A Grain of Wheat Read online

  Although it was muddy and messy everywhere, no one was complaining. Large patches of snow still dotted the fields, but each day a revitalized and rejuvenated sun squeezed a little more cold rushing water out of them and dumped it into the low places. And when the low places filled up, new streams were born leading to gullies and ditches, whence the turbid waters raced on into swelling creeks and streams. Doughty flowerlets fragile to behold were breaking through the snow crust and heralding days of profuse color ahead. The grip of frozen death was relaxing and the whole world was warming to life again.

  Away out in a field more than a mile from College Hill, a strange figure was sloshing through the sloppy snow, every now and then breaking through thin spots and sinking deep into the mud. He looked ridiculous in his tattered work jacket, his faded pair of Levi’s, and his floppy galoshes.

  From the moment he had stepped out of the dorm that morning, Steve had known what he was going to do with the day. Giving a shudder at the mere thought of Dr. Brockhaus’ 10:20 physics class, he went back inside, slung his .22 over his shoulder, and headed into the nearby woods for a day of squirrel hunting under the streaming sun. How could anybody with real blood in his veins resist the invitation of such a glorious day? So now there he was, trampling over the fields towards the large wooded tract of land on the Anderson farm where they had told him he was always welcome.

  And what a day for hunting it was! The trees, still barren of their leaves, offered little cover for the acorn-fattened squirrels. Arriving at the edge of the woods, Steve stopped to look it over. The untouched contour of the forest floor, the untamed tangle of trees, stalks, bushes and vines, and the startling depth of the blue sky all drew his heart free from its usual shroud and set it on edge.

  That morning he took many trick shots and left many easy ones, giving the squirrels what he considered more than a fair chance. Often he just sat down on a high spot free of snow or on a fallen log and took in his surroundings. This total change of environment exhilarated him and the freedom he felt here cheered him up. The cloud of gloom that had hung over his soul for so long gradually began to dissipate. Immersed in the goodness of his immediate surroundings, he forgot about all the things that had kept him depressed. He felt so much a part of this special world that for a little while it actually seemed to him that he could possess it forever. At noon he skinned a squirrel, sprinkled salt on it, and roasted it over a crackling fire. It was mouth-watering.

  As evening approached, he gathered up the fourteen choice squirrels he had shot and carried them down to the Anderson farmhouse. He knew that they were very fond of squirrel and that ever since their children had grown up and left home, their many chores left them little time for hunting. With a measure of pride and satisfaction, he presented his collection to them. Old Anna beamed from ear to ear.

  “Ya, and I vass yust commencin’ to get very hongry for dem!”

  They wouldn’t let Steve leave the farmhouse until he had eaten all the roast squirrel and other fixings he could hold.

  He took off down the road back to the college at that time of dusk when the world seems to recede in all directions, leaving the observer alone with his thoughts. The whirr of the wind and the noise of the day’s activities cease, and a man must make his own music. It was still early enough in spring for the sun’s mellow influence to vanish the moment it dipped below the horizon and for winter to return for the night. But just now the air was still tangy and crisp, the earth warm and soft. Contentment and indefinable peace reigned in Steve’s soul, quickened by the aftertaste of a successful adventure.

  Then behind him, in the distance, he heard the soft erratic hammering of an engine. It grew gradually louder as it bore down on him. Looking over his shoulder, he could make out in the twilight one of those motorcycle contraptions American soldiers had discovered in Europe during the Great War. It was wallowing and splashing grotesquely through the slosh and mud. Steve had to laugh out loud. The only other motorcycles he had ever seen were sleek black darts racing along well-graded roadways, leaving a trail of dust in their wake, a far cry from the sight before his eyes now. Mud and water were flying in all directions. The machine was clawing hungrily at what was supposed to be the roadbed. The rear wheel was sliding around in the ruts formed during the heat of the day by the traffic that had passed over it, and the front wheel was responding to the driver’s skillful efforts to hold the thing on the road and keep it from bogging down.

  It didn’t take long for the cycle to overtake Steve. He stepped a respectable distance off to the side, but the cyclist had caught sight of him and pulled to a halt. “Hi there!” he shouted. “Don’t you live on the east end of the dorm?”

  “Yeah!”

  “Well, come on! Climb aboard if a little mud doesn’t bother you. It’ll soon be dark. I’m heading up there right now.”

  Nothing could have struck Steve’s fancy better. The perfect end to a perfect day!

  “You bet! What’s a little mud?” His heart swelled up within him as he swung onto the rear extension of the seat. Cramming his .22 between himself and the driver, he grabbed onto the rings on the back of the seat and planted his feet on the footrests.

  “Better hang on to me around the guts. It gets a little tricky with all these ruts. By the way, I’m Craig Olafson, from St. Paul.”

  “Steve Pearson. North Dakota.”

  “Good to meet you, Steve.”

  Craig shifted into gear. The engine roared. Steve plastered himself to Craig’s back and they were off in a spray of muddy water. On up the road snorted the laboring cycle, careening from side to side. For one of the two riders straddling its back, these wild moments were to epitomize for months to come what life should be all about, an unforgettable dream, a symbol of true freedom, a heady blend of inner peace and life on the edge.

  It was all totally beautiful for Steve—the smooth embracing flow of cool air around his head and ears, the reassuring swell and ebb of the engine, the thrill of surmounting all the challenges that came along, the flying mud, the splashing, the sliding around, even the noise. As they roared up the hill and swung through the stone gate into the upper campus, Steve’s heart swelled with pride. This was life!

  Craig pulled the cycle up behind the dorm. Not a few curtains drew back as they sputtered to a stop. He gunned the engine a couple of times to clear her out and then shut her off. A deafening quiet encased the two of them. Through the ringing in his ears, Steve overheard the affectionate comment, “Well, baby. It’s a shame I’ve got to sell you. A fellow’s got to pay his way somehow.”

  Craig turned to Steve who had hopped off the cycle. “Hope you don’t mind a little mud there. At least you’re home before dark.”

  “Not at all. I’ve been wallowing in it all day.”

  Now for the first time the two young men were looking at each other face to face. There was a moment of muffled silence and surprise. Then they burst out laughing, and they laughed themselves sick and silly.

  “Naw, a little mud never hurt anyone!” Craig proclaimed.

  “Maybe you should open a beauty parlor that offers mud packs.”

  “Do you think they’d approve of my way of applying them?”

  They stared at each other for another minute or two. They couldn’t stop laughing and smarting off.

  At last Craig announced with a touch of urgency in his voice, “Hey! I’ve got to clean up for my date tonight!”

  “Sounds like a legitimate excuse to shed this stuff. Thanks for the ride.”

  “You bet. Any time. See you later.”

  They parted company, Steve heading to the east end and Craig to the west end of the dormitory. Steve flew up the stairs to his room on a cloud, trailing clods of mud behind him. That night he joked with Ted, his roommate, in a way Ted had never seen before. But he was genuinely weary now, limp from head to toe. So for the first time in months, after he had taken a hot bath, he fell into bed before ten o’clock and slept like a baby until the alarm went off in the mornin
g.

  VIII

  When Steve awoke the next morning, the brightness of the day immediately cheered him and reminded him of the previous day. The air was every bit as fragrant and the sun every bit as glorious as on the morning before. Nothing could have been further from his mind than the dingy atmosphere of the classrooms he so despised. As a matter of fact, he was among the first in line for breakfast. There was something about the whole appeal of things that gave him an appetite. A hearty breakfast seemed the order of the day.

  Who knows what prevented him from taking off across the countryside once again? When he stepped out of the cafeteria and inhaled the clean air, his spirit soared. In his mind’s eye he was back in the woodland where life went on in a harmony of desire and duty because its creatures were all doing by instinct exactly what they wanted to do. Watching a couple of early spring robins peck around in the damp lawn in front of him, he imagined their joy in possessing the bright wide freedom of the whole world. And then he looked around and thought of man.

  Why did man alone have to build walls, make unnatural laws, deprive animals of their freedom, and make a slave of himself? It might be understandable if some greater animal had robbed him of his liberty just as he had robbed the horse. But man had made a slave of himself! He had made his own bit and bridle. And if he was slave only to himself, then what’s to prevent him from setting himself free?

  “Nothing!” Steve exclaimed out loud.

  The rest of the morning he found it easy to live out his newfound conviction. It’s not that he rebelled against what was going on around him, nor did he openly oppose his teachers. Rather, it was the woodland itself, with its carefree spirit and elemental satisfactions still burning like a fire within him, which held the classroom, the professor, and subject matter at bay and made them simply irrelevant.

  At 10:20 he went to his physics class. Right off the mark, Dr. Brockhaus was visibly irritated by Steve’s unexcused absence the day before. He opened the class by letting fly a well-aimed dart in Steve’s direction which missed its mark because its mark was elsewhere in spirit. In the course of the lecture, Dr. Brockhaus asked Steve two easy questions to which he received no answer because Steve never even heard them. The student next to him had to jab him in the ribs and the question had to be repeated. The second time this happened, the professor took a deep breath and said in a cold tone of voice, “Mr. Pearson, you will remain here after class is dismissed.”

  This jolted Steve abruptly out of his reveries and back into the classroom. “What a way to die!” he flustered to himself.

  And it was as though he had just died. A moment ago he had been living his dream, and now it was gone. In its place there remained the cold propositions he had formulated in his well-ordered mind to make sense of his dream. The scenes and smells that had been dancing around in his head now suddenly were reduced to tableaux, lifeless murals, mounted laboratory slides, information you could put into a dusty textbook. The old shroud dropped on him like a curtain and smothered him in darkness again.

  Class was over. Dr. Brockhaus was shuffling some papers around on his desk as the students filed out. Steve approached him slowly. When the other students were gone, the professor looked up and said, “Mr. Pearson, what is the matter with you?”

  A long pause ensued.

  “I was just beginning to think we were making some progress with you. Am I wrong? Do you have no sense of obligation to those who fought and died to make our world a better place? Doesn’t it matter to you at all that a lasting peace is within reach, that democracy is giving the whole human race a chance to move up, that men with your ability are more needed now than ever?”

  Silence.

  “Young man, I know what you did yesterday,” the professor went on more gently. “I know how difficult it can be to concentrate on your studies in the springtime. I was young once too, you know. But you can’t just spend your life yielding to your whims. It’s fine to indulge them in the right time and place, and in the right amount. But it is just plain foolish to choose them over the effort it takes to stick with things that are much more necessary but not as much fun. You don’t want to spend your whole life darting around after butterflies. You may not realize it now, but most of the good things you take for granted on every level, others have worked hard to place at your disposal. It’s the duty of every one of us to do the same thing for those who come after us. Remember, there’s a big difference between being truly happy and just having fun. Working to add something good to the rich cultural store that supports us all is the only path to happiness.”

  Steve was seething within. Here was a man so obsessed with “culture” that he failed utterly to see that “culture” was the very wall that penned man in, the very bridle that made him a slave. What did he know about life on the other side of the wall? All that mattered to him was adding to the wall, making it harder for people to escape. The job of the superintelligent is to shore up the wall and pen everybody else in, like cattle in the stockyards, is that it?

  Steve was too furious to talk. Dr. Brockhaus turned back to his papers. Stephan Pearson stormed out of the room, his beautiful world in a shambles and his orderly mind deeply offended.

  Back in his room he sulked and fumed. So great was his agitation that he finally had to turn to paper and pencil to get it out of his system. He wrote feverishly in a large scrawl all the convictions that had distilled in his mind that morning. He saved the paper and put it in the bottom drawer of his desk. For the next several months it remained there, a symbol of the lucidity of his reasoning based on real experiences and a silent justifier of nearly everything he did.

  He had scarcely finished writing and had just started to pace up and down the room when he heard a familiar roar coming from beneath the window. Down below he saw Craig winding up the engine of his motorcycle to go somewhere. A ripple of excitement passed over Steve.

  “If only every day could be like yesterday,” he heard himself saying out loud. “Then life would be life.”

  The memory of his thrilling ride through the dusk over the muddy roadway drew a pained smile across his face. It was a crooked smile that incorporated both what life could be and what life actually was.

  “If only…,” he mused. “If only….”

  He settled back in his overstuffed chair and listened to the sound of the cycle fade away in the distance. Shutting his eyes he tried to envision the day before, but succeeded only in evoking bits and pieces of it. Then all at once this bit came to the surface: “Well, baby. It’s a shame that I’ve got to sell you. But a fellow’s got to live somehow.”

  Steve sat up, startled. What was that all about? Did Craig actually say he had to sell the cycle? A shaft of light broke into the gloom and all but drove it away in an instant.

  “Why can’t I buy it?”

  It seemed forever until Craig got back. Was he out there right now selling it to someone else? What if he came back without it? An hour passed. Two hours. And then, through the opened window, he heard the sound he was longing for. He ran down the steps to meet Craig just as he pulled into the parking stall. Trying to appear relaxed, he sauntered over to him as he was shutting off the engine.

  “How’s she purring today?”

  “Smooth as ever. Polished her up this morning. It took a good hour to get all the mud off.”

  “That’s not hard to believe. I’ll bet you’re not too happy about having to … did I hear you say sell her?”

  “O yeah.” Disappointment was written all over Craig’s face. “I owe the school over a hundred dollars before the end of the semester. That’s what I get for buying a motorcycle with my college money, I suppose. But it was worth it even for just half a year.”

  “Do you have any prospects—for buying it, I mean?”

  “Well, there’s a couple of fellows in Minneapolis, but I don’t know….”

  “How much are you asking for it?”

  Craig’s interest perked up. “Well, I paid over two hundred dollars f
or it, but I’d be willing to part with it for a hundred and fifty.”

  “Would you be willing to take fifty now and a hundred within a couple of weeks?” Steve was not even trying to hide his excitement.

  And that’s how Stephan Pearson acquired the motorcycle that ultimately altered the course of so many lives.

  IX

  The rest of the school year involved Steve in a constant effort to escape as often as possible from doing things he hated. It helped that it was spring. Whenever the walls seemed to be closing in around him like the jaws of a mammoth vise, he leapt onto his cycle and fled into open spaces in a cloud of dust. Steve made the woods his backyard and the country roads his private pathways, all aimed at reliving his one perfect day.

  It was a strange fact that the more he employed his cycle to drain off the pressures swelling within him, the more he succeeded in stirring them up. The only relaxation he could count on came when he was on the move. His rides did succeed in momentarily smothering the fires of frustration within him, but like a shovelful of coal on a bed of smoldering clinkers in a furnace, their long-term effect was to generate more heat and energy than ever. Returning to the dormitory in the evening was a growing disappointment. The pangs of emptiness quickly caught up with him. As long as he was on the run they trailed out behind him like the dust he was raising, but as soon as he stopped they were all over the top of him, right down into the pit of his stomach.

  By the time school was at last over until fall, Steve had developed a firm concept of what he wanted to do that summer. He had long since concluded that the only thing preventing him from reliving the carefree happiness of his first spring day in the woodlot was having to come back to face on a daily basis people who were committed to enchaining his will to theirs. The answer? Get as far away from such people as you can. Find a place deep in the northern woods where you can spend the entire summer in harmony with nature in all its simplicity and undemanding routines. Leaving most of his things packed in a trunk in a store room at Christiania, he took his bedroll and a few other essentials and set off for home to get some money and pacify his parents.