The Bones of Plenty

by Lois Phillips Hudson

  She was forever rushing off to frenzied activity when George appeared. It didn’t hurt his feelings any, but it made him nervous. Sometimes it left him standing idle and intensely conscious of his two hundred pounds of unemployed muscle while he had to watch a thin old woman do something she refused to let him do. It was a way she had, he felt, of putting him in his place. Now she proposed to wrestle an unwieldy five-foot disk of galvanized tin up a dark steep set of stairs while he stood uselessly at the top.

  She was already down there rummaging about below him.

  “Let me carry it up, Rose, for Pete’s sake!”

  “Oh, I’ll just see if it’s down here,” she fussed back up at him.

  He stood looking through the kitchen window to try to catch a glimpse of Will. Finally she came back up to report that the brooder was not in the cellar.

  George had one more chance to find Will alone, if only she would let him go now by himself. He would pack up the whole family and head West before he would let Rose hear him ask Will for money.

  “I’ll call him,” she said. “He’s out in the sheep shed, I think.”

  She pushed up the window and yelled, “Will? Will?” The way she would start on a high note and then let the one syllable of the name slide down her throat, straining and gargling to get volume from an “l,” was enough to make a man come running to see what awful thing had happened. George was certainly glad that Rachel didn’t call him that way. Not that he would have stood for it.

  “Why, I’ll go find him, Rose,” George cried.

  He started for the shed, hurrying to head Will off. Sheep were one of the things he and Will disagreed about. George wouldn’t have a sheep on his place. He simply couldn’t stand the beasts, and besides, they ruined good pasture land. Will was putting salve on the ewes’ teats so they wouldn’t crack and chap in the freezing nights. He, too, was a little surprised to see George at that time of day. He pulled a blue bandanna out of his hip pocket and wiped his hands on it. “How’s it going, George?”

  “Pretty fair,” George said. “Rachel thought I might as well pick up that brooder you folks don’t need. Rose can’t seem to find it.” He thought Will looked relieved. Was that because Will had had second thoughts about the loan?

  “Oh, I meant to tell her,” he said. “I left it out in the granary. Let’s go get it.”

  Even after the sliding door had stopped its grumbling and echoing, they could still hear the scraping flight of rodents. “Damn the vermin!” Will said. He had to be really exasperated to swear, and he was. He had stored as much wheat as the granary would hold rather than sell at last fall’s prices. But the rats and mice and insects had seemed to converge on him from the whole country. Their multiplying and marauding had gone on despite his traps and poisons, and the price rise he had been waiting for was still so slight that it would hardly finance the war he had been carrying on, let alone make up for the wheat he had lost.

  Will had read the Bible through more times than he had counted—the first time before he was twelve, the age of Jesus in the temple at Jerusalem. And one of the verses he had memorized from early childhood was the one that whispered above the scuttling of the mice each time he opened the granary door, as though the grain spoke from the heavy cold bins: Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal.… Take no thought for the morrow.… Consider the lilies of the field.… Wasn’t a man supposed to look out for his family the best way he could? It was certainly hard to know.

  They walked into the room where he kept the sacks of feed and chicken mash, and he pulled the brooder away from the wall.

  “Some of the braces have to be fixed,” he said. “You’ll have to find some kind of top for the water jar and clean up the burner a little. It’s really in perfectly good shape, but we just can’t use it this year. We got too many chicks last spring. A big flock don’t hardly pay its way now, anyhow.”

  George could see that it wasn’t going to occur to Will to bring up the subject. “Well, now then,” he stalled. “I reckon it won’t take too much to get her in shape.” It was now or never.

  “I figured I could make a deal with Vick for the seed wheat and the thrashers,” he said, “but the damn fool won’t let me put in any feed and hay if he lends it to me. I had—most of it in the bank.”

  “How much do you need?” Will asked.

  “Two hundred and fifty would do it, I guess.”

  “Are you sure that’s enough? I can spare you three hundred without hurting myself at all.” Will felt that he hadn’t said that the way he wanted to. It sounded as though he was rubbing it in.

  “Two hundred and fifty will be a great plenty, and I’ll be much obliged,” George said icily. He’d taken it the wrong way, of course. “I’ll pay you the same interest Goodman would have charged me—the dirty little kike.”

  Will wished he could defend Harry, but he didn’t dare.

  “I’ll get it here the first of the week and we’ll write up a little note,” Will said.

  George picked up the brooder and Will followed with the glass accessories. They were loading the brooder in with the two empty cream cans when Rose came out with a pan of hot cinnamon rolls covered with a dish towel. She put the rolls in the front seat and George climbed in beside them. “Much obliged, folks,” he said.

  They watched him go. “I can’t see why George is so set on Ceres,” Will said. “I bet I’ll beat him with Marquis this year, just the way I beat his Marquis last year. Seems like there’s a couple new hybrids every year, but they never do anything except right in the spot where a bunch of Fargo professors are coddling them along in a little kitchen garden. Look at what happened to Clarence Egger when he planted Hope. That just about ruined his hopes for good—that’s what Hope did. Ceres probably won’t work out a bit better, either, but then, you can’t make a young man see things like that.”

  George was irritated by the banging of the brooder against the cream cans, but he was even more irritated by the spicy smell of the hot bread. He was sure that Rose was always sending food to his house because she felt his family might not be properly fed.

  He walked back into his house carrying a new burden now—no longer of anticipation but of fulfillment. The burden of humbling himself was past, but the burden of debt was just begun. For him the debt was by far the easier burden of the two. Still, if he didn’t get a harvest, there was absolutely no place left to turn. He had already gone to the man he had managed to avoid going to ever since he had married that man’s daughter.

  “I got the brooder,” he said to Rachel. And then, as gratuitously as usual, it seemed to her, he added, “I’ll bet your dad has lost a hundred bushels of wheat this winter. That granary is a regular breeding ground for pests. I told him he should have gone ahead and got rid of some of that wheat. I’ve never known the time that that man has listened to reason.”

  He stopped to hear what was coming over the radio. Then he guffawed bitterly. “Well, somebody’s happy somewhere today! Beer and wine over the counter! Roosevelt better look out. All the bootleggers’ll be voting Republican next time. Yes, sir! Roosevelt—the friend of the forgotten man! No more Goat Whiskey and Indiana Red Eye. What in the world will the politicians and cops do for graft money now? Why, even your little brother can go on a legal bender today—that is, if he’s in one of the right spots. Where was he, did you say, when he sent the last letter?”

  “Arizona. On a ranch.”

  “Well! He’s in business then. Did you hear it? Arizona was all ready for Roosevelt. Stuart can go on a nice safe drunk, without losing his eyesight or paralyzing his hands and feet. And he won’t have to guzzle any more canned heat nor antifreeze.”

  “Oh, George, why do you hate everybody in my family so much!”

  “Because they’re hypocrites! Lucky hypocrites that just happened to get born at the right time. They got in when the getting was good and now they try to tell me it wasn’t luck—it wa
s their hard work and their God-damned religion!”

  In a few more weeks Lucy would be promoted to the third grade, beginning the next fall. And still she would be in the same room where she had been this year and last year, and probably have the same old teacher. There would not be a single new thing to look forward to except the miseries of multiplication. She had finished the third-grade reader before she was out of the first grade.

  If there had been anybody at home to play with, Lucy would have preferred never to go to school, but Cathy was too little to be much fun. At school she sat at her desk and dug her toes into her shoes all day long, waiting for the big clock over the door to release her. After she had had a pair of shoes for two or three months, the innersoles were worked up into ridges between her toes and the ball of her foot.

  By this time of the year the humps were as big as they could get and she could feel the shapes of all her toes in them. She had torn away all the lining from the uppers by scraping at them with her toenails, and large holes were wearing up through the soles, layer by layer, to meet the holes she made with her toes. It was because she skipped so much, her mother said, that she was so hard on shoes, and Lucy tried to remember not to skip, especially in gravel.

  Now, with the winter wind suddenly gone and the heated gravel making the bottoms of her feet warm, she felt a hateful itchiness under her skin when she thought of being trapped in the second-grade row, between the first- and third-grade rows, for this whole first day of spring. All day long she had not got over being mad at her father, either, and she had hunched over her papers so Douglas Sinclair couldn’t copy from her. If boys were so much smarter than girls, why did any boy she had ever sat behind always want to copy her papers? If only she dared ask her father that question! And she could chin herself more times than Douglas could, or than either of the other two boys in her grade. She had told her father that, and he had said that was because the boys lived in town and weren’t like the farm boys he had in mind. But he would see, now, how much faster she could walk home than Douglas Sinclair ever could.

  Right here, however, she had to walk slowly and make as little noise as she could, for fear of Mr. Greeder’s mean bull, and she put her hot coat back on because she was wearing a red blouse.

  It was not polite to say the word bull, or even to think it. In fact, it was practically a sin. Lucy had begun to wonder, lately, how a person was supposed to keep impolite or even terrible words out of her head. She even knew two words that were so bad people only wrote them in different places and never said them, but still the words said themselves in her head; they were very simple words and she knew how they would sound, even though she didn’t know what they meant or why they were terrible.

  She couldn’t see the cow, she said loudly in her head, but still she did not dare to unbutton her coat. Two things were sure to make a cow sense your presence, no matter how far away from the road he was. The two things were running or showing something red. It was just the same thing as having a dog smell you if you were afraid.

  Finally she reached the foot of the long hill with her family’s mailbox at the top of it, but just as she was starting up, she heard the horses and the creaky buggy behind her. She knew who it was, without looking, by the buggy and the voices. The buggy was so old that there were no more like it in the world. Its black leather top flapped and tilted over a trio of struts coming up on either side of the seat. Behind the double triangles made by the struts sat the stiff black figures, strangely flat and hazy, as though they were hiding in a very old photograph from which they would jump out and come alive at any instant.

  At once the sounds of being under water began inside Lucy’s head, and that showed she was afraid, even when she had made up her mind that she wasn’t. It’s only Gid and Gad, she said. Sissy! Sissy! SISSY!

  But they looked exactly like every picture of a witch she had ever seen. One appeared to be skinny and the other fat, but all the skin and shape of a woman that ever showed on them was their faces. From their chins down they were heaps of black tassels of shawls and cloaks and heavy black cloth of sleeves and swooping skirts. The buggy drew closer and the sounds of being under water became loud and continuous in her ears.

  They’re not witches. They’re just old maids. That’s all that ails them, Daddy said. But they’re mean. Horses don’t pick up their feet that way, so high and fast, as if the ground was afire under them, if they haven’t been trained with chains looped around their legs above their fetlocks. And it’s even against the law to bob their tails like that. Daddy said so. It’s too cruel to cut off a horse’s tail. But they just have horses like that because their family used to be rich and rich people always used to have them. That’s what he said. Gid and Gad were too good for the men around here, they thought, and now they’re nothing but old maids. Old maids are nothing but grown-up women who don’t get married. Not witches.

  Anyway, why would real witches need real horses? But perhaps the horses were not real either. A clock could chime or a magic bugle could blow and the horses could turn back into something else.

  “Let us give you a ride!”

  She had been going to jump into the ditch and run for it if they came after her, but her legs just stood there.

  “Put your foot on the step there. There’s lots of room.”

  She could feel the way the bones under the black cloth were swaying and pressing together in order to fold her in. At the level of her eyes a pointed shoe stuck out from under the cloth. A line of black fasteners ran down the side of its wrinkled instep. It was impossible to imagine a foot inside the shoe.

  “I just go up there,” she whispered, waving her hand at the tiny mailbox so far away.

  “But that’s the hardest part of the walk. Hop in here, and we’ll take you up. Do you climb inside, now, and see if the oven is warm yet.”

  “Oh, please let me go!”

  The witch shut her mouth and her lips disappeared as if she had eaten them. She slashed the horses with her long black whip and the team went into a gallop from a standing start.

  Lucy was afraid to move till they were halfway up the hill, still at a gallop. Then she began to run. She didn’t stop until she had turned into the driveway. By then the need of her lungs for air and the underwater sounds in her head were as bad as they were the time last summer when she jumped off the dock into the James River before she knew how to swim. A laughing high-school girl whom she still hated had reached into the water, finally, and pulled her out by the straps across her back. At first she had been thankful, but then she had become embarrassed as she stood there coughing and coughing and coughing, surrounded by laughing people. Sometimes at night, and often when she had done something silly, she would think about that laughing girl who saved her life and grit her teeth trying to stop the embarrassment from burning her face and prickling her eyes with terrible dumbbell sissy tears.

  She was beginning to feel it now. Her mother had told her always to be polite to Gid and Gad and not hurt their feelings, because they were sad not to have any little children, and not ever, ever to say they were old maids when they could hear her. Polite, polite. Bull, bull, bull! Old maid, old maid! “Oh, please let me go! Oh, please let me go!”

  The mimicking noise in her head could just as well have been Douglas Sinclair running after her, mimicking that unbelievable scream. It went on and on, no matter how many impolite words she shouted back at it.

  And still, with all the noise in her head, she thought of how horrible it would be to be an old maid. And then came the thought that even made her stop running. Could she ever marry Douglas Sinclair in order to keep from being an old maid? There was only the one hope left—the miracle she prayed for every night—that God would turn her into a boy so she wouldn’t have to be an old maid, or marry a man either.

  “Hello!” her mother said. “You’re home so soon. Did somebody give you a ride?”

  “Just ran,” Lucy said.…

  It was getting cool in the shadow of the house
, but it was warm in the pasture. Lucy slipped under the gate by the barn, straightened up, patted the two little celluloid ducks in her overall pocket to make sure they hadn’t spilled out, and started for the far corner of the farm, running again.

  Long before she rounded the hill that stood between her and the slough, she heard the innumerable, unceasing calls of the new flock of blackbirds that had come there to nest. She stopped to listen and watch for a minute. There was at least one bird on every cattail or bit of brush still standing after the winter storms. It was hard to see how a bird hung on to a straight-up-and-down stem that swung under it like that.

  She followed one of the rivulets that fed the slough. Its source was a shady ravine where the snow and frost tarried the longest. The rivulet was deep and swift for a long way up the ravine. She took the ducks out of her pocket and launched them tenderly into the water. One of them was brown and the other was gray-blue. She had had them for three years now, and she saved them just for April.

  The miniature river wound about hummocks sloped as subtly as the mile-round hills rising behind her. The hummocks were beginning to be green, and the washed black mud of the stream bottom was embroidered with sparkling circlets of unfolding leaves. Here and there the water gushed between dark rocks and the ducks leapt and twirled in the rapids. She made bridges of straw for them to swim beneath because she had always wanted to swim under a bridge herself. She rescued them from eddies and spoke to them about the adventure they were having and warned them about the huge and dangerous ocean they were sailing toward. If only she could be as small as the ducks and live in this enormous kingdom of brilliant water and unexplored forests. That would be a hundred times better even than being turned into a boy.

  Each winter as the time for thawing drew near, she began to be afraid that the kingdom of the ravine must really have been a dream. Then she would look at the ducks waiting in their proper spot on the kitchen windowsill, so small against the great swirling feathers of frost on the glass behind them. She would know that in the interlude between the glacial winter wasteland and the flaming summer wasteland, those very ducks had swum down an emerald river in a fairy country that was wet and green, like the places she had read about.