The Bones of Plenty (18 page)

“Who wants to come and help feed the lambs?” he said.

“Me!”
Lucy cried. That was another thing he remembered—how Stuart had once been able to come back into a room instantaneously when there was something he wanted to come back for.

They filled three baby bottles with morning’s milk and Will slipped the black nipples over them. When the lambs were smaller, he had warmed the milk, but that wasn’t necessary any more.

One of the lambs was an orphan and the other two were twins their mothers wouldn’t own. Sometimes a ewe did that—just bunted away one of the twins when feeding time came around. In the natural state, that lamb would simply starve to death. Will could never understand such an apparent distortion of the maternal instinct. What other instinct was stronger? He’d always wondered the same thing about those human twins born to Isaac, that other keeper of flocks. Why had the mother loved Jacob and not Esau? In the case of the ewe who pushed away one twin, did she choose between them for such obscure and female reasons as caused Rebekah to choose between Jacob and Esau? Or was there some practical instinct working—did the ewe know that she had only enough milk to raise one lamb, and did her instinct force her to push away the weaker one, even while her mother’s heart bled that the world must be so?

When he thought of Jacob and Esau, Will thought of Rachel and Stuart. It was impossible to believe that he had not loved them equally. Surely, surely, he had loved them equally. Why then, had one of them run away, bitterly renouncing his birthright? Esau had at least cried out to his blind father.
(Hast thou but one blessing, my father? Bless me, even me also, O my father!)
But never once had Stuart spoken of the things that troubled him. He had simply run away, leaving his father to wonder, for two tortured years, what terrible blindness of his own had driven his son away from him.

They stopped a little way from the sheep shed and the lambs came running, crying in their high baby voices. Will held a bottle in each hand and stuck them through the fence.

He let Lucy have the third bottle. “Now hang on with both hands,” he told her. “When he gets ahold of that, he’ll really wrastle it!”

The bottle throbbed in her hands from the pulsations of his hungry little tongue. His small black jaws never let go, no matter how fast the milk came. She could see it welling and bubbling at the corners of his mouth, but never a drop rolled out on his chin. It wasn’t that way with Cathy at all. She could swallow only so fast, and after that the milk poured down her neck. But the lamb had no trouble at all. He could waggle his little black tail, and do a dance with his twinkling black legs, and butt his head up and down, as though he was nursing his mother, and pull at the bottle—all at the same time. He finished the bottle before Cathy would really have got started, and then he pulled harder than ever.

“Take it away, now,” her grandfather said. “He’ll chew up the nipple.”

Lucy put her fingers next to the little black muzzle and pulled out the nipple. The lamb bleated for more.

“What a little pig you are!” he laughed. “Look how full he is.” The lamb’s stomach was bulged out under its thin baby wool.

“All
babies are little pigs, aren’t they?” Lucy said.

“They sure are,” he agreed. “They’d never grow up if they weren’t.”

The smell of the milk had seemed like the soul of the gentle, fertile day itself. Now that the milk was gone, it was as if they still smelled it in the soft south breeze—a wind so soft that it scarcely seemed to be there, but still it was—as elusive but as alive as the pushing wheat in the fields. Lucy said hopefully, “Have you got time to tell me a story?”

She was as hungry as the lambs. He felt it. He wondered how it was that he knew so many things about her, and how it was that sometimes a child could be closer to the parents of its parents than to its own parents. His own grandfather had been full of Indian stories and Civil War stories, and Will now had his grandfather’s medal, hung on a red-and-blue ribbon, packed away in the trunk along with the other Civil War things. That seemed so long ago. Yet his own father was already twelve years old when the war ended, and his own father remembered when Lincoln was shot.

But Lucy was not interested in war stories, nor in Indian battles, though she liked stories about Indians in the forests or on the prairies, so long as there were animals in the stories too. She could not tell him what she expected from his stories, but he had begun to understand that she looked to him to build a plausible passageway between the two disparate and distant places in which she lived.

The two far-apart places were irreconcilable. The first was the world of the little dark house set between its two narrow groves in the prairie. The other was the world in her head that changed and expanded as she grew, and slipped ever farther away from the first. Many years ago, when Rachel was only a year or so older than Lucy, he and Rose had bought the books that now made Lucy’s second world. The set was called
The Young Folks’ Treasury,
and it ran to twelve thick volumes bound in red, generously adorned with heavy shiny color pages full of beasts, giants, fairies, princesses, and heroes of legends.

After several years of being read to by her mother, Lucy was now working her own way through them. She was presently in the stage where the enchanted world was intertwined with the religious one. She believed that if she only wished hard enough for something, and worked hard enough to deserve it, she would surely get it. She wanted stories from him that proved she was right. She was getting harder and harder to tell stories to.

“Have you got time?” she begged. “It’s
Sunday.”

He teased her while he tested such ideas as he could snatch away from the pain that was as determined to destroy his brain as he was determined that it would not. “You won’t let me tell about fairies or princesses. It has to be so it really could happen. But when I tell you about something that really could happen, then you’re sad.”

“Only that one time!” she protested. She looked up at him, pleading for the bridge that could never be built from the real world to the good world.

He leaned back against the fence and hooked a heel over the bottom board. A lamb tried out the black rubber, but found it was not the proper shape. The pain shot through his abdomen again. He loosened his belt another notch but it didn’t seem to help.

“Shall I tell about a lamb?” he asked.

“Yes!”
she whooped. He didn’t know anybody who could say
yes
the way Lucy could. The one sudden syllable was like the whole world crying
Joy!

“Well,” he began, “there was a little girl who had a pet lamb. What shall we call the girl?”

“Sally,” Lucy said at once. She was always full of names.

“Sally had wished for a baby lamb for a long time,” Will said.

“Every night she wished on the first star for a lamb. She wasn’t like a little girl I know who wishes every night for a dapple-gray pony like her cousin’s. She just wished for a little baby lamb.

“One night when she went to fetch the cows for her father, she heard a little weak ba-a-a, ba-a-a. She couldn’t imagine where it was coming from because her father didn’t have any sheep. That was why she had never had a baby lamb of her own. She looked all around, but she didn’t see the lamb.”

He had to repeat himself while he thought. Usually he had only to choose between alternatives that waited in his mind, but not today.

“The sound seemed to be coming from a little bit above her in the gulch. She looked up, but she still couldn’t see anything. She climbed up the side of the ravine a little ways and she saw a dark spot in the side of it. It was a tiny little cave! She was so surprised! She had never seen that cave there before. And then she saw that there really was a lamb lying in the cave, but it was a black lamb—all black, not just feet and muzzle and tail. That was why she couldn’t see it in the cave.

“She wondered how the little lamb had ever got there. When it saw her it tried to stand up, but it had a sore foot, and it stumbled and fell back down again. She picked it up and it didn’t even try to wiggle out of her arms. It wasn’t afraid of her at all. It knew she wanted to help it.”

“Was it very heavy for her?” Lucy asked.

“Yes, it was. It was all she could do to carry it, because she was not a very big girl. I doubt if she was as strong as you are, either. But she carried it all the way to where the cows were grazing and then home. When her father saw her bringing in the lamb, he was very surprised. But he said that if she would take care of it she could keep it. He even built a little house for it, inside a little fence. He looked at its foot and said it had been cut on the barbed wire but it would get better. So Sally fed the little black lamb and soon it was well, and it could run and jump like any lamb. In fact, it got so it could jump over its little fence, and then it would run away. Sally thought it looked so funny jumping over its fence that she would laugh and chase after it, and she begged her father not to make the fence higher.

“So, one day the lamb ran very far away, and this time Sally looked and looked, and couldn’t find him. He was a real black sheep, that little lamb. He was really a bad little egg.” He repeated again, waiting for some more story to come. Where did the lamb run to? Where? Where?

“Sally looked all day long. She didn’t notice the sky getting darker and darker and darker, until it was almost as black as her little lamb. Her mother had told her always to run right home when the sky got black like that, and to watch for a tornado. Her mother had told her that if she ever saw a tornado coming along, she should not even try to get home, but lie down in the lowest spot she could find and hang on to something. If she was out in the stubble, she should just hang on to that. But Sally had forgotten that, because she was so worried about her lamb.

“So she kept on wandering around and calling for her lamb while the clouds got bigger and blacker. Suddenly she felt the tornado come and grab her right up, and the next thing
she
knew, she was blowing around and around with all the other things it had picked up, but she couldn’t see any of them because it was
so
black.

“Now, you know, I’ve seen a tornado do awful queer things. You just can’t believe it till you see it. Once right down here in Jimtown a tornado took a roof off one house and set it down again, just right! on another house. Down South, where they have a lot more tornadoes than we do here, the wind does a lot of crazy things. You know, just last week they had some storms down there that killed a lot of people, they were so bad. And yet the wind lifted up one man right out of his house and carried him prit-near two blocks away and set him down again, just as pretty as you please. Didn’t hurt him a bit. And I’ve seen, myself, back in Indiana, a straw that went through an oak door two inches thick. It never even bent or broke on account of hitting the door so fast and so hard. Just went
clean
through it—just like that!”

“What happened to Sally?” Lucy said.

“Well, sir, just the same thing that happened to that fellow down in Kansas. That tornado picked her up and whirled her around and around and set her back down again, about a mile away, just as easy as pie.

“And guess who had been there with her, twirling around in the big black tornado all the time, so coal-black she never saw him at all?”

“The lamb!” Lucy cried.

“Right!” Will said triumphantly. He had feared she wouldn’t accept the idea. He knew he just wasn’t up to snuff. “And the tornado set
him
down, too, just as nice as could be. And she ran over to him and she saw that he had got himself all tangled up in something up there in the tornado. And I bet you can’t guess what it was!” He thought desperately.

“Well, it was a—a—a …” Now was the time to try some magic, but it would have to be probable magic. “It was a golden bridle—just right for a pony. She untangled his little woolly black legs from it. It was gold, all right. It glittered and glittered. It was heavy, too. But she ran all the way home with it. The little lamb ran right behind her.
He
had learned
his
lesson, you just bet.
He
wasn’t going to run away any more!

“And when she showed the bridle to her father, he got a wonderful idea. He said, ‘Say, Sally, I bet we could find some rich person who would buy this bridle. Then I bet there would be enough to buy you a pony, with a regular saddle and bridle. What do you say? Should we put an ad in the paper?’ And sure enough, some rich man came and bought the bridle, and Sally’s father took her to the horse auction and they came home with the prettiest little dapple-gray pony you ever saw. So then Sally had
both
a lamb and a pony, and it was all because of her bad little lamb that she got a pony!”

He felt deeply relieved at the smile she gave him. She had not been disappointed. Her smile, when she was really happy, was like her
yes.
There was no other smile like it.

“Let’s go get the checkers and have a game out here in the sunshine, shall we?” he asked. It wasn’t polite to leave the others for so long, but he just felt too blamed bad to get back into an argument.

“
I
tell you what.” He had an even better idea. “I’ll just be out here looking after the ewes while you take the bottles back in and fetch the board and checkers.”

“Okay!” she said. She was running before she finished the word. He stood watching her and thinking again how easy it was for a child to change worlds. Very soon she would reach the age where she would be trying to make the leap between her worlds all by herself, just as she already didn’t need to hold his hand any more when they walked in town, though she always did.

He thought about how small her hand still was, and how sharp her little knuckles felt when he pressed his thumb over them. She had not stopped fighting against her solitude; that was why she still wanted to take his hand when they walked in town.

He wondered when she would surrender to solitude, as Rachel and Stuart had, so that it would become necessary to her. For many years he had wondered if everybody’s soul had to be defined by solitude after a certain stage of maturity, or if it was only prairie people who almost always grew that way.