mile walk to the nearest well to haul for a bath, even though washing day wasn’t until the following Wednesday.
Charles hated baths, but that night he let Janet sponge the black blood off him like a child fresh from a mud puddle frolic. Gregory cried when clean water splashed in waves over the sides of the trough.
Though he’d never admit it, Gregory was a little afraid of his brother.
“No, sweetheart,” said Rufus. “Gregory goes or we forfeit our chance. We don’t own the land where our girls are buried.”
“I’ll be fine, Ma,” said Gregory.
She left to get the Window.
There’d been no rain on the McKays’ land since the seventh of September. Half an inch came down at midnight on that day and Rufus drilled in the wheat at dawn. Most of it cooked in the ground. Last week the stalks started turning ivory, like shoots of winter light. Janet spoke to the shriveling sheaves with delusional fervor, as if they were her thousand thirsty children.
Rufus muttered that this weather would dry them all to tinder. He’d spent every day since that last hour of rainfall plowing firebreaks until exhaustion. He growled plaintively at the blue mouth of heaven—the one mouth too distant for his fists to lick.
Janet’s purple bookmark used to move around Bible chapters with the weather, but for the past year and a half, it’d been stuck on Psalm 68:9.
“Thou, O God, didst send a plentiful rain, whereby thou didst confirm thine inheritance, when it was weary.”
Through their home’s empty socket, Gregory could see his mother hunched over in the deepest shadows. Dust whirled around the floor in miniature twisters, scraping her ankles raw. She bent her cemented vertebrae over the glass on her lap. Poor Janet was thirty-one, but the frontier painted old age onto her with broad strokes.
All day she traveled this room, sweeping the floor made of dirt, scrubbing dinner plates into gleaming white ovals, shaking out shabby sheepskin rugs. Now she polished the Window by licking the end of her braid into a fine point and whisking it over the surface like she was watercoloring on stained glass.
The Window itself, in fact, was the size of a hanging portrait with an inch border of tinted glass. Two channeled lead strips traced amber and sapphire light around it. But the inner panels were the most beautiful, were as transparent as the soul of innocent youth.
Janet wrapped it in some scatter rugs and penny burlap.
“Goodbye, Gregory,” she said.
They fixed the cargo carefully to the horse’s flank, raveling half a dozen ropes to one knot at the saddle horn like a mooring bollard. Rufus hitched Gregory’s leg at a painful angle, warned him not to put weight anywhere near the Window. Then he handed Gregory an envelope and came up to his ear like he did Janet’s. “Tell the Inspector there’s more waiting at the McKay place.”
“Okay.” Gregory frowned. “Is there?”
Rufus slapped Marjorie on the rump. She took off like a bird at the sight of
sprinkled corn.
When he finally turned to salute his father, Gregory watched his parents
swaying together in the stunted wheat. Rufus’s big hands tightened around the
spindle of Janet’s waist and her face was buried in his neck as though engaged in a
dance. Her black hair cascaded across the caked grime on his shirt while she
sobbed as dryly as the October clouds above.
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