The Bones of Plenty

by Lois Phillips Hudson

  George had no visibility at all, and he could feel the team wandering back and forth across the road. Once another team arose out of the blackness into sudden existence and nearly collided with his own horses. He never even saw whose team it was, he was so busy hanging on to his own. It could have been a team created from the furious dust itself, for the horses abruptly ceased to exist as his own went on trying to make some headway into the wind. Nobody drove automobiles in something like this, so he wasn’t afraid of being struck by a car. Once he had been caught in the Ford when it got like this, and when he couldn’t see the radiator cap any more he finally had pulled over and sat it out. But he could at least trust the horses to stay on the road.

  He made it before school was out and he walked into the building to get Lucy.

  “You better bring along your arithmetic book,” he told her. “If this keeps up, we won’t be able to bring you in tomorrow.”

  He put the book in his denim jacket pocket, which seemed half full of dust, and he tied a scarf over her nose and mouth. “There, now, can you breathe through that?”

  She looked up at him. Her blue eyes, isolated from the childish parts of her face by the scarf, were disturbingly mature. He felt as though a strange woman was sizing him up. Then she nodded her head like any little child.

  Once they were on the road leading through the open fields, they might as well have been lost in the swirling shrieking Sahara, with the wind flogging their backs, whipping the breath from their mouths, lifting at their elbows, even lifting at the wagon, tipping it, gathering strength to spill them into the blackness and blow them away. They could not have heard each other even if they had shouted into each other’s ears. They lowered their heads and shut their eyes against the flaying sand and let the wind blow them to shelter or to the deaths of whatever worlds they kept inside their heads while the desert’s dry convulsion annihilated the world outside.

  This road that Lucy knew by heart was now the deep rumbling hole which led down to the golden palace of King Pluto, and she herself was the poor little sobbing Proserpina, swept down the tunnel in the golden chariot behind the two black horses with smoke coming out of their nostrils. And far away in the sunlight Mother Ceres was wandering over the earth, refusing to make the seeds grow because of her grief over her little stolen daughter. All the starving sheep and cattle were following Ceres, bleating and mooing and begging her to feed them. But Mother Ceres had made a rule that until Pluto gave Proserpina back, nothing would ever grow again anywhere on the earth. So the whole black earth was waiting for little Proserpina to come smiling back into the sun.

  Lucy stayed home the next morning because it was still gusty and dirty outside. She did two pages of arithmetic and then some more problems her mother made up for her to do, but she finished them quickly and did not know what to do next. She began bouncing a ball in the dining room. Presently it got away from her and bounced into the kitchen.

  “Must you do that?” her mother asked.

  “Can I go outside?”

  “No! Of course not! If you could go outside, you could have gone to school. What’s the matter with you, anyhow? Why don’t you read?”

  “I’ve read everything that’s interesting. Can I go over to Gramma’s?”

  “Maybe Daddy can take you over this afternoon if it lets up some more.”

  “Well, can I bounce the ball carefully for a while?”

  “All right. Carefully!”

  She bounced it higher and higher because the game was getting more and more monotonous. She was just doing it because she’d won the argument about it and now she had to pretend it was what she wanted to do. Then the ball escaped again and she ran after it, to recapture it quickly and show that she really was in control of it. But instead she kicked it and it rose into the air as though it was possessed. It traveled in a long, unswerving arc straight for the kitchen window and slammed against it with a conclusive sound.

  Her mother was peeling potatoes. She dropped her hands into the pan of water. “You’ve broken it!” She began to cry. Finally she sat down on the kitchen stool and covered her face with her apron and shook and shook. Lucy had never seen her cry like that. She went close enough to the window to look at the long slivers of glass and the hole in the pane. She couldn’t really believe it was there; she would shut her eyes very tightly—so tightly that she saw the little designs of color in the dark—and then open them again and the window would be all right.

  “Oh, how will we ever pay for another one!” her mother cried. “We’ll just have to board it up the way we did the car window, and then we won’t have any light at all in this awful little place!”

  She raised her face from her apron and let the rumpled cloth fall back over her dress. She stood up and went back to the potatoes. She would not look at Lucy.

  “You’ll just have to tell Daddy yourself. I’m not going to do it. You’ll just have to take your spanking when he comes in.”

  She put the potatoes on and swept up the glass. Then she took a heavy flour sack that she had still not ripped apart or washed out and tacked it at the four corners of the window frame to stop the dust and wind. It did make the room much darker, with the floury, dauntless Dakota Maid there, shivering and smiling in the wind. And it made the house drafty. They would have to patch it right away.

  Her father would not be in for another hour. He was out tearing the wildly rolling Russian thistles away from the barbed-wire fences. The thistles would stop the dust and then the dust would stop more thistles, and the dust bank would get so high in places that the stock could walk right up it and out of the pasture.

  It was an hour that Lucy thought would never end. Yet what would she do when it ended? Her mother had never before been too mad at her even to spank her. She sat at the dining room table with a book open before her, too terrified to look at it, wondering why she hadn’t wanted to get a book when her mother had first asked her to, because it seemed that if only she had wanted to read then, she would now be the happiest little girl in the whole world.

  When her father came, black-faced and exhausted, she went to stand in the corner behind the stove. She leaned against the wall, wondering if some Gobble-uns could be good enough to snatch her through the ceiling, and wondering if her mother and father would care or if they would be glad because, like the mother and father of Hansel and Gretel, they were too poor to take care of her anyhow. She could hear nothing except the wind, but she could feel her mother waiting in the kitchen. This was the first time her mother had ever refused to stand up for her with her father. Lucy could not even guess how badly it might go with her. She watched him pulling off his shoes. At last she said, “Daddy?”

  He looked up from his feet. “Well?”

  “I have to tell you something.”

  “Shoot.”

  “I broke a window.”

  She had expected, the instant the words were out, to have him upon her as if he were the black wind itself, to feel his hand holding her arm and the razor strop falling again and again and again. She stood pressing herself harder and harder into the corner, watching him. Sometimes she dreamed that when she was trapped like this she miraculously learned to fly, and she went straight up and past his clutching hands and out the door, like Peter Pan.

  He did not leap up from his chair. He only lifted his head so he could look straight at her. His eyes were all red and black. “Well, how did you do that, anyhow?”

  “I was playing with my ball,” she whispered. Now he would come—now that he knew for sure there was no excuse at all for such an accident.

  He finished emptying the dirt out of his shoes and socks and whisking it out from under his toes. He put the socks and shoes back on and got to his feet. He seemed too tall for the ceiling.

  “I’ve told you never to play ball in the house, haven’t I?” he said. He always made it clear to her why she would have to be beaten.

  She nodded her head once, feeling her hair brush back and forth against the wallpape
r.

  “Well, let’s see what we can do about it. What window?”

  “Kitchen.”

  He went and looked at the flour sack window curtained by dyed flour sacks. He took the tacks out of the flour sack and looked at the hole. “Pretty far gone for patching,” he said. He got some adhesive tape from the medicine cabinet and taped the cracks running back from the break. Her mother moved about putting dinner on the table, saying nothing.

  Her father cut a rounded piece of cardboard to fit the hole and taped it on the outside of the glass so the wind would help to hold it in place. He was making her wait, so she could think about what a terrible thing she had done before she got her beating for it.

  When he came back into the kitchen, he said, “I have to go to Jimtown in the morning. I’ll stop off at the junk yard and get a piece of glass.”

  Neither her mother nor her father said a word while they ate dinner. They had never acted like this before. That meant that she must have done a much worse thing than she had ever done before. So bad that she couldn’t even understand how bad it was. So bad that it wouldn’t even do any good to beat her for it. If it wouldn’t do any good to beat her for it, then what would do any good? Nothing. The answer was very clear. Nothing she could ever do could make up for what she had already done. How much better it would have been to get a beating.

  Wednesday, April 18

  George stopped at the junk yard along the highway outside Jamestown. It was noon and he figured he might as well give Vick time to get back from lunch. He nearly had a fight with the junkman. The chiseler wanted almost as much for a piece of glass from a wrecked car as George would have paid for it new, cut to his own specifications. He was furious at having wasted his time with a chiseler. That was the way it was when you were poor. You frittered your time away, trying to save a nickel here, a dime there.

  He hadn’t been in Vick’s store since the year before. He had been to Jamestown a couple of times, but he never went near that store for any of his buying.

  He walked down the jammed aisles under the busy little funiculars flying money up to Vick. Every time he went there he thought he hated that store as much as he could possibly hate it, yet every time he went he knew he was hating it more than he had the time before. He climbed the twisted stairs and ducked under the little door.

  “Well, Mr. Custer!” Vick said with his businessman benevolence—J. T. Vick and J. P. Morgan.

  His heartiness was a noisome patronization. He was rubbing in his forgiveness. He was showing how he could afford to forget the way his tenant had tramped out of his office a year ago. He had just sat and waited for his tenant to come back, knowing that he would have to come back. He knew, too, that his tenant would have to shake the hand he stuck out.

  “Well,” Vick said, “shall we renew the lease on the same terms as last year?”

  “That’s what I came to see you about, Mr. Vick,” George said.

  “Things look kind of bad this year, don’t they?” J. T. Vick was so sympathetic!

  And Vick always took the offensive away from him before he knew what was happening. It gave him the feeling that Vick had been through the whole conversation and had all his counter-arguments already figured out.

  “Too dry. Too windy,” George said. “Hard to say what kind of crop I can get this year. Could be so bad it would make last year look good.”

  “And last year was plenty bad,” Vick agreed.

  It was easier to fight orneriness than this agreeableness, because the agreeableness seemed to convey not a willingness to negotiate but an intransigent decision not to negotiate.

  “Well, I’ve done some figuring,” said George, “and I think we’re just going to have to work out something different for this year.”

  He plunged in before Vick could stop him. “I’ve got some extra expenses coming up—doctor bills and the like—and I’ve got to be able to count on at least three hundred dollars clear after the crop is in next fall. I just can’t get through the winter and get the crop in a year from now without that much. So, I propose that for this one year we work out some sort of flexible deal that will get me through till next spring.”

  Vick said nothing at all; he just sat and looked sympathetic. He said nothing about what he owed George Custer, morally if not legally, for taking over that farm ten years ago and making it worth twice what it was worth when he moved on to it. Worth twice as much, anyway, if the bottom hadn’t fallen out of farm real estate. Worth twice as much, surely, if it had a good dependable well.

  “And there’s another thing, too,” George said. “The well might give out on me this summer. I don’t think we’d have too much trouble finding water on the place. I know one spot where there used to be a well—I damn near lost a good mare in it! We could try around there again. But I don’t have the cash to dig a well. That’s one of the things I think you ought to be responsible for anyway. I want some assurance from you that you’ll dig a well if I need one.”

  “Just a minute, Custer. I’m not responsible for any well. Your water is your problem. I lease you the land and I pay the taxes on it.”

  George hung on to himself. He had to hang on. “Look, Mr. Vick. None of these troubles may come up. I may not need a well; the doctor might decide the kid’s tonsils can wait; the dentist might decide her teeth can wait; there’s still time to get some moisture before summer comes; the grasshoppers and smut might not be so bad this year—the only thing I’m getting at is that I have to know there’ll be some place I can lay my hands on a reasonable loan if I have to get a loan at all. I figured we could write up some kind of terms this spring that would get me through this year, and if that means you take less than your usual share this fall, we can make it up when things get better.”

  “What makes you think things are going to get better?” Vick asked.

  “Why … they’ve just got to, that’s all.”

  “Maybe they’ll get worse.”

  “How could they? It just isn’t in the cards. Sooner or later we’ve got to get some rain again.”

  “So we get rain. So the crops get better and prices go way down again. Looks to me like you’re going to make about the same every year, whether the crops are good or bad. Good crops, no price. Bad crops, fair price. Either way, you’ve made about the same for the last few years, haven’t you, Custer?” The way he said “Custer” made it sound as though he thought another farmer could have done better on that farm.

  Still George hung on. He mustn’t lose his temper again, the way he had before. This was not the time to start the big fight. He’d only end up in jail, along with the other farmers here and there around the country who’d been walking into city men’s offices and blowing heads off landlords and bankers.

  “Look at the prices we got before the war,” George said. “The parity years, when a man could buy a pair of overalls for a bushel of wheat. When those times come back again, we’ll be on our feet in a year or so.”

  “Custer, you know as well as I do that those ‘parity years’ are nothing but politicians’ ballyhoo. Those years are never coming back for the farmer. They didn’t have unions back in those days, for one thing. The people that worked in the mills and made the denim for your overalls—why, they got paid the price of two or three bushels of wheat for working a seventy-hour week. I know something about this kind of stuff. This is my business. Those strikers are fighting this out right now and they’re going to win, because Roosevelt is on their side. And you’re not ever going to buy a pair of overalls with a bushel of wheat again! And a lot of other things have changed, too. But there’s one thing that’s been the same for a long time. I was born in eighteen seventy-seven, and ever since I can remember, every so often there’d be talk about a wheat surplus.

  “Back around the time you were born, Custer, I remember a year when they couldn’t move it out of Kansas fast enough. They had a bumper crop that filled all the elevators and all the railroad cars, and finally they had to just dump it in piles alongs
ide the tracks. You want me to hope the parity years are going to come back—the way you hope they will. A man doesn’t do business on hope. There’s no reason to expect wheat to be a bonanza kind of deal again. There’s never going to be the kind of export market again that we had before the war. I have to look at things the way they are.”

  “All right,” George said, “Look at things the way they are. If I can’t count on three hundred dollars clear from this crop, I just can’t make it, that’s all.”

  “Go on relief.”

  “There are a lot of things I’ll do before I’ll go on relief!”

  “Suit yourself. I can’t guarantee you any such thing as three hundred dollars cash. That’s no way to do business. Put up or get out, that’s all. I can’t afford to carry you without getting a decent share of the crop money.”

  “Carry me! You paid twenty-seven cents an acre taxes on that land last year. All right, I’ll pay that big forty-three-dollar tax bill, how’s that? It won’t cost you a cent to own that land next year.”

  “What do you mean, it won’t cost me to own that land? I have to have a return on my investment. That’s the only way to do business!”

  “What kind of a return do you think I’m getting on my investment, Mr. Vick? On my sweat? I’ve got to get a return on my investment, too!”

  “I can find people to lease that farm on my terms.”

  “Yeah, and whoever you find might just put it right in the hole for you the first year they’re there, too! What if the well goes dry this summer?”

  “My terms don’t include well-digging. Maybe I’ll lease it to somebody that won’t even live there. Then they won’t need a well at all.”

  “Look, Mr. Vick, you can certainly afford to risk a return on your investment for one year, after the returns you’ve been getting.”