The Bones of Plenty (26 page)

When the two deputies gingerly descended the steps and headed for the barn, every man knew they would not come back without the horses, because Otto had been complaining ever since the sheriff had come out and laid down the law about what chattels were to be where. But no man was really prepared for what the deputies led out of the gloom beneath the high open doors. Otto must have risen even earlier than any of the rest of them. He had curried the last bit of chaff and manure from the dark-gray fetlocks and polished the last loose hair and speck of dust from the enormous dappled rumps. He had tied their clipped manes into red-ribboned soldiers marching up the mountains of their necks. He had braided their tails with red ribbon, too, but it was the frivolous parade of tiny ribbons arching over the magnificent necks that emphasized, as nothing else could have, the four thousand pounds of horse perfection that were being offered for George and Otto’s other neighbors to bid upon.

George’s heart leapt as though he had been transported into the show ring of a great fair. Here was a team such as men like him had yearned for all their lives—ever since they had been three-year-old boys at the fairs, standing as close as they dared to the stalls in the Equine Building, breathing in the sweet smell of hay and sweat and
horse.
They had all spent hours looking up at those horses and they each possessed an infallible image of such a horse from every possible angle. They had begun their loving admiration when they were so short that they still stood far beneath the horses’ bellies and their eyes were but a few inches above the splendid hocks—marvelous peaks of bone, majestic as the knuckles of God. Every fall at the fair their eyes had been a little higher, and they had committed to unfading memory a little more of a champion’s configuration.

George remembered the feeling of stepping worshipfully aside when the owners came to lead the nervous animals from their stalls, and he remembered how it was to follow along and watch what happened in the hot, brilliant ring before the grandstand, where the judges paced back and forth with dazzling white spats over their shoes, swinging their canes, cocking their white straw hats, writing on score cards. Otto’s Percherons were the kind of horses that wore the ribbons away from the ring.

The sheriff turned his head from the horses to smile at the silent men. He was a man, George thought, lower than a worm’s belly button.

“I reckon you men all know these horses!” the sheriff yelled. “You all know they’ve won some prizes at the State Fair! A beautifully matched team. Who’ll start in at one and a quarter for the team? One and a quarter, one and a quarter!” He was trying to sound like a professional auctioneer, but he wasn’t very convincing.

Not that he needed to be convincing. There wasn’t a man there who could not have scared up a hundred dollars or so by selling his two best horses. They were shabbily dressed men and they all had to go home to stricken farms after this shindig was over. How could they help lusting after the glory of that team?

“All right, men,” the sheriff shouted. “If I don’t hear one and a quarter, I’ll up it to one and half before I even hear the first bid. Now who’ll give me one and a quarter?”

George felt an earthquake unhinging his legs and rattling his head. He lifted his voice over the crowd. “It’s an insult to fine horseflesh for us men here not to bid on an offer like that! I’ll give you one and a quarter—
one dollar and a quarter,
I bid—one buck and two bits. That team is worth that
any
day!”

The tremors still fluttered in his stomach. Now, surely, somebody would jump in after him and help to break this thing up quickly before the sheriff hypnotized them all.

There was a fair amount of nervous laughter, but nobody said anything. The men were dazed, as though they had wakened from a beautiful dream to find the dream standing in front of them. Nobody could take his eyes off the Percherons.

Both of them were restive under the fearful hands of the city men. They couldn’t use their braided-up tails against the flies swarming over them, and the muscles of their thick hides flickered steadily over the ribs and shoulders and down the legs. The deputy holding the gelding apprehensively eyed the dappled skin rolling over the mammoth planes and joints of his horse, but the deputy holding the stallion had much greater worries.

He looked very small and impotently urban. The brim of his hat came below the stallion’s nostrils and the broad chest of the animal was like a wall behind him.

The stallion was in a state of monstrous excitement. It was the kind of moment to bring a fleeting wistfulness to the purest of men—the kind of moment that had for centuries inspired cave paintings, tile murals, and ceremonial costumes. It was the kind of moment that the deputy was scarcely qualified to deal with.

The men emerged from their dream to become conscious of a mare standing by Lester Zimmerman’s wagon. She was making feverish signals to the stallion and Lester had both hands on her halter. Otto looked over toward Lester and gave him a quick grin.

Lester had prudently unhitched the mare as soon as he arrived, and now he let her go. She sprang away from him to meet her muscular prince.

The stallion plunged and knocked the deputy off balance. The man yanked himself back to his feet by the halter rope and ran with the horse. He bounced behind the driving shoulders like a man tied to a locomotive. The stallion, as unhampered as a locomotive, had forgotten all about the man attached to his halter. The rope burned out of the deputy’s grip and he fell aside without even a wound to show for his disgraceful efforts.

The men who had demurred so long in letting the sheriff’s car up the drive took no time at all to clear a path from the stallion to the mare.

George wondered at the ignorance of the deputy in trying to manage such a horse with nothing but a halter. Had the fellow thought a halter was a bridle? Didn’t city people know that no man could ever trust any stallion? Didn’t they know the world was full of stallions so mean they’d as soon as bite your arm off as look at you? Wilkes himself had a goat running around the farm that had climbed into a Percheron stallion’s manger for a peaceful summer afternoon’s nap. When the horse returned to his stall from the day’s work, he went in after the goat and took the tip of its face off in one snap of his jaws. Otto’s goat had no nose now, but its nostrils were still there—just holes in its blunted muzzle. It had recovered, but it was a funny sight—and a memorable one.

Didn’t city people know that out on the range with nobody to get in their road, the mustang stallions ripped each other to the bone with their big yellow teeth and commonly fought till one was killed? This little city man was probably damned lucky that the mare had been there to distract the stallion before he got other ideas.

The horses thundered away together, the mare’s harness jangling and sliding from side to side. It was a cumbersome, workaday wedding garment. Watching them fleeing toward their assignation, Lester remarked to George that it was too bad about the crupper strap, but probably it wouldn’t bother a pecker like that too much. Oscar Johnson heard him and passed the remark on to his neighbor.

“Who brung that mare in heat in here?” yelled the sheriff.

But nobody heard him. The jokes and guffaws wended their way through the crowd. The sheriff dropped his hand toward his pistol and then he picked up his auction hammer instead. When the men were ready, they fell back into their complete, unnerving silence. They wouldn’t even bother to heckle him—any more than the stallion had bothered to kick the deputy.

“All right,” the sheriff said. “We’ll put the Percherons up again. Who’ll give me a hundred and fifty
dollars?”

“Who’ll fetch the stallion back?” Oscar Johnson roared. “I didn’t hardly get a good enough look at him to risk a bid.”

“Now you men out there watch your step or I’ll run you in for inciting to riot!” the sheriff cried.

“Don’t arrest
me,
for Christ’s sake!” Oscar yelled back. “Arrest the
horse!”

“Now, by God, we’ve had
enough
of this!” The sheriff spoke to the two deputies and both of them took hold of the gelding’s halter to lead him back to the barn—a hundred and fifty pounds of man on either side of a ton of horse.

“Those little fellas look as useless as tits on a boar, don’t they?” George inquired of Lester.

“If their brains was dynamite it wouldn’t blow their nose,” Lester agreed.

Some of the men in that crowd had not enjoyed themselves so much since the days when they ganged up to badger a female teacher, feeling the first restless power of their manhood. They hadn’t run into this schoolroom kind of authority since their graduation from the eighth grade, and they were beginning to be exhilarated by their return to the game they used to play—the mass defiance of the helpless against the authority standing before them. Only this time the game was more fun than it had ever been before, because it was so much more serious.

The deputies came back with Otto’s other team, contrasting so pitiably with the Percherons that the crowd began to laugh again. These were an ungainly pair of sinister creatures that had recently run half wild on ranges in the far West. When the Depression had got so bad that farmers couldn’t afford to buy gas for their tractors, the horse traders out West began corralling bunches of wild mustang mares, running them with domesticated draft stallions—big males to increase the size of the colts—and raking in fancy profits. By the looks of them, these two had been sired by Belgians that were more than twice as big as their untamed mothers.

This team was as badly mismatched as the Percherons were perfectly matched. They were both geldings but one was black, with a complicated brand on his rump that had burned off all the hair on a patch the size of a man’s hand. He had probably been stolen once, and therefore branded twice. The other was a sorrel as ewe-necked, paunchy, and buck-kneed as a living horse could be. Neither of them was worth more than twenty-five or thirty dollars, and the buyer would be sure to discover that they had various nasty stable vices which would not show until they were taken home.

After the laughter, though, the crowd was quiet again. George couldn’t bear the tension any longer. “I’ll start this pair of moth-eaten critters at two bits!” he shouted.

“Thirty cents!” came a voice from behind him.

“Thirty-five!” came another.

“Take it easy, boys,” Lester scolded. “You’re getting way past me. Thirty-six!”

“Thirty-seven!”

Clarence Egger appeared beside George. “It’s as good as a vawdville show,” he snickered. “I never really thought it would work. I gotta hand it to you, George.”

“Thirty-seven and a half!”

“Thirty-eight!”

“Hell,” said George, “if Lester wants them two roarers that bad, let him have ‘em. I’m not going any higher.”

“Now listen here,” shouted the sheriff. “This man standing right here behind me has got a perfectly legal mortgage on this property. Now let’s just cut out this tomfoolery and get down to business. Who’ll give me thirty dollars for the team?”

“Which team?”

“I said, cut it out! This sale is going to go on!”

“Forty cents!”

“I’m not having that kind of sale!” the sheriff screamed.

“If you don’t aim to have a sale what did you waste our tax money printing up those signs for?” George wanted to know.

The little zephyr of levity had blown itself out. It was as though a wind, lifting up the light silver backs of the willow leaves along a river, had died down and let them drop to show their dark tops again. The crowd showed how quickly it could become another kind of crowd. George’s chest grew tight with exultation. This was the way it was going to be when the
big
fight came.

“Yeah, if he don’t want to have this sale, maybe there just might be some other way we can get our tax money out of those signs—or at least our money’s worth!”

“All right, now,” the sheriff said. George thought he sounded desperate. “We’ll just forget about horses for a minute and go on to sheep. You all know how wool is going up. Wilkes has fed them sheep for you all winter. Keep ’em this winter and cash in next summer. Now then, I’ll start ’em at two dollars a head, in lots of twenty, take ’em as they come, young or old, or any wethers along with the ewes and lambs. Just the fleece off’n each one of ’em this summer brought in two dollars or more. Who’ll start, now, at forty dollars for lots of twenty?”

George spoke up again. “Yeah, and once Otto got the wool off, it was a wonder those sheep held together at all. Skinniest sheep I ever saw in my life. Five cents a head.”

The sheriff conferred with the man in the silk suit. The man said something to Irene.

“A
telephone!”
she shrieked.

The man turned back to the sheriff, and the two deputies started down the steps. It’s over, George thought, but the sheriff pounded again with his hammer and shouted, “Now, then, we’ll have a little recess for a while till some real bidders get here. Anybody that wants to bid can stay. Anybody that doesn’t might as well go home. It’ll be a long hot spell of waiting,” he finished solicitously.

“I think we got a few too many slickers around here right now, don’t you?” George asked. He moved in front of the deputies just in time to cut them off from the sheriff’s car, and leaned innocuously against the door of it. He rested the heel of one large work shoe on the running board and braced an elbow in the open window.

The deputy who had let the stallion escape stepped up to redeem himself.

“Get away from there,” he said. “That’s county property.”

“That means I own a little bit of it then, don’t it?” George said. “I reckon, for the time being, till you can get your pettifogging shysters to work on it, I’ll just settle for this little piece of running board, here”—he clunked his heel down, sending a shudder through the car—“and this little piece of windowsill.”

“This here is county property,” the deputy said again. “You get away from there, now, and let me get inside. I got my orders from Sheriff Press, and you know it.”