The Bones of Plenty Read online

  He mopped his plate with the last piece of bread until it was polished free of cheese and potatoes. He changed into his old overalls, put his rubber boots back on, pulled his cap hard on his head, and paused, with his cotton work glove on the doorknob. He opened his mouth again, but when he spoke it was only to bring up a small question concerning their daily existence.

  “You can go over to fetch Lucy from school, can’t you?” he asked. “This job’ll take me right up to milking time.”

  Why don’t you ask me now, he thought. Why don’t you say, “Well, how did it go? What luck did you have?”

  Her failure to ask was another indication that she no longer cared what became of their future together. Her lack of curiosity was another sign of her lack of commitment to him. She did not ever ask to know what he was thinking.

  “All right,” she said. “I need a few things at the store anyway, so I might as well go after her.”

  He tipped her chin roughly in his glove and made her look at him. “I sure picked a swell time to get born, didn’t I? Twenty-five years sooner and I’d have cleaned up on wheat. Twenty-five years later and I’d have been chauffeured back and forth from school like Little Lord Fauntleroy.”

  He banged the door against the weatherstripping and walked down to the barn. He did the cows’ stalls first because they were the most offensive to him. He never liked to put off a distasteful job, because he could not stop thinking about it till it was done. He didn’t mind the droppings in the horse stalls, for unless the smell became too concentrated, it was actually pleasant to him—rather like a faintly decaying hayfield, much distilled.

  As he squeezed the handle of the shovel and lifted the mushy loads out of the cows’ trench he said over and over to himself, “That liver-lipped swindler will never know how close he came today. He’ll never know.”

  How could an ignorant dime-store owner be expected to know anything about a new kind of wheat, anyhow? He was too busy buying celluloid dolls from Japan for a penny each and selling them for a dime. And then the Japs were using every American dollar they could get their hands on to buy guns to kill the Chinese. If nobody else on earth made a thing George needed, he would get along without it rather than buy anything that said “Made in Japan.” But a man who made his money selling celluloid dolls and supported Japanese aggressors who were slaughtering Chinese farmers and their families—that man was going to twit him about burning his bridges when he decided he had to change the seed he was planting.

  Nobody in the vicinity was planting it yet, but they all would. He knew they would just as soon as they all saw how well the Ceres was going to do for him. It took a little guts to be first to try something, that was all.

  For a long time Marquis had been the favorite of hard red spring wheat growers, but stem rust did more damage every year, as the rust spores became ensconced in a wider and wider area, and new varieties, traveling north on the rigs and clothing of the threshing crews, mixed with the old spores and grew strong through hybridization.

  Rust and smut were the two ravaging diseases. Smutty wheat brought less from the millers because cleaning it was an expensive proposition, but at least there was some wheat to cut with the binder; smutty wheat wasn’t collapsed on the ground in red-brown broken stalks devoid of kernels. Seed wheat could be treated for smut, but nothing could stop rust except the kind of state-wide effort to wipe out its winter host—the barberry bushes—that the government would not make. So Ceres was George’s last hope. It was rust resistant and more drought resistant than Marquis. It had been developed at the North Dakota Experimental Station just a couple of years ago, and it ought to be right for North Dakota if any wheat was any more.

  No brand of wheat was immune to wheat midges, sawflies, pink maggots, cutworms, leaf hoppers, plant lice, billbugs, army worms, black chaff, Hessian fly, chinch bugs, true wireworms, false wireworms, strawworms, jointworms, white grubs, or grain moths. And if the grasshoppers were bad enough they could strip the fields, as they had done a couple of times within his father’s memory, and the brand of wheat would not make any difference at all to them, either. Moreover, Ceres and Marquis were equally vulnerable to dust storms and wind. Hail, or even a hard rain, would dislodge the hardening kernels during their maturing weeks, and the kind of seed he had planted wouldn’t make any difference at all.

  But after the way his Marquis had surrendered to rust last summer, George had made up his mind never to plant it again. He had simply sold every bushel he harvested and decided that one way or another he would find the money for the new seed when the spring came. Now spring had come, and he was left with exactly one place to get the money. He squeezed hard on the shovel handle again. The man he had sworn never to go to for help—the man he had cut off this very morning.

  He pushed the wheelbarrow down the aisle and laid a row of planks from the barn door to the manure pile across the slushy barnyard. That morning the ground had been hard with thickly frosted ridges outlining the hoof prints in the mud of yesterday’s thawing, and water had been frozen in the deeper tracks. Tomorrow morning it would be the same. Spring came reluctantly to this northern place, but it was here, nevertheless.

  Ceres, goddess of growing things, was the name that had been in his mind all winter long. No more Marquis, that debilitated aristocrat which bled so easily that he could lose up to fifty per cent of his crop in a bad rust year. Ceres, after all, was of the family of aristocrats also, as far as wheat went. Hard spring wheat was bread wheat—the best in the world. All the soft wheats and the winter wheats grown farther south and west were used for inferior products—restaurant pies and crackers and abominable new kinds of cereals to be eaten cold. Durum wheat was used for macaroni and spaghetti and other foreign things. But the bakers had to have hard spring wheat for bread, even when they mixed it with winter wheat. When there was an American surplus of the softer wheats, they still would have to import Canadian spring wheat in the years when North Dakota did not produce enough. It took an austere climate to create that kind of wheat—wheat that grew hard and full of protein under the withering semidesert sky. It was the kind of durable, determined grain that could survive and flourish on the smallest possible margin—very much like the men who grew it. Like George’s ancestors, who had fought for and built the state that men like James T. Vick were now taking away from them. Half the farmers in the state were tenants now, like George.

  Nevertheless, George was still proud to have been born in a state that created distinction from hardship. It pleased his Scottish blood. If ever there was a one-crop state, it was the one he lived in.

  The trouble was that a state with such extreme dedication to one crop—bread—was so helpless when something went askew with the market for bread. When the world was lean with war and could buy bread, North Dakota fattened; when the world was lean with peace and could not buy bread, North Dakota starved—through drought and bumper crops. A North Dakota farmer ought to be able to lay up enough cash and own enough livestock so that he didn’t have to plant wheat at all in such a bad year as this one promised to be. But half the farmers in the state had to do what a city man told them to do. The economy needed radical changes that were long overdue. The absentee landlords must be stripped of the absolute power they had over their tenants, the railroads and elevators must be forced to abandon their monopolies, and the Wall Street and Chicago speculators must be outlawed. Until these changes were made, George Armstrong Custer must go on obediently plowing up a hundred and sixty acres of dry blowing land and trying to get a wheat crop out of it.

  That night he sat down after supper with his books and figured out how much money he would have to borrow. He needed a little over two hundred bushels of seed, for he always planted the optimum amount—roughly a bushel and a half to the acre. It would be around a hundred and fifty dollars for seed alone. Considering all the other things he would need cash for, including the biggest expense—paying the threshers—he didn’t see how he could possibly get by on less than thre
e hundred dollars cash between now and September.

  He must not count on more than forty dollars from cream between now and then, for the prices always dropped in the summer when the market was glutted from all the freshening cows. His five-year record book showed that the year before the Wall Street crash a decent cow, producing around a hundred and fifty pounds of butterfat a year, had brought in sixty-nine dollars cash just for her cream, not counting the skim that had gone to pigs, calves, and chickens. But last year, just four years later, a herd of six cows had netted him less than a hundred and fifty. Last year, of course, had been the worst year in history, but even so, when he put the two sets of figures together, they were hard to take.

  “Rachel!” he called out to the kitchen. “Do you realize that a man could make as much money with two cows in 1928 as he can make with six now? It just works out almost to the last penny. A man sweats just as hard and grows just as much feed and cleans out just as much manure and he makes a third as much money. It just don’t figure, does it?”

  “Nothing makes sense,” she said.

  “What did you say?”

  “Nothing makes sense!”

  It bothered him to have her agree with him. “Yes it does make sense! It’s just the same old story. Just the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. Just Jay Gould and J. P. Morgan and Jim Hill and all the rest of them getting crookeder and richer every day. Why, these senators are proving it on them every day—what they all did on the stock market, and the way they got their monopolies on the railroads! They’re the only ones to blame for the crash—all those birds on Wall Street. They’re the fellows we have to thank for getting twenty-six cents a bushel last fall. But you don’t see any of those big guys losing their shirts, do you? No. Only the little guy.”

  But even with the farmer’s market ruined, cream prices were a little better this spring because of the drought. George thought he was safe in counting on forty dollars cash from cream between now and when the wheat checks came in. He would ask Will for two hundred and fifty dollars. Four years ago that much money would not have looked like the fortune of half a lifetime.

  He wouldn’t have been quite so reluctant to borrow if he could have done it a little later in the season—June or July, with a stand of growing wheat as security. But this way he was borrowing against ground that still froze every night—ground that wasn’t even his—ground that he was utterly committed to, though it was in no way committed to him. His operating margin had narrowed into a wedge that was threatening to pinch him to death. Everything and everybody had a hold on him, and he had a hold on nothing. So long as rich men wrote the laws, what could a little man do?

  Wednesday, April 12

  George awoke in the prairie dawn at four in the morning, too hot under the quilts that had been just right when he went to bed, knowing what that hot feeling meant—that the south wind of spring had come and that today was the day he would finally have to borrow money from his father-in-law.

  Money became more confusing every day. There were forty bills in Congress calling for some kind of inflation. There was an embargo on shipments of gold from American shores. But rich American citizens who knew the revolution was imminent had already sent so much gold to Switzerland in the last three years that the Swiss, feverishly building vaults, had stopped paying interest on the gold and started charging storage costs.

  Some people, convinced by William Jennings Bryan and his Cross of Gold, predicted that leaving the gold standard would be the salvation of the country. Other people, usually rich Easterners, predicted that leaving the gold standard would lead to the violent end of Western civilization—as they put it. George, being a follower of the silver-tongued Nebraskan, believed that his silver standard was already half a century overdue. But whether Roosevelt followed the lead of Bryan or not, there was one thing about money that George was dead sure of when he woke up that morning. Today was the day he had to go to his father-in-law and ask him for two hundred and fifty dollars.

  All the while he milked he became more and more furious with his wife’s preaching father—hypocritical old man! He must have kept plenty of it in Jamestown all the time or he wouldn’t have it to spare now. No wonder the old man didn’t want inflation—not with the amount of cold cash he had stashed away. When he got back up to the house and found that Rachel had not quite got the separator together, he erupted.

  “For Pete’s sake! I go down and pitch hay to six cows and milk every last one of them by myself and you can’t even get the damned separator together!”

  “Maybe that’s because you forgot to run the rinse water through it last night, and when I started to put it together this morning, it was so sour I had to wash every single disk!”

  She clamped the two spouts over the thirty-two disks, banged the last fitting on top of them, snatched up a large aluminum float, and let it drop into place with a clang that stung his ears.

  “Rachel!” he shouted. “What on earth ails you!”

  He began turning the handle with a retaliatory spleen. A bell on the handle rang with every revolution until the speed was up. “Ting! Ting! Ting!” it went, as the thirty-two disks spun faster and faster, building up the force that would separate the milk, particle by particle. When the bell stopped ringing he turned the valve and let the milk flow from the bowl on to the float. The whining groan of the heavy parts whirling in the machine was the only sound in the kitchen.

  After he had run all the milk through, he poured the warm cream into one of the cans on the porch and wrote out two tags on the kitchen table.

  “I’m going over town to take in the cream and I’ll take Lucy,” he said. “Is there anything you need?”

  “Why do you have to take it? Isn’t Otto going to pick it up today?”

  “I want to go in and weigh it myself on old man Adams’s scales,” George said. He was being half honest. He did want to check on the weights he’d been getting from the creamery in Jamestown. But mostly this was the best excuse he could think of for getting over to see Will during the daytime when he could try to catch him alone outside. “Besides,” he added, “I don’t trust Wilkes as far as I could throw his Percheron by the tail. If he thought he could get away with it, I wouldn’t put it past him to bring along an empty can of his own and just fill it up with a few dips out of all the other cans he hauls.”

  “Oh, George,” Rachel said. “You mustn’t talk that way about a neighbor!” She glanced at Lucy, waiting behind George with her lunch pail. Lucy looked back with that assured gaze that said as clearly as a seven-year-old could, “Do you think I don’t know all about the Wilkeses?”

  “Phooey!” George said. He couldn’t stand her sob-sister delicacy—just like her old man’s. “You know the scoundrel as well as I do!” He started out the door. “Is there anything you need? You never answered my question.”

  “No … not really. But if you have time I wish you’d stop by the folks’ and pick up that old brooder Dad said we could have. You’re going to have to fix it before we can use it and you might as well get it so you can work on it this Sunday.”

  George was simultaneously grateful and annoyed at being handed such a good excuse for stopping to see Will. He was angry because he had to have feelings of gratitude or relief at all, and because now it would look to Will as though he had thought up the brooder himself as a way of reopening the conversation he had so rudely closed. But still, if he should get caught with Rose and be unable to find Will, it would be handy to have a ready-made bit of business with her.

  “I reckon I can manage that,” he said.

  In the car he said to Lucy, “Days are long again, and three miles is no distance. You ought to be walking home from now on. When I was a boy, I used to walk almost four miles to school every day, whether the days were long or short, till they built that new school next to our place. When I was your age I could have walked home from town in less than an hour.”

  “So can I!” Lucy cried. “I’ll do it tonight! I can
walk just as fast as a boy!”

  It tickled him to be able to get her goat so easily, but he was irritated, too, because she had no business using that tone of voice to him.

  “Just watch yourself,” he said coldly.

  She bent her head so he couldn’t see her face and outlined with her finger the reflections in her lunch pail. Her cheeks were scarlet. She had a Custer temper all right.

  “You can walk tonight,” he told her when he stopped the car at the schoolyard gate.

  She jumped out and ran with a straight, easy stride toward the building. She had the best body and the strongest run of any child he could see in the yard. What a waste it was that she hadn’t been born a boy!

  He drove back over the tracks from the depot with the two weight tags for a net total of seventy-six pounds of cream, dated and signed by Millard Adams, stuck in the big pocket of his overalls. There just might be some fireworks now, if the creamery check didn’t square with this weight. And if the creamery did agree, there might still be some fireworks. He just might have to ask Otto, how come? Prices were low enough to make him pretty mean about being cheated by a deadbeat who already overcharged him for hauling. And when George Custer felt mean enough …

  Rose heard the car when he was halfway up the drive, and stepped out of the house with a welcoming smile that flickered from happiness to civility when she saw that nobody was with him. She didn’t expect to see him during plowing season at this time of day, though Rachel often came with the baby on her way back from taking Lucy to school and stopped for a few minutes.

  “Rachel said you folks had a brooder you wasn’t planning to use this spring,” George said.

  “Oh, I’m so glad you decided you could use it,” Rose said. It seemed to George that she always said the wrong thing. He always saw through it when she tried to be polite to him. “I’ll just run down and see if it’s in the cellar,” she went on. “I think that’s where I had Will put it.”