The Bones of Plenty

by Lois Phillips Hudson

  The barn was the comfortable meeting place of all the dwellers in its precincts. Even those who properly lived in the other houses were drawn by the barn. The poultry strolled in and out to peck at stray bits of grain and to dust in the straw on blistering days and the dog sought out the coolest stall for a summer nap. If a sheep managed to squeeze under the fence around its shed, it would go to the barn, followed by the rest of the flock, to investigate the interesting sounds and smells there. Children went to the barn to watch a row of tiny pink pigs gluttonously nursing a sow, or they went there to hold a bucket of skim milk for a calf or to seek out the newborn kittens whose eyes were so tightly shut and whose fearful claws, like burrs, sought always to implant themselves in the hay or a sweater or a bare leg.

  The menfolk would retire to the barn to perch on the rails of the calf and pig pens whenever womenfolk filled the house. City men, because they had no barns to retreat to, almost always became shockingly coarse on the infrequent occasions when they found themselves in a barn with a farmer. Rachel’s father had often remarked on how surprised some salesman’s wife would be if she could hear what came from her scissor-bill husband out there. Once in a while even a preacher could come up with something that set an old hobo on his ear.

  A farm without a barn was like a body with its digestion stopped and the warm and sensual lower portions of its brain gouged away.

  “Oh, how will he stand it!” Rachel moaned. “How will he bear it? How will he bear it!”

  “Oh, now Rachel! Don’t get hysterical, for Pete’s sake! He’s got insurance, hasn’t he?”

  Rachel went into the house with the baby; but George saw Lester Zimmerman’s car slowing on the road below, and he waited for him by the porch. Lucy slipped away and went to the place where the barn had been. She had rather expected to see it there this morning. It had always been there.

  The four cows lay where they had fallen at their stanchions. In a few spots where there had been little flesh between the hide and the bones, the hide had burned completely away, leaving the bones a dark dirty yellow. The legs stuck straight out from the bellies as though the cows were standing on a vertical floor that she could not see. The black gristle of their noses was shrunken, and the thin skin that rippled under their jaws was gone, exposing the appallingly long lines of their yellow jawbones set with the jaundiced teeth that had chewed a cud out in the pasture yesterday morning at this hour. Bone showed all around the great eye sockets, swimming with dark jelly.

  She stepped over the shards of two crossed beams and felt the heat from a crumpled black milk pail against her leg. Another bit of metal brushed her and she recognized it as the far, proud weather vane she had so often wished to touch. It was much bigger than she had thought it was.

  She began to perceive the enormity of the thing that had happened, and she was afraid they would be angry with her for coming to the barn. They often seemed angry when she understood something that she was not supposed to understand. She ran to hide in the granary before the men coming from the house could find her. She sat inside the door on the powdery, rumpled top of a sack of chicken mash and watched what they did.

  Her father drove the tractor down from the shed, towing the stoneboat. The other men cleared away enough of the burned wood so he could maneuver it down the aisle. They looped ropes around the stiff legbones of the first cow and pulled her body toward the stoneboat, resting between spurts of hauling.

  “Jesus, I never seen an animal burnt up like this,” said Mr. Zimmerman. “A haymow fire don’t usually take off the skin this way. I seen a bunch of horses once that was in a livery stable, and outside of not having no hair left, they could of been just normal. They looked like they just had their hides scraped off and tanned. But I never seen anything like this!”

  “The ceiling give way,” Mr. Greeder said. “I could tell, even from where I was at. It just dropped right down onto ‘em. Probably twenty, thirty tons of hay burnt right on top of ‘em.… Ready! Heave! Heave!”

  When Rose came home from spending the night in the hospital, she refused to go to bed. “I’ve been in bed all morning!” she said. “I’m not sick! Just leave me be, now. Will wants to see the papers right away.”

  She sat down at the desk and located a paper that folded and unfolded like an accordion. “I can’t believe this is all we had,” she said. “There must be a later one than this.” She took the papers out of each pigeonhole and finally emptied each drawer. George loitered in the kitchen, wondering if she already knew about the money, and wondering if she would come across the promissory note for his loan, and if she would be surprised. Will must have kept a record of it somewhere.

  “Well, I guess this is all. As far as I can see, this may or may not cover it,” she said. “I just don’t know what I’m going to tell him. He thinks we got them all out. I just don’t see how I’m going to tell him. He would have stayed right there and burned up with them, trying to get them out, and he blames himself for the whole thing. He thinks I got them out. He doesn’t remember.”

  “Do we have to tell him?” Rachel asked.

  “Now, Rachel, just stop and think a minute!” George said. “Just where is he going to think they are when he gets back?” George was only too well acquainted with where they were. They were in an enormous hole that he and Will Shepard’s neighbors had damned near killed themselves to dig so that Will would never come upon their stinking carcasses or their burnt bones as he went about his farm.

  “How am I going to tell him?” Rose asked again.

  Will lay in his room in Trinity Hospital, his cracked shin in a cast, his wried shoulder on a hot pack that aggravated two cinder burns on the skin more than it helped the shoulder muscle, and his smashed thumb wrapped in an oversized bandage. Pills to dull his various miseries were dissolving in his stomach.

  “Why did I do it? Why did I do it why did I do it?”

  He had said the words to himself so many times that they became as abstract and confusing as the pain in his body. The words ran into each other until they wouldn’t go into the rhythm of a sentence any more. All that day he lay adrift in his abstractions, but that night he slept, and when he waked up the next morning his head was clear again.

  A doctor came in and poked at him. “Now let’s see about your middle, here,” he said. “We just want to know that nothing is ruptured down here. We didn’t want to pester you with X-rays yesterday, because what you mostly seemed to need was air. You obviously got a kick or two, if we can judge by these.” He touched a couple of spots that Will didn’t have to see in order to know they were black-and-blue.

  “When can I go home?” Will said.

  “Mr. Shepard, yesterday you acted like a man with a lot of trouble somewhere. We have to make sure you’re all right before we release you. Tomorrow we have to get some pictures.”

  The doctor probed farther down in his abdomen. Will could not stop an agonized reflex in a couple of places.

  “I don’t see why it should hurt here.” He delved into the bad spots again. “No contusions at all, that I can see.”

  Of course it doesn’t show—what’s really gone wrong—Will could have told him. You don’t know what I know and how could you? You know about your microscopic events and I know about mine. You can’t see what’s wrong with me, but I understand it. It’s a set of laws working a different way, toward a different end. I thought that if I wasn’t going to save my hay it would be because the laws destroyed it with mold, but the laws destroyed it with fire instead. All perfectly legal—however unexpected, however unprepared for.

  That morning I put the hay in—then I saw only as far as those clouds—the half-inch of water that might have fallen from them, the hay grown in a few mortal weeks on a tiny piece of a tiny particle in space, the few mortal days of my own that I coveted as though they were mine alone and not a part of all those laws around me. Now I see that rain, that field, those bits of time—I see them from the other side of the clouds. There was that moment in th
e hot rain when I was so foolish as to believe that God ought to save me from the laws. But now I can see things in a longer light, from the other side of the clouds. Go ahead and take all the pictures you want.

  They took the pictures the next morning and in the afternoon the doctor came again. He looked at the purple thumbnail, felt the shoulder, tapped the cast nervously with his pen.

  “Mr. Shepard,” he said. “I want you to go and see a specialist in Bismarck as soon as you can comfortably travel there.” He wrote on a prescription pad and handed it to Will.

  “He’s as good a man as there is in the state.”

  “When can I go home?” Will asked.

  “Probably day after tomorrow, if the leg seems to be doing all right. Of course you’ll have to stay off it for quite a while. But it’s not a bad break and you ought to mend nicely.”

  Will looked at the scrap of paper. There was the name of a drugstore on it, and a telephone number. Under that the doctor’s handwriting said, “Oliver Murdoch, M.D. Internist. Bismarck. Mercy Hospital.”

  He laid it on his bedside table and then he picked it up to throw it away, but instead he stuffed it into his billfold.

  The Eggers came all the way down to get him because their Chrysler was so much smoother-riding than the Custers’ old car. Where Clarence had got the money for it, Will couldn’t imagine. For a one-armed man Clarence drove with amazing skill.

  Will had the whole back seat to himself, and he was comfortable enough, but he couldn’t think of anything except how his barnyard was going to look without a barn in it. And he kept trying to remember how he had got all those cows out.

  When he and Rose were finally alone, he said, “We got them all out, of course.”

  He knew, because she wouldn’t look at him.

  “How many?” he asked.

  “Four. Four cows. All the pigs got out.”

  Four cows tortured to death because he had locked them in stanchions under hay he had put away knowing that it was too green.

  But it had been harder for Rose than for him. He had been lying in a hospital, not having to know, while she had been here alone with the knowledge, with the cleanup, with the night memories and the screams.

  “You ought to have told me right away,” he said.

  “What good would that have done? Do you want to go to sleep now?”

  For four days he had been fighting to extricate himself from the clawing images of the fire. Every time he closed his eyes he was like a fly trapped in an infernal kaleidoscope. He was surrounded by the multiplying images of flame and torture and guilt and condemnation that fell together and then fell apart as the garish triangles spun and spun. Even before he knew about the cows, he had wondered when the mirrors would slow in their spinning—when he would be allowed to crawl to their convergence and escape through the long empty eye of forgetfulness. But now he knew that the kaleidoscope would never let him go. No, he did not wish to close his eyes just now.

  “No, I think I’ll just catch up on the Sun, if you saved the back copies.”

  The Custers did their own chores early and came over to help Rose and to have supper with Will. After supper George lingered in the bedroom while the women did the dishes, waiting for Will to mention that the loan would come in handy now, for the doctor and the hospital, not to mention finishing the new barn.

  I should simply bring it to him, George thought, but since he had no idea of where he could get what he had spent of it or how he could last through the summer without the rest of it, he continued to talk of nothing and to sit with his kitchen chair tipped back against the dresser, his wrists dangling at his sides, his fists curling and uncurling around the rungs of the chair. He was positive that Will knew what he was waiting for. Why didn’t the old man go ahead and spring it?

  But Will was thinking of the boy last heard from nearly eight months ago in Arizona. Would he come home in time or not?

  Finally George let down the front legs of his chair and stood up. “Well, take ‘er easy,” he said. He went out to the kitchen to start the family moving toward the car. He couldn’t stand it any longer.

  After they had gone, Will called out to the kitchen. “Rose, do you think if we could get in touch with Stuart he’d come home?”

  “I think he’ll come home if and when he feels like it. He’ll come home if he runs out of money or if he gets sick. We wouldn’t have heard from him the last time or the time before that if he hadn’t needed money to get out of trouble—or to spend on liquor! Where does he always find it? What good are the laws, anyway?”

  George lay awake in the stagnant air of the low little house. A man might as well try to sleep in a fireless cooker as a one-story house after a day of so much sun. The house, like the cooker, absorbed heat all day long and cooked all night.

  The old man expects me to bring it to him, George thought, but he’s not going to ask me for it. After he practically forced it on me in the first place. What if he needs it to get his wheat threshed? He must have finished off his Jimtown account to bail himself out of the hospital. Now Rachel will have to know. Damn him—if he needs it he ought to ask for it. How am I supposed to know what to do? God-damn it, this is what comes of borrowing from a man’s inlaws.…

  A small futile sound escaped from his throat. From the way Rachel moved, he knew she heard it and was not asleep either. He rolled over to her roughly, and roughly took what was his.

  Afterwards, like the man in the desert whose last reckless strength has brought him running to an illusion, he was more alone than ever. What the hell had made her change so much, anyway? He’d never forgotten the joke his brother had made when he got married. “You just remember what I say, Georgie-Porgie. Put a bean in a jar for every time during the first year, and then take one out for every time after the first year. I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts you’ll never get all them beans back out of the jar again.”

  Rachel didn’t wake up until just before five, and she hurried to make a fire in the kitchen range. “Monarch” was stamped in the nickel-plated frame around each of the warming-oven doors at her eye level. She wondered idly, as she had a thousand times, what could possibly be royal about the black monster that dominated her life. She doubted that the manufacturer had meant quite the quality of dominance she had in mind. She lifted out the two lids, each as big around as the bottom of her gallon teakettle. Lately in the mornings her wrists had been so weak and achy that she had to use both hands on the lifter. By the time she went out to get the first bucket of water she was usually all right, but still it made her desperate to wake in the morning and not have her joints work properly. The only hope left was in the strength of their limbs. The strength of the land was wasting away, and they had to make up for that depletion with their own strength.

  She went out to the porch to get the boiler and she saw how the weeds that had managed to survive in the afternoon shade of the house seemed to be wilting already in the morning sun. It was going to be a bad day to wash, but there were no clean diapers left for the baby.

  She was just ready to start down the hill for water when George came into the kitchen.

  “I’ll fetch you a couple of pails full,” he said. “Just as soon as I tie up my shoes here.” He guarded the well now, even from her. He was like a dragon brooding over a magic fountain. If he was attentive enough, the temperamental fairy in the fountain would feel propitiated; she would not give the order that dried up the fountain.

  He came back up with the two buckets and dumped them in the boiler for her. Then he brought two more, but he dumped only one into the boiler.

  “Can you get along on that?” he said.

  While he was milking she started wringing out the diapers she had had soaking in the wash tub on the porch. She unfolded them and dropped them into the boiler, poking them down into the warming water and stirring the soap around to try to get a little suds. Then she dipped the mop pail full of the soiled water in the tub and carried it out to the garden where she poured
it gently around several hills in a row of beans. It was not good to do any watering now, early in the morning, because so much would be lost through evaporation, but she had forgotten to wring out the diapers the night before and now she had to empty the tub so she could put clean rinse water in it.

  George came up with the milk as she was returning from the garden with the empty bucket. “My God! You’re not watering this time of day?” He was almost hysterical. He acted as though he might strike her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know I should have emptied the tub last night. I was too worried about Dad to be able to think straight.”

  “Honestly, Rachel, I just don’t understand why you can’t keep a thing like this well on your mind all the time! Just what do you think we’re going to do if we run out of water, anyway? Do you think I can just say abracadabra and produce an unlimited supply of water for you to waste?”

  “Oh, George, you know I don’t waste water!”

  “You are wasting it—right now! Just deliberately wasting it! I can see with my own eyes, can’t I?”

  He went into the kitchen but she stayed on the porch till she got control of herself. After nine years he could still wound her by saying things they both knew weren’t true. She wondered why it was that his wildest, most farfetched accusations were the ones that hurt the most. They were the ones she ought to be able to forget entirely, weren’t they? She emptied the last pail of fresh water into the tub and watched while the sun flitted over its agitated surface and then settled into the trembling rings of light made by the galvanized ridges around the bottom of the tub. It was a hot light—as though the sun would drain the tub before she could come back out and rinse her clothes. Wherever she looked, she saw the greedy sun. Would the sun never be satisfied till every well in the world was dry?