The Bones of Plenty

by Lois Phillips Hudson

  “Is it going dry?” Lucy asked anxiously.

  “Well, now, that’s a silly question!” George said. “Of course not! You can see we got water, can’t you?”

  “Let’s go,” he said. When they reached the edge of the wheat, he turned off to go and hoe in the potato patch.

  “Just go on up and straight across the road, and let them go anywheres on that unfenced section. All you have to do is keep them off the road and bring them home at chore time.”

  Lucy went on behind the cows. A leaning barbed-wire fence along the driveway kept them in line and out of the wheat. There was no challenge to the job. Their hoofs were almost silent in the deep dust but the air was full of insect noise—mostly of grasshoppers. Without the indifferent cows ahead of her to deflect them, the grasshoppers that rose in hordes from their feasting in the wheat would be rattling through the air, smacking their hard-shelled bodies against her own nakedness. She would feel the whining of their long, brittle wings, and some of them would become entangled in her hair or hang on her bare arms and legs and chest, half stunned by the force with which they had struck her, clinging frantically and spitting their filthy brown juice in big drops on her skin.

  She would flail her arms at them, and jump up and down, and brush herself all over, and run to get out in the open again. Even in winter when she walked between the fields she remembered how it would be when summer came again. Even in winter she had nightmares in which an endless stream of thick bodies flew at her and pressed their millions of resined feet into the flesh of her neck.

  She wondered if there could possibly be as many grasshoppers all through the acres of wheat as there were along the lane. It seemed as though all the grasshoppers for miles around must be concentrated along that one stretch of wheat, just waiting for her to have to pass them every day to fetch the mail or do other errands.

  Her mother had explained that they flew up at her because she scared them. Well, then, why didn’t the silly things just stay where they were and mind their own business, since she was just as afraid of them as they were of her?

  She followed the cows across the county road, and she noticed that their pace quickened as they scented the new pasture. Even here the grass was withered and sparse, but still it was much more appetizing than the worked-over remnant that had been their pasture for the last month. They were no trouble at all to herd, for they set to work hungrily, moving slowly and not spreading away from each other too much.

  They no longer grazed the way they had early in spring, flitting from one place to another, unable to settle at one spot because the grass was so new and green everywhere. Now they sank their noses into whatever turf they could find and tugged at the very roots of it till they had cleaned out every blade and leaf.

  Still they would not touch the pungent rosinweed. Perversely, its gummy leaves grew lush and healthy beside the dying edible weeds and grass. From the porch in the early morning the smell of the nearest rosinweed patch was fresh and clean, like sagebrush sprinkled with cinnamon. But later in the day the smell altered and intensified; the weed exuded a sour mustiness. Then the strong fragrance that accompanied the glad sounds of birds at their breakfasts and the gentle touch of the only cool moments of the day became instead the reeking adjunct of hot sticky skin and dust that crawled in her scalp. She could see why the cows might try eating rosinweed once and then resolve to starve to death before they would touch it again. She had been so surprised, herself, to find that the same thing that sent the beautiful smell blowing across the porch in the morning could also give off such a rank and nose-burning stench in midafternoon.

  “You can start them home when the sun is about there in the sky,” her father had said, pointing to a place above the northwestern horizon. “It’ll be about six o’clock then.”

  But the sun seemed to have caught, today, on an invisible snag in the sky. She had read the story of Icarus, and she could imagine, with the sun on her shoulder blades, how it must have felt when the wax began to melt away from the feathers of the boy’s wings and the sun just got hotter and hotter. There was no shade except the short shadow at the base of a huge rock that was half the size of their house. The last time she had sat there she had been too near a hill of fierce red ants nearly half an inch long. She had gone home full of bleeding welts. This time she decided she would climb the rock instead, but it blistered her hands even to touch it.

  All these rocks had been left here by the glaciers, her mother said. The giant rock hung restlessly on the brow of the hill, brooding over the smaller strays below it. Her mother had told her that the earth had worn away from it—that it never would have just stuck there that way of its own accord.

  It was hard to imagine a glacier on this parching hill. The rocks shot flecks of gold and silver into the sun. Lucy searched around for a while, thinking that some time she would surely have to find a gold nugget. Her father had told her that gold nuggets did not look at all like gold; they did not shine that way, and that without knowing what a gold nugget looked like, she could walk past a million dollars’ worth of gold and never know it. It was the same with diamonds. The biggest diamond in the world had been mistaken for a clod of earth. But she had a feeling that if she ever got near that much gold or that big a diamond she would surely know, somehow, that it was there. After all, God wouldn’t let her get that close when they were so poor and not let her find it, would He?

  What was it that her father said he had done when he herded cows—all those things that were so interesting? There were the ants to watch—foot-high cones of deathly dry pulverized earth, blank and smooth on the outside but horribly populous on the inside, with rooms full of tiny eggs and big pupae, and hallways up and down where millions of ants rushed about on mysterious errands. She could see all the ants anybody could ever want to see if she just poked a stick into one of those cones. She could watch them—terrified and angry—scrambling over the ruins of their city, rescuing the long white bundles encasing their next generation. One had to respect the organized speed with which they could disappear when there were so many of them. Still, she did not really like ants well enough to want to watch them all afternoon. What else had her father done? Watched a hawk after a gopher, he said. She searched the sky for a hawk, but it seemed too hot up there even for birds. She couldn’t even hear the call of a meadowlark. She couldn’t think what else he said he had done. It was easier to imagine that she was in Africa than to try to think of the things her father had done when he was a little boy.

  Compared to glaciers, African animals here were perfectly believable. In fact, she needed only to think of them and they populated the rolling hills, hiding behind the rocks, treacherously blending their stripes and spots and tawny skins with the clumps of thistles and weeds that made wavering black shadows in the wind—it was really only the wind moving, of course. She sat down on the highest curve of the hill and looked down to where there was a draw which was mostly hidden from her by another ridge above it that ran along the big hill. The draw was a moist, cordial little place in spring, blooming with crocuses, and later with buttercups. It was the kind of place she would have picked to live in herself if she had been a wild animal. There was a rocky ledge a bit above the bottom of the draw, and once she had found the skull of a rabbit there. A hawk had probably got it, her father told her.

  In summer the ledge was sparsely tufted with rough brown grass, and it looked savage and strange, like a ledge pictured in the National Geographic Book of North American Mammals. A yellow-eyed cougar waited on the ledge in the picture. He peered down in feline concentration, holding his haunches tightly and leaning on his forelegs, making the muscles of them swell against the white chest that seemed, even in the picture, to breathe with the lion’s lungs and to throb with his heart. She wondered if a cougar could have eaten the rabbit that belonged to the skull she found, instead of a hawk.

  Or why not a real African lion or tiger? She had been to a movie once, in Jamestown, after she had had to go to th
e dentist there. It was a Tarzan movie, and it had all the animals in it, alive, that she had studied in the pictures in a book on Africa. People should not be so sure that there could be no such animals around here. Circuses and carnivals went through on the highway all the time. They never set up their shows any closer than Jamestown, but thirty miles was no distance for an angry lion to travel. Animals could escape from those flimsy red cages. There was plenty of unfenced room around her for every single animal she had seen in the movie or in the book or ever even imagined.

  The most terrible thing in the movie had been the way, time after time, the great mane and wide-open jaws of a white-toothed lion could emerge from the empty grass. The grass in the movie had been very like the grass that grew in this abandoned grazing land. The grass in the floor of the draw was especially tall because the shade of the hill protected it from the drought. Plenty of room for whole prides of lions down there. They would be asleep, for it was too hot to hunt unless they were disturbed, just as a house cat or a dog would sleep in the shade on such a day as this.

  At home she had a four-year collection of illustrated Sunday-school papers that she liked to look through on stormy days. The very best picture of them all was the one of David when he was only a shepherd boy, hardly bigger than she was. The picture showed him on a hillside that looked like her own hillsides under a hot blue sky that was like her own sky. His sheep were spilled down the hill around him, like her cows, and a huge lion was jumping over a rock at him.

  On the inside of the paper were the Bible verses telling about it. “Thy servant kept his father’s sheep, and there came a lion, and a bear, and took a lamb out of the flock.” Here the teacher had explained that the lion and the bear did not both come at the same time. “And I went out after him, and smote him, and delivered it out of his mouth: and when he arose against me, I caught him by his beard, and smote him, and slew him.” The memory verse that was printed in black type at the end of the lesson read “The Lord hath delivered me out of the paw of the lion, and out of the paw of the bear.”

  David, of course, was a boy. How much more wonderful if she, a girl, should manage to triumph over such a lion as that one in the picture. She kept an eye on the entrance to the draw, which was in deep shadow now, though the sun was still fairly high. The cows had all disappeared in it, as she had known they would. She had to keep a sharp look around her all the time. Bing was so hot and sleepy he probably wouldn’t smell a lion even if it came right up behind them. What good was a dog anyway? No dog could kill a lion, and especially not Bing. He was part Boston bull and part terrier and he wasn’t any bigger than Cathy.

  Occasionally she would hear a sound and whirl about on her knees, her heart banging, to see what was behind her. Then she would whirl back again to make sure the sound behind her wasn’t just a queer echo of a danger in front of her that she had somehow missed seeing.

  If she lay on her stomach, so that the next hill rose up against the sky in her line of sight, the sun was low enough. She manuevered stealthily down the hill and over the little ridge, keeping close to the ground. Bing was close behind her. She started running the last lap down to the cows. Bing rushed after her, yipping and begging to play. She whispered frantically to him. “Shut up! Shut up! Be quiet!”

  But he was determined to play. He ran at one of the cows and barked straight into her face before she had time to raise her startled head out of the grass. She tossed her stubs of horns at him and he jumped at her face again. Lucy shouted at him to stop. But Bing never minded anybody except her father.

  The cows broke into a sham stampede. Bing barked and nipped at their flying heels, and Lucy ran far behind them—the straggler, the helpless one with the delicious human blood, and no one at all behind her to divert the lion for even a moment. The grass shivered and rippled. Shadows leapt from thistles to hollows to rocks.

  Bing worried the herd into an honest gallop. They labored up the hill and Lucy began to gain on them, but when they reached the top they shot over the crest and down toward the road, making a beeline for the faraway barn. They tumbled madly into the ditch, clattered across the dusty gravel, tumbled in and out of the next ditch, and bunched up in the driveway.

  Shoving and bumping against one another, they snapped one of the posts of the weak fence. Lucy got to the ditch on the far side of the road just in time to see them jumping over the fallen wires and fanning out through the wheat field.

  George looked up from his potato row. He dropped his hoe and ran along the edge of the wheat. By the time the first cow reached him, the dog was far behind in the grain, taking extra high leaps into the air to get his bearings. George headed off the cow and turned her toward the barn. The rest slowed down and followed her, leaving their meandering, trampled swaths behind them.

  “Bing! Come here!” The dog slunk toward him, showing teeth in a half-grin, half-snarl. George swung his fist down into his ribs, holding him by the scruff of the neck while he beat him.

  Lucy had lapsed into an exhausted trot and she stopped far down the road when the dog began to howl.

  “Get along here!” It was the same voice that had called the dog. He was waiting for her. When she came to him, he grabbed her arm just below her shoulder. She could feel how his fingers went around and lapped half way around again. All of her arm—bone and flesh from shoulder to elbow—was contained so easily and so tightly in the palm of his hand. When he took hold of her like that, she knew what would have to come next, just the way Bing had known. She felt as though her arm no longer belonged to her. He hurried her along toward the house, shouting down to her, “What in the Sam Hill did you think you were doing?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “What do you mean, you don’t know? Haven’t I told you never to run a cow when she’s got her bag full of milk? Never run a cow any time. It’s a wonder they haven’t all got their legs broke in the gopher holes. And they’ve gone and tromped down forty bushels of wheat into the bargain.”

  He was holding her arm so hard and lifting it up so high that she felt as though her feet did not touch the ground at all. This was the first part of the nightmare—this swift movement toward the beating when she did not tell her feet to take the steps they took, when a force rushed her through the air to the pain that she would finally not be able to bear without screaming, even though the humiliation of screaming was worse than the pain.

  She hovered above the porch steps and felt herself flung toward the door.

  “Get the razor strop!”

  “No! It wasn’t my fault!”

  “I’ll teach you to talk back to me!”

  The feeling came back into her legs as he tore open the door to get the strop, but before she could take one step the strop was swishing, flaming, cutting. The bare skin of her thighs and back burned away and still the strop rose and fell, still it branded her with its own passionate torment.

  At last the sounds she could not stop became the screams that showed she had learned what he wished to teach her. He let go of her arm and kicked her away like a loathsome thing. She ran into the house.

  He did not go back through the door. Instead he hung the razor strop on the outside nail where he kept his straw hat. Then he walked down the hill to let the cows back into the worn-out pasture.

  He lifted the pump handle and then let it drop. It was too soon to try it again. If it had really gone dry, he didn’t want to know it yet.

  The beans and peas and the root-cellar vegetables—carrots, beets, turnips, rutabagas, onions, parsnips—were far enough along to produce something without more irrigating and the potatoes would probably make it without much more water, but it would be a hard thing to watch the tomatoes die. Tomatoes took so much water that he had already begun to wonder if they weren’t a luxury this summer. But they took the place of fresh fruit through the whole long winter. Rachel always put up quarts and quarts of them.

  They were more work than anything else to raise. They had to be started in flats, trans
planted, staked, tied, irrigated, and conscientiously weeded. Nine-tenths of the work of growing them had already been done. It would be hard to watch them die now, but if the well acted up any more, he wouldn’t dare to water them and they would dry up long before they produced anything. He had to think of the human and animal needs first, and the hottest, driest month was still before him.

  Rachel came back from a trip to town for canning rubbers and took up where she had left off with her pea canning. She already had one boilerful of jars nearly processed and she wanted to get the next load ready to go before she had to stop to fix supper. The baby played about her feet, chewing on an empty pea pod and always being in the wrong spot when boiling water had to be poured or a few hot peas from the parboiling pan escaped and plopped on the floor. She wore only her diapers and her skin was as red with the heat as if she had been scalded. Up above the stove, Rachel felt as scalded as the peas. It couldn’t be quite so bad in the rest of the house. She walked the baby into the dining room, hoping she would decide to stay there.

  A little later, when she heard the baby making happy exclamations of discovery, she thought she had better make sure the discovery was not the button drawer in the sewing machine or Lucy’s paper dolls. In the bedroom she found Cathy peering under Lucy’s cot. That was the place Lucy had hidden ever since the first time, when she was barely three years old.

  “Lucy! What happened? What did you do? Come here to me!”

  The only sound from under the cot was an indrawn breath, fighting its way into her lungs against the spasms of her chest.

  “Lucy! Please!”

  But this child was already so proud. She would keep her shame under the cot rather than bring it out with her and come for comfort.