The Bones of Plenty

by Lois Phillips Hudson

  Rose nodded grimly. “I suppose they’ll start finding out things about Hoover, now,” she said. “Just the way they have about Coolidge.”

  “Oh, I think Hoover’s probably an honest man,” Will said. “Just scared to do anything for fear of getting on the wrong side of his Wall Street friends. I don’t know that there’s anything a Republican could have done. The country was just going crazy, that’s all.

  “Say, I was just going to tell you how I got hold of some shearers today and here I see the Happy Farmer wrote his poem about that. Says, ‘Along about wool-clipping time, I’m jealous of the sheep, Who skip away and leave their clothes, Behind them in a heap.’ He makes it sound awfully easy. Sometimes I wonder if he ever lived on a farm, you know that? But other times he hits it right on the nose. Well, anyhow, I was going to tell you, I talked to a gang of fellows today over at Larsen’s, and they said they can come day after tomorrow. There’s four of them, and they look pretty fast. They think they can do the flock in a day and a half, so that will be just a few meals for you to cook. They figure on finishing Larsen’s tomorrow, and he had nearly six hundred. I didn’t get much of a chance to talk to Larsen about them, but I gathered he was satisfied.”

  “They’re all alike,” Rose said.

  “Well, I can tell you one thing, they were making him hump. He ought to have hired himself one more man—two helpers aren’t enough, with four shearers. I’ll get Ralph and George, I guess. I imagine George won’t have quite so much to say this year about what a mistake it was for me to feed the flock all winter.

  “Why, just think! Last summer we got seven cents a pound—that was hardly fifty cents a fleece—minus ten or fifteen to get it sheared. But the way the prices have been going up, by golly, it wouldn’t surprise me if we’d get around two dollars this summer. I bet it’ll be two bits a pound by the time they get around to paying us for what we ship. And Hoover’s been blaming the low prices on the wool-growers. Too much wool, he said, that’s why there’s no market. But Roosevelt comes along and gets things to rolling again, and all of a sudden it looks like there is a market after all!”

  And it wasn’t taking another war to move prices either, the way a lot of people said it would. In fact, there was good news of peace in the paper. Italy, Britain, France, and Germany had just signed a Four-Power Peace Pact at Rome. It was a treaty to last ten years and then be renewed.

  “I think maybe the world is starting to get some sense, Rose. It looks like maybe people are finally going to spend money on something besides war. What do you think?”

  “I think,” she said, “that we’re living in the Thousand Years of the Beast, right now.”

  He tried to josh her out of it, or think of something else to talk about whenever she said that. “Oh, Rose! Well, then, if you think that, let’s take a vacation! We’ve never had one in our lives! Let’s go somewhere this winter. When the boom was on, everybody else took their big wheat checks and went off to Florida or some place. But we just stayed right here in the cold and snow. It’s cheap down there now—two or three dollars a day would get us a luxury room and meals. Come on, it’s our turn now.”

  “Oh, Will, you don’t know what you’re saying! Ever since Harry closed the bank you’ve had one crazy idea after another! I couldn’t enjoy myself for one minute spending money we ought to leave the children.” Rose thought and then added, “George won’t take it now, but I don’t imagine he’ll be quite so proud after we’re gone and can’t see the good it’s doing them.”

  “Oh, Rose, he’s not that way! He doesn’t want to spite us. He’s just an extra proud young man, that’s all—but I wish he wasn’t so blamed stubborn.”

  He gazed at her quilt a minute. “You wait and see. George won’t let me pay him what I pay the shearers. ‘They’re skilled men,’ he’ll say. A skilled man is worth twice as much as a helper.’ And then he’ll work harder than any other man here, all day long.”

  He searched for his glasses and then, remembering that he hadn’t been out of his chair, felt on the top of his head and flipped them back down to his nose. “I haven’t had such itchy feet for forty years,” he said. “I’d sure like to get a look at that Chicago fair.

  “Says here, ‘The most spectacular event in the opening of the Century of Progress Exposition was the turning on of the thousands of lights in the Hall of Science. By some highly scientific process, which has to do with a photoelectric cell, the light which left Arcturus, a fixed star of the first magnitude, was caught at four observatories in the nation and beamed to throw the master switch at the fair when Postmaster General James A. Farley pressed a button. The light which threw the switch had been traveling through space for forty years to reach the planet Earth.’ Isn’t that remarkable, Rose? Think of it! Think of the things man has discovered just since the turn of the century. It hardly seems possible. By golly, I sure would like to go to that fair.”

  “I suppose Mr. Farley thinks God made all the firmament so that he could push a button that was connected to a star some way.”

  “No, no, that’s not the idea! The light was there! It was there all the time! And men just now figured out how they could use it.”

  “Of course the light was there all the time. And now man thinks he can step up to the throne of God because of some puny trick. I tell you, the days are at hand. We will all see how puny we are.”

  It depressed him when she was like this, and he felt as though he ought to do something about the terrible way she felt. He knew it was Stuart that made her feel this way. But he just felt too tired tonight. He shuffled his feet back into his slippers and wandered out the kitchen door. The full moon hurtled across the sky, riding over a wind-scattered flock of softly gleaming translucent clouds. The moon looked the way it looked through the wide-open door of a breezy boxcar when he rode it across the Kansas plains forty years ago.

  He wondered where Stuart was tonight.

  Shearing day dawned hot and muggy. The wind that Will had hoped would bring a bit of cooler weather from the northwest had died down during the night, and there were no clouds at all. He and Rose got up extra early, but it was already hot enough to make them sweat as they did the morning’s milking, and by the time George and the family arrived, Will had a bandanna tied around his forehead under his hat to keep the sweat out of his eyes. He was nervous with excitement. It was worth shearing this year. He wanted to get at it. Besides, any kind of harvest excited him. That was why he had come back from roving to be a farmer.

  “What’s the matter with that Sundquist boy, anyway!” he wondered. “I told him to get here so we could get set up before the shearers come! Well, George, I guess you and I can wrastle the dip tank.”

  The women lingered in the yard for one last bit of air before they began cooking. Finally Ralph Sundquist showed up, riding bareback on one of his father’s workhorses.

  “The old man promised me the truck today,” he said, “but she wouldn’t start, no matter what I done to her. Like to’ve cranked my arm off.” He massaged the large muscle of his upper right arm.

  “You can just turn your mare loose down below there,” Will said, “We’ll be fixing up the tank.”

  As they headed for the windmill George said, “You’d think the old man would have sense enough to do something about that mare’s withers, wouldn’t you?” Will nodded, half sick. One thing he and George agreed on. They couldn’t bear to see an animal mistreated. The mass of weeping sores on Ralph’s old mare revolted them both. It was really inexcusable to let a horse’s shoulders get in that shape. Sundquist was just too tight to buy a decently padded collar for the poor beast. If it had been George’s horse, he would have bought the collar even if he had had to sacrifice something he badly needed for his own health or comfort. Think of that mare pulling a load against a pair of shoulders like that.

  “Maybe they’re easing off on her,” Will said, wanting to believe what he was saying. “Maybe that’s why Ralph rode her today.”

  They still had
not finished pumping the dip tank full and getting the chemicals into it when the shearers arrived in a rattling pickup. The truck came up the driveway so fast that the dust it raised still hovered over the whole length of the lane by the time the truck had stopped. Will nailed the driver as he jumped out of the cab.

  “You come up here like that again and you’re fresh out of a job,” he said. He thought he smelled beer. Perhaps Gebhardt was already selling it in his little back room, even though it wasn’t legal for two more weeks.

  “Okay, okay,” the driver said.

  The other three men had already unhooked the single chain on the tailgate and begun to unload their equipment. They were as rough-looking as the driver. Will had noticed before how a crew of roving workers always looked ornerier and more suspicious the minute they came on his own place than they had looked when he observed them on somebody else’s place. Itinerant workers were a different lot nowadays. Forty years ago, when he had been a temporary hobo, the crews were full of boys like himself, out to see a bit of the world on a harmless lark before settling down. But the men who had been coming through for the last two decades tended more and more to be like these ruffians—beaten men, looking forward to nothing.

  What would they do with the sheep, he wondered. Two full days of pay from Larsen was enough to get them all three sheets to the wind. It was a cinch he wouldn’t pay them anything till they were through. With the price of wool up as it was, he wanted a good close job. He could lose as much on every fleece as it cost him to get it clipped if they didn’t take it off properly. He wished he hadn’t contracted to pay them by the hour; it might have been better to pay by the fleece so he could dock them on any sheep that wasn’t properly sheared.

  Each of the four men set himself up in a separate stall with his equipment. The double doors at either end of the barn were wide open, but the building was airless; it was going to be mighty hot labor. Will hoped they would sweat out their beer in a hurry.

  Ralph and George, with the collie circling the bleating sheep, drove a dozen head down through the yard from the shed and into a couple of stalls where Ralph stayed to be supply man for the shearers. Will herded each newly sheared sheep up the incline leading to the platform above the tank and shoved it off into the amber water, which reeked with creosote and tobacco and other poisons meant to kill various pests—the worst being ticks and scab mites.

  George grabbed the terrified, sputtering animal by the folds of its neck, forcing it to swim the length of the tank, and then pulled and pushed it up to the platform at the other end. From there the sheep usually needed no more encouragement to run down the ramp and into the lane, bellowing and dripping and shaking from its cold bath and its drastic haircut. A newly shorn ewe, George thought, could look about as ridiculous as any critter in the world. Her neck was so surprisingly thin and long, and with the thick wool gone from her face, her forehead was low and bony.

  As the oldest of the three men, Will ought to have assigned himself the least taxing job of keeping the shearers supplied with sheep and tying up the fleeces, but he wanted to be where he was in order to keep an eye on the kind of job the shearers were doing. He checked the closeness of every clip, running his fingers over the lightly fuzzed wrinkles of shorn skin as he guided each sheep up to the tank. He also made sure that any gouge got well dosed with a virulent solution of iodine. He had discovered a long time ago that the best way to run a farm was for its owner to be everywhere at once.

  The first time he looked up at the sun to estimate the hour, he wondered how he would last till dinner. He had known the time in his life when he could work steadily and never even think to look up until the sun was standing so straight and hot over his shoulders that he knew it was noon. But now he felt the shocks of the struggling sheep tear at his middle, and when the first ewe with a couple of clipped teats came through, he burst into fury. He examined her quickly. She was still nursing. A lamb was in for a kick or two. He swabbed her with iodine and pressed a palmful of salve against her to ease the smart of her bath. Then he stormed back to the shearer from whose hands he had received her a moment before.

  He had to shout above the uproar of the engine turning the long flexible shafts and the clippers buzzing at the ends of the shafts and the sheep bleating beneath the clippers. “Now if another ewe comes through with her tits cut like that I’ll dock you an hour’s pay! Either that or I’ll take it out of your hide. I’m paying you by the hour just so you’ll take your time and do a good close job without nicking these animals. You talked me out of paying you by the fleece, and now, by God, I expect you to do first-class work! Now go and take five minutes off and have a smoke and don’t send me any more sheep like that!”

  The shearer, a bristly-faced young man wearing shamelessly taut Western-style jeans over his solid thighs, flopped his new sheep on its side and attacked it with the clippers. When he finished the sheep, he gave her a shove with his foot, not looking at Will, rolled himself a cigarette, and strolled out toward the fence where Lucy sat watching the dipping.

  “Jesus, what a dirty business this is,” he remarked to her. Lucy did not know what to say to any stranger, least of all one who would swear for no good reason right in front of a child. She had been told to smile at people who talked to her, so she parted her lips to show the two top teeth that were still so big for her mouth and closed them again. She was conscious of the way her upper lip felt over the teeth, and she drew it down and hooked the teeth inside of it.

  After she smiled she looked away from the shearer down at the damp trails scuffled into the hard ground by the horrified sheep.

  “No critter on earth as dumb as a sheep,” he said. “Look at that old grammaw jumping around like a spring lamb.”

  “It probably feels good to get all her wool off on a hot day,” Lucy said.

  “Well, if she knows it’s gonna feel so good, why don’t she just set still then, when a fella’s trying to shear it off her? Tell me that? If a sheep ain’t the dumbest animal in the world, why don’t they learn, after while, that getting clipped off makes ’em feel good?” He blew a smoke ring that collapsed before he had time to show it to Lucy.

  “Well, I don’t know,” she said, “But I’d like to have a lamb and feed it with a bottle every day.”

  A thought came to him—a very funny thing that he had learned recently. “You know what happens to this here wool now?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Grandpa and Daddy and Ralph put all the tied-up fleeces into the wool sacks and tramp it down to get three hundred pounds in each one and then Grandpa takes them to town. Then after while he gets the money. He told me he was going to get a whole lot this year, too.”

  “Ya, but what happens after that?” he persisted.

  “They make sweaters and coats,” she said dubiously. It was hard to imagine how this manure-matted, bug-infested stuff could be transformed into the red and blue sweaters she saw at Christmastime in the Penney’s store.

  “Ya, but before that” he went on, satisfied that she didn’t know, “they wash it, see? You know what happens when you wash a frying pan or something, that has a lotta grease in it? You know how the grease all floats up to the top?”

  “Yes,” she said, frowning distractedly at the pastures shimmering with heat. It was far from noon but she was feeling hungry.

  He was irritated. She was pushing him out of her mind. “Well,” he said roughly, “they wash this here filthy-dirty wool just like a frying pan, see? And then ya know what they do with that dirty old grease all fulla manure? They make stuff for women to put on their face out of it! All kinds of cream. They put something in it to make it nice and white and some stinky perfume so the women don’t ever know how it used to smell, and all them women never know what they’re smearing all over their faces!” He laughed in coarse triumph. She was looking at him now, all right. “Your own ma uses it, I bet!”

  “She does not!” Lucy cried. “She doesn’t ever put anything on her face, because we don’t believe
in it, that’s why.” She stopped. If her father ever heard her contradict any grown-up person he might whip her, but she said it anyway. “Anyhow, I bet they don’t either do that.” She looked at him to see if he would tell on her.

  “Oh, yes they do!” he said. “Maybe your ma don’t, on account of she knows where it comes from, but them city women all do.” He added in a high sissy voice, mimicking a woman talking on the radio, “Lady Esther’s Cole Cream. At your favorite drugstore cosmetics counter.” He flipped his cigarette butt into the wet path made by the sheep. “You’ll smear it all over your face, too, in a couple more years!”

  “I will not!” she yelled so loudly that her father heard her above the noise of the sheep and shot her an ominous look, the way he did when there was company and she said something wrong. The shearer laughed lewdly. He was looking at a picture he had evoked for himself of a city girl wearing plenty of paint, like a girl in a movie, saucily angry with a man the moment before she succumbed in his arms.

  He leered up into the little girl’s face. Then he flexed his spine against the fence rails, snapping his body forward and into a reluctant shamble back to the job.

  Lucy sat glowering after him. There was always some new reason why it was an intolerable joke to be female. But she intended to find out if that was true about cold cream—not that she had ever thought of using it.…

  In the house Rose and Rachel worked making ready the first of the season’s harvest feasts. Itinerant workers expected a well-stocked table; it was the women’s job to try to make up for the murderous pace their husbands set in the shearing stalls and the threshing fields.

  The workers often tried to get the women to feel competitive about cooking. At noon they might say, “My that was good lemon pie, Mrs. Shepard. I reckon lemon pie is my favorite dessert next to chocolate cake with white frosting on it. Over at Mrs. Larsen’s last night we did have a good dark cake.”