The Bones of Plenty

by Lois Phillips Hudson

  “Don’t call me Pickle-puss!”

  “Why not, Snickle-frits? You like pickles, don’t you?”

  She decided not to answer. “Can I drive the team?”

  “Just be sure you keep up with me.”

  She walked beside the horses and led them by their bridles. Her father twisted an ear from the stalk with an echoing crack, whisked off the husk with the help of a small hook he wore over his heavy leather glove, and then, without ever looking behind him, even while he was reaching for the next ear, he tossed the husked ear squarely against the center of his backboard. Lucy couldn’t understand how his aim could be so good. He never missed once, all the way up the row.

  She herself was not working hard enough, and she was getting cold for lack of exercise. If she had not been guiding the horses, she would have been running up and down the hill, ridding herself of the deadly hours of sitting at a desk and smelling chalk dust and radiators. Here was the smell for her—a blend of many smells surrounded by the cold smell of the air itself. The silk had a smell, and so did the husks, the bruised stalks, the hard ripe corn kernels, and the chaffy cobs. And there was the smell of the horses, too, and a trace of smoke from some distant outdoor wood fire—somebody perhaps was rendering lard, feasting on cracklings.

  The compound fragrance meant the complex thing that excited her so much, even though she could not have said why she was excited. This fragrance signified the rush of the harvests and the sun hurrying the winter and the winter hurrying the people, and the mystifyingly close connections of so many disparate things. Here was the corn that would go to make next year’s pig, like the one they had just butchered, and the corn that would be ground for her to feed to the baby turkeys next spring. This year’s turkeys would be slaughtered in a few more days now. But even though this corn went to raise so many creatures for death, still the smell of the field was the smell of being alive.

  She held Kate’s bridle up tight under her jaw. The horse’s soft nostril, lined with dewy hairs, was only a few inches from her fist and nearly as big. From where she walked beside the mare, Lucy could see only the nostril on her side, and it was so active that it almost seemed like a small separate animal. The moist breath came out of it very warm on her bare hand and wrist, and then a cold breath went back in, passing over the moisture on her hand and making it feel half frozen. Then the next breath would come out warm again, heated by all of the big body behind her. Kate’s coat was already thick and brushy for winter, and it would not be sleek again until summer.

  When they reached the end of a row which was still some distance from the unfinished end of the field, her father looked up at the darkening sky and decided to quit. They climbed up on the wagon wheels and swung themselves in on top of the corn. Her father untied the reins and handed them to Lucy.

  “Now take it easy. This ain’t hay! This is heavy.”

  He sat back on the corn, lifting up an ear here and there and working off the kernels with his thumb to see how deep and hard it was. Considering the drought, it was a good crop. The ears were pretty well filled and they were fairly heavy. Some of the corn crops he had seen this year had ears that were kerneled only a third of the way along the dried cobs. This corn was only mildly afflicted with ear rot, which meant it would store fairly well. He had switched to the Diplodia-resistant hybrid strain a couple of years ago, and the results had been nothing short of astounding. Yet now, only two years later, there were some still better hybrids on the market. His neighbors who had not switched were not getting anywhere near the harvest he was and now they were buying seed from him. Why hadn’t the Ceres vindicated his judgment the way this hybrid corn had?

  They stopped next to the corncrib between the barn and the house. “No time to unload now,” her father said. “I’ll just unhitch and leave it here till the morning. You run to the house and fetch me the milk pails.” He led the horses away.

  After she had taken him the pails, Lucy stopped to look up at the wagon and try to guess how many shelled bushels there might be in it. She did love bringing in the corn. There were no bugs and snakes in it as there were in gardens and in wheat and hay fields. She was not afraid of snakes, but it startled her to have a long fat garter snake come wriggling out at her from under a haycock or a shock of wheat. If her father saw her jump, he would laugh at her and she would know that he was thinking a boy would not have jumped. She herself knew that was not true because she herself had picked up a garter snake in the schoolyard once and scared Roger Beahr half to death with it. But with a corn harvest there were no such situations that caused a person to act afraid of something when she really was not. The snakes and bugs were all gone for the winter.

  Right from the start, corn was a lovely crop. Nothing was prettier than the first bright green rows of long, slender leaves arching out against the black earth. Nothing except wild prairie roses—delicious pink Dixie cups standing up along the thin, rare briars on the barren ground, passing away too soon to have been real, but leaving the memory that they had smelled like raspberries and spice—nothing except those roses had a sweeter, more delicate fragrance than young corn. And then in the summer nothing but corn gave such high shade in its long warm rows while the slender leaves tittered and shushed each other in the wind.

  Corn made such a solid, definite harvest. The kernels were big enough to be significant one at a time. The yellow stream from the spout of the sheller quickly filled bushel basket after basket while the ragged cobs spewed out to be hauled away in her red wagon for fuel or fertilizer.

  The corncrib itself was a satisfying edifice—so simple, so symbolic of abundance. It was a circle of the tallest snow fence wired together to make the walls that were held up by the corn inside. The dull red slats against the gold were like treasure-house bars around real gold. When she was smaller Lucy had wondered if there might not be a little elf like Rumpelstiltskin somewhere who could be captured and coaxed to turn all the corn in the corncrib into piles of gold pieces.

  For some reason she did not want to go back into the house. The night was as dark now as it would get—much darker than it would be when the harvest moon rose up a little higher. Already the clear stars swarmed over the sky and flowed into the white deluge of the Milky Way. This was like so many nights accumulated in her memory—this coming in to the little warm house from a harvest field, chilled and heroic and victorious. Those other nights before this one had already massed themselves into a nebulous yet familiar structure—a vast house of time all around her, reassuring her and enchanting her and reminding her—now that she had wandered inside without knowing what she did—that she had been here before. And the little warm house with the lamp on the dining room table called her to come and shut the door on the vast heroic house, and the regret she felt at leaving the vast house was part of the memory too.

  After supper that night they spread out the catalogs and began figuring out their winter order. They usually sent to Ward’s, because her father had proof that Sears Roebuck was run by Jews, but once in a while if there was a great discrepancy in price or if Sears offered a brand line not available at Ward’s, they made out a little order from the other catalog. It was necessary to compare the prices and offerings of both before committing oneself to the order blank on any particular item.

  They usually sent no more than three orders during the year—one at Christmastime and one in the spring and the fall. For the last two years when the fall order went out, her parents had argued over whether to order high-topped shoes or oxfords for Lucy. She had worn the high ones until she went to school, but then her mother had told her father that girls didn’t wear that kind of shoes to school any more and that Lucy ought not to be the only girl wearing them, especially since she lived on a farm.

  “How many times do I have to say that what the other fellow does shouldn’t make a particle of difference? If everybody else went barefoot all winter, would you let her, too? You’re always worrying about all the colds she gets. Why not try the proper shoes f
or a change?”

  “Oh, you always exaggerate! You know it’s her tonsils and not her shoes that make her get these bad colds!”

  Lucy sat at the edge of the table looking sideways across the two catalogs opened at the shoe pages. Would her mother desert her this time before the argument was won and order a pair of hideous black high-topped shoes? She stuck her thumbnail under a tiny raised piece of oilcloth peeling away from the sticky webbed backing.

  “You’ll just spoil her silly, that’s what you’ll do.” He picked up the paper and said no more. Lucy had three or four bits of oilcloth off by then, and she was horrified when she realized how greatly she had enlarged the little hole that had started her in the first place. She looked at the newspaper shielding her from her father’s face and quickly swept the bits into her hand. It was a good thing they were going to order a new one tonight. Maybe nobody would notice.

  Her mother tore out the catalog page with the children’s foot measurements marked off on it. She dusted Lucy’s bare foot with powder so it would make exactly the right imprint when she stepped down on the markings.

  “Just make sure you get them big enough,” her father said, remaining behind his paper. “Let’s try to get her through the winter on one pair this year.”

  “I ordered them just as big as I could last fall. Don’t you remember how they were so big they slipped up and down so she had to have her heels bandaged till her feet grew? And the toes curled up and they always were too wide for her, even when they got too short. How can I get them any bigger than that? It isn’t my fault her feet grow so fast. She takes after you and you know it!”

  After the shoe ordering was done and checked and rechecked with powder on both bare feet, the wonderful noncontroversial part of ordering began. This was the year for her to get a new sleeper and a new union suit. Last year was the year to skip and by now the ankles of her underwear were nearly to the middle of her calves and her mother had had to cut the feet out of her sleepers. She took a long time to decide whether the new sleepers should be pink or blue or yellow. It was lovely to sit and imagine all that new fuzz that would soon be snuggling around her in such a friendly way.

  After Lucy was taken care of, Rachel tackled the oilcloth. Only the “best” grade was shown in color and she never bought that. She always chose something from the rotogravure pictures facing the color page where the “good” quality was illustrated. She would try to imagine from studying the tiny pictures what the full-sized patterns would be like, and from reading the description what “predominantly green” might mean. They had once got a “predominantly green” that George claimed was not green at all, but blue. He despised blue. “Nobody but a Roosian could stand that color,” he would say.

  Rachel sighed and shut her eyes against the two gas mantles burning two feet in front of her face. She tried to visualize a new oilcloth on the table, but all she saw were the mantles thrusting like thumbs against her eyelids. Herman had some nice oilcloth in the rolls on his rack, but he was so much more expensive; even when she figured in the cost of mailing it from Chicago, she could get just as good a grade for as much as twenty-five cents less from Ward’s.

  There were other colors George did not like in excessive amounts. Red was all right for a kid’s sweater or a pair of little girl’s ankle-socks, but not to look at for three meals every day. She herself found “predominantly black” not quite cheerful enough for a winter breakfast some hours before the sun came up, and two years ago she had got a “predominantly yellow” one that had turned out to be exactly the color of squash. Maybe it was just that she had been pregnant with Cathy that year, but the very thought of that oilcloth made her sick. Whatever else she got, she wouldn’t choose “predominantly yellow.”

  The oilcloth would not have been so important if it had not been almost the only thing that ever changed in the house and if the dining room table had not been the commanding piece of furniture in the main room of the house. She finally decided on “predominantly pink,” and hoped it wouldn’t turn out to be either too red or too orange.

  The order added up to $27.46, plus $2.97 for postage. She was just adding those two together when George cleared his throat and said from behind his paper, “How much is it going to come to, do you think?”

  “A little over thirty dollars. I don’t see how I can cut it down.”

  “Well … that’s not so bad. Will that really do it?”

  “Till Christmas it will. I don’t know—we may need some things then.”

  “I was just thinking … maybe we ought to get Lucy’s Christmas present early this year. She might as well get the good of it all winter. Do you want some ice-skates, Lucy? Real skates? Not these clamp-ons that are always falling off, but shoe-skates? Would you rather have them now and then not have anything much at Christmas?”

  “Oh, George, can we afford anything like that?”

  “She’s getting big. She ought to be strengthening her ankles now, before she gets too heavy. She’s got wonderful balance. She ought to be learning to skate.”

  “Yes, but here you worry about her growing out of her shoes! Shoe-skates are a huge investment for the amount of good she’ll get out of them before they’re too small.”

  “We’ll save them for Cathy,” he said. He sounded mad. Lucy could hardly breathe, she was so afraid he would change his mind. “We’ll get the good out of them. If I say we can afford it, we can afford it.” He got out of his chair and turned to the skate pages. “Here. Let’s see … ‘built-in steel arch supports … lined for extra warmth… reinforced toes … hardened, tempered nickel-plated blades … hockey style.’ That looks like what we want.”

  “George! That’s almost the most expensive pair!”

  “Now Rachel, there’s no use getting a thing like this if it’s going to be no good. The steel in these other blades here wouldn’t hold an edge, and the shoes aren’t strong enough. Why save a dollar by getting something that you’re never satisfied with? This here is a reasonable price—that is, as reasonable as any prices are these days. If we want her to learn to skate, this is what she should have.”

  Lucy could hardly wait for the next morning when they could mail the letter and she could know that the order was on its way to wherever the big store was. She said over and over to herself the fine phrases describing her skates—“built-in steel supports,” “nickel-plated blades, nickel-plated blades!” There might even be some ice in the slough by the time the skates got here if only the slough got some water and froze. But the main problem was the water, not the freezing.

  The thing she couldn’t stop thinking about, as she lay in bed, too excited to sleep, was how hard it was to understand what her father wanted. One minute he was so mad that they had to buy her just a plain pair of shoes and the next minute, out of a clear blue sky, he just got up out of his chair and came over to the table and picked out the best pair of skates in the catalog.

  Friday, November 10

  George planned to ship his first batch of turkeys the next day when Lucy would be there to help. Before it got too dark to see he sharpened the knives he would need, straddling the narrow board seat and working the treadle with both feet while with both hands he held a howling blade against the spinning stone. A rim of fire spat into the dusk around the side of the stone as the knife took a hot, gleaming, new edge. George was proud of the way he could operate a grindstone. He was better than most professionals even on this old thing he had assembled out of what had been nothing but junk.

  His family had come to this prairie before there were any such professionals and had done very well without them. When the specialists came and built a town, they were useful, of course, but the town men, who could not live a day without the food he grew or the business he supplied, were there to serve him, never he to serve them. The town men lived by their specialties, he by his mastery of nearly all the things they could do individually. If he did not have enough of their medium of exchange to purchase their services, he could almost alway
s get along without them. It would take him a little longer, using makeshift tools, but he could do it.

  But that one medium of exchange—cash—undependable as it had proved to be, had become so important in the last few decades that now a man like him found himself in a paradoxical situation. The currencies his ancestors had used and he had inherited—his inventiveness, courage, strength, skill with his land and his animals—had been driven off the market by the intrinsically meaningless currency of printed paper. The currencies of his ancestors had always before added up to a sum that read “independence,” a thing that no man could ever put a paper-money price tag on. Once the currencies that added up to that sum called independence had been indispensable for the kind of cosmic bargaining that required a man to fight Indians, live in a sod hut, see the grasshoppers take all of the crop that he had planted almost barehanded in virgin soil, or watch a prairie fire burning toward him across the entire round horizon.

  Now his independence was the one great treasure left to him, entrusted to him by the men who founded his line in this nation and in this prairie, and he did not believe that any material reverses could ever cause him to lose a treasure that was not material. It did not matter how drastically his own inherited currencies appeared to be devalued by that worthless paper currency which was so nefariously used by Jew bankers and grain speculators. The speculators and the country had found out just how much a lot of their paper was worth, hadn’t they? But he, G. A. Custer, still had his treasure—his independence.

  Thus he would ask himself, “Can I grind this knife better than it would be ground by a city man who can do nothing else besides grind knives?” And he would answer himself, “Yes, Custer, by God you can!” And again he would ask himself, “Custer, is it time for you to go to work for the other fellow, and punch his time clock, go down in his cussed mines or run a cussed lathe for him?” And the answer would be, “What Custer, for the last two hundred years, has punched another man’s time clock?”