The Bones of Plenty (48 page)

Her mother tore out the catalog page with the children’s foot measurements marked off on it. She dusted Lucy’s bare foot with powder so it would make exactly the right imprint when she stepped down on the markings.

“Just make sure you get them big enough,” her father said, remaining behind his paper. “Let’s try to get her through the winter on one pair this year.”

“I ordered them just as big as I could last fall. Don’t you remember how they were so big they slipped up and down so she had to have her heels bandaged till her feet grew? And the toes curled up and they always
were
too wide for her, even when they got too short. How can I get them any bigger than that? It isn’t
my
fault her feet grow so fast. She takes after
you
and you know it!”

After the shoe ordering was done and checked and rechecked with powder on both bare feet, the wonderful noncontroversial part of ordering began. This was the year for her to get a new sleeper and a new union suit. Last year was the year to skip and by now the ankles of her underwear were nearly to the middle of her calves and her mother had had to cut the feet out of her sleepers. She took a long time to decide whether the new sleepers should be pink or blue or yellow. It was lovely to sit and imagine all that new fuzz that would soon be snuggling around her in such a friendly way.

After Lucy was taken care of, Rachel tackled the oilcloth. Only the “best” grade was shown in color and she never bought that. She always chose something from the rotogravure pictures facing the color page where the “good” quality was illustrated. She would try to imagine from studying the tiny pictures what the full-sized patterns would be like, and from reading the description what “predominantly green” might mean. They had once got a “predominantly green” that George claimed was not green at all, but blue. He despised blue. “Nobody but a Roosian could stand that color,” he would say.

Rachel sighed and shut her eyes against the two gas mantles burning two feet in front of her face. She tried to visualize a new oilcloth on the table, but all she saw were the mantles thrusting like thumbs against her eyelids. Herman had some nice oilcloth in the rolls on his rack, but he was so much more expensive; even when she figured in the cost of mailing it from Chicago, she could get just as good a grade for as much as twenty-five cents less from Ward’s.

There were other colors George did not like in excessive amounts. Red was all right for a kid’s sweater or a pair of little girl’s ankle-socks, but not to look at for three meals every day. She herself found “predominantly black” not quite cheerful enough for a winter breakfast some hours before the sun came up, and two years ago she had got a “predominantly yellow” one that had turned out to be exactly the color of squash. Maybe it was just that she had been pregnant with Cathy that year, but the very thought of that oilcloth made her sick. Whatever else she got, she wouldn’t choose “predominantly yellow.”

The oilcloth would not have been so important if it had not been almost the only thing that ever changed in the house and if the dining room table had not been the commanding piece of furniture in the main room of the house. She finally decided on “predominantly pink,” and hoped it wouldn’t turn out to be either too red or too orange.

The order added up to $27.46, plus $2.97 for postage. She was just adding those two together when George cleared his throat and said from behind his paper, “How much is it going to come to, do you think?”

“A little over thirty dollars. I don’t see how I can cut it down.”

“Well … that’s not so bad. Will that really do it?”

“Till Christmas it will. I don’t know—we may need some things then.”

“I was just thinking … maybe we ought to get Lucy’s Christmas present early this year. She might as well get the good of it all winter. Do you want some ice-skates, Lucy? Real skates? Not these clamp-ons that are always falling off, but shoe-skates? Would you rather have them now and then not have anything much at Christmas?”

“Oh, George, can we afford anything like that?”

“She’s getting big. She ought to be strengthening her ankles now, before she gets too heavy. She’s got wonderful balance. She ought to be learning to skate.”

“Yes, but here you worry about her growing out of her
shoes!
Shoe-skates are a
huge
investment for the amount of good she’ll get out of them before they’re too small.”

“We’ll save them for Cathy,” he said. He sounded mad. Lucy could hardly breathe, she was so afraid he would change his mind. “We’ll get the good out of them. If
I
say we can afford it, we can afford it.” He got out of his chair and turned to the skate pages. “Here. Let’s see … ‘built-in steel arch supports … lined for extra warmth… reinforced toes … hardened, tempered nickel-plated blades … hockey style.’ That looks like what we want.”

“George! That’s almost the most expensive pair!”

“Now Rachel, there’s no use getting a thing like this if it’s going to be no good. The steel in these other blades here wouldn’t hold an edge, and the shoes aren’t strong enough. Why save a dollar by getting something that you’re never satisfied with? This here is a reasonable price—that is, as reasonable as
any
prices are these days. If we want her to learn to skate, this is what she should have.”

Lucy could hardly wait for the next morning when they could mail the letter and she could know that the order was on its way to wherever the big store was. She said over and over to herself the fine phrases describing her skates—“built-in steel supports,” “nickel-plated blades, nickel-plated blades!” There might even be some ice in the slough by the time the skates got here if only the slough got some water and froze. But the main problem was the water, not the freezing.

The thing she couldn’t stop thinking about, as she lay in bed, too excited to sleep, was how hard it was to understand what her father wanted. One minute he was so mad that they had to buy her just a plain pair of shoes and the next minute, out of a clear blue sky, he just got up out of his chair and came over to the table and picked out the best pair of skates in the catalog.

George planned to ship his first batch of turkeys the next day when Lucy would be there to help. Before it got too dark to see he sharpened the knives he would need, straddling the narrow board seat and working the treadle with both feet while with both hands he held a howling blade against the spinning stone. A rim of fire spat into the dusk around the side of the stone as the knife took a hot, gleaming, new edge. George was proud of the way he could operate a grindstone. He was better than most professionals even on this old thing he had assembled out of what had been nothing but junk.

His family had come to this prairie before there were any such professionals and had done very well without them. When the specialists came and built a town, they were useful, of course, but the town men, who could not live a day without the food he grew or the business he supplied, were there to serve
him,
never
he
to serve
them.
The town men lived by their specialties, he by his mastery of nearly all the things they could do individually. If he did not have enough of their medium of exchange to purchase their services, he could almost always get along without them. It would take him a little longer, using makeshift tools, but he could do it.

But that one medium of exchange—cash—undependable as it had proved to be, had become so important in the last few decades that now a man like him found himself in a paradoxical situation. The currencies his ancestors had used and he had inherited—his inventiveness, courage, strength, skill with his land and his animals—had been driven off the market by the intrinsically meaningless currency of printed paper. The currencies of his ancestors had always before added up to a sum that read “independence,” a thing that no man could ever put a paper-money price tag on. Once the currencies that added up to that sum called independence had been indispensable for the kind of cosmic bargaining that required a man to fight Indians, live in a sod hut, see the grasshoppers take all of the crop that he had planted almost barehanded in virgin soil, or watch a prairie fire burning toward him across the entire round horizon.

Now his independence was the one great treasure left to him, entrusted to him by the men who founded his line in this nation and in this prairie, and he did not believe that any material reverses could ever cause him to lose a treasure that was not material. It did not matter how drastically his own inherited currencies appeared to be devalued by that worthless paper currency which was so nefariously used by Jew bankers and grain speculators. The speculators and the country had found out just how much a lot of their paper was worth, hadn’t they? But
he,
G. A. Custer, still had his treasure—his independence.

Thus he would ask himself, “Can I grind this knife better than it would be ground by a city man who can do nothing else besides grind knives?” And he would answer himself, “Yes, Custer, by God you
can!”
And again he would ask himself, “Custer, is it time for you to go to work for the other fellow, and punch his time clock, go down in his cussed mines or run a cussed lathe for him?” And the answer would be, “What Custer, for the last two hundred years, has punched another man’s time clock?”

A chicken that had adopted George came to grab for something beneath his banging treadle, nearly getting its head mashed. “Where did you come from?” he said. “Hasn’t Lucy locked you all up yet?”

The chicken was the bizarre result of one of his minor experiments. For a while he had simply let various breeds of chickens run together and mix themselves up as their inclinations led them. After all, every once in a while a crazy mixture bred true and turned out to have some new and superior characteristics. He got a kick out of it. He had had Rhode Island Reds, Buff Orpingtons, Leghorns, and a few little black bantams. He couldn’t imagine how it had happened, but although all the other chickens had turned out to be at least recognizably half and half, this one seemed to be an equal mixture of all four. It was black and red and yellow and dirty-white, and it was about three-quarters of the size of a normal chicken. It had the thick under-down of a Buff Orpington in various shades of yellow. There was Rhode Island Red on its wings and tail and Leghorn in its white neck and head and startling red eye. When it had first begun to feather out he had hardly been able to believe what he saw, and he had taken it aside from the others and fed it extra corn. He wanted to make sure it survived because he wanted to see what happened to it. Because of the corn, it began to follow him about—as though it felt more at home with him than with those whose haphazard cohabitations had produced it. It had never laid an egg as far as he knew, and he wondered if it was sterile, like a mule, or just lazy.

He would talk to it in an imitation of the desultory and witless sounds emitted by a foolish old hen who had neither chicks, unhatched eggs, a juicy food discovery, nor a laid or unlaid egg on her mind. The chicken would talk back to him and whenever he had human company he introduced the chicken and conversed with it for the visitor’s amusement. It was such an improbable creature that it was like a walking parlor trick.

“You good-for-nothing freak. What are you doing here?” he asked it again. He stopped the wheel, took off his glove, and tested the knife against his bare thumb. He flicked his glove at the chicken. It side-stepped with a mad squawk that sounded exactly like “Look
out
there!” and then came back to peck at his hand when he reached down for the glove.

“Don’t you ever get enough to eat?
I
ought to eat
you!”

He waved the knife at it. “You better make yourself scarce in the morning. I’m liable to get you in spite of myself.” He went on pumping the treadle, feeling his feet begin to get heavy as the stone disk whirred against the blade.

Before he went to bed he hauled up as much water as would fill the boiler and the tub. The well was acting almost normal again, but he still felt tense when he pumped it and relieved when he had finished pumping.

As he made his trips past the turkey pen, he looked over at the dark masses of them roosting on their poles and wondered what they would bring this year. Turkeys were a lot of work. In order to have them as big as possible for the Thanksgiving market, he got the hens to set early in the year—so early that he always had to worry on a cold spring night for fear some poults would become lost from their mother and freeze to death. He would go out searching for chilled poults on those nights, and if he found any he would bring them into the house to revive them.

It was wonderful, though, to see how fast turkeys would grow, given enough food and space to scratch around in. By September the scrawny ugly adolescents had become big birds gulping down corn by the bushel, shoving and fighting each other for it, though there was plenty for all. They preened their magnificent white-tipped feathers in the Indian summer sun and strutted about so dignified one minute and so ridiculous the next. One kernel of corn down its Sunday throat would set a bird running in distracted circles, stretching out its neck and uttering frightened exclamations.

They were as brainless as a creature could be, and susceptible to all sorts of diseases. An epidemic of swellhead could not only wipe out a whole flock, but so contaminate the ground that turkeys could not be raised in the same yard again for at least three years. On the other hand, they were the last hope of the harvest year. If they were good plump birds and sold for a halfway fair price, they made up for the winter slump in the cream checks.

As soon as breakfast was over, George took his knife and went out and scattered a little corn in the yard. He could stick a turkey the right way only about half the time. The proper procedure was to grab the first bird to fight its way to the corn, thrust the knife up through its open mouth into its tiny brain, and try to sever the right nerve there. If the right nerve was cut, all the muscles in the turkey’s skin went completely limp for about ninety seconds, which was long enough for an accomplished picker to strip off the feathers while the bird was still not really dead. But after those few moments the muscles would tighten again when all life ceased and rigor mortis set in. And if the knife went too far too swiftly, then rigor mortis set in immediately, tightening around every last pin feather so that the turkey had to be scalded before it could be picked.

He missed on the first bird. He left it beating its wings against the frozen ground, circling the axis of its dead feet. He missed on the second one, too—he hadn’t quite got on to it yet. He picked them both up and took them to the house.

Big as the steaming boiler was, the turkeys seemed almost too big to go into it. He lifted the first turkey almost to the ceiling and then plunged it into the boiler. With the plunge of that first turkey the smell of the little damp house was established for the long day. It was a smell of fresh heated blood, sodden feathers, filthy feet and legs, and recently functioning innards.

Until that first turkey went into the boiler, the house had smelled of the new oilcloth that had come two days before and of the top-grain leather of Lucy’s new nickel-plated skates hanging on the wall, waiting for the first ice.

Lucy and Rachel held the turkeys between their knees, yanking out handfuls of hot, oily feathers and dropping them into bushel baskets. They worked fast because they knew they would probably have more any minute. As they shifted the turkeys from side to side, the long claws raked their forearms and the dangling beaks pecked against their ankles as though the turkeys were struggling to obtain revenge from the other side of death.

At noon George quit with a pretty fair record behind him. About half of his sticks had been successful, and Rachel and Lucy had only had eight birds to pick completely. He hung up his stained overall jacket on the porch and went into the kitchen. The birds were piled on the kitchen table, waiting for the finishing touches.

He looked at them with pride while he washed up. “Well, I wonder how much those swindlers’ll give us
this
year,” he said cheerfully. “They’re certainly prime turkeys if I ever saw any. Some of those two-year-old toms will go better than thirty pounds. Perfectly fattened, too. Look at these nice yellow breasts and drumsticks.”

Rachel and Lucy had spent all morning in the smell, and the yellow breasts and drumsticks did not seem appetizing.

“Look at the way their feathers have matured, too. Won’t have many pinfeathers to dig out, that’s a cinch.”

He paused again, but no enthusiasm came to match his own. It just wasn’t like the old days, when families worked happily together.

Cathy did not like being penned in by the dining room chairs and she stretched up her arms to him and cried to get out. “Oh Katy!” he said. Then he began to sing. “K-K-K-aty! Beeyootiful Katy! You’re the only g-g-g-girl that I adore! When the m-m-moon shines over the cowshed, I’ll be waiting at the k-k-k-kitchen door.” Cathy stopped crying to listen to her name in the song.

“She wants to pick, too,” he said. “She’s going to make a
good
farmer.… Watch, Lucy, that you get that bird nice and clean. If you don’t get those little fuzzy feathers out from under the wings and over the shanks there, somebody else just has to do it, you know.”

He unfolded a wing of Lucy’s turkey and pointed to the bluish-gray fuzz that had warmed its armpit. Lucy scraped her fingers into the hollow and got out the fuzz. “That’s the way,” he said. “You can get to be a fine picker if you just watch what you’re doing.”

By midafternoon there were twenty-five turkeys piled on the kitchen table. Their snake-scaled legs drooped in a maze of flexed toes and spurs, making Lucy think of the tangled crisscrossings of the multiplication tables.

“If a turkey has three toes on each foot and one spur on each foot, and there are twenty-five turkeys, how many toes and spurs are there?” It was one of those tricky thought-problems where you were supposed to forget, despite the reminding “eaches,” that a turkey had two feet. That was the sort of trick she never fell for, but then when she turned her paper in, it would always turn out that in all those different things to multiply she had made some silly mistakes in her tables or her addition.

When her father said her name she knew that he was going to make her get a pencil and paper and figure it all out. That was the kind of problem he liked to give her—something that had to do with the farm. But what he said instead was almost as bad. “Lucy, here’s a fine kid job for you now. Mother will fix you a pan of warm water and find you a nice thick little rag and you can start washing off those feet good and clean.”

He lifted a turkey from the top of the pile and laid it on the wash stand. He stretched its legs out over the pan, and showed her how the process should go. “Make sure you spread out the toes, so it’s nice and clean in there between them,” he said.

The ball of the gray-brown wrinkled foot was curiously soft and spongy, and her thumb pushed way into it as she steadied the toes. The toes were firm along the rim of bone on their upper side, but they too were thickly padded with skin and muscle on the walking part, and softer than a person might have expected them to be. “Make sure you wash all the way up the leg, too. Get it good and clean at the knee joint there, where it hooks onto the drumstick.”

Lucy knew her 2’s all too well. Forty-eight more feet to go after this one. “They sure are different from chicken feet, aren’t they?” she said.

“Why sure,” George said. It pleased him to have her notice things. “Look at all the weight they have to support on those feet. They have to have some padding, don’t they? Just like
my
shoes are thicker than
your
shoes.”

He liked leaving her with a big job like that. It was important for her to learn to work at something until she got it finished. He and Rachel extended the dining room table, and covered it with newspapers, and began going over the birds for the last time. They dressed them New York style, with the big feathers of the wings and tails left on.