The Bones of Plenty (15 page)

Once they weighed her along with the wheat, and then Mr. Beahr, laughing as grownups did, swung her down and took her over to a set of scales at the side, where he weighed out sacks. She could still remember how his fingers had been around her bare ribs. He had kept one hard hand far down on her stomach while he fiddled with the scales till they balanced at fifty-one pounds.

She had been wearing only the boxer shorts that her mother made for her, and he had reached down and hooked his finger under the elastic at the back of her waist, pulled it out and let it snap against her skin. Then he had laughed again until his laughter came back from the faraway ceilings, and he said loudly, “We’ll have to take off a little for the shorts here.” What he said echoed too, and it came back sounding like “We’ll have to take off the little shorts here.”

Her father had been terribly mad at Mr. Beahr, though he did not show it at all right then. That night she had heard him telling her mother about it.

“That hoary old buzzard,” he said. “One of these days I’m going to smash him on top of his fat head so hard he’ll have
three
tongues in his shoes. I just wish he’d lay his dirty paws on
me
sometime!”

Whenever she thought about Mr. Beahr weighing her, she was a little relieved just to be waiting in the car. This time it took her father so long that she was rewarded by the passing of a train. She saw the semaphore to the east uncannily raise its arm long before she could even hear the train. Her grandfather had told her that meant for the engineer to go straight on through. Then when the train was in sight, the flat round bell at the road crossing began to clang desperately back and forth. That red bell made her feel that even while it was warning her away, it was calling her, too. It gave her the same feeling she had when she climbed so high in a tree that she knew it would kill her to fall to the ground. Then part of her was afraid of falling, but another part of her kept calling, “Jump!
Jump!
Try it! Jump!”

Then while the bell clanged, the engine rushed through so fast that she barely saw the big glove of the engineer waving out his window at her before the cars with faces at the windows began to stream by. She had to look hard in order to count the cars, watch for the mail sack to be snatched from its post, and wave back at all the waving people. She usually didn’t like waving at people because it made her feel silly and strange, but she liked waving at people in trains because they went away so fast.

She was deeply pleased to have seen the whole thing, starting with the semaphore arm and ending with the brakeman saluting her from the open platform of the last car. It was so necessary to get through things from start to finish. One of the reasons she was in such a hurry to grow up was that people interrupted her whenever they felt like it, and didn’t care whether something got finished or not. When she was grown-up herself they couldn’t do that any more. She was glad it was taking her father so long up there in the office.

Her father did not like the railroad at all. He was always saying that the Northern Pacific owned the state of North Dakota. But she herself liked absolutely everything about a train. She liked to keep track of the different pictures painted on the box cars and notice interesting things about the long numbers on them—like a one-three-five-seven or a three-three-three-nine or a two-two-four-eight. If she watched hard enough, she got a wonderful blurred feeling as though she was moving with the train.

Some trains would be made of almost every kind of car, and then she wouldn’t bother with the numbers. She would just watch the red-brown flanks of the steers through the slats of the cattle cars and smell the sweet raw lumber on the flatcars and admire the enormous cylinders of the tank cars.

And always at the beginning and end of every train were the trainmen who gave her a long, deliberate, majestic wave, as though she was somebody very important.

Adolph was charging him too much, George knew, but not as much too much as he had feared. He could make it, all right, with what he had borrowed and what the cream would bring. As they finished up their deal, Adolph said, “Looks pretty bad down South, don’t it? Should help us all a little up
here,
anyhow.”

“I reckon the biggest hog has finally got what he had coming to him,” George said.

Adolph was a blindly devout Republican, almost as bad as Zack Hoefener, and George took a great pleasure in twitting him with quotations from the Hoover administration. Hoover’s Farm Board chairman had gone to Kansas last fall to plead with the winter wheat men to cut back their acreage, and he had become so infuriated with the responses he got that he told a large farm audience in Wichita, “The biggest hog will always lie in the trough. Kansas is now in the trough.”

Even Northern wheat farmers were aghast at such a statement from a government man who was supposed to be on the farmer’s side. And to add insult to injury, that Farm Board chairman was also the president of the International Harvester Company and he had made his millions by selling machinery to wheat farmers. And the kind of machinery he manufactured was one of the major reasons why there was now the kind of wheat surplus that had caused him to make his remarks about Kansas. The Farm Board chairman’s cloudy view of the wheat farmer’s world seemed surpassed only by his enormous ingratitude to that world for making him a millionaire. Newspaper editors were still lambasting him, even now that a new administration had come to power.

Adolph had got what he’d laid himself open to, and he knew it. “Well, good luck with the seed,” he said.

“You bet. Prosperity’s just around the corner,” said George.

For
me,
he added to himself as he walked out of Adolph’s office. The way things were now, it was dog eat dog when you farmed wheat, and one man’s catastrophe was another man’s salvation. That was why he had to risk everything this year to switch his seed. It would be different if he could farm his own way, but so long as Vick could tell him how much wheat to plant, he had to do his best to profit by what had happened to the Kansas winter wheat men. Let the trough go dry and the hog starve for a while.

He almost ran down the short flight of wooden steps, worn and scooped in their centers by the boots of farmers who kept Adolph well-to-do, whether they succeeded or failed. Adolph could always wait for the good years, his comfortable operating margin stored away in the great chambers above him, while he gazed out over the town backed up against the railroad tracks. He could always wait till some farmer had to have cash and then he could buy wheat at any price he named. In this late afternoon he could see the shadow of his building stretch nearly across the town.

George pulled open the door and climbed in under the wheel next to Lucy. “What’s the matter, pickle-puss?” he said. He had found out she hated that nickname, so he teased her with it—to get her so the town kids wouldn’t bother her so much, he said.

“Nothing is the matter,” she said.

He grabbed her thigh and rolled the muscles of her leg between his great fingers, exclaiming in a scolding voice, “Why Lucy, what’s the matter with you? Have you gone clean out of your head? What ails you, anyway, Lucy? What makes you carry on like this? What’re you laughing so much for, if something’s bothering you? Can’t you make up your mind whether to laugh or cry? Just like a woman!”

She was giggling hysterically and screaming at him to stop, wanting the awful tickling to stop, but wishing he would go on noticing her—and he must have, because when they went to the store, he did not give her a penny, but a whole nickel.

The next day was May Day. Next to Christmas and the Fourth of July, it was the biggest holiday of the year. Lucy lay in bed, but she could not sleep. It was eight o’clock but the sun had set only an hour ago and the long twilight was still there, behind the thin shade. Tomorrow was May Day. Tomorrow was May Day. Her father was reading a long piece in the paper, interspersing the reading with comments and raising his voice so that her mother could hear him above the noise of the dishes in the kitchen.

“This is just what I told you would happen, Rachel,” he was saying loudly. “I told you it couldn’t help but happen. It says here that yesterday Henry Morgenthau liquidated the last million bushels of September wheat owned by the government. Sold it in the Chicago pit. Says that from May of 1930 to this last March the Farm Board bought nine million bushels of wheat through Hoover’s Grain Stabilization Corporation, and now that they’ve sold the last of it they figure the government lost over a hundred and sixty million dollars. It took them just three years to lose a hundred and sixty million dollars. Oh, they’ll admit now that it was a crackpot idea. Any little farmer like me could’ve told those fatheads exactly what would happen—just in case they didn’t know just as well as
I
did!

“Pay prices way above the world market and what do you get? A lot of men that never farmed before jumping in and plowing up virgin soil so’s they can get their hands on those government
loans.
But you notice a little guy like me can’t even get a
sniff
at those loans to help out the
farmer,
can he? The
rich
man that never did a day’s work in his life—
he
can get paid by the government for a bunch of wheat stored in his own granaries that he’s never even
seen!
He gets a
loan
on it! A loan he never has to pay back. But they fix it so a little guy like me can
never
get one of those loans. A man has to have
this
qualification and
that
qualification, and be the head jackass of some damned
lodge!”

He was quiet for a minute and then he yelled, “You know what Morgenthau sold that last million bushels for?
Sixty-nine
cents! I got
twenty-six
last fall from Adolph—the same time the government was buying that wheat from the rich men. If the government is losing millions of dollars selling twenty-six-cent wheat for sixty-nine cents, then who in hell is getting their fat hands on all that dough? It don’t make sense no matter how you look at it, does it? It just
has
to be as crooked as a bear’s hind leg. Who is it, anyhow, getting all that taxpayers’ money?

“Rachel, can you hear me?” he called. “Just who do you think is getting that forty-three cents, anyhow? Who? The government sells at a
loss
for nearly
three
times what
I
could get last fall.
Think
of it!”

“I
am
thinking of it,” she said. “But I don’t understand it any more than
you
do! The whole world is just crazy, that’s all!”

Lucy got scared when she heard her mother say things like that. What happened, anyway, when the whole world was crazy?

“Oh, no, it isn’t!” her father cried.
“Some
of us are not crazy, and we know
exactly
where all those government
losses
went to. I can walk right down the street tomorrow and point to the pockets our tax money has gone into.”

Lucy could see how they would walk down the wooden sidewalks in Eureka, looking for bulges in pockets, and listening for jingling sounds.

“The elevators owned by the big men got the best rates in history for wheat storage! That’s
one
set of pockets. And the rich
farmers
got such generous
loans —
and I reckon the railroads got even better pay than
I
have to pay them. I tell you, the whole thing is rotten! It stinks to high heaven! How can you fight a thing like this, anyhow?”

“I don’t think you
can,”
her mother said.

“Oh,
yes
I can! You just wait till enough little guys like me figure out just how bad they’ve been skinned.
We’ll
fight it all right.”

It was quiet for a while, and Lucy could begin to hear the sounds of the late spring twilight. Then her father gave a mad laugh. “‘Stabilization,’ they called it. ‘Grain stabilization!’ My, aren’t the prices going to be
stable
now, with the government unloading an accumulation like that just a few months before we try to sell a crop this fall! It’s just as bad as the damn Roosians unloading all their wheat all over the world for three years now. Stabbed in the back by your own government! And you have to pay for the knife yourself! How much longer do they think they can
do
this to us? I tell you, there’s going to be
blood.”

Blood! She never could understand what he meant when he said there was going to be blood. Sometimes when they thought she was asleep they talked about getting her tonsils out or taking her to the dentist. Sometimes it was about this terrible thing that was going to happen to the world. It always seemed to have something to do with blood.

Finally she was too sleepy to keep up with what they were saying. Tomorrow was May Day. Tomorrow she would win a race and get a quarter for a prize. The sounds of the frogs singing in the slough came clear and liquid above the dry rattle of the
Jamestown Sun.