The Eighty-Dollar Champion - Elizabeth Letts [30]
The “farm problem” was at the top of most politicians’ agendas. Small farms were consolidating; workers were leaving or being pushed off farms; and the cost of government subsidies to farmers was skyrocketing. The entire way of life that underpinned the farm was being challenged from all directions. But when Harry and Johanna arrived, they knew nothing of the complicated economic, social, and political forces that swirled around farming at midcentury. They only knew that they were hardworking, and they intended to make a go of it in their new land.
Workers’ cabins were lined up in a row along the farm’s edge. Harry and Johanna’s new home had been fashioned from rough plank boards; standing inside, you could see gaps through some of the walls, straight to the outside. Harry worked in the fields from sunup to sunset, while Johanna tried to spruce the place up despite their small budget, sewing curtains and making cushions. They lived carefully on their meager capital, expecting that in November, when the tobacco crop came in and was sold at auction, they would reap a good reward.
The tobacco country in Guilford County, North Carolina, was nothing like St. Oedenrode, the close-knit traditional Dutch village where Harry and Johanna had grown up. But they appreciated the buoyant mood in America. The Dutch countryside had been ravaged by the war, and the postwar atmosphere in Europe was pessimistic. Loss and destruction had marred the landscape that people had known and loved—fortunes had been lost, villages torn apart. Across the ocean, the United States beamed like a beacon, a place where peace reigned, the homeland of the brave young men who had risked their lives to come to the Dutch people’s aid. It wasn’t easy to get a visa to the United States. Most young Dutch emigrants had gone to Canada, where the government had extended an open hand to people with a background in farming.
Growing up, Harry had believed that he would lead a life much like his father’s. While he wasn’t interested in the brewery business, he loved the farm. As the oldest son, he’d assumed he would take it over. But after the war, so much had changed. The farms needed to be rebuilt, and the economy was sagging. In his boyhood, Harry had worked harder than anyone to help his father keep the farm running. The farm and the brewery went hand in hand: the crops fed the animals and provided the hops for the beer. The one couldn’t survive without the other. But after the war, without horses to work the land, the fields had lain fallow, and the whole farm had fallen into disarray.
Harry’s father astride his horse. The church in St. Oedenrode is in the background. (illustration credits 7.2)
Then, a year or two after the war ended, just when things were starting to look a little better, a tornado swept through town, knocking over trees and littering the fields with debris. The next morning, Harry, then eighteen, and his younger brother Jan, thirteen, headed out to clean up their land. Harry took two horses over to a field that needed plowing; Jan took a third to where the big cultivator had been left the day before. A short while later, Harry looked up, confused to see Jan’s horse galloping toward him unhitched, with his brother nowhere in sight. Harry left his team and ran to the next field.
Jan lay on the ground unconscious. A tree branch had downed an electric wire, and some part of the metal cultivator must have been touching it. When Jan had grabbed the machine, a powerful electric shock had jolted him. Harry ran back to the farmhouse, shouting as he ran. The family poured outside to come to their aid.
Pale and silent, Jan lay in a coma for days. Each day the village doctor came around to check on him; but he said little,