The Bones of Plenty Read online

After breakfast George took a hoe and went out to the potato patch. As he walked along the edge of the wheat, he couldn’t help noticing that the fishy odor of smut was getting stronger. “Must be the way the wind’s blowing,” he thought.

  Lucy came too, carrying her gallon Karo pail with a cup of kerosene sloshing in its bottom. She knelt at the end of the row he was hoeing and began plucking the striped potato bugs from the leaves and dropping them into her kerosene. Some of the leaves were eaten away to the delicate lace of their skeletons; they were quite pretty, those leaf skeletons; but if there were too many of them the plants no longer breathed, and then the potatoes would be no bigger than pullets’ eggs, and sacks and sacks of them together would never feed the family through the winter.

  She had to watch, too, for the deposits of eggs glued to the undersides of the leaves, though there were not so many now as there had been earlier in the summer. The eggs were bright yellow, like the yolk of a hen’s egg, and rather soft. Any leaves with eggs on them had to be picked off and dropped into the kerosene along with the black-and-yellow bugs. Most horrid of all were the fat squishy larvae which had not yet grown their hard beetle shells. They were made of nothing but mashy insides that popped all over her fingers.

  Potatoes and potato bugs. They were about equally monotonous. After attending to ten plants she had the bottom of her pail almost covered with the bodies of bugs in both stages, a mixture of segmented larvae and striped beetles, like buttons in a drawer. They all died the moment they sank beneath the kerosene. She could scarcely bear the feel of their legs struggling against the ball of her thumb and because of that awful feeling she was not sorry that they had to die, but it did make her a little sick to have to drop them into her noxious pail. Why hadn’t they gone ahead and died when her father sprayed them with the Black Leaf 40?

  The heat made the fumes rise around her face till she seemed herself to be drowning along with the bugs, and she wondered, as she often did, how it felt to be a bug. Once she had sat on the porch for a long hot time after Sunday school and tried to imagine how God had started. God had made everything else, but how had He been made? She had decided, after thinking of all the smallest things in the world, that God must have been a bug in the empty air—a very tiny bug that made Himself grow and grow and grow until He was big enough to fill part of the sky and to start making the rest of the world. Everything started by being small and growing bigger, and that must have been the way God started, too. A tiny bug was the smallest thing there was. That had to be what He used to begin Himself with.

  She had an awful feeling, when she had to kill bugs, that God had a special attachment to them. She could feel Him hovering over her shoulders, telling her through the blasting rays of the sun that she was doing an unforgivable thing.

  “How many you got there?” he called.

  She felt the deadly ice pierce through her and then she was embarrassed to have been overtaken and so violently surprised in her own silly feelings. She leaped obediently to her feet and made a mark in the dust with her toe, as though she could order the potato-bug commerce to stop on either side of it, and ran toward him with her pail.

  George had merely meant to be companionable when he called to her. He had wanted to let her know that he knew how it was to work at a job that there was no possibility of finishing—how he understood her frustration at knowing that no matter how many bugs she found, she still would have to be aware that all the potato bugs in the patch seemed to be rushing to repossess the row behind her. He felt the same way about the weeds he was hoeing.

  He had meant for her to call back something that might be friendly, or even jocular, so long as it was respectful—anything to complement the effort he had made to create in the potato patch the kind of cordial family cooperation that could refresh and inspire all those who worked together for survival. Now he felt trapped by the hopelessness of trying to be friends with her, and when she held up the pail to him, with its smell and the dead dozens of beetles circling slowly in its bottom, he tightened his lips and looked away from her raised eyes.

  “Quite a fair number, I see,” he said. “Now just make sure you don’t miss any. One old grandma can lay a lot of eggs.”

  Lucy nodded her head and lowered her pail. Back on her knees at the mark she had made, she took up where she had left off, pushing each plant away from her with one forearm and letting the leaves shuffle back gradually while she watched for the yolky eggs and the black-and-yellow stripes.

  Her father liked to tell her when she worked at this job that President Hoover had got paid a penny a hundred for picking potato bugs when he was a little boy. Hoover liked to talk about that in his speeches about people helping themselves. “I guess that’s why he kept saying prosperity was just around the corner. I guess he had things too easy when he was a kid. He never found out how hard it really is to earn a penny!” Her father would say that and look down at her on the ground in the potato row and laugh, and she would not be able to see exactly why.

  Monday, August 14

  The news came from Austria that while Soviet wheat was being dumped on the world market for less than it cost to produce, millions of Russians had died of starvation during the summer. The Kremlin officially denied that anyone had starved to death in Russia, and then doubled the price of a loaf of bread.

  George Custer decided that the day had come to cut his wheat, and early in the morning he went out and oiled a few spots on the reaper, installed a new roll of binder twine, hitched up the horses, and trundled the big old machine out to the near corner of the field he had planted first. He lowered the blade and let it bite its first swath of the Ceres. Despite his repairs, the ancient machine couldn’t do the kind of job it should have. It flailed about like a rampaging Dutch windmill, wasting more wheat than he cared to think about. All day long the serrated blade chopped through the dry stems and the revolving wooden wings swept up the wheat and the spool of twine rotated as the bundles dropped behind him. It was an outmoded way to do things. He should have had a tractor and a combine, but he didn’t. A combine handled the wheat once. With a reaper a man handled it four times: first he cut it, then he shocked the bundles, then he pitched the bundles into a hayrack to carry it to a threshing machine, then he pitched it out of the hayrack into the machine.

  The smut was bad. He was out in the middle of the field now, and he rarely got a breath of air that did not smell of it. Stinking smut alone, of all the enemies of wheat, he had read in the Sun last night, was causing a loss of as much as eighteen million bushels per year in the United States. The stench filling his nose and mouth assured him that he would be contributing at least his share to this year’s national smut losses.

  Besides the initial loss in the field, he might be docked as much as ten cents a bushel by the millers who had to clean it out of the wheat. He had had the feeling all along that Adolph lied to him about the seed. Now he was sure of it, but how could he prove that Adolph deliberately swindled him?

  Still, he couldn’t help being excited when he began the shocking. Even if some of the heads were smutted, the stems and leaves, considering the drought, were remarkably strong and healthy. Next year, with properly treated seed, then everybody would see how right he was.

  He felt sorry for people who punched a time clock all year round and never knew when one season ended and another began. And it was his pleasure in seasons that kept him from being altogether sorry that he didn’t own a combine. If he had a combine he’d never see his fields in shocks. Ever since he’d been big enough to tag the men around, he’d liked wandering over the new golden stubble, through the rich marshaling of the mown treasure, between the formal ranks casting their shadows across the hundreds of acres.

  It always made him proud to see shocks or bundles of wheat on the great seals and the coins of states and nations, or even to see the two heads of wheat curved around the back of a penny beneath the E PLURIBUS UNUM. Somebody a long time ago had figured out that unity and abundance went together.
Now it seemed that abundance was on the verge of shattering unity. Perhaps some people whose pennies were all too abundant would be forced to think a little more, before long, about the men who grew the wheat that framed the motto.

  The stories about the threshers preceded them, traveling from wife to wife, from county to county, from South to North, from Texas to Manitoba. The migrant threshing crews had numbered a quarter million men when Rachel was a young girl helping her mother cook for the threshers; but now there were only a few thousand left, because combines had replaced them. Nevertheless, the straggling remnant kept alive all the traditions of the former great army. Every year somebody told Rachel the same kind of stories she remembered hearing some neighbor woman recount to her mother in the kitchen while they cooked in frantic preparation for the epic digestions that were coming to feed at their table for four or five eternal days.

  Long before the threshermen got to the Custer place, Rachel had heard about the oversized Swede who ate a dozen eggs for breakfast and then demanded fried potatoes and sometimes pie besides. For the midmorning lunch he ate five sandwiches of thick-sliced homemade bread and more pie. For dinner he ate a quart of mashed potatoes, half a pound of ham, a pint of cole slaw, five or six slices of bread, and a quarter of a pie. For the midafternoon lunch he ate only three sandwiches because he did not want to spoil his appetite for supper, at which time he ate about what he had at dinner, except that he wanted cake instead of pie. Even allowing for the way Elsie Egger exaggerated things she had heard, Rachel wondered how she was ever going to manage if the whole crew ate that way. It sounded like the worst crew she had ever heard of.

  There was one man who was no more than a boy, really, who could drink even the Swede under the table on a Saturday night and then go on a binge that would have finished off most of his elders. He had never been known to turn down the vilest brew, and it was only a question of time till he would get hold of something that would kill him on the spot—not that it would matter at all to him, the way he carried on. Rachel hoped he wouldn’t manage to find any of it while he was around their place. It was hard to know what she should really expect because she was getting the crew before anybody else in the community. Elsie, as always, had got her stories from her sister-in-law down at Gackle.

  Rachel baked two batches of bread a day for the two days before they came. She hoped she wouldn’t have to feed them store bread because they always complained that there was nothing to it. She also baked a half dozen pie shells to be filled with lemon or chocolate custard just before a meal.

  On the night before the threshers were due, George helped her put all the leaves in the round table, making its oval length fill the room. The oilcloth was not big enough to cover it, so she put on the good damask cloth she used for Sunday dinners, hoping she would somehow be able to get all the stains out of it again.

  The next morning they were up at four. Rachel had to begin the day’s cooking, and George wanted to be sure the chores were out of the way and the horses hitched and the hayrack loaded with the first bunch of sheaves by the time the separator arrived. The family sat about the table, strangely far from each other. George was nervous. Crews didn’t always show up when they said they would. The wheat had been standing in shocks long enough. Every day, even though the sky remained cloudless, he feared that rain or hail or a high wind might come and knock the ripe heads out of the wheat.

  Lucy, feeling remote enough from watching eyes, used her thumb against the edge of her oatmeal bowl to push the last bite of porridge into her spoon. Her father caught her, of course. “Oh, George!” her mother said. “She’ll never eat right if you keep at her like that!”

  “I just don’t want her to be embarrassed! I’m trying to teach her some manners for her own good,” said her father. He pushed back his chair and went down to harness up the teams.

  Lucy ran up the road to wait for the threshers. There were not nearly so many grasshoppers now that the wheat was cut. If one did jump at her, he had to jump from the stubble, not the top of the wheat, and that made him land against her legs instead of her neck or her face.

  The rig would be coming from the south, and she was watching in that direction when the Sinclairs’ car came up behind her from town. Giles was driving it and Douglas was with him. Giles was coming to help with the threshing, but what was Douglas doing here?

  He was always teasing her at school. Once when she was riding on the merry-go-round, the garter on her stocking broke and the end of it hung down below her dress. Douglas saw it and started laughing and pointing and yelling, “I see Germany, I see France! I see Lucy’s underpants!” Everybody on the merry-go-round had laughed then, and it was almost the worst thing that had ever happened to her in two long years of school. She had to wait forever until the merry-go-round stopped and she could get off. And just before school ended last spring Douglas had chased her and gotten two pencils away from her and he had kept one of them.

  “Hello there,” Giles said. “Where’s the thrashers?”

  “I don’t know,” Lucy said, not looking at Douglas at all.

  “Well, I’ll go on down and start loading bundles, I guess.” Giles started to drive away but Douglas yelled to be let out.

  “Let’s play hide and seek behind the shocks.” He spoke in the bossy way boys always did to girls. He wasn’t asking if she wanted to play; he was telling her to play.

  “No,” Lucy said. “I want to watch for the thrashing machine to come.” Even if there had been nothing else to do, she would not have played with Douglas, but now she was especially annoyed at having him around. She had the same feelings about the threshing as she had about watching a train. She wanted to see it from the very beginning to the very end. She wanted to catch the first sight of the separator trundling slowly along the road to the waiting shocks in her father’s fields, to be near it while it threshed out all the wheat, and then watch it out of sight again as it moved away toward her grandfather’s farm.

  “Besides,” she told Douglas, “you never gave back my pencil.”

  “What pencil?”

  She looked away from him. Wasn’t it bad enough to be pestered by him at school? Did he have to come all the way out here to keep it up?

  Then she saw the threshing machine. It was a spot she had had her eye on for quite a while but she hadn’t wanted to say anything till she was sure. It had disappeared behind a hill and reappeared, much larger, and now there was no mistaking it—after all, it was bigger than the house she lived in. The first sounds of it began to reach them and soon she could distinguish the noise of the tractor pulling it from the sounds of its own ponderous joints.

  George came up to the road to watch it travel the last half mile. He was as excited as Lucy. He’d know, now, in a few more hours, what a difference planting the Ceres had made. It was hard to judge a yield just by walking through the wheat and plucking a head of it here and there. He waved his hat, when the rig got close, and the man driving the tractor waved a speck of white.

  As the noise grew louder still, it was like the finale of a resolute, yet triumphant war song. The little parade of the tractor, separator, and truck was more throat-tightening to a man like George than any city street parade of bugles, drums, or bagpipes could ever be. He was grinning and swallowing as he watched it and listened to it. The cry of the final hours of fierce and iron-hearted toil was in the chaotic music coming toward them, but there was a cry of victory, too—an incredible, prayed-for, cursed-for, watched-for victory. Just two more days without rain or hail or wind or fatal accidents or locust migrations and the war song would be unequivocally a victory song when the parade moved on again.

  The tractor driver leaned down to howl over the engine, “Where do you want her?”

  With one hand George pointed toward the field where he and Giles had begun to work. With the other he made a megaphone to carry his voice through the six feet of noise between his mouth and the man’s ear. “Set ‘er up right in the middle over there,” he shouted. />
  The man swung as wide as the road would let him and managed to bring the threshing machine straight in behind the tractor. There was no room to spare on either side of the locomotive-like wheels as they rolled across the approach that spanned the deep ditch. He did a nice job, George was glad to see, and he seemed to take such a touchy piece of maneuvering in his stride.

  George and Douglas and Lucy walked beside the rig till it stopped. The tractor driver shut off the engine and climbed down. He was the boss of the outfit and he hurried around giving orders to get the big machine ready to go. He walked past the hayrack and got a whiff of the wheat. “That sure must be damn smutty wheat!” he said. “Been a lot of smutty wheat this year, but I never smelt it any worse than I do right now. One time I got too many of them smut balls in a old separator and blew it all to hell. Damn near killed a thrasher, too.”

  “You got insurance on this rig?” George asked.

  “Ya, but none on the men. How you going to insure a crew when they change every week on you? Looks like I’m going to have to find another man this morning if my drinkin’ boy don’t show up. He got hold of some stuff last night and we couldn’t even find him this morning. Somebody said he went back down to Gackle.”

  “Has the Marquis been smutty?” George wanted to know.

  “Ya, pretty bad. They figure there’s some new kind of smut this year. Everything’s smutty. You can’t win. Even if you do get the stuff to grow, you can’t sell it, can you?”

  “Oh, the price is up a lot over last year,” George said. He made up his mind not to wonder how much he’d get docked for the smut. In a few minutes now the crop that had required so much work and so much waiting would begin pouring out of the machine. Finally he had a little control. The crows he couldn’t control had left some seed in the ground for him; the freak late frost he couldn’t control had not come; the grasshoppers had not cleaned out the fields, though they tried; the black clouds had not brought tornadoes or hail.