The Bones of Plenty Read online

  “Oh now, Rachel! They’re not going to do anything like that! You’re just hysterical. And I did it because once in a while a man has to take a stand and act the way he believes!”

  “I don’t think you acted out of any belief at all!” she cried out. “You did it because you got mad, that’s why!”

  “That just shows all you know about it. Women!”

  Monday, July 31

  George rushed through his chores and breakfast and then changed his clothes. He was supposed to be at the courthouse at ten o’clock, and he wanted to be on time. He didn’t want to give them an excuse to add additional penalties to any they might now have in mind. The one thing that terrified him was a fine. He didn’t think they’d dare to lock him up; that would arouse the rest of the men too much. But a fine could easily take at least a month’s extra checks.

  He put on the only suit he had—the one he had bought to get married in. It was still new-looking; it had maybe too many buttons on the sleeves, or maybe not enough—he didn’t worry about such things. It fit the way it fitted nine years ago, except that it was a trifle looser here and there. Rachel had starched his collar as stiffly as she could, to make it survive the heat as long as possible, and he wore a smart-looking figured maroon tie to set off the suit.

  If only he had a summer hat. He needed it to complement the rest of his outfit. He bent to see the top of his head in the mirror over the washstand. His hair was thinning in an unattractive way, with kinky, sandy wisps straggling over the sunburned skin of his scalp. His neat instincts were bothered by the way his hair was going. He wouldn’t have minded being completely bald so much as he minded this. He felt that he had always looked very youthful for his age. It wouldn’t matter if he did get bald young. But he needed a hat to make himself look really snappy, and cover up that ragged hairline.

  “Well, Mrs. Custer,” he said. “You have to admit I make a good-looking jailbird. I’ll be the best-dressed con in the hoosegow.”

  He had a way, it seemed to her, of always refusing to admit that things were as bad as they were. He could conceivably be on his way to signing away every bit of cash they would get from the wheat before it was even harvested. How could he joke?

  She had a way, it seemed to him, of deflating every effort he made toward rendering an impossible situation possible. All she needed to do was to look up at him the way she looked now.

  He knew he couldn’t kiss her goodby. She would turn away. So he turned himself away first.

  On the way to Jamestown he decided to buy a hat. He’d get a good one, too, by God—one that went properly with his suit. He’d show them that just because a man wore overalls to get in his hay, he wasn’t any hayseed. In another few weeks he’d show everybody, when he harvested the Ceres. The smutty whiffs he got from the wheat didn’t mean anything. One smutted head in a square yard of healthy heads could stink up the atmosphere. He wasn’t going to worry about it. The well was a more immediate problem.

  He paid two and a half for the hat—more than half of a week’s cream checks. To hell with it. Maybe the hat would scare them into giving him his legal rights, whatever they were. He walked up the steps to the second floor of the courthouse and presented himself at the sheriff’s door at exactly ten o’clock.

  A sweating, red-faced woman sat before a typewriter at a desk on the other side of the counter from George. Her breasts appeared to be rolled, like thick wads of heavy cotton batting, and they were haphazardly and precariously straining the thin silk blouse.

  George took off his hat.

  “What can I do for you?” she said. She acted as though anything she did for him would be a very big favor that would put him forever in her debt. Political job, of course, George thought. She probably had something pretty good on Sheriff Richard M. Press. Otherwise he’d have a pretty girl behind that desk.

  George pushed the subpoena across the counter. She scudged back her chair and hauled herself out of it. The contrast between the amorphous weight in her pink blouse and the straight narrowness of the skirt encasing her thighs was enough to make a man wonder what she would look like—not that it would be especially desirable. She studied the subpoena—or whatever it was. George could have sworn she knew it was at least questionable, if not downright illegal.

  “I see it’s for today,” she said finally. “Couldn’t you serve it yet?” He had a pleased moment, knowing that she did not take him for a criminal, but then he was irritated at having her class him with the little weasel who had served the thing to him.

  “No, this is me,” he said. “I’m George Custer!”

  She looked at him with a different expression—the one she used for people she could browbeat with impunity. He looked back, and he thought he could see her deciding not to browbeat him.

  “Well, I don’t know what he aims to do about it,” she said. “He ain’t in any special place that I know of, so I expect he’ll show up around here sooner or later. He usually checks in around lunchtime. You might as well just set and wait for him.”

  The picture was not developing the way George had expected it to. He looked around for a hatrack, but he saw none, so he sat down on a bench and laid the new summer hat beside him. He read the subpoena once again, and wondered for the hundredth time if he could just walk out of the office and forget the whole thing. He reconstructed the picture the way it should have been. He walked in, looking so dapper and polished that the sheriff didn’t recognize him. He handed the subpoena to the sheriff in the envelope so that the sheriff had to take it out himself. The sheriff looked fat and awkward as he fumbled with the envelope. George looked down at him, composed and waiting.

  When the sheriff looked back up at him, George would be able to detect his surprise. He would be expecting a chastened farmer in sweaty overalls; instead he would be looking up at a well-dressed, self-possessed man of the world in a new hat. He would realize he didn’t dare go very far with this fellow. George would watch that realization dawning on him. Then they would have a little talk, with the sheriff blustering out of the mess he had got himself into, and George would leave, after letting the sheriff know that he had taken up the time of a very busy man.

  And when wheat was pushing three dollars a bushel again, and the rain came again, the picture enlarged with the inspiring clarity of a movie closeup. He would have his own lawyer in Jamestown then, and he would simply pick up his telephone and tell his lawyer to fix everything up—the way his enemies did. But of course they never tried to pull anything like this in the first place with a man who could afford a lawyer.

  George picked up the front page of the morning’s Jamestown Sun. It was wilted and used, the way his suit and shirt were beginning to look. In New York State the farmers of four counties were refusing to ship milk into the city at the rates set by the Milk Control Board. They stopped trucks and dumped the milk into ditches, just as the men along Highway Number 20 had done last fall in Iowa. Babies in New York City were dying of malnourishment while the roads leading into the city ran with milk, said the paper. A Pennsylvania coal striker was killed by the state militia. Those poor devils—27,000 of them out on strike while their families starved. The mine-owners who controlled the militia knew damned well their whole ill-gotten empires would collapse if those miners ever really started marching. A five-day heat wave in New York City was blamed for fifty-one deaths. Phooey! In the first place those fifty-one people probably just starved to death, and in the second place those pantywaist Easterners didn’t have the vaguest idea of what a heat wave was.

  Noon came and went. The secretary took a sack lunch from her desk drawer. “He probably won’t be back now till after he’s ate,” she said. “You might as well go on out and get a bite yourself. I’ll tell him not to leave till you get back.”

  “I’ll wait,” George said.

  “Suit yourself.” She shrugged her flabby shoulders and the movement wobbled down the front of her blouse. George went back to the paper.

  At a quarter of two the s
heriff walked briskly through the door. He nodded toward George and said to the secretary, “Any mail worth looking at?”

  “Well, just these. But I think they can wait. This man here —”

  “I got some phone calls to make,” the sheriff said. “I’ll get around to him in a while.” He disappeared behind the frosted glass in the door of his office.

  George sat for another half hour. A man came through the door behind him, chirped, “Hiya, Toots,” to the secretary, and walked into the sheriff’s office without knocking. Presently Toots’s desk buzzed and she said to George, “You can go on in now.”

  Both men sat waiting for him. “Close the door,” the sheriff said, before George had quite managed to get through it. “You wasn’t born in a barn, was you?”

  George slammed it hard. The sheriff turned to the man sitting with him behind the desk. “I reckon maybe he was, at that.”

  “You are Custer, aren’t you?” he said. “You ain’t dressed quite the way I remember you, but I never forget a face.” George felt as though he was in overalls again. “This here’s the county prosecuting attorney,” he went on, pointing with an elbow at the man beside him.

  “Mr. Custer,” the lawyer said.

  “A pleasure,” George said savagely.

  “Now then, Mr. Custer,” the sheriff began. “We’re busy men—the county attorney here and me —”

  “I’m a busy man myself!”

  “Well, fine, then, we’ll start right off understanding each other, won’t we?”

  “You bet!” George said.

  “The attorney here, and me, have the lawful duty to collect money that rightfully belongs to holders of delinquent mortgages. If a sale of chattel property is the only way to do it, then it’s our lawful obligation to hold a sale. When something goes wrong at a sale, we got to have an investigation, see? We got to have records to show just how things went. And we got to have witnesses to them records, so’s nobody can come around later and say to us, ‘No sir, I just don’t believe that’s the way that happened at all. You must’ve been in on that swindle yourself, Sheriff Press.’ Just suppose, now, that Mr. Burr has sent in his report on the sale—just suppose that a man from the head office out in Hartford was to come out here and put it to me—suppose he was to say to me, ‘You’re the man this county elected to enforce the law. What have you done about it?’ So you see, we try and get these records all fixed up while everything is still fresh in everybody’s mind. Do you follow me?”

  “Perfectly!” George shouted.

  “Now, then, Mr. Custer, I’m just trying to do my job here. Just ask yourself where would you be without the protection of the law.”

  “A hell of a lot better off than I am!”

  “Now then, Mr. Custer—the county attorney and I have simply got a factual statement of the way the Wilkes auction went on, and we simply have to have that statement attested to by a man that was there. The county attorney here can notarize your signature, of course.”

  George was sure, now, that he was being slickered. “What’s the matter with those stool pigeons you had there?” he asked. “Can’t they write? They need a farmer to come all the way down here to Jimtown and show them how to make an X on a dotted line?”

  “Oh, my deputies will sign it, too, don’t you worry. But we think, Mr. Custer, that there’d be less chance of argument from your side of the fence if one of you signed it too. After all, you might want to argue some day that our version of the goings-on was attested to only by stool pigeons, mightn’t you?”

  “What the hell are you getting at, anyhow! You know I’m not going to argue with you about Wilkes’s sale, and neither is anybody else. It’s all over and done with! Let’s cut out this pussyfooting around. You know damn well that moneybags back in Hartford isn’t going to know me from Adam, and I know my signature on a piece of paper isn’t going to get him off your tail if he takes a notion to send you back out to Wilkes to collect his money for him. Now let’s quit beating around the bush.”

  “All right, Mr. Custer! You don’t suppose I’m going to go out and conduct another foreclosure sale with rabble-rousers and crazy men there, do you? I don’t have to explain to you that it wouldn’t be smart for a man with his name signed on a paper like this to show up at any more sales in this county, do I? Now I advise you to sign your name here and stop wasting everybody’s time. Go ahead and read it.”

  George snatched the paper from the desk. He was prepared to see Wilkes’s name there, and somehow the sheriff had found out who he was, so he expected his own name. But how had Press found out that they met at Will’s house the night before the auction? Good God—they had even found out who owned the mare! And who had told him that Wallace Esskew had been the one to haul out a gun at exactly the right moment? Oscar Johnson’s name was there—every man who had opened his mouth in the sham bidding was named. Who was the stool pigeon whose name wasn’t on the paper? But the shocker was the last brief paragraph. It was written as though he himself had given all the information that preceded it.

  It was so far-fetched that he began to laugh.

  He stood up. “I advise you,” he said, “to get the Judas that gave you this to sign it. Whoever he is, he’d steal the pennies off a dead man’s eyes, so you shouldn’t have no trouble.”

  “Oh, there is one trouble, Mr. Custer. He’s not nearly such a dependable witness as you. If a man like you signs his name, it means something, doesn’t it, Mr. Custer?”

  “You bet it does! There’s not a man that knows my name that doesn’t know it stands for an honest man and a gentleman!”

  “Well, now, that’s just why that name is worth a lot to me — and to you too, I imagine. Maybe it’s even worth enough to you so if it sets here in my file when I go out to the next foreclosure sale, you just won’t be able to find the time to be on hand. What do you think?”

  George did not say what he thought. He was so far gone in rage that he was becoming two men—one observing the other—the way he often did in dreams—one wondering what the other might do.

  “Well,” the sheriff went on. “I was hoping we wouldn’t have to show you this other paper here. I was hoping we could just tear it up.” He twisted his ugly square head toward the attorney. One man in the dream twisted it the rest of the way around—all the way off.

  The attorney hauled another sheet of legal-size paper from his coat pocket.

  “Compliments of the county attorney’s office,” he said, smiling.

  One man in the dream read the paper and saw that it was a warrant for his arrest on a charge of inciting to riot, and saw also that it looked very legal, except that nobody had incited a riot. The dream ended with a noise made by both men and then by George himself. “There wasn’t any God-damn riot!”

  “Oh?” The county attorney smiled again. “That could be kind of expensive to prove, couldn’t it? And if you did win your case, you’d still have to sit in jail for a few weeks before you got to court—unless, of course, you could lay your hands on a considerable amount of cash bail. Otherwise you might sit right here when you ought to be out threshing, mightn’t you?”

  “You haven’t got a jail in this town that could hold me!”

  “Oh, come, Mr. Custer. Take another look at this statement. It’s really a perfectly accurate statement, is it not? We wouldn’t ask you to perjure yourself, now would we? There’s no reason for this paper ever to bother you again, if you’ll only remember to conduct yourself in a sensible manner henceforth. Don’t you agree? Come now. We’re all busy men.”

  There was only one way to spring the trap—for a little guy without any money. So what if he could win a case? He couldn’t spare even this day away from the farm. Weasels were the cleverest creatures at getting out of traps, and here was the weaseling all written out in front of him, waiting for the signature of the weasel. But somebody before him had been the big weasel. That was the first traitor—the one to blame. But the first traitor was nameless. He was protected by the sheriff. G
eorge realized that now he himself would have to have the same protection from the same repugnant source.

  “If you get my name on that statement,” George said, “What do I get?”

  “It doesn’t seem to me, Mr. Custer, that you are in a position to ask for anything at all,” the attorney said. George could see him hesitate. They obviously hadn’t expected him to be quite so difficult. He was losing, of course, but not so easily as they had thought he would. “How would you like this for a little keepsake?” the lawyer asked, holding the riot arrest warrant at George and looking at the sheriff.

  George didn’t understand for a moment, and then he saw that, in his own hands, the arrest warrant had considerable power. For one thing, it was certainly not a document he would have legitimate reason to possess. He could bother them with it if they bothered him with his signature on the statement. They still had the upper hand, for they could ruin him with his neighbors if they wanted to, but if he didn’t bother them any more, they would not want to waste time bothering him either. This was the law in practical operation. Learn something every day.

  George flipped the warrant out of the attorney’s hand and stuffed it into his inside coat pocket. He took the pen the sheriff was holding for him and scratched his name across the paper beside the X.

  “Very good, Mr. Custer.” the prosecutor said.

  It wasn’t till he was going to turn on to the highway and he looked up into the rear view mirror that he realized he had left the new summer hat on the bench in the sheriff’s office.

  All the way home he could think only far enough to feel his fists beating the body of the stool pigeon—the anonymous first traitor, the betrayer from the ranks of little men who had stood together, for once, against the conspiracies of rich men and government.