Lucy could not see why the horses would mind so much. When they trotted, their harness made nice metallic jinglings, and she listened to those sounds and pretended they were bells. However, when they went as slowly as they did now, the main sounds were those of hoofs clumping into the dry light snow and runners slicing along behind the hoofs.
That afternoon they had a special singing session out of the green books. Miss Liljeqvist said, “Let’s sing songs about the snow!” So they sang about the bells on the sleighs and horses. Lucy raised her hand.
“Do you have a song you want to sing, Lucy?”
“No, but I just wanted to ask … ”
“This is singing time now, Lucy. Yes, Charley, did you have a song you wanted us to sing?”
Lucy did not sing the next song, picked out by Charley Wilkes. He always chose a song about a train—a talkative little engine that puffed and chattered about all the things it pulled behind it in the freight cars. It was a chummy engine, totally unlike the haughty and merciless engines that came through Eureka hauling a hundred box cars behind them. The song offended her and made her feel silly. So Miss Liljeqvist scolded her for not singing. “We can’t always have our own way, you know, Lucy. We must sing each others’ songs. How would you like it if Charley wouldn’t sing ‘Jingle Bells’?”
“I wouldn’t care!” Lucy flung out.
She had to sit up in the corner by the blackboard while the rest of the singing went on. When school was out, Miss Liljeqvist stopped her as she went into the cloakroom.
“What was it that you wanted to ask, Lucy?”
Lucy looked at the floor. She was afraid Miss Liljeqvist would see how much she hated her if she looked up at her face. “I just wanted to know why the sleighs and horses have bells. My father said it was a silly idea.”
“Well, because when everybody had horses instead of cars, the bells took the place of horns. I can’t think of any other reason, Lucy.”
“Not just because people liked them?”
“Oh … probably not. There had to be a reason. Is that all you wanted to ask?”
As soon as she and the Wilkes boys opened the door of Herman Schlaht’s store, she heard her father’s voice, loud in argument, and Zack Hoefener’s louder, gruffer voice interrupting her father’s voice. She couldn’t imagine how anyone could have the courage to interrupt her father, and it always astounded her when somebody did. She could tell they were going to wait a long time for him and she went to stand by the candy counter. James and Charley stood beside her.
Zack had once said to George, “I’d vote for a yellow dog if he was a Republican,” and George had never forgiven him for that. Whenever people asked George if he was a Republican or a Democrat, he would feel more insulted than if he had been asked if he were a jackass or a billy goat. And so he always felt duty-bound to argue with Zack because Zack was so grievously wrong. And besides, Zack had a way of putting things that made George feel his entire destiny depended on the outcome of the argument.
“Men like me,” Zack said, “are paying taxes to keep men like you in business. I don’t see the sense of that. If a man needs a subsidy in a business, he ought to get out and go into some other business. You don’t see tax money subsidizing the hardware business, do you? You don’t see us getting no subsidies, do you?”
“What do you call a tariff!” George roared. “If that ain’t a subsidy to a bunch of American manufacturers and storekeepers just like you, I don’t know what it is. You wreck our export markets so nobody over there has any dollars to buy wheat with, and then you talk about how you haven’t got any subsidy. The tariff is the biggest cockeyed subsidy I ever heard of!”
“Pshaw! What good would it do you if other countries had a few American dollars from selling their cheap stuff over here? I tell you, in the first place, they’ve got their own farms going again, and in the second place they’ll always be able to buy cheap wheat from somewheres. They won’t need one single American dollar to buy more wheat than they can eat. Whenever a country gets a bumper crop, it’s going to dump, and I don’t give a damn how many agreements the brass hats sign on the dotted line. A couple years ago it was the Roosians and the South Americans that dumped. Now this year the Australians are gonna dump. I tell you, there’s just too many of you farmers that won’t admit you’re licked and quit growing wheat!”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about! If there’s too much wheat, just tell me why men are standing in line all day long for a piece of bread!”
“Because they don’t want to get out and work, that’s why! Not because there ain’t enough wheat to make bread for them! This country has been having wheat surpluses ever since we got reapers and thrashing machines. Comes a little boom or a war or a drought somewheres and the prices go up and everybody and his brother starts raising wheat. Then there’s so much wheat the bottom falls out of the market again. And every time the bottom falls out you think the government ought to buy your wheat if nobody else will. Phooey! It’d be better if you was just to take pure relief till you could get offa the farm and into some other kind of work.”
“How’d you like it if a war come along and the government pushed a couple million men into your business alongside of you, and then when the war was over, somebody comes along and says, ‘Well, Zack, there’s too many of you guys in the hardware business. Why don’t you just quit and go on relief?’ Why I oughta bust you right in the snoot! Don’t tell me to go on relief!”
“I tell you, you little guys are just not going to make it. When are you going to buy a tractor, George, and a combine?”
“I’ll buy one! And I won’t buy it from you, neither—not if I have to drive it all the way back from Chicago at five miles per hour!”
“Wait! I wasn’t done! I’m in the machinery business and I know something about it! There’s a million tractors in this country now, and there’s going to be a lot more. A million tractors and six million farmers, and the million men with tractors can do as much work as the other five million men and their horses and mules all put together. And those men with tractors are going to put the rest of you guys out of business, and—no, wait! I’m not done yet!
“Here’s another thing that never seems to dawn on you guys. Fifteen years ago it took millions and millions of acres just to feed all the horses and mules in this country. Now everybody’s got a car. Cars, trucks, tractors, airplanes—who the hell needs horses? Who the hell needs oats and hay? But what do you guys do? You find out you got only ten per cent of the market for oats you used to have—you can only sell so many oats to the Quaker Oats Company—so you put all that extra acreage into wheat. There just ain’t that many human beings to eat it up! And if you get a tractor, you’ll do the same goddamn thing! You’ll decrease your feed acreage and put it into wheat. Now just where will that get us?”
“I’ll tell you where it’ll get us! The wheat I’ll raise will get these starving miners enough to eat for the first time in their lives and it’ll get me some coal at a decent price. Right now those men are getting twenty-three cents a ton to bring coal out of a broken-down death trap, and I’m paying nine dollars for that same ton of soft coal! And right now those men are watching their little kids bleed to death because they haven’t got bread to give them. Their kids are so hungry they go dig roots out of the ground and eat dirt and stuff that rips their insides out—they bleed right out of their guts till they finally die some night—hundreds of them—thousands of them! Don’t talk to me about a wheat surplus! And one of these days those miners are going to figure out that there’s no such thing as a wheat surplus nor a coal surplus and they’re going to start fighting back. And once we all let a little blood out of you middlemen — then we won’t hear about these surpluses any more!”
“Who’s gonna let the first blood out of me, huh, George? Who?”
“Take it easy!” Herman yelled.
“Who’s gonna start it, huh, George?”
“I might start it! I might start the whole
damn war with one pigheaded, beer-bellied storekeeper just like you!”
“Take it easy!” Herman cried again.
“Pshaw! Get ten men like you together, Custer, and you’ll all kill each other! Like old Jay Gould said, ‘I can pay one half of the working men to go out and kill the other half.’ Well, that’s you, George. Who’s gonna be left to fight this big war of yours?”
“Take it easy!”
“All right, Hoefener, if all us little men kill each other, who’s gonna be left to buy your lousy overpriced nails and screwdrivers any more? Just how long are you gonna stay in business, even if nobody does let the moonshine out of your belly with a bowie knife?”
“Take it easy!”
“I’ll stay in business as long as I’ve got my franchises! I make my money selling John Deere and International Harvester—not rivets! I still say, when are you gonna buy a tractor?”
“Maybe I’ll just take a tractor, Zack. Maybe I’ll just tear you up in little pieces right now and walk on over there and take one.”
“Custer, aren’t you ever gonna take these kids home?” Herman shouted.
George turned and saw them standing by the candy counter. When had they come, anyway?
“Well, just remember this,” he told Zack. “If I get beat out of work I’ve put in on Vick’s farm out there, watch out! If I have to get out, so will a lot of other men just like me. Just look out for us. Just look out.”
“You’ll kill each other!” Zack retorted.
George had the door open before Lucy and the boys understood that he was ready to go. Lucy had been in the store before when her father got very mad, but she had never heard him tell another man that he was going to knock him down. Her ski pants seemed to have no legs in them. She seemed to be all wool from the waist down. Her woolen legs would hardly carry her toward the door where her father stood boiling with rage.
“We’re gonna hoof it tonight,” he snapped. “Get a move on.” He left the door in her hands and was suddenly ten feet ahead of them.
“Shake a leg, I said! It’ll be pitch dark in just a jiffy now.” He was twenty feet ahead.
James was Lucy’s age, in the third grade, but Charley was barely six. He was afraid of the dark. He reached for his brother’s hand. “He talked too long,” he whispered.
“Now don’t waste your breath jawing at one another!” he shouted back at them. “Just save it for hiking. Everybody walk in my tracks, now, and I’ll tromp you a path. That’s the way the Indians did it—everybody single file—braves first, women and children afterward—every person made it a little easier for the fellow behind. Come on now.”
But no matter how he shortened his stride, they still fell farther and farther behind. The snow seemed to be falling harder and harder, and Charley began to whimper. He would not let go of James’s hand and they were having a hard time walking single file.
“For Pete’s sake,” said George, “a big boy like you don’t need to hang on to anybody does he? That’s what’s slowing you down. You ought to be walking straight, Indian file, like I told you.”
Charley did not say anything—just sniffled wetly. James said, “He’s only just in the first grade and he ain’t never had to walk it in the snow. We always just stay home when it snows.”
“Phooey, I walked it in the first grade, and I never cried about it either,” Lucy said. She hoped her father was noticing that boys cried at least as much as girls did, and that boys were not necessarily even as strong or as brave as girls.
But her father told her, “Well it don’t help any for you to light into him does it? Just let him be. Come along now.”
Lucy kept up. She was panting and her throat burned with the cold air. Her head was sweating under her heavy cap. But she kept up, and the boys fell behind again. Charley turned into a real crybaby. All he said was, “It’s too dark! It’s too dark!”
“Dammit! We’ll never get home at this rate. Come here!” Her father squatted in the snow in front of Charley. “Wipe your nose and then climb on my back.”
Lucy thought of how her father never would carry her, no matter how tired she ever got, and she just couldn’t understand it. Now her father was carrying a boy he didn’t even seem to like. And he always said boys were tougher than girls. Was he carrying Charley because Charley was being a crybaby or because he was a boy or what? She felt the sissy lump get big in her throat and tears in her eyes, but she shook her head and ground her teeth and stopped it. By the time she was Charley’s age she had already learned how not to be a crybaby, that was a cinch!
The only thing to do was to try even harder, and to hope that James would not be able to keep up even when he didn’t have Charley for an excuse. That would show her father that all boys were not stronger than all girls of the same age.
She kept up so well that when her father had to stop and wait for James, she bumped into his legs. “For goodness sakes, Lucy! Watch where you’re going,” he told her.
She hardly heard him. She felt like the Little Match Girl. She often felt like her, because they were both in the same trouble—nobody cared what happened to either one of them. The poor Little Match Girl, all alone on the bitter-cold New Year’s Eve, all the rich people hurrying past, too busy and too cold to notice the little girl or buy her matches. The little girl sitting down on the steps of a house to get in out of the wind, striking her matches to try to warm herself—and the next morning the rich man’s servants finding her frozen just as hard as the marble of the steps.…
With the pestilential Wilkes child sniffling through blood-raw nostrils a few inches from his ear, George tramped through the snow as fast as he could go. When Rachel opened the door to them, she had a fit.
“Why, George, they have circles under their eyes! Dark circles! Just as though they’d been up all night. What ever possessed you? You can’t expect them to walk as fast as you do!”
“Now then, Rachel, I carried this one three-quarters of the way! Do you mean to tell me that a couple of half-grown kids can’t keep up with a man carrying sixty pounds through a foot of loose snow?”
“You know they can’t! You’ve said yourself a sixty-pound pack shouldn’t slow down a strong man in good condition. Besides, Charley can’t weigh over forty.”
“Not in a foot and a half of loose snow I didn’t! And he does weigh more than forty pounds!”
“Lucy will come down with tonsillitis tomorrow!”
“Well, if she does, it’ll be because you talked her into it! I tell you, this walk was nothing! How did people get educated twenty, thirty years ago? Did we let a little snow stop us? We never gave it a thought. I tell you, this country was not built by the kind of pantywaists we’re raising now.”
“Oh George! Why in the world didn’t you go after them with the sleigh? Those boys aren’t going to walk another step. You take them in the sled or else they’ll have to stay here all night and you’ll have to walk over and tell Edith they’re all right.”
“Rachel, the horses were all clear at the other end of the place, in the lee of the strawstack, and they’d never hear me whistle in the snow. Why, in the time it would have taken me to walk down there and get them and bring them back in here and harness up, I could walk in to town, so that’s what I did. Why, it’s not more than two miles as the crow flies. That’s no distance at all!”
“It’s plenty of distance when your legs are so short that you sink clear down to your knees with every step you take! The horses have come in now. I went down and let them in the barn a little while ago.
Oh, how stubborn she could look when she felt like it! Just like her old man. George tramped out of the kitchen to go down and harness up two horses to haul a heavy sled a quarter of a mile diagonally across his fields and another quarter of a mile back. It certainly beat the devil, the way everybody had to go out of his way for a deadbeat and his family.
Monday, December 25
On Christmas Day they ate an early lunch and then they all drove up to the hospital. The
right rear window of the Ford had got cracked during the summer and George had taken it out for fear it would shatter. When it got too cold to go without something there, George fitted a piece of plywood into the window. Stuart found himself sitting next to the plywood, and by the time they had gone five of the seventy miles he was wondering how he was going to make it the rest of the way.
His mother was sitting next to him. His eight-year-old niece was on the other side of her. His sister sat in the front seat with his brother-in-law. She was holding his infant niece. His infant niece was the only one in the car with anything to say. She made sounds continually. Sometimes the sounds rose in pitch and then his sister let the baby jump on her lap and chew her finger and search through her purse. Sometimes the sounds were simply fizzy experiments the baby made with the wetness on her lips—his sister had explained that the baby drooled so much because she was teething. Sometimes the sounds had an earnest variety and inflection that was nerve-wracking—as though the baby was trying to say something that was very important to her that nobody would ever know about because she would have forgotten what it was by the time she knew the words to use.
It was these last earnest sounds that got him down. He couldn’t get out of the notion that he ought to be listening and trying to figure out what she wanted to tell somebody. He’d never been around kids much; maybe that was why they got under his skin sometimes. He could never just not listen when some little three-year-old was jabbering at him; he always felt as though he had to try to make something out of it.
The dark plywood so neatly varnished by his brother-in-law was like a hand over his right eye. He wanted to shove his fist through the plywood the way he would have struck the hand away from his eye. He was getting a funny tight feeling across the top of his head, as though a line was being drawn over the center of his scalp and all the right side of his skull was going numb because of the blindness of his eye. He couldn’t quit rolling and pushing that eye to try to glimpse something out of the corner of it and get over being blind.
The Bones of Plenty Page 39
