The Bones of Plenty Read online

  Now Cathy was hungry and Rachel would have to feed her very soon. She considered the bone-colored dough. The loaves needed to rise before going into the oven; on the other hand, she was afraid they might rise too much before she had finished with the baby. If she forgot them for too long, the bread would bake out too airy and dry, with a bubbly crust. If she punched them down again right now, they might not rise enough, and then the bread would be heavy and doughy. George had a fit over faulty bread. At every meal while a bad batch lasted, he would wonder aloud how it was that his mother had always been able to bake perfect bread.

  Once she had thought that doing her best to please him would be a joy to her, as it had always been one of her greatest joys to please her father. But now, even if he complimented her, she could not help thinking of the crushing ratio between complaints and compliments. Why, then, did it matter whether a batch of bread ever pleased him again or not?

  She came upon the question the way she occasionally came upon a serpent as she was starting the garden in the cold spring. The snake, barely sentient after sleeping so long in the frozen ground, would finally become aware of her and uncoil like a rubber band snapping beneath her hand. And even while she was trying to calm the ridiculous physical reaction she always had when this happened, she was saying to herself, “But I was looking at it all the time! I saw it right there, all the while it was so still!”

  So it was with the question. Now that she had seen it, she knew how long it had been there, and she knew that, unlike the snake, it would never go away and let her calm herself again. She would live always with this astonished burning in her chest. The baby’s crying, she thought, the bank, the baby, your father! always preaching! I don’t care, I won’t ever care again.

  The baby was hungry. She must feed her. But she didn’t want to be crying while she fed her. That wasn’t good for a baby, to be held and fed while the mother was upset. The bank, the bank, the bank, and why should it matter any more either? It was not going to matter any more. Neither were his shouts.

  She remembered how he had been that first year when he was courting her—in his way. His father’s farm adjoined the schoolyard and that was why they had met at all. It was a glorious Indian summer day. She had wanted to eat her lunch outside with the children, but she had to write a geography lesson on the blackboard.

  The sounds of calamity sent her rushing to the door. Except for the big boys, the children were flying toward her in terror. Behind them, on the safe side of the Custer fence, stood the big boys, yelling with laughter. A huge Holstein bull fanatically assaulted the other side of the fence. They bellowed and raged at him; they flapped their arms and danced back and forth. One boy took off his shirt and waved it, leaping about in his underwear.

  “Boys!” she cried. “Boys!”

  She ran out to them, conscious even at such a moment of how short she was beside them, and said all the wrong things.

  “Put your shirt on! Get away from that fence! What did you do to him? He could have killed all of you!” They laughed like demons. They showed off for her.

  Then the bull, butting at the fence post, hooked a horn under the bottom wire, raised his head, and pulled the post out of the ground.

  She didn’t need to tell them to run. They were all far ahead of her, stringing across the schoolyard and pounding up the steps. She had a memory of the giant bull face, twice the size of a cow’s, of the great wall of bone that was his forehead and of the two shining black globes in it, rolling, seeking—glittering as they came to focus on her, seeing her as she would look under his hoofs after the fence came down. She remembered the black leather nose, no more bothered by the ring in it than a boot is bothered by a bootlace. She remembered the blunt profile, descended of Ice Age bison and Grecian bulls—the head, created like those others, to be nothing more than a senseless battering-ram proceeding from an enormous, obscenely male neck.

  She remembered, too, how the last boy had slammed the door of the schoolhouse in her face and she had thought, he’s locked me out, and even in her fear, as she ran up the steps, she was furious at this trick to compound her humiliation. Were they going to make her beg to be let in, with a three-thousand-pound bull behind her? But the door was not locked; the boy had only slammed it out of his own fear. Much later, after they were all safe again, she felt hurt that they would not have thought of her at all. Males, she said to herself when the hurt came.

  The bull, in his epitome of male savagery, charged to the steps and stopped. Now there was nothing for him to attack with his aroused maleness. He seemed to know that he was ludicrous and to be further enraged. He shook his head at the bottom step, but there was nothing soft and alive to gore. He bellowed steadily. When he saw the children moving at the window he rammed his skull into the wall below.

  The bristling flame of a red-haired human head appeared in the window then—the head of a man whose profile pushed out and down from his red pelt with an impatient force of elongated brutish angles. The mouth was long-lipped and excessively arched, and the jaw, instead of ending properly in a civilized chin, jutted out and down as though it never intended to stop. Altogether it was the face of a cave man.

  But then when she looked down to see all of him at once, she discovered that the jawline was remarkably straight and that it led back up to an ear that was large but refined. Nor was the skull that of a flat-headed cave man, for it was high and curved behind, and it balanced the jutting jaw on the slender prideful neck. The neck was set on wide shoulders, the shoulders on a potent torso. The torso supported mighty limbs. Then she saw that the face was not that of a male human throwback, but of a young man so overpowering that before she could stop it, the thought quickened and created itself: He looks exactly the way a man ought to look.

  He moved carefully but fearlessly, scolding the bull in curiously soothing tones. Either the bull was very much afraid of the man, or else he was no longer so enraged as he pretended he was, and glad to be persuaded to stop smashing his head into the school building. With not more than a minute of quick footwork on the part of the man and half-hearted dodging on the part of the bull, the capture was done. The man had his lead stick hooked in the ring and the bull followed, rocking his massive shoulders and haunches in a gait calculated to crowd the man. But the man had a great stride to match the bull’s, and he kept the leather nostrils stretched into such painful ovals that the bull could not side-step to dislodge the hook. The man never looked behind him. He marched away over the flattened fence, with his straight back no more than four feet in front of the glittering eyes and the cruel secret brain.

  The more logical it was to stop trembling, the more difficult it seemed to stop. The big boys took up the siege where the bull had left off. Even after she finally got them to sit down and ostensibly to work, the atmosphere in the one big room, grown stuffy and confining with the warm day, was that of a becalmed ship alive with the vibrations of mutiny. If she asked a question, she was more likely to get an uncontrolled burst of laughter than an answer. She knew they couldn’t be blamed for thinking it was funny to see a teacher run away from a bull—even if it was for her life. What she blamed them for was starting the whole thing—wandering far into a pasture where they had no business and getting an animal worked up like that.

  When the man came back to fix the fence, she was grateful and yet angry. Why did he keep such an animal in such a flimsy fence? She could not stop being aware of him out there, digging, pounding, nailing, with the sun glinting on his red-gold arms. Once when she looked out the window, her heart beating with the remnant of her fright and with her exasperation over the laughing savagery of the disobedient males ranged in front of her, she saw the man resting, leaning his arm across the new post, gazing at the schoolhouse, and then laughing until he finally had to blow his nose. He must be crazy, she thought.

  After school he came in. She saw his inches of crinkly red hair rub the top of the door. He introduced himself politely enough, but then he said in a severe deep
voice, “Now then, Miss Shepard, that was our prize bull out yonder in the breeding pasture.” He did not apologize by his tone or his expression for speaking the words “bull” and “breeding” to a young woman. “In the future we’ll have to ask you to enjoin your pupils from trespassing on our property. After all, it is a schoolteacher’s duty to be responsible …” A belly laugh that rolled from him as though he were a Barnum and Bailey bass drum put an end to the speech he had been working on all afternoon.

  He saw me run, she thought, and hated him.

  He was often near the school when it let out, and particularly, it seemed, when she needed him. Once her little Ford got snowed in during the day and he pushed her out of the bank. But just as she could feel the wheels getting traction again, the car started to make a dreadful, sharp, rapid thumping. She stopped and let the engine idle. The trouble didn’t seem to be there. Cautiously she let the car move and again the thumping resounded. It was in the back and she got out to see if it was the bumper. But nothing seemed amiss, and she thanked George again for his help, while he stood inclining his head to her with a respectful hand on the bill of his cap. She climbed back into the car and started it once more. This time the banging shook the whole automobile.

  She leaned out and called, “Do you suppose it’s the transmission?”

  “Could be. Sounds like she’s all froze up somewheres, don’t she?” he said. (She had noticed that he talked much less grammatically when he wasn’t making a speech he had prepared just for her. She found the contrast amusing and foolishly flattering.)

  She couldn’t remember any more how many times she started the car and stopped it again in annoyed confusion before his wild laughter gave him away. He was so good with machinery that he knew just how his hands beating on a rear fender ought to sound. After they were married, she had seen him run stooping behind a car as visitors started to leave their yard, playing the awful tattoo, and she knew, by the way their faces looked, how she must have looked herself. His jokes almost always made her feel stupid, and therefore irritated with him, and yet, as the year went on, she was ever more restless on the weekends she spent at home. Sunday afternoons were endless, even though she could play the piano she missed so much all week. Finally she began to be irritated with him because her Sunday afternoons were so dull and empty.

  All the while she kept wondering how she was supposed to feel, and how she did feel, and what the truth was about various sorts of physical mysteries. There was the way her body vacillated between an energy so great that she had no peace and could not even digest her food and a lassitude so profound that she had no will and did not care at all what happened to her. And there were more subtle and complicated physical mysteries which caused a recurrence of the shocked feelings she had had about her father when she first knew some things had to be true, as they were true of all men.

  Now all she knew was that the feelings of that year, whatever they were, whatever love was, had resulted in a wedding as soon as school ended. All she knew now was that there had been a roomful of bad boys, Sunday afternoons when she was nearly paralyzed by her need for some unknown thing, a snowbank, a snowbank—the bank, the bank, the bank. This must have been a love story and now this must be the end of it. She knew more than she thought she knew. She knew, after all, what love was and how it ended.

  The baby was screaming in hunger and outrage. Rachel wondered if some accident had happened while she stood in the kitchen staring at five pans of bread dough through tears that would not stop. Did the baby have a pin scratching her stomach or stuck in her throat? She was afraid even to go and look at the baby.

  A few nights before, she had gone to cover Lucy and seen what she could not put out of her mind. The child labored with a heavy cold, and her body was twisted, her head straining back at a broken angle from her neck, while she fought her loud unconscious battle for air. Her braids had come undone and her long hair streamed across her face, covering it in the darkness as hair covered the faces of dead children flopping in their mothers’ arms or gaping in the gutters of Spanish streets. The picture was sometimes static, sometimes moving. Sometimes Rachel saw how it happened to one after another in the procession of mothers carrying dead children. One had looked out her window just as the bomb fell or the grenades exploded or the men, appearing from nowhere, opened fire in the street. This mother would have seen the child fall but she would not have been able to reach it in time. Nevertheless, when she got to its side, she would know how it had been—how her little girl of six had borne alone this agony still on her face, had wondered why her mother didn’t come to explain what was happening to her and to save her from it—for here, on the child’s face, was the terror and grief of dying all by herself.

  The next mother did not know; she was searching, but of course this tiny body here was not what she had set out to find, not what she would allow herself to find. The hair tangled over the face hid the features, but this was her shoe, her dress, her jacket. But this was not her hand, no, this was not her face. Another little girl had died here when the men threw the things in the street. But here, under the blood, this was her dimple. (Lucy had dimples, round and sudden now, like pin pricks, but when she grew up they would be deep short lines at the corners of her mouth, like George’s. But no, she would not grow up, for here, under her hair, was the place the blood had come from.)

  This, this was the way love stories ended. Husbands killed each other in the streets and wives went out and picked up their babies. Banks failed, nations died, babies starved—this was a fine world, wasn’t it, that men had built to live their love stories in?

  Her own baby was screaming. The procession of mothers sank into the weary blackness beneath her mind and the blackness snapped back a maddening primitive retort. Life goes on, it said. Why? she retaliated. Why?—the silly question prompted by the awkward assertions one’s foolish instincts were always making. George for instance, like all males, had absolutely no reasons except those of his instincts for anything he did. That was why it didn’t occur to him not to go on, even now, when they were so obviously ruined.

  She had not stopped shaking but she had stopped crying, so she wiped the flour from her hands and went in to pick up her baby.

  Saturday, March 4

  The drifts of the blizzard around the steps of the Eureka Bank were all undisturbed, so that it could as well have been tenantless for two years as two weeks. But not even having every other bank in the nation for company could make it look less lonely.

  The President had closed them all. Harry Goodman’s Eureka Bank—assets $78,000, liabilities undetermined—was no more tightly closed than the biggest, oldest bank in New York. On that day the Eureka Bank was no more of a failure than any of the others with their good and bad mortgages and other kinds of good and bad paper.

  The President’s inaugural address came over Herman’s radio in the forenoon, and the store was filled with men who had come to hear it. Some of the men had radios at home, but they came to Herman’s store anyway, so as to have company while they listened. Even George was there, standing far back against the shelves, not joining the men around the stove or the ones who leaned on the counter, hovering over the radio, so possessed by the voice in it that they forgot themselves and let their hopefulness and their anxiety show in their faces. George, standing apart from them all, ground his teeth and wondered how they could be so taken in. He didn’t like the phony accent and he didn’t like the highfalutin language and it was just too much when the President said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” By God, what rich man was going to accuse him of being afraid and get away with it, anyhow? He hardly heard any of the rest of the speech, he was so angry at being called afraid.

  When the speech was over and the first murmurs began, he said loudly, “I’d like to get that hothouse pansy out on a farm for just one hour. I’d like to watch him pitch bundles into a thrashing machine when it’s around a hundred and ten in the shade—or wrastle a bull calf that’s taken
a notion he just don’t want to grow up to be a steer!”

  Zack Hoefener began to laugh, holding his goiter with his hand, as though he must not lose track of the upsetting vibrations of his laughter and his heart beating there. Otto Wilkes laughed too, and so did Wally Esskew and Lester Zimmerman. Even the Koslovs began to laugh, though George doubted that any of them could understand what was funny about giving a man with that accent the chore of emasculating a calf.

  Clarence Egger, whose arm had been gobbled up by a threshing machine, waited for them all to stop. “Don’t you sheep brains know that the guy can’t even walk? He had infantile paralysis, for Christ’s sake!”

  George was not going to be made a fool of by Clarence Egger. “Well, he got a great big infantile silver spoon, too, didn’t he?”

  “I’ll take walking any day,” Clarence said. He was the only man in the room who dared, because his right arm was gone, to stand up to George. At times when he was drunk enough, Zack would do it, but nobody else ever did.

  Nevertheless, George felt that they were displeased with him for making them laugh at a crippled man. God-damn them—they were so dumb and ignorant—always confusing the issue. The issue was that a rich man was telling them all not to worry even if they had just lost their last red cent to a little Jew banker. A rich man who couldn’t possibly imagine what it was like to work sixteen hours a day for six months of the year and to sit in a dark house smothering in snow for the other six months, wondering where the money for coal was going to come from. That was the man who was telling them not to worry, and that man’s coddled, polished ignorance was the issue—not whether or not the man could walk.

  George considered himself a well-spoken man, but he had no words to substitute for the obscenities he wanted to say to these silly bleating sheep. Clarence Egger calling him a sheep brain. He put his hands on his hips and lifted his shoulders as though he would sashay into a wrathful jig and he roared the chorus of a bitter song —