The Bones of Plenty (55 page)

“Well, Mr. Shepard?” Oblonsky said. “Do you know how lucky you are to have a place to go to die? Even a dog in this world can die in private—but a
man
can’t any more—unless he owns property.”

Oblonsky had not stooped to pity himself in all these months. It was saddening, not to mention frightening. The man couldn’t sit up much now, and his voice had lost its power, but he had found out one thing in the last week that was new enough so that he reacted with a little of the irony that had sustained him for so long.

“Don’t feel too bad about the way our great country is going, Mr. Shepard. The Wilson Democrats put me in jail and took away my citizenship because I did not believe in war, but two days ago the Roosevelt Democrats gave me back my citizenship. Now I can have a citizen’s burial.”

To a man who had not had his nose outside since that long-ago Indian summer day, it was a gratifying change to be riding privately in an ambulance through the walls of dirty snow thrown up along the highway. Will could leave off wrestling with the foolish hope that had kept sneaking into his mind for so long. For the moment he could just look out at the rushing walls of snow—piled so high that from his flat bed in the bottom of the canyon he could see no end to them at all. They might join the clouds from which they came, for all he could tell, and the clouds might be lying no farther away than the roof over his cot. He still could not quite manage the concept of ceasing to exist physically, and so he rode along in his white ambulance between the hovering white walls in a matching white limbo. He had no hope, nor did he have anything to take the place of hope.

He felt that something ought to come to a man to replace hope, but he couldn’t think what it might be. He therefore surrendered himself to the white limbo—as though he were caught again in a blizzard like some of the ones he remembered so well, and he could be content this time not to fight his way to a fence line, but to stray with the wind until it put him to sleep.

All his life he had been as willing as the next man to take his chances with the forces he could not control, and he had been willing to fight those forces every way he could with all the strength he had. The wind and heat and hail and cold had all contended with him, and once or twice they had nearly annihilated him. He had never before confronted a force that a man could not appropriately fight. Now he had to learn a new thing—how to surrender as decently as possible.

At least he would be tortured no more by another mere man, and it
had
been torture, no matter how well-intentioned. It was not that he felt superior to any other man; it was just that he ought not to die beneath the hands of a small creature like himself when all his life he had fought the mightiest adversaries the sky and the earth could send against him.

He thought so often now of that brother who died by lightning as he was felling a tree. There beside the tree that smoked and hissed in the first drops of rain lay a strong young man who would never marry, never build his house, never beget children. Yet even while Will grieved for his brother, he had believed in the fitness of that death. A youth with a heavy, sharp axe was hewing out a place for himself to cultivate and possess—a youth whose enduring passion could not be diverted by the transitory passion of a summer storm. He had worked through other such storms and he knew how, after the sky had drenched him, it would quickly dry him again. He knew that if a man was going to make a space for himself on a hurrying planet, he could not afford to take time off to hide while the planet went about its own turbulent affairs.

And so he died in one lash of the long hot tongue—died before he heard the explosion around his ears or submitted for even an instant to the indignity of fear. The lightning came to his axe, people said. He ought to have known better. But still, thought Will, it took the sky to kill him. For a man who lived not to fight other men but to fight the accidents of the sky, that was a fitting death.

Then the seventy miles were over and Will felt his long white chariot slanting and climbing the hill to his high house. Stuart must have just cleaned off the driveway, because the tires lost traction only once before the ambulance leveled again and stopped. Will looked across the snow at the dining room window with the button-mended crack. That was the window where Rose would have been standing to watch the white car bringing him home through the blowing frozen snow. But she was out beside him now, clutching one of his old sweaters around her throat and tapping on the glass next to his face where the backwards white lettering said MERCY. And Stuart was there behind her, fitting a coat over the sweater, over the apron straps, over the shoulders that had always been too curved, as if she were old.

“Take him in through there?” the driver asked her. He shivered at the cold he had let in when he wound down the window.

He and his helper left their doors hanging open as though they wished to make it clear that this was a very brief delivery stop.

They trotted six paces along their respective sides of the ambulance, met in the back, and turned their respective door handles. Then they were lifting him out and the wind was blasting across his face and he was trying to say hello to Rose and goodby to the wind before he passed through the portals of his house and away from the sky’s last howling respects.

The covers on his bed were turned back so that a starched formal triangle of sheet cut across the embroidered spread. While the four of them were putting him to bed, he couldn’t think of anything but how they were disarranging the triangle, and he wondered why in the world that should bother him so.

The men picked up the stretcher. “So long,” said the driver.

“Much obliged,” Will responded.

Rose pulled the covers over him. “What can I get you for dinner?” she asked.

“Almost anything liquid,” he said tiredly. That had been a long ride.

Then it occurred to him that she wanted very much to do something hard and complicated for him. That was what the immaculate bedspread and the careful triangle had been telling him. All he really wanted was to have her sit beside him and talk—tell him about Rachel and the children and the neighbors. But neither of them had ever been much good at time-passing talk. They had never had the time to pass.

Now that was all he had—a little time to pass—and neither of them knew what to do about it. The limbo of the ambulance ride was over; now he must rouse himself for the last long effort.

“What kind of liquid?” she was asking.

He recited, trying not to sound too self-conscious or too apathetic. This preoccupation with his body was a repulsive monotony. “Bland,” he said. “No spices, no tomatoes, no onions, no pork. Little chunks of chicken or something like that is all right. Other vegetables are all right if they’re strained so there’s no skin—like peas.”

Rose’s face took on a purposeful look and lost some of its fear. The worst fear of her life was to find herself unable to do something useful. He knew that, and he knew that his effort was rewarded. “How would it be if I opened one of those cans of stewing hens that I did up last summer when they started to molt? I could make some chicken soup in a minute.”

She was eager to be doing for him—to be near him but yet to be gone from him. He knew she must have been watching for the ambulance all morning, but now that he was home, she did not know what to do. It had always been that way. The nearer he came, the more a trembling part of her urged her to flee. After he had come to understand how much she did really need him, he was no longer wounded except by his occasional sorrow that things must be this way. Once in a while he had been angry; often he had felt the pangs of his selfish lust. Now he felt his old wistfulness at seeing her ready to rush away from him and that made him realize how much he must still want to live.

Yes, he told her, he would like some chicken soup. It would be a treat to have a meal that did not come out of a hospital kitchen on a stainless steel tray.

“And will you put a little salt in it?” he added. “Salt isn’t really a spice, is it? And speaking of salt—I got downright lonesome for the taste of that cussed well-water. Tell Stuart to pump me a little of it and bring me a drink next time he comes in, will you?”

“I know what you mean about that water up there in Bismarck,” Rose said. She was thankful for a recent common experience to speak of. “I always notice it so when I change drinking water. It always seems to affect my bowels one way or the other—” She stopped. “Well … I’ll go down and get that jar of chicken.”

The door opening directly down on the cellar steps was right next to the bedroom door. She left it open and he felt the cold rising up into his room. He heard her fumbling in the dark to light a lantern so she could see the shelves of jars. No electricity, after thirty years of waiting. From his bed he could see two of the three outlets he had left in that room—one in the center of the ceiling for a light and the other just above the mopboard for a plug.

The dark cellar steps worried him. “Be careful, now,” he called to Rose. He found that he wanted to do nothing but visualize her in whatever surroundings took her away from him. It was a way to hang on to reality, and he had been away from reality for so long.

He heard her running up the stairs and then he heard her panting at the top. “What did you say, Will?” She was more worried than ever about her hearing now.

She came into the room and he saw how relieved she was to find nothing amiss with him. “Did you change your mind about the soup after all? I could make you some good strong beef broth.”

He felt so foolish he hardly knew what to say. “Why, I just said for you to be careful. I wish we had a light of some kind on those stairs. I don’t know what ailed me—yelling down there at you like that. You shouldn’t have run up the stairs. I couldn’t have expected you to hear me way down there anyway.”

There was more relief in her face. He began to see what a burden he was going to be. And every day he would be a little bigger burden.

She set up the card table beside his bed and she and Stuart ate their dinner there with him while he worked on his soup. Once more the husband and wife said the Lord’s Prayer together but the son did not join them. He bent his neck enough so that he looked straight down between his knees to his damp boots and lowered his lids only as much as he had to in order to look down.

The card table had never been used for cards but it was well worn. Children had eaten holiday meals from it for many years while the older people sat at the big table, and it had provided extra space for sandwich plates and sewing at Ladies’ Aid meetings. Before Will went to the hospital it had been covered with the two thousand pieces of an enormous jigsaw puzzle. The puzzle had come in a jumble of very small and very similar bits of colored cardboard in a large box, and there was no clue as to what the finished picture would look like. They had got about a third of it together before he left, with the rest of it still in its mottled pile. Nobody ever sat down and worked at it seriously; it was amusing to fit in a piece or two when one was passing by, that was all.

They had always been a family that could not ignore any game with a challenge to it, but they had never had the time to study over things very long, either. An upstairs closet was half full of dominoes, anagrams, chessmen, caroms, checkers, and playing boards, all of which got considerable use on Sunday afternoons and during blizzards. Crossword puzzles, cryptograms, acrostics, and the other teasers printed in newspapers and magazines rarely got finished unless somebody was sick in bed, but they seldom got to the used paper pile without some writing on them. Stuart especially liked them. Stuart seemed to like doing anything that required serious effort but was without serious purpose.

By the time he had finished his soup, Will wondered how he could ever have been fool enough to stay in that hospital for so long. He belonged right here, where there were some things he could still try to do—such as making one last attempt to get Stuart’s energies aimed in some sensible direction.

Rose got up to take the dishes into the kitchen and Stuart got up, too, but Will stopped him. “What did you do about the production-control contract?” he asked.

“Well, we passed up the deadline, but Finnegan’s been out here a couple times. He says we can still sign up. He’s really been after me. But I said it was your farm and you’d be back and you ought to sign.”

Will looked up at him. Stuart was in that fresh hour of manhood when a man’s skin was still as fine and smooth as a little boy’s. When he was closely shaven he looked almost as young as he had at twelve, with the lines of his brow and jaws just beginning to establish themselves, with the pure color of his cheeks seemingly still impervious to the weather—not one thread of vein showing yet, not one pore forced open and blown full of dust. Clean-shaven as he was now, Stuart seemed young enough so that all his worldly knowledge might easily be contained in the handful of obscenities a boy of twelve could be expected to know. But later this afternoon when the dark whiskers began to show again, then perhaps it would be easier for Will to believe that he himself was a married man when he looked like this boy.