The Bones of Plenty Read online

  Rachel was afraid even to stoop down to her, knowing how that would shame her. She wanted to roll under the cot with her and sob with her and never come out again.

  How many times had he done it since that first time? Twenty? A hundred? Five? How was it that she had gone on living with a man who could turn into an insane wild beast? She couldn’t believe it.

  She could never believe it when the man she had married became a beast. He would not come back to the house until he was in control of himself again. Then he would look like a man, speak like a man. She would pity him as a man. He would be her husband; he would not be a beast. He would explain how he had beaten his child out of his love for it—out of his obligation to rear it properly. What was there to do? End her marriage? Go back to her father and the farm that joined this land? Watch from there while the man she had promised to cherish forever went ahead and killed himself trying to keep possession of the place to which they had both given nearly a decade of their lives?

  He had not been this way in those first years. He had truly loved Lucy when she was Cathy’s age. While Lucy was still creeping she would scramble to the door when she heard him scraping his boots on the porch. She would make little baby shouts of excitement waiting for the door to open. He would throw her in the air. He would swing her up and down on his foot while she held his fingers in her fists and clamped her strong, tiny legs around his instep. He had been so powerful, the baby so confident. They had reveled in their combination of power and confidence. They had laughed hysterically together, and even then it had been so easy to see how much they were alike. And it had been so charming to see how the giant red-haired father and the elfin platinum-haired baby were so alike, how they both loved what their bodies could do, how they could intoxicate each other with the wildness of their spirits.

  When they played that way, she, the mother, the one who had brought the spirits together, had herself felt a wild gaiety that was new and exquisite, as though a great and remarkable thing had come to pass because of her. It had been such an unexpected feeling. Always before, her life had been spent watching on the edge of something and never understanding what it was, but then suddenly, with the bass drum rolling and the miraculous bell pealing, with the laughter of the man and baby all around her in the house, she saw that she had been caught unawares and made a part of the very mechanism of the universe. Paradoxically, she felt that she had already accomplished what she had been put on earth to do, and yet she also knew that her life had only just begun. The hand of God moved her and her own will submitted as it had never done before, and yet she was necessary to the will of God in a way that she had never been before. That was how it was when a woman had her first baby. Every day was filled with unprecedented, humbling, exalting paradoxes.

  In those days could the beast have been in the father of the baby? Was the beast in him the day he led the three-thousand-pound bull away from the schoolyard? Did a man have to have a beast in him to deal with such a beast? If the beast had been in him then, why hadn’t she seen it in time? If it had not been in him then, where had it come from since, and why had it come? What was there to do? What was there to do?

  And now this child was still like him, so much more than he knew. Now she was proud and there was never anything to say that did not make things harder. The worst part of the beating was not over, but only beginning. It was the humiliation that hurt now, and it was the humiliation that would remain. Long after the welts had gone down and the last greenish-yellow mark of an old bruise had disappeared, the humiliation of a child would defile the house. What was there to do?

  Her arms, her body, her throat, her face, even her eyes ached with her need to comfort the child who would never be comforted. She yearned for one thing only—to sit in the corner on the floor of the shadowed bedroom holding the proud doomed little head against her breast till night fell and the merciful angel came for them both. What else was there to do?

  It was very hot under the bed. Lucy lay looking up at the lines of short springs hooked together and crossing each other to fasten into the little holes along the frame.

  She heard her father come in with the milk and run it through the separator. She heard them all sit down to dinner.

  “Where’s Lucy?” her father said.

  “She’s not hungry,” her mother answered.

  “I’m telling you, Rachel, I’m not going to raise a kid that doesn’t obey me! Absolute obedience must be required of a child! Otherwise, they grow up spoiled rotten. They’re no good to anybody then. Not even themselves. I don’t see why you can’t understand that you don’t do a kid a favor when you spoil him.”

  Lucy did not hear her mother say anything. Only after she had heard them all go to bed did she creep up to lie on top of the mattress that she had contemplated so long from below. She had not answered when her mother called to her again after supper. She was beginning to feel a little hungry, but not hungry enough to give in and ask for food.

  That night she dreamed again about the great yellow-eyed lion sleeping in the grass. Then the mischievous, noisy monkeys woke him and he saw her and came bounding after her like a flaming thistle in a black wind, while she ran through fields and jungles in a rampant maze with her feet never quite touching the ground. In the morning it seemed that this hysterical landscape had burned against her eyelids all night long until it was replaced by the burning of the early hot day shining strongly down on her bed—the day that finally brought back memory of the reason why her eyes were so dried and salted.

  “Lucy isn’t going out with the cows again,” Rachel said to George, quietly, so Lucy could not hear. She was cutting the bread for breakfast; and she paused, resting the knife on the breadboard, and looked up at him. He forced himself to meet her eyes, to prove that he was right.

  Then he turned his back to go out the door and summed up the situation as it looked to him.

  “If a man can’t count on his own family for help,” he said, “I don’t see how he can be expected to make a go of it. If he has to fight every fat middleman in the country and then his family too, what in Sam Hill is he going to do? When I was half her age, if I’d done a fool thing like that my old man would’ve beat me with a black-snake. Your father spoiled you, and you want me to spoil her”

  “I love my father! And just how did you feel about yours?”

  “What has that got to do with it?” He grabbed his cap in one hand and the milk pail in the other and headed for the barn. It was nobody’s damned business how he felt about his father—nobody’s.

  After breakfast he went out to rake the hay he had mowed a few days before. Hay-raking was about as pleasant as any job he could think of. It was a job that went much faster than most, and gave a man the feeling of having accomplished a great deal in a little while. When he finished a field he liked to look at the long low mounds of half-cured hay, sweetly pungent with the stored work of the resting acres.

  But two things spoiled his pleasure in the job today. The hay was so thin this year because of the drought—thinner than he could ever remember it. That was the first thing. The second was that he would have to start using it up almost immediately if he couldn’t figure out some way to get the cows to pasture. Now he was committed to paying for grazing land that would go to waste for the lack of a fence or a herder. How maddening could a man’s life get, anyway?

  He could always just drive the cattle over there and hope they’d stay. They probably would, but he could not be sure; and anyhow, he wasn’t the kind to let his stock run loose the way Otto Wilkes did. He could stake out the whole herd, but that would be so much effort for him that it would hardly be worthwhile, considering how rushed he was. The only thing to do was find a herder somewhere or just forget about the pasture. This was what happened when a man’s family let him down. Well, he’d let them know he could manage without them. Next time he went to town he’d find himself a boy. All the farm boys would be working for their own fathers, as children ought to do, but he could find
a town boy to do it.

  There was one big thing to be optimistic about. He still saw little rust damage in the wheat, though the fields of Marquis all around him were in bad shape. It was just a little too early yet to tell about smut. He didn’t even have to look at his Ceres to know that it was suffering from bad grasshopper damage. But so was every other field. His competitors had nothing on him there. If the smut didn’t get him and the rust got everybody else, then he would be one up, at least, on the others.

  The price of cream was another thing to be hopeful about, if he could only keep up the production of his herd. Cream was up ten cents a pound over July of last year. He decided to go to town that very day and see if he could find a boy.

  He went to Herman first, to ask him if he knew of anybody and to get a package of Bull Durham. Mrs. Finley and her boy Audley were getting their week’s groceries. Now there was a likely-looking lad—about ten, George would judge, and certainly in need of the money. It was handy to have his mother there, too. He could ask them right now.

  George cleared his throat. “Say, how would you like to make a loan of this boy here?” he said.

  Audley looked as startled as she did. “Loan him? What for?”

  “Simplest job in the world. Herd six cows on a section that isn’t fenced alongside of the road.”

  “Well,” she hedged, “he’s quite a lot of help to me around the house with the littler ones. I don’t know if I could let him go just now.”

  “I’d fetch him and bring him back and pay him a quarter a day for five days a week. How’s that?” George said.

  When she got a check at all, Pearl Finley got a relief voucher for four dollars’ worth of groceries a week, for herself and the five kids. Another dollar and a quarter was a lot of money.

  “Why, I think that’s just wonderful,” she said. “Audley would love to do that, I know.”

  “I don’t like cows much,” Audley said.

  “Oh, that don’t matter,” George scoffed. “Who does? A fellow doesn’t have to like them to herd them, does he?”

  “Audley would thank you kindly for the job,” Mrs. Finley said firmly.

  “Would it be all right if he started today?” George said. “I can wait a minute and run you home with your groceries.”

  George waited by the counter, tapping an aimless rhythm on it. He couldn’t get the well out of his mind for a minute. It had filled up just enough in the night so he could water the stock, but they’d have to forget about the tomatoes. What if he had to take time off now to sink another deep well? And what if he couldn’t find water at all? What then? Haul it? Where would he haul it from? And how could he spend all day hauling water, even if he did find somebody who would let him have all he needed? Get rid of the cattle? Then no cream checks. What then?

  That was why it was worth a lot to him to get the cows to green pasture, or what passed for that. He was going to pay the boy as much, almost, as it would cost to feed hay, but when cows ate grass they didn’t need so much water. And for the next six weeks, literally every drop made a difference. He could always buy hay, too, though the price was going up. But water he might not be able to buy. If the railroads had to start hauling it in, he could certainly never pay their prices. Other men in other places were doing that, to preserve herds they had spent a lifetime breeding, but he was in no position to buy water.

  He and Audley did not talk on the way home after they had let Mrs. Finley off. George felt too triumphant to mess with kid talk. He hadn’t told Rachel what he was going to town for. He jumped out of the car. “Come on in,” he said. “I’ll get the old lady to fix you a bite to eat and then we’ll fetch the cows.”

  Audley followed him into the kitchen.

  “Well, I got me a boy!” George said loudly. “You know Audley Finley, don’t you? Got me a cow-herder!”

  “That’s wonderful,” Rachel said. She knew George wanted her to be angry, but she wasn’t. He never seemed to understand that such things would not anger her.

  Haying was the first heroic once-and-for-all job of the summer. The wheat had a month to go yet, and the corn had more than two months. Most of the work between planting and threshing was gardening—long days of weeding and fussing with bugs and sprays. A man got to hating every tiniest seedling weed that had used up some drops of precious water—precious enough when the well had given plenty and only the labor of hauling it up the hill to the garden had made it costly. It was nerve-wracking and degrading to have to feel such anxious solicitude for each root, such anger with each pale green cutworm.

  It was a relief to get away from that hard, dry ground, to stand upright with head and shoulders against the sky, and pitch clean hay into the loader. Nobody had to worry about weeds in the hay. The cows could eat around the spiky brown thistles in this, their winter pasture, just as they could eat around the fuzzy green thistles in the summer pasture. A man could charge into haying with all the impatience he had accumulated hoeing in a garden all day.

  Lucy loved haying because she was in charge of the hayrack and she drove the team. Every once in a while her father would vault into the hayrack and pitch a few huge forkfuls to the front to make room for more hay coming down from the hay loader in the rear, and then he would jump back to the dusty stubble to pitch to the loader again.

  Then it was Lucy’s job to tramp down the hay he had pitched to her. After five minutes of tramping, her legs began to balk, and after ten minutes her thighs turned to stone and her raw tendons disconnected themselves from her ankles and stopped lifting her feet. After that, with a boy out there across the road herding her father’s cows and shaming her, she kept her legs working only by praying all the time that God would not let her be humiliated any more.

  She was just turning around the corner of the field and feeling the hot wind shift to her other cheek when she noticed a car stopping at their mailbox. A man got out and read their name. Then he turned down their road, but instead of going on to the house, as they expected him to, he parked as near to them as he could. He climbed through the barbed wire, stretching it badly, and cut through the wheatfield.

  “Look at that bird!” her father yelled. “All I’d need is fifty or sixty more like him and there wouldn’t be any wheat left standing to cut. I thought he was the Watkins man. Don’t the Watkins man have a green car like that?”

  “Yes, he does,” she yelled back.

  The man hurried toward them. Once they saw him skitter sideways and take a few running steps while he watched behind him.

  “Scared of a garter snake!” George shouted.

  “Good morning,” the man said. Then they knew for sure he was from the city. Nobody in the country said that, just as nobody in the country would say lunch for dinner or dinner for supper.

  George swung his fork down and planted the tines a good two inches in the rock-hard ground, gripping the handle with only one fist. The tines struck into the dust very near the man’s shoes. “You know, Mister, nobody ever sold me a thing by trespassing on my property and tramping down my wheat, but bigger men than you have got in trouble for provoking me a lot less than you just did. This here is private property, and I reckon you just better take whatever it is you want to sell me and get right back to your car. And you better walk around that wheat this time or I’m liable to hit you on top of your head so hard you’ll have three tongues in your shoes.”

  The man seemed surprisingly unworried—insolent, in fact. George wished the fellow would do something that would justify hitting him. “You must be George Custer,” he said in a peculiar way.

  “That’s me,” George said, “and that’s George Custer’s wheat you just walked through.”

  “Well, this must be for you, then” the man answered, smiling up at him.

  He thrust an envelope into George’s hands and walked away across the hayfield, almost running.

  “Now just a minute!” George yelled after him.

  “It’s self-explanatory, Mr. Custer!” the man yelled back. “That i
s, if you can read!”

  “Why you little yellow …” George took a half step after him and then stopped to look at the letter. It might be a telegram or something.

  The return address impressively printed on the outside was enough. He knew what it was. It was trouble from the office of Sheriff Richard M. Press in the courthouse of Stutsman County. Well, the sheriff had to make it seem as though he was doing his job. Since the law was already working for the really big crooks, it was forced to look hard for some legitimate business.

  George watched the little city man backing his car out of the lane. He didn’t even have the guts to drive on down and turn around in the yard. They were all yellow when they weren’t on their own territory. They had to get him alone, down on their own ground, before they dared to go to work on him. He wondered what would happen if he didn’t go. They’d probably come after him with a posse twice the size of the ones that used to go out after Jesse James. That would be gratifying. He’d think about it. After he saw that it was a kind of subpoena, he stuck it in his overall bib pocket and jerked his fork out of the ground. He would have to tell Rachel about it because Lucy would tell. She was looking down at him now from the hayrack.

  “Is it a telegram?” she asked. They had got a telegram once when somebody had died. She could barely remember it.

  He didn’t really read it until that night after supper. Then he showed it to Rachel. It seemed to him that it was oddly worded. He wished to God he had the money for a lawyer or the time to read up on subpoenas himself. He was positive they were pulling a fast one on him. It ordered him to appear the next Monday as a material witness in a sheriff’s investigation of conspiracy to obstruct the due processes of the law. All the fancy language was there, but that didn’t mean that this was a really legal subpoena.

  “What do you think would happen if I didn’t go?” he said, feeling her out. Was she willing to back him up now? To go to war?

  “Oh, George,” she said miserably. “For heaven’s sake, do what they say. They’ll fine you, probably, and if they have to come after you, they’ll fine you even more. And besides, how awful that would be—if they came and took you away in one of those cage cars! Oh, why did you do it?”