The Bones of Plenty (52 page)

After the children were in bed she took a bath to make sure she got rid of as many tuberculosis germs as possible. The draft along the kitchen floor was milder than it had been a few days ago. She thought the weather must be warming up. George came out to the kitchen for a drink while she was in the tub. She hated it when he did that.
Males …

In the morning she could feel the heavy predawn whiteness at the window before she got out of bed.

“Oh, dear,” she said. “I wish this had held off for a few more days. I hate to send Cathy over to Mom in this mess every day, but I know I ought to be over at the Wilkeses as much as I can this week.”

“Oh, Rachel, you’re never satisfied,” George said. “Be glad we’re finally getting some moisture. What’s a little snow, anyway?”

If he had really wanted to know, Rachel could have told him what a little extra snow at the Wilkeses meant—leaks in the roof, wet footprints over all the floors that she had scrubbed clean for the first time since—well, probably since she had gone to scrub when the last Wilkes boy was born.

By the time they got to the Wilkes house, the sun was rising somewhere, but it was hard to tell where. The only effect the growing light had was to extend the apparent height from which the snow was falling. Lucy’s father helped her mother out of the sleigh. Her figure blurred and almost faded out by the time it reached the vague outlines of the house. Presently two small blurs emerged from the spot where the first blur had disappeared and grew into the two boys who went to school. They attacked the sleigh at the same moment and climbed up it, racing each other.

“Hey, take it easy there,” her father yelled. “Don’t
hang
on things that way. Where’s your big sister?”

The boys crouched away in the corner. “She ain’t going today,” said one.

“She sick?” her father asked.

“She’s gonna help.”

Lucy had all she could do to make Cathy stay under the robe with her until they left her off with her grandmother. Then her father let her stand up with the boys.

They held their mittens out flat so the flakes could land in their palms and showed the shapes of the snow to each other. Sometimes an especially big crystal would land intact, cushioned by the mitten, and they could see its perfect outlines. Lucy stuck out her tongue to catch the flakes and the boys copied her, lifting their faces and shutting their eyes against the tiny, soft, cold slaps. They were the teasing hands of the frost fairies—those little soft pats—but it did no good to open your eyes, for the white little things only hid in the falling whiteness. When Lucy lowered her head and opened her eyes again, her lashes were stuck full of snow and she saw that the boys’ eyebrows were thick and white like old men’s.

Lucy wished that her father would put sleigh bells on the horses. She sang songs in school about the way the bells jingled when people went for sleigh rides, but she had never seen any horses or sleighs with bells. Yet in none of the songs about sleighing were bells ever absent. She hated to be missing so much. Once she had asked if they could get some bells. “Pshaw!” her father said. “Where did you get
that
idea? Why, it would drive a man crazy. Not to mention the horses. They’ve got enough to think about now.”

Lucy could not see why the horses would mind so much. When they trotted, their harness made nice metallic jinglings, and she listened to those sounds and pretended they were bells. However, when they went as slowly as they did now, the main sounds were those of hoofs clumping into the dry light snow and runners slicing along behind the hoofs.

That afternoon they had a special singing session out of the green books. Miss Liljeqvist said, “Let’s sing songs about the snow!” So they sang about the bells on the sleighs and horses. Lucy raised her hand.

“Do you have a song you want to sing, Lucy?”

“No, but I just wanted to ask … ”

“This is singing time now, Lucy. Yes, Charley, did you have a song you wanted us to sing?”

Lucy did not sing the next song, picked out by Charley Wilkes. He always chose a song about a train—a talkative little engine that puffed and chattered about all the things it pulled behind it in the freight cars. It was a chummy engine, totally unlike the haughty and merciless engines that came through Eureka hauling a hundred box cars behind them. The song offended her and made her feel silly. So Miss Liljeqvist scolded her for not singing. “We can’t always have our own way, you know, Lucy. We must sing each others’ songs. How would you like it if
Charley
wouldn’t sing ‘Jingle Bells’?”

“I wouldn’t
care!”
Lucy flung out.

She had to sit up in the corner by the blackboard while the rest of the singing went on. When school was out, Miss Liljeqvist stopped her as she went into the cloakroom.

“What was it that you wanted to ask, Lucy?”

Lucy looked at the floor. She was afraid Miss Liljeqvist would see how much she hated her if she looked up at her face. “I just wanted to know why the sleighs and horses have bells. My father said it was a silly idea.”

“Well, because when everybody had horses instead of cars, the bells took the place of horns. I can’t think of any other reason, Lucy.”

“Not just because people liked them?”

“Oh … probably not. There had to be a reason. Is that all you wanted to ask?”

As soon as she and the Wilkes boys opened the door of Herman Schlaht’s store, she heard her father’s voice, loud in argument, and Zack Hoefener’s louder, gruffer voice interrupting her father’s voice. She couldn’t imagine how anyone could have the courage to interrupt her father, and it always astounded her when somebody did. She could tell they were going to wait a long time for him and she went to stand by the candy counter. James and Charley stood beside her.

Zack had once said to George, “I’d vote for a yellow dog if he was a Republican,” and George had never forgiven him for that. Whenever people asked George if he was a Republican or a Democrat, he would feel more insulted than if he had been asked if he were a jackass or a billy goat. And so he always felt duty-bound to argue with Zack because Zack was so grievously wrong. And besides, Zack had a way of putting things that made George feel his entire destiny depended on the outcome of the argument.

“Men like
me,”
Zack said, “are paying taxes to keep men like
you
in business. I don’t see the sense of that. If a man needs a subsidy in a business, he ought to get out and go into some other business. You don’t see tax money subsidizing the
hardware
business, do you? You don’t see
us
getting no subsidies, do you?”

“What do you call a
tariff!”
George roared. “If
that
ain’t a subsidy to a bunch of American manufacturers and storekeepers just like you, I don’t know what it is. You wreck our export markets so nobody over there has any dollars to buy
wheat
with, and then you talk about how you haven’t got any
subsidy.
The
tariff
is the biggest cockeyed subsidy I ever heard of!”

“Pshaw! What good would it do
you
if other countries had a few American dollars from selling their cheap stuff over here? I tell you, in the first place, they’ve got their
own
farms going again, and in the second place they’ll
always
be able to buy cheap wheat from somewheres. They won’t need one single American dollar to buy more wheat than they can eat. Whenever a country gets a bumper crop, it’s going to dump, and I don’t give a damn how many agreements the brass hats sign on the dotted line. A couple years ago it was the
Roosians
and the
South Americans
that dumped. Now this year the
Australians
are gonna dump. I tell you, there’s just too many of you farmers that won’t admit you’re licked and
quit
growing
wheat!”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about! If there’s too much wheat, just tell me why men are standing in line all day long for a piece of bread!”

“Because they don’t want to get out and
work,
that’s why! Not because there ain’t enough wheat to make bread for them! This country has been having wheat surpluses ever since we got reapers and thrashing machines. Comes a little boom or a war or a drought somewheres and the prices go up and everybody and his brother starts raising wheat. Then there’s so much wheat the bottom falls out of the market again. And every time the bottom falls out you think the
government
ought to buy your wheat if nobody else will. Phooey! It’d be better if you was just to take pure relief till you could get offa the farm and into some other kind of work.”

“How’d
you
like it if a war come along and the government pushed a couple million men into
your
business alongside of
you,
and then when the war was over, somebody comes along and says, ‘Well, Zack, there’s too many of you guys in the hardware business. Why don’t you just quit and go on relief?’ Why I oughta bust you right in the snoot! Don’t tell
me
to go on relief!”

“I tell you, you little guys are just not going to make it. When are you going to buy a tractor, George, and a combine?”

“I’ll buy one! And I won’t buy it from
you,
neither—not if I have to drive it all the way back from Chicago at five miles per hour!”

“Wait! I wasn’t done! I’m in the machinery business and I know something about it! There’s a million tractors in this country now, and there’s going to be a lot more. A million tractors and six million farmers, and the million men with tractors can do as much work as the other five million men and their horses and mules all put together. And those men with tractors are going to put the rest of you guys out of business, and—no, wait! I’m not done yet!

“Here’s another thing that never seems to dawn on you guys. Fifteen years ago it took millions and millions of acres just to feed all the horses and mules in this country. Now everybody’s got a car. Cars, trucks, tractors, airplanes—who the hell needs
horses?
Who the hell needs oats and hay? But what do
you
guys do? You find out you got only ten per cent of the market for oats you used to have—you can only sell so many oats to the Quaker Oats Company—so you put all that extra acreage into wheat. There just ain’t that many human beings to eat it up! And if
you
get a tractor, you’ll do the same goddamn thing! You’ll decrease your feed acreage and put it into wheat. Now just where will
that
get us?”

“I’ll
tell
you where it’ll get us! The wheat I’ll raise will get these starving miners enough to eat for the first time in their lives and it’ll get
me
some coal at a decent price. Right now those men are getting
twenty-three cents
a ton to bring coal out of a broken-down death trap, and
I’m
paying
nine
dollars for that same ton of soft coal! And right now those men are watching their little kids bleed to death because they haven’t got
bread
to give them. Their kids are so hungry they go dig roots out of the ground and eat dirt and stuff that rips their insides out—they bleed right out of their guts till they finally die some night—hundreds of them—thousands of them! Don’t talk to
me
about a wheat surplus! And one of these days those miners are going to figure out that there’s no such thing as a wheat surplus nor a coal surplus and they’re going to start fighting back. And once we all let a little blood out of you
middlemen —
then we won’t hear about these
surpluses
any more!”

“Who’s gonna let the first blood out of
me,
huh, George? Who?”

“Take it easy!” Herman yelled.

“Who’s gonna start it, huh, George?”

“I might start it! I might start the whole damn war with one pigheaded, beer-bellied storekeeper just like you!”

“Take it easy!” Herman cried again.

“Pshaw! Get ten men like
you
together, Custer, and you’ll all kill each other! Like old Jay Gould said, ‘I can pay one half of the working men to go out and kill the other half.’ Well, that’s
you,
George. Who’s gonna be left to fight this big war of yours?”

“Take it easy!”

“All right, Hoefener, if all us little men kill each other, who’s gonna be left to buy your lousy overpriced nails and screwdrivers any more? Just how long are you gonna stay in business, even if nobody
does
let the moonshine out of your belly with a bowie knife?”

“Take it easy!”

“I’ll
stay in business as long as I’ve got my franchises! I make my money selling John Deere and International Harvester—not rivets! I still say, when are you gonna buy a tractor?”

“Maybe I’ll just
take
a tractor, Zack. Maybe I’ll just tear you up in little pieces right now and walk on over there and
take
one.”

“Custer, aren’t you ever gonna take these
kids
home?” Herman shouted.

George turned and saw them standing by the candy counter. When had
they
come, anyway?