The Bones of Plenty (9 page)

The President had closed them all. Harry Goodman’s Eureka Bank—assets $78,000, liabilities undetermined—was no more tightly closed than the biggest, oldest bank in New York. On that day the Eureka Bank was no more of a failure than any of the others with their good and bad mortgages and other kinds of good and bad paper.

The President’s inaugural address came over Herman’s radio in the forenoon, and the store was filled with men who had come to hear it. Some of the men had radios at home, but they came to Herman’s store anyway, so as to have company while they listened. Even George was there, standing far back against the shelves, not joining the men around the stove or the ones who leaned on the counter, hovering over the radio, so possessed by the voice in it that they forgot themselves and let their hopefulness and their anxiety show in their faces. George, standing apart from them all, ground his teeth and wondered how they could be so taken in. He didn’t like the phony accent and he didn’t like the highfalutin language and it was just too much when the President said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” By God, what rich man was going to accuse him of being afraid and get away with it, anyhow? He hardly heard any of the rest of the speech, he was so angry at being called afraid.

When the speech was over and the first murmurs began, he said loudly, “I’d like to get that hothouse pansy out on a farm for just one hour. I’d like to watch him pitch bundles into a thrashing machine when it’s around a hundred and ten in the shade—or wrastle a bull calf that’s taken a notion he just don’t want to grow up to be a steer!”

Zack Hoefener began to laugh, holding his goiter with his hand, as though he must not lose track of the upsetting vibrations of his laughter and his heart beating there. Otto Wilkes laughed too, and so did Wally Esskew and Lester Zimmerman. Even the Koslovs began to laugh, though George doubted that any of them could understand what was funny about giving a man with that accent the chore of emasculating a calf.

Clarence Egger, whose arm had been gobbled up by a threshing machine, waited for them all to stop. “Don’t you sheep brains know that the guy can’t even walk? He had infantile paralysis, for Christ’s sake!”

George was not going to be made a fool of by Clarence Egger. “Well, he got a great big infantile silver spoon, too, didn’t he?”

“I’ll take walking any day,” Clarence said. He was the only man in the room who dared, because his right arm was gone, to stand up to George. At times when he was drunk enough, Zack would do it, but nobody else ever did.

Nevertheless, George felt that they were displeased with him for making them laugh at a crippled man. God-damn them—they were so dumb and ignorant—always confusing the issue. The issue was that a rich man was telling them all not to worry even if they had just lost their last red cent to a little Jew banker. A rich man who couldn’t possibly imagine what it was like to work sixteen hours a day for six months of the year and to sit in a dark house smothering in snow for the other six months, wondering where the money for coal was going to come from.
That
was the man who was telling them not to worry, and
that
man’s coddled, polished ignorance was the issue—not whether or not the man could walk.

George considered himself a well-spoken man, but he had no words to substitute for the obscenities he wanted to say to these silly bleating sheep. Clarence Egger calling
him
a sheep brain. He put his hands on his hips and lifted his shoulders as though he would sashay into a wrathful jig and he roared the chorus of a bitter song —

Let them
see,
if they could, that this was
their
song unless things were radically changed. He shoved his way past them as he sang, and stamped out the door. He went on singing as he took the blankets off the horses and climbed on to the seat in the wagon box —

By the time the President got around to making a speech on the radio about the banks, a good many of them had already reopened. He called his talk a “fireside chat,” and the image was not reassuring to George. “Chat” was an effete word, used either by women putting on airs or by wealthy people of either sex who had the time to waste in small talk while they sat around in parlors that bulged with bay windows hung in velvet and lace. A fireplace was an expensive luxury which added to the cost of heating a house by inviting down the chimney every prowling wind. The fireplace that came to George’s mind was accoutered with hundreds of dollars’ worth of brass, polished by some ill-paid servant. And over the mantel was an oil portrait of the Wall Street grandfather who made the fortune by speculating in Western land or by other questionable means.

“It is safer to keep your money in the reopened bank than under the mattress,” the President said.

“What
money?” George cried to Rachel. “Another rich man in the White House. Oh, how they love to tell us how they know all about being poor.
‘You
ah fahmahs.
I
am a fahmah, too!’ Oh, yes,
he’s
a farmer too! What a nice little farmhouse he has there at Hyde Park!”

George sat at his own fireside, a bearable distance from the plump round stove that blistered the air in a six-foot radius, and helplessly cursed Harry Goodman while the President urged the people to bring their money back to the banks. But George predicted that putting the bankers back in control of the country might not go so smoothly as the President thought it would, and sure enough, there was quite a piece in the paper just a few days later. He read it aloud to Rachel after supper, yelling out into the kitchen over the noise she made doing the dishes.

“Look here what happened down in Oklahoma,” he said. “I
told
you there was going to be bloodshed. Unless I miss my guess this is just the beginning. Fellow here—a state bank examiner—W. C. Ernest, his name was, was looking over the Citizens’ State Bank. Paper says he telephoned the State Bank Commissioner to come and take over the bank. Then it says, ‘As Mr. Ernest replaced the receiver of the instrument and turned to speak to the bank president, he was shot in the head and died instantly.’ Well, I tell you, it’ll get so the government don’t dare send
out
anybody on jobs like that any more. Or anyhow they won’t be able to find anybody that’ll
go!
You know how that fellow from Bismarck roared in and out of here when he came to clean out Harry’s bank.
He
knew his life wasn’t worth a plugged nickel around here! Who cares? Might as well hang as starve. You wait. It can’t help but start pretty soon.”

Most of the time Rachel believed he was only relieving his feelings by talking this way. But once in a while he worried her. “Who do you think is going to start it?” she called in.

“How should
I
know?” he said irritably. “Who
ever
knows who starts a revolution? It just starts, that’s all. Maybe the coal miners. Maybe the veterans … Hah! How do you like this? Right on the same page with this other story. President said he got ten thousand telegrams ‘applauding his bank policy.’ Well, that’s a little late for W. C. Ernest, isn’t it? I wonder if Roosevelt has heard about
him
yet.”

The newly elected German parliament organized, held its first meeting, handed all its power over to the newly elected Chancellor for four years, and dissolved itself again. Almost everywhere new officials were taking over, they were doing drastic things. Wild Bill Langer, the new governor of North Dakota, proclaimed a moratorium on payments of farm mortgages and decreed that there must be no more forced sales of premises or personal property used for agriculture.

George thought about that decree while he rode behind his team, round and round an eighty-acre field, turning two furrows at a time. The governor swore he would call out the state militia to restrain the county sheriffs from carrying out sales. They were already having battles over the Minnesota governor’s proclamation to the same effect. George wondered if Langer would really follow through on what he’d said. Above all, he wondered if what Langer had said would carry any weight with Vick. According to Wild Bill Langer, Mr. James T. Vick would not be able to attach George Custer’s stock and equipment in order to collect rent. George did not propose to try to beat Vick out of his rent, but on the other hand, if Vick did not loan him the money to get in the crop, Vick would have everything to lose and nothing to gain, the way George saw it. After all, there were always just two ways for Vick ever to get his rent—out of a crop or out of George’s own possessions. Now there was supposedly only one—out of a crop. The more George thought about it, the more reasonable it was to expect that Vick would let him have the money.

Every day he plowed and figured. With his four-horse team and a two-bottom plow he could turn over four acres in a twelve-hour day. He could get by without plowing the other wheat field because he had plowed it last spring and it was loose enough just to disk and drag and seed. Even so, he had oats and corn and barley and hay to get in. He might have to get Ralph Sundquist over for a week or so with his team, and he would have to pay Ralph in cash because he didn’t have either goods or labor to trade for Ralph’s work.

On the last day of March the weather was unseasonably warm. This early in the year they were already falling behind their normal seasonal total of moisture. If it was going to be another drought year, he should get the crops in as soon as it was humanly possible in order to take advantage of what little moisture the winter had left behind. He decided he could no longer put off going to bargain with James T. Vick.

Will had been watching and hoping to catch George driving by alone in the car. He was just coming from the barn when he spotted the old Ford below on the road and he jogged down his driveway and flagged George to a stop. George did not turn off the engine; he couldn’t bear to be interrupted in a project—especially one that was so unpleasant to think about. Will found it even harder than usual to talk to him.

“Have you got a minute, George?” he asked.

“Just about that,” George said.

“Rachel’s mother and I—that is—I don’t know whether you lost money in the bank or not,” Will began, “but if you did, we’d like to let you have whatever you lost for as long as you need it. We’ve always kept an account in Jimtown. That is, I wish you’d ask us if you need help this spring, regardless … we … Rachel—might not need to know.” He saw that George was already angry and he wondered miserably what he had done wrong, besides telling a lie about a sizable Jamestown account.

His first four words had been wrong. George took them as an affront to him as a son-in-law. Why hadn’t Will said, “Rose and I”? Why “Rachel’s mother and I,” as though Rachel still belonged in her father’s tall house on the hill, not in his own?

“We’ll get the crops in, I reckon,” George said. “Much obliged.”

He shifted into gear and pretended not to hear Will shouting, “Well, now, you know where to come if you change your mind!”

Will walked back up the hill. His legs seemed uncommonly heavy. They made his toes come scudging into the ground at each step just an instant before he expected them to. He glanced up at the orchard, at the dead crab-apple tree over the box of money. He wondered if it was the pain in his belly that made his legs so heavy.

The thirty miles to Jamestown were gone before George had even begun to exhaust the choice words he might have said to Will or that he would like to say to James T. Vick. He had, in fact, spent the entire time assembling choice words, so that he found himself parking the car down the street from Vick’s store without any clear idea of what he was actually going to say.

He made his way past the disgusting counters, wondering if Vick was watching him from the balcony. He flinched as one of the little change carriers whizzed over his head, so close that he could feel its breeze parting his hair. A damned store for women.

He stood in the door of Vick’s office, holding his light summer cap in one hand, shaking Vick’s hand with the other.

“How’s the farm, Custer?” Vick shouted above the noise of the little cash carriers coming home.

“Still there, Mr. Vick,” George said.

He decided to make an oblique approach. He began while Vick cleared papers off a chair for him. “They say it’s going to be a bad grasshopper year, and the drought’s going to be bad, too, maybe. I think I ought to put in more hay this year—hay and pasture. No rust and smut to worry about; not so much pest damage; drought don’t hurt it so much; good for the land. If the hay don’t bring any price, maybe I could feed a couple-three more cows through the winter. Cream prices are going up a little.”