The Bones of Plenty Read online

  “Have you got time?” she begged. “It’s Sunday.”

  He teased her while he tested such ideas as he could snatch away from the pain that was as determined to destroy his brain as he was determined that it would not. “You won’t let me tell about fairies or princesses. It has to be so it really could happen. But when I tell you about something that really could happen, then you’re sad.”

  “Only that one time!” she protested. She looked up at him, pleading for the bridge that could never be built from the real world to the good world.

  He leaned back against the fence and hooked a heel over the bottom board. A lamb tried out the black rubber, but found it was not the proper shape. The pain shot through his abdomen again. He loosened his belt another notch but it didn’t seem to help.

  “Shall I tell about a lamb?” he asked.

  “Yes!” she whooped. He didn’t know anybody who could say yes the way Lucy could. The one sudden syllable was like the whole world crying Joy!

  “Well,” he began, “there was a little girl who had a pet lamb. What shall we call the girl?”

  “Sally,” Lucy said at once. She was always full of names.

  “Sally had wished for a baby lamb for a long time,” Will said.

  “Every night she wished on the first star for a lamb. She wasn’t like a little girl I know who wishes every night for a dapple-gray pony like her cousin’s. She just wished for a little baby lamb.

  “One night when she went to fetch the cows for her father, she heard a little weak ba-a-a, ba-a-a. She couldn’t imagine where it was coming from because her father didn’t have any sheep. That was why she had never had a baby lamb of her own. She looked all around, but she didn’t see the lamb.”

  He had to repeat himself while he thought. Usually he had only to choose between alternatives that waited in his mind, but not today.

  “The sound seemed to be coming from a little bit above her in the gulch. She looked up, but she still couldn’t see anything. She climbed up the side of the ravine a little ways and she saw a dark spot in the side of it. It was a tiny little cave! She was so surprised! She had never seen that cave there before. And then she saw that there really was a lamb lying in the cave, but it was a black lamb—all black, not just feet and muzzle and tail. That was why she couldn’t see it in the cave.

  “She wondered how the little lamb had ever got there. When it saw her it tried to stand up, but it had a sore foot, and it stumbled and fell back down again. She picked it up and it didn’t even try to wiggle out of her arms. It wasn’t afraid of her at all. It knew she wanted to help it.”

  “Was it very heavy for her?” Lucy asked.

  “Yes, it was. It was all she could do to carry it, because she was not a very big girl. I doubt if she was as strong as you are, either. But she carried it all the way to where the cows were grazing and then home. When her father saw her bringing in the lamb, he was very surprised. But he said that if she would take care of it she could keep it. He even built a little house for it, inside a little fence. He looked at its foot and said it had been cut on the barbed wire but it would get better. So Sally fed the little black lamb and soon it was well, and it could run and jump like any lamb. In fact, it got so it could jump over its little fence, and then it would run away. Sally thought it looked so funny jumping over its fence that she would laugh and chase after it, and she begged her father not to make the fence higher.

  “So, one day the lamb ran very far away, and this time Sally looked and looked, and couldn’t find him. He was a real black sheep, that little lamb. He was really a bad little egg.” He repeated again, waiting for some more story to come. Where did the lamb run to? Where? Where?

  “Sally looked all day long. She didn’t notice the sky getting darker and darker and darker, until it was almost as black as her little lamb. Her mother had told her always to run right home when the sky got black like that, and to watch for a tornado. Her mother had told her that if she ever saw a tornado coming along, she should not even try to get home, but lie down in the lowest spot she could find and hang on to something. If she was out in the stubble, she should just hang on to that. But Sally had forgotten that, because she was so worried about her lamb.

  “So she kept on wandering around and calling for her lamb while the clouds got bigger and blacker. Suddenly she felt the tornado come and grab her right up, and the next thing she knew, she was blowing around and around with all the other things it had picked up, but she couldn’t see any of them because it was so black.

  “Now, you know, I’ve seen a tornado do awful queer things. You just can’t believe it till you see it. Once right down here in Jimtown a tornado took a roof off one house and set it down again, just right! on another house. Down South, where they have a lot more tornadoes than we do here, the wind does a lot of crazy things. You know, just last week they had some storms down there that killed a lot of people, they were so bad. And yet the wind lifted up one man right out of his house and carried him prit-near two blocks away and set him down again, just as pretty as you please. Didn’t hurt him a bit. And I’ve seen, myself, back in Indiana, a straw that went through an oak door two inches thick. It never even bent or broke on account of hitting the door so fast and so hard. Just went clean through it—just like that!”

  “What happened to Sally?” Lucy said.

  “Well, sir, just the same thing that happened to that fellow down in Kansas. That tornado picked her up and whirled her around and around and set her back down again, about a mile away, just as easy as pie.

  “And guess who had been there with her, twirling around in the big black tornado all the time, so coal-black she never saw him at all?”

  “The lamb!” Lucy cried.

  “Right!” Will said triumphantly. He had feared she wouldn’t accept the idea. He knew he just wasn’t up to snuff. “And the tornado set him down, too, just as nice as could be. And she ran over to him and she saw that he had got himself all tangled up in something up there in the tornado. And I bet you can’t guess what it was!” He thought desperately.

  “Well, it was a—a—a …” Now was the time to try some magic, but it would have to be probable magic. “It was a golden bridle—just right for a pony. She untangled his little woolly black legs from it. It was gold, all right. It glittered and glittered. It was heavy, too. But she ran all the way home with it. The little lamb ran right behind her. He had learned his lesson, you just bet. He wasn’t going to run away any more!

  “And when she showed the bridle to her father, he got a wonderful idea. He said, ‘Say, Sally, I bet we could find some rich person who would buy this bridle. Then I bet there would be enough to buy you a pony, with a regular saddle and bridle. What do you say? Should we put an ad in the paper?’ And sure enough, some rich man came and bought the bridle, and Sally’s father took her to the horse auction and they came home with the prettiest little dapple-gray pony you ever saw. So then Sally had both a lamb and a pony, and it was all because of her bad little lamb that she got a pony!”

  He felt deeply relieved at the smile she gave him. She had not been disappointed. Her smile, when she was really happy, was like her yes. There was no other smile like it.

  “Let’s go get the checkers and have a game out here in the sunshine, shall we?” he asked. It wasn’t polite to leave the others for so long, but he just felt too blamed bad to get back into an argument.

  “I tell you what.” He had an even better idea. “I’ll just be out here looking after the ewes while you take the bottles back in and fetch the board and checkers.”

  “Okay!” she said. She was running before she finished the word. He stood watching her and thinking again how easy it was for a child to change worlds. Very soon she would reach the age where she would be trying to make the leap between her worlds all by herself, just as she already didn’t need to hold his hand any more when they walked in town, though she always did.

  He thought about how small her hand still was, and how sharp her
little knuckles felt when he pressed his thumb over them. She had not stopped fighting against her solitude; that was why she still wanted to take his hand when they walked in town.

  He wondered when she would surrender to solitude, as Rachel and Stuart had, so that it would become necessary to her. For many years he had wondered if everybody’s soul had to be defined by solitude after a certain stage of maturity, or if it was only prairie people who almost always grew that way.

  Saturday, May 27

  It was summer and school had been let out the day before. George was seeding the last of the Ceres. A good part of it in his first field was up already. It looked as though it was going to make a fine stand. Still, he didn’t trust Adolph as far as he could throw a steer by the tail. He knew Adolph would get away with anything he thought he could. He could only hope that the seed had been properly treated for smut. It was too late now to do anything about it if it hadn’t. He had paid for treated wheat, but there would be no way to come back on Adolph if it became clear that he had lied, except to take it out of his hide. There were so many crooks a man could never get at.

  That big crook J. P. Morgan, for example. The Democratic Senate Committee had been investigating him this whole week, and proving what any sensible man had known for a long time—that if a crook was only a big enough crook, he could get away with anything. Even Calvin Coolidge had been in on Morgan’s stock market manipulations—just two or three months before the crash back in 1929. Ah, but Morgan could dole out a little money here and there, and people thought he was a wonderful philanthropist—“a builder.”

  Nevertheless, George knew that things were going to change. He liked to remember what Lincoln had said about how nobody could fool all of the people all of the time. The time was coming—the time when the majority of the people would no longer be fooled. The time was nearly here when there would be enough men like himself to make a stand. Then all of those Wall Street jackals could damn well run to their hypocritical churches and sit and quake in their plush high-priced pews. The little men would be waiting for them outside.

  And when the little men were finished, there would be a new economic system. Countless paper transactions could no longer transform this wheat he seeded here in this solid earth to paper wealth that enabled speculators from New York and Chicago to possess even the government without shedding a drop of sweat.

  A flock of crows scratched busily at a safe distance behind him. These were the robbers he could shoot. The idea of having seed wheat go straight from the drill box into a crow’s gizzard was almost more than he could tolerate. He stopped the team and took his shotgun from a set of hooks he had screwed into the drill. He blasted both barrels into the crows and a screaming “Caw! Caw! Caw!” mocked him from behind. He whirled around with the gun and saw Lester Zimmerman sitting on his wagon box, laughing.

  “You’re a lucky bastard! If I’d had a shell left in here you’d be full of shot right now!” George roared.

  “Caw! Caw!” Lester answered.

  George went over to the road and leaned on the wagon. He pushed his hat back on his wet forehead. “In fact, Lester, you use up more luck every week than I’ve ever had in my whole life. That old barn of yours gets a worse lean to it every day. If I was to walk in that thing it’d fall down on me before I so much as picked up a milk stool. But I’ll tell you one thing—if I was you and I was in there milking, I’d never aim a sneeze at that south side. Now, for a small fee, I’d jack that thing up for you.” He bowed. “You see before you an expert with a building jack.”

  “To hell with you!” Lester said. “You’ll never catch me fixing up my place for no landlord! And if he goes ahead and kicks me offa there, I’ll fix it so’s that old barn will fall right on his bald pate. That reminds me—how come you got all that hair everywhere but on the top of your head? If a redheaded man gets bald, is he still mean?”

  “Just twice as mean,” George assured him. “By the time I lose the last hair up here, there isn’t one of you boys that’ll dare look cross-eyed at me.”

  Lester started up his team. “I’m gonna butcher that old Jersey bull this fall. He ain’t worth feeding through the winter. You wanta buy a little piece of hide to cover your scalp? It’ll just match. And one of you’s about as ornery as the other.”

  “I got a brain that keeps my scalp warm!” George shouted after him.

  George went back to the field that seemed no more and no less empty than before. The sounds of his neighbor moving away down the road were lost in the sounds that accompanied him around the field—the scraping and creaking of machinery, the monotonous thudding of the sixteen thick hoofs, and the calls of birds and insects. There were so many sounds more indigenous to the prairie than the sound of human speech. By the time he had made one round of the field he no longer heard any echoes of his conversation at all, and he began to sing to himself and the horses.

  They were the songs he had heard his own father sing in the field—about the bulldog on the bank and the bullfrog in the pond, the mockingbird, the Red River Valley, and the goose that died with a toothache in her head. He often sang a song about the railroads:

  Oh I like Jim Hill, he’s a good friend of mine,

  And that’s why I’m hiking down Jim Hill’s main line.

  Hallelujah, I’m a bum, hallelujah, bum again …

  He liked all the songs of American soldiers too, and he would march along to “Yankee Doodle” or “Dixie” or “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” hearing in his head the quick piercing notes of the fife playing above the drums and horns in a parade—martially gay and painful. “How I loved that gal, that pretty little gal—The girl I left be-ee-hind me!”

  That was the song played by the band of the Seventh Cavalry as Colonel Custer rode out of Fort Abraham Lincoln, heading for the draw above the Little Big Horn River. Custer’s widow had died just a few days ago. She was ninety-one years old, and she had been a widow for fifty-seven years. The Sun had carried a long piece about her and the fort and the massacre, and how the steamboat Far West had come out of the Yellowstone country and down the Missouri to bring the news to Libby Custer and the other wives waiting at the fort. George had always been proud to be named after the Boy General, and he always paid particular attention to anything he came across in his reading that had to do with him.

  Like his namesake, George was a gambler. Nobody could farm that country without being a gambler. One good year, with enough moisture, plus high prices in the fall—that was all it took to make up for six or seven years of failure. There were smart gamblers and stupid gamblers, but every North Dakota farmer was a gambler, and even the smartest one reached a point, every season, where all he could do was stand and watch what happened to his crop like a man watching the spinning of a gambling wheel constructed in Hell. When several good years came along in a row, he cashed in on his lucky streak and put his winnings back into the game, like any other sporting adventurer, by investing in new buildings, new machinery, more stock, more land.

  But when the good years came even farther apart than the seven promised in the Bible, perhaps he failed utterly. Then he watched the last days of the earth, while plague after plague was unloosed upon him, with the hailstones as heavy as cannon balls, and the great star falling on the fountains of waters and scorching his unrepentant head, and the grasshoppers as big as horses, with breastplates of iron. Then he stood in the midst of the ruin, smelling the smoke from the bottomless pit, hearing the echoes of the last thunder and the final trumpet blasts, and he did not repent of the work of his hands. He was proud of having played out the game, even though his name be blotted out of the book of life. He was brokenhearted and wounded with the kind of permanent wounds that only the proud sustain, but still he was proud. If he had it to do all over again, he would choose to gamble again.

  Lucy sat on the rough, hot boards of the porch. She was all ready to go to town, having sponged off her chest and legs and put on a clean pair of shorts. She was waiting for her mother to fini
sh putting the bread to rise so they could leave. The sun flashed from a rust-free spot on the Ford and in line with that flash was another flash, fifty yards away at the edge of the grove.

  She took a languid step from the porch, wondering if she had time for an investigation before the car left for town. She fixed her eyes on the flash and she saw it move as sun reflections never did. She walked quickly but quietly toward it. She stopped when she saw what it was—a straying young jack rabbit, running in short crouching steps, snuffing at the unfamiliar ground.

  She wetted a finger and held it up—a trick she had read in one of her mother’s Ernest Thompson Seton books. Good—the rabbit was upwind from her. She was sure she could catch it, for it was hardly more than a baby. It kept its long, kangaroo-like hind legs in tight circles against its flanks, the way rabbits were always drawn in books. She wondered if it was hurt, and thought of how she would love it and pet it and feed it and make it well again.

  At last she was so close that her shadow, short as it was in the late-morning sun, passed blackly over the baby’s haunches and turned the circles of brindled fur into miniatures of the galvanic hind legs on a full-grown jack rabbit. It leapt away in short, strong jumps, but it went in a fatal direction. She forced it away from the shelter of the grove, making it dart back and forth in front of her, expending valuable energy, before it struck off across the yard, heading for the wheat fields.

  If God had just reached down and suspended the rabbit’s motion for only an instant, she could have caught it easily, for she was always so close that she needed just an extra moment to bend forward, stretch her arm to the ground, and scoop it up. Instead, they went all the way across the yard with neither gaining on the other. As they veered past the house she used the last breath she could spare to shout at the open kitchen window, “I’m catching a rabbit! Don’t go without me!”

  Her legs began to ache and something hot swelled and swelled inside her head. But the little rabbit, too, was exhausted and frantic. He no longer tried for distance, but only for deception. He would dart to one side and freeze next to an extra-large clod or a rock, and then, when he saw her stumbling shadow, spring off to find another bit of hopeless shelter.