The Bones of Plenty

by Lois Phillips Hudson

  “Who would have brought me in!”

  “Your family, of course.”

  “Why don’t you just tell my family what ails me and send me home for Thanksgiving?”

  “Because I don’t know for sure what ails you. I may know after this second look. We’re going in from the other side this time. Now let me take a little listen here.” A doctor with a stethoscope could always stop any argument—temporarily at least.

  After he was gone, Oblonsky said softly, as though he didn’t want to say it but he had to, “I told you that you would go for another ride any time they decided to take you. It’s this disgusting instinct, isn’t it? And it doesn’t even have anything to do with hope, does it?”

  “How do you know I’ll go for the ride?” Will asked.

  “Why do you keep on saying things you do not believe!” Oblonsky blurted angrily. He unfolded his newspaper and put it up so that Will could not see his face. Will wondered, as he did every day, how the man could read the gray blur that his shaking hands must make of the newsprint. Oblonsky was the only person Will had ever known besides George who memorized the daily paper.

  It seemed to Will that today’s news was scarcely the sort of thing for a sick man to be memorizing. A cloud of dust ripped up from the prairies was darkening the sky above New York State for the third day now as it passed over on its way to sink into the Atlantic. The United States Government was buying up a million bushels of wheat and thousands of bales of cotton to try to halt the falling farm prices—yes, they were falling again, the way he had had a premonition they would, looking out of the train windows at the whited sepulchers filled with wheat, that day so long ago when he came to see Dr. Murdoch. There was another farm strike in North Dakota, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. The farmers struck for higher prices while the government bought surplus farm produce that nobody else wanted or would buy at any price. Things could look mighty ridiculous from a hospital bed.

  And while American politicians were making thousands of speeches to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of the Armistice signed in Versailles, the Germans had other ways to celebrate this November eleventh. The German Reich withdrew from the League of Nations, the disarmament conference at Geneva, and the World Court.

  Will had heard all this and more on the radio next to his bed. The world was as sick as he was. Why should a man fight to live in such a world? But that was the question Oblonsky was always asking. He himself was supposed to have different views. He was a grateful man. All his life he had been grateful for the world. All his life he had fought to preserve life, to nurture it. But he knew well enough that there were many things a man could do nothing about.

  Every year he helplessly watched a great many things die. In every batch of incubator eggs there would be at least one that would crack as it was supposed to under the attack of the little beak inside and then look no different, for a long time, from the other cracking eggs in which little chickens worked, then rested, then worked some more. But after a while it was clear that all the other eggs which had begun to hatch at the same time as this particular egg were now broken and the new chicks were out, drying their wet fluff and looking hungry. If one listened, pressing the unhatched egg to his ear, he could hear the fragile sounds of the lonely struggle inside. It was the kind of sound that made it hard for the listener himself to breathe. And the feeling in the listener’s chest made him say to himself, “Perhaps this is an unusually tough shell this poor little mite is trying to fight his way out of. Perhaps even I myself am to blame for feeding his mother too much oyster shell so that this egg she laid is too hard and thick. I’ll watch this fellow, and if he is not out in a little while longer, I’ll see if I can help him a bit.” Then the listener would mark the shell, lay the egg down again, and go away.

  When he came back he would pick up the egg and the anxiety caused by such violent motion would make the prisoner pip feebly at its prison. Thus assured that the prisoner was still alive, the benefactor would decide to free it. He would peel the shell away from the soggy thing inside, taking care not to bruise it with his big thumbnail.

  The chick would lie in his hand, sometimes able to squat by bracing its little yellow breast against its tiny pink legs that would not stand up. The benefactor would feel the weakness of the stringy toes. The chick’s round, damp head would droop to one side; the quarter-inch pink beak with the pinholes for nostrils would hang open a little to reveal the sliver of hard, innocent tongue. Sometimes there would be a bit of slightly bloody excrement glued beneath its tail. Sometimes there would be a smear of blood on the pink toes, but it would nearly always be impossible to find the source of the smear. Often there would be nothing at all to show why this baby was different from his stronger brothers who were already flapping their cotton wings, already bullying each other, while this one hung his head and could not keep the round white lids from drifting down over his eyes.

  Not one of all the babies that Will had felt compelled to help out of their shells had ever survived. True, it took some chicks a little longer to chip out than others, just as some chicks would grow faster than others and learn quickly to boss the others around. But any chick that could not get out of its shell by itself would not live.

  He looked around at the beds in the ward filled with whiskery, tired lumps of men like himself. It was very silly to compare men and baby chickens—that’s what Murdoch would tell him—and he would have to admit that if there was one thing these men did not look like, it was baby chickens.

  It was a week after his second operation before Will got a chance to pin Murdoch down.

  “I removed a second obstruction in your lower intestine,” the doctor said, “and then I spliced it all back together again—as good as new, even if it doesn’t feel like it right now!”

  “All right, now how many more obstructions are there?”

  “I’m not sure. I may have them all now. We can’t tell until we X-ray again. What are you worried about? You’ve still got a few feet of gizzards to spare, you know, and you’re in remarkable shape for a man your age.”

  “I’m even in remarkable shape for man with cancer, is that what you’re trying to say?”

  “No, I’m not. I certainly am not.”

  “Look, I’ve had enough of this. I’m just wasting money—money I’ve worked all my life to save for my old age and for my children. I want you to send me home—out of here—before it’s all gone.”

  “Mr. Shepard, my duty is to my patient—not to his family and his heirs. There’s always hope—when a man is generally in as good shape as you are.”

  “I’m not talking about hope. I’m talking about gambling away the last of my savings.”

  “It’s my business not to lose hope,” Murdoch said. “Of course I would never do anything that I see as hopeless. But what kind of a doctor would I be if I didn’t think I ought to gamble, as you put it, on a hopeful proposition?”

  “But I don’t want to gamble! It’s my money! I’m through putting up the stakes.”

  “But it’s not your choice. The choice is your family’s. And they would choose to gamble your last penny on you—you know that. And then they would gamble every last penny of their own and every last penny they could beg, borrow, or steal—isn’t that so?”

  “Yes that’s so. That’s why I’m simply not going to go on with this.”

  “This kind of decision can’t be left solely in the hands of a man as sick as you are. You’re depressed. It’s only natural. You’ve been lying here in a hospital for a long time. So long, in fact, that you’re obsessed by the notion that you’ve got to get out—one way or another. You’ve put yourself into my hands and now you’ve got to let me decide what’s best for you. You’re too gloomy and weary right now to have any perspective.” Murdoch clapped him on the shoulder and was gone.

  It was ridiculous that a man should be deprived of this choice. A haphazard clot, a small bubble of air—these things should be given more power than a man�
��s own conscious acts and orders? Was his mind vanquished by his body simply because his mind no longer possessed the vehicle of a sound body to command? Could the condition of his body really overrule any choice his mind wished to put into action?

  Tuesday, December 5

  Rachel sat beside the dining room table churning with one hand while she held the Sun in the other. She rarely found time to read a newspaper at all, and when she did she found most of its contents so shocking that she wondered how anyone could stand to read a paper from the first headline to the last want ad every day the way George did. For example, the Grain Futures Administration had completed its investigation of last summer’s grain market collapse and now announced that three-fourths of all the traders in wheat and corn on the Chicago Board of Trade were speculators. They were not millers or bakers or cereal manufacturers or spaghetti makers or anyone with a legitimate interest in wheat or corn. They were men who would not have been able to tell the difference between hard or soft wheat or red or white or durum wheat if sheaves of each were laid in front of them. They were men who had never laid eyes on a wheat field, but they were the only men who were making money from wheat. And they were quite obviously the only men who would ever make money from wheat again.

  And if that wasn’t bad enough, three more states had just voted in favor of the Twenty-first Amendment, which meant that the Eighteenth had been repealed. A revolting story, which she supposed was meant to be humorous, told of the lines of “parched citizens” who “gleefully celebrated the end of the fourteen-year drought” by standing in mile-long lines in a “torrential rain” in New York City, waiting to get into the department stores to spend their precious money on poison. She wondered just how much those “parched” people knew about real years of drought.

  The churn was making so much noise next to her ear that she didn’t know Otto Wilkes had arrived until she heard him and George on the porch. She stopped churning and listened with horrified concentration. She knew that if Otto was coming into her house, it meant that she was needed in his house. Was this the morning that he was coming to ask her to help with five little bewildered children whose mother had finally coughed away her life in the night?

  She heard him chuckle as he opened the door, and she realized how her heart had begun to pound. She didn’t know why she was so panicky lately. “Why, hello!” she said. “I thought I heard George talking to somebody!”

  “Hello, Rachel!” Otto cried. “Congratulate me! I’ve got a new boy!”

  Males! God save the world from males! How could that man come in here and confess that his own hideous lust had procreated another tragic child to grow up motherless? How had Edith ever survived another pregnancy, another delivery? He couldn’t mean it. He couldn’t mean that they had a new baby. She tried to count backwards and think of something to say, all at the same time. Had she really not seen Edith since it would have showed? How shameful! But it couldn’t be true anyway!

  “Well I never!” she said. “Why in the world didn’t somebody tell us?”

  “Well, the fact is, we thought she’d miscarry, like she did the last time. She prit-near did a couple times, too, and she never made it quite to the end, neither. But the Doc says they’re both okay.”

  “Well, I just can’t imagine why she never told me,” Rachel repeated. The truth was that she had no trouble at all in imagining why. Edith was even more independent than Otto was obsequious. The longer she lived with him, the more opposite from him she became, seemingly trying to compensate for his willingness to beg. Edith hadn’t been to town in over a year. She couldn’t bear any more to walk into the grocery store where they always owed Herman just as much as Otto had been able to beg. Worse, even, than all the other terrible things about the Wilkes house was Edith’s heartbreaking shame—the look in her eyes and the apologies in her conversation. Every cough from the lungs filled with tuberculosis was an apology. Surely now this new baby would be still another source of shame to his mother, for surely she knew what a terrible crime it was to bring another child into that house. Surely she knew that all of her children were probably contracting her disease. Surely she knew that she would almost certainly have to leave this new baby before he would be old enough even to have made his memory of her.

  “Why I’ll hurry over right away,” Rachel said. “Just as soon as this butter comes.”

  “If it’s just going to be a little bit, I could wait and give you a ride,” Otto said.

  “Oh, no. No, you get right back. I know she needs you.”

  “Well, then, much obliged. See you later.” Otto bowed out the door George held open for him.

  “How is it, I wonder,” George said to Rachel, “that brassy fakes like him always get boy after boy?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” she said, “unless it’s because nothing but males could possibly be conceived from pure filth! Poor Edith! She’ll never have a day of rest until she’s dead and gone.”

  Rachel felt so ashamed of herself. No matter what you thought of people, if they were your neighbors you ought to be interested enough to know when they were expecting a baby. And besides, it wasn’t that she didn’t care about Edith; after all, they had gone to school together. It was just that she was so busy—and that she simply couldn’t bear to go into that house unless she had to. She had a great fear of carrying the pestilence from that house back into her own. She had a superstitious conviction that she was too lucky, whenever she compared Edith’s children to her own. Why was she entitled to have babies so much healthier than Edith’s?

  Despite the cod-liver oil she forced into her children and the warm clothing she managed to keep around them, would there not be a dreadful balance struck some day? Would not one of her own have to be very sick, to make up for having been well all this time, while half a mile away there were children, surely just as deserving, surely just as innocent, who had never known a really healthy day?

  More rationally, she knew that though Cathy was still little enough to get most of what she needed from milk, Lucy was growing too fast and her margin of physical reserve was narrowing. Every day in school Lucy was exposed to all sorts of wintertime diseases. She did not get enough different things to eat. She got no fruit at all, and this year there were not even canned tomatoes. How long would Lucy, with her inflamed tonsils and sore throats, be able to resist the bad sicknesses that other children got?

  Rachel felt so nervous that it was hard to take the time to work the butter, but there was none to leave George for his dinner and besides, she knew the Wilkeses would be out of it. Some fresh butter might tempt Edith’s weak appetite. She sat down with the wooden butter dish in her lap and squeezed the pale, mushy lump with the curved paddle to get the bluish-white water out of it. Frequently she poured off the water as the lump became firmer and darker. Finally no more drops rolled down the sides of the fragrant, buttery, wet wood.

  She packed half the butter and enough other food for two or three days into her big roasting pan, changed to a clean apron, buckled on her overshoes, and got Cathy ready to be left with her grandmother.

  By the time Rachel had driven back from her mother’s house to Otto’s she was in another near panic. What if Edith had died while she was fussing around at home?

  She picked her way through the littered yard to the house, wondering why nobody appeared on the porch to welcome her. She carried the sacks of clean towels and Cathy’s outgrown baby clothes with her, but she left the food in the car till she could get a place cleaned up for it.

  She knocked on the back door, but though she could hear the children inside, no one opened it. The curiously inflected voice of Irene rose above the noise, screaming at somebody to open the door. When nobody did, Irene shouted, “Come in!”

  Rachel set down the sack full of towels and opened the door. “Hello, Irene.”

  “Hello,” Irene said shyly. She was beginning to understand that her family was different, and different in a shameful way. She seemed to realize that it was ungracious
of her not to have opened the door for somebody who had come to do her family a favor, and in her odd voice she made the kind of apologetic sounds her mother would have made. It was like a parody of a parody—as she herself was a parody of a younger child, so she imitated a younger child imitating its mother’s ways with company.

  “I didn’t know it was you. I mean, I didn’t know you had your hands full.” She had her own hands in a pan of water, having just got to the breakfast dishes. A bubbly gray line of grease around the sides of the pan had combined with whatever soap had been in the water and neutralized it. Irene had stacked all the dishes in the skillet, which sat on the bottom of the dishpan and sent up an inexhaustible tide of leftover frying fat to settle on every layer of surfaces above it.

  It seemed logical to begin with Irene and the dishes—to remove the source of the pollution she vainly struggled with and start her with new soapy water. It seemed logical until Rachel looked around. Her first look almost convinced her that there was no logical place at all to begin—and that furthermore she could never work back to wherever she did begin and recognize it as a logical place to stop.

  “Won’t you have a chair?” Irene said, in the parody of the parody.

  “Oh, thank you, dear. I think I’ll just go in and say hello to your mother if she’s awake. How’s the baby?”

  “Oh, he’s fine. He’s just such a little toady. We named him after Papa, but I call him Toady.” She adored the baby already, as she had adored the others when they came. Rachel remembered a girl a little like Irene who had been in her room the year she taught school. The child had never seemed to learn anything so far as her schoolwork went, but at recess she worked and clucked over all the little ones, played house with them, picked them up when they fell down—little ones who read twice as well as she did herself. Rachel had thought the child hovered over the younger ones because the older ones either ostracized her or teased her, but that was not the whole explanation. She simply loved the little ones, that was all. She probably had begun a mentally handicapped brood of her own by now.