The Bones of Plenty Read online

  She fell, finally, and if he had been wise enough to hop away immediately, he could have got the head start he needed. Instead, he remained in his last hiding place, shrunk into the smallest possible ball of grayish, white-tipped hairs, and she closed her hand over his back just as he started to jump away.

  He uttered a frightful sound halfway between a squeal and a whistle. The claws of his little hind foot dug into her wrist and scraped down her arm. When the foot came to her elbow, it pushed against her upper arm and catapulted him into the air.

  She stood watching him go, scarcely noticing that the blood was beginning to fill the long white scratches, wondering why it was that wild things were so afraid of people. Why didn’t he know—why wasn’t there some way to tell him that she wished only to take care of him and keep him for her own? It was always the same. She had caught wild things before. Once she had followed a little white-breasted nuthatch all over the grove for half the morning. She managed to touch its wings once or twice, but it always flew away to the bottom of another tree and started working its way up the trunk, pecking at the bark with its tiny beak. Perhaps at last it got used to her, for it ignored her an extra split second and she captured it. But when it was in her hands, fluttering its wings and scrabbling its many wire-sharp toes against her palms, she let it go because of her own fright.

  It was even worse the time she tried to lift a woodpecker baby out of its mysterious hiding place. She waited till she saw the adult flicker fly out of the hollow tree, and then she stuck her hand inside the hole to feel in the nest. Her defenseless arm was horrifyingly attacked by a beak that drilled holes in wood, and when she finally got her hand out of the hole, another grown bird shot straight into her face. After she got over being scared, she did remember something about the secret house in the hollow tree—it was so hot in there, from the bodies of the birds. And there was still the smell of warm feathers and down-covered babies clinging to her own skin.

  It was always the same. She could catch almost anything she went after, if she only tried enough times, but once she caught it she could never hang on to it.

  She sat down on the ground and watched the blood still oozing in the scratches. A person would never think a baby rabbit could have such strong legs or such long toenails. Why hadn’t she hung on to him? She could have tamed him—she knew she could have.

  For two years she had been trying to catch a rabbit, and now that she had finally caught one, what had she done? Let him go again!

  Rachel was in a hurry to leave for town and get back in time to bake the bread. When she looked out the window, the two running specks were so far away that she thought Lucy must have decided she would rather chase the rabbit than go to town. She took off her apron, changed the baby, and put her into the car.

  On the way to town she began to wonder if Lucy had caught the rabbit and what in the world they would do with it if she had. Lucy would never be persuaded to let it go and George would never consent to feeding and keeping an animal that was one of his worst enemies.

  It seemed to her that the smallest events had a ridiculous way of juxtaposing themselves with other small events so that the confluence of trivialities became suddenly a bitter maelstrom involving them all. She was always caught in the center, trying to steer each disputant out again, still clinging to whatever splinter of righteousness he had ridden into the maelstrom in the first place. If George did allow Lucy to keep the rabbit till it was full-grown, he would surely never hear of letting it go again to reproduce itself. He would shoot it, as he shot scores of rabbits every winter, for the skins and for dog meat.

  The rabbit would not be so attractive to Lucy after it was grownup, but she would certainly never be able to resign herself to having it killed. George and Lucy would both be right and they would both look to her to uphold their respective cases. She did not at all enjoy being an arbitrator. It was not a job she had ever been cut out to do, but she was continually caught in the battles of these two who would never have been brought together if it were not for her. The battles were always part of her responsibility. She hoped the rabbit would escape, but she ached for Lucy’s disappointment.

  If only she had got the bread set ten minutes earlier, they would have been gone by the time the rabbit wandered into the yard. Sometimes her life seemed ruled by such meaningless little accidents of time and place. How difficult it was to see what rational purpose such a situation as this could serve in a rational existence. Yet one must believe that either everything or nothing had a rational purpose.

  In the store she seated the baby on the counter and shuffled through her purse for her list. The list was not to keep her from forgetting something, but to keep her from buying anything that was not essential. Herman went off to collect the things on it while she stayed with Cathy.

  Propped on one of the dusty shelves behind the counter, looking even grindier than the shelf it sat upon, was a stuffed pink rabbit that had sat there since long before Easter. It was lined up with the other punchboard prizes, and she had scarcely noticed it before.

  When Herman came back to dump a sack of sugar against the front of the counter, she said casually, “Which of these boards do you punch for that rabbit up there?”

  “Why it’s right here, Mrs. Custer,” he said. “People just seemed to quit punching on it. But you can see for yourself how good the chances are. Why there ain’t more than fifty-sixty punches left on it. Look here! There’s only five of ’em in this here section. Punch out all five and you get …” He rummaged around till he found a greasy sheet of cardboard.

  “The last punch in each section wins a pound of Kissinger’s Candy Easter Eggs. … I reckon them Easter eggs are melted all together, but I could throw in a Hershey bar if you was to punch out the five.”

  “Oh, no! I just meant I wondered which board the rabbit was on, that’s all. I couldn’t be buying candy like that.”

  “Oh, well,” said Herman. He went back to get the Bull Durham and the canned pears. Rachel picked up the sheet with the prize numbers listed on it and studied it.

  “Cuddly Easter Bunny,” it read. “#8510.”

  She picked up the board with the little punching key dangling from its string. Something would guide her fingers and make her put that key in the right hole. For once an accident of time would be good—it would be time for the pink rabbit to be won.

  She pushed the key into a tiny tinfoil seal and drove it firmly through the board. The curled-up paper with its fateful number dropped on the counter. She picked it up. #5305. She had not had the slightest idea that she would lose. In fact, it hadn’t seemed like gambling at all when she was pushing the key through the board—because she had believed, in that instant, that she was pushing out the rabbit’s number. She had thrown away a whole nickel. How often, this summer, would she have to tell Lucy there was no nickel for an ice cream cone? She couldn’t believe she had done it.

  Herman came back with the last of the groceries and added them all up. “Four dollars and thirty-seven cents,” he said. “Say, Mrs. Custer, I could maybe sell you that rabbit cheap. It ain’t very new-lookin’ any more. Then I could put the money you give me on another prize when somebody punched out that rabbit.”

  She knew she must be blushing. “Oh, that’s all right, Mr. Schlaht. I was just looking at it.… Oh, and add a nickel to that bill, will you? I just took a punch for fun.”

  He stared at her. “Well, where’s the punch? You might’ve won something even better than the rabbit.”

  “Oh, no!” she cried. “It was just for fun!”

  She couldn’t bear to face him any longer. She started toward the door.

  “But you never —”

  “I’ll run ahead and open the car door for you, so you can bring out the sugar,” she said.

  She followed him back into the store, swept the sack of groceries off the counter, and fled.

  Herman had found the number she punched and unrolled it. “Hey!” he called. “Hey, you won a prize! Your num
ber’s here in this here red prize section!”

  He held up the tiny bit of paper, thinking she could not hear him.

  “Hey, you won a free punch!” He stood in the door yelling at her, shaping his lips to help her make out what he was saying.

  She shook her head at him and drove off.

  When she got home, George was down at the house waiting to help her unload and to be fed his dinner. He took the can of pears out of the sack. It was one of the few things that bore a trademark, because most of the staples came from Herman’s bulk bins and sacks. He looked at the label.

  “What did you buy these pears for?” he demanded.

  “Why? I just thought it would be nice to have a can of fruit on hand. I’m all out of my own, till the fruit comes in again.

  “Oh, now, Rachel, you know that’s not what I mean! You know it’s not the pears; it’s the principle of the thing. Why did you buy this brand?”

  “Why, I never even saw it,” she said. “Herman reached it down for me and I …”

  “Herman!” George exclaimed. “Boy, how dumb can he get! What’s he doing, carrying this big store stuff anyhow? He’s just cutting his own throat, that’s all. These chain stores would be happy if they could put every little fellow in the country out of business. They own millions of acres right now. They crowd out the little guys and then they let the little guys come back and work for them — for whatever they want to pay, that is. It’s just a slow way to starve, that’s all. That’s what the Finleys were doing before they decided to try and get to Canada—picking tomatoes down in Indiana on a big company farm.”

  “Did Lucy catch the rabbit?” Rachel asked.

  “Yeah, she caught it all right. You’ll probably have a fit when you see how it scratched her—you’ll have her dead from lockjaw or gangrene.”

  “What happened!”

  “Nothing!” he retorted. “She caught him and he kicked her and she let him go, that’s all. It’s a good thing for her, too. I can just see myself growing feed for a damned rabbit!”

  “Where is she?” Rachel said.

  “Oh, she’ll be along. She’s still out roaming around and pouting over it. Boy, when I was that age I sure wasn’t out using up good energy on such foolishness, I can tell you that! My old man would have had me out with the hoe, planting potatoes! It’s getting drier by the day. Quicker I get everything in, the better chance it has.”

  “Will you call her to dinner?” Rachel asked.

  George walked around the house to the west side and beamed his voice toward the fields. Rachel thought perhaps it had been a good accident after all when she didn’t win the rabbit. How in the world would George have taken to that?

  Lucy was furious at missing a trip to town, and she would not talk when she came in.

  “Lower lip’s a mile long,” George observed acidly.

  “Why, honey, you should have put something on that right away!” Rachel said. “Come over here to the window and let me look at it in the light. Does it hurt a lot?”

  Lucy stared away without speaking.

  “You answer your mother when she asks you a question or you’ll eat your meals standing up for a week!” George shouted.

  “No,” Lucy said defiantly.

  “As soon as I slice the potatoes to fry, I’ll fix it,” Rachel said.

  Lucy did enjoy the big bandage. It made her feel that perhaps, after all, she had fought a good fight. After dinner she poked about in the cupboard to see what was new from her mother’s shopping. She could always hope that there would be a tiny white sack there with a little candy in it.

  “Why didn’t you bring me some candy, for leaving me at home?” she said.

  “Oh, honey, I forgot! I was thinking of so many things!” (The nickel—the whole nickel she had wasted!)

  Rachel fixed her one of her candy substitutes—dry uncooked oatmeal mixed with several teaspoons of sugar in a tin measuring cup—Lucy always insisted on the tin cup. She went out and sat on the porch to eat it, staring off at the edge of the woods where she had first seen the rabbit—brooding.

  Each vertebra, it seemed to Rachel, was painfully sharp along the round of Lucy’s drooping back. How could there be any resistance in such a spare body? What if she should get an infection? She would be gone, before they had time to get her to a doctor. Why was her cheek so flushed and why was she so listless? She might very well be coming down with blood poisoning. Stuart had had it once, when he was about fourteen. That had been just a scratch, too. He didn’t even know how he got it. He had almost died, and he was a husky boy then, not tall yet, the way he got later, but with a bit of early adolescent fat still on him—much, much more to spare than Lucy had. His whole arm had become horribly red and swollen, and red lines ran down it and up his shoulder. They had saved him, but just barely. He kept a fever for over a week.

  She went out on the porch. “Let me feel your forehead,” she said. Lucy lifted her face. She seemed hot, Rachel thought. “Now let’s look at your arm.” It seemed very red.

  George came down for the new package of Bull Durham which he had forgotten. “I’m worried about Lucy’s arm,” Rachel told him.

  “Oh, pshaw! You just look for trouble, don’t you?” he said.

  “No, I don’t! I wouldn’t have to look for it if you would look a little more! You should have put something on that as soon as it happened!”

  “I didn’t even know when it happened,” he protested.

  “Well, and just why didn’t you? Because you’ve trained her never to say when she’s hurt. You’ve shamed her into not talking about how bad she may feel. You tell her to be like an Indian—no matter if she’s dying! Well, she’s not an Indian. Maybe Indians didn’t care if their children died from blood poisoning, but I do!”

  “Now, then, just what are you trying to say, Rachel? You know I care what happens to her just as much as you do! It’s just that I can’t stand a sissy, and I’m not going to let you turn her into one!”

  “It’s not sissy to complain when you have something wrong with you and you need help! If Stuart hadn’t let Dad know when his arm first started to hurt, he’d be dead by now. Just don’t forget what happened to Danny McNelis! All because his father had beaten it into him never to talk about how he felt!”

  It was no use arguing with her, once she brought up Danny McNelis. George put down the dipper he had been drinking out of. “All right, pack her up and drive her thirty miles to Jimtown and use all that gas and pay some damn doctor two dollars to pour some iodine on her and send you home!”

  Listening from the porch, Lucy did feel a little sick thinking about what happened to Danny McNelis last year. When he came to school that morning, he had not looked well. Even Miss Liljeqvist had noticed it and asked him if he wanted to go home. He said no, he felt fine. All day long he got whiter and whiter. In the afternoon he fainted and fell out of his desk. His father came then and took him to Jamestown. That night Danny died from appendicitis. And Danny’s father, though he felt so awful, still was very proud of the way Danny had acted. Lucy often heard him talking over at the store. “Never a single word did he say! Can you beat that?” Danny’s father would ask.

  But Lucy’s mother had told her afterwards that if Danny’s father had not been so set on making a little boy act like a tough grown man, Danny might still be alive. It certainly made more sense to say when you had a bad stomachache, and never mind if your father called you a sissy or not. Fathers were not always right, were they?

  It was going to be another hot summer, Rose thought. Here it was still May, and only midmorning, and the sun beating on the tarred roof of the chicken house had already made the air impossible. She would have begun the cleaning much earlier if she had known the day would turn this way. The stench was so strong it hurt her nose. She leaned against the door frame, still sticky with the creosote they had sprayed to get rid of the mites. The fumes of it grew more intense in the heat, like the chicken manure, but a hot breeze brought unpolluted air to he
r.

  What ails me, anyway? There’s nothing wrong with you! What ails you for thinking something’s wrong? You haven’t changed a bit since you were ten years old. You’ve had fifty-four years to learn how to clean a chicken house without dirtying your mind as much as your rubbers, and still you can’t do it. Just think of what you’ve been thinking in there. How much you hate chickens. How much you hate to wash eggs. How much you hate to butcher chickens and smell the filthy brown of their warm intestines in your hand. How you wouldn’t care a bit if the chicken thieves took every last hen in this place the next time they come. How you could watch the whole flock get coccidiosis and die slowly and miserably and never feel a qualm of sympathy. Yes, how you could watch them all, and God knows, nothing can look as sick and pitiful as a chicken.

  Your own father, Rose Stuart, would have punished you with his buggy whip for saying such thoughts aloud. Is it any better, now that you’re fifty-four years old, to say them to yourself? Now that there is no one to punish you but God? Should you not be thankful, every minute of your life, that you have not had to live the life of your mother and to bear eleven children in a sod hut to a man who would not control either his wicked temper or his evil desires? And should a woman who has been married for thirty-six years, Rose Shepard, be still remembering a dead father’s cruelty—and, far worse, should she be remembering him as if she had not forgiven him long ago? Should there be any hatred in a Christian woman who has had fifty-four years to learn to follow Christ?

  You may well ask, Rose Stuart, what ails you when you let your mind be filled all morning with complaints and vicious thoughts. You should thank God for every egg you wash and every chicken you eat. People are starving to death everywhere in the world. You should be on your knees before God right here in this stinking manure, thanking Him that you do not have to steal the chickens you eat.