The Bones of Plenty (37 page)

“No!” She was amazed at the very idea. Boys were so sneaky. “Not unless there are some left over.”

“Okay,” he said. “Then let’s have our own picnic with what’s left.”

“Maybe,” she said.

Presently two men who had been pitching bundles climbed down from the hayrack and came toward her. One was tall, and the closer he came the bigger he looked. He was even bigger than her father and moved as though he would walk right over her. She couldn’t help ducking away when he came up to her. The other man laughed.

“Don’t let Swede bother you none. He loves kids, don’t you Swede? He eats ’em for lunch if he don’t get his pie.”

The big man’s face was a fiery red against the near-whiteness of his hair. He had a blank, foreign expression. He was dumb, like the Finn. His face was very long, and his lower lip swelled farther out than his upper one, giving him a very hungry look.

“Swede don’t speak English, but he sure found out about apple pie in a hurry,” his friend chuckled. “You better have some apple pie there.”

“No, it’s in the wagon, and it’s cherry,” Lucy said.

“Well, Swede’ll take cherry this one time. Won’t you, Swede? But you better bring him apple tomorrow. Huh Swede?

“We call him Swede because it’s the only word he knows from the Old Country,” the man told Lucy. “Pie is the only American word he knows for sure.”

The giant slapped the little man on the shoulders. The little man laughed as though he liked it.

“What kind of sandwiches you got there?” he asked.

“Chicken and cheese,” Lucy said.

“Swede’ll have cheese,” the man said. “That’s what his mamma raised him on back in the Old Country, ain’t it, Swede?” The little man laughed again—an insulting, high laugh.

Once Lucy had fed a colt sugar from the palm of her hand. The colt was not used to being fed that way, and when he finished the sugar, he spread his lips and nibbled at her skin, trying to get the last of the wonderful taste. The feeling of his big teeth had made her know what a big bite he could have taken out of her hand. She had the same feeling now about this great blank man. It was hard to tell what he
might
do but it was
easy
to tell what he
could
do. She held out the sandwich toward the giant, not looking at his face. The minute she saw the black-nailed fingers touch the bread, she snatched her hand away.

The men took in the food like cruising whales. They seemed to be able to swallow without ever closing their mouths. They sloshed in the water and coffee so fast it dribbled back out the sides of their mouths again. Lucy watched the debris escaping like plankton in little streams down their cheeks—bits of bread and butter, pie crust, and cherry juice, all finally mixing with the dust in their bristled chins. Sometimes men made her feel sick.

When all of them had eaten there were still a few sandwiches left. Douglas had been riding with Giles on one of the hayracks, but he came running when he saw her start back toward the house. “Let’s have our picnic!” he shouted. They settled beneath one of the nearer shocks.

“You should of saved out some pie,” he said.

“Phooey! The pie was for the thrashermen, not you! You didn’t
earn
a piece.”

“Well,” he said, “when I grow up I’m going to be a thrasherman myself. Or maybe just a farmer. I’m going to get married to you, too, when I grow up.” He put his bare arm around her neck and kissed her a wet cheesy kiss on the cheek. She had a swift impression of his bright blue eyes and white teeth and lips full of bread crumbs grinning an inch away from her face. He laughed and laughed as she ran away—the same way he had laughed that day on the merry-go-round. Nothing so disgusting had ever happened in her whole life.…

After making sure that Douglas was nowhere in sight, Lucy went out to the first truckload of wheat which stood some distance from the separator, waiting to be driven to town. Though it was in the middle of a blistering field, far from the shade of so much as a fence-post, the wheat in it was cool. One of the memories she carried from year to year was that surprising coolness of the threshed wheat that had so lately been first in the hot field and then in the hotter insides of the threshing machine. Yet each year she was surprised all over again to feel it around her bare legs as she sat in its clean, shifting granules. One grain of wheat was hard, with the richness of the earth and the air crystallized into a tiny sharp gem. Yet a whole truckload of wheat was a soft and regal couch.

Once wheat was in granary bins, it was different. It was not cool, but cold, and the stillness of the granary was worrisome compared to the excitement of the threshing field. And a bin piled high with wheat was a dangerous place, for if a child worked himself too far down in the midst of the slipping grains, it was like being in quicksand. He never got out unless help was near. That had happened to a little girl her mother knew. The little girl’s mother and father looked for her for days and weeks before they found her.

But she was safe out under the mounting sun. She could play until it was time to ride in to the elevator.

She made a road from the cab to the tailgate along the dark line of shadow made by the truck side across the wheat. She was starting to plow a field in her precious cool landscape when Douglas came and flopped over the side into the wheat—just as though he had never done anything terrible in his life. “Boy this is
fun!”
he said.

“I want to play by myself,” she said.

“I’ll tell your dad.”

“All right,” she said. “Take it all.” She climbed out over the tailgate and jumped down.

“Aw, come on back!” he cried. “I’ll do just what you want if you’ll come back and play.”

It was a new experience for her to have a boy beg her to do anything. This was the first time a boy had ever abdicated his birthright to be the boss.

“Okay,” she said. “You can bring in the wheat and I’ll be the elevator man and tell you how much I’ll pay you for it and all the things that are wrong with it.”

They played until dinnertime and then they followed the men in. The table was still not quite set and her father was mad. “Now Rachel,” he said, “why haven’t you had Lucy in here helping you with these little chores that she can do as well as you? Then you’d be all ready now.”

“I let her play because she never has anybody to play with,” her mother said. “I want her to have a little bit of childhood! That’s why! When she has somebody to play with I’m going to let her have as much time as I can!”

Lucy and Douglas took their plates out to the porch steps to eat. They had just sat down when a young man came walking around the porch. “Well,” he said. “I see I’m just in time for dinner.”

Nobody except her father had talked about him much, but Lucy knew he had done something incredibly bad.

“Hello,” he said. “What’s the matter? Aren’t you going to say hello! Cat got your tongue?”

“Hello,” they both said, because you had to say that when people asked if the cat had got your tongue.

“Stuart!”

Rachel went to him but she did not touch him. He looked so much older, with all those whiskers. He was twenty now; he was a man.

The crew boss shouted from the dining room: “Stuart! Is that drinkin’ bum here finally? Get in here and put some food on toppa that liquor! By God, you’re gonna do a full day’s work out there between now and quittin’ time or I’ll know the reason why!”

“Oh,
Stuart!”
Rachel said.

“Just watch to see Swede don’t eat it all,” Stuart yelled back. “I’ll be ‘long in a minute.” His speech was fuzzy, like his face. His whiskers did not hide the sick greenish color of his skin. “You going to invite me in or not?” he asked her.

“Oh, Stuart!” she cried again. But still she could not touch him. The booze on his breath was revolting. “Haven’t you been to see the folks yet, Stuart?”

He propped himself against the corner of the kitchen, with an elbow braced on the towel bar. He looked over her head, across the kitchen at the window, but the light seemed to hurt his eyes. He closed them. “Nope. I started over there last night but I just didn’t seem to make it.”

There was a frightful banging in the dining room. “Oh, get those potatoes in there,” he said. “I don’t know why that Swede don’t learn to speak English. He just stomps on the floor when he runs out of potatoes. Liable to go right through this little house.” He kept his eyes closed. Was it the light or his family he could not look at?

George came out and took a whiff of the air. “Pew!” he said.

“George!” Rachel begged.

“We need spuds in there,” George said. He looked at Stuart, who would not open his eyes. “Nobody told me my wife’s little brother was supposed to be the sixth man on this crew. We all sweat a little extra for you this morning!” Stuart said nothing.

George erupted. “What was it
this
time, anyhow, Junior!” “Embalming fluid? Hair tonic? Or did you get hold of some genuine rotgut moonshine? Why don’t you wait till you’re big enough to
shave
before you start trying to drink with the men? Maybe then you’d know what to leave alone. You better get in here and
eat
before that stuff burns out your guts!” He went back to the table.

“Just give me a plate,” Stuart said to Rachel. “I’ll eat with the kids.”

His hand shook as though the plate was more than he could hold. “Stuart,” she said. He pushed the screen door open and let it slam behind him.

It was queer, she thought, how little shocked she was. But this was so like him. When he was a little boy not yet in school and she was already in her last year of high school, he would hide for half the afternoon in the barn just so he could jump out from a manger to startle the folks when they went out to milk. “I declare,” her mother would say, “what ails the child! Here I thought he was out with
Will
all afternoon! And Will thought he was with
me
in the chicken house. And just when we were sure he was lost and we were going to look for him, out he came, making that outlandish noise. He scared us half to death. It’s the
third
time. Whatever makes him
do
it!”

What
did
make him do it? He seemed to have a need to do shocking things, even though he was always so shy. Did he crave attention so much that the one titillating moment when he could command all the thoughts of his surprised parents was worth such a long wait lying in the manger hay? What had he thought about while he waited? What
did
a five-year-old think about?

Lucy had run away once when she was five. She had gone to sleep in a straw stack and when she woke up she came home. Rachel had never even known that the child had run away. She had just thought Lucy was exploring birds’ nests or following George around. That had been the part about the running away that still haunted her. Not to know, until your child comes back—stiff, desolate, swollen-eyed—that she had run away from you because something had been so much more important to her than you had ever dreamed. Something you had said—had commanded or forbidden as you rushed through your work—had changed her whole world. If only you had not been so busy, you cried out to yourself. If only you had noticed. If only you could expunge those hours of lonely anguish from her life. Was that how it had been with Stuart? Had his mother been too busy? Rachel had hardly been at home after he started doing the things he did. On weekends her mother would only say, “What
makes
him do these things?”

And now here he was. What had made him run away? What had made him come back? Why had he come here first, sneaking in with this uncivilized crew? How could anybody find it easier to face George Custer than Will Shepard? Yet Stuart must think it easier to come here first. He must be hoping that
she
could do something. What could
she
do?

He was sitting beside Lucy now, with his plate in his lap, pretending that he and the two children were the only people there. “Do I look different?” he asked Lucy. “
You
look different.”

“Yes,” Lucy said carefully. “You look different.”

“I’m a big man now,” he said. “When I went away I was just a kid like Giles in there. Now I’m a man. When I went away you weren’t even in school yet, were you? What grade are you in now?”

“Third,” she said.

“No!” he said. “You’re … let’s see—you’re not hardly eight yet, are you? Did you skip a grade, like your mother? Oh, I see what you mean. You’ll be in the third this coming fall, right?”

“Yes,” she admitted.

“That’s just where you should be, isn’t it? Haven’t skipped any grades yet, huh? Maybe you’re like
me,
instead of like your mother. What grade are
you
in?” he asked Douglas.

“Third,” Douglas said forcefully.

“He’s just the same as me,” said Lucy.

“Is that so?” Stuart said. “Which one of you is the smartest?”

“I
am,” Douglas said.

“He is not!” Lucy said. “He
copies
me all the time!”

“I bet you she’s right,” Stuart said to Douglas. “I bet you she can beat you sixty ways to Sunday because I bet she takes after her mamma. Is that right, Lucy?”