The Bones of Plenty

by Lois Phillips Hudson

  When they reached the ocean, she left them in a safe cove and searched for a rock with which to make a great wave. In just a little while there would be no place to splash a rock for another whole year. The entreaties of the blackbirds rang wildly around her. What did they say to each other that excited them so much? It was awful to have to be a human being and never know what all the animals said and never get to live in a cave or a nest or a tunnel or the waving grasses in the slough.

  A flight of small gray birds swept over the water, so close they nearly touched their own shadows. They could have been leaves blowing across ice. How glorious to fly like that and see your own luminous image like an arrow flashing beneath you.

  Beyond the slough in the burgeoning pasture lay the blue pools of sky. How lovely to be a baby frog trying out first one pool and then another. Sometimes a cloud briefly dipped a white edge in a blue mirror. Sometimes a big cloud would blot out a mirror. Then suddenly Gid and Gad wheeled their black chariot between the earth and the sun, waving their black sleeves and spreading their barren skirts to eclipse the warm light, transforming the blue glass into a cold murky lake and causing the baby frog to kick out desperately with his long webbed feet and hide in the mud.

  Sometimes even the whole pasture would go dark, and then the sun would streak through in some far spot and ignite the ground; she would see the spot burn with an unearthly yellow-green fire. Then the clouds would move again and the darkness and the fire would both be gone.

  The sun told her that there was time for only one more voyage down the ravine. She must not be late with the cows. Cows could be very stubborn in new grass, especially this time of year when they were not in a hurry to be milked. Most of them were half dry because they would soon be getting new calves.

  At last she put the two ducks back in her pocket, wrapped in her handkerchief to get dry and warm. The clouds had multiplied and massed in the sky and the shadows of them raced over her and turned the air frosty around her. She began to notice how icy the soaked wrists of her sweater felt and how wet the knees and seat of her overalls had gotten.

  She ran up the hill that bordered the west end of the slough, hoping to find the cows before dusk overtook her. They were there, lined up against the fence and reaching through it, though there was not a whit more grass on the other side. Cows were never happy, once they came to a fence.

  “Hie on there!” she yelled. “Cuh boss, cuh boss! Hie on there!” They swung their heads on their flat supple necks and looked at her, but they did not move. She picked up a small stone and shied it off the flank of the nearest one. They started off then, but they stopped to chew at every likely tuft they passed.

  She studied the western horizon, feeling so much smaller now that the sun had gone from the pasture. The clouds banked above the hills had turned in a few minutes from white to deep blue. The sun was behind them, lighting their upper edges with a cold pale gold. Her father could always tell when it was going to rain by looking at the clouds. She wanted to be able to tell, too, so that some day he would have to say that she was just as smart as a boy.

  He was waiting for her at the barn, smoking a cigarette and leaning against the edges of the open double doors.

  “Right on time,” he said approvingly. He seldom sounded that way, and she was encouraged to try again to please him.

  “It looks like it might rain tomorrow, doesn’t it?” she said, looking once more toward the west before they followed the cows into the barn.

  “Could be,” he agreed, in a half-listening tone. “Could be,” he said again, for the rhythm of it.

  She could tell he had forgotten she was there. She went up the hill to the house.

  “How on earth did you get so wet?” her mother said. “You just got over one cold, and now you’ll probably get another. Hang your sweater by the stove and change into your other overalls. And you better take off your shoes and put on your slippers. Then hurry and set the table.”

  It was impossible for Rachel not to worry over how thin Lucy was when she saw how purple the cold made her. Her little body seemed so breakable, with such long bony legs and such sharply pointed wrists and ankles. But whenever Rachel mentioned getting Lucy’s tonsils out so she could gain weight, George would say, “Oh, pshaw! You ought to have seen me at that age! She’s fat compared to what I was!”

  “Why do Gid and Gad always wear such long black dresses?” Lucy asked.

  Where did that question come from? Rachel looked out the west window of the kitchen at the gold-and-blue clouds. “Why, maybe because they’re poor now, like all the rest of us. Maybe they don’t have any other clothes.”

  She turned from the window to confront the deep inscrutable blue of the clouds in Lucy’s eyes. They looked at her just the same way George’s did when she didn’t manage to say exactly the right thing to him. And sometimes those eyes, only seven years old, could look just as implacable as George’s, and sometimes as shocking and furious.

  Lucy took the ducks out of her pocket and arranged them on the windowsill. When she looked up again, the blue of her eyes was the happy artless blue of the clean melted-snow pools in a greening pasture.

  Monday, April 17

  The Wheeler inflation amendment to President Roosevelt’s farm relief bill was defeated in the Senate, thus leaving the value of the money under Will’s dead crab-apple tree still in doubt. Most of the big banks in the country were open again, and whole cities, so Will read in the papers, were going on spending sprees. However, there were no spending sprees in Eureka, North Dakota, nor in a thousand or so other places a great deal like it. The Treasury Department closed permanently the banks in those places. Most of them were very like Harry’s bank—little square wooden buildings set between other square wooden buildings on graveled prairie streets: little concentrations of desolation in the midst of millions of acres of desolation—emptiness distilled from emptiness. The desert sky and the blowing acres were omnipotent—immune to accusation. But the empty little banks with the boarded-over windows were there to point at, to explain all the other emptinesses, to be responsible for what had gone wrong with the world. The Treasury Department was so busy reopening the banks in big cities and restoring confidence to the country that none of the government auditors had got around to making final disbursements to Harry’s depositors yet, but the depositors all knew what to expect, and it didn’t matter that the auditors took their time about coming out to the country.

  Will went out to dig up his money and take it back to the Guardian Trust Company in Jamestown. With the snow gone and the ground loosened up, he came upon the box after only a few spadefuls. It startled him; he had had the feeling that it was deeper than that. He held it in his hands and thought how he had no more right than any other man to be holding a box with his life savings in it.

  He heard another whisper, like the one he always heard in the granary. The rust of your gold and silver shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days. And the one he must have had for a Sunday school memory verse before he was four years old—the one as short and unequivocal as a bullet—For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

  Could his heart really be in this rusted box? Would he break the rusted lock to find the money gone and a jeering comic valentine—his heart—in its place? No, here was the paper money, not so crisp as it had been, but not rusted either—the treasure he had heaped together for the last days.

  He took it into the house and stuck three hundred dollars in a vase far back on the top shelf behind the good dishes. He hoped he’d have a chance to slip it to George soon. He didn’t like having that much money around loose. He changed into his suit and went out to the kitchen to say goodby to Rose.

  He thought of something at the door. “Maybe we oughtn’t to let Rachel know about this—let George tell her. And I let him think you weren’t in on it either.”

  “I don’t expect to talk to him about it! And I
won’t to Rachel either. She’s got enough worries. I don’t care where George tells her he got the money.”

  “Well, so long then,” Will said. He didn’t feel a hundred per cent safe about putting his money back into a bank. He wanted to stay in the kitchen with Rose and not go to Jamestown at all.

  He tossed up the box, twirling it end over end, so high that it nearly touched the ceiling. “Come on. Get your hat and go to Jimtown with me.”

  “Will, have you gone out of your head?”

  He would not have known, from the way he felt, that spring had come.

  That spring came like a wandering, useless uncle of the family, welcomed only by the dogs and children who could not see that it was a shabby deceiver. In the prairies from Texas to Saskatchewan its carousing roiled the dust of nine years of drought. Dust thickened over the new leaves before they were fairly uncurled, and dust now, instead of frozen miles of water, choked the space between the earth and the sun, causing that northward-moving star to swell and bleed in prophetic tides across the evening sky.

  But the birds still flocked to the north in their sudden vast numbers, and the children played in the mud, and the seeds knew that it was springtime.

  Rachel was in the dining room, delicately sprinkling the thread-thin seedlings of tomato plants, when she heard the babble of red-winged blackbirds arriving in the north grove. She went out to the porch to watch them come. The bare tree limbs were clotted black with them, and the whole sky seemed hardly able to contain their singing. She thought how harmonious they were—how the staccato flash of red on their obsidian wings was so like the staccato music they wrenched from their tireless throats.

  They would wait only a little while in the grove before they followed the other blackbirds to the slough and began building their nests in the reeds. They would eat insects until the wheat began to head. Then they would eat wheat.

  She never ceased to wonder at the incredible powers of birds for adaptation. These had flown perhaps a thousand miles from the South to raise their families in the northern prairie. Some people thought migrations were a habit left over from the Ice Age, but nobody really knew why birds migrated. Why didn’t they just stay in the South all the time? Perhaps it was their migrations that kept them hardy and pliable and able to survive drastic changes in the world. Perhaps people ought to migrate too, and never strive to put down roots at all. It often seemed to her that the desire of human beings to own land was the cause of all their troubles. Their desire kept them enslaved, from one generation to the next. Yet how would a human being know who he was, without roots?

  George was getting the plowing done at an encouraging pace. The weather had been so favorable that he was actually doing as much work as he had planned to do, and that happened rarely. There was no land like this North Dakota prairie anywhere else in the world, he thought. But it was no good if it never got water, or if it was all allowed to blow away.

  A man who wanted to farm that land had to do what the land did. He had to explode with the spring explosion, and work as close to all the hours of the day as he could, just as the thawing winds and the germinating seeds worked all the hours of the day. And in the fall he ought to leave the ground strictly alone, the way the buffalo and Indians left the dying grass to hold the sleeping soil in the clasp of an ancient root system while the winds blew through the fall and winter and spring. But in the last few years George had seen more than one summer-fallowed field where the wind had completely leveled six-inch furrows. That was six inches of topsoil gone in one winter. It took a hundred years to make an inch of topsoil.

  But the people who tried to farm too much land plowed up as much stubble as they could find in the fall, so they could have that much more time in the spring for disking, harrowing, and drilling. Will was one who did that. He had begun farming in the days when there were sizable stretches of unbroken prairie to help stop the dust, and like all other old men he figured that what had always worked should go on working.

  George looked ahead and behind at the two incisive black lines he drew through the stubble—at the latitudes and longitudes he created. Among all the lines in the world that crossed and crossed and went to unknown points, only his own were significant as he rode the steel seat mounted over the two fourteen-inch plowshares, while the sixteen obedient hoofs plodded ahead of him, day after day.

  When the flock of blackbirds passed between him and the clouds, he did look up for an instant. It wouldn’t be long before they would be back to feed on the grain. Just one of the plagues visited upon the helpless earth by the busy sky. He looked back down between his legs at the plow blades just in time to see a fair-sized snake slither away behind him. Too bad a wheel or a blade hadn’t got it. That snake would eat a hundred toads that would otherwise eat a hundred thousand insects. There were precious few creatures of a field that were on the side of the farmer, that was a cinch.

  Halfway up the south side of the field he heard the clear brave call of a meadowlark. That was one of the few creatures on his side. Meadowlarks ate no grain at all—only insects by the millions—especially grasshoppers. The hoppers loved drought; they throve on it as the wheat perished from it. The USDA was putting out a lot of publicity about how bad the grasshoppers were going to be this year, trying to get the farmers to put out poisoned bait. But the farmers who had to borrow money for seed had none to spare for bait. In spot-checked areas around the Dakotas the USDA found 10,000 grasshopper eggs per square foot of sod. Four different varieties of them would begin to hatch in another week or so. Last year they had even stripped the leaves from the trees in some places, and left cornfields as bare as fallow prairie.

  Yes, so far as George was concerned, there was no sound in the world like the call of a meadowlark—his friend that preyed upon his enemies. He heard it call again, beginning on a high G natural and dropping about a third to an E, then back to G, then down five notes to a C, then back to E and G, with a final trill all the way down to C.

  He had an acute ear for music. When he was young, the boys had got together a little band for dancing, and he had played the clarinet. He had fingered out the meadowlark’s call one day, and had been surprised to find how high it was. That call was one of the earliest sounds in his memory. When he was five or six years old, herding cattle far from the house, that call in the early morning had made the long day ahead seem less lonely.

  As he passed a bunch of dead Russian thistles caught in the fence, he glimpsed the brightness of the lark’s yellow breast. No doubt it was making a nest there. When it sat on the nest to hatch its eggs, the yellow breast would not show; only the brown back, striped and speckled with black, would be visible, so that from above the bird would look like the shadows of the thistles on the ground. But that clever coloring hardly helped it or its eggs or its babies so far as rats, weasels, barncats, coyotes, and egg-sucking dogs were concerned. Well, he hoped that particular one would manage to raise a hungry brood or two, to discourage the grasshoppers a little. He’d remember where it was and leave those thistles when he got around to burning.

  A little way past the lark, the fence was sagging from its load of thistles and the dust they had stopped. He’d have to replace a post there if he didn’t clear it out pretty soon. When he was growing up, the days of the real Western tumbleweed were still not over. It grew six or seven feet tall on a tough stem that broke away from the ground in the fall after a few frosty nights. It would roll on the round crown of its branches until the wind flipped it up and it landed on its stem. Then it would bounce into the air like a clown on a circus net. Tumbleweeds had no stickers, and if they were young enough and the cattle were hungry enough, the stock on the range would eat them.

  But Russian thistles were a different story. They were shaped less like the tall cowboys who made the songs about tumbleweeds and more like the squat round immigrants who had stupidly transplanted them from the Old World. Russian thistles grew long hard barbs, and when they broke loose and started to roll, a man had to dodge o
r get nettled right through his overalls.

  After the lark stopped singing, George heard few sounds save those made by the horses and the machinery. But the silence was filled with the mute strugglings of a multitudinous embryonic hostility—in the wombs of rodents, the egg sacs of birds, and the laid and unlaid eggs of insects. Even the seemingly impeccable air was at this instant drifting over his field the spores of ruinous diseases.…

  Oh, it ain’t gonna rain no more, no more;

  It ain’t gonna rain no more —

  How in the heck can I wash my neck,

  If it ain’t gonna rain no more?

  He sang loudly to the horses, to cheer them along and to do something about the silence.

  “Hey, George!”

  He almost jumped off the plow seat. Trust his wife’s father to sneak up on a man from behind like that in the middle of an empty field.

  Will held out an envelope. “I wrote this up for four per cent,” he said. “Keep it for as long as you need it.”

  “Four per cent is not what I’d pay anywhere else, and you know it,” George said. “I’ll pay you eight.”

  “Whatever you say. But don’t let it be on your mind, George. See you later.”

  “You bet,” George shouted after him. “Much obliged.”

  I’ll pay him ten per cent, he thought. “Don’t let it be on your mind.” Oh, no, of course not! Don’t let a loan from your pious father-in-law be on your mind, especially when it’s more money than you cleared on your whole damn wheat crop last year, especially when you had to borrow it because of the dirty Jew who was going scot-free at this exact instant while you were riding around a field making two furrows at a time with a four-horse team that ought to be replaced by a tractor which ate only when it worked.