The Bones of Plenty Read online

  After she had spoken she waited, her mouth having returned to the position of a mouth which tried never to make frivolous movements. Her jaws were square without being heavy or hard. Their squareness was perfect for the rest of her face, but the perfection made the face seem unapproachable.

  It was the kind of face that in her extreme youth had either frightened off a man or challenged him. Most men had been frightened; Will had first been challenged and then he had recognized that she was beautiful. He kept his eyes on her face while he reached under his coat and brought out a roll of fifties.

  “Will, what have you done?” she gasped.

  He had always had a tendency to grin, nervously and broadly and uncontrollably, when he really wanted to fight or roar with misery. He could feel his lips twitching as he said, “Harry has closed the bank. All washed up.”

  “Oh, Will! What will we do?”

  “I’ve got it all.” He began pulling the rolls out of his pockets.

  The money fell on the steel table-top with little rustling sounds, as of birds alighting and settling upon their evening roosts.

  “How will we keep it all?” she asked, when the last roll had fallen. “What shall we do with it?”

  His proposal sounded even more outrageous than he had expected it to. “I know it sounds silly, but I suppose we ought to bury it, like everybody else. I suppose it’ll be good as long as there’s anything left of the country.”

  Her quick agreement surprised him. “Yes,” she said positively. “It mustn’t be in the house.… Oh, Will, thank God you got it. How did you know? How did you get it?”

  He shrugged his shoulders; he hadn’t yet taken off his coat and it was getting heavy. He was beginning to feel heavy, too—to sag after the shock. “I didn’t know,” he said. “Harry just gave it to me. We didn’t talk about what happened. I don’t know why it happened.”

  When they looked at the money again it seemed like less than it had when it was flowing from his pockets. By now Will was getting used to the way the same amount of money could expand and shrink by turns. It lay in loose curls between the slab of bacon tied in brown paper and the twenty-pound sack of sugar slumping in portly wrinkles of lettered cloth.

  Neither of them had any impulse to count the bills. They unrolled them and flattened them into the box. Then they closed the lid and flipped the catch in front and tried it in different places in the house. Finally they decided to keep it under the bed for the night.

  They sat down to their supper, repeating the Lord’s Prayer together as they did three times each day. Then they thought of George and Rachel.

  “Will, do the children have anything in the bank?” Rose asked anxiously.

  “I’ve been wondering,” Will said. “I don’t see how it could be much. I wish they would let us make it up to them, whatever it is.”

  “George would die first!”

  “I know.”

  “Will, if you rushed back into town now do you suppose you could catch Harry and ask him just for George’s deposits?”

  “Oh, no. Harry’s a good many miles away from here by now—that’s a cinch. And nobody knows which direction, either.”

  He leaned back in his chair and stared across his plate at the blackness on the other side of the dining room windows. A long crack split one of the windows diagonally from top to bottom. He could not see the crack because of the darkness, but he could see the button in the middle of it, tied through to the button on the other side to steady the fracture and make the window less likely to shatter. Lightning had done it. He had been in the room when the bolt stabbed through the window—hissing, crackling, booming, ripping out his eardrums and blowing the house to smithereens. Still—even as it trundled away—it possessed him; with its own detonations it commanded and contained the detonations of his heart; within the grinding concussions of its bowels it whirled the bursting organs of his own digestion. Finally it mocked him. It tumbled his splitting, craven head back into the room and declined to execute the claim it had established. Then he found, first, that he was alive, next, that the house had not exploded—it was not even on fire—and last, that his eardrums were in their accustomed place, aching.

  Why it had let him go he could not guess. While it possessed him he had thought how coincidental and how appropriate. His oldest brother had died by lightning.

  Will never fixed the window, though he was not sure why. Perhaps it was for a bond with his brother. Perhaps it was superstition—so long as the window remained cracked, all other bolts would pass by. Perhaps it was merely to remind him of how capriciously death frolicked in a man’s house.

  It wasn’t that he was afraid to die but that he hoped passionately, perhaps ungratefully or even irreverently, to live long enough to be assured that things were going to get better. He had fathered two children and worked inhumanly hard to give them what he had never had himself. But neither of them, at the moment, was in anything like the circumstances he had envisioned for them.

  “Why did Rachel marry George?” he said to Rose.

  “George was a very handsome man when she married him,” said Rose.

  “Would a girl with a mind like Rachel’s really marry a man for his looks?” Will demanded.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Who knows why anybody marries anybody?”

  “But why in thunderation didn’t she marry that boy in college?” he asked.

  “Maybe she was too young. Maybe it was a mistake to send her when she was only sixteen. Maybe if she’d been older …”

  “But Rose, there was nothing here for her! What else could we have done? Kept her on the farm driving a tractor till she was eighteen—till she forgot half of what she’d learned? Once you start an education you’ve got to keep on with it, that’s all.”

  Rose was silent. She was right, he thought. Nobody knew why anybody married anybody.

  After a while he couldn’t help himself any longer and he had to say it:

  “I wonder where Stuart is.”

  “We’ll probably hear when he gets short on money again.” Rose pushed away and began to clear the table. Stuart had been gone nearly two years and she still refused to talk about him.

  The next morning Will went out early, before the eastern rim of his gray fields had yet rounded toward the sun, and buried his box of money.

  He walked through the orchard from the gate—six trees up, two over—and he chopped with his pick on the downhill side of a dead crab-apple tree. As the daylight grew he looked nervously up and down the road. He felt like a criminal or a fool, or both.

  He winced a little when he heard the first chunk of frozen earth thud against the box. He filled the hole, brushed the bit of snow back over his digging, and tramped it around a little. He had chosen that particular tree because he knew it was dead. Last summer’s drought and this winter’s sudden plunging freezes had finished it off. He was almost as tall as the tree. He had to admit that it had not done so well as he had promised Rose that it would do, and it certainly was not so hardy as the catalog had told him it would be.

  Saturday, February 18

  Otto Wilkes trotted his showy team of matched dappled-gray Percherons across the railroad tracks, nearly catapulting his two youngest and lightest boys off the back end of the wagon. A gelding and a stallion the horses were, and they weighed a ton apiece. He had hated to geld the one, but the other, being three years older, was already mature and a proven sire, so he had had no choice. Otto didn’t want to try to manage a team of two Percheron stallions.

  He pulled up before the dusty window that read “HOEFENER’S EUREKA HARDWARE, Agent for John Deere Tractors & Equipment.”

  “All right boys,” he said. “You can come in with me.”

  He lifted the smallest of the four, who was scarcely able to walk yet, and they all lined up behind him and followed him into the store.

  Zack saw them as they pulled up, and he shoved his dark brown bottle under the cash register. He didn’t know who made him sicker�
�Otto with his brassy, pickthank ways, or Otto’s numberless, shivering, dirty-nosed children breathing loudly through their mouths.

  Otto bought a box of rivets for some harness repair he was doing and some other harness fittings. The whole purchase came to just under a dollar, but Otto wrote out a check for five.

  “I’m not no bank!” Zack objected when he saw the check. “Why don’t you ever come in town on a weekday and get your cash over at the bank? Is this thing gonna bounce on me? I’m a pretty mean man when I get a rubber check.”

  “Oh come on, Zack. I got to have a little cash. We’re all out of coal and you know I can’t get coal without cash.”

  Zack cashed it, mostly to get the pestilential brood out of his store. He just couldn’t stand to have that grimy bunch of kids fingering everything in sight.

  Monday, February 20

  Even though Harry never opened up until ten in the morning, Zack spent almost the entire hour after he opened his own place peering through the backward lettering on his window at the bank across the street. If Otto’s check was no good, he would drive out there that very night and either take it out of the oily bum’s hide or attach his team, which was the only thing he had worth attaching.

  At eleven o’clock Zack hung a sign on his door, “Gone to lunch,” and went over to the bank.

  It had been such a slow morning that Zack was sure he hadn’t missed seeing Harry come, but still he could not believe it when he found the door locked, Harry had had colds before, but he had always sent his wife down to keep the bank open. Zack went down to Herman Schlaht’s store.

  “Where’s Harry?” he demanded.

  “How should I know?” Herman retorted. “Maybe he ain’t gonna run a bank no more. You ain’t worried are you? You got yours.”

  “I just thought somebody might’ve been in that knew what happened to him,” Zack said angrily. “By God, I’ll just go on up there myself, right now.”

  He stamped out of the store and headed around the corner and up the street. He glared at the empty window of the bank and turned and spat at its steps. The sidewalk ended at the end of the block. Then he walked on the edge of the road, past houses that had once been yellow or white or brown. All of them had columned front porches, gables jutting from their high roofs, and privies set squarely in line with their back doors. But they were not really so much alike as they looked. It was just that the same thing had happened to them all. They were like a double row of unfortunate sisters, who for different reasons all remained gray-haired spinsters, staring at each other wonderingly across the frozen street.

  In the yard of one house a swing hanging from the branches of a great bare tree played by itself in the wind. In another yard a privy door flapped and banged, and in still another, several paths from convenient approaches crossed to one of the town pumps.

  There was only one house beyond the Goodmans’ to the north, but it was far out in a field and not on the street. That was where the Finleys lived, and Zack saw, as he approached Harry’s house, that Mrs. Finley had already got a big Monday morning wash out, to freeze stiff in the wind. He didn’t see how that Finley outfit stayed alive in that big old leaking house. Harry, being the money-grubber that he was, actually demanded rent for the place. Harry owned it the way he owned all the other places, because of a no-good mortgage.

  Harry’s own house was set in a yard so full of trees that, living or dead, bare or leafed, they nearly hid it from people passing by. Zack’s knock, muted by his glove, drew no response. He took off the glove and rapped again with the sharpness of his cold knuckles. He twisted the door knob, but it would not turn. Then he kicked the door.

  He tramped down the path to the garage. The doors were locked, but he found a window draped with spider webs and dotted with the dry husks of insects. He could see that the car was not there. He heaved himself up the steps of the back porch, and yanked at the screen door, which opened so cordially that he nearly lost his balance. But the porcelain knob on the back door was as resistant as the brass knob on the front door.

  He shouted into the house and pounded on a window. He stood for a moment, his glove cupped around his goiter, while he thought. Then he lunged around the house and up the steps of Harry’s neighbor.

  Old Mrs. Webber came to the door. She shivered in her long black woolen dress and clutched her shawl around her age-deformed shoulders. “Come in, come in,” she said in a high voice that scratched something in her throat. Zack’s glove went back to his goiter.

  “It’s so cold. Come in, so I can shut the door. Martin’s in bed today. His laig and his hip is hurting him. What did you want?”

  “Where’s the Goodmans?” Zack shouted. “When did they go away? Have they cleared out for good?”

  “I never see nobody in the wintertime,” Mrs. Webber mourned, and her voice scratched on something a notch or two higher. “Just the boy that brings me the groceries and goes down to the pump and fetches me my water. And that old man with the big blue lip that brings the coal.” Mrs. Webber no longer remembered names.

  “Them Goodmans haven’t never been neighborly to us,” she went on, and her voice went back down and scratched in the first notch. Listening to it was like watching an old cow bend her head to the side and rake her neck up and down against a knot on a fence post. “Martin says that’s the way them Jews are. When they first come here I went over and called on the missus and took her an angel food cake—angel food—with twelve egg whites. They’s a lot of people in this town said I used to make the best angel food cake in the county. But that was before my wrists got too sore to beat it right any more.”

  “But what about the Goodmans!” Zack cried.

  “Why, do you know what she brought back in the dish I took her that cake in? Six rotten little fish! Martin said that would learn me to give something free for nothing to a Jew. We give them fish to the dog.”

  “Did you see them go away?”

  “Are they gone away?” Mrs. Webber asked.

  “They’re gone all right! Their car’s gone.”

  “Well, I swan,” said Mrs. Webber. “Never even said goodby. Just like a Jew.”

  Zack ran all the way back to Herman’s store, clumping ponderously down the middle of the road, keeping his arms crossed to steady all the burning, jumping things inside his chest.

  “He’s gone all right,” he cried to Herman. “Cleared right out. I said he would, didn’t I?”

  Johnny Koslov, the youngest of the Koslov brothers, loitered in the rear of the store, hopelessly eyeing a horse blanket that he coveted for the bed of himself and his Hilda. He came forward to the counter and demanded, “Who iss gone? Who iss it?”

  “The banker’s gone—that’s who!” Zack roared. “The little Jew banker. Just like I said he would!”

  “Oh my!” said Johnny. Johnny had never had any money in the bank and he had not heard about the panic, but he could react to sounds in voices and looks on faces. “Oh my!” he said again.

  Zack paid no more attention to him. He despised all Russians. “You find me a Roosian with any brains,” he would say, “and I’ll prove to you he’s probably got German blood in him. And they’ll stand around in your place and spit their filthy-dirty Roosian peanuts anywhere they feel like it—just like they act at home!”

  Herman didn’t care about the sunflower seed husks. When he got around to it, he swept them out the front door onto the sidewalk, where they eventually sifted away between the boards. It didn’t bother him when the Russians gathered around his stove, chattering in their foolish language and blowing the salty slivers from their muscular lips. As long as the Russians spent money, Herman didn’t care how many Russian peanut shells they spat.

  Herman had dust from a sack of chicken mash in his apron, and he beat at it, raising a yellow cloud that settled over the hairs on his hands. He dangled one of the hands in a small vat of dill pickles and brought up half a pickle which he put in his mouth. “You reckon he’s gone for good?”

  “Wel
l, now then, just what do you think?” Zack sneered.

  “Why, he might just be taking one of them bank holidays,” Herman said. “He maybe will come back when the new President comes in.”

  Herman had learned how to handle Zack Hoefener in twenty years of running a store in the same town with him. “You make me sick,” Zack said. “We should go after him with a rope. We should have a good old-fashioned necktie party.”

  “You cannot hang a businessman for losing all his money,” Herman observed. “Or for taking a holiday, either.” He was not exerting himself to be fair to Harry but only to infuriate Zack, who flung open the door and charged through it, nearly ramming into the customer on Herman’s steps.

  “What ails him?” George Custer said, holding the door open and leaning out to watch Hoefener’s departure.

  Herman crunched the last of the pickle into his mouth and said to George, “He just found out about the bank.”

  “What bank?”

  “Harry’s bank. He closed it up.”

  “What do you mean!”

  “He went away. Nobody knows where.”

  George took a long breath. “The dirty little Jew,” he said. “The stinking tight little Jew. Who in hell did he lend the money to? The stingy scoundrel must’ve lost it himself! The dirty little swindler!”

  George paced to the stove in three enormous strides, and had no more than stuck his cold hands over its searing top than he whirled and paced back again.

  The Adam’s apple in George’s neck sawed up and down. “Maybe he’s just took a holiday,” Herman suggested.

  “A holiday!” George shouted. “A holiday! Yeah, out to California, maybe, where it’s nice and warm—and far away! Well, he damn well better stay wherever he’s at. It’ll be plenty warm around here for him, you bet!”

  “If he took money that is not his the police will catch him, won’t they?” Herman said.

  “Sheriff Richard M. Press!” George scoffed. “He’s just after the little guy that can’t hire himself a shyster lawyer. Oh, the Goddamned little chiseler! He’ll go scot-free!”