The Bones of Plenty Read online

  As he drove through Eureka, he glimpsed Otto’s Percherons trotting down the road to the elevator.

  The witness had a reputation for being undependable, the sheriff said. The witness would also be a talkative man, wouldn’t he? And a man over whom the sheriff had power—a man who would be eager to make a deal with the sheriff—a man who would gladly exchange a few of his neighbors’ names for the promise that his precious pair of Percherons would not be put on the auction block again.

  If anybody had tried to tell him early this morning that he, George Armstrong Custer, would put his own priceless signature to the statement of a deadbeat cock-sucker, and that he would do this in order to survive for one more year on a rented half-section of dried-up prairie—if anybody had tried to tell him that G. A. Custer would sell his honor and his guts for a chance to harvest a drought-stunted, grasshopper-infested hundred and sixty acres of wheat—well, he probably would have killed the man that had tried to tell him that.

  Will had mowed his last field of hay and raked it and turned it once when the clouds appeared one day in the clear northwestern sky. The clouds probably did not mean rain, for rarely had summer clouds brought rain in the last nine summers. But while the wheat could still profit from rain, and rain on the garden could save rows of dying plants, rain on nearly cured hay would only damage it, cause extra labor in turning it, and run him short of time for other things he had to get done before the threshing began. He already had all the outside haystacks he had planned on, and this premium hay was slated for the mow.

  He walked through the field, studying the sky, feeling the formidable drag of the pain. He didn’t know but what he might be too sick to work one of these days. If he lost time with the hay and then had to take a couple of days off in bed, he’d be impossibly far behind. He stuck his fork into a long pile of sweet alfalfa and lifted. The hay was on the green side, no doubt of it. If he put this hay into the mow and turned it into musty compost, he would never forgive himself. But his abdomen felt as though he had used the pitchfork on himself instead of the hay.

  Rain, sickness, mold, time—these things all had their laws, some of which he understood and some which he did not. Sometimes the laws worked together usefully, from a man’s point of view, and sometimes they did not. Sometimes rain and mold and time made compost just as he wanted them to. Sometimes, if a man had been unlucky or foolish, they made spoiled hay. Decay, sickness, death—sometimes, from a man’s point of view, they were good—sometimes bad. A man’s life was totally dependent upon the same microscopic events that would eventually destroy his life and return him to dust. Sometimes it appeared that he had more choice, or at least more leeway, in his manipulations of the laws than he had at other times. Sometimes he felt forced to confront the laws with his own needs and risk himself to his own ignorant impertinence.

  The hay was green, but he would put it away now. He went to town to get help before the rain came. He bought some chewing tobacco and hired Herman Schlaht’s boy Buddy on the spot. Then they got Carl Stensland from the pool hall and rushed back to the hay field.

  They set to at a frantic pace. The clouds rolled and blackened, and heat lightning flashed around them in tiers of silent white flames that ignited half the sky. In a few hours the three men had swung the last load on the hay lift in through the high gaping doors of the mow, and stuffed it to the roof with the rich-smelling hay. Despite the drought, the alfalfa had not done too badly. Will was well satisfied to have the top half of his big barn filled with such fine winter pasture, and he was glad he had decided to put it away before rain could wash it out and a second curing would bake more of the nourishment out of it.

  The clouds remained all day, but they did not move any nearer and they began to turn lighter again. Perhaps a breeze would spring up in the night and blow the clouds over them and they would wake to the sound of rain. Then he would lie in the darkness rejoicing that rain had come and exulting because for once he had managed to win against the weather.

  The next morning the clouds were gone but the sky was less pure than usual. The air was sultry, but there was no rain in it; if they got any precipitation at all, it would be a twenty-minute hailstorm that would beat the wheat down flat and thresh out all the grain and bury it in a slushy white wasteland. In the afternoon the sky began to clear, with the sun growing ever brighter and hotter. The vanished clouds had not been, after all, the overtures of a repentant universe about to send forth the fountains it had so long stopped. Still, there was reason to be grateful; for the murderous balls of ice had been up there and they, like the rain, had gone away again.

  After that there were no more clouds. Each day seemed unnatural, endless. When he went out to milk in the evening at six o’clock, with the sun still hours away from setting, the air seemed as hot as it had at noon or at two or four.

  Finally one night as he leaned in the doorway of the smothering barn, he confessed to himself that he would have to take it easy the next day unless either the heat or the pain let up a little. The combination was doing him in.

  He was so tired that his eyes kept losing their focus on his nine milch cows filing through the door. They kept fading into insubstantial blotches. He was shaken by his pity for the weary blotches. All day long the sun crushed them, withered them. How could they hold back enough water to make their milk? Maybe he ought to skip the milking tonight. Maybe they wouldn’t care whether they were milked or not. Maybe this was the day he should have spent resting. Maybe this was the night he wouldn’t make it through the chores.

  He directed himself into the barn, into the first stall. He slid the wooden stanchion against the neck of the first cow. The block of wood that braced the bar felt abnormally big in his hand. Fingers swollen with the heat, he thought. He went in and out of eight more stalls, pushing the stanchions, letting the wood blocks fall. The blocks made a hollow sound as though they were quite far away—much farther away than the length of his arm. The heat, he thought, the heat deadened the air between his ear and the sound.

  He went to Charlotte—black, mean, grouchy Charlotte—and clipped her tail to the wire above the stall. Then he snapped the kickers around her smeared legs. She always dirtied herself worse than any other cow. He looked around for the rag to clean her with, but it seemed to be missing. Rose would bring another.

  He began milking the cow by the pasture door of the barn. Rose would come soon and begin at the other end of the line. The first jets of milk broke sharply against the sides of the pail between his knees and made a hissing metallic echo that was too close to his ear. Peculiar, how sounds were all coming from the wrong distances. He settled in to the rhythm of the job, leaning forward on his one-legged stool and resting his forehead against the cow’s soft, heated belly. The two thin lines of milk steadily punctured the rising white froth. The sound of the first stream was always pitched higher than the second. Spit-spat, spit-spat, spit-spat, spit-spat, spit—he was sprawling in the straw, the white froth was wetting his legs, the pail was banging the cow’s shanks, the cow was trampling him, she was bending his shin the wrong way, she was breaking it, the roof was flying apart and the hurricane was booming in his ears.

  He heard Rose’s screams contending with the cows and the flames, and then the screams shaped themselves into his name.

  “I’m all right!” he shouted. “Go back! Go back! Shut your doors! The draft! Stay out! Go back!” Even while he was shouting, gulping smoke, tearing his throat, he could not hear any of his own words. He was as demented as the screeching cows. He lay in the straw commanding his sanity to come back. No matter what else he did in his life, he could do this. He could be sane now.

  The heat pressed down out of the mow, but no flames broke through. There was enough fuel up there so the fire would continue to follow its natural upward direction for a little while. There was time, he thought. The smoke was getting bad, but there would be time.

  He wormed his way through the straw beside the cow while she did her terrible dance—bra
cing her feet and hauling back till her jawbones locked against the wooden bars, crying out, plunging forward to crash her shoulders into the stanchion as though she pursued the screaming head there on the other side of the bars.

  He pulled himself up by the side of the manger, balanced on his good leg, and lifted the wood block. She was gone before he could get back down on his knees to crawl to the next stall. Thank God it was cows, not horses in here. A cow could get herself out of a fire, but a horse couldn’t. Thank God it was cows.

  He got another bad kick in the next stall and he could not really see the cow escape. His streaming eyes had stopped seeing anything but smoke. He felt his way in and out of two more stalls and knew that four of the nine were liberated. He understood that he ought not to try coping with Charlotte, but before he could get around the years of morning and evening habit, he was hanging on the side of the stall and reaching up for the clip that held her tail. It burnt his fingers, but he squeezed until the tail stripped itself away.

  Still there were the kickers to undo. He worked at the clamp on the chain between her knees, telling himself how he would shove with his good foot and fall away from the blows of the unfettered legs. But when he shoved, he did not seem to be altogether sure of which direction to fall in. He seemed, in fact, to fall directly into a hoof and knock out his wind on it. When he finally could breathe again, he discovered that there was no air to breathe anyway; it was amazing that a man could keep on moving after he had stopped breathing air, but he found that he had got himself dragged up to the wood block on her stanchion and black, mean, grouchy Charlotte was free.

  He started on his hands and knees to find the next cow, keeping one hand cupped over the edge of the refuse ditch in order to know where he was going. The smoking boards of the haymow floor still intervened between him and the holocaust, but down through the knotholes and crevices rained the live sparks—the meteors spewing from a galactic ambush that had been waiting such a long time for him—billions of years it had waited for this blunder of the stellar system containing him. Now the earth fell into the fire, fell at ten thousand miles a minute into the fire, and the meteors rained into the stalls of his barn—the drops of incandescent rain came now to drown his dry planet with light, to transmute it to an evaporating star and to scatter it in darkened cinders.

  He thought of Rose, but he couldn’t hold on to the thought long enough to wonder what might have become of her—the thought was only her name, as her screams had been his name. And then he heard only the ancient recapitulation of anguish. In a flight as blazing and lucid as the flights of the meteors raining around him, he understood and entered into the fellowship of despair.…

  My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me!

  She found him lying across the ditch near the next cow he had been going to save. Her scorched eyes barely saw, through the yellowish liquid smoke of the burning grass, the way his body joggled over the strawed floor after her as she backed down the aisle toward the door.

  Some burning hay dropped down through a feeder hole over a manger and she imagined she heard above all the other sounds the one last sound that came from the head between those stanchion bars.

  She dragged his body over the graveled yard toward the house till his weight collapsed her on the ground beside him. She lifted his head and laid it in her lap.

  “Will!” she cried. But the only sounds were the wind of the fire, the snapping of beams, the rasping supplications from the smoke-seared throats of the roasting cows. “Will!”

  A cough as frightful as the sounds from the barn vibrated his throat. She began to sob. “Oh thank God! Oh thank God!”

  She went on repeating it as she plucked at him—unbuttoning his shirt and pulling the underwear back from his chest, as though by exposing the outside of him to the air, she could clear away the smoke from the inside of him. He smelled like a firebrand. He smelled as if he were a living sacrifice tumbled down from a funeral pyre. His clothes were full of brown-ringed holes and there was a red spot on his skin beneath every hole.

  A sensation of movement made her lift her eyes from the face on her lap in time to see the great flower of the windmill plummeting into the flames. The few surviving beams of the haymow gave way and the floor of the fire dropped into the main part of the barn, burning away the bars from the throats that screamed no more. Oh, God, God, God, what if he was in there now?

  “Oh, thank God!” She began saying it over and over again.

  She never heard the Custer car come up the hill behind her, and when she looked up to see them running toward her, she began to cry again. Only a few tears fell—she was too dried out to have any tears left—but the sobs shook her body and the unconscious head on her lap undulated with her motion in a dreadful acquiescence, as though it would never again move of its own accord.

  Rachel knelt beside her mother and took her father’s head into her own lap. “He’s alive,” she said. “He’s alive. He’s alive.”

  Rose clutched at her daughter’s arm, yielding as she had not yielded before in all her life, and fainted, drooping forward while a little humming sigh came out of her white lips. George rubbed her wrists. Then he ran into the house for a cup of water and bathed her face with it.

  Miraculously, as though her soul had deserted her unconscious body and gone clear to Hell for him this time, refusing to come back until he came too, dragging him back out of the smoke once more, Rose opened her eyes just as Will opened his. He coughed and began to groan softly from his fiery throat. Rose heard him and raised herself on one elbow. “Oh, thank God!” she cried again. The sound of her voice made him aware of the sounds he was making himself. He realized he was groaning and he stopped at once.

  “The stock,” he whispered. “Is all the stock out?”

  A stampeding litter of shoats came pouring around the side of the granary. Their mother lumbered after them. Her torn snout dripped blood and her face was blood-smeared all around her maniacal little eyes. She had battered through the planks of her pen to get her babies out of the fire.

  Rose counted the baby pigs. “They’re all there, Will,” she said. “They got out—every one.”

  Will settled more heavily into Rachel’s arms. He closed his eyes.

  Neighbors began to arrive and Adolph Beahr came with his big truck and some volunteers. The nearest hospital was in Jamestown, and they decided to go and meet the ambulance. They laid Will in the back seat of Clarence Egger’s new Chrysler and Rachel sat in the front, helping her mother sit up. As Will felt the car slant down his drive, he thought, It’s all downhill now—just one direction now.…

  The Eureka volunteer firemen finally ceased their touring inspections and gathered in a watchful, awed knot at the truck. Buddy Schlaht was the most awed of all, for he felt that he bore some responsibility for what had happened.

  “I wondered, when I seen how green that hay was, if the old man really knew what he was doing,” he said for the third time.

  “I never seen such a sight in my life,” said Ed Greeder. “I was out yonder in my pasture there and all of a sudden I seen that whole roof just blow up. The whole roof afire—all over, all at once. I bet you that thing burnt to the ground in twenty minutes flat. And that was a big barn, too.”

  Adolph had reason to be an authority on that kind of fire. “Well, this ain’t the first time I’ve gone out to throw water on what’s left of one of these things—not by a long shot. Usually happens around this time of day, after the sun has beat down on the roof all day long. They always go the same way, too—all at once. Think how hot that hay has to get to just blow up like that. It stands to reason they’re going to go mighty quick.

  “I just got a little booklet here the other day from the government,” he said. “I always send for them things. The government says last year there was over a million dollars lost from spontaneous combustion just in grain elevators around the country. Lots of people killed, too. Remember that dust explosion back in Chicago just a couple days before Chr
istmas? Blew the whole damn elevator into little pieces—and two poor devils into littler pieces. You just can’t be too careful when it comes to this kind of stuff. You just can’t believe how hot a big mow jammed up with green hay can get. It ferments and then it’s just like green beer in a bottle. Put a little heat on it and the bottle blows to pieces. You just can’t realize that anything can get so hot till you’ve seen one or two go like this.” He waved his hand toward the spotty red lines around the spaces where the barn used to be.

  The sky darkened and the long timbers, broken and fallen into chaos, glowed like the framework of an elaborate burned-out set of fireworks. The wind shifted and the odor of the four cows came around with it. The men smoked and chewed their tobacco and did not mention the smell.

  Rachel had been trying to prepare herself for the way her father’s farm would look without its barn, but even from the road none of the other buildings looked right. They were sad, mute orphans, cowering around the spot from which the cords of each proceeded and returned—the sheep shed which sent its population to the barn every year to give up the winter fleeces, the granary which held in its bins the corn and oats that went to the horses, cattle, and pigs, the outbuildings housing the machinery that harvested the hay for the vanished mow. Even the tall yellow building that sheltered the farmer and his family looked as bereft as the others. The most stalwart farmhouse was too frail without a barn looming between it and the outstretched prairie.

  For thirty years the structure above that hideous bared space had sheltered animals from week-long blizzards. It had penned in soft-haired calves smelling of the milk they drank. It had provided a high, warm, prickly privacy for the births of generations of barn cats. It had provided eaves over the barnyard to be plastered full of the straw and mud nests of the swallows who swooped through the dusk and helpfully devoured the blood-sucking insects drawn by the animal smells. Now the distraught birds fluttered about the roof of the granary. There were no babies to feed this morning.