The Bones of Plenty (53 page)

“Well, just remember this,” he told Zack. “If I get beat out of work I’ve put in on Vick’s farm out there, watch out! If I have to get out, so will a lot of other men just like me. Just look out for us. Just look out.”

“You’ll kill
each other!”
Zack retorted.

George had the door open before Lucy and the boys understood that he was ready to go. Lucy had been in the store before when her father got very mad, but she had never heard him tell another man that he was going to knock him down. Her ski pants seemed to have no legs in them. She seemed to be all wool from the waist down. Her woolen legs would hardly carry her toward the door where her father stood boiling with rage.

“We’re gonna hoof it tonight,” he snapped. “Get a move on.” He left the door in her hands and was suddenly ten feet ahead of them.

“Shake a leg, I said! It’ll be pitch dark in just a jiffy now.” He was twenty feet ahead.

James was Lucy’s age, in the third grade, but Charley was barely six. He was afraid of the dark. He reached for his brother’s hand. “He talked too long,” he whispered.

“Now don’t waste your breath
jawing
at one another!” he shouted back at them. “Just save it for hiking. Everybody walk in my tracks, now, and I’ll tromp you a path. That’s the way the Indians did it—everybody single file—braves first, women and children afterward—every person made it a little easier for the fellow behind. Come on now.”

But no matter how he shortened his stride, they still fell farther and farther behind. The snow seemed to be falling harder and harder, and Charley began to whimper. He would not let go of James’s hand and they were having a hard time walking single file.

“For Pete’s sake,” said George, “a big boy like you don’t need to hang on to anybody does he?
That’s
what’s slowing you down. You ought to be walking straight, Indian file, like I told you.”

Charley did not say anything—just sniffled wetly. James said, “He’s only just in the first grade and he ain’t never had to walk it in the snow. We always just stay home when it snows.”

“Phooey,
I
walked it in the first grade, and I never
cried
about it either,” Lucy said. She hoped her father was noticing that boys cried at least as much as girls did, and that boys were not necessarily even as strong or as brave as girls.

But her father told her, “Well it don’t help any for
you
to light into him does it? Just let him be. Come along now.”

Lucy kept up. She was panting and her throat burned with the cold air. Her head was sweating under her heavy cap. But she kept up, and the boys fell behind again. Charley turned into a real crybaby. All he said was, “It’s too dark! It’s too dark!”

“Dammit! We’ll
never
get home at this rate. Come
here!”
Her father squatted in the snow in front of Charley. “Wipe your nose and then climb on my back.”

Lucy thought of how her father never would carry
her,
no matter how tired
she
ever got, and she just couldn’t understand it. Now her father was carrying a boy he didn’t even seem to like. And he always said boys were tougher than girls. Was he carrying Charley because Charley was being a crybaby or because he was a boy or what? She felt the sissy lump get big in her throat and tears in her eyes, but she shook her head and ground her teeth and stopped it. By the time she was Charley’s age she had already learned how not to be a crybaby,
that
was a cinch!

The only thing to do was to try even harder, and to hope that James would not be able to keep up even when he didn’t have Charley for an excuse. That would show her father that
all
boys were not stronger than
all
girls of the same age.

She kept up so well that when her father had to stop and wait for James, she bumped into his legs. “For goodness sakes, Lucy! Watch where you’re going,” he told her.

She hardly heard him. She felt like the Little Match Girl. She often felt like her, because they were both in the same trouble—nobody cared what happened to either one of them. The poor Little Match Girl, all alone on the bitter-cold New Year’s Eve, all the rich people hurrying past, too busy and too cold to notice the little girl or buy her matches. The little girl sitting down on the steps of a house to get in out of the wind, striking her matches to try to warm herself—and the next morning the rich man’s servants finding her frozen just as hard as the marble of the steps.…

With the pestilential Wilkes child sniffling through blood-raw nostrils a few inches from his ear, George tramped through the snow as fast as he could go. When Rachel opened the door to them, she had a fit.

“Why,
George,
they have
circles
under their eyes! Dark circles! Just as though they’d been up all night. What
ever
possessed you? You can’t expect
them
to walk as fast as you do!”

“Now then, Rachel, I
carried
this one three-quarters of the way! Do you mean to tell me that a couple of half-grown kids can’t keep up with a man carrying sixty pounds through a foot of loose snow?”

“You
know
they can’t! You’ve said yourself a sixty-pound pack shouldn’t slow down a strong man in good condition. Besides, Charley can’t weigh over forty.”

“Not in a foot and a half of loose snow I didn’t! And he
does
weigh more than forty pounds!”

“Lucy will come down with tonsillitis tomorrow!”

“Well, if she does, it’ll be because
you
talked her into it! I tell you, this walk was nothing! How did people get educated twenty, thirty years ago? Did we let a little snow stop us? We never gave it a thought. I tell you, this country was not built by the kind of
pantywaists
we’re raising now.”

“Oh George! Why in the world didn’t you go after them with the sleigh? Those boys aren’t going to walk another step. You take them in the sled or else they’ll have to stay here all night and you’ll have to walk over and tell Edith they’re all right.”

“Rachel, the horses were all clear at the other end of the place, in the lee of the strawstack, and they’d never hear me whistle in the snow. Why, in the time it would have taken me to walk down there and get them and bring them back in here and harness up, I could walk in to town, so that’s what I did. Why, it’s not more than two miles as the crow flies. That’s no distance at all!”

“It’s
plenty
of distance when your legs are so short that you sink clear down to your knees with every step you take! The horses have come in now. I went down and let them in the barn a little while ago.

Oh, how stubborn she could look when she felt like it! Just like her old man. George tramped out of the kitchen to go down and harness up two horses to haul a heavy sled a quarter of a mile diagonally across his fields and another quarter of a mile back. It certainly beat the devil, the way everybody had to go out of his way for a deadbeat and his family.

On Christmas Day they ate an early lunch and then they all drove up to the hospital. The right rear window of the Ford had got cracked during the summer and George had taken it out for fear it would shatter. When it got too cold to go without something there, George fitted a piece of plywood into the window. Stuart found himself sitting next to the plywood, and by the time they had gone five of the seventy miles he was wondering how he was going to make it the rest of the way.

His mother was sitting next to him. His eight-year-old niece was on the other side of her. His sister sat in the front seat with his brother-in-law. She was holding his infant niece. His infant niece was the only one in the car with anything to say. She made sounds continually. Sometimes the sounds rose in pitch and then his sister let the baby jump on her lap and chew her finger and search through her purse. Sometimes the sounds were simply fizzy experiments the baby made with the wetness on her lips—his sister had explained that the baby drooled so much because she was teething. Sometimes the sounds had an earnest variety and inflection that was nerve-wracking—as though the baby was trying to say something that was very important to her that nobody would ever know about because she would have forgotten what it was by the time she knew the words to use.

It was these last earnest sounds that got him down. He couldn’t get out of the notion that he ought to be listening and trying to figure out what she wanted to tell somebody. He’d never been around kids much; maybe that was why they got under his skin sometimes. He could never just not listen when some little three-year-old was jabbering at him; he always felt as though he had to try to make something out of it.

The dark plywood so neatly varnished by his brother-in-law was like a hand over his right eye. He wanted to shove his fist through the plywood the way he would have struck the hand away from his eye. He was getting a funny tight feeling across the top of his head, as though a line was being drawn over the center of his scalp and all the right side of his skull was going numb because of the blindness of his eye. He couldn’t quit rolling and pushing that eye to try to glimpse something out of the corner of it and get over being blind.

Looking through the windshield between his sister and his brother-in-law, he saw that they were just coming into Medina. Good God! Fifty-eight more miles! The snow was deep along the highway—drifted way up behind the snow fences.

“Well, it looks like Old Man Winter is finally here, don’t it?” his brother-in-law said.

If
he
started talking, Stuart knew he’d never make it. He’d open this dark door and leap out of this thirty-mile-an-hour trap and light out across the snow, even if he got a broken leg. Nobody answered his brother-in-law’s question. After a while, when he moved his arm because of a cramp in his shoulder, he realized he’d been sitting there with his elbow ready on the door handle for a long time.

He’d been up to see the old man before they took the third whack at him, and he looked bad enough then. What was he going to look like now? It must be cancer. What else did they go slicing into a man three times for?

The old man was going to die, wasn’t he? Soon. And yet, by God, there was the old lady praying to some God-damn God morning, noon, and night. Before every meal, praying “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done,” all the while her
husband
was up there in Bismark being a guinea pig for some small-town quacks. It was all a man could do to eat a meal after his mother got through with her praying.

When he found himself at the hospital steps, he couldn’t understand how he had got there. Hadn’t he thrown himself out of the car back there along the highway somewhere?
Now
where could he go? There wasn’t anywhere to go now but up to look at an old, old man that had been his father—the strongest man in the world. He’d
always
been the strongest man in the world, God-damn it all. Not even the God-damn brother-in-law could do some of the things he’d seen his old man do—even when his old man was ten years older than the brother-in-law was now.

What was he supposed to
say
to the old man now, anyhow?

Rose sat down in the hard white chair by Will’s bed. Rachel had gone to find a rest room where she could change Cathy and feed her.

Oblonsky said urgently, “Take
my
chair!” George looked at Stuart.

“Take it,” Stuart said. “I’m sick of sitting.”

Will wondered if Stuart was about to go off again. He’d stayed clear of the stuff all this time. But the tone of his voice was so dead. It was a bad sign.

George took the chair. “Much obliged,” he said.

“That’s a fine little girl you have there,” Oblonsky observed.

“I reckon she’ll do,” George said.

“You do not believe in praise for children?”

“Well, you sure don’t do a kid any favor by spoiling him, that’s a cinch! A kid grows up and it’s dog eat dog. The sooner a kid finds out how it is, the better chance he’s got.”

“Ah, another good capitalist. You believe in the dog eat dog system even if
you
are the dog that is eaten?”

“I don’t
expect
to be eaten!”

“You expect to eat somebody else?”

“No! That ain’t what I said! I just said I wasn’t going to be the
underdog,
that’s all!”

“But you think the
system
you call free enterprise is a good one.”

“Why sure I do. It’s been ruined by racketeers and rich politicians, that’s all. We just need to get back to what we had when this country was first started.”

“I see. When the only dogs that were eaten were the Indians who happened to be living here when your ancestors came.”

George stood up and replaced the chair by Oblonsky’s bed.

“We don’t need any
foreigners
to come over here and reap all the benefits of living in this country and then tell us all about what’s wrong with it. Much obliged for the use of the chair.”

The nurse rushed in. “Mr.
Oblonsky!
You
must
not start shouting arguments! Imagine! Even on Christmas Day!”

George knew well enough that
he
was being bawled out too. If Oblonsky had been fifteen years younger and in normal health, he would have mopped the floor with him.

“Mr. Oblonsky and I have had some good conversations,” Will said into the silence of the ward.…