The Bones of Plenty (3 page)

He remembered how a schoolmate of his had fallen down an old well like this one. It was spring and the ground was wet. The well was so old that all the curbing had rotted away and the sides kept collapsing on the boy. They had got him out alive, but he grew up peculiar.

He could tell from the way Kate was stamping around that the foal wasn’t born yet. He wished she’d hurry up about it if she was going to do it. He wanted to get back to work. After this morning’s catastrophes, he felt more desperately far behind than ever. This last year he had got so far behind that he sometimes caught himself saying, “What’s the use?”

George Armstrong Custer saying, “What’s the use?”

He thought, as he so often did, of how things had changed so much faster than anybody had ever supposed they would. George had been born a mere twenty-three years after his namesake rode a high-stepping sorrel horse into ambush at the Little Big Horn. His grandfather had come from Illinois to homestead in the Dakota Territory just two years after General Custer was killed. The old man loved to tell about how he had been to Bismarck when it was nothing but a ferry landing on the Missouri River and a place for the soldiers from Fort Abraham Lincoln to get booze and women. And two years after the Boy General was dead, he was still, after booze and women, the main topic of conversation. Fort Abraham Lincoln—four miles from Bismarck—the westernmost fort in the north of the continent. And out of it had ridden the troops behind the fearless redheaded cavalryman—so nearly immortal while he was alive, so obviously mortal when they found his white, naked body lying along with all the others on the hillside.

George’s old granddaddy would not believe his eyes if he could see Bismarck now. Here the twenty-story white tower of the capitol rose up from the prairie—there a silver bridge spanned the Missouri, and beyond, Highway 10, the Red Trail, proceeded in a humdrum concrete strip through the country of Sitting Bull and on to the Pacific Ocean. Yet George himself had been born on the western frontier, and his grandfather had seen fit to bestow on him the name of a frontier hero. When he was a lad of six or seven, herding cows in the unfenced pastures, he would kick over a buffalo skull every time he went after a stray calf or ran a badger down a hillside. Some of the skulls even had patches of hide on them.

It was all over in Kate’s stall. He stood up and buttoned his sheepskin coat. He drew on his heavy leather gloves and pulled the flaps of his hunting cap down over his ears. He was a big man, nearly six feet three, and almost two hundred pounds. He could still spring up from a milk stool as light as a cat on his feet, but the job ahead of him at the moment did not cause him to move in such a manner.

He pushed the wheelbarrow down the aisle, hoping the fetus wouldn’t be too hard to look at. It was a light little thing, seemingly perfect. The afterbirth was normal. Kate was feverish, but that was to be expected. He made sure the blanket he’d put on her was securely fastened. After he got the foal out of her stall, he’d bring her some water.

He loaded it in the wheelbarrow and pushed it out of the barn. He’d wait till it dried off and then drag it out where the coyotes would take care of it. He might be able to shoot a couple when they came to the carcass and earn himself some bounty money.

He felt like going after bigger game than coyotes. He felt like shooting the bastard who’d left that hole. He felt like shooting the storekeeper whose lousy cash gobbled up land that other people had tamed for him. A man born on the frontier, dammit, had a right to own enough land to build himself a house on.

He looked across the pasture hills to the heavy noon sky. He wondered if it would be snowing by the time he would have to drive into town to get Lucy from school. When
he
was seven years old, nobody had toted
him
back and forth from school, but things were different nowadays. He couldn’t think when it was that he had last come across a buffalo skull.

Will Shepard braced himself against the eccentricities of the springs under the truck seat while he coasted over the thumping timbers that were laid between the railroad tracks as a concession to whatever traffic found itself at cross purposes with the Northern Pacific’s main line.

He glanced out to his right to see if old Millard Adams was watching for a wave from him, but he saw no one at all in the depot—just the boards of the building and the platform. Those of the building had once been painted and those of the platform had not, but for a long time they had all been the same color. Only the letters at either end of the building had been retouched. They said EUREKA.

Most of the town was either to Will’s right or straight ahead of him to the north. The tracks to his left stretched west, accompanied only by telegraph wires except for the faraway shapes of Clarence Egger’s farmyard.

In front of Will, at the corner across the street from the depot, was Herman Schlaht’s store, and on up the street were Gebhardt’s pool hall, the bank, and the café. It was the bank that Will was heading for first. He let the truck roll along past it, applying a minimum of pressure on the brake pedal so as to spare himself the awful squalling of the worn steel shoes slipping against the drums. He must get the truck down to Ray Vance for a new set of brakes before the busy season started. He turned the wheel so the tires rubbed into the low bank of snow piled along the wooden sidewalk, and the truck stopped. He opened the door and jumped out; he was in a hurry to get rid of the tobacco plug in his mouth because he hadn’t been able to spit since he crossed the tracks.

He sent it plopping into the snowbank, where it added its sprawling brown stain to the other offenses committed against that mound since the last snow. It was forty years since he had begun to chew to prove, when he was sixteen years old, that he was as tough as any other man in any threshing crew in the world. By the time he didn’t need the proof any more, he was stuck with the habit.

Except for that pile accumulated from the clearings of the road and the sidewalk, most of the snow had been taken away by the wind. The wind robbed them of the water in the snow. After fighting through ten-foot drifts for six months, they were likely to be told by the official measurers that a hard winter had left them perhaps three inches of water in the ground. So far this winter there had been half of three inches, but the heaviest snows of the season might still be on the way. He looked up at the early afternoon sky, thick and gray with the moisture that didn’t come down. It just stayed there, apparently frozen solid for the whole ninety-three million miles between him and the sun.

He stamped down the sidewalk, trying to pound some blood back into his feet. He had got chilled in the three-mile drive to town, for the holes around the pedals in the floor of the truck aimed a frigid wind at his feet and legs.

He was not a tall man, but neither was he quite so short as his stocky body or the comparison of it with the generally taller bodies of his neighbors made him appear. His face was milder than it used to be, his middle was rounder, and his head was nearly bald. The years of his astonishing strength were gone. Nevertheless, there was no one in town who did not know that once when Will Shepard had wanted to get a Ford engine block from Leroy Kellogg’s to Ray Vance’s garage across the street, he had simply lifted the engine on his back and carried it over and set it down in a spot that was convenient for Ray.

Now, at fifty-six, he still worked right along with the young men he hired on his farm, but without competing—only with gratitude that he was given the strength to continue bearing the great burdens he allotted to himself. Work had rewarded him. In this desperate time he owned free and clear a full section of land as rich as any that existed anywhere on earth, plus buildings, machinery, and stock. He had, in addition, a sizable savings account and a few collapsed securities which had a fair chance to recover, providing, of course, that the nation itself survived. He had been just the right age to ride the country’s good years and the best twenty years of all time for wheat—the first two decades of the century. He had been too old to go to war sixteen years ago, but young enough to manage five hundred acres of wheat land yielding thirteen bushels or more to the acre, at prices up to two dollars and seventy cents a bushel. His wheat checks had mounted well into five figures for several years, and the net returns had made the farm his. He himself had made no war sacrifices, and he felt indebted to those who had. His business now was with a man who had gone to war.

Harry Goodman was the man. He had started up the bank in Eureka soon after the war and he was nearly forty now. The twenty flabby pounds Harry had put on since he came to Eureka had transformed him from a thin young man to a fat older man, for his frame was much too short and slight to make any sort of graceful adjustment to so much added weight. For a while Harry had displayed an enlarged, cloudy, full-length photograph of himself in his overseas uniform. “Here I am,” the picture seemed to say, “a doughboy just like the boys who boarded the train right here in Eureka. Here are my lumpy puttees over my polished boots, my creaseless pants, and my soup-dish helmet. And here, hanging from my arm, my goggle-eyed mask, to preserve me from the Kaiser’s mustard gas.”

But after a few years Harry had taken down the picture, perhaps because of the increasing discrepancy between the length of the webbed belt in the picture and the length of the belt he now required, perhaps because no one in Eureka had appeared to see the connection between him and the hometown doughboys, perhaps because he had wished to hang his Notary Public sign over that spot on the wall.

Will had been glad to have a banker come and open up shop in Eureka, even if the fellow was a Jew, even if a few country banks had already failed. Jamestown was nearly thirty miles away, and it was inconvenient to go there every time he needed the services of a bank. He had immediately transferred a small part of his Jamestown savings to Harry’s bank and opened a checking account. Over the years his confidence in Harry had grown; and gradually he had increased the amount he kept in Harry’s bank until, for the last several years, Harry had had almost all of it.

To some of the tall, belligerent Gentiles who came to his window, or inside to his office, Harry was belligerent in return. To a few he was ingratiating. To all he was adamant. Thus he had hung on, year after year through the twenties, while seven thousand other banks failed, and through the last three years after the crash when another seven thousand closed their doors.

Will did not doubt that Harry was in good shape, but he did like to drop in to the bank fairly often. He had a feeling that he would know if the moment came when he ought to make a withdrawal. He had seen no reason to join those depositors who had withdrawn everything and presumably buried it. Credit was already hard enough to get—mortgages hard enough to extend. Quite obviously the whole country would cease to function if people withdrew their support from all the institutions that kept it going. That truth seemed so obvious, in fact, and Harry’s service to the community seemed so necessary, that Will felt impatient with those who had been so quick to panic.

On Tuesday, though, the state of Michigan had been treated to Governor Comstock’s Valentine, and that had made Will a tiny bit nervous. Michigan’s governor was not the first governor to close all the banks in his state, but Michigan seemed closer to North Dakota than any of the other states.

Will walked up the three wooden steps and opened the door of Harry’s bank. Harry came to the window.

“Hello …
hello,
Mr. Shepard! I’m … so glad you came by today.”

“Hello, Harry.” Will was embarrassed. He was afraid Harry knew why he came so often for such petty business. “I’m just going to get a little cash. Ten dollars will do it.” He began to write out the check.

“Mr. Shepard—wait a minute. Just let me check your balance here. Just a minute.”

“My balance?”

“Mr. Shepard, you and I have been friends a long time, right? Ten years, right? You’ve been a good friend of mine … here. Here it is. It’s all up to date. Two thousand, eight hundred and sixty-seven. That’s your balance—checking and savings. Make it out for that!”

Will couldn’t understand it. He’d been Harry’s friend; now Harry wanted him to withdraw his entire account. Was Harry so deeply offended just because of these frequent small checks? Will was horrified to think that his petty fears had so injured a man for whom he felt nothing but respect and sympathy.

Harry began counting out bills from his drawer and Will opened his mouth to beg Harry’s pardon. But he closed it, in shock, as he would recoil from the lung-searing breath of a blizzard wind. The window with the terrible face in it was the window that had opened at last between him and the storm burying the world. There was nothing at all to say.

Harry scuttled to the vault and came back with more bills. “I’ll make it all twenties and fifties,” he said. He jammed his finger into a rubber tip and began sliding off the fifties into a pile on Will’s side of the window.

The bills slapped down so fast that Will could not begin to say “a half of a hundred dollars” to himself as each one dropped. He lost count after the first three or four and just watched.