The Bones of Plenty

by Lois Phillips Hudson

  “Sissy.”

  “Sissy yourself,” he said dully. He started off across the street. Then he saw Roger Beahr come out of the grocery store. “Hey Roger!” he yelled. “Got some candy?”

  Roger held up a little white paper bag and began to run. Douglas went after him.

  Lucy watched them run up the wooden sidewalk. She wondered what it would be like to live in town and to be a good friend of Roger Beahr, who always had pennies.

  “Where’s the Sinclair boy?” her father asked.

  “He went home. The sissy.”

  “What’s the matter? Didn’t you act nice to him?” George said. “You can’t expect to have any friends if you’re not nice to people.”

  “I don’t like him.”

  “Oh, now, Lucy, that’s not any way to talk. You’ll never have any friends if you talk like that. Shame on you!”

  Lucy felt her throat start to swell and she got up on her knees to look out the window in the rear of the cab. As the truck turned she could see the two boys coming back down the sidewalk, heading for the elevator. It must be nice to have your father own an elevator. Even from a distance she could see that both of them had a cheek puffed out with a jawbreaker.

  When they got back home it was nearly six o’clock. “Time for you to get at your chores,” her father told her. “You haven’t done a lick of work all day. Probably a good thing your boyfriend didn’t come back.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend! I hate boys!”

  “Gonna be an old maid, huh?”

  “No!”

  It seemed to her that a man or a boy had been laughing at her all day in the wheat fields. How mean, mean, mean they were. And if you didn’t want to marry one of them, they made you always be alone and called you horrible names.

  She had a hopeless, forsaken feeling in her stomach as she scattered the corn for the chickens, cleaned and filled their muddy water pans, and looked in the nests for eggs that might have been laid late in the day. She wondered if Douglas would come back with Giles in the morning.

  After supper the men went back to the field to smoke and then to spread their blankets on the straw and sleep. Stuart walked out of the kitchen with them.

  “Stuart!” Rachel said. “Are you going to sleep in a field when you’re half a mile away from your own bedroom?” If he did this, then she would have to give up. How could she drive over and tell her mother and father that now they could know where their son slept? They could know, but he couldn’t be bothered to come home. He was answering her, speaking in a casual sensible way.

  “Wouldn’t be the first time,” he was saying. “Used to do it all the time. I’d be so hot in that old upstairs I couldn’t go to sleep at all, so I’d go out in the field. You’d be surprised. Twenty or thirty degrees cooler out there. Try it some time. After the thrashermen have gone, of course!” He walked away.

  She had read stories about men who disappeared from their homes in crowded tenements and moved into little windowless apartments a block away and so lived out their years. She had always thought that such a pathetic insanity was proof that cities perverted the human race. People felt so hemmed in by each other that they couldn’t stand even their families any longer; yet they were so timid that they could not move away from the spot where they had always lived—nor could they go home again. What could make a boy like Stuart behave like these mole-hearted men in the slums of cities?

  What did he want, anyway? Did he want his mother and father to come to him in the stubble tonight and beg him to come home, just as they had once exclaimed in the barn, “Oh, there he is!” She was afraid, now, to go over and tell them that he had come, for there was nothing in the world she could say or do to make him stay.

  George had gone to bed long before she finished the dishes. She lay down as far away from him as she could and clung to the edge of the mattress all night. It was possible that she would do something awful if he so much as touched her. She might scream in his ear or slap him. She could still feel the cats’ tails in her sweating hands. She wondered if it really was thirty degrees cooler out there where those bestial men were sleeping beside her brother.

  Stuart knew that he would not have to lie awake long—not after the way he had spent the last twenty-four hours. Still, it would be too long. One minute under this home sky was too long. If he were able to travel, he would not be here to see the sun come up. Well, that was the way he had done it all along. He either stayed or moved on, depending on what shape he was in when the feeling came. It was always the same feeling: He was alone among people he knew. The only relief, outside of liquor, was to hurry somewhere else, so he would only be alone among people he didn’t know. For two years he had told himself that this feeling would go away when he was home again. It was silly to ask himself why he had not come home before, if he really believed that. It was sillier still to wonder how two years had gone so quickly. It was silliest of all to pretend, like a baby, that he didn’t know how ridiculous he was—out here in the stubble.

  It was funny how sky over one part of the prairie could be different from all the other skies. It was the things you could see from the corners of your eyes that shaped the sky you knew so well—nothing about the sky itself. It was the low blackness of hills and the lines of windbreaks. And trains sounded different in different places. Oh, he was home all right. Every night when he went to sleep like this in some farmer’s field, he knew how silly that son in the Bible felt. Yes, almost every night he had gone to sleep wondering why he wasn’t in his own bed in his father’s house. Now he wondered whether he would be in that bed tomorrow night or not. He couldn’t see how he was going to do it. There would be only one way to do it.

  Has the cat got your tongue? What’s the matter? People always used to say that to him and he always hated them for it. But he’d said it himself today, because he hadn’t known what else to say. Was that why people had always said it to him, too? Did people go around all their lives saying things that didn’t mean anything just because they thought they ought to be saying something? Was that all they cared for each other?

  Supper the second night was more rushed than the first night because they were going to move on to their next field after they had eaten and get set up to go the first thing in the morning. Before Rachel realized they were leaving, George and all the men had left the porch and gone back to the field.

  It was nearly dark when George came back into the kitchen. “Well—that’s that for this year. Boy, I think I’d rather be the thrasherman than the farmer—they sure get paid more for an hour’s work than I do.”

  “Oh, George! You haven’t paid them already!”

  “Rachel! For God’s sake don’t jump at me like that! You’d startle a man half to death! Of course, I paid them. Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Oh, I didn’t want Stuart to have any money. He won’t go home now, I know he won’t! Oh, dear! What can we do?”

  “Rachel, it beats me the way you can carry on! We can’t do anything, of course! He’s a grown man! I’ve said to you a thousand times before—if a man wants to drink himself to death, no power on earth is going to stop him.”

  Somewhere he found enough that night to take him the rest of the way home. Just before dawn he banged open the kitchen door. Rose scurried out, clutching her nightgown about her, afraid that the dog had been frightened by something to make him crash in the door that way.

  “Is that you, Mom?” came the crucifying voice out of the darkness.

  She had been preparing herself for it, but no preparation could stop in time her first horrified gasp. Nor could she stop her first words to him.

  “You’re drunk!”

  “Gone for two years and that’s all she has to say to me,” he remarked, as though there were a third, more sympathetic person in the room.

  Will lay in bed listening. He was able to get around now, but he did not go out to the kitchen. He had seemed to know exactly what was happening the instant he awoke. That was the way it was with your
children. They possessed you forever, from the moment they were born. The two and a half years of his absence might never have been. It could have been the same night—the first night that Stuart came home that way. In a way it was always the same night they had been living with for three years. It was really no shock at all now to hear him speaking again in the belligerent, chaotic sentences they had heard before he left. Will’s strongest feeling was one of weariness. He knew he’d never get back to sleep that night. Why couldn’t the boy have waited till morning, if he was going to come in this way? When he realized what his first thought had been, he knew how sick he must be. He hoped to God that Stuart had come back to stay.

  He got out of bed and stood in the hall, but he did not say anything. Stuart was still meandering on; he talked more when he was drunk than in all the rest of his waking hours put together. Rose had not lit the lamp and Will hoped she wouldn’t. It would be enough to get through till rising time with the memory of his sounds; let there not be a memory of his looks to go with it. He had been waiting for two years to see his son, but not this way. There was a paradoxical, disorganized doggedness—a kind of animal forcefulness—in the boy when he was drunk that was nowhere in evidence when he was sober. One sight of him drunk established a more lasting image than many sights of him sober.

  Finally Will said, “Your bed is all made up for you, Stuart. You sound tired to me. Why don’t you go crawl in?”

  “Why, Dad, I couldn’t sleep in that bed without a bath! I’m nothing but a filthy thrasherman!”

  “The sheets are washable,” his mother told him. “Go on up.”

  In a few hours he was sober again, and as much of him as had ever been there had come back.

  Will’s Marquis yielded not quite eight bushels to the acre. He had two hundred and fifty acres in wheat, as opposed to George’s hundred and sixty, but the difference in their harvest was not so great as the difference in their acreage, for George’s yield was better. However, the smut in the Ceres caused George to be docked almost eight cents a bushel. It graded Number One despite his fears that the protein content was light, but the smut docking reduced it to eighty-two cents, while Will got ninety.

  George sat down and worked it all out. It was the kind of thing he enjoyed doing. He could even forget, while he was doing it, that the numbers represented his survival.

  Will got checks of $1800 for his wheat and George got $1296 for his. That worked out to $7.20 per acre for the Marquis and $8.10 for the Ceres. Not a significant difference. Not enough to pay for the smutty Ceres seed he had got from Adolph. He and Will paid the same freight rates. Everybody except the big fellows paid the same freight rates. And the freight rates never went down, no matter what the farmer earned or what the consumer paid. Will paid $110 and George paid $88 to ship the wheat to Minneapolis.

  It cost Will about $250 to thresh and himself $180. That left George with roughly $1000, after the two major expenditures of marketing the crop were taken care of, and Will with $1440. As far as real profits were concerned, though, he had to consider so many other things. Will had used his own seed, saved when wheat was selling for twenty-six cents a bushel, which made it much cheaper seed than George’s. Most of the seed money came out of George’s pocket, too, after the splitting of the cash profits with James T. Vick. Vick had allowed him twenty-six cents a bushel for what he had spent on the seed. And Vick considered that the mill’s price minus seed, threshing, and freight, was the net profit, a third of which was his. Vick wasn’t interested in labor, food for horses all winter long, machine repair, binder twine, or other such incidentals. They were all the farmer’s business. Vick just owned the land and paid the taxes on it.

  Vick’s cut this year, after subtracting the thirteen cents a bushel he paid for seed, would come to $340. That left George with $660. Pay Will $250 plus interest for four months—make it five months. He couldn’t believe it. Scarcely $400 left from the wheat. That was quite a little more than he had made last year, the way prices were then, but he knew, without doing any more figuring, that he would have been far ahead to plant the Marquis and take the rust loss.

  Still, there were reasons to hope. In the first place, the Ceres, he was sure, had not had anything like a fair trial because the seed had not been properly treated; in the second place, poor as he felt, he was so much better off than so many people below him that he really should be able to get along somehow. After all, if there were only enough other farmers below him, the things he would have to buy would have to be cheap enough, that was all there was to it.

  If the USDA figures for last year’s farm profits were at all accurate—figures that he had kept in his mind ever since they had been in the Sun a couple of months ago—then more than forty per cent of his fellow wheat farmers had gone in the hole last year and only about twenty per cent had made more than he had. Only six per cent had cleared over five hundred dollars. His father-in-law was in the six per cent, of course, and he would be there again this year. If a man could only start with enough cash, money would make money.

  Look at what Vick had done with a little cash. He had taken advantage of the slump that began in 1921 and bought this half section for scarcely more than delinquent taxes in 1924, just before George moved onto it. He paid forty-three dollars a year in taxes now, while George and Rachel fretted over the state of the school, the lack of a school bus, the condition of the county road, and a score of other things that taxes ought to cover, and yet George had paid Vick as much as five or six hundred dollars a year. Some years Vick got as high as a twenty per cent return on his investment. And he was nothing but a cheap chiseling dime-store owner who had had a little spare cash at the right time. The return on his investment was a simple translation of George’s sweat, good only on a farm, into the medium of exchange called cash—good anywhere in the world for anything he desired. He could buy other men’s sweat with that return earned for him by George Custer’s sweat, and that was the way little dime-store owners became millionaires.

  George knew what he could do about it, of course. He could get out of farming and forget that he ever hoped to exercise the option rights that had been dangled in front of him for nine years. He could get out of the occupation he had been raised in and trained for, and then what could he do?

  But there was the one hope left. There were still so many farmers so far below him. They were competing to undersell him, but they had to compete to buy machinery and pay rent, too. Over half the farmers in the state had to pay rent. When things got so bad that no tenant farmer could make a living, then all the tenant farmers would get together and do something about the landlords. So long as seventy-five per cent of the nation’s wheat farmers made less than George did, he would either succeed because he was ahead of the majority, or else, if he fell back into that growing ruined majority, he would revolt with them.

  Any time George Armstrong Custer could not make a living, one way or another, then the system had to be wrong. If a man like him tried every possible scheme and worked fourteen- and sixteen-hour days and still went broke, then the system certainly needed major repairs, didn’t it?

  Meanwhile, for one more winter he would figure things so closely that even the occasional pennies he gave Lucy in the store had to be considered part of his budget—and he would repay Will at an interest rate that would restore his self-respect.

  When he showed his figuring to Rachel, she did not seem at all surprised that they had cleared scarcely a third of what he had predicted they would. Her lack of surprise discouraged him.

  “Well, look at it this way,” he said. “Next year I’ll have two hundred bushels of properly treated seed. It doesn’t look like cash now, but it will be. That will make a vast difference, can’t you see that?”

  “Enough to buy a tractor?” she asked.

  “Well … sooner or later.”

  “How much longer can we work the way we worked this year?”

  “As long as we have to!” he said.

  Wednesday, Septem
ber 27

  Spanish farmers were setting torches to thousands of acres of crops. Sweden and Holland renounced the tariff truce they had signed with the United States thirty days before, and declared that they would again bar American food exports from their countries. A hundred and fifty thousand American factory workers were on strike, and a thousand farmers around Chicago were dumping milk again.

  With the wheat checks all in, Will was planning to take the morning train to Bismarck to see Dr. Oliver Murdoch. His leg was in fair shape, and he and Stuart took a walk around the farm to use up the hour till it was time to go.

  They went first to the far sheep pasture. A couple of half-grown ewes bleated at him as he walked among them, and followed him a few steps away from the flock. He smiled to think how they remembered those bottles.

  Prince swished his tail and cantered away. He was enjoying his rest after the summer’s work and he was going to make Will fight to get him into harness today. He was unaccountably mean for a gelding; but Will had never had the heart to sell him, because he knew most people who bought such a horse would beat him.

  But now he thought Stuart ought not to be stuck with Prince. “For Pete’s sake, sell that horse before he takes a bite out of you,” Will said. “He’s just about ready for the glue factory anyway.

  “And we should get those truck brakes fixed. I’ve been putting it off for months. You might do that right away, now that we can get along without it for a day or two.”

  Finally, when they were coming back through the new barn still smelling of raw lumber, Will had to say it. “I hope to God, Stuart, that you’ll leave that stuff alone while I’m gone! What in the world will your mother do here all by herself? She won’t drive the truck and she won’t ask George for help.”

  He went on to the other subject that must be brought up now. “We were talking last night … When I come back, we think you ought to go to college. You’re still young—a lot younger, maybe, than you feel. I didn’t feel so young myself after a couple years with a thrashing crew, but I was—now I see how young I was.… Your mother’s calling. I never knew her not to have a fit over catching a train. Start up the truck, will you?”