The Bones of Plenty

by Lois Phillips Hudson

  The county agents and the preachers were setting aside official prayer days for people to go to church and pray for rain. Farmers were moving their stock by railroad, truck, and hoof to try to find pasture and water or to sell the animals before they became so emaciated that they would be condemned for use as human food. Minnesota, North Dakota, and Wisconsin had all banned shipment of livestock across their borders, and National Guardsmen were out patrolling state lines.

  In honor of the fine state of the Union, the Century of Progress Exposition was slated to reopen tomorrow in Chicago.

  Rachel had gone from “Red Sails in the Sunset” and “The Isle of Capri” to some old tunes he began to see he wasn’t going to be able to take tonight. When she started on “Red River Valley,” he got up and went down to the barn, but the farther he went from the house, the better he seemed to hear the piano. He stood near the smoke of this last smudge he’d built for his horses to help them through the mosquito-filled night. He rubbed Kate’s nose, and she moved her big soft lips in the most delicate of nibbling kisses across his palm. He’d taught her to do that with sugar; now she did it even when she knew there wasn’t any sugar.

  “Hey, Kate,” he said to her. “Remember when I pulled you out of the well by your tail? Remember that, Kate? If Ralph Sundquist buys you and he don’t keep a decent collar on you, Kate, you kick the living daylights out of him. You hear? Kick the living daylights out of him!”

  Where were the god-damned ENEMIES, anyway!

  He’d been thinking all the rest of the day about what that foul-mouthed German storekeeper had said, and he’d been thinking about what he’d said himself, too. He’d blamed everything on losing a measly two hundred and fifty bucks in Harry’s bank, but he’d known when he said it that he was talking through his hat.

  He hadn’t lost the war in that one disaster—it was millions of disasters everywhere that had caught up with him while he had been telling himself that nothing could ruin him so long as he was in the top fifty per cent of farmers. The top fifty per cent—that didn’t mean any more than the moratoriums and the embargoes and the processing taxes and the prayer days.

  And the damned storekeeper was right: Custer wasn’t making any stand at all. Custer had been waiting and watching for the chance to strike at his destroyers, but he hadn’t so much as reconnoitered the battlefield before he was down. Somebody had hit him from behind. Hundreds of men had hit him from behind. Middlemen all over the country, plus the monopolists, speculators, bankers—they had done him in and they didn’t even have to get close enough to see the color of his hair—any more than he had ever got close enough to them to see the faces that should be smashed in.

  In any last stand he had ever had in mind, he got at least one of his enemies before his enemies got him. If he could only have got his hands on one! He had not struck a man once during all the time he was going down to defeat—no, he had struck one man—a boy not dry behind the ears yet, who couldn’t hold his liquor.

  But God knew he’d been fighting all this time! Who the hell had he been fighting, if he hadn’t struck one single blow at a real enemy?

  What was it that silly county agent had said? Something about “I wanted to get you all together so you could look around at your neighbors and see who you’re competing with. I want you to see just who it is that’s ruining you at the markets in Chicago and Liverpool.” Well, he was dead wrong in the second statement and dead right in the first one, wasn’t he? It was Custer’s own neighbors he’d been fighting, all right. They’d been climbing all over each other—competing, trying to get into that meaningless top fifty per cent.

  And all the different kinds of big men—the ones who owned the huge farms, the ones who speculated in farm products and never set foot outside of a commodities exchange, the ones who ran the railroads and the elevator organizations and the chain stores—they were the ones who were ruining him in Chicago and Liverpool, and none of them had ever even noticed him so far away below them down there, entangled with the other bitter little men in the mortal struggle. All those little men could have been wrestling together in a bog of quicksand. They could have sunk from sight and perished, and none of the big men would have noticed that they were gone. Custer had never once been in a position to compete with the men who had ruined him.

  But his real competitors—they would come tomorrow and buy his horses and his cattle and his machinery for a song, because that was the way competition worked among little men like himself. They all ought to be marching in ranks together tomorrow, not picking over each others’ bones. Couldn’t they see that everybody was in the same boat? When would little men stop slitting each others’ throats? What was the difference between competing with a man and slitting his throat? George had slit throats himself, probably, while he struggled to stay in his top fifty per cent. But he hadn’t ever really wanted to slit another little farmer’s throat, had he? Who had put the razor in his hands and who had maneuvered it when he wasn’t looking?

  It was the betrayal in the ranks that kept the world from getting better. Clarence Egger getting rich on that rotgut booze, Otto turning him in to Press. What was the difference between competition and betrayal? With one arm Egger could never survive on farming alone. Otto could not survive without his Percheron stud fees. Anything that helped them survive they wrote down as competition. Was that how they thought? No—Otto didn’t think about such things at all, and Egger was just a one-armed man who liked to stand on the sidelines leering and giggling over other men’s fights. There must be those in the ranks who could draw a line between competition and betrayal, but where were they?

  The whole world went to the defense of a deadbeat like Wilkes. The world gave Otto relief; the world took care of his runny-nosed brats and his doomed wife; yes, he himself, even Custer himself had made his only stand of the war when he broke up Otto’s sale.

  But the man who still had any self-respect took it on the chin alone. He couldn’t understand why it always worked out that way. Tomorrow at his own sale the work of the prime decade of his life would be wiped out, peacefully and legally. What kind of a last stand was that?

  Rachel’s music had stopped. He had thought he did not want to hear it on this night, but as soon as it stopped he realized how much he must have been listening, because now it was so quiet he noticed the million needling voices of the mosquitoes following him even into the sharp smoke. He wondered listlessly how much the piano was going to bring.

  Saturday, May 26

  They got up very early because they had to take things apart. They were going to sell the beds, except for the mattresses on the big bed and the cot. They did not make a fire, and Rachel heated coffee water on the little alcohol stove that left the kitchen smelling of the cool blue sweet flame in the blackened can. It was a curiously evocative smell—a smell that went with sitting in the quiet darkness and holding a tiny baby in her arms while she gave it a bottle in the middle of a hot summer night—a bottle she had warmed over canned heat because there was no fire.

  Now the smell of the sweet flame meant that she was leaving the house where she had raised her babies; the smell meant that she was not going to have a place for a regular stove with a regular fire in it for a long time—not till they found a place to settle where a farmer still had a chance. What if such a place no longer existed?

  George was thinking that the big Monarch was a good stove. It should bring in a little cash. He shook down the last clinkers, pulled out the drawer of ashes, and dumped it on the ash pile. He disconnected the stovepipe and took the sections of it outside to lay it beside the pipe for the heating stove which he had cleaned yesterday.

  The pile accumulated rapidly in the yard—the bed frame that echoed so loudly in the house when they knocked it apart, the springs for the bed, the dining room chairs and the bare round table with its extra leaves piled on top of it, the empty bookcase and the empty dresser drawers.

  Lucy put her own things all in one place. Her sled was there, wit
h its runners nearly buried in dust, and her wagon and tricycle stood beside it.

  The bigger the pile in the yard got, the less related the components of it were to each other, and the more unrelated everything was, the more everything looked like useless junk. The coal scuttle, for instance, sitting there beneath the baby’s crib. It was a perfectly serviceable scuttle with a good sturdy bottom and a strong secure handle, but it looked discredited—shabby and worn next to the baby’s crib. When it had stood by the stove it looked as good as new, but now it looked worthless. Rachel realized in panic that not one soul would bid on it at any price.

  And the crib, solid enough against the blue calcimine of the bedroom, looked rickety and unsubstantial with its rusted link springs bare to the sun and its upended mattress propped against its side and everything slanting downhill to boot. She lifted the mattress and laid it back in the crib and beat the dust from it with her knuckles. But it still looked old and drab without any blankets in it. She couldn’t believe that this was the crib in which both her babies had been so marvelously beautiful.

  She picked up the coal scuttle and moved it over next to the stove pipes, both for its own sake and for the sake of the crib. That helped the crib a little, but the coal scuttle still looked like a dirty useless thing.

  This yard did not look like a place in which anybody would wish to buy anything. It looked like a spot where a band of refugees had paused in flight. It looked like the pictures of trashy belongings she had seen in the paper—and the people sitting beside the belonging were flooded-out sharecroppers usually—people who looked like the Finleys. The Custers would look like the Finleys now, moved out of the house where they had thought they had roots and exposed to the pitiless sky which had finally blown them out of their shelter. Everything uprooted from the dark little house was turned into junk in the glare of the sun. Why should anyone buy? She suddenly knew that they were not going to make any money at all on this sale—that George had vastly overestimated, once again, the possibilities that were open to them. And she, once again, had allowed herself to be persuaded until the moment of sense returned to her. Always she believed too long. She must have been out of her mind to have gone along with him.

  It was too late to try to save themselves. The whole world had lost its operating margin, just as they had lost theirs. In a normal May they would have got two and a half inches of rain, but in this May the newspapers had to go to two decimal places in order to report any moisture at all—.09 of an inch they had received in this parched May. And the temperatures had run very high—an average of ten degrees over normal, so that it seemed as though they had already lived through another long, hot summer.

  In the five months of 1934 the prairie world had received an inch of water out of a normal five inches. It was the wildest kind of speculation to put seed into the ground under such conditions. Yet what else was there for them to do in a world where there were no margins anywhere? Was it not even worse speculation for them to give up what few roots they had? Even Pearl Finley longed to go back to the South, now that Floyd had been killed and none of them would ever get to Canada. That was the human instinct, even of people like the Finleys. It was an instinct—just as much of an instinct as those more obvious instincts of breeding and of fighting for food and water.

  And now this instinct demanded that they hang on to the roots they had: they must go on borrowing ever farther ahead on the irreplaceable energies of their lives, but how else would they live, no matter where they went? And roots were as irreplaceable as lives, and much less expendable. It would be better to stay here and lose her life than to leave and lose her roots. Here she stood, amid the objects that had provided the civilized necessities to her family—no matter how ridiculous they might look now in this shambles of a yard. What did one do when one no longer had a bed, a stove, or a table? When those things were gone, what did one do with the few dollars that one had got in exchange for them? What did one do for an address? Without a mailing address, how did a person even know who she was? How did her children—oh God!—how would her children know who they were? And George had thought of none of these things.

  She picked up the coal scuttle and walked toward the little house that was waiting to be planted with roots again. She set the scuttle by the stove. Even though the stove no longer had a pipe connecting it to the smudged hole in the chimney, the scuttle looked proper there again—useful, valuable, perhaps even invaluable. (After all, how would a person get along without one?)

  She paused on the porch on her way to get the stovepipe and looked across the prairie to the tall yellow house she could not see because of the swelling land, but which was closer to her than any other house she would ever see anywhere. The house that had been her refuge for as long as she could remember—her refuge from the snubs of the town kids when she was in school, from advances she was too shy to accept in college, from thundering words that had resounded here in this little house—in this little house where she must re-establish her roots as speedily as possible.

  The strong, gentle father was not there in the tall house now, but still his hand was everywhere—feeding the lambs, pulling the cables that opened and closed the petals of the creaking windmill above his faithful salty well; and his body was everywhere—in the fields where she had run to keep up with his affirmative stride and even in the barn, though it was another barn. Even on college weekends she had still gone out there with him to the barn while he milked, to talk and help with various small chores—to feed the calves for him, as she had done all her life.

  And now a strange and garish girl had come to live in that tall house, and establish her roots—her “sitting room,” as she called it was already installed in what had once been Rachel’s own bedroom. And if Rachel did not stay here in this little house, attached forever to her own roots in that big house, then indeed she must acknowledge her total kinship to this girl and her family. Yes, she would be a Finley—she would be one of that numberless mass nobody ever counted in a census, nobody mailed letters to—that mass which might as well be called Finley as Jones or Custer. Did it make any sense at all for a rootless Finley to usurp her father’s house while she was cast out of her own house to become rootless?

  But there was still time to save themselves. George must rush off to the auctioneer. They must put up a sign at the mailbox reading AUCTION CANCELED. Then George could go down to Vick on Monday and say he had decided to go along on the same basis after all.

  Then they would descend, unless things changed more radically than she could imagine, into that ineluctable bankruptcy that waited for them—recognizing that each swing of the hoe expended a part of the only currency left to them—their lives. But it would be a bankruptcy—a death—that was not so different from the deaths of all those who were committed to making great expenditures in order to live and die in dignity—as the father from the tall yellow house had died. For it was necessary to die beside one’s investments, borne up by one’s roots, in order to die with dignity.

  She and George would stay here with their investments and die as her father had died. But if they had made this hideous mistake—if they had become wandering Finleys, then what commitments would they show to staring, disdainful people? Above all, what commitments would they give their children to live by? Lucy and Cathy would speak and think in the way Annie and Audley spoke and thought. The Custers would live out their lives in a way that would make aristocrats even of the Wilkeses in their consumptive ancestral home.

  How was it that she had ever listened to George, even for a moment? She had got the stovepipe back in, for she intended to cook dinner over a regular fire. Now she was starting on the chairs, for they were never going to eat a meal that was not eaten from a table by people sitting on chairs.

  George came out of the barn and saw her walking to the house with a chair in each hand. He ran up the hill to her.

  “Rachel! What on earth are you doing?”

  She never stopped walking toward the house—
the little dark house that had always shamed her so.

  He grabbed her arm. “Put those chairs down, for Pete’s sake!” It was frightening to live with a person for a decade and find out that she was totally different from what he had ever dreamed she could be.

  “We’ve got to stay!” she cried. “We can’t go away. There’s nothing in the world for us anywhere, except what’s right here. We’ve worked too hard here. And besides there’s nothing anywhere else. The roots are all we’ve got left—just roots!”

  Up the hill between the two fields George had plowed and never planted, they saw a car raising a half acre of dust behind it.

  “It’s the auctioneer, for God’s sake! Churchill is here. Put those chairs down!”

  He wrenched them from her hands, twisting her wrists savagely. She swung a smarting arm at him and slapped his face hard.

  He couldn’t believe she had done it. Neither could she. It was not like anything else she had ever done in her life—except one thing. She had a memory of herself, flinging the cats away from the porch. She had a memory of her voice saying, I’m losing my mind.

  “I’m losing my mind.” She was saying it aloud now. I’m losing my mind. Only Finley men and women hit and slapped and swore at each other. She was a Finley already, and they hadn’t even sold the stove and the table and the bed yet.

  She walked toward the house, dazed, shaking her head, wiping the tears from her eyes with her fists like a child, streaking her cheeks with the dust of the yard. I’m losing my mind. I’m losing my mind.

  She heard the men coming and she went into the bedroom. She listened to them grunting and adjusting, panting directions to each other. “A little to your left, there. Will she make it through this door?” “Sure, she will! Came in through this one—it’s the only door there is.” “Easy now, easy does it. Just let me get clear through here first.”