The Bones of Plenty (24 page)

Both her grandparents liked to tell Lucy how her mother had been so little and walked so early that when she first walked she went right under the tin kitchen table without ever knowing it was there. They would laugh over how mad her baby mother got when she first started bumping her head on the drawer under the table. “You could tell she was just crying because she was mad. She really had a temper when she was little like that, but then she got over it. And talk! How she would chatter on and on. You ought to have heard her talking to her doll. It was just an old corncob doll, not a nice one like yours. Hardly any little girls had real dolls then. They cost so much more money in those days. But you just should’ve seen your mother put that corncob doll to bed every night, and cover it up just like it was a real baby.”

Lucy loved to hear them talk about when her mother was a little girl, though she could not have told why.

The midsummer was no less muddled than the spring. The British restrictions of food imports were beginning to ruin the South American farmers the way the North American farmers had already been ruined. Thousands of sheep were being slaughtered in Chile and left dead on the ranges because the farmers could find no market for mutton. In China the drought was so bad that no grass grew and the trees died. The people of China were eating each other and ants were dining on mutton in the Chilean hills. It did seem as though Secretary Wallace was right when he kept saying that the world’s problems were essentially a question of distribution.

On the other hand, Wallace’s experiment to redistribute the consumer’s dollar so that the American farmer would get more of it and the middleman less did not seem to be working. The price of a loaf of bread in wheat states went from six to eight cents—the thirty-three per cent increase being blamed by the flour millers on the thirty per cent processing tax they were paying. The AAA tax was being passed on to the consumer, exactly the way George had predicted it would. It wasn’t costing the middleman a thing. The question of distribution was going to have to be settled by the little men.

This very day he had talked with men at picnic tables who appeared to be wholly of his opinion. Freedom for poor men was no longer a reality, and the celebration of Independence Day was a mockery. The men in the Jamestown park seemed to be as restless, as ready as he was himself. Why sit tamely through this empty ritual of firecrackers when what the country needed was the kind of action that established Independence Day? Why settle any longer for the pops and bangs of a make-believe battle?

Holidays almost always disappointed George, even when they didn’t commemorate something that had become a lie. He worked fourteen or sixteen hours a day from the time plowing began until the harvest was in. He worked as long as the daylight would serve him and as long as his horses could last. Why could he not rest one day and enjoy himself? Today’s swim in the tepid James River had only enervated him when he had expected to be invigorated. Instead of resting him, a holiday seemed only to break his stride. It was as though he had got himself perfectly paced for a desert marathon that would end in failure and death if he so much as broke his stride a half dozen times. Now he fought for balance in the vast emptiness, while the sky tilted and the world fell away under him. The momentum that got him through the summer was temporarily gone, and he was aware that some day he would be old and this was the way it would feel.

The sun was still high and the main street of Eureka still broiling. Nobody had spoken for the entire thirty miles of the trip back from Jamestown. Lucy was half asleep in the back seat, and Rachel sat in front beside him with Cathy asleep on her lap. For the whole trip she had been as far away as the slowly moving, slowly mutant horizon. The whole space between them and the dry line of sky might as well have been between him and Rachel in the front seat.

He parked the car near Gebhardt’s Pool Hall—the only place in town that was open. They were going to get a celebrative pint of ice cream for supper. His throat was so dry he could hardly speak. “What’ll you have?” he asked Rachel.

“Oh, it doesn’t matter at all to me,” she said. “Ask Lucy—or get what you want yourself.”

Never
would she commit herself to him—not even about the flavor of ice cream. He saw how it was—if he presented her with something she had asked for, then that gave him some claim on her. He didn’t give a damn what Lucy wanted. Lucy was a kid—she liked all ice cream. But his wife used his children a dozen times a day to hold him at a distance.

“Well what’s the use of getting any at all if you don’t care about it?” he asked angrily.

“
I
care!
I
care!” Lucy cried, quickly wide awake.

“All right, what’ll it be?” he said.

“Chocolate!” she said.

“Okay with you?” he asked Rachel.

“Fine,” Rachel said. “The baby’s going to wake up now that we’ve stopped, and she’ll be awful till I can get her fed. Let’s just get home as soon as we can.”

Who the hell wanted a holiday, anyhow? He wanted a fight.

He stalked into Gebhardt’s.

Everybody in the pool hall was too happy to want to fight. Legal beer for the first time since North Dakota entered the Union in 1889!

George looked around to see who was there. He might have known Wilkes would be sponging a drink on the Fourth of July. He was surprised, though, to see who was bustling about refilling the glasses. It was Annie Finley. Business was so brisk that it kept her sweating, and she had wiped her face so much that her mascara was all down on her apron. Dark wet half-circles showed under her arms, but as she passed by George the only smell he got was one of cheap perfume. She was obviously making a hit with the customers. Old Gebhardt stood over behind the counter watching her like the lewd old goat he was.

“Hey, neighbor!” Wilkes called. “Custer! Come on over and have a drink! Oh, my, doesn’t it make you sick to think of them making this stuff for thirteen years and then taking all the alcohol out again!
Near beer
for thirteen years! I tell you one thing, boys, I bet there was plenty of sampling that went on at them breweries before they took the kick outa their damn near beer! Come on, George! Have a drink! Good stuff, this is. None of that rotgut green beer.
This
ain’t out of Benjamin’s alley; it’s right out of that barrel over there! Come on, George! Three cheers for Roosevelt! And three more for Wild Bill Langer that took the near out of this here beer, by God! And three more for that great man, Richard M. Press, the finest sheriff this county ever had!” He waved at the big placard Press had put in Gebhardt’s window. The placard announced that Otto Wilkes’s real property and chattels would be auctioned on Saturday, July 15, to repay a long delinquent mortgage.

“No thanks, Otto. The old lady’s out in the car and she’d make me walk home if I come out of here smelling like you. Now if you was to offer me some of that dandelion wine Lester made that time, I might not be able to turn you down.”

Lester howled. “Oh that was plenty skookum! Tastiest, smoothest stuff you ever drank, if I do say so. A man could drain down a glassful and think it didn’t have no more bite than a glass of milk, but wait till he stood up—if he could!”

Rachel sat in the car wondering what was keeping George. The baby’s cheeks were deeply flushed and her hair was wet enough to wring out. She stirred, woke, and struggled to stand up. She began at once to make the complaining noises that preceded an earsplitting demand for food.

Despite Cathy’s grumblings, Rachel was aware of the paralytic silence around her. There were no trains, no cars, no horses, no one passing on the sidewalk. Except for an occasional loud laugh coming from Gebhardt’s down the street, the whole planet could have been a tomb. There
was
one other sound—the sound of an empty schoolyard on a twilit afternoon. It was the sound of the wind banging the hooks on a flag rope against a hollow flagpole somewhere behind her. It was not the sort of sound one associated with the flag on the Fourth of July. Where was George?

Finally he emerged from the pool hall, calling something gay over his shoulder. He came grinning back to the car.

“I bet he’s cleared a thousand dollars in that place since Saturday noon! And guess who quit at Gus and Ruby’s to cash in on the beer?”

Rachel didn’t really care. “Who?” she said.

“That Finley girl. She’s doing all right, too, I can tell you! She had an apron pocket about ready to bust with dimes. Pretty little thing, isn’t she?”

“Oh, George! What’s
pretty
about her? It’s all make-up!”

“Well—I can see why the boys at Gebhardt’s think she is.” He knew he never should have said it.

“They’re probably all so drunk they wouldn’t know Annie from her mother,” Rachel said. “Langer! Oh, I just hope the people of this state let him know what they think of him for this! Haven’t we had enough trouble here without making it legal!”

“Well, now, Rachel, that’s just
why
we’ve had so much trouble, for Pete’s sake! Why, before Prohibition, the Minneapolis bootleggers made
huge
fortunes bringing booze across the line. Why, every other store on Hennepin Avenue sold wine and liquor. And there was never a time when a man couldn’t walk down any street in Jimtown and hold out his hand behind him, like so, and say ‘blind pig’ out of the side of his mouth, and have somebody take the money out of the hand and put a jug of beer in it. The only difference between having Prohibition and
not
having it was that the bootleg stuff
before
Prohibition probably wouldn’t kill you—that’s all.

“But this stuff since nineteen-twenty—why, everybody and his brother have been cooking up mash from
something —
prunes, potato peelings, garbage—anything that would cook. Get her up around a hundred and eighty degrees so’s you get most of the alcohol up into the condensing pipes and not too much water and sour mash taste. Then you take the alcohol out of the pipes. For God’s sake, that’s all you have to
do
to make alcohol! But if you wanted to do it by the book, you could always write the U. S. Department of Agriculture. They had a good set of free instructions they’d be glad to send you, no questions asked.

“Hell, if a man wants to drink himself to death, he’ll find the stuff to do it with. Of course, if he gets a little Jamaica Jake or Old Horsey or the like, he can save himself money. It won’t take too much of that. I hear they’ve been making a lot of the stuff out of rotten cactus down there where Stuart is. Why don’t you ask
him
whether it’s a good idea to go ahead and make hooch legal?”

Rachel looked out her window without answering. George knew he’d gone too far and he wasn’t even sorry. He shut up, though, and started whistling “Turkey in the Straw.”

Presently he said, “This sure isn’t like the July Fourths
I
remember. We used to have a great big family reunion. Twenty-thirty-forty people—maybe more. Big baseball game, just in the family, after we ate our dinner. Did I ever tell you about the time Uncle Lon got a frog up his pants leg? I can see that just as clear as if it happened today! Uncle Lon was just sitting there stuffing himself and all of a sudden he started in yelling and jumping around, kicking the dishes and sandwiches every which way, shaking his leg in the air like he’d gone loco. I tell you, I never saw anything so funny in my whole life. There was Uncle Lon—he had a long white beard, did I ever tell you? And he was a schoolteacher, too—and mighty proud of his dignity.

“Well, I guess he stuck his leg so far in the air that the frog just couldn’t fall out. All I know is—I was just a little fellow then, about Lucy’s age—it seemed to me he must’ve jumped around like that for at least ten minutes before that frog let loose of his leg and fell out. Smack in the middle of the chokecherry jelly! You couldn’t believe it! You never saw such a sight as that scared frog in that gooey jelly.

“But at that, he wasn’t half as scared as Uncle Lon. When he finally got rid of that animal, Uncle Lon sat down and never said a word for about ten more minutes. He just kept pulling his pants leg up and sort of rubbing his leg there where the frog had been hanging on to him—he had the hairiest legs of any man I ever saw. It was no wonder that frog couldn’t get loose. But you know, you never could kid him about that frog? Never! But I’ll never forget that beard waving in the air—came clean down to his chest—took him years to grow that thing.”

Lucy was laughing. She had heard the story before, but it always made her laugh, partly because her father always sounded so gay when he told it. She wished too that families were big, the way they used to be, and that somebody would get a frog up his pants leg. That would be even better than going home to eat chocolate ice cream.

Although he didn’t feel up to it, Will had the meeting about Otto’s auction at his house. Most of the men who came were members of the Farmers’ Union, and Will had been a supporter of the union too long to back out now. After all, this was exactly the action the union advocated, and even the governor himself told them to do it.

If they let the sheriff get away with this sale, it just might be the beginning of the end for a lot of hard-working farmers in the county. All over the nation a thousand more farmers lost their farms every day. The year was half over, and in a hundred and eighty days of 1933, nearly two hundred thousand farmers had been dispossessed by banks and insurance companies.

The men at the meeting talked a good deal about the banks. What they were planning to do did not seem like much of a crime compared to what Harry Goodman did, that was a cinch. They were getting checks from the auditors of Harry’s bank now—for ten cents on the dollar. There were rumors that Harry was all set up in business far away. The Jew receivers had seen to it that their brother was taken care of. You couldn’t fight them, the way they stuck together. Not unless you got together among yourselves, too, and showed the sheriff that the farms around here were not going to be handed over to the city speculators for a song. If the law was going to let Harry Goodman go scot-free, then the law just better keep away from the farmers, because the law was good for nothing at all except to help the rich get richer at the poor man’s expense.