The Bones of Plenty Read online

  Oh, Lady, would you be kind enough to give me a bite to eat —

  A piece of bread and butter and a ten-foot slice of meat?

  A cake, a pie, a pudding, to tickle my appetite —

  Let them see, if they could, that this was their song unless things were radically changed. He shoved his way past them as he sang, and stamped out the door. He went on singing as he took the blankets off the horses and climbed on to the seat in the wagon box —

  Come all ye jolly jokers, and listen while I hum.

  A story I’ll relate to you of the Great American Bum.

  From North to East, from South to West,

  Like a swarm of bees they come.

  They wear a shirt that’s dirty

  And full of fleas and crumbs.

  I’ve met with all the toughest cops—as tough as they can be.

  And I’ve been in every calaboose in this land of liberty.

  Sunday, March 12

  By the time the President got around to making a speech on the radio about the banks, a good many of them had already reopened. He called his talk a “fireside chat,” and the image was not reassuring to George. “Chat” was an effete word, used either by women putting on airs or by wealthy people of either sex who had the time to waste in small talk while they sat around in parlors that bulged with bay windows hung in velvet and lace. A fireplace was an expensive luxury which added to the cost of heating a house by inviting down the chimney every prowling wind. The fireplace that came to George’s mind was accoutered with hundreds of dollars’ worth of brass, polished by some ill-paid servant. And over the mantel was an oil portrait of the Wall Street grandfather who made the fortune by speculating in Western land or by other questionable means.

  “It is safer to keep your money in the reopened bank than under the mattress,” the President said.

  “What money?” George cried to Rachel. “Another rich man in the White House. Oh, how they love to tell us how they know all about being poor. ‘You ah fahmahs. I am a fahmah, too!’ Oh, yes, he’s a farmer too! What a nice little farmhouse he has there at Hyde Park!”

  George sat at his own fireside, a bearable distance from the plump round stove that blistered the air in a six-foot radius, and helplessly cursed Harry Goodman while the President urged the people to bring their money back to the banks. But George predicted that putting the bankers back in control of the country might not go so smoothly as the President thought it would, and sure enough, there was quite a piece in the paper just a few days later. He read it aloud to Rachel after supper, yelling out into the kitchen over the noise she made doing the dishes.

  “Look here what happened down in Oklahoma,” he said. “I told you there was going to be bloodshed. Unless I miss my guess this is just the beginning. Fellow here—a state bank examiner—W. C. Ernest, his name was, was looking over the Citizens’ State Bank. Paper says he telephoned the State Bank Commissioner to come and take over the bank. Then it says, ‘As Mr. Ernest replaced the receiver of the instrument and turned to speak to the bank president, he was shot in the head and died instantly.’ Well, I tell you, it’ll get so the government don’t dare send out anybody on jobs like that any more. Or anyhow they won’t be able to find anybody that’ll go! You know how that fellow from Bismarck roared in and out of here when he came to clean out Harry’s bank. He knew his life wasn’t worth a plugged nickel around here! Who cares? Might as well hang as starve. You wait. It can’t help but start pretty soon.”

  Most of the time Rachel believed he was only relieving his feelings by talking this way. But once in a while he worried her. “Who do you think is going to start it?” she called in.

  “How should I know?” he said irritably. “Who ever knows who starts a revolution? It just starts, that’s all. Maybe the coal miners. Maybe the veterans … Hah! How do you like this? Right on the same page with this other story. President said he got ten thousand telegrams ‘applauding his bank policy.’ Well, that’s a little late for W. C. Ernest, isn’t it? I wonder if Roosevelt has heard about him yet.”

  Thursday, March 23

  The newly elected German parliament organized, held its first meeting, handed all its power over to the newly elected Chancellor for four years, and dissolved itself again. Almost everywhere new officials were taking over, they were doing drastic things. Wild Bill Langer, the new governor of North Dakota, proclaimed a moratorium on payments of farm mortgages and decreed that there must be no more forced sales of premises or personal property used for agriculture.

  George thought about that decree while he rode behind his team, round and round an eighty-acre field, turning two furrows at a time. The governor swore he would call out the state militia to restrain the county sheriffs from carrying out sales. They were already having battles over the Minnesota governor’s proclamation to the same effect. George wondered if Langer would really follow through on what he’d said. Above all, he wondered if what Langer had said would carry any weight with Vick. According to Wild Bill Langer, Mr. James T. Vick would not be able to attach George Custer’s stock and equipment in order to collect rent. George did not propose to try to beat Vick out of his rent, but on the other hand, if Vick did not loan him the money to get in the crop, Vick would have everything to lose and nothing to gain, the way George saw it. After all, there were always just two ways for Vick ever to get his rent—out of a crop or out of George’s own possessions. Now there was supposedly only one—out of a crop. The more George thought about it, the more reasonable it was to expect that Vick would let him have the money.

  Every day he plowed and figured. With his four-horse team and a two-bottom plow he could turn over four acres in a twelve-hour day. He could get by without plowing the other wheat field because he had plowed it last spring and it was loose enough just to disk and drag and seed. Even so, he had oats and corn and barley and hay to get in. He might have to get Ralph Sundquist over for a week or so with his team, and he would have to pay Ralph in cash because he didn’t have either goods or labor to trade for Ralph’s work.

  On the last day of March the weather was unseasonably warm. This early in the year they were already falling behind their normal seasonal total of moisture. If it was going to be another drought year, he should get the crops in as soon as it was humanly possible in order to take advantage of what little moisture the winter had left behind. He decided he could no longer put off going to bargain with James T. Vick.

  Will had been watching and hoping to catch George driving by alone in the car. He was just coming from the barn when he spotted the old Ford below on the road and he jogged down his driveway and flagged George to a stop. George did not turn off the engine; he couldn’t bear to be interrupted in a project—especially one that was so unpleasant to think about. Will found it even harder than usual to talk to him.

  “Have you got a minute, George?” he asked.

  “Just about that,” George said.

  “Rachel’s mother and I—that is—I don’t know whether you lost money in the bank or not,” Will began, “but if you did, we’d like to let you have whatever you lost for as long as you need it. We’ve always kept an account in Jimtown. That is, I wish you’d ask us if you need help this spring, regardless … we … Rachel—might not need to know.” He saw that George was already angry and he wondered miserably what he had done wrong, besides telling a lie about a sizable Jamestown account.

  His first four words had been wrong. George took them as an affront to him as a son-in-law. Why hadn’t Will said, “Rose and I”? Why “Rachel’s mother and I,” as though Rachel still belonged in her father’s tall house on the hill, not in his own?

  “We’ll get the crops in, I reckon,” George said. “Much obliged.”

  He shifted into gear and pretended not to hear Will shouting, “Well, now, you know where to come if you change your mind!”

  Will walked back up the hill. His legs seemed uncommonly heavy. They made his toes come scudging into the ground at each step just an instant b
efore he expected them to. He glanced up at the orchard, at the dead crab-apple tree over the box of money. He wondered if it was the pain in his belly that made his legs so heavy.

  The thirty miles to Jamestown were gone before George had even begun to exhaust the choice words he might have said to Will or that he would like to say to James T. Vick. He had, in fact, spent the entire time assembling choice words, so that he found himself parking the car down the street from Vick’s store without any clear idea of what he was actually going to say.

  He made his way past the disgusting counters, wondering if Vick was watching him from the balcony. He flinched as one of the little change carriers whizzed over his head, so close that he could feel its breeze parting his hair. A damned store for women.

  He stood in the door of Vick’s office, holding his light summer cap in one hand, shaking Vick’s hand with the other.

  “How’s the farm, Custer?” Vick shouted above the noise of the little cash carriers coming home.

  “Still there, Mr. Vick,” George said.

  He decided to make an oblique approach. He began while Vick cleared papers off a chair for him. “They say it’s going to be a bad grasshopper year, and the drought’s going to be bad, too, maybe. I think I ought to put in more hay this year—hay and pasture. No rust and smut to worry about; not so much pest damage; drought don’t hurt it so much; good for the land. If the hay don’t bring any price, maybe I could feed a couple-three more cows through the winter. Cream prices are going up a little.”

  “Oh, no, Custer!” Vick burst in. “This is just the year for wheat. Government says the drought’ll have the prices way up—better than they’ve been for years. No, this is the year to plant wheat and get whatever we can.”

  George had learned that an argument inevitably and quickly led to the same conclusion. Vick always confronted George with the same simple alternatives—George could obey or lose his lease. If George lost his lease, he would also lose all the improvements he had made. George knew that if Vick even got around to offering him those alternatives today, he would hit him. He started over. “I want to plant a new kind of seed this year. The money for it was in the bank. I never saved back any seed last fall. If I don’t put in a crop, I guess you don’t get any rent, do you? That is, if Langer sticks to his guns.” His hand was being forced too early in the game. With Vick he always found himself having to bet his chips before the draw.

  Vick tilted back his swivel chair and smiled. He had big, oddly flat lips. When he stretched them to smile, George thought of the ragged strip of dull red rubber tied to a boy’s slingshot.

  “Always burning your bridges, aren’t you, Custer? That’s no way to do business. Why didn’t you save some seed?”

  “It’s useless to keep on planting Marquis year after year! The rust takes more of it every year. I figured last fall I might as well make the switch to Ceres this spring or—or just get out! The rust don’t bother Ceres and the smut couldn’t be any worse than it is in the Marquis, and the Ceres is supposed to take the drought better. I didn’t burn my bridges! I saved every dime I could toward this seed.”

  “Did you actually have enough in the bank to see you through?”

  God, how he hated the impertinent way the man had of pinning him down! Landlords! Vick was so lucky that nobody had killed him yet.

  “I figured on a very small loan.” George never could lie.

  “Well,” Vick said. He let his chair fall forward and bounce him out toward the file where he kept his claims on the sweat of men. “I think we can arrange for the seed.”

  He pulled out George’s papers. He figured on scratch paper for a moment and then laid the paper on the edge of his desk, inclining a shoulder toward George to indicate that he should move his chair closer. George did not move his chair, but he leaned forward. Vick pointed with his pencil to his scattered bits of arithmetic, as though George would have trouble following him. George gritted his teeth.

  “Here’s the way the deal works,” Vick said, in a tone he might have used in explaining the store’s policies to a new clerk. “Another sixty acres in wheat—that will still leave you a hundred for pasture and corn and hay.”

  “How do you know how much hay and pasture I’ll need?” George cried. “It depends on how dry it is, for Christ’s sake! It depends on how soon I have to start feeding hay when the pastures give out!”

  “Get rid of some stock.”

  “I told you, the cream is what’s keeping us going! And I’ve got to have horses, for Pete’s sake. You want me to hitch my wife to the plow, maybe, like them Roosians used to do?”

  “The hell with cream,” Vick said. “You and I don’t have any agreement about cream. I don’t care how much cream you sell. It’s wheat I care about. That’s the deal. Take it or leave it.”

  George’s heart shook his great chest under the denim jacket he had worn as an insult to Vick. He was very hot. His hands were slippery on the varnished arms of his chair. His hands were hungry, pleading to wrap themselves around a neck. He stood up.

  “I can get along without your money, Mr. Vick,” he said. “I’ll put the crops in the way the lease stands now. A hundred and sixty acres of wheat. A third of the net to you. Good morning.”

  He strode from the office and before he had taken three steps he knew he had got out just in time. A minute longer and he might have killed him.

  On the way home he thought about Will’s offer. He would have to take him up on it now, or else get out. He would have to go to the one man he had vowed never to go to. And even after he had borrowed from his wife’s father, he still had to put up with the same galling agreement with Vick. Before, he had been running to stand still; now he was going in debt to stand still. Now he would be entirely dependent on what the Ceres and the fall prices did. If they let him down he would be hopelessly ensnared by two old men—James T. Vick and Will Shepard. It wasn’t right that the accident of birth should place one generation in a position of such power over another—just because they had been around to get when the getting was good. Will had cashed in on every good year since the beginning of the century. He had bought a section of choice land that had increased in value more than three hundred per cent in a decade, so that the original mortgage, which had once been so huge, had decreased to an almost insignificant percentage of the value of the farm. And then Will had paid off that mortgage with war-inflated dollars and with wheat prices five times what they had been when he bought the farm and a dozen times what they were again now, a dozen years later.

  And where had he, George Armstrong Custer, been during those good years? Working for nothing on his father’s farm, that’s where. A boy in his late teens, already stronger than most men, doing more work than most men, thirsting to go to war, kept home by his father to raise the wheat that would win the war. Oh, yes, win the war, and make so much money for his father that the old man had felt rich enough to speculate with it and finally lose his shirt. He managed to lose it even before the crash, and then he managed to die from drinking a little too much Indiana Red Eye and leave a farm, mortgaged in inflated dollars, to the boys who had earned him the money that had made him feel so rich.

  Then a very young schoolteacher had come to take the one-room school where he had gone himself. She had not the vaguest notion of how to make the big boys behave, and he had been amused by her helplessness. In fact, he had been infatuated by it. He had wanted to protect her, even though he had enjoyed teasing her himself.

  He had married her, and moved off his father’s farm, leaving the financial wreck to his brothers. The next thing he knew, he was leasing a half section conveniently adjacent to the farm of his father-in-law. That was his life in a nutshell, he thought.

  Yet all it took to succeed, if a man had been born at the right time, was a good piece of property, the strength to farm it profitably, and the sense to hang on to it, to get it free and clear, and to keep it that way. Then a man could get through the drought years; he could farm the way he wante
d to. What did a man’s good farming sense count for if a city man made all the rules? But his father-in-law and his own father had been born at the right time. His own father had been a fool. His father-in-law had been a hard-working, conservative farmer. It was all that simple. And now Will Shepard was in a position to make loans to his son-in-law even when millions of solid citizens all over the country were finding themselves entirely wiped out.

  When George got home it was nearly two in the afternoon. Rachel had just finished draining some soured curds from their thin pale yellow water.

  “You haven’t eaten yet, have you?” she asked. “I’ll have this Dutch cheese ready in a minute. I can fry you some bread if you want it. I’m ready to bake this batch and the last of the old loaf is pretty dry.”

  He looked at her standing before her cupboard, adding another dollop of cream, getting a clean teaspoon, tasting the cheese, sprinkling on a bit more salt, mashing it into the cheese. Her short, durable figure, built like her father’s, was clothed in a cotton print dress and an apron she had made herself. Her arms, bare below the short sleeves, were still tan from last summer. She never burned. He, on the other hand, never seemed to stop burning. And every winter he became white and vulnerable again. She did not look at him, pretending that the cottage cheese took all her attention. She was letting him choose exactly what and when to tell her, and her delicacy defeated him. It neutralized him, just as Vick had succeeded in neutralizing him. There was never anything to strike at.

  He sat alone at the round table, looking down the hill toward the barn and chewing the food she put before him. The day was shot as far as accomplishing anything in the field went. He might as well let the horses rest for the afternoon. They needed it. If he hustled he could clean the barn in the time left before evening chores.