The Bones of Plenty

by Lois Phillips Hudson

  “Well,” Finnegan yelled, “maybe this is a little optimistic for this year, but it’s the sort of thing the government would like you to keep in mind and plan for. It’s the sort of thing you can look forward to, if only we can get this overproduction whittled down and the prices boosted up. In the meantime, there are these other bulletins here about things you can do. Here’s one called New Ways to Use Your Root Cellar, and here’s another—Simple Improvements for the Farm Home, which I know will interest your wives.

  “Well, let’s go over these forms, now, shall we? I have a little book here with a set of tables in it to make the figuring easier. Just hold up your hand, when you’re ready, and I’ll come and read them off to you.”

  “This isn’t Russia you’re in, mister,” said George. “We can all read and do simple arithmetic here. And I’ll tell you what little book of tables I’d like to see. As long as you’re going to use our money to print up so many of these little books to tell us what clodhoppers we are and how we ought to go about building bathrooms—I’d like a little book to tell me how to go bankrupt and come out of it with more than I was worth to begin with, the way these bankers and big businessmen and big farmers do. All I know is what I see. I see a little guy lose his shirt and him and his family wind up on relief with every businessman in the county still trying to get something out of his hide. I see a big man go broke and I see him start up again somewheres else, making just as much as he made before. I see a Jew banker go broke right here in this town and go off scot-free with our money and make himself nice and comfortable. Now why don’t you print up a book to tell us clodhoppers how to do that?”

  Finnegan couldn’t disregard him. There were too many approving headshakes and loud agreements.

  “Well, now then, sir,” he said. “I’d like to know how that’s done, myself, if it is. [Oh, it most certainly is! We all know them. We all know Harry Goodman.] And if a little book on that subject comes out, I’ll be sure to let you know. But all I have at the moment are some booklets about agriculture which I’ll be more than pleased to let you have. I’m not an expert in accounting. I came here tonight to tell you about the AAA program to get farmers back on their feet, and I’ll be glad to answer questions on that subject.”

  But nobody had any more unanswerable questions for the county agent not to answer. That was the end of the meeting. “Much obliged to you folks for coming on out tonight,” Finnegan cried, “and I do hope you’ll get your neighbors to come to the next one.” He raised his voice another notch. “And talk about this between yourselves, and watch the Sun for the next meeting-time up here in Eureka, won’t you?”

  “Well,” George said to Stuart as he let him out of the car at the foot of the hill, “it was just as bad as I thought it would be.

  “Well, I guess that’s his job,” Stuart said.

  Somebody really must teach that boy some manners, George thought as he drove home. This was what came of spoiling them when they were little. He parked the car, kicked the blocks under the front wheels, and walked the few steps to the house. The two breaths he took and exhaled made thick gleaming clouds in the light of the rising third-quarter moon.

  “How was it?” Rachel held a sock stretched over a wooden darning egg.

  “I brought you something so you could get in on all the fun yourself.” He handed her the pamphlet on how to install a bathroom complete with three fixtures for a hundred and fifty dollars.

  “That silly little squirt!” he burst out. “I don’t need him to use my money to print up a book to show me how to dig a hole in the ground and stick a pipe into it nor how to hook up a bathroom set from Montgomery Ward’s! They send all that information with the fixtures, for God’s sake! If you can buy the fixtures and get the damn water, you don’t need any little book printed by the government! I just can’t tolerate it, I tell you! When I think of tax money paying pipsqueaks like him to come out here and spread the rich man’s propaganda for him, I get so mad I just can’t see straight! It was just the way I told you it would be—only worse!”

  “Well, how about the acreage-control contracts?” Rachel ventured.

  “Oh pshaw! A little guy like me just can’t get anywhere with them. A man like your father could retire seventy-five or eighty acres and not have a landlord to fight for the cash that was left. I can’t do that! A man on such a narrow margin as I am has just got to gamble on making every cent of cash he can. I know it’s not the best way to farm, but what can I do with Vick breathing down my neck?”

  Then she asked what she really wanted to know. “I suppose Stuart got home all right.”

  “Well, why wouldn’t he have got home all right? I let him off at his own driveway! He can’t walk up his own driveway in the dark after riding around in freight cars for two years? Rachel, what ails you these days?”

  Not long after the meeting George noticed an item in the Sun. He read it to Rachel as she did the dishes. The Secretary of Agriculture was pleased, it said, by the response to the acreage-control program. A full eighty per cent of the nation’s wheat acreage had been signed up. But only half of the nation’s wheat farmers were involved in the program, which meant—said the Secretary—that it would be easier and cheaper to administer. It didn’t mean any such thing to George. What the discrepancy in those percentages meant was that the big owners were going to collect tax money for doing nothing, while the fifty per cent of farmers working twenty per cent of the land were going to go right on sweating as usual.

  “You know who they’re calling ‘farmers’ in that fifty per cent that signed up, don’t you?” George said. “The Guardian Trust Company. The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. Farmers! Everybody who doesn’t know any better is going to think that the government has gone all out to help the farmer. Everything is going to be just rosy now!”

  He sat in the black leather rocking chair with his feet up on the stool in front of the stove. He’d stepped in a gopher hole this morning and turned his ankle and it had hurt him all day. Even propped up next to the heat, the damn thing wouldn’t stop hurting. It made him more tired than he ought to be. He was tired and poor—as poor as ever. An inflated dollar for the farmer was an inflated dollar for everybody else, too. If he had a ten-year-old mortgage to pay off now, he might be getting a little good out of the inflation. But he’d never even got far enough to mortgage anything yet. Well, he could probably stay on the treadmill for another year. Then he’d see where he stood. He’d fight before he’d go on relief. He wasn’t going to lick the boots of a Finnegan or anybody like him, nor stand in any line for any kind of government relief. There must be countless men like him—who knew their rights and would know when they had patiently taken enough.

  Those other men in their lamplit houses—far-flung dots in the prairie night—a lot of them must be getting ready, too, just like him. Those other men, whether tenants or owners with mortgaged farms, were very much in the same boat. Owners’ farms were worth a third of what they were valued at when the mortgages had been taken out, so one year of failure to meet the interest payments, and the owner was no longer an owner. In George’s case, one year of failure to pay Vick would either evict him from the farm immediately or put him so hopelessly in debt to Vick that it would be madness to go on.

  He could try moving to a city and going to work for the other fellow, but the government was doing its best to move surplus city people into the country. Even in a place the size of Eureka there were always displaced men sitting on the steps of the Town Hall hoping to be hired for a few hours’ work. The city people were starving now on worn-out bits of abandoned ground instead of starving in bread lines. In short, the city people generally reacted like any other ignorantly transplanted thing. Still, George knew men who were going from the country to the city—faraway cities—to try their luck. It was a senseless mobility. If a man couldn’t live where he was, how could he possibly afford to move? Yet that was what more and more millions were doing—starving and moving, starving and moving. It seemed
to him more sensible to try to ride it out in a spot where he had already invested so much of himself than to join that dislodged multitude.

  On the other hand, it would be intolerable to fail in a spot where you’d lived for a long time. What would be harder than taking a relief check from the hand of a man who had once sat behind you in a fifth-grade classroom? Yes, from a man you could beat in those days sixty ways to Sunday, whether you were trying to spell him down or be the first to plug a duck in the waterline at a hundred yards. Mobility at least provided anonymity for failure, and a man was compensated for the loneliness of wandering by not having to face the grudging pity of his community. Oh, he would certainly clear out before he got into any such straits as Otto Wilkes was in.

  George had always thought, after it was clear that his old man would never let him off the farm to get an education, that he would at least use the education he got on the farm. He would farm this same northern prairie as two generations before him had done, and he would make good, too, as they had.

  But there had been no years in his life like the early years of free land when his grandfather had homesteaded. Nor had there been any years like those when he was a boy and his father became prosperous—those years that were so good the Roosevelt administration had chosen them for the “parity years,” to butter up the farmers.

  The parity years—he was ten years old in 1909, fifteen years old in 1914. And those years had been good ones. With four boys to help him, his father was making plenty of money, expanding his farm, getting set for the killing he would make during the war. And those were good years to be a boy on the prairie, too. He had enjoyed himself. He had been old enough to be an essential part of the male brawn that it took to run a farm in those days. At twelve he had gone with his father into a blizzard he would never forget and brought back a herd of cattle that would otherwise have perished. At thirteen he had been six feet tall and could manage a ten-horse team as well as any full-grown man.

  And he had been young enough not to want anything else—not to want any more schooling, not to wonder about getting married, not to worry about owning his own land some day. He had wanted only to do what he was doing—to use his strength against the strength of brutes and elements. Even when he wasn’t working, he was looking for activity that would be wild enough for him. He and his brothers would each pick a steer, run up behind him, grab his tail and jump on his back. They’d twist those ornery steers’ tails up into such knots that the critters would have all four feet off the ground for a quarter of a mile. They’d try to do it in sight of the house if they could. Then their mother would stand on the porch and add her bawling to the bawling of the steers.

  They could ride standing barefoot on the back of a galloping horse as well as any circus rider—in fact, better, because they couldn’t be bothered with well-rosined white slippers. Eventually they got a three-horse team so well trained that they could stand with a foot on each outside horse and straddle the middle horse. It wasn’t nearly so hard as it looked. It was just a question of training the horses. And back at the house their mother would be screaming from the porch that they were going to kill themselves. She was as good as a circus crowd. He would never forget it.

  His foot slipped off the stool and crashed to the floor. He realized that his eyes had been closed. He’d almost gone to sleep in his chair—like an old man. He was tired—even tired of his own fury. He sat staring at the hot red-black metal of the round stove till he felt as though his eyes were melting. The parity years, the parity years.

  “Rachel,” he called out to the kitchen, “do you suppose a man will ever be able to buy a pair of pants with a bushel of wheat again?”

  For three days Will lay in the nightmarish consolation of morphine hypos, curtained away from the rest of the men by the sheets pulled about his bed.

  On the fourth morning the orderly bathed the limbs that were still connected to him by the various systems circulating through his bandaged middle. The nurse drew aside the sheets and he was greeted by Mr. Oblonsky. He had forgotten all about him.

  “And how are you feeling this morning, Mr. Shepard?” asked Mr. Oblonsky.

  Now that the sheets no longer hid the pain, it was necessary to hide it behind decent manners instead. “Much better,” said Will. Once he had spoken, he lay in a sweat while the sledge hammer smashing into his belly subsided into nothing more monstrous than his monstrous pulse.

  “Well, it takes a while,” Mr. Oblonsky observed in a shockingly loud voice. “It takes a while. You will feel much better tomorrow. The fourth day is the dark before the dawn. I have had three fourth days myself now, and I know.”

  Appalled, Will managed two syllables in reply: “Why three?”

  “They never tell me. Just come in and say, ‘All right, let’s take a little ride in the morning.’ ”

  In spite of what it cost, Will felt that he had to set the record straight on that point. “I’ll just tell them … to treat me … like the old gray mare … with her leg broke.”

  “No you won’t,” Oblonsky said. “And the reason you won’t—that is the reason they all know.”

  Will was played out. “Who?” he said.

  “All the exploiters. Doctors, bankers, mine owners, factory owners—they all know we are born with the instinct that makes us totally vulnerable. The instinct to live—to exist, at any cost. If we did not care whether we existed or ceased to exist, would any man in the world choose to go down into a mine every day of his life? That man thinks he is alive, Mr. Shepard, and yet he never sees the sun!

  “These men watch their babies starve when the owners shut the mines; they see their comrades murdered—murdered, Mr. Shepard, by the hundreds, because the owners will not go to the expense of installing the simplest safety devices. Yet those owners have been able to persuade these men that they are alive.… You don’t think that you can be persuaded to believe you are alive when your whole mind tells you that you are not? Wait! Wait till they come and ask you to go for another little ride. You will go!”

  “No. I won’t.”

  “Yes, you will—let me give you a hypothetical man—he is only hypothetical because he is two or three generations in one. First he is a proud, rugged, independent farmer—the backbone of the country, poor but free. Then the bank takes away his farm and he becomes a tenant—a sharecropper. If he is not too dazed by hunger to be able to think, he knows he is no longer free, but it never occurs to him to think that he is no longer alive. But then the soil is worn out and there is too much cotton, anyway. So the sharecropper must become a picker—wandering over ten states, picking whatever the exploiters want him to pick, for whatever wages the exploiters want to pay him. And he will fight other pickers for a job—for a chance to earn fifty cents a day. Isn’t that a funny joke? He is not alive; yet he will kill another man in order to continue his existence. We were all born to eat each other in obedience to the commands of our disgusting digestions—I imagine you do find your digestion wearisome, do you not?”

  “A little,” Will whispered.

  “But you will take as many rides as they tell you to take, Mr. Shepard, in order to keep your tortured digestion alive, because as long as you keep your digestion alive, you will think you are alive.”

  The last hypo was wearing off. The nurse had told him he must begin to stretch the time between them, or he would become addicted to morphine. He had thought that he had got some idea of what pain was in the past six months, but now he knew that the pain going before had been only a primer. Another day, perhaps, he could tell this man that he too knew something about these laws of living and existing.

  “I think I’ll have to sleep,” Will said.

  “I am sorry. I did not mean to get so carried away. This battle with the exploiters—it is so much more important than you know—it is my life! … I, too,” he mused, “must still believe myself to be alive.”

  Friday, October 20

  The Mundane Meridian that was the road rolled southward and upw
ard, and the latitude of a fence line that began on an eastern hill invisibly crossed the road and rolled on to the west, down around the earth into the celestial meridians of sunset color brilliantly ascending the horizon. Along the mundane meridian a point that was Lucy dogtrotted almost the whole three miles between the points that were school and her father’s farm. If she hurried, there would still be time to help her father with the corn picking before it got dark.

  Changed into her overalls and play coat, she ran through the north grove to the edge of the cornfield where the rise of land lifted the long rows up to the sky. Her father was far enough on the other side of the rise so that she could not see him, but she could hear the sounds of the hard corn ears thumping against the high backboard he had attached to the side of the wagon. She knew he was trying to finish the field today.

  She ran up the slope between the two rows of dead stalks, kicking into the rich litter of ripped husks and piles of silk. The yellowed husks were softer than they looked—much softer than fallen leaves—and the fine strands of red-brown silk compressed beneath her feet into a springy cushion over the hard ground. The cushion made her feel as though she must be bounding up into the sharp air like a jack rabbit. She had a picture of her long ears silhouetted against the skyline as she took her great leaps of alarm, scanning the hillside for the coyote she scented.

  When she reached the top she saw her father just beginning another row, starting back toward her from the end of the field. He saw her, too, and waved a glove at her.

  “Well, Pickle-puss,” he said when they met, “what’s new?”