The Bones of Plenty Read online

  Herman shrugged. He himself stood to lose nothing. His only capital was the inventory on his shelves; his reserve was his own corpulence—a product of the tempting shelves and a margin that could well last him for many days should the shelves go empty.

  He was curious to know how much George would lose, for it was obvious that he was going to lose something, but Herman would never ask a question like that to a man like Custer. George’s great frame alone was formidable, but the frame housed a violence of soul vastly more formidable than that of flesh. No room into which George stepped was free from tension until he left it again.

  “Maybe Harry will come back after Roosevelt gets in,” Herman said.

  “Roosevelt!” George pronounced the “Roo” as in kangaroo. “He’s nothing but another rich man. He don’t care if a few million of us lose our shirts. What’s he care about a little dinky one-horse bank way out here? There ain’t a thing he could do anyhow.”

  He turned away and stared toward the back of the store, with his jaw as hard as ever, but with his eyes drifting out of focus in a peculiar way—almost like a fellow Herman had known who had a case of the falling sickness. It was queer how mean George looked that way. He wasn’t looking at anything at all, and yet he seemed ready to kill anything he might see.

  Finally he said, “Better get this stuff for the old lady, I reckon.”

  He bought a hundred-pound sack of flour and some little things for which he paid in exact change and bills so limp they felt more like silk than paper. Herman wondered how long those bills had ridden around in Custer’s hip pocket before he had to use them. And he wished he knew how much George had lost in Harry’s bank.

  George couldn’t even look up at the house of his wife’s father as he passed below it on the road. He wondered how much the old man was going to lose. He wanted to go up and tell Will about the bank, but he was so angry he couldn’t trust himself. Why had he listened to the sanctimonious ass telling him all about how safe that God-damned bank was? Now the money he’d been saving for seed was gone, and he was sure it was gone for good. Yet he could hardly believe his luck could be so bad. He had thought losing the foal was enough bad luck to last for the next year at least.

  He drove the last half mile to his own mailbox and turned into the frozen ruts that led through his fields to the farmyard. The land sloped away from the county road so that he could survey nearly all of the half section as he coasted down the quarter-mile incline to the house. On either side of him were his two biggest fields—eighty acres apiece—which he planted in wheat. These two fields stretched the entire width of the property, and their eastern edges cut the farm in half. The north and south windbreaks of well-grown willows, cottonwoods, and box elders defined the limits of the yard. The groves stopped the wind enough so that the snow was encouraged to settle between them, and thus the Custers paid for their bit of shelter from one element by spending the winter half-buried in another element.

  Below the house the long swell dropped more precipitously to a trough of the lowest ground on the farm, and then rose again to form the eastern, rougher part of the property—humped, notched by ravines, and quite rocky. Here George had plotted out his pastures and the fields where he grew corn and a hay crop of sweet clover or alfalfa.

  Set just above the final drop of the western swell, the house appeared to command the hill and the buildings at the foot of it. But the appearance was deceptive, for those who lived in the house were really commanded by the hill. Nearly everything went down the hill empty and came up the hill full. Water buckets, milk pails, egg baskets, and wheelbarrows went lightly down to the well or the barn or the chicken house or the compost pile and came wearily back up to the wash boiler, the cream separator, the cooler, or the garden behind the house. Once each morning and evening the milk pails went down full—after the cream was separated and the skim milk went back to the barn to feed the calves and pigs.

  The house had begun as one big room with an east and a west window and a chimney on the north. Then smaller rooms had been leaned against the north and south sides of the first one, each with a window to the west. The kitchen stove, the shelf for the water bucket and wash basin, a cupboard, a cooler, and a small work table nearly filled the room on the north. The baby’s crib and Lucy’s cot and a large storage closet filled the room on the south. It was such a simple little house that George felt as though he confronted the inside as well as the outside every time he came down toward it from the western fields and saw the three windows looking up at him—one from each of the three rooms.

  In the main room, which they called the dining room, was an expandable round table on which the family ate all its meals, wrote letters, bathed the baby, did homework, cut out paper dolls, butchered, sewed, or spread out catalogs for ordering garden seeds, repair parts, shoes, and clothes. There were four straight chairs around the table, and a high chair. There was a heavy rocking chair covered in black leather, scraped full of furry brown scratches and showing brown rings on the seat made by the springs pressing up through the stuffing. There was an expensive upright piano, a bookcase too small for the books in it, and a clothes rack beside the round heating stove, nearly always hung with diapers and baby blankets. In an alcove curtained off from the rest of the room was the double bed for himself and Rachel.

  As George neared the house he looked out once more across the fields. He loved and hated them for the same reason: They represented the hope of independence that grew drier and dustier every year. It was bad enough not to own the land he worked, but it was intolerable to pay rent on that land to a city man—a city man who knew enough about buttons and thread and cheap toys from Japan to make money running a store full of junk, and who thought, since he had made the money to buy land which had sold for taxes, that he also knew how to make money with that land. No matter how much surplus wheat was left over from last year or what plagues of drought, disease, and grasshoppers were predicted, he stipulated that George must plant half the acreage in wheat, of which he took a full third of the proceeds—not of the gross, but the net, after threshing, transporting, and all other costs except a percentage of the seed price were borne by George. If George chose not to plant half the land in wheat, he had to make up in cash for what Mr. James T. Vick figured would have been his share.

  George had counted on getting a small loan from Harry for this season. Prices the last September had been the lowest in history, and he had got twenty-six cents a bushel from the elevator, minus the penalty for smut. Out of that he had had to pay threshers. Nevertheless, he had managed to keep nearly two hundred dollars in the bank, and another hundred would have seen him through in fairly good shape. But now he would have to go to the office of that city man in Jamestown, pushing his way between the gaudy counters of junk and squeezing through a doorway half blocked by more cartons of junk, and feeling his ignominious way up the few dark stairs leading to the office of Mr. James T. Vick. It was a low, cluttered little balcony where Mr. Vick sat at his desk, which overflowed with the business of a half dozen enterprises, looking out over the store from time to time to see that no hands went from alluring counter to threadbare pocket. His change-girl and bookkeeper sat at a desk nearly touching his, loading coins into the spherical bottoms of the money carriers, screwing them into the heads mounted on the wires, and yanking the handles to send them back to the clerks waiting below. George would have to sit in the presence of that girl while the frenetic carriers hissed back and forth, clanging into the steel rings that snapped shut around them. They arrived with the solid assurance of money come home—money rushing, rushing to come home. And while the girl doled out coins and smoothed bills and stored them away, George would have to beg for cash so he could get in the spring crop. And he would put up, as the only security he had, his muscles and his hope.

  He was home—with his good news. He stopped the car near the house, threw the tanned hide from one of his own steers over the heated radiator, and then wedged a rock beneath each of the front whee
ls. He ought not to have been able to see more than the windows and the roof of the car. It should have been buried in three feet of snow while he drove a sleigh over the white depths that would leave a little water in the ground and at least protect the fields from blowing. He thought of the snows when he was a boy—twenty-foot drifts in some places, packed dirt-hard. He even had a photograph of himself on his pony atop a drift so high that his head was higher than a telegraph pole. And in the spring the snow went back up into the sky and fell again in rain, and the wheat sent long threads of roots down to the water, and in the fall one bushel of Number One wheat would buy a pair of overalls. A farmer got a fair shake then, and a man who was willing to work hard and who used his brains could manage to buy the land he worked and build a fine big house for his family, like Will, or like his own father, whose farm had been clear till he mortgaged it again in order to speculate. But then Hoover had come along as Food Administrator during the war and pegged the price of wheat at $2.18 a bushel while he let the overall manufacturers hike their prices till they were getting $6.50 for a pair of cockeyed denim pants. Ah, yes! The Great Humanitarian, putting a ceiling on wheat because of the hungry people in the world. But just who cared what it cost the man who grew the wheat to put a pair of overalls over his naked rump? Who cared? That was what George wanted to know.

  He scooped up the hundred-pound sack of flour as though he would let the Great Humanitarian have the whole hundred pounds right in his crabbed little face. All a man had to do was buy a sack of flour to see who kept right on making money—who shed none of the sweat and made all the money. Since 1929, in less than four years, wheat prices had fallen over sixty per cent. But retail flour had dropped only forty per cent and bread had dropped less than twenty-five per cent. The more middlemen there were to get their sticky mitts on the wheat he raised, the less of a drop in price there was; yet he was the only fellow who had to sweat. Every single time he bought a sack of flour he thought about what Adolph Beahr took at the elevator, then what the railroad took to carry the wheat to the mills in Bismarck or Grand Forks and then to bring the flour back to Herman Schlaht, and finally what Herman took for his share.

  When George bought back his own wheat, sold from the harvest fields at a price that scarcely more than paid the threshers and the rent to James T. Vick, he bought it back at a price that made him wonder how much longer his family could even eat bread—yes, how much longer a wheat farmer could eat bread.

  And now another city man—a dirty little Jew—undoubtedly had run off with the money George had hoarded all winter for putting in the new crop and buying staples until the next harvest. If he could have got that Jew banker’s neck between his hands at that moment before he had to go into his dark little house to break the news to Rachel, he could have throttled him. He could have watched without remorse while the face turned black above the white grip of his bare hands, and the legs kicked and dug at the frozen ground and then grew limp. And then, when he saw it was done, he could have unwrapped his fingers from the wrung neck, dropped the body, and left it behind him while he walked toward his house and wiped his hands free of corruption on his overpriced “Oshkosh B’Gosh” overalls.

  Still trembling with his vision, he stamped his boots on the porch to signal Rachel to open the door.

  “What happened?” she gasped, when she saw his face.

  “That dirty little Jew has closed the bank.” He pulverized the words with his teeth, letting them drop down to her like chaff dropped by a whirlwind.

  Like chaff they blew about her and suffocated her. It took her a moment to put them together. “Oh, he couldn’t have closed it permanently. He couldn’t have. It must just be that he was getting too much of a run and he wanted to stop it. They don’t close just because there’s no money left; they close to protect the rest of us.”

  He looked down at her, the sack of flour still squeezed in his arms. “You and your father!” he shouted. “Preaching, preaching! Always preaching! Leave the money in there! If everybody would just leave it in there. Then the banks could loosen up and help out the little fellow again. Oh yes! Just have faith! Support the filthy banks and they’ll be able to help the little guy.”

  His tone shifted from fire to ice. “Every one of those damned ignorant Roosians got their money out, if they ever had any in there in the first place. And so did the Germans. Zack Hoefener and Herman and Beahr—they won’t lose anything! You can bet on that. But it was up to us—up to the people that built the country to keep it going. You and your old man! Preaching. Going to church. By God, anybody knows you can’t trust a Jew. That’s what I told you all along!”

  Rachel turned back to her bread, hoping he would stop before he woke up the baby. She rarely defended herself or her family when he was like this. She wanted her silence to make him feel that he had won, but instead it defeated him. It left him alone, with his anger gone, to hear again the things he had said, without so much as one culpable word of hers to recall and cling to in his search for justification. He had to bear the guilty aftermath of his rages all by himself. Still he couldn’t stop.

  “Well, your old man will get just what he asked for now! He’ll lose a hell of a lot more than we will. I’ll just bet he won’t drop his damned holy tithe in that collection plate next Sunday!”

  The table and floor creaked with the rhythmic strong pressure Rachel applied to the bread as she turned and folded it on the board, hauling up the dough and bending it back into itself with a little thump and a whisper of the flour on the wood.

  He carried the sack past her and set it on the floor by the lard can they used for a flour bin. It stood beneath the window that looked out on the fields that made the wheat. The frost from the night before had melted and moistened the windowsill, making it smell of old wood and the dust from fields. Some of the wetness darkened the streaked pea-green calcimine on the wall below the window.

  He took a penknife out of his pocket and cut the linked red and white strings hanging from the top edge of the sack. He lifted the sack and dumped it carefully into the empty can. He pinched the bottom corners of the bag and shook it to spill the last ounce out of the sides of it, and then he replaced the lid of the can and folded up the sack and laid it on top of the lid. The flour-dulled picture of the girl on the sack looked up at him.

  “Dakota Maid,” her grayish-black braids hanging stiffly to her breasts, held out to him a great basket heaped with golden sheaves of wheat. Her too-dainty moccasins were planted much too close together to balance the weight she carried, and her dusty brown face was stretched in a wide Anglo-Saxon smile. The outline of the same improbable Indian maid showed ever so faintly through the faded dye of the curtains at the window.

  George straightened up and looked at Rachel. She did not look at him. She held up one end of the dough until it thinned itself out, sliced off a length with the butcherknife, kneaded it into shape, and laid it in the first of the five waiting pans. She filled the other four pans and punched down the dough.

  He couldn’t believe it. Surely it must matter to her that they had lost two hundred dollars. Surely she was not going to let him bear the loss alone. Surely she would say something that would commit herself to him. She would express her fear over what would become of them, thus admitting that now they had no choice but to survive together or fail together—admitting that she could not get along without him. She would begin to cry, because of the world’s enormous treachery; he needed to see her cry because he needed to cry himself. And her crying would also be an admission of her weakness and a sign that he would have to be strong for both of them—and he needed the sign in order to be strong enough. Or possibly she would burst into the kind of fury he longed for—the fury that would justify his own fury, and bring them once more together in furious righteousness. What was a wife for? Even if she would simply strike back at him with all the fury she must feel about everything (For she must feel it? She must!), as he had only now struck at her—even then it would be a kind of commitment.
What was a wife for, if she let a man bear a thing like this alone?

  But though she worked beside him as hard as he worked, all day, every day, and submitted to him silently in the night, she was no longer committed to him. Sometimes he knew why little things went wrong; sometimes he didn’t. He hadn’t the least notion of why the whole thing had gone wrong. If a piece of machinery misbehaved, he watched and listened and tinkered till he found the cause of the trouble, and then he set about fixing it calmly and competently. He was contemptuous of the sort of man who kicked an ailing machine. A machine had no will to defy the man. Why should the man feel emotions about the machine? But it was things like this that made him want to kick something—things like these grievances of hers that went round and round till they lost their beginnings—these grievances that were more important to her than the ruin of them both. An overpowering heat flooded down his legs, as though he was wetting himself in a nightmare. He knew that if he kicked the streaked green wall under the window, he could put his foot right through it.

  He hadn’t intended to do it, but once he had the door open, he was afraid he might rip it out of the kitchen—to make her look up from the everlasting little chores that she found so convenient to pile up between them—nevertheless, he had specifically told himself that he would not do it; but when the door was in his hands he did slam it with all his strength. Once again she had won.

  Rachel had no idea that she had won. Cathy began to fuss almost as soon as the noise ended. She was that kind of baby. Lucy had been that way too. Some babies, when they first woke, would lie and look up at the ceiling with their wide eyes that seemed never to have been asleep, and they would speak softly to themselves with their tiny soft mouths for a long time before they decided they were hungry. But not her babies. They were like George. The minute they woke they wanted up, whether they were hungry or not. They couldn’t wait for anything. They couldn’t even wait to be born; both of them came nearly two weeks early.