The Bones of Plenty

by Lois Phillips Hudson

  Oh, God forgive me, God forgive me. I don’t hate him any more. No, and I don’t hate the chickens. Don’t let the things come into my head. How do they come there when I have continually commanded them to stay away, when I have prayed for strength to fight them away? It’s the smell; the smell becomes my brain. Now here I am, already pitying myself again, excusing myself, and yet a whole lifetime was given to me so that I could learn gratitude. Forgive me, forgive me.

  My back is worse than usual today. That must be what ails me. What was he thinking of, my father David Stuart, when he set me to drawing buckets of water from the deep well, hand over hand, before I was eight years old? Didn’t he know it would bend me so I would never be straight again? He didn’t care, that was all. Stop, stop, stop! I’ve had good health all my life. My back is my only cross and I have always been able to work. What if I had been asked to bear tuberculosis or paralysis or the loss of a limb or insanity? Can I not ever, ever learn to be grateful? I have had enough air. The more I breathe, the more my mind disobeys.

  She set to work again, loosening the droppings with her hoe and scraping them into shovel-sized piles. When she had to stop to breathe again, she shoveled a load into the wheelbarrow and took it to the compost pile in the orchard.

  They had so carefully cultivated and protected that little orchard. Will had dug a fence deep into the ground to keep out the gophers and other burrowers that would have chewed the roots of the baby trees. They had done everything they could to nurture and guard it; yet a predestined force had prevailed over it—the same force that had overtaken Stuart, when he had gone on a lark with some other boys and they got hold of some bootleg liquor. There was only one way to explain the force. There was only one reason why there should be a difference between what people knew was right and what people did. There was a force far stronger than mortals which intervened between them and their consciences, and that force was Satan.

  The burning hellish years had come. Never before had the world been so evil. The thousand-year reign of the Beast had begun, and the mark of the Beast was on all who bought and sold, as it said in the Bible—for if the mark of the Beast had not been on men during these last years when governors and judges and senators had been the open and avowed friends of the bootleggers—even pallbearers, yes pallbearers, for bootleggers who had been shot by other bootleggers—if the protecting mark of the Beast was not on those men, then why had the world not risen up and overwhelmed them?

  This drought that slowly stifled the orchard—it was only one of the many symptoms that the Thousand Years had begun. Everywhere among the great and powerful of the earth there was fornication, idolatry, drunkenness, and blasphemy. And her own son had run away into that doomed world—for two years he had been there—dragged there by those whose greed drove them to damn the souls of boys.

  She hurried back to the chicken house to finish the cleaning and scatter new straw before she should have to go in to begin Will’s dinner. A hen clucked at her from a nest. It was a warning all too easy to interpret this time of the year. The hen would have to be captured and put in a breaking-up coop before it managed to sneak off and make a nest in the weeds where coyotes would get the eggs.

  She leaned her hoe against the wall and walked slowly around the roosting poles. The hen became louder and more quarrelsome. She wished she had her heavy leather gloves. It bothered her to be pecked by a chicken. She shot her hand beneath the warm feathers to grasp for the horny legs. Instead of pecking and standing its ground as she expected it to do, the hen half jumped, half flew at her face, with a startling rush of feathers and venomous exclamations. In her surprise, she missed her chance and the chicken squawked past her and thudded on the floor.

  Rose got to the door first and slammed it shut. The hen retreated under the roosting bars and fluffed the feathers on her neck and spread her wings. She stalked about under the poles, uttering low wrathful sounds, and glaring from her red-rimmed, unblinking eyes.

  Rose pushed at her with the hoe. The hen shouted savagely from a wide-open beak and zig-zagged under the poles, always out of reach.

  Finally Rose stooped quickly, doubled herself under the poles, grabbed a leg, and straightened up too soon, knocking her head against the befouled roost. Dizzy from her sudden move and the blow on the back of her head, she staggered to the door, dangling the screeching chicken from her hand. The hen battled with her wings till Rose flung her through the door of the first empty coop. One more hen that would have to be fed and watered separately for a week or more while she sat on the slats until the air circulating under her superheated breast cooled her nesting ardor. There was no use taking a setting hen out of the breaking-up coop until she had stopped clucking for a couple of days. So long as she clucked, her feeble mind was on nothing but hatching eggs.

  Rose went back to her scraping, still dizzy and still determined to be done with this job before she went in to clean herself up and peel the potatoes.

  Will wanted to finish drilling his flax field before he went in for dinner, but he stopped the Fordson for a minute anyway, and climbed down from it to lean against the drill box and rest.

  Even standing on the ground he still felt the vibrations of the tractor, like a sailor without his land legs. The engine missed badly. He’d have to have it gone over as soon as he could spare it for a day or two. Maybe George could find the time to fix it. It would be a way to put a little cash into George’s two big proud fists. He unscrewed the top of the tank behind the seat and poured gas into it from the five-gallon can stored on the tractor platform. The engine continued to sputter and he thought he better get going again before it stalled and died on him. He didn’t want to have to crank it.

  He did finish the field, pushing himself and the Fordson hard, and then he rode the tractor in and left it standing in the shade of the barn. Thirty feet above him, the galvanized blades of the windmill spun a blurred aureole from the beams of the sun.

  Everything was in a straight line—the sun with its invisible ring of blazing million-mile petals, the tin flower of the windmill blooming with hot light, the point of the well pipe four hundred feet below the revolving blades, and the middle of the earth. He and his windmill were suspended between two fires—the fire ninety-three million miles away in frigid space and the fire at the core of the planet.

  The water came up warm from the well, because it tapped a warm spring in the earth. Rose had never been satisfied with the well. It looked to her as though the men who drilled it had simply been trying to get as much money as they could. They had gone through vein after vein of refreshing, cool water, charging more for each foot they drilled, until they struck this warm, salty, heavy stuff under the layers of rock and clay and sand and gravel. But the supply was inexhaustible. As the drought got worse and worse, Will was more and more thankful that those well-drillers had tried to skin him. It just went to show how often a bad turn really worked out for the best.

  Before he had got used to the sharpness of the water, it had only made him the more thirsty when he drank it, but he had learned to like it and so had his family. They had a big cement cistern under the house from which they could pump fresh cold water into the kitchen all year round if only they got enough snow and rain during the wet months. The gutters along the roof caught the water and piped it down through a charcoal filter into the cistern. Then they pumped it back again through a brick filter. But in the years when the cistern went dry during the summer, they all drank the salty water brought up by the windmill, just as the stock did.

  The water was flowing now out of the long, moss-lined cattle trough down the hill to the sheep trough, and then out of the sheep trough into the pasture. He hardly ever shut off the windmill, because he had never had the slightest indication that there was any end to the water supply. Still, with both tanks full and the water evaporating so quickly—there was no use tempting fate. He walked under the tower and pulled on the wire leading to the blades. The flower folded shut, the companionable nagging sounds
of the rubbing parts ceased, the long rudder behind the blades creaked and drifted in the wind. For a while the salty river where the well pipe drank was free to flow wherever it would—there below the layers and layers of earth.

  He walked away from the flashing iron skeleton of the tower and looked up its narrowing height and the ladder that went to the top of it. He shook his head, remembering the day he had had to go all the way up to fetch Lucy back down from that ladder when she was only four. Stuart had pulled the same stunt, too, when he was about the same age.

  Stuart was dark now, but he’d been almost as light-haired as Lucy. The two heads had looked very like each other up there—tiny bright flowers a few feet beneath the great spinning flower. And when he climbed up to them, the two expressions had been the same—absorbed, purposeful, astonishingly innocent. The heads that had looked so tiny, so many miles away, looked so big when he got to the top of the ladder with them. Their chests, their stomachs, their narrow little seats were all smaller around than their heads. How did the baby bodies balance the heavy heads? How did the two-inch fingers grip so confidently the wide flat ladder rungs?

  Both of them were wounded and bitterly indignant. Neither of them felt the slightest need to be rescued. They had simply wanted to go as high as they could go and see as much as they could see, and it happened that they were not through exploring when he came after them. He grinned and shook his head again.

  Rose was pumping up the kerosene stove for a last jet of heat when she heard Will speak to the gold-and-white collie in the shed. He sloshed water from the basin over his arms and face and then he called in to her.

  “You know, Rose, every time I read in the paper about how they’re shipping water all over the country on freight trains just to keep the stock alive, I’m mighty thankful for that salty well out there.”

  “I suppose we ought to be,” she said. She was not in the mood for conversation. She was exhausted and she felt like a ninny for having got such a knot on her head because of a stubborn old hen. She had a headache now, but she refused to take an aspirin for an ailment that she had stupidly brought upon herself.

  Even his first washing out in the shed had taken enough dust off Will’s face to show the whiteness of it, but Rose did not let on that she noticed it. She never gave in to illness herself and she never encouraged anybody else to. There had been only one time in her life when she had almost given in. That was several years ago, when she got pneumonia. Will had brought the doctor, but it was not because of the doctor that she had lived. It just hadn’t been her time to go, that was all. Her mother and her grandmother had died of pneumonia. Weak lungs ran in the family, and her own bout with pneumonia had just been the first sign that she was going to go the same way the rest had.

  “Rose, do you suppose George would have a fit if we gave Lucy a pony for her birthday this summer?”

  “Why, Will, I’m sure he’d never let her have it. He’s even mad every time I give Rachel some old thing to make Lucy a coat or a jumper out of. I declare, what ever made you even think of such a thing?”

  Will leaned against the wall, still rubbing his hands and forearms with the towel. “Well, maybe it hurts his pride to think that he can’t buy new clothes for Lucy. Maybe he’d look at a pony in a different light.”

  “Everything hurts his pride,” Rose said. “No, I’m sure he wouldn’t hear of it. It would just make trouble.”

  “I wish there was some way for her to have a pony,” Will said wistfully. “Wouldn’t it be fun to watch her come galloping over to visit us? She’s such a wild little cuss. I bet she’d get a horse all lathered up just bringing in the cows.”

  Will ought not to encourage Lucy’s turbulent behavior. It seemed to Rose as though she herself was the only one in the family who cared whether or not Lucy grew up to be a lady. Even now it was a fight to get her to wear a dress or to keep her legs together when she was wearing one. Rachel was working too hard to think about what Lucy’s behavior might turn her into, and George and Will both did their best to make a tomboy out of her. It was awful. What would become of the child? After all, she was a girl. Every day she walked more like George, with long, unfeminine strides. “Whistling girls and crowing hens always come to some bad ends,” Rose often told her.

  Lucy would either sulk at this or laugh impertinently and whistle loudly. The child was a caution.

  “Maybe it’s just as well if she doesn’t have a pony,” Rose said. “She’d probably just kill herself on it.”

  “Oh, no,” he argued. “She’s really a pretty sensible little girl, I think. She’d handle a horse all right.”

  “Well, George would never hear of it and you know it. Come and eat.”

  It was one of those smoldering spring days that just kept getting hotter and hotter—a foretaste, Rachel feared, of another scorching summer. In the middle of the afternoon she sent some water to the field with Lucy.

  George saw the nimbus of her light hair, brilliant against the black earth, as she came over the rise of the hill toward him. There she was again, with nothing better to do than run over the fields. Why hadn’t she been a boy?

  He had not been too disappointed when she was first born, because he realized that one girl was an asset in a farm family; otherwise the mother had a hard time keeping up with the housework and the other babies as they came along. But no other babies had come for six years, and finally, after long months of hope, there was Cathy.

  And the older Lucy got, the more it seemed to him that she should have been a boy. She was running so easily now that he could see she had no notion that she was coming up a hill. She brought him a quart of water in a gallon lard pail. A tin cup rolled and thumped around the bottom of the pail.

  “You should have carried the cup in your other hand,” he told her. “This way we have to reach our dirty hands down through the drinking water to get it.”

  He noticed the way something set in her face and it angered him. A man couldn’t even make a contribution to the practical education of his child any more without having the child act abused. He handed back the drinking cup. She set off for the house again, picking up momentum as she began to go with the hill. When she was twenty or thirty feet away, he called over his shoulder, “Much obliged.” He couldn’t tell whether she heard him or not.

  She put the pail in the kitchen and then she went and sat in her swing. She pulled the bandage aside to peek at the end of the longest scratch the rabbit had made. Then she stood up in the swing and began to pump. She wedged her feet against the ropes and shoved mightily. Higher and higher she went, until the long swing ropes stretched out almost parallel to the ground and she stiffened her body to keep from flying out at the forward end of the arc. Then the ropes would snap with a dangerous jolt and she would begin the descent and the backward curve that pulled on her back and legs and made her feel as though her stomach was dropping away behind her. At the other end of the arc she would be suspended for an instant, nearly horizontal, unable to breathe, looking down, like a bird, with just time to wonder before she started down again, if this was the moment she finally was going to fall.

  There was a tantalizing branch at the end of the arc. She could almost touch it with the swing board, but not quite. Every day she tried it. Every day, when she had pumped up till the ropes went lax and free for that moment when she knew she might flip clear back over the branch from which the swing hung, she would begin to chant, “Please …” on the way up, “God …” on the way back, “make me …” on the way up again, “a boy,” on the way back. There had to be the awful jerky moments at either end of the arc before she could begin the prayer. One had to be very brave to bear the sight of those ropes buckling and rippling with indecision. Every day she proved to God that she was worthy of being changed into a boy.

  Saturday, June 17

  Will sat reading the Jamestown Sun in the scuffed brown leather chair he had sat in almost every night for as long as they had lived in the tall yellow house. Rose filled half
the living room with a quilting frame. The quilt was a generous double-bed size—five large white squares across and eight down, separated by wide bands of pale green. First she had quilted it all, in two-inch squares standing on their corners like diamonds, then she began stitching in the sunbonnet children. They were pleasingly conventionalized, with long flaring dresses cut from various scraps of print and huge sunbonnets of different solid colors. Even while she worked, Rose thought of how near the end of the world might be, and she wondered why it mattered to her to leave a thing like this behind her. This quilt, when it was finished, would be washed to brighten it after the long hours under her working hands, and then packed away in a trunk. When Lucy was married it would be given to her, and then, when her first daughter was married, to that daughter.

  “Well, they’re still after J. P. Morgan,” Will said. “Seems they uncovered another railroad he got control of by shady means. That’s what I try to tell George. A man’s sins will be found out sooner or later. I’ve always believed in the justice of this world. Here … here’s another piece here. Did you read this piece about Henry Wallace’s speech, Rose?”

  “No,” she said. “I want to finish this square tonight. I probably won’t get to the paper at all. Why don’t you go ahead and read it to me?”

  “Well, there’s just a little bit here, but here’s what he said, and he said it to a bunch of bigwigs, too. Just goes to show you that selfish men don’t always run the government in this country. Here … he says, ‘How much more socially intelligent it would be to redistribute purchasing power in such a way as to put it effectively to work. Unemployed purchasing power means unemployed labor and unemployed labor means human want in the midst of plenty.’ There, now, isn’t that just what ails us in a nutshell? That’s mighty well put. Whatever you say about Roosevelt, this is quite a change from Hoover.”