The Bones of Plenty Read online

  Now at last there was a job he could do—a job to put all his strength into—a job that would quickly fill the truck, while he watched, with the results of all the work and the waiting. It was an intoxicating feeling. It made him want to slap somebody on the back and sing, even with his throat full of dust and chaff.

  Despite the man-killing tempo set by the separator’s roaring appetite, the field was a festive place. Once every second the engine uttered a sharp, open-mouthed sneeze—“Ka-chung! Ka-chung! Ka-chung!” It was like the engines that ran the concessions at carnivals and fairs. Down below the people whirling around in capsules called Dipsy-Doodles, and down below the people turning in the great circles of the Ferris wheels would be the same sneezing engines and the oil-smudged men with their hands on the long throbbing levers that stopped and started the machines that made the rides go round. But this field resounding with one such engine was a thousand times better than a carnival to George.

  Lucy stayed at a little distance from the machine, watching them get ready. There were so many belts and pulleys to slip over wheels and tighten, hatches to batten and unbatten, spouts to extend and bolt together, levers to adjust, and cranks to crank that turned grinding parts deep inside the machine. There were steadying blocks to put beneath the separator’s belly and finally there was the truck to be backed up under the grain spout and the hayrack to be drawn up beside the bundle chute.

  Lucy saw her father high on top of the bundles, shoving them in by huge forkfuls. He leaned far over the chomping ravening insides of the separator. She knew that Clarence Egger had only one arm because the other one had got caught in a threshing-machine belt. And last year she heard about the thing she knew was bound to happen. She heard one thresher tell another one about a big dumb Finn who fell into a threshing machine.

  “Yes sir,” the thresherman said, “that Finn wanted that job so bad and he was so scared he’d get the boss mad at him. He just kept on pitching harder and harder until he went right on in with a big forkful. That was his last forkful. Unless the Devil give him a pitchfork when he got down to Hell. Nowadays these rigs couldn’t of handled him, but that thing was one of them big steam jobs—kept two-three men busy just stoking her with wood to keep the steam up. That separator could of thrashed ten Finns, all at once! We hollered at the boss, ‘The Finn’s in the bundle chute! Stop the engine!’ The boss yells back, ‘He’s a goner!’ He was right, too. By the time we got it stopped, that Finn wasn’t in the bundle chute any more. He just wasn’t anywhere at all—that is, his top half wasn’t anywhere at all. We hauled out his legs and laid ’em in a blanket and started up the machine again.

  “When his buddy from the Old Country come back in from the field with a load of bundles, we says, ‘There’s your pal down there,’ but he couldn’t understand the language. Somebody took him over and showed him what was wrapped up in the blanket. When he seen it was his buddy’s boots you never saw such a surprised man in your life.

  “Finally he pointed to himself up above his waist, and patted his hands up and down over his stomach, and felt of his head. All the time he kept yelling in his own language. We kept pointing at the thrashing machine, and when he finally come to believe it, he just up and run. You never seen a man run like that. Just took off right over the stubble and never did stop, as far as I know. Anyhow, we never seen him again. You know, there in Europe they don’t have any of this machinery. Those foreigners that come over here, they just don’t know what to make of it all. They’re scared to death of a rig like this here one even, and they can’t understand nothing you yell at them. It’s no wonder they get theirselves killed off all the time.”

  He was nearly finished with his sandwich, but he wanted to spread out his rest break a little longer. Lucy had to stay and wait for his coffee cup. She remembered how he kept switching his legs as he sat on the ground, bending up the knee of the one that had been straight and laying the other one out flat.

  “You know, it’s hard to know just how to bury the legs of a man. Do you just build a box long enough for half of him or do you build him a full-size coffin and just pretend all of him is in it? What do you do about a man that’s thrashed so you could never find a whole hair from his head? Where do you say he is, anyhow, on the grave-marker?” He gave a short laugh. “Besides, we never even knew the bastard’s name! Never knew even what to call his legs!

  “You’re giving me a look like you don’t believe me! Why you aren’t even dry behind the ears yet!

  “You should of been around in the days when they had them special trains full of machinery. I’ll never forget the time the J. I. Case Special come into Teed’s Grove, back in Iowa, when I was just a little kid—around nineteen-aught-eight—somewheres along in there. I’d never saw anything like it in my life. Right then I made up my mind to be a thrasherman. It was a whole train full of J. I. Case machinery—steam engines with ten-foot iron wheels. And thrashing machines. And on one car a crazy old son-of-a-gun, he played all day on a steam calliope.

  “And then, by God, they revved up one of them new agitator thrashers—they was new at that time—and a fella got up there to show off what it could do, and you know what he did? He started feeding two-by-six planks into ’er! You should of seen the sawdust fly. You still think it couldn’t of thrashed one flesh-and-blood Finn?”

  Lucy herself had been totally convinced. She remembered the conversation perfectly, and even the looks of both the men—the old one and the young one.

  She had always wondered what it would be like to fall into a threshing machine. Even from several yards away, the noise was almost more than she could stand. What would it be like inside?

  Finally she had told the story to her mother, who had instantly said it couldn’t be true. “That’s just the kind of story these thrashers love to tell,” she said. “Don’t you ever believe a word they say!”

  “But what if it was true!”

  “Well … if it really did happen … he couldn’t have suffered long, poor fellow. Don’t you think about him. Once a person is dead he can’t feel anything hurting his body, you know. It’s worse for the people who are left behind. He probably never knew what happened at all. There are really worse ways to die.”

  Lucy could not think of anything worse than suddenly having life taken away without even knowing anything about it. She couldn’t imagine everything just going on and not being there to watch it herself. She could not imagine being the legs wrapped in a blanket on the stubble while the threshing crew started up the machine again and went on with the harvest.

  And yet farmers were broken in pieces every year by their own machinery. She heard people talk about it. Somehow they slipped under the cleated iron wheels of the tractors they were driving, or the tractors moved as they tinkered with the hitch of a disc or a harrow and they fell beneath the knives or the teeth and were sliced into the dirt they had cultivated all their lives. They got caught in the tines of hayloaders; they looped an ankle in the rope of a haylift and were yanked into the air and flopped back on the ground; they fell into wells and off barn roofs and windmills.

  And there was the vanished arm of Mr. Egger. Her grandfather had been there when that happened. He had told her about it so she would be sure never to get too close to the threshing machine. It hadn’t been so terrible, even, because it had happened so fast that nobody heard the arm come loose or noticed the blood spurt. And Mr. Egger had not even yelled. He jumped back and looked at his torn, empty shirtsleeve and said, “Why, I never even felt it. I never even felt it.”

  But the more dangerous the separator was, the more exciting it was, too, and Lucy couldn’t have stopped watching her father up there even if she had wanted to. Even if it frightened her to see how fast her father worked and how he leaned. Not even the strongest man could keep the bundle chute full for more than fifteen or twenty minutes at a stretch. It wasn’t at all hard to see how a man who had never threshed before would pitch too fast and too long until he grew dizzy there on top of the bund
les and lost his balance.

  The chaff blew high in the air and formed a great light cloud, and the straw blasted out and settled into the beginnings of the wide lopsided stack, and the little stream of grain poured down to make a golden cone on the rough gray boards of the truck floor. The sides of the cone slipped and trickled and the base of it inched from one row of rusty nailheads to the next. She would pick a smutted kernel to concentrate on and watch it, never blinking from the time it came out of the spout till it was buried. Then when she looked back out at the field again, she would seem to be seeing it through a solid rain of wheat.

  When the cycle got going, they really missed the fellow who had gone back to Gackle on a bender. George told the boss he expected the crew to finish in two days, even if they were shorthanded. “Well, if he don’t show up by noon, I’ll go over town at dinnertime and get somebody else,” the boss promised. “Don’t worry. We’ll make ‘er.”

  They had better make it. If they began to see that they wouldn’t finish in two days, George knew they’d slow down to make it another whole morning. Just paying for that extra half day could decimate the profits he was counting on.

  He took a bead on the sun and went to Lucy. “You better go along in and help Mother bring out the sandwiches,” he said.

  Douglas tagged her into the house. He stood around in the way while Lucy helped to butter the bread. It was not quite ten o’clock and Rachel had been working as fast as she could work for more than five hours, but she was getting behind.

  “If Douglas helps you,” she said to Lucy, “do you think you two could take all this food out by yourselves, so I won’t have to leave the baby?”

  “I can do it by myself,” Lucy said.

  “I want to help,” Douglas argued.

  “I think it’s very nice that Douglas wants to help,” Rachel said. “Why don’t we let him pull your wagon, and we’ll load it with the food and coffee. You can pretend you’re like the men with the popcorn and sandwich wagons at the fair.”

  “I want to pull it,” Lucy said.

  They filled the rusty red wagon with the sandwiches, a cut pie wrapped in a flour-sack dish towel, a kettle full of coffee, two gallon pails of water, and the cups. The wagon was so heavy that it took both of them to pull it, and neither of them argued as they went up the hill, walking backwards to keep an eye on the kettle of coffee.

  “Let’s just have one piece of pie before we take it all out to them,” Douglas said.

  “No!” She was amazed at the very idea. Boys were so sneaky. “Not unless there are some left over.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Then let’s have our own picnic with what’s left.”

  “Maybe,” she said.

  Presently two men who had been pitching bundles climbed down from the hayrack and came toward her. One was tall, and the closer he came the bigger he looked. He was even bigger than her father and moved as though he would walk right over her. She couldn’t help ducking away when he came up to her. The other man laughed.

  “Don’t let Swede bother you none. He loves kids, don’t you Swede? He eats ’em for lunch if he don’t get his pie.”

  The big man’s face was a fiery red against the near-whiteness of his hair. He had a blank, foreign expression. He was dumb, like the Finn. His face was very long, and his lower lip swelled farther out than his upper one, giving him a very hungry look.

  “Swede don’t speak English, but he sure found out about apple pie in a hurry,” his friend chuckled. “You better have some apple pie there.”

  “No, it’s in the wagon, and it’s cherry,” Lucy said.

  “Well, Swede’ll take cherry this one time. Won’t you, Swede? But you better bring him apple tomorrow. Huh Swede?

  “We call him Swede because it’s the only word he knows from the Old Country,” the man told Lucy. “Pie is the only American word he knows for sure.”

  The giant slapped the little man on the shoulders. The little man laughed as though he liked it.

  “What kind of sandwiches you got there?” he asked.

  “Chicken and cheese,” Lucy said.

  “Swede’ll have cheese,” the man said. “That’s what his mamma raised him on back in the Old Country, ain’t it, Swede?” The little man laughed again—an insulting, high laugh.

  Once Lucy had fed a colt sugar from the palm of her hand. The colt was not used to being fed that way, and when he finished the sugar, he spread his lips and nibbled at her skin, trying to get the last of the wonderful taste. The feeling of his big teeth had made her know what a big bite he could have taken out of her hand. She had the same feeling now about this great blank man. It was hard to tell what he might do but it was easy to tell what he could do. She held out the sandwich toward the giant, not looking at his face. The minute she saw the black-nailed fingers touch the bread, she snatched her hand away.

  The men took in the food like cruising whales. They seemed to be able to swallow without ever closing their mouths. They sloshed in the water and coffee so fast it dribbled back out the sides of their mouths again. Lucy watched the debris escaping like plankton in little streams down their cheeks—bits of bread and butter, pie crust, and cherry juice, all finally mixing with the dust in their bristled chins. Sometimes men made her feel sick.

  When all of them had eaten there were still a few sandwiches left. Douglas had been riding with Giles on one of the hayracks, but he came running when he saw her start back toward the house. “Let’s have our picnic!” he shouted. They settled beneath one of the nearer shocks.

  “You should of saved out some pie,” he said.

  “Phooey! The pie was for the thrashermen, not you! You didn’t earn a piece.”

  “Well,” he said, “when I grow up I’m going to be a thrasherman myself. Or maybe just a farmer. I’m going to get married to you, too, when I grow up.” He put his bare arm around her neck and kissed her a wet cheesy kiss on the cheek. She had a swift impression of his bright blue eyes and white teeth and lips full of bread crumbs grinning an inch away from her face. He laughed and laughed as she ran away—the same way he had laughed that day on the merry-go-round. Nothing so disgusting had ever happened in her whole life.…

  After making sure that Douglas was nowhere in sight, Lucy went out to the first truckload of wheat which stood some distance from the separator, waiting to be driven to town. Though it was in the middle of a blistering field, far from the shade of so much as a fence-post, the wheat in it was cool. One of the memories she carried from year to year was that surprising coolness of the threshed wheat that had so lately been first in the hot field and then in the hotter insides of the threshing machine. Yet each year she was surprised all over again to feel it around her bare legs as she sat in its clean, shifting granules. One grain of wheat was hard, with the richness of the earth and the air crystallized into a tiny sharp gem. Yet a whole truckload of wheat was a soft and regal couch.

  Once wheat was in granary bins, it was different. It was not cool, but cold, and the stillness of the granary was worrisome compared to the excitement of the threshing field. And a bin piled high with wheat was a dangerous place, for if a child worked himself too far down in the midst of the slipping grains, it was like being in quicksand. He never got out unless help was near. That had happened to a little girl her mother knew. The little girl’s mother and father looked for her for days and weeks before they found her.

  But she was safe out under the mounting sun. She could play until it was time to ride in to the elevator.

  She made a road from the cab to the tailgate along the dark line of shadow made by the truck side across the wheat. She was starting to plow a field in her precious cool landscape when Douglas came and flopped over the side into the wheat—just as though he had never done anything terrible in his life. “Boy this is fun!” he said.

  “I want to play by myself,” she said.

  “I’ll tell your dad.”

  “All right,” she said. “Take it all.” She climbed out over the tail
gate and jumped down.

  “Aw, come on back!” he cried. “I’ll do just what you want if you’ll come back and play.”

  It was a new experience for her to have a boy beg her to do anything. This was the first time a boy had ever abdicated his birthright to be the boss.

  “Okay,” she said. “You can bring in the wheat and I’ll be the elevator man and tell you how much I’ll pay you for it and all the things that are wrong with it.”

  They played until dinnertime and then they followed the men in. The table was still not quite set and her father was mad. “Now Rachel,” he said, “why haven’t you had Lucy in here helping you with these little chores that she can do as well as you? Then you’d be all ready now.”

  “I let her play because she never has anybody to play with,” her mother said. “I want her to have a little bit of childhood! That’s why! When she has somebody to play with I’m going to let her have as much time as I can!”

  Lucy and Douglas took their plates out to the porch steps to eat. They had just sat down when a young man came walking around the porch. “Well,” he said. “I see I’m just in time for dinner.”

  Nobody except her father had talked about him much, but Lucy knew he had done something incredibly bad.

  “Hello,” he said. “What’s the matter? Aren’t you going to say hello! Cat got your tongue?”

  “Hello,” they both said, because you had to say that when people asked if the cat had got your tongue.

  “Stuart!”

  Rachel went to him but she did not touch him. He looked so much older, with all those whiskers. He was twenty now; he was a man.

  The crew boss shouted from the dining room: “Stuart! Is that drinkin’ bum here finally? Get in here and put some food on toppa that liquor! By God, you’re gonna do a full day’s work out there between now and quittin’ time or I’ll know the reason why!”

  “Oh, Stuart!” Rachel said.

  “Just watch to see Swede don’t eat it all,” Stuart yelled back. “I’ll be ‘long in a minute.” His speech was fuzzy, like his face. His whiskers did not hide the sick greenish color of his skin. “You going to invite me in or not?” he asked her.