Free Bess Truman by Margaret Truman Page A

He dashed to New Mexico in search of prime farmland that he hoped he could buy or lease with his Uncle Harrison’s help. At the farm, he watched his brother Vivian depart to his own farm - he had married in the fall of 1911 - and then let the hired men go, too. He was going to work the entire farm on his own to try to raise the profits. His father was planning to run for road overseer for the town of Grandview, and that was going to take much of John Truman’s time. “Work is the only way I see to arrive at conclusions,” Harry wrote. “This thing of sitting down and waiting for plutocratic relatives to decease [he was referring to his Uncle Harrison] doesn’t go with me.”
    Now began a terrific struggle to make the farm profitable and simultaneously keep Bess Wallace’s interest in him alive. Everything seemed to conspire against him. Trains failed to run, and he would lose a whole night’s sleep trying to get back to Grandview. His father became surlier about the time Harry spent in Independence. John Truman began going out of his way to make life difficult for his son.
    In this letter, written in the middle of August of 1912, Harry gives Bess (and us) a graphic picture of a particularly bad night and day. It began with the train sitting on the tracks halfway to Grandview until 6:00 a.m.
    There was a bunch of hoodlums behind me [on the stalled train] . . . and every time we’d get to sleep they’d let out a roar and wake me up. Mr. Galt [a fellow passenger] seemed to sleep placidly on. We both called ourselves some bad names for not going into the Pullman. But I thought every minute would be the last and it would only take them thirty minutes to get to Grandview.
    Well you could put all the sleep I got last night under a postage stamp. I got home at 7 a.m. which by the way is the latest yet for me, and changed my glad rags for my sorry ones and went to loading baled hay into a car. That is the hottest job there is, I think, except shoveling coal for His Majesty [his name for the Devil]. We finally managed to get 289 bales into the car at seven thirty this evening. I came home and put on my clean overalls and a white soft shirt, had supper and was just getting ready to come up and start this letter when Papa came in and said it was lightning around and that we should go over to a haystack some three quarters of a mile away where the baler had been at work and cover up the hay. I almost told him we’d let the hay go hang, for you can imagine how very much I’d feel like going three quarters of a mile across a stubble field with low shoes and silk stockings after being up all night and working all day - at 9 p.m. besides. I went though and handed up thirty two boards a foot wide and fourteen long while Papa placed them on the hay. I’ll bet two dollars to two cents it doesn’t rain now, but it sure would if I’d refused to go.
    It might be helpful to note that Harry was twenty-eight years old at this point. He displayed incredible forbearance with his father’s tantrums. But he also stood up to him. “Papa says he’s going to adopt a boy if I don’t stay home on Sundays. I told him to go ahead,” he wrote.
    A few weeks later, he excused a disconnected letter, explaining: “I have to write this on the installment plan, as usual Papa keeps wanting something.” Next came a report that his father was “on his ear” because he had come home with two loads of cows and Harry was not there to meet him. His father angrily telephoned Independence and was frustrated by an uncooperative operator. Harry was “glad.” He said that there was “no harm done and I spent the evening where I wanted to.”
    His letters are full of references to his exhaustion. One day, he fell asleep shelling corn. But he doggedly continued his visits to Independence. His devotion clearly began to make an impression on Bess Wallace. In the fall of 1912, they went for a walk in the country on which Farmer Truman proved he could more than