Wind and Wheat

by Mike Mayak

I went custom cutting during the hot summer of 1980 when I was nineteen years old.

Growing up in Millington, Kansas we were always around farm country even if you live in town. My cousins had grown up on a farm between Millington and Pending and so I’d helped out at harvest time but since I was nineteen I signed up for custom cutting.

My Brother had done it the year before and told me it was a great way to meet girls. I was also interested in meeting guys but I didn’t tell him that. Besides, it was better than spending the summer working at the grocery store again.

Custom Cutting involves taking a combine and harvesting somebody else’s crops for pay. Between my cousin and a couple of their neighbors we had enough people and equipment to make some serious money.

It was the second week of cutting and we were up in Nebraska just sitting around outside with a couple of beers, enjoying the cool of the evening when Big Arlo asked if any of us had ever heard about the Wheat Stalker?

“Yeah,” said Benjy. “Isn’t that the Wichita State mascot?”

“Naaaah! It was a TV show,” Jonnie Miller said. “Darren McGavin was in it.”

They started laughing. Big Arlo wasn’t laughing.

“The Wheat Stalker,” Big Arlo said, “is a Spirit of the Prairies that follows the wheat harvest. It was rejected by the other spirits and so it goes its own way. It’s made up of failed crops, vanished dreams and dashed hopes. It makes a sound like a mournful wind through the trees and a crunching noise like walking on crumbled, dried wheat stalks. But nobody ever sees it.”

“So what does this thing do?” I asked. “Eat people or wheat?”

“It finds somebody who is having doubts about themselves,” Big Arlo said. “It feeds their fears, their doubts, their inadequacies. Makes them leave the prairie. Move to a city where they are more comfortable surrounded by concrete and steel.”

We went on talking about other things and when the beer was finished we reluctantly went into our cheap motel rooms for the night.

It had gotten down to eighty degrees with a breeze outside but that was cooler than inside the motel room where the wall air conditioner barely worked and we slept four to a room. Two of the guys took the bed and Benjy and I slept on the floor. We’d flipped a coin for the bed and I figured I won because the floor was probably cooler than two guys cramped on that bed would probably be.

Something woke me up. I stared at the room; dim light coming through the curtained window. The motel. Yeah. I checked the luminous dial of my watch; 2:15. Been asleep a couple of hours. I sat up and listened for a moment. I knew I’d heard something.

There! A low, mournful noise made by the wind. Probably blowing through the harvester. That kind of noise had spooked me when I’d heard it as a kid, it shouldn’t have spooked me as an adult.

I was dead tired. My head plopped back down on my gym bag that I was using as a pillow and I was out. The last thing I heard was a crunching noise outside.

The next morning we headed out, only to find that Jonnie Miller had checked out in the middle of the night.. The desk clerk (who Jonnie had woken up) said he’d caught a lift with a trucker and said he was going to get a bus to the East Coast.

Big Arlo and I looked at each other but didn’t say a word. Had he heard the wind in the middle of the night? I was sure Jonnie Miller had.

Me, I’d heard the wind but I stuck with the job and came back home with nothing worse than a sunburn.

And I stayed in my air conditioned bedroom for a week.

—end—

AUTHOR’S NOTE: My best friend in College, the late John Bogner, went custom cutting in the summer of 1980. The rest is totally fictitious. I wanted to do a riff on a Fritz Leiber story, but this is what came out. Big Arlo’s story is highly reminiscent to me of Ray Bradbury. —-mike, 8/11/23