BOOK SIX
CHAPTER XXI
It was a summer night in Ohio and the wheat in the long, flat fields that stretched away to the north from the town of Bidwell was ripe for the cutting. Between the wheat fields lay corn and cabbage fields. In the corn fields the green stalks stood up like young trees. Facing the fields lay the white roads, once the silent roads, hushed and empty through the nights and often during many hours of the day, the night silence broken only at long intervals by the clattering hoofs of homeward bound horses and the silence of days by creaking wagons. Along the roads on a summer evening went the young farm hand in his buggy for which he had spent a summer's wage, a long summer of sweaty toil in hot fields. The hoofs of his horse beat a soft tattoo on the roads. His sweetheart sat beside him and he was in no hurry. All day he had been at work in the harvest and on the morrow he would work again. It did not matter. For him the night would last until the cocks in isolated farmyards began to hail the dawn. He forgot the horse and did not care what turning he took. All roads led to happiness for him.
Beside the long roads was an endless procession of fields broken now and then by a strip of woodland, where the shadows of trees fell upon the roads and made pools of an inky blackness. In the long, dry grass in fence corners insects sang; in the young cabbage fields rabbits ran, flitting away like shadows in the moonlight. The cabbage fields were beautiful too.
Who has written or sung of the beauties of corn fields in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, or of the vast Ohio cabbage fields? In the cabbage fields the broad outer leaves fall down to make a background for the shifting, delicate colors of soils. The leaves are themselves riotous with color. As the season advances they change from light to dark greens, a thousand shades of purples, blues and reds appear and disappear.
In silence the cabbage fields slept beside the roads in Ohio. Not yet had the motor cars come to tear along the roads, their flashing lights—beautiful too, when seen by one afoot on the roads on a summer night—had not yet made the roads an extension of the cities. Akron, the terrible town, had not yet begun to roll forth its countless millions of rubber hoops, filled each with its portion of God's air compressed and in prison at last like the farm hands who have gone to the cities. Detroit and Toledo had not begun to send forth their hundreds of thousands of motor cars to shriek and scream the nights away on country roads. Willis was still a mechanic in an Indiana town, and Ford still worked in a bicycle repair shop in Detroit.
It was a summer night in the Ohio country and the moon shone. A country doctor's horse went at a humdrum pace along the roads. Softly and at long intervals men afoot stumbled along. A farm hand whose horse was lame walked toward town. An umbrella mender, benighted on the roads, hurried toward the lights of the distant town. In Bidwell, the place that had been on other summer nights a sleepy town filled with gossiping berry pickers, things were astir.