The Bones of Plenty (29 page)

Her arms, her body, her throat, her face, even her eyes ached with her need to comfort the child who would never be comforted. She yearned for one thing only—to sit in the corner on the floor of the shadowed bedroom holding the proud doomed little head against her breast till night fell and the merciful angel came for them both. What else was there to do?

It was very hot under the bed. Lucy lay looking up at the lines of short springs hooked together and crossing each other to fasten into the little holes along the frame.

She heard her father come in with the milk and run it through the separator. She heard them all sit down to dinner.

“Where’s Lucy?” her father said.

“She’s not hungry,” her mother answered.

“I’m telling you, Rachel, I’m not going to raise a kid that doesn’t obey me! Absolute obedience
must
be required of a child! Otherwise, they grow up spoiled rotten. They’re no good to
anybody
then. Not even themselves. I don’t see why you can’t understand that you don’t do a kid a
favor
when you
spoil
him.”

Lucy did not hear her mother say anything. Only after she had heard them all go to bed did she creep up to lie on top of the mattress that she had contemplated so long from below. She had not answered when her mother called to her again after supper. She was beginning to feel a little hungry, but not hungry enough to give in and ask for food.

That night she dreamed again about the great yellow-eyed lion sleeping in the grass. Then the mischievous, noisy monkeys woke him and he saw her and came bounding after her like a flaming thistle in a black wind, while she ran through fields and jungles in a rampant maze with her feet never quite touching the ground. In the morning it seemed that this hysterical landscape had burned against her eyelids all night long until it was replaced by the burning of the early hot day shining strongly down on her bed—the day that finally brought back memory of the reason why her eyes were so dried and salted.

“Lucy isn’t going out with the cows again,” Rachel said to George, quietly, so Lucy could not hear. She was cutting the bread for breakfast; and she paused, resting the knife on the breadboard, and looked up at him. He forced himself to meet her eyes, to prove that he was right.

Then he turned his back to go out the door and summed up the situation as it looked to him.

“If a man can’t count on his own family for help,” he said, “I don’t see how he can be expected to make a go of it. If he has to fight every fat middleman in the country and then his family too, what in Sam Hill is he going to do? When I was
half
her age, if I’d done a fool thing like that my old man would’ve beat me with a black-snake.
Your
father spoiled
you,
and you want
me
to spoil
her”

“I
love
my father! And just how did
you
feel about
yours?”

“What has
that
got to do with it?” He grabbed his cap in one hand and the milk pail in the other and headed for the barn. It was nobody’s damned business how he felt about his father—
nobody’s.

After breakfast he went out to rake the hay he had mowed a few days before. Hay-raking was about as pleasant as any job he could think of. It was a job that went much faster than most, and gave a man the feeling of having accomplished a great deal in a little while. When he finished a field he liked to look at the long low mounds of half-cured hay, sweetly pungent with the stored work of the resting acres.

But two things spoiled his pleasure in the job today. The hay was so thin this year because of the drought—thinner than he could ever remember it. That was the first thing. The second was that he would have to start using it up almost immediately if he couldn’t figure out some way to get the cows to pasture. Now he was committed to paying for grazing land that would go to waste for the lack of a fence or a herder. How maddening could a man’s life get, anyway?

He could always just drive the cattle over there and hope they’d stay. They probably would, but he could not be sure; and anyhow, he wasn’t the kind to let his stock run loose the way Otto Wilkes did. He could stake out the whole herd, but that would be so much effort for him that it would hardly be worthwhile, considering how rushed he was. The only thing to do was find a herder somewhere or just forget about the pasture. This was what happened when a man’s family let him down. Well, he’d let them know he could manage without them. Next time he went to town he’d find himself a boy. All the farm boys would be working for their own fathers, as children ought to do, but he could find a town boy to do it.

There was one big thing to be optimistic about. He still saw little rust damage in the wheat, though the fields of Marquis all around him were in bad shape. It was just a little too early yet to tell about smut. He didn’t even have to look at his Ceres to know that it was suffering from bad grasshopper damage. But so was every other field. His competitors had nothing on him there. If the smut didn’t get him and the rust got everybody else, then he would be one up, at least, on the others.

The price of cream was another thing to be hopeful about, if he could only keep up the production of his herd. Cream was up ten cents a pound over July of last year. He decided to go to town that very day and see if he could find a boy.

He went to Herman first, to ask him if he knew of anybody and to get a package of Bull Durham. Mrs. Finley and her boy Audley were getting their week’s groceries. Now
there
was a likely-looking lad—about ten, George would judge, and certainly in need of the money. It was handy to have his mother there, too. He could ask them right now.

George cleared his throat. “Say, how would you like to make a loan of this boy here?” he said.

Audley looked as startled as she did.
“Loan
him? What for?”

“Simplest job in the world. Herd six cows on a section that isn’t fenced alongside of the road.”

“Well,” she hedged, “he’s quite a lot of help to me around the house with the littler ones. I don’t know if I could let him go just now.”

“I’d fetch him and bring him back and pay him a quarter a day for five days a week. How’s that?” George said.

When she got a check at all, Pearl Finley got a relief voucher for four dollars’ worth of groceries a week, for herself and the five kids. Another dollar and a quarter was a lot of money.

“Why, I think that’s just wonderful,” she said. “Audley would
love
to do that, I know.”

“I don’t like cows much,” Audley said.

“Oh, that don’t matter,” George scoffed. “Who
does?
A fellow doesn’t have to
like
them to herd them, does he?”

“Audley would thank you kindly for the job,” Mrs. Finley said firmly.

“Would it be all right if he started today?” George said. “I can wait a minute and run you home with your groceries.”

George waited by the counter, tapping an aimless rhythm on it. He couldn’t get the well out of his mind for a minute. It had filled up just enough in the night so he could water the stock, but they’d have to forget about the tomatoes. What if he had to take time off now to sink another deep well? And what if he couldn’t find water at all? What then? Haul it? Where would he haul it from? And how could he spend all day hauling water, even if he did find somebody who would let him have all he needed? Get rid of the cattle? Then no cream checks. What then?

That was why it was worth a lot to him to get the cows to green pasture, or what passed for that. He was going to pay the boy as much, almost, as it would cost to feed hay, but when cows ate grass they didn’t need so much water. And for the next six weeks, literally every drop made a difference. He could always buy hay, too, though the price was going up. But water he might not be able to buy. If the railroads had to start hauling it in, he could certainly never pay their prices. Other men in other places were doing that, to preserve herds they had spent a lifetime breeding, but he was in no position to buy water.

He and Audley did not talk on the way home after they had let Mrs. Finley off. George felt too triumphant to mess with kid talk. He hadn’t told Rachel what he was going to town for. He jumped out of the car. “Come on in,” he said. “I’ll get the old lady to fix you a bite to eat and then we’ll fetch the cows.”

Audley followed him into the kitchen.

“Well, I got me a
boy!”
George said loudly. “You know Audley Finley, don’t you? Got me a cow-herder!”

“That’s wonderful,” Rachel said. She knew George wanted her to be angry, but she wasn’t. He never seemed to understand that such things would not anger her.

Haying was the first heroic once-and-for-all job of the summer. The wheat had a month to go yet, and the corn had more than two months. Most of the work between planting and threshing was gardening—long days of weeding and fussing with bugs and sprays. A man got to hating every tiniest seedling weed that had used up some drops of precious water—precious enough when the well had given plenty and only the labor of hauling it up the hill to the garden had made it costly. It was nerve-wracking and degrading to have to feel such anxious solicitude for each root, such anger with each pale green cutworm.

It was a relief to get away from that hard, dry ground, to stand upright with head and shoulders against the sky, and pitch clean hay into the loader. Nobody had to worry about weeds in the hay. The cows could eat around the spiky brown thistles in this, their winter pasture, just as they could eat around the fuzzy green thistles in the summer pasture. A man could charge into haying with all the impatience he had accumulated hoeing in a garden all day.

Lucy loved haying because she was in charge of the hayrack and she drove the team. Every once in a while her father would vault into the hayrack and pitch a few huge forkfuls to the front to make room for more hay coming down from the hay loader in the rear, and then he would jump back to the dusty stubble to pitch to the loader again.

Then it was Lucy’s job to tramp down the hay he had pitched to her. After five minutes of tramping, her legs began to balk, and after ten minutes her thighs turned to stone and her raw tendons disconnected themselves from her ankles and stopped lifting her feet. After that, with a boy out there across the road herding her father’s cows and shaming her, she kept her legs working only by praying all the time that God would not let her be humiliated any more.

She was just turning around the corner of the field and feeling the hot wind shift to her other cheek when she noticed a car stopping at their mailbox. A man got out and read their name. Then he turned down their road, but instead of going on to the house, as they expected him to, he parked as near to them as he could. He climbed through the barbed wire, stretching it badly, and cut through the wheatfield.

“Look
at that bird!” her father yelled. “All I’d need is fifty or sixty more like him and there wouldn’t be any wheat left standing to cut. I thought he was the Watkins man. Don’t the Watkins man have a green car like that?”

“Yes, he does,” she yelled back.