They had moved onto the farm too late in the summer to plant or to do much of anything with the land other than try to save some of what was left of Duncan’s crop. With the spring, they would be able to try their own luck. Emaline wrote to the Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C., and to the University of Nebraska to order every pamphlet, booklet, paper that might help them decide what crops to plant, how and when to plant them, how to keep the soil from blowing away, how to irrigate in the absence of rain or to use the irrigation water that was pouring down from the Guernsey Dam in Wyoming.

She was able to engage Jake’s attention only now and then. The agricultural pamphlets were far too difficult for him to read, so Emaline would take notes for him and boil it down to simple instructions. Plant this, don’t plant that. Plow to a depth of eighteen inches. Plant in strips fifty yards wide, allowing one strip to lie fallow while you planted the other. Chicken manure makes the best fertilizer for a truck garden. Create a windbreak by planting a row of poplar trees. She learned to tell him what she had to say in five minutes or less. Longer than that and his attention would wander. He’d tap his foot, gaze out the window, pace back and forth. He was so perpetually restless that at times she wondered if it hadn’t been a mistake for him to retire from the ring. During the winter, he played checkers, listened to the big fights on the radio, worked horses on the coldest days, argued politics and religion with anyone who cared to argue. He also made it to every Saturday night dance in town, no matter what the weather. Emaline watched it all and fretted. Those dances were expensive. She went along with him at first, but they never got home before two or three o’clock in the morning, with cows bawling to be milked at six. He could do it, but if she tried to get through a Sunday on two or three hours’ sleep she would be exhausted for days.

In the spring of 1934, Jake did the plowing with the team, then swapped the draft horses and a hundred dollars for a used Farmall tractor from the International Harvester company. The tractor had been fitted with rubber tires and it had the narrow tricycle wheels on the front so that it could be driven between the rows. He also swapped the De Soto straight up for a little Ford Roadrunner pickup, a truck that would be a good deal more use on the farm than the automobile. Emaline wanted him to sell the motorcycle as well, but Jake refused to part with the machine.