The Bones of Plenty

by Lois Phillips Hudson

  Above him stood his boy, looking out into the streaks of snow blowing between the house and the solid new barn. It would be hard to pick a worse time to be twenty years old, wouldn’t it? But it would be hard to pick a worse year, too, in which to die—to leave so many obligations unfulfilled, to abandon so many precious plantings to the drought and the wind.

  If only he could start this boy back to school before he had to leave. In school Stuart would find himself. How could a man not find himself if he were busy getting the most important thing in the world—education? “All right, then,” Will said. “If the bottom is out of everything, and the farmer can’t get a price for anything, what else is there for you to do besides go back to school? Things’ll probably be booming again four years from now, when you get out, and then you’ll be ready for the boom when it comes. You’ll be twenty-four years old—just old enough to have a little sense—and you’ll have your pick of jobs.… And another thing—farming’s going to take more and more capital, for machinery and enough land to make the machinery pay. And there’s going to be a bigger and bigger surplus of farmers, too. We’re going to be a drug on the market—just like our wheat. Get into something where you don’t need so much cash and where you don’t have so many other men competing for the same fat middleman’s skinflint prices.”

  “You know,” Stuart said, “a lot of other guys are sitting out this mess by going to college, too. They’re all figuring it just the same way you are.”

  “They’re all figuring it right! I’m telling you, four years from now, you won’t have half the competition from college graduates that you will from farmers.”

  Stuart stretched his arms up from his shoulders. His fists clenched and worked back and forth from his wrists as though he was manacled to the wall behind him. “You want me to get a desk job?”

  Will confessed to himself that it was a little hard to see a starched collar set over those shoulders or white shirtsleeves around those thresherman’s wrists. It would be too bad to put such a man behind a desk or behind a window. Could a boy who had ridden in box cars for two years settle down to polite explanations of Pullman schedules to old ladies? Or could he stick out those flashing perfect teeth in a shoe salesman’s smile for nine hours every day? Whether he could or not, Will would rather think of him pitching bundles. But there must be other alternatives.

  “You don’t have to sit at a desk just because you’ve got a diploma. You could build dams or look for oil or—I don’t know what all. That’s what you have to go to school to find out. If you’ll just start in, I know you’ll find something to suit you, and I know there’ll be a job waiting for you when you get out—unless things get even worse.”

  “Well, they are getting worse, aren’t they? It doesn’t look to me like there’s any law that says just because things have gotten bad, now they have to get better again. They can just as well get worse and worse and worse. And there won’t be a damn thing I can do about it if they do.”

  “All right, if it turns out that one guess is as bad as another, at least you’ll have an education. They can’t take away what you’ve got in your head, but they can take away just about anything else.”

  “I gotta go clean out the chicken house now,” Stuart said. “Looks like we might be in for it before morning. Weatherman says so.”

  The young man, the twelve-year-old boy, was already out of the room and into the hall. “Stuart! Don’t spend your life scraping droppings out of a hen house and selling eggs for thirteen cents a dozen!” Will couldn’t tell whether Stuart heard him or not. The only thing he could catch from the kitchen was the sound of dishes in the dishpan.

  From what meal, Stuart wondered—from what meal could his mother possibly be doing the dishes? Not from that ancient meal they ate sitting at the card table—that first meal they ate after his father came home in the Mercy Hospital ambulance—not that meal?

  His mother kept her head turned away from him. She was too provoked with him even to speak to him. She was mad because he wouldn’t say he’d go back to school. She’d been trying to get him to say it, too. He sat down with his back to her and pulled his rubber boots on over his leather ones.

  He forced his feet into them, standing up before his heels were down, hobbling to the door with one rubber leg still twisted and caught on one leather heel. He closed the door, jerked his coat from its hook in the shed and pushed his arms into the cold sleeves. The cold back of it raised the tight goose pimples on his shoulders, and when he buttoned the cold across his stomach, the lump of that meal he had eaten so long ago froze under the goose pimples on his belly. And it would always be there now—this lump of the dinner he ate on the day his old, old father came home to die.

  He wondered if there was any chance at all that he could get through it without some liquor. His mouth watered as though he was going to throw up, he needed a drink so much. He couldn’t quit salivating even after he began scraping and shoveling out the chicken house, and after a while his throat wouldn’t swallow the saliva any more, or else there wasn’t any more room for it down there on top of the lump, so he had to spit it out. Back and forth he went, from the chicken house to the compost pile in the orchard, spitting and spitting into the dirty straw and the dusty snow.

  Rose made the dishes last as long as she could because otherwise the tears would have outlasted the dishes, and if she finished with the dishes before she managed to finish with the tears—well, she just didn’t know what she would do with herself then. She powdered her face and whitened her eyelids as well as she could and went in to Will. “Do you think we can get him to go?” she asked. “Do you think it would straighten him out?”

  Will couldn’t believe how tired he was. But he roused himself again. Talking made his belly hurt worse, but it was going to hurt anyway. To hell with his belly.

  “We’ll have to go slow with him. And I think you ought to sell the farm as soon as prices go up again. I don’t want to think of him tied to it if he doesn’t want to be, and I certainly don’t want to think of you on it here alone. If George wasn’t so ornery, you could figure out something—but he is, so that’s out.”

  “I’ll never sell this farm. We built it.”

  “You must sell it. You must promise me you’ll sell it. You can’t compete now, anyhow, unless you’ve got machinery. Every year these state colleges come up with new hybrids and new fertilizers—and the machinery makers come up with high-priced new gadgets to cut out manpower. But nobody anywhere comes up with any new markets. And the men that are going to make a living out of farming are the men that can buy the fancy seed and machinery and the new livestock. You can’t hire five Ralph Sundquists to take the place of one of these new corn harvesters they’ve got. If you and I were young, and we owned this place free and clear, and the market was any good—if, if, if … Or if we hadn’t used up so much of our cash, if I hadn’t used up so much of our cash—you’d be in pretty good shape—you and Stuart could gamble a lot of it on a combine and a better tractor. Even then it would be a gamble. When is there ever going to be a decent price on wheat again?”

  “Will, we are in good shape. How many farmers own their farms outright?”

  “I tell you, you’re not thinking right. That’s the way George thinks. He’s always talking about how he’s in the top fifty per cent. You and I are in the top ten per cent, and we still haven’t made anything for years. It’s like—well it’s practically like being in the bustle business! If you can’t sell bustles, what good does it do to be in the top ten per cent?”

  “People have to eat.”

  “There’s enough wheat just in Minnesota elevators to feed everybody in this country for a year. Actually, if Mr. Wallace’s figures mean anything, you and I were in the top five per cent last year, with a measly little net of twelve hundred dollars or so. Just ask yourself how many new tractors and combines you’re going to buy with twelve hundred dollars and still have anything left over for all the other things we need. But there’ll be enou
gh for you, though, if you sell at the right time.”

  “Well—I’ll have to see what Stuart wants.” She said it to please him, he knew. That was all right. It would take her a while to see it.

  “Can you lay your hands on that AAA contract now?” he asked. “We ought to get it taken care of.”

  He held the government papers on a breadboard propped against his knees while he figured on sheets of yellow scratch paper. As he filled in blanks and laid out acreages for wheat and for all the other crops, he saw the black land of his snow-covered square mile around him, and then he saw it as it had been in Indian summer. He could feel the midmorning sun soaking into the heavy suit he hadn’t worn back from Bismarck after all. Then he saw it as it was in April. He could feel the air in a field just before a spring rain and he could smell the fragrance that rose from the dust as the first drops kissed it. He’d always wondered what created that wonderful smell. It was like an offering of praise and thanksgiving from the earth herself. He could see his blue field of flax blooming below the blue field of the sky. He could see all the black, brown, green, blue, and gold fields and pastures under his square mile of snow—just as he always saw them while he waited for the winter to pass.…

  He finished the contract and signed it in writing that was beginning to show how his hand shook. He called Rose to take away the papers and help him lie down. He was straightening out his legs, slowly, so as not to use any of the muscles across his abdomen, when he heard his other child and her children coming into the kitchen.

  The only thing worse than to be Stuart in these times—to be feeling the first disillusionment natural to a boy of twenty in even the best of times—was to be Rachel or George—to be losing the most productive years of life to the worst years the country had ever known. Even Will’s frequent exasperation with George did not keep him from having some idea of what the man was going through.

  And these children of his older child—they seemed already doomed to be sacrificed like the bright and beautiful innocents of myths. They were already marked for the monster. Or monsters. The ones who sprang from the ground that had been sown with dragon’s teeth, who grew two heads for every one cut off, who leapt up stronger every time they were felled to the earth—inscrutable monsters whose existence was never quite explained by the myths. But they were there, nevertheless, to count off the procession of the hecatombs into their bone-filled caves while the country around echoed with the lamentations of their fathers and mothers. What myths, what monsters, would Lucy and Catherine have to be given to? Oblonsky had thought he knew. Oblonsky had called “free enterprise” the myth, capitalism the monster. Will could not forget how sure Oblonsky had been about these children’s world—about the myths that created the monsters and the monsters that perpetuated the myths.…

  He stretched out his hands to Lucy—his very white hands with the new green-black ink stains—and pulled her to the side of his bed with one thin arm around her waist. It was odd; he hadn’t really thought about how thin he had got. Before, it was always her ribby little chest that had seemed thin to him, but when he felt how hard his arm was against her, clear through her jumper, he knew how he had fallen away from himself. He vaguely remembered the feel of the jumper. Then he realized it was made from an old tweed suit of his that had been packed away for so many years, ever since it had got too tight for him. They had thought Stuart might get some good out of it, but he was much too tall for it by the time he could have worn it.

  It bothered Will to see such rough, thick material on Lucy. A little girl like her ought to be dressed in something much lighter and gayer. It seemed to him that his granddaughters ought both to wear fairy clothing of summertime things—of flower petals and corn tassels—things that would call to mind a warm wind pushing through a flax field, or the sweet, milky, infant heads of green wheat. He didn’t know how their dresses ought to look, only how they ought to feel. In his weakness and fatigue, he felt a remarkable projection of his vision—a much broadened, if misty, grasp of all the things that had composed his life, from the time when he was Lucy’s age through all the years up to Lucy herself, right now. It was a panorama—like the jigsaw puzzle he had gone away without finishing. All the pieces of his life were here now. None were missing, still to come. But even with all the pieces right in front of him, he still couldn’t quite see what they made when they all went together.

  “Say, I’ll tell you what,” he said to Lucy. “On Saturday you come over here and we’ll work on that big puzzle all day long and finish it and find out what it’s a picture of. What do you say?”

  Her taut little face blazed with the smile he saw when he let her beat him at checkers or when he yielded and said yes, he’d tell a story, or when he told her she could ride standing up in the back of the truck, or when they went to feed the lambs. He tried not to think of how she would not smile because of these things any more. The important thing was the smile. Who ever saw the smile but him? Lucy’s face had had a distance about it ever since she was a baby. By the time she was five, she could look as preoccupied, as unapproachable, as her grandmother had looked at eighteen when he first met her. Lucy at five—her head tilted thoughtfully downward, her hair half out of her braids, the outline of her small cheeks so pure and precise beside the straying platinum hair, the curves of her chin and mouth and nose so tiny and so separate, the gaze of her eyes under the brows and lashes so dark for her hair (for her hair would darken to match her brows, as Stuart’s had)—the gaze itself so dark when she was five. Now at eight the gaze was darker. That was one of the reasons why the smile was like the sun.

  He had the same desperate feeling about that smile that he once got about the problem of whether or not there could be a sound in the forest if a tree fell and no one was there to hear it. Of course there was a sound, he had insisted—whether any human being heard it or not. A certain combination of things occurred and they produced a sound, and that had to be all there was to it. But when he had first come up against that problem, he had wanted to rush to all the places in the world where a tree was falling, just to make sure that there would always be a sound. Now here was a smile that supposedly could always be smiled, but would it? Would somebody be sure to see it for him when he couldn’t see it any more for himself? Above all, would somebody make sure that the smile was never lost?

  She was a very beautiful child when she smiled. He wondered if everybody else knew it. He began to see that there might be so many things that he knew and that nobody else knew. He would have to try to tell everybody while he had the time.

  Then the blazing smile died, the sun set. “Mamma says not to pester you to play with me,” she said soberly.

  “You just let me worry about that,” he said. They were protecting him, trying to force him into more idleness. They were still trying to save him.

  “Well,” he went on, after waiting for somebody else to speak, “tell me the news. Has the sheriff been around to badger Wilkes any more?”

  “Otto never has said,” George told him. “But if I know Press, he won’t be around again till summer. Mr. Press likes to stick close to home in the winter, where it’s nice and warm and he can feather his nest with the pickings around town.”

  “How’s Edith?”

  “I don’t see how she keeps going,” Rachel said. “She’s up and around now, and she doesn’t seem to be any worse off than she was before. The baby seems to be all right, too.”

  The visit did not last long. They could all see how tired he was and they refused to stay. Lucy gave him a refreshing conspiratorial look as she left. He and she were fooling all the others once more.

  He thought about how unfair he had been in his thoughts about George. All the credit for a child like Lucy could not be given to Rachel or to her side of the family. George had given Lucy some of her intensity and courage, and not a small share of her intelligence. Will was astounded to think that it had never occurred to him before to be grateful to George for Lucy and Catherine. His unfairness
to George could not be excused just because George had been unfair to him, too. It came to him that rarely was a man really fair in his life. Not till a man was dying could he afford to see things as they really were. All these years he had blamed George for the hard life that Rachel was obliged to live; yet in good times George would have been a highly successful farmer. He was sensible about farming, and he worked as hard as any man Will had ever known.

  There would never be the time nor the means for making amends to George, he knew. But on the other hand, he never could have seen that there were amends to be made until the time for making them was gone. He had been angry with George for insisting on repaying the loan; now he had to admit that he never could have respected a son-in-law who hadn’t repaid him. He had been annoyed with George for refusing even to think about taking relief of some sort; now he had to admit that he never would have respected a son-in-law who went on relief. Now he could see … now that he was about to be interrupted.

  He had struggled so hard with the tiredness he felt while his grandchildren were visiting that now he had a feverish second wind. His mind was leaping from one spot to another in an undisciplined way, and he had neither the strength nor the desire to try to control it. He felt as if he were in the midst of a fireworks display, with extravagant shapes and colors exploding all around him. If he tried to trace out the trajectories of one particular burst, he found himself staring at nothing but thin wiggly lines of smoke that swiftly expired in the darkness. It was better simply to float from burst to burst—fireworks were not meant to be pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle on a card table. But he would return from the fireworks and try to do something about the smile—something to bridge the coming interruption, the way his stories used to be bridges. He asked Rose to bring the breadboard and some paper back to him.