And men are proud, for of their knowledge they can make the year heavy.
They have transformed the world with their knowledge.
The short, lean wheat has been made big and productive.
Little sour apples have grown large and sweet, and that old grape that grew among the trees and fed the birds its tiny fruit has mothered a thousand varieties, red and black, green and pale pink, purple and yellow; and each variety with its own flavor.
The men who work in the experimental farms have made new fruits: nectarines and forty kinds of plums, walnuts with paper shells.
And always they work, selecting, grafting, changing, driving themselves, driving the earth to produce.
And first the cherries ripen.
Cent and a half a pound.
Hell, we can’t pick ’em for that.
Black cherries and red cherries, full and sweet, and the birds eat half of each cherry and the yellowjackets buzz into the holes the birds made.
And on the ground the seeds drop and dry with black shreds hanging from them.
The purple prunes soften and sweeten.
My God, we can’t pick them and dry and sulphur them.
We can’t pay wages, no matter what wages.
And the purple prunes carpet the ground.
And first the skins wrinkle a little and swarms of flies come to feast, and the valley is filled with the odor of sweet decay.
The meat turns dark and the crop shrivels on the ground.
And the pears grow yellow and soft.
Five dollars a ton.
Five dollars for forty fifty-pound boxes; trees pruned and sprayed, orchards cultivated—pick the fruit, put it in boxes, load the trucks, deliver the fruit to the cannery—forty boxes for five dollars.
We can’t do it.
And the yellow fruit falls heavily to the ground and splashes on the ground.
The yellowjackets dig into the soft meat, and there is a smell of ferment and rot.
Then the grapes—we can’t make good wine.
People can’t buy good wine.
Rip the grapes from the vines, good grapes, rotten grapes, wasp-stung grapes.
Press stems, press dirt and rot.
But there’s mildew and formic acid in the vats.
Add sulphur and tannic acid.
The smell from the ferment is not the rich odor of wine, but the smell of decay and chemicals.
Oh, well.
It has alcohol in it, anyway.
They can get drunk.
The little farmers watched debt creep up on them like the tide. They sprayed the trees and sold no crop, they pruned and grafted and could not pick the crop.
And the men of knowledge have worked, have considered, and the fruit is rotting on the ground, and the decaying mash in the wine vats is poisoning the air.
And taste the wine—no grape flavor at all, just sulphur and tannic acid and alcohol.
This little orchard will be a part of a great holding next year, for the debt will have choked the owner.
This vineyard will belong to the bank.
Only the great owners can survive, for they own the canneries too.
And four pears peeled and cut in half, cooked and canned, still cost fifteen cents.
And the canned pears do not spoil.
They will last for years.
The decay spreads over the State, and the sweet smell is a great sorrow on the land.
Men who can graft the trees and make the seed fertile and big can find no way to let the hungry people eat their produce.
Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby their fruits may be eaten.
And the failure hangs over the State like a great sorrow.
The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all.
Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground.
The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be.
How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up?