The Bones of Plenty Read online

  “Who brung that mare in heat in here?” yelled the sheriff.

  But nobody heard him. The jokes and guffaws wended their way through the crowd. The sheriff dropped his hand toward his pistol and then he picked up his auction hammer instead. When the men were ready, they fell back into their complete, unnerving silence. They wouldn’t even bother to heckle him—any more than the stallion had bothered to kick the deputy.

  “All right,” the sheriff said. “We’ll put the Percherons up again. Who’ll give me a hundred and fifty dollars?”

  “Who’ll fetch the stallion back?” Oscar Johnson roared. “I didn’t hardly get a good enough look at him to risk a bid.”

  “Now you men out there watch your step or I’ll run you in for inciting to riot!” the sheriff cried.

  “Don’t arrest me, for Christ’s sake!” Oscar yelled back. “Arrest the horse!”

  “Now, by God, we’ve had enough of this!” The sheriff spoke to the two deputies and both of them took hold of the gelding’s halter to lead him back to the barn—a hundred and fifty pounds of man on either side of a ton of horse.

  “Those little fellas look as useless as tits on a boar, don’t they?” George inquired of Lester.

  “If their brains was dynamite it wouldn’t blow their nose,” Lester agreed.

  Some of the men in that crowd had not enjoyed themselves so much since the days when they ganged up to badger a female teacher, feeling the first restless power of their manhood. They hadn’t run into this schoolroom kind of authority since their graduation from the eighth grade, and they were beginning to be exhilarated by their return to the game they used to play—the mass defiance of the helpless against the authority standing before them. Only this time the game was more fun than it had ever been before, because it was so much more serious.

  The deputies came back with Otto’s other team, contrasting so pitiably with the Percherons that the crowd began to laugh again. These were an ungainly pair of sinister creatures that had recently run half wild on ranges in the far West. When the Depression had got so bad that farmers couldn’t afford to buy gas for their tractors, the horse traders out West began corralling bunches of wild mustang mares, running them with domesticated draft stallions—big males to increase the size of the colts—and raking in fancy profits. By the looks of them, these two had been sired by Belgians that were more than twice as big as their untamed mothers.

  This team was as badly mismatched as the Percherons were perfectly matched. They were both geldings but one was black, with a complicated brand on his rump that had burned off all the hair on a patch the size of a man’s hand. He had probably been stolen once, and therefore branded twice. The other was a sorrel as ewe-necked, paunchy, and buck-kneed as a living horse could be. Neither of them was worth more than twenty-five or thirty dollars, and the buyer would be sure to discover that they had various nasty stable vices which would not show until they were taken home.

  After the laughter, though, the crowd was quiet again. George couldn’t bear the tension any longer. “I’ll start this pair of moth-eaten critters at two bits!” he shouted.

  “Thirty cents!” came a voice from behind him.

  “Thirty-five!” came another.

  “Take it easy, boys,” Lester scolded. “You’re getting way past me. Thirty-six!”

  “Thirty-seven!”

  Clarence Egger appeared beside George. “It’s as good as a vawdville show,” he snickered. “I never really thought it would work. I gotta hand it to you, George.”

  “Thirty-seven and a half!”

  “Thirty-eight!”

  “Hell,” said George, “if Lester wants them two roarers that bad, let him have ‘em. I’m not going any higher.”

  “Now listen here,” shouted the sheriff. “This man standing right here behind me has got a perfectly legal mortgage on this property. Now let’s just cut out this tomfoolery and get down to business. Who’ll give me thirty dollars for the team?”

  “Which team?”

  “I said, cut it out! This sale is going to go on!”

  “Forty cents!”

  “I’m not having that kind of sale!” the sheriff screamed.

  “If you don’t aim to have a sale what did you waste our tax money printing up those signs for?” George wanted to know.

  The little zephyr of levity had blown itself out. It was as though a wind, lifting up the light silver backs of the willow leaves along a river, had died down and let them drop to show their dark tops again. The crowd showed how quickly it could become another kind of crowd. George’s chest grew tight with exultation. This was the way it was going to be when the big fight came.

  “Yeah, if he don’t want to have this sale, maybe there just might be some other way we can get our tax money out of those signs—or at least our money’s worth!”

  “All right, now,” the sheriff said. George thought he sounded desperate. “We’ll just forget about horses for a minute and go on to sheep. You all know how wool is going up. Wilkes has fed them sheep for you all winter. Keep ’em this winter and cash in next summer. Now then, I’ll start ’em at two dollars a head, in lots of twenty, take ’em as they come, young or old, or any wethers along with the ewes and lambs. Just the fleece off’n each one of ’em this summer brought in two dollars or more. Who’ll start, now, at forty dollars for lots of twenty?”

  George spoke up again. “Yeah, and once Otto got the wool off, it was a wonder those sheep held together at all. Skinniest sheep I ever saw in my life. Five cents a head.”

  The sheriff conferred with the man in the silk suit. The man said something to Irene.

  “A telephone!” she shrieked.

  The man turned back to the sheriff, and the two deputies started down the steps. It’s over, George thought, but the sheriff pounded again with his hammer and shouted, “Now, then, we’ll have a little recess for a while till some real bidders get here. Anybody that wants to bid can stay. Anybody that doesn’t might as well go home. It’ll be a long hot spell of waiting,” he finished solicitously.

  “I think we got a few too many slickers around here right now, don’t you?” George asked. He moved in front of the deputies just in time to cut them off from the sheriff’s car, and leaned innocuously against the door of it. He rested the heel of one large work shoe on the running board and braced an elbow in the open window.

  The deputy who had let the stallion escape stepped up to redeem himself.

  “Get away from there,” he said. “That’s county property.”

  “That means I own a little bit of it then, don’t it?” George said. “I reckon, for the time being, till you can get your pettifogging shysters to work on it, I’ll just settle for this little piece of running board, here”—he clunked his heel down, sending a shudder through the car—“and this little piece of windowsill.”

  “This here is county property,” the deputy said again. “You get away from there, now, and let me get inside. I got my orders from Sheriff Press, and you know it.”

  George took his elbow out of the window and swung his foot to the ground and straightened up. He looked around the crowd. Didn’t they all know that if Press got some city bidders out here, the jig was up? Nobody made any overt move to back him up; on the other hand, the men had pushed in around him and the deputies, so that there was no chance for the sheriff to worm his way through to them.

  A gigantic double-barreled shotgun materialized like a thunderbolt in the fidgety grip of Wallace Esskew. Nobody ever knew what to expect from Wally. He had a funny high laugh that was more scared guinea hen than it was human. He wasn’t married—just lived at home with his parents and brothers. More than any man there he could afford to get himself out on a limb.

  Wally let out his funny deranged laugh. The deputies jumped when they saw the cannon. “Nothing but rock salt in here,” Wallace giggled. “I was just afraid one of these little Wilkes kids might get at it there in the car. I just remembered I had it cocked and ready to go because I
was aiming to chase down them chicken thieves the next time they come back to our place.” He grinned and respectfully bobbed his head again and again at the deputies, while the gun wavered in his uncoordinated hands. Nobody claimed that Wally was crazy—just peculiar. Nobody ever knew what was in his head.

  No man considered that giving a rock-salt lesson to a chicken thief was really shooting him. The sheriff and the deputies obviously understood that the thought of filling official pants with rock salt would appeal to almost every man in the crowd. The sheriff had come to perpetrate a farce, not to be the hero of one. It might be disastrous to his reputation if he had to drive back to Jamestown with his pants full of rock salt. If all the men there had rock salt in their guns and he fired into the crowd, it would be said that he returned lead for salt. Farmers still had one vote apiece, and they took their votes seriously. And if any rock salt should find its way into that silk suit …

  It seemed to George that they had him. He probably had a couple of tear-gas bombs in the car; he could use one to show the Big Man that he was doing his best. But that might be the best way to stop a load of rock salt—fired, of course, by a man who was so blinded he couldn’t see what he was doing. He could place them all under arrest, but George didn’t imagine they would all just climb in their cars and follow obligingly along to the clink. He could start taking their names and addresses, but he would probably have to do that at gunpoint, and it would hardly be sensible for him to encourage any more gun-thinking with the kind of reinforcements he had at the moment. He could come back with a posse, but he might find himself confronting a troop of state militia. Who knew what Wild Bill Langer might do? They were only seventy miles from Bismarck, and Langer had only been governor for a few months—he might still be crazy enough to do what he had said he would do.

  In any case, George reasoned triumphantly, if Sheriff Press left and came back, it was certainly more likely that he would find the militia waiting for him than that he would find any of the men facing him now, with the exception of Wilkes, of course.

  Like most politicians, the sheriff had got elected because of his big broad smile that forced people to smile back at him. He smiled his way through the tight crowd, and he was still smiling when he looked up at George. The man in the silk suit was so close behind him that he might have been joined to him, like a Siamese twin.

  “Stare him down, George,” somebody said.

  “I never argue with a fellow this big,” the sheriff said lightly. “I just ask him if he’ll kindly move aside so I can get in my car and go home.”

  George hesitated and then stepped back. Sheriff Press climbed into his official car and started the engine to show that he meant what he said. The deputies found room to pass through the crowd then, and got into the front seat with him. Everybody forgot about the real villain till it was too late to give him a scare—the man in the silk suit was already sitting behind the wheel of his Oldsmobile. He had his window rolled almost up, and it was a safe bet that he had the door locked.

  The sheriff took off his cavalry hat and leaned his head out the window. “I reckon you’ll have to back out first, Mr. Burr,” he called tactfully. Mr. Burr did not need to be coaxed.

  Once again the dust took a long time to settle over the crowd but this time the dust proved that little men, not the moneylenders, were in control. The little men had shaken off the county sheriff with as much impunity as that impetuous stallion had rid himself of the useless deputy.

  The law was an abstraction, like money, that functioned only so long as the majority partook of it, possessed it, believed in it, and felt committed to it. The law seemed quite as insubstantial now as the numbers they had once believed in—all the numbers that represented what they thought they had safely stored in Harry’s bank.

  What had happened this morning in Otto Wilkes’s squalid yard proved that the system of the whole nation was so rotten it was on the very edge of collapse. It was too late to try to restore the system in pieces, with Roosevelt’s bureaus and bureaucrats.

  “Well, we did a good morning’s work, boys!” George said. “There goes a couple of weasels that found out it’s going to take more than a damned piece of paper before they can kick a man off his land.”

  He wanted to make a speech. He wanted to say, “We are fighting in defense of our homes. Our petitions have been scorned; our entreaties have been disregarded. We entreat no more; we petition no more. We defy them.” It had been a long time since William Jennings Bryan said that. He’d been dead for nearly ten years now. George had memorized that speech for his oration when he graduated from the eighth grade. A man never forgot things he memorized when he was young. Kids nowadays didn’t do anywhere near enough memorizing. They didn’t even have to learn the Declaration of Independence.

  “Now that we know how to do it,” George said aloud, “we have to stick together and break up the next sale, too. We can’t let let them get the jump on us again. This revolution is fifty years overdue now.”

  “By God, that was the funniest thing I ever seen!” Clarence Egger was nearly beside himself, carried away by the morning’s entertainments, not by what had been proved and accomplished. Talking about vaudeville shows. Lapping up other men’s fights. The bleating little sheep. He kept pounding Wallace Esskew on the back with his one arm. “Old Dick Press really thought you was going to pepper his ass with rock salt!”

  Wally’s blankness could be comical. “What rock salt?” he said.

  II

  What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

  Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

  You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

  A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

  And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

  And the dry stone no sound of water. Only

  There is shadow under this red rock,

  (Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

  And I will show you something different from either

  Your shadow at morning striding behind you

  Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

  I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

  T. S. Eliot

  The Waste Land

  1922

  Tuesday, July 18

  Every day the temperature climbed a little higher. At four in the morning the house was already hot enough to wake the bluebottle flies and send them buzzing and bumbling over the faces of humans trying to sleep. The pastures were dry and brown.

  At dinner George said to Lucy, “I’ve got a good kid job for you this afternoon. I want you and the dog to take the cows over to Oscar Johnson’s land there, across the road, and watch so they don’t run away or get out on the road. I saw Oscar over town yesterday, and I promised him I’d fix up his car for him this winter if he’ll let us get whatever pasturing we can out of that section of his. He isn’t going to use it anyhow. There’s a lot on the hillsides there that doesn’t get burned too bad in the afternoon. It’ll give our pastures a little rest. Maybe if we’d get one rain we’d get some more grass yet. Anyhow, we’ll see how it goes for a couple of weeks over there.”

  “Oh, George,” Rachel said. “She’s too little to do such a long hard job as that! She’s not even eight yet!”

  “I herded cows when I was five! And not just in the afternoons, neither. I got sent out as soon as the morning’s milking was done and I got told not to come back till it was time for the evening chores. And I knew what I’d get if I came back too early, too! They gave me a piece of bread and a bottle of water and packed me off! That’s the trouble with kids nowadays. They’re spoiled and lazy and good-for-nothing. I’m not asking her to go out all day—just afternoons!

  “I saddled my first horse when I was five. By the time I was her age I’d be out in the barn of a morning, harnessing up the team, while my dad finished the milking. I had to stand up on a block of wood to reach over the horse’s back, but I harnessed up a team, I tell you. I
don’t expect anything like that of a girl, but she can certainly herd a few milch cows for a few days. It’ll be the best thing in the world for her. Why, I learned how to keep myself from ever being bored—I could watch a bunch of ants working for hours—or a hawk trying to catch a gopher—or—any one of a hundred different things.…”

  Rachel did not argue. She walked into the kitchen and started the dishes. George sat whittling a match down to a fine enough point so it would get at a spot that a toothpick wouldn’t reach. Lucy was numb and still. When her parents quarreled over her this way, she realized that she was the cause of all the trouble in the house. If only she were not here, there would be nothing for them to fight about. And if only she had a dappled-gray pony like her cousin’s. She would love to herd cows with a pony like that.

  The cows were gathered under the spreading box elder tree, chewing their morning’s cuds while they lay in its shade. They kept the ground bare beneath it, and the dust they kicked up heavily coated its leaves. They had come in for water around noon, as they did almost every day now, and they would not head out to the pasture again for an hour or so—and then only out of desperation. George was already supplementing what they foraged for themselves with his precious hay, but he hated to be using it up when there was still a little pasture available anywhere. They never produced as well without green stuff, and since the price of butterfat was staying up so high this summer, he felt it was worth a great deal of effort to get as much cream as possible.

  “I’m going up towards the road myself, so I’ll help you get them started,” George said. “Looks like they’re a little low on water. We better give them some first.”

  He primed the dry leather and began to pump. The cows walked eagerly to the stream of water. What little water they had left was thick with red box-elder bugs and other insects drowned in the feathery slime on the bottom of the tank and when the water was like that they would blow into it, trying to push the bugs aside before they drank. When the tank was half full, the pump began to strain and then came the sound of sand rasping against the leather. The water choked off into spasmodic, discolored, thin spouts. George let go of the pump handle.