The Bones of Plenty (31 page)

“Perfectly!”
George shouted.

“Now, then, Mr. Custer, I’m just trying to do my job here. Just ask yourself where would
you
be without the protection of the law.”

“A hell of a lot better off than I
am!”

“Now then, Mr. Custer—the county attorney and I have simply got a factual statement of the way the Wilkes auction went on, and we simply have to have that statement attested to by a man that was there. The county attorney here can notarize your signature, of course.”

George was sure, now, that he was being slickered. “What’s the matter with those stool pigeons you
had
there?” he asked. “Can’t they write? They need a farmer to come all the way down here to Jimtown and show them how to make an X on a dotted line?”

“Oh, my deputies will sign it, too, don’t you worry. But we think, Mr. Custer, that there’d be less chance of argument from
your
side of the fence if one of
you
signed it too. After all, you might want to argue some day that our version of the goings-on was attested to only by stool pigeons, mightn’t you?”

“What the hell are you getting at, anyhow! You know I’m not going to argue with you about Wilkes’s sale, and neither is anybody else. It’s all over and done with! Let’s cut out this pussyfooting around. You know damn well that moneybags back in Hartford isn’t going to know me from Adam, and I know my signature on a piece of paper isn’t going to get him off your tail if he takes a notion to send you back out to Wilkes to collect his money for him. Now let’s quit beating around the bush.”

“All right, Mr. Custer! You don’t suppose I’m going to go out and conduct another foreclosure sale with rabble-rousers and crazy men there, do you? I don’t have to explain to you that it wouldn’t be smart for a man with his name signed on a paper like this to show up at any more sales in this county, do I? Now I advise you to sign your name here and stop wasting everybody’s time. Go ahead and read it.”

George snatched the paper from the desk. He was prepared to see Wilkes’s name there, and somehow the sheriff had found out who
he
was, so he expected his own name. But how had Press found out that they met at Will’s house the night before the auction? Good God—they had even found out who owned the mare! And who had told him that Wallace Esskew had been the one to haul out a gun at exactly the right moment? Oscar Johnson’s name was there—every man who had opened his mouth in the sham bidding was named. Who was the stool pigeon whose name wasn’t on the paper? But the shocker was the last brief paragraph. It was written as though he himself had given all the information that preceded it.

It was so far-fetched that he began to laugh.

He stood up. “I advise you,” he said, “to get the Judas that
gave
you this to sign it. Whoever he is, he’d steal the pennies off a dead man’s eyes, so you shouldn’t have no trouble.”

“Oh, there
is
one trouble, Mr. Custer. He’s not nearly such a dependable witness as you. If a man like you signs his name, it means something, doesn’t it, Mr. Custer?”

“You
bet
it does! There’s not a man that knows my name that doesn’t know it stands for an honest man and a gentleman!”

“Well, now, that’s just why that name is worth a lot to
me —
and to you too, I imagine. Maybe it’s even worth enough to you so if it sets here in my file when I go out to the next foreclosure sale, you just won’t be able to find the time to be on hand. What do you think?”

George did not say what he thought. He was so far gone in rage that he was becoming two men—one observing the other—the way he often did in dreams—one wondering what the other might do.

“Well,” the sheriff went on. “I was hoping we wouldn’t have to show you this other paper here. I was hoping we could just tear it up.” He twisted his ugly square head toward the attorney. One man in the dream twisted it the rest of the way around—all the way off.

The attorney hauled another sheet of legal-size paper from his coat pocket.

“Compliments of the county attorney’s office,” he said, smiling.

One man in the dream read the paper and saw that it was a warrant for his arrest on a charge of inciting to riot, and saw also that it looked very legal, except that nobody had incited a riot. The dream ended with a noise made by both men and then by George himself. “There
wasn’t
any God-damn ri
ot!”

“Oh?” The county attorney smiled again. “That could be kind of expensive to prove, couldn’t it? And if you
did
win your case, you’d still have to sit in jail for a few weeks before you got to court—
unless,
of course, you could lay your hands on a considerable amount of cash bail. Otherwise you might sit right here when you ought to be out threshing, mightn’t you?”

“
You
haven’t got a
jail
in this town that could
hold
me!”

“Oh, come, Mr. Custer. Take another look at this statement. It’s really a perfectly accurate statement, is it not?
We
wouldn’t ask you to perjure yourself, now would we? There’s no reason for this paper ever to bother you again, if you’ll only remember to conduct yourself in a sensible manner henceforth. Don’t you agree? Come now. We’re all busy men.”

There was only one way to spring the trap—for a little guy without any money. So what if he could win a case? He couldn’t spare even
this
day away from the farm. Weasels were the cleverest creatures at getting out of traps, and here was the weaseling all written out in front of him, waiting for the signature of the weasel. But somebody before
him
had been the
big
weasel. That was the first traitor—the one to blame. But the
first
traitor was nameless. He was protected by the sheriff. George realized that now he himself would have to have the same protection from the same repugnant source.

“If you get my name on that statement,” George said, “What do
I
get?”

“It doesn’t seem to me, Mr. Custer, that you are in a position to ask for anything at all,” the attorney said. George could see him hesitate. They obviously hadn’t expected him to be quite so difficult. He was losing, of course, but not so easily as they had thought he would. “How would you like
this
for a little keepsake?” the lawyer asked, holding the riot arrest warrant at George and looking at the sheriff.

George didn’t understand for a moment, and then he saw that, in his own hands, the arrest warrant had considerable power. For one thing, it was certainly not a document he would have legitimate reason to possess. He could bother them with it if they bothered him with his signature on the statement. They still had the upper hand, for they could ruin him with his neighbors if they wanted to, but if he didn’t bother them any more, they would not want to waste time bothering him either. This was the law in practical operation. Learn something every day.

George flipped the warrant out of the attorney’s hand and stuffed it into his inside coat pocket. He took the pen the sheriff was holding for him and scratched his name across the paper beside the X.

“Very
good,
Mr. Custer.” the prosecutor said.

It wasn’t till he was going to turn on to the highway and he looked up into the rear view mirror that he realized he had left the new summer hat on the bench in the sheriff’s office.

All the way home he could think only far enough to feel his fists beating the body of the stool pigeon—the anonymous first traitor, the betrayer from the ranks of little men who had stood together, for once, against the conspiracies of rich men and government.

As he drove through Eureka, he glimpsed Otto’s Percherons trotting down the road to the elevator.

The witness had a reputation for being undependable, the sheriff said. The witness would also be a talkative man, wouldn’t he? And a man over whom the sheriff had power—a man who would be eager to make a deal with the sheriff—a man who would gladly exchange a few of his neighbors’ names for the promise that his precious pair of Percherons would not be put on the auction block again.

If anybody had tried to tell him early this morning that
he,
George Armstrong Custer, would put his own priceless signature to the statement of a deadbeat cock-sucker, and that he would do this in order to survive for one more year on a rented half-section of dried-up prairie—if anybody had tried to tell him that G. A. Custer would sell his honor and his guts for a chance to harvest a drought-stunted, grasshopper-infested hundred and sixty acres of wheat—well, he probably would have killed the man that had tried to tell him that.

Will had mowed his last field of hay and raked it and turned it once when the clouds appeared one day in the clear northwestern sky. The clouds probably did not mean rain, for rarely had summer clouds brought rain in the last nine summers. But while the wheat could still profit from rain, and rain on the garden could save rows of dying plants, rain on nearly cured hay would only damage it, cause extra labor in turning it, and run him short of time for other things he had to get done before the threshing began. He already had all the outside haystacks he had planned on, and this premium hay was slated for the mow.

He walked through the field, studying the sky, feeling the formidable drag of the pain. He didn’t know but what he might be too sick to work one of these days. If he lost time with the hay and then had to take a couple of days off in bed, he’d be impossibly far behind. He stuck his fork into a long pile of sweet alfalfa and lifted. The hay was on the green side, no doubt of it. If he put this hay into the mow and turned it into musty compost, he would never forgive himself. But his abdomen felt as though he had used the pitchfork on himself instead of the hay.

Rain, sickness, mold, time—these things all had their laws, some of which he understood and some which he did not. Sometimes the laws worked together usefully, from a man’s point of view, and sometimes they did not. Sometimes rain and mold and time made compost just as he wanted them to. Sometimes, if a man had been unlucky or foolish, they made spoiled hay. Decay, sickness, death—sometimes, from a man’s point of view, they were good—sometimes bad. A man’s life was totally dependent upon the same microscopic events that would eventually destroy his life and return him to dust. Sometimes it appeared that he had more choice, or at least more leeway, in his manipulations of the laws than he had at other times. Sometimes he felt forced to confront the laws with his own needs and risk himself to his own ignorant impertinence.

The hay was green, but he would put it away now. He went to town to get help before the rain came. He bought some chewing tobacco and hired Herman Schlaht’s boy Buddy on the spot. Then they got Carl Stensland from the pool hall and rushed back to the hay field.

They set to at a frantic pace. The clouds rolled and blackened, and heat lightning flashed around them in tiers of silent white flames that ignited half the sky. In a few hours the three men had swung the last load on the hay lift in through the high gaping doors of the mow, and stuffed it to the roof with the rich-smelling hay. Despite the drought, the alfalfa had not done too badly. Will was well satisfied to have the top half of his big barn filled with such fine winter pasture, and he was glad he had decided to put it away before rain could wash it out and a second curing would bake more of the nourishment out of it.

The clouds remained all day, but they did not move any nearer and they began to turn lighter again. Perhaps a breeze would spring up in the night and blow the clouds over them and they would wake to the sound of rain. Then he would lie in the darkness rejoicing that rain had come and exulting because for once he had managed to win against the weather.

The next morning the clouds were gone but the sky was less pure than usual. The air was sultry, but there was no rain in it; if they got any precipitation at all, it would be a twenty-minute hailstorm that would beat the wheat down flat and thresh out all the grain and bury it in a slushy white wasteland. In the afternoon the sky began to clear, with the sun growing ever brighter and hotter. The vanished clouds had not been, after all, the overtures of a repentant universe about to send forth the fountains it had so long stopped. Still, there was reason to be grateful; for the murderous balls of ice had been up there and they, like the rain, had gone away again.

After that there were no more clouds. Each day seemed unnatural, endless. When he went out to milk in the evening at six o’clock, with the sun still hours away from setting, the air seemed as hot as it had at noon or at two or four.

Finally one night as he leaned in the doorway of the smothering barn, he confessed to himself that he would have to take it easy the next day unless either the heat or the pain let up a little. The combination was doing him in.

He was so tired that his eyes kept losing their focus on his nine milch cows filing through the door. They kept fading into insubstantial blotches. He was shaken by his pity for the weary blotches. All day long the sun crushed them, withered them. How could they hold back enough water to make their milk? Maybe he ought to skip the milking tonight. Maybe they wouldn’t care whether they were milked or not. Maybe this was the day he should have spent resting. Maybe this was the night he wouldn’t make it through the chores.