The Bones of Plenty

by Lois Phillips Hudson

  Lucy did not doubt that the poem applied to herself in every respect. She grinned, and she knew she wasn’t supposed to. It wasn’t ladylike to grin, especially when a person had such big teeth. Every time she had to have her picture taken, somebody would say, “Smile,” but as soon as she smiled, they would say, “No! Don’t grin! Smile!” It was only impolite to grin, but it was terrible to say, “I don’t care!” which was a thing she often said. She sometimes kicked her heels, too, and she hid when she was mad. And she whistled just to provoke her grandmother.

  She knew exactly how it would feel to get snatched through the ceiling before she knew what she was about. There were certainly enough reasons why she deserved to have the two great big black Things appear by her side at any moment. As soon as the light was out, they could hide under the table if they wanted to, the way she did herself. Tonight could be the night.

  Her father emptied the coal scuttle into the two stoves and turned the dampers in the chimneys. That was almost the last thing he did every night before he put out the light. Oh, if he could only leave it on. Just for tonight.

  “You all set in there, Rachel?” he said. Her mother had already gotten in bed with Cathy. If only she was a baby, too, safe in bed between a mother and a father.

  “Move the clothes rack,” said her mother. “We’re not getting enough heat back here. I just can’t get warmed up at all—even under this tick.”

  “Well this is some cold wave,” her father said. “I’d like to see a few of those hothouse flowers in New York out here tonight!”

  He turned down the gas and the hiss of it stopped. The gas left in the mantles made a few struggling sounds, the mantles became two terrible glowing blue eyes in the darkness, and then they went out.

  Now there was no protection at all from any attacker—not from black Things or white Things or hands floating around in the air above her. She wondered if a cold wave could make a glacier in one night—like the beanstalk growing to the sky in one night. Or perhaps if a cold wave was cold enough, it was a glacier—a wall of ice higher than the grain elevator, rumbling toward them like a thousand threshing machines. She would stay awake and listen, so if it came it wouldn’t catch them the way it had caught the mammoths.

  It seemed to her that she could not have slept at all—that she must have spent the whole night wondering where the glacier was, and wondering how the shapes got under the table to lurk and twitch there in the freezing light that recoiled from the marble sky and crept through the window into the warmth of the house. It seemed that she had not been asleep at all when she woke to the sound of whispers—three sets of whispers—and a vagrant flashlight beam glaring and vanishing in the kitchen.

  She heard footsteps approaching her bed and she closed her eyes, for she knew that she was supposed to be asleep.

  But her mother came to her in the darkness and whispered to her without ever asking if she was awake—seeming to know that she was awake.

  “Daddy and I have to go, but we’ll be back as soon as we can. You’ll be a big girl, now, won’t you? And take care of Cathy when she wakes up. Be very careful when you light the lamp.…

  “Grampa won’t suffer any more.”

  III

  Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us

  Leaders of the people by their counsels, and by their knowledge of learning meet for the people.

  All these were honoured in their generations, and were the glory of their times.

  And some there be, which have no memorial; who are perished, as though they had never been born; and their children after them.

  Ecclesiasticus 44:1-9

  Old Testament Apocrypha

  Monday, February 12

  There was a wide gate on the south side of Highway Number 10, and attached to the gate was a fence that went along the highway and then around the base of an unusually steep hill that was dotted thickly with big square stones. The gray-white lintel of the gate was scarcely distinguishable from the dusty snow on the hill behind it, but the black letters—CALVARY—stood out upon it. Near the top of the hill, several crouching men leapt to their feet and scattered across the snow, dodging or jumping the few headstones that protruded into their random flights. They dropped to their knees just as the spot near the top of the hill exploded in flying chunks of snow and black earth.

  In a moment they ventured back, sniffing the burnt powder. One of them was limping, and he rubbed his leg while he studied the hole. “Thunderation,” he said. “Prit-near broke my leg and it still ain’t deep enough. I oughta get paid by the hour on this job.”

  He was a drifter they called Tiny Tim. Every once in a while he sneaked off a boxcar and over to the Town Hall to try to get hired for some piecework. He hit every town along the main line often enough to be familiar to most men who dealt out piecework.

  “Don’t make me laugh,” said the man who had hired him. “If I was paying you by the hour, you’d of got some jack outa me and hiked in to the saloon by now.”

  “Sure I would,” Tiny Tim agreed. “I’m too cold to work any more. What do you wanta bury a man when it’s this cold for? No need to. Sixty below, two-three nights ago. I ain’t been warm since—just thinking about it. All you need to do is let him freeze good and stiff and pound him in the ground.”

  “Haven’t you got no feelings at all!” the boss cried. “You say anything more like that and I don’t care how you beg me, I’ll never give you no more jobs out here!”

  “Ya, I got feelings! Cold feelings!”

  “Go back down to the truck and fetch some more sticks!” the boss told him.

  Tiny Tim stumped away down the hill, moving as though he didn’t dare to bend his toes for fear they would snap off.

  “Shake a leg! Move a little and maybe you’ll get warmed up! We haven’t got all day! They’ll be here in another three hours or so. Come on, get a move on,” the boss urged the men preparing the holes for the next charge. “We gotta clean it up too before they come.” He looked around at the strewing of clods over the snow. “We can’t let ’em see it like this. They shouldn’t know about it. Anyway, they shouldn’t think about it.”

  Once more the spot near the top of the hill erupted and finally it was deep enough. The men squared off the corners as neatly as they could. Their picks rebounded as though they were striking solid rock, but with every jolt to elbows and shoulders a few crumbs broke loose and dribbled down into the hole.

  Finally they piled the frozen chunks of dirt in one big mound beside the hole. They did their best to make it look as though the grave might have been dug. They raked up the smaller dirt chunks and rocks, and they separated the larger lumps of snow from the lumps of dirt so the dirt would settle down better.

  The boss untied the strings of his ear flaps and pushed his cap back to cool his forehead. “Well,” he said, “I don’t see how it’s possible to work up a sweat on a day like this, but I done it.”

  He’d had this job for a long time, but he’d never got over being nervous about it. He still had nightmares about not getting the grave dug in time, or about mistaking the day and having the preacher and the whole funeral procession arrive with the casket and no hole to put the casket in.

  “Let’s get out of here. I need a beer. Thank God a man can go get a beer now after he digs a grave.”

  By the time they got back to town, the two men who had had to sit out in the truck bed could barely move their lips to speak, even though they had wrapped scarves around their faces. They trailed the boss into Gebhardt’s.

  Tiny Tim worked his jaw to limber up his mouth. “Let me have my money. Gotta warm up.”

  The boss pulled a dollar out of his back pocket. “That’s more than you’re worth.”

  “Aw—for a day like this!”

  “I’ll buy you a beer, but that’s all the cash money you get. You know you loafed as much as you could stand to without freezing to death.”

  Tiny Tim drained the mug. “Much obliged for the order
ve,” he said. He headed for the back room.

  “Takes a fool to drink that stuff back there,” the boss said. “I ain’t going to touch a drop that ain’t legal. Now don’t get too warmed up in here. We gotta go back out there and fill it in again.”

  Lucy felt the tickle of tears on her cheeks, then the salt running over her lips. Then the hymn book in the rack swam away out of sight, after she had managed to keep looking at it for this whole time. She wiped her eyes with her clenched fists, wiped the fists on her coat, and then wiped her eyes again. She stopped presently, and nobody had even noticed that she cried. She was glad that she had not been able to keep from crying, even if it was so embarrassing. She even wished that somebody had noticed, because it was lonely not to have anybody know that she too had cried for him.

  There were a great many flowers, and more people even than there were for the Christmas program. That was because they all liked her grandfather so much. But not as much as she did, not as much as she did.

  They sang the hymn he liked best. It was “Abide with Me.” Then the men closed the casket and carried it down the aisle. Lucy saw them lift him into the long black car. The people walked past the car to their own cars, bending their heads toward each other and holding each other by the elbows. They seemed as though they could not stand up alone—as though they had to help each other to walk against a strong wind.

  The long car started down the street toward the highway and the other cars followed behind. They went very slowly because a few of the people were driving buggies.

  He’s not in there, Lucy said to herself. I don’t believe he’s even in there at all.

  The pallbearers, shaking with cold, lowered the casket into the grave. Reverend Brant drew from his pocket a handful of dust. It was an old trick of the trade—keeping a little unfrozen dirt in the house. While he was still speaking, the diggers got out of their truck and came in to wait by the gate.

  George looked down the hill and saw that one of the diggers kept coming on up toward them and that he wasn’t a digger at all. He was Stuart. George could tell, even from this distance, where Stuart had been during his father’s funeral. A little man ran up and took Stuart by the arm, trying to hold him back.

  “They had to dynamite it!” Stuart shouted. “He worked his whole life in the damned dirt, and then it wouldn’t even let him in! They had to dynamite it! Took twenty sticks to make him a little hole in the ground! It wouldn’t even let him in! This fella here—he knows! He helped ’em do it. He told me and he knows!”

  Tiny Tim fled to the truck.

  Nobody wanted to be the one to keep a son from his last sight of the box with his father’s body in it—no matter what the son’s condition was. Stuart forced his way through the mourners to the side of the grave. He lunged at the mound of frozen clods and straightened up with a chunk of earth the size of his head.

  “Dust to dust!” he cried.

  He stood with his feet wide apart like an executioner, raised the earthen missile between his hands, and hurled it down into the hole. There was a crash on metal—a gong sounding in Hell.

  George was probably the only man there strong enough to handle Stuart without any help. He grabbed him from behind and jerked him from the edge of the grave. Stuart stumbled and lurched as though he could no longer keep his balance. George kept it for him all the way down the hill, scarcely feeling the effort it required. So this was the boy who pretended to be embarrassed when George had his say at the county agent’s meeting, was it? But this boy didn’t mind that the whole county would hear about this scene, and that of course the whole county would never forget it.

  “If you’re looking for a fight, you found just the right man,” George told him. “But if you lift a finger to me, you’d just better kill me the first time!”

  “I don’t wanna fight you! I’m too drunk to fight…. I never feel like fightin’ when I’m drunk. You know, George, you need a drink. Let’s go on back and get a drink. I just thought you oughta know about what this fella here told me.” He looked around for Tiny Tim. “Well he told me all about it. He’ll have a drink with us!”

  “Shut up!”

  “Twenty sticks!” Stuart twisted away from George and shouted his words back up the hill.

  The graveside group watched, almost as motionless as the man they had come to bury, while the man’s son-in-law struck the man’s son on the jaw.

  The minister beckoned to the gravediggers and they moved forward with their shovels. They juggled the clods like teacups on saucer-edges and lowered them into the grave as far as they could before letting them fall. Even so, the gong sounded again and again.

  Reverend Brant was accustomed to graveside hysterics of one kind or another, and Prohibition or no Prohibition, there always seemed to be about the same incidence of drunks at funerals. People just couldn’t seem to really believe that the person they loved was not in the casket at all, but far away in a blessed place. He finished reading the short service and sprinkled the dust he had been holding in his hand. Then he waited for the diggers to finish and arrange the flowers over the broken earth.

  George pushed Stuart behind the funeral parlor car. Here at last was somebody who needed to be hit.

  “Stand up and fight, you bastard! Somebody should have straightened you out a long time ago. Dirty shiftless bastard! Roam around the country—bring the god-damned smut from Texas. Fight, you bastard!”

  Stuart was laughing harder and harder. “That’s what I call respect for the dead! They haven’t even got him in the ground yet and you call me a bastard!”

  George hit him again with everything he had, and Stuart stretched out on the highway without a whimper.

  He’d be out for a while but he wasn’t really hurt. George looked over the roof of the hearse and up the hill to see what the crowd was doing. It was scattering and heading down toward him. He grabbed the limp ankles and dragged Stuart to the delivery end of the hearse. He flung open the doors and hauled the unconscious body inside, head first. It smelled strongly in there of the bouquets that had been riding beside the coffin. That flower smell so cooped up and intensified was like the smell of death itself.

  “Just wait till you come to!” George told the body.

  The funeral parlor owner came hopping ahead of the crowd. “I saw that! Have you gone out of your mind? Get him out of there! Have you killed him?”

  “You mewling little shrimp! You mincing little butcher! No, I didn’t kill him! You haven’t got another customer yet! Leave him be! It’ll sober him right up when he wakes up in there. Just give him a ride back to town, you bloodsucking chiseler!” George was aware that he didn’t really want to be shouting.

  “I said get him out of there!” The little ghoul dressed all in black was so overwhelmed by ordinary human rage that his white face was turning to an ordinary crimson. “Get him out!”

  “You bugger! You sawed-off little vampire! You’ve got enough of his cash so you can afford to give him a lift back to town. I won’t touch him again!”

  The embalmer grabbed Stuart under the arms and pulled him out the end of the hearse. Stuart opened his eyes when his feet hit the ground. He stayed on his legs long enough to stumble to the second black car and he sat down on the bumper.

  It was necessary to remove him as quickly as possible. Reverend Brant had ridden in that car and he took Stuart’s arm. “Can we give you a ride?” he asked.

  Stuart looked around. He distinctly remembered coming out in a truck, but he couldn’t see one now. “Much obliged,” he said, and crawled into the car. He leaned back against the seat and looked up the hill. The bouquets made a last discordant explosion against the colorless snow and sky. It was an explosion that hurt his eyes.

  “Why’d you do that?” Stuart said. “What makes you think he’d want all those flowers out there just to freeze? ‘When It’s Springtime in the Rockies’—that was his favorite song—‘Springtime in the Rockies.’ How come you did that?”

  “We always do i
t,” the preacher said. “It doesn’t make any difference what time of year it is, does it?”

  Stuart did not come home that afternoon, but Rose would not let anybody else stay with her. And since there was no one to see her cry, she cried.

  She sat at the little black desk trying to get through the papers in it. They went back thirty years and more—back into the last century. Looking at so many of them all at once made her weep for his life even more than for his death.

  He had been carrying much more insurance than she had thought he was. He had always been so much more generous with her than she had been with him. She knew that he had lived his life without some of the things a man ought to have with his wife. But she couldn’t see how she herself could ever have been any different. For thirty-six years she had known well enough what she did. She had held him away from herself and tried to make up for it by working too hard. He had seen what she was doing—he always saw—and she had pushed him farther away because she was afraid to have him see.

  I never wanted him to know what was in my mind. But I loved him. But if he knew what was in my mind, I wanted to run away. I never wanted anybody to know what was in my mind. But I loved him. But I loved him. But I loved him. But I hide what is in my mind even from God. Even from God.