The Bones of Plenty Read online

  “Nothing is the matter,” she said.

  He grabbed her thigh and rolled the muscles of her leg between his great fingers, exclaiming in a scolding voice, “Why Lucy, what’s the matter with you? Have you gone clean out of your head? What ails you, anyway, Lucy? What makes you carry on like this? What’re you laughing so much for, if something’s bothering you? Can’t you make up your mind whether to laugh or cry? Just like a woman!”

  She was giggling hysterically and screaming at him to stop, wanting the awful tickling to stop, but wishing he would go on noticing her—and he must have, because when they went to the store, he did not give her a penny, but a whole nickel.

  Sunday, April 30

  The next day was May Day. Next to Christmas and the Fourth of July, it was the biggest holiday of the year. Lucy lay in bed, but she could not sleep. It was eight o’clock but the sun had set only an hour ago and the long twilight was still there, behind the thin shade. Tomorrow was May Day. Tomorrow was May Day. Her father was reading a long piece in the paper, interspersing the reading with comments and raising his voice so that her mother could hear him above the noise of the dishes in the kitchen.

  “This is just what I told you would happen, Rachel,” he was saying loudly. “I told you it couldn’t help but happen. It says here that yesterday Henry Morgenthau liquidated the last million bushels of September wheat owned by the government. Sold it in the Chicago pit. Says that from May of 1930 to this last March the Farm Board bought nine million bushels of wheat through Hoover’s Grain Stabilization Corporation, and now that they’ve sold the last of it they figure the government lost over a hundred and sixty million dollars. It took them just three years to lose a hundred and sixty million dollars. Oh, they’ll admit now that it was a crackpot idea. Any little farmer like me could’ve told those fatheads exactly what would happen—just in case they didn’t know just as well as I did!

  “Pay prices way above the world market and what do you get? A lot of men that never farmed before jumping in and plowing up virgin soil so’s they can get their hands on those government loans. But you notice a little guy like me can’t even get a sniff at those loans to help out the farmer, can he? The rich man that never did a day’s work in his life—he can get paid by the government for a bunch of wheat stored in his own granaries that he’s never even seen! He gets a loan on it! A loan he never has to pay back. But they fix it so a little guy like me can never get one of those loans. A man has to have this qualification and that qualification, and be the head jackass of some damned lodge!”

  He was quiet for a minute and then he yelled, “You know what Morgenthau sold that last million bushels for? Sixty-nine cents! I got twenty-six last fall from Adolph—the same time the government was buying that wheat from the rich men. If the government is losing millions of dollars selling twenty-six-cent wheat for sixty-nine cents, then who in hell is getting their fat hands on all that dough? It don’t make sense no matter how you look at it, does it? It just has to be as crooked as a bear’s hind leg. Who is it, anyhow, getting all that taxpayers’ money?

  “Rachel, can you hear me?” he called. “Just who do you think is getting that forty-three cents, anyhow? Who? The government sells at a loss for nearly three times what I could get last fall. Think of it!”

  “I am thinking of it,” she said. “But I don’t understand it any more than you do! The whole world is just crazy, that’s all!”

  Lucy got scared when she heard her mother say things like that. What happened, anyway, when the whole world was crazy?

  “Oh, no, it isn’t!” her father cried. “Some of us are not crazy, and we know exactly where all those government losses went to. I can walk right down the street tomorrow and point to the pockets our tax money has gone into.”

  Lucy could see how they would walk down the wooden sidewalks in Eureka, looking for bulges in pockets, and listening for jingling sounds.

  “The elevators owned by the big men got the best rates in history for wheat storage! That’s one set of pockets. And the rich farmers got such generous loans — and I reckon the railroads got even better pay than I have to pay them. I tell you, the whole thing is rotten! It stinks to high heaven! How can you fight a thing like this, anyhow?”

  “I don’t think you can,” her mother said.

  “Oh, yes I can! You just wait till enough little guys like me figure out just how bad they’ve been skinned. We’ll fight it all right.”

  It was quiet for a while, and Lucy could begin to hear the sounds of the late spring twilight. Then her father gave a mad laugh. “‘Stabilization,’ they called it. ‘Grain stabilization!’ My, aren’t the prices going to be stable now, with the government unloading an accumulation like that just a few months before we try to sell a crop this fall! It’s just as bad as the damn Roosians unloading all their wheat all over the world for three years now. Stabbed in the back by your own government! And you have to pay for the knife yourself! How much longer do they think they can do this to us? I tell you, there’s going to be blood.”

  Blood! She never could understand what he meant when he said there was going to be blood. Sometimes when they thought she was asleep they talked about getting her tonsils out or taking her to the dentist. Sometimes it was about this terrible thing that was going to happen to the world. It always seemed to have something to do with blood.

  Finally she was too sleepy to keep up with what they were saying. Tomorrow was May Day. Tomorrow she would win a race and get a quarter for a prize. The sounds of the frogs singing in the slough came clear and liquid above the dry rattle of the Jamestown Sun.

  Monday, May 1

  There were enough races and other strenuous contests to last the whole day, for people who lived by muscular toil knew no other way to play. There were long races and dashes for all age groups, beginning with the five-year-olds, and specialty races such as the sack race and the three-legged hop. There were broad jumping and high jumping, throwing, horseshoe-pitching, and weight-lifting. And there were such unclassifiable events as the hog-calling competition and the rolling-pin-throwing contest, where two prizes were given—one to the woman who threw the farthest and one to the husband who ran the fastest. There was a conscientious dance done by the primary pupils, and afterwards their crepe paper streamers danced around the Maypole alone in the wind.

  The celebration was always held in the same public field—a two-acre rectangle bordering the railroad tracks. It was pleasantly green at that time of year and it was big enough to hold several times as many people as there were in the town and all the farmers the town existed to serve.

  All the dogs in town were there, stopping races and knocking over children. Horses munched in their feed bags, stamping and switching their tails as the newly hatched swarms of gnats and horseflies hurried to the feast.

  Young men jostled and insulted each other as they stood in the sidelines panting and sweating from one event and getting wind back for the next one. Women pushed together the folding tables from the church, the town hall, and the school. Then they spread them with the tablecloths they had brought from home, making each long table a mosaic of checks, flowers, colors, and whites. Finally they superimposed another mosaic on the first, made of the individual intricacies of pies, cakes, salads, sandwiches, pans of meat loaf and pots of beans. Old men leaned their blue or white elbows on the tables, waiting near dishes they were especially interested in.

  The May Day field itself was made of all the common ingredients of festivals kept by the anonymous servants of life. It was a canvas for the portrait of hope in equinoxes and solstices that had for centuries made tolerable the lot of those whose lives were, in fact, not tolerable. The feast and the faces might have been painted by Brueghel, and so might the dogs and horses and grass and sky—extreme, wantonly brilliant, blown by the wind, and embraced by the young, tender fire of a returning sun.

  When Lucy thought about the many spectacles in this cornucopia of spring, she saw herself speeding across the finish li
ne first, and then she saw Fred Wertzler, the postmaster, reaching down and leaving a big heavy quarter in her hand. Last, but not least, was the picture of herself showing the quarter to all the town kids who had raced against her.

  To George, May Day was the one day of the year when, for many years, he had been bested by no man in half a dozen contests. He was no good at the dash, but once he got his great strength in motion, nobody could beat him running a long race. The momentum he created at the beginning seemed to move his iron legs around the rest of the course without any more impetus from him, and his deep chest never ached for air. His keen eyes, his powerful, long-fingered hands won him more laurels. Nobody else could throw so hard or so accurately; nobody else could squeeze a raw potato into sheer pulp that dripped through his fingers. It all came from working hard when he was very young. He would stand and watch now, and compare the softness of the twenty-year-olds to the way he had been himself. If he were not afraid of embarrassing this new generation of pantywaists, he would get out there and make them eat his dust—show them what a tough old man like himself could do.

  Still, he liked to watch them trying—he liked to get to the field in plenty of time for the first event. Above all he hoped that Lucy would follow in his footsteps—it was hard for a man like him not to have a boy, but Lucy could beat the boys at most things anyhow. She had been so shy last year. Another year of school ought to have made her more confident and competitive—like him. He had watched her shinnying up her swing rope, chinning herself on the bar he had put up for her between two trees, running easily, as he did himself, across half a mile of pasture. Like him, if she got up enough momentum she could jump a remarkable distance; he had seen her go over a seven-foot puddle with inches to spare. Like him she was physically fearless. She would tease her mother from some precarious place high in a tree, hanging by one hand. If she were only a boy, what a magnificent athlete he could make of her.

  The sun was up before five o’clock and so were the Custers. They hurried through the chores so they could get to town and let Lucy deliver a May basket to her teacher. Rachel had gone through school and college with Alice Liljeqvist, and she could not understand why Lucy hated her so. When her own life seemed barren, Rachel sometimes thought of Alice living in that big house with her aging mother, teaching the children of all her friends.

  Lucy understood perfectly well why her mother was always having her take little presents to Miss Liljeqvist at Christmas and Easter and other holidays, and she knew those presents did no good at all. She delivered them, but they never made Miss Liljeqvist like her any better.

  Her mother sat in the car while she ran up the front steps, hung the basket on the doorknob, knocked, and fled to the back of the house till she heard somebody answer the front door and go back inside again. She waited and heard nothing and decided it would be safe to go back to the car. But all of a sudden she heard Miss Liljeqvist sneaking up behind her, and before she could get away Miss Liljeqvist grabbed her and kissed her, because that was the penalty for being caught giving a May basket. She could hardly believe it.

  “She kissed me!” Lucy cried when she got back to the car.

  “Why, now, you see?” her mother said positively. “I’ve always tried to tell you how much she likes you. Are you going to like her now?”

  Lucy hung her head far out of the window and made the kind of noises she would have made if she were violently carsick.

  Rachel changed the subject. “Do you remember your piece for this morning?”

  Lucy scraped out some last retching sounds.

  “All right, now. That’s enough of that! You’ll have your tonsils all sore again.”

  “Good! Then I won’t be able to say that dumb thing at all!” She did seem slightly hoarse. She was always doing odd things with her voice, mimicking frogs and birds and animals. Rachel couldn’t remember that she herself had ever been like that. Lucy was so much like George. Every day Rachel worried a little more about what would ever become of a girl who was like George.…

  May Day always began formally with a program at the school. Each of the thirty-odd pupils in the first six grades was given a piece to recite. When her name was called, Lucy stood up and said, “Buttercups and daisies oh the pretty flowers coming ere the springtime to tell of sunny hours while the trees are leafless while the fields are bare buttercups and daisies spring up here and there.”

  Rachel couldn’t help being irritated. Lucy had managed a civil amount of expression when she’d gone through it last night. Watching her stand there with her eyes on the floor and listening to her babbling monotone, who would believe that she even had the wit to do an imitation of a frog—or of a person stricken with nausea?

  All day long, no matter which way Lucy looked, she saw Miss Liljeqvist. It seemed to her that she spent the whole day hiding, instead of seeing the things she had come to see, and she was standing behind a wagon when they called for the six-to-eight-year-old race. She had to run so far and so fast to get to the starting line that she was too tired to do her best. There were only seven entrants with the whole width of the course to run in, and she realized, at the last minute, that she had run in a long diagonal. She came in third and won an ice cream cone.

  Her father yelled at her from the sidelines. “What in the Sam Hill did you think you were doing out there? Don’t you know a straight line is the shortest distance between two points?”

  “What?” Lucy said.

  “Why didn’t you run in a straight line? A straight line?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Can I go get my ice cream cone now?”

  “Go ahead! Go ahead!” He turned to the man standing next to him and said for her to hear as she walked away, “Ain’t that just like a woman?”

  She hated to be called a woman! Whenever her father said the word, it always seemed to come at the end of that expression. She began running as fast as she could.

  “Look at her go now!” he shouted. “Women!”

  She ran the width of the field, across the tracks, and all the way up the street till she got to the Café-Restaurant. She stopped and looked in through the window. The ticket in her hand was a small slip of ordinary yellow construction paper with typing on it. The typing read “Good for ONE 5¢ ice cream cone at Gus and Ruby’s Café-Restaurant.” It didn’t look very valuable. It was just the same kind of paper she sometimes got in school. It was hard to see how it could really take the place of a nickel. Why hadn’t they just given her a nickel? A nickel with a good stout buffalo and a smooth-faced Indian on it. A nickel that would not have wilted and blurred from the moisture in her hand. The more worn the paper looked, the less confidence she had in it. It would be so terribly embarrassing to order the ice cream cone and then have the paper refused. Everybody in the Café-Restaurant would laugh. She decided she would show the ticket first, just to be on the safe side.

  There were three big boys sitting at the far end of the counter. One of them went to high school. He was Douglas Sinclair’s big brother. They were all kidding with Annie Finley. She had quit high school to go to work for Gus and Ruby, which was not a good thing to do. Now she wore a lot of lipstick, which was an even worse thing to do. She had a huge amount of fuzzy reddish hair which was curled with a curling iron. She had a long, dirty butcher’s apron gathered around her waist in such a way that she looked very billowy on top, and she was wearing a sleeveless light pink dress. In the darkness of the café, the combination of dress and apron gave Lucy a first upsetting impression that the only clothing on Annie’s breasts and upper parts was the apron bib. Lucy was sure that such a laughing big girl with red grease shining on her lips would never take a yellow ticket in place of a nickel.

  One of the boys stood up from his stool on the platform, leaned over the counter, and reached a long arm clear across the dishpan in which Annie was washing some glasses. He pinched her arm, high up among the freckles.

  She gave the kind of stupid shriek Lucy often heard high school girls make when
they were around boys. He laughed. “Now you’ve got another one! Wh-where do you get all them little s-s-spots, anyhow?” he said.

  “None of your business!” she told him.

  He leaned forward again. “Be careful!” Annie said. “You’re going to knock over the ketchup. You almost did before. And you almost hit the soda water, too.”

  That seemed to give him an idea. He grabbed the big knob and yanked it back. A narrow white stream went hissing into the dishpan. Annie pulled her rag out of a glass and flung it in the boy’s face with a wet splat that sounded exactly like the sound of a cow enriching the pasture.

  He wiped the water from his lips with the back of his hand. The hand was big-boned and rolling with tendons, like a man’s.

  “S-say, Kewpie-Doll, I ought to f-f-fix you for that!” he stammered.

  “You fix me and I’ll fix you again, Mister Smarty!” Annie said.

  “Are you going to the d-dance over to the Town Hall tonight?” he wanted to know.

  “None of your business!” she said again.

  The boy looked down toward the door, as though he was going to do something he knew he shouldn’t do, and wanted to make sure nobody was coming in. Lucy could tell he was surprised to see her.

  “Hey, you got a c-customer down there,” he shouted. Lucy hated him. How he would laugh if it turned out that her ticket was no good.

  Annie came down and looked over the counter. She had round starey blue eyes, and Lucy saw, up close, that she appeared to have put some brown stuff on her eyelashes.

  “This isn’t like a nickel for an ice cream cone, is it?” Lucy asked. She was so sure of the answer that she was already sliding off her stool.

  “Lord, yes!” Annie said. “This here must be the fortieth one today!” She took the ticket. “What flavor?”

  Lucy had been thinking so hard about the ticket that she had not thought about the flavor. That was a very hard decision. It always took her a long time. But here was the girl, standing with a scoop in one hand and an empty cone in the other. Lucy wanted to go to the ice cream end of the counter and look down into the little wells filled with such wonderful cold colors, and watch the frost misting on the underside of the thick steel lids, but she did not want to go near that boy. It was almost impossible to make up her mind so far away from the ice cream.