The Bones of Plenty

by Lois Phillips Hudson

  “Oh, Stuart!” she cried again. But still she could not touch him. The booze on his breath was revolting. “Haven’t you been to see the folks yet, Stuart?”

  He propped himself against the corner of the kitchen, with an elbow braced on the towel bar. He looked over her head, across the kitchen at the window, but the light seemed to hurt his eyes. He closed them. “Nope. I started over there last night but I just didn’t seem to make it.”

  There was a frightful banging in the dining room. “Oh, get those potatoes in there,” he said. “I don’t know why that Swede don’t learn to speak English. He just stomps on the floor when he runs out of potatoes. Liable to go right through this little house.” He kept his eyes closed. Was it the light or his family he could not look at?

  George came out and took a whiff of the air. “Pew!” he said.

  “George!” Rachel begged.

  “We need spuds in there,” George said. He looked at Stuart, who would not open his eyes. “Nobody told me my wife’s little brother was supposed to be the sixth man on this crew. We all sweat a little extra for you this morning!” Stuart said nothing.

  George erupted. “What was it this time, anyhow, Junior!” “Embalming fluid? Hair tonic? Or did you get hold of some genuine rotgut moonshine? Why don’t you wait till you’re big enough to shave before you start trying to drink with the men? Maybe then you’d know what to leave alone. You better get in here and eat before that stuff burns out your guts!” He went back to the table.

  “Just give me a plate,” Stuart said to Rachel. “I’ll eat with the kids.”

  His hand shook as though the plate was more than he could hold. “Stuart,” she said. He pushed the screen door open and let it slam behind him.

  It was queer, she thought, how little shocked she was. But this was so like him. When he was a little boy not yet in school and she was already in her last year of high school, he would hide for half the afternoon in the barn just so he could jump out from a manger to startle the folks when they went out to milk. “I declare,” her mother would say, “what ails the child! Here I thought he was out with Will all afternoon! And Will thought he was with me in the chicken house. And just when we were sure he was lost and we were going to look for him, out he came, making that outlandish noise. He scared us half to death. It’s the third time. Whatever makes him do it!”

  What did make him do it? He seemed to have a need to do shocking things, even though he was always so shy. Did he crave attention so much that the one titillating moment when he could command all the thoughts of his surprised parents was worth such a long wait lying in the manger hay? What had he thought about while he waited? What did a five-year-old think about?

  Lucy had run away once when she was five. She had gone to sleep in a straw stack and when she woke up she came home. Rachel had never even known that the child had run away. She had just thought Lucy was exploring birds’ nests or following George around. That had been the part about the running away that still haunted her. Not to know, until your child comes back—stiff, desolate, swollen-eyed—that she had run away from you because something had been so much more important to her than you had ever dreamed. Something you had said—had commanded or forbidden as you rushed through your work—had changed her whole world. If only you had not been so busy, you cried out to yourself. If only you had noticed. If only you could expunge those hours of lonely anguish from her life. Was that how it had been with Stuart? Had his mother been too busy? Rachel had hardly been at home after he started doing the things he did. On weekends her mother would only say, “What makes him do these things?”

  And now here he was. What had made him run away? What had made him come back? Why had he come here first, sneaking in with this uncivilized crew? How could anybody find it easier to face George Custer than Will Shepard? Yet Stuart must think it easier to come here first. He must be hoping that she could do something. What could she do?

  He was sitting beside Lucy now, with his plate in his lap, pretending that he and the two children were the only people there. “Do I look different?” he asked Lucy. “You look different.”

  “Yes,” Lucy said carefully. “You look different.”

  “I’m a big man now,” he said. “When I went away I was just a kid like Giles in there. Now I’m a man. When I went away you weren’t even in school yet, were you? What grade are you in now?”

  “Third,” she said.

  “No!” he said. “You’re … let’s see—you’re not hardly eight yet, are you? Did you skip a grade, like your mother? Oh, I see what you mean. You’ll be in the third this coming fall, right?”

  “Yes,” she admitted.

  “That’s just where you should be, isn’t it? Haven’t skipped any grades yet, huh? Maybe you’re like me, instead of like your mother. What grade are you in?” he asked Douglas.

  “Third,” Douglas said forcefully.

  “He’s just the same as me,” said Lucy.

  “Is that so?” Stuart said. “Which one of you is the smartest?”

  “I am,” Douglas said.

  “He is not!” Lucy said. “He copies me all the time!”

  “I bet you she’s right,” Stuart said to Douglas. “I bet you she can beat you sixty ways to Sunday because I bet she takes after her mamma. Is that right, Lucy?”

  “No, I take after Daddy,” she said. “But he always got a hundred in arithmetic and sometimes I don’t.”

  “So did your mama always get a hundred,” Stuart said. “At least that’s the way I always heard it from the teachers. ‘Why, I can’t understand why you aren’t more like your big sister!‘ “ he said in a silly high voice. “‘Why, I remember how she was always the smartest one in the room. Now, Shtew-art, I just know you can work harder!’ ” He said the last sentence with his tongue between his teeth and his lower lip, making a silly face and an even sillier sound. Lucy and Douglas thought he was very funny.

  Suddenly he leapt off the porch and sprinted for the barn. After a while he came back. He looked at Lucy trying to shoo the flies off his plate.

  “Much obliged,” he said. “I reckon it isn’t quite time for me to eat yet. You bring me something good this afternoon, huh? And tell your dad I’ll be out by the rig.”

  He walked away up toward the field. Lucy brought the barely touched plate back into the kitchen. “He said he wasn’t hungry yet.”

  “I heard him,” Rachel said. She scraped the plate into the pigs’ slop bucket.

  She could tell when she took dessert into the men that they were more shocked than she was. They looked down at their plates as if she were a mother or a sister to them, or at least as if they thought of a woman or a family somewhere. None of them can go home, either, she thought, and was more shocked by all the men around her than by her brother. They can’t go home and they don’t know why not. It doesn’t make sense. I’m thirty-two years old and I’m an old woman because I can’t understand anything about the world any more.

  “I told that kid to lay off that stuff while he’s workin’ for me,” murmured the boss. “I don’t want to be unwrapping his innards from the innards of that there thrashing machine. But I never hardly saw anybody work like him when he’s cold sober.”

  George walked out with the rest of the crew—avoiding her as well he might after the greeting he had given to her brother.

  “George!”

  He came back into the kitchen.

  “For heaven’s sake, don’t let him kill himself out there!” she pleaded. “And don’t let him get away. We have to get him back to the folks! He wouldn’t have come this far if he didn’t want us to get him back.”

  “Now, Rachel, I can’t order your little brother around. He’s a grown man—or he thinks he is! Nobody could ever tell him anything. He’s just as stubborn as the rest of your family. I’m not going to try and keep him here if he doesn’t want to stay. But he damn well better do his job this afternoon because that’s what I’m paying for! And he can pitch his share of bundles too,
like anybody else!”

  “Oh, George, don’t let him get near the separator if he’s still weaving around like that, please! Dad will pay you for whatever work you think you haven’t gotten. Please!”

  George simply could not understand how women’s minds could work the way they did. Who the hell was she married to, anyhow? Him or her family? “Now, Rachel,” he said, “just how do you expect me to figure what the work of one man of a six-man crew is worth when I pay by the job—machinery and all? I’d look pretty silly going to your father and asking him for your brother’s wages, wouldn’t I? I’m paying this outfit for two days of thrashing, and if it goes more than two days, we’re going to be in the hole. But I’m not going to ask your father for Stuart’s wages and I’m not going to try to tell a stubborn Shepard anything at all about where to stay or where to go. Talk to him yourself. He’s your brother. If he wants to quit the crew right now, we’ll go get somebody else. If he don’t want to quit, he works!”

  George left, hurrying to catch the crew. Lucy and Douglas were gone too. The house was so quiet now. Rachel wondered if Stuart would really be waiting at the threshing machine or if he had just kept going again.

  He had begun this disappearing when he was only nine or ten. He would get up before it was light, steal out of the house, and disappear until suppertime without telling where he had been. Then one morning just before his eighteenth birthday, he had got on a freight train. Fred Wertzler saw him go. Fred was hanging the mail sack on its hook by the tracks when he glimpsed Stuart ducking behind a box car. He thought that the Shepard boy was only playing truant again.

  But it was days and then agonizing weeks and finally months before the first brief letter arrived. There were a few more letters in the two and a half years of his disappearance, but none of the letters mentioned his return. It had begun to be plausible to them that this disappearance could be permanent. They were all preparing themselves to bear the pain and shame and eternal anxiety of it. Now he had reappeared and he was a man—a man who had been sleeping for the last week in fields not thirty miles from his father’s farm instead of going home to his father’s house. And what would such a bitter thing do to his father’s heart?

  Stuart was born when Rachel was twelve, and she had cherished him as if he were her own baby when he was tiny. But because he had always seemed more like her baby than her brother, she had had the instincts of a mother about him. That first time he had got drunk in high school she and her mother both felt as though he had died. He was permanently separated from them by their own incredulity. They could not believe it had happened. “Wherever did he get the taste for it?” they asked each other. “Where did he get hold of it? How can he do it? What makes him do it?”

  “Males,” her mother would say. “They don’t care what they do, most of them. But how could a son of Will’s be like this?”

  How? Yes, how. And how was she to get her brother the rest of the way home? She worked feverishly in the kitchen so she could spare the time to talk to him when she took out the midafternoon lunch. She boiled the custard, filled the pies, set them to cool while she made the sandwiches, and then managed to get the meringue on them before leaving to go to the field. The baby had gone to sleep amenably for her nap. It was the first agreeable thing she had done all day and Rachel hurried out to the field so she could get back before the nap ended.

  The Swede and his sidekick were again the first to come. The small laughing man stared at her body. “Swede saves his appetite now,” he giggled, “but be ready for him at supper time. And he’ll want a dozen fried eggs in the morning.”

  “I know,” Rachel said shortly. She had a pretty good idea of who started the stories about the mute Swede—the stories that had got from Elsie Egger’s sister-in-law down in Gackle up to her. This little man was the kind she despised most of all—the kind who got away with everything because he laughed. The kind who liked to attach himself to another man and somehow feel safe in his shadow. That was the way that fellow had been in college who had asked her to marry him. There was a basketball player he was forever talking about. She could never explain to her parents why that boy had repelled her so because she didn’t really know why herself.

  The small man was annoyed. No doubt he liked to think of himself as a man who could at least get a smile from any woman. When he and the Swede stood up to go back to work he ogled her again.

  “You’re just the type of woman Swede likes,” he said as he handed back the tin cup. “Kind of nice and round. You better tell your old man to lock up your door tonight. Swede could lick him with one hand tied behind him.” Swede smirked at her whenever he heard his name.

  Rachel walked away from the little man—violated and despoiled by his rutting eyes. How she despised males. If George could have known what that man had said, he might have killed him. And then he probably would have taken on the Swede, too. But not for her sake. It would have been for his own honor that George would have bloodied the stubble with a filthy little stray that dared to insult his wife. She had never ceased to be amazed at the grossness of most men. To think of cooking for such debauched animals—of politely waiting on them for another day and a half! To think that such men had been her brother’s companions for two years—to think of how they might have influenced him—how they must have influenced him.

  Had Stuart ever stood in a harvest field eating sandwiches served by a farmer’s wife, made from bread baked by the farmer’s wife, and looked at her that way—as though she was nothing more than an animal who existed only for his animal pleasure?

  He was coming for his sandwich now, moving as though his legs were melting. The field was nearly cleared and there were no shocks behind him—nothing but burning stubble, burning sky. He was a tin soldier dying in a great forge all alone—his face blank, his heart hidden. But such a fine face, even unshaven. Not like these other faces. Surely the heart of a man with such a face could be reached by somebody someday. But he must never be with this other kind of man again—never.

  “Just some water first,” he said, when she held up the plate of sandwiches. He took the cup in hands that still shook and drained it, then filled it and drained it again. He wiped his mouth with his dusty arm and sat down on the stubble.

  He still looked very sick. She couldn’t imagine how he could keep on working so hard. “Do you want a sandwich now?” she asked again.

  “Wait’ll I get my breath for a minute,” he said. It was obviously all he could do to keep down the water.

  “Stuart, you’re going to go home now, aren’t you?”

  “I heard about the barn,” he said. “Was it Dad’s fault, really?”

  “He blames himself,” she answered. “Are you going to go home?”

  “That’s where I was headed for last night,” Stuart said. He waited to see a hint of comprehension in her face, but there was none. She would never understand why a prodigal son might need a little alcohol to get him back through the Old Man’s door. Not to mention the Old Lady’s.

  “You ought to try to eat,” his sister said.

  “A little more water will do it.” He drank another cup and turned back toward the threshing machine.

  “Stuart! You’ll go home tonight won’t you?”

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “What shall I tell them?”

  “Anything at all, just like you always did,” he said.

  She hurried back to the house. There wasn’t time to think about what he’d said. The screen door was ajar; she supposed Douglas had left it open. The half-grown cats that had taken to sleeping under the porch in the hot weather were up on the kitchen table. Their tails stuck straight up with pleasure, as if they were still kittens drinking warm cow’s milk from an old saucer. They were rapturously licking neat trails across the gleaming meringue on the pies.

  Rachel seized a tail in either hand, walked out on the porch, swung her hands as far behind her as they would go, swung forward again with all the momentum the backward swing had gi
ven her, and let go of the cats. They lit running at least fifteen feet away and never stopped until they disappeared into the barn. She stood on the porch, watching them go, feeling still in her fists the narrowing vertebrae of their tails under the soft long hair and the thin warm skin, seeing still the way the tails had pointed in the air over the kitchen table as the cats ruined her pies.

  I must be losing my mind, she thought. I must be losing my mind.

  She went back into the kitchen and looked at the pies. Ruined utterly. What would she feed those lustful, gluttonous men? She looked at the clock. There was simply not time to make another dessert. Swede would probably stamp on the floor if he didn’t get pie. It would serve him right if she just repaired these pies. What they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt any of them, including George. She skimmed the rest of the meringue off and tossed it in the slop pail. There were the barest traces of the busy quick tongues in the chocolate custard. The lemon showed nothing at all, being less solid. If there had been trails in it, they had all flowed together again. She hurried with the new meringue so she could get the pies back in the oven before Cathy woke up.

  And all the while she broke the eggs, separated them, beat the whites, measured the sugar, poured the vanilla—all the time she worked on the meringue she felt sure that none of it had happened. She had never done a violent thing in her life—never come close to hurting an animal. And she had never lied, either, and now she was lying—covering polluted pies so nobody would ever know. But if what she was doing now was not real, then Stuart was not out there in the field, either, was he? Either this day was all true or none of it was true.

  Douglas and Lucy stood outside the elevator watching a long freight pulling toward Bismarck. The heat from the building pounded at their backs.

  “I’m going home,” said Douglas. “It’s too hot out there at your place.”