The Bones of Plenty (40 page)

Will’s Marquis yielded not quite eight bushels to the acre. He had two hundred and fifty acres in wheat, as opposed to George’s hundred and sixty, but the difference in their harvest was not so great as the difference in their acreage, for George’s yield was better. However, the smut in the Ceres caused George to be docked almost eight cents a bushel. It graded Number One despite his fears that the protein content was light, but the smut docking reduced it to eighty-two cents, while Will got ninety.

George sat down and worked it all out. It was the kind of thing he enjoyed doing. He could even forget, while he was doing it, that the numbers represented his survival.

Will got checks of $1800 for his wheat and George got $1296 for his. That worked out to $7.20 per acre for the Marquis and $8.10 for the Ceres. Not a significant difference. Not enough to pay for the smutty Ceres seed he had got from Adolph. He and Will paid the same freight rates. Everybody except the big fellows paid the same freight rates. And the freight rates never went down, no matter what the farmer earned or what the consumer paid. Will paid $110 and George paid $88 to ship the wheat to Minneapolis.

It cost Will about $250 to thresh and himself $180. That left George with roughly $1000, after the two major expenditures of marketing the crop were taken care of, and Will with $1440. As far as real profits were concerned, though, he had to consider so many other things. Will had used his own seed, saved when wheat was selling for twenty-six cents a bushel, which made it much cheaper seed than George’s. Most of the seed money came out of George’s pocket, too, after the splitting of the cash profits with James T. Vick. Vick had allowed him twenty-six cents a bushel for what he had spent on the seed. And Vick considered that the mill’s price minus seed, threshing, and freight, was the net profit, a third of which was his. Vick wasn’t interested in labor, food for horses all winter long, machine repair, binder twine, or other such incidentals. They were all the farmer’s business. Vick just owned the land and paid the taxes on it.

Vick’s cut this year, after subtracting the thirteen cents a bushel he paid for seed, would come to $340. That left George with $660. Pay Will $250 plus interest for four months—make it five months. He couldn’t believe it. Scarcely $400 left from the wheat. That was quite a little more than he had made last year, the way prices were then, but he knew, without doing any more figuring, that he would have been far ahead to plant the Marquis and take the rust loss.

Still, there were reasons to hope. In the first place, the Ceres, he was sure, had not had anything like a fair trial because the seed had not been properly treated; in the second place, poor as he felt, he was so much better off than so many people below him that he really should be able to get along somehow. After all, if there were only enough other farmers below him, the things he would have to buy would have to be cheap enough, that was all there was to it.

If the USDA figures for last year’s farm profits were at all accurate—figures that he had kept in his mind ever since they had been in the
Sun
a couple of months ago—then more than forty per cent of his fellow wheat farmers had gone in the hole last year and only about twenty per cent had made more than he had. Only six per cent had cleared over five hundred dollars. His father-in-law was in the six per cent, of course, and he would be there again this year. If a man could only start with enough cash, money would make money.

Look at what Vick had done with a little cash. He had taken advantage of the slump that began in 1921 and bought this half section for scarcely more than delinquent taxes in 1924, just before George moved onto it. He paid forty-three dollars a year in taxes now, while George and Rachel fretted over the state of the school, the lack of a school bus, the condition of the county road, and a score of other things that taxes ought to cover, and yet George had paid Vick as much as five or six hundred dollars a year. Some years Vick got as high as a twenty per cent return on his investment. And he was nothing but a cheap chiseling dime-store owner who had had a little spare cash at the right time. The return on his investment was a simple translation of George’s sweat, good only on a farm, into the medium of exchange called cash—good anywhere in the world for anything he desired. He could buy other men’s sweat with that return earned for him by George Custer’s sweat, and that was the way little dime-store owners became millionaires.

George knew what he could do about it, of course. He could get out of farming and forget that he ever hoped to exercise the option rights that had been dangled in front of him for nine years. He could get out of the occupation he had been raised in and trained for, and then what could he do?

But there was the one hope left. There were still so many farmers so far below him. They were competing to undersell him, but they had to compete to buy machinery and pay rent, too. Over half the farmers in the state had to pay rent. When things got so bad that no tenant farmer could make a living, then all the tenant farmers would get together and do something about the landlords. So long as seventy-five per cent of the nation’s wheat farmers made less than George did, he would either succeed because he was ahead of the majority, or else, if he fell back into that growing ruined majority, he would revolt with them.

Any time George Armstrong Custer could not make a living, one way or another, then the system had to be wrong. If a man like him tried every possible scheme and worked fourteen- and sixteen-hour days and still went broke, then the system certainly needed major repairs, didn’t it?

Meanwhile, for one more winter he would figure things so closely that even the occasional pennies he gave Lucy in the store had to be considered part of his budget—and he would repay Will at an interest rate that would restore his self-respect.

When he showed his figuring to Rachel, she did not seem at all surprised that they had cleared scarcely a third of what he had predicted they would. Her lack of surprise discouraged him.

“Well, look at it this way,” he said. “Next year I’ll have two hundred bushels of properly treated seed. It doesn’t look like cash now, but it
will
be. That will make a vast difference, can’t you see that?”

“Enough to buy a tractor?” she asked.

“Well … sooner or later.”

“How much longer can we work the way we worked this year?”

“As long as we
have
to!” he said.

Spanish farmers were setting torches to thousands of acres of crops. Sweden and Holland renounced the tariff truce they had signed with the United States thirty days before, and declared that they would again bar American food exports from their countries. A hundred and fifty thousand American factory workers were on strike, and a thousand farmers around Chicago were dumping milk again.

With the wheat checks all in, Will was planning to take the morning train to Bismarck to see Dr. Oliver Murdoch. His leg was in fair shape, and he and Stuart took a walk around the farm to use up the hour till it was time to go.

They went first to the far sheep pasture. A couple of half-grown ewes bleated at him as he walked among them, and followed him a few steps away from the flock. He smiled to think how they remembered those bottles.

Prince swished his tail and cantered away. He was enjoying his rest after the summer’s work and he was going to make Will fight to get him into harness today. He was unaccountably mean for a gelding; but Will had never had the heart to sell him, because he knew most people who bought such a horse would beat him.

But now he thought Stuart ought not to be stuck with Prince. “For Pete’s sake, sell that horse before he takes a bite out of you,” Will said. “He’s just about ready for the glue factory anyway.

“And we should get those truck brakes fixed. I’ve been putting it off for months. You might do that right away, now that we can get along without it for a day or two.”

Finally, when they were coming back through the new barn still smelling of raw lumber, Will had to say it. “I hope to God, Stuart, that you’ll leave that stuff alone while I’m gone! What in the world will your mother do here all by herself? She won’t drive the truck and she won’t ask George for help.”

He went on to the other subject that must be brought up now. “We were talking last night … When I come back, we think you ought to go to college. You’re still young—a lot younger, maybe, than you feel. I didn’t feel so young myself after a couple years with a thrashing crew, but I was—now I see how young I was.… Your mother’s calling. I never knew her not to have a fit over catching a train. Start up the truck, will you?”

Rose’s face was red with heat and nervousness. “Where on earth have you been?” she said. “What do you want me to put in this suitcase?”

She was wearing her best winter dress for the trip. It was a hot day, but it was September, after all, and no decent woman would wear a summer dress to Bismarck in the last week of September. It was fine light wool plaid with a big collar and a low belt line.

Will was as hot as she was. He had on his heavy black suit, with its thick vest. She had made him wear it because she wanted to make sure he would be warm enough when he wore it home again.

She looked him over, from his hat, to the chain of his watch looped across his vest, to his freshly polished shoes. “Look at you!” she said. She snatched a whisk broom from the closet. “Come out on the porch.”

She swept the bits of hay and straw from his suit. “Now take a rag and dust off your shoes. What ever made you go out in the fields after you had got all dressed up?”

“What ever made you make me put all these glad rags on at six o’clock in the morning?” he teased her.

“Because I thought it would keep you in the house! With no supper and no breakfast you oughtn’t to be moving around so much!”

He had been ordered not to eat for twenty-four hours before the X-rays, which were to be made as soon as he got to the hospital.

“I wanted to take a look at the mare and remind Stuart to put her in nights now. She could drop the foal in a week or so, or even sooner. And it’ll frost again any time now. We don’t want to lose the colt.… I think Stuart’s going to straighten up, Rose.… Just be a little easy with him. That’s the ticket, don’t you think?”

“I think we ought to be going,” she said.

He hauled his watch out. “It’s not due till eleven-fifteen. I make it only ten now.”

“You’re ten minutes behind the clock and I set it with the radio this morning,” she said. It terrified her to think they might have depended on his watch. “It takes that old man half an hour to get far enough down the tracks to flag that fast train.”

“Yes, but Stuart said he told him yesterday to be sure to stop it for us.”

“Oh, you
know
he’ll forget. Come on, let’s go!”

Stuart swung the suitcase up into the back of the truck and Will felt, for the hundredth time since Stuart had come home, a great pride at how strong the boy had grown. Nobody in the world—not even loggers or miners—grew stronger muscles than a thresherman. Stuart had hit the work at just the right time in his life, too. A few years earlier and he would have worked too hard and perhaps stunted himself a bit, even while he grew strong—the way Will had himself. A few years later and he would have been a little overripe to do the best job of hardening. But from eighteen to twenty—those were the years to make a man out of a boy, if he had the stuff.

As for Will himself now—it was a relief not to be carrying the suitcase. It was even a relief to be able to admit, finally, that he was too miserable and too weak to walk fast or to stand up straight.

Stuart got in under the wheel, Rose sat in the middle, and Will hauled himself up with his hands braced against the door frame, like an old man. He shook like an old man from the effort of getting his weight a mere three feet off the ground. Those muscles that had served him so well all his life were burdens now. He reminded himself that he was weak from hunger, even if he did not feel hungry.

They had already had the first killing frost of the fall. This morning’s baking sun was a little ironic on the blackened stalks of the hollyhocks by the house and on the slender snapped necks of the heavy-headed sunflowers he had planted along the orchard fence to shade the strawberries.

This year there had been only a few dehydrated berries, rich and sweet because they were so distilled. Next spring there would be enough for a shortcake or two. This year he had saved every one for Rachel’s babies. Just the look on Cathy’s baby face and the bright red berry stains all over her hands and cheeks and chin had been worth all the work he had gone to. Lucy’s reactions were pure bonus. She made every berry last a good five minutes, almost eating it seed by seed like a little goldfinch.

He had covered the plants with straw and canvas just in time, only a few days before the heavy frost had come, and now they must be as hot as he was himself under this sun. Almost every year there would be as much as a month of Indian summer after the first frost, with several more frosts coming between the hot days. It was sometimes frustrating to swelter during the daylight hours long after the growing season was ended, and then have the temperature drop so far at night. Still, there was something about Indian summer that made him rejoice to shiver while he did the morning’s milking and then to sweat in the field a couple of hours later.

There was something in the wild extremes that roused something in him—like the clamor in himself that responded to the clamor of the ducks and geese streaming south in their countless stately chains, or the clamor of the gold and scarlet leaves, hanging brilliantly dead in the brassy clamor of the sun itself. Let the sun make its daily withdrawal to the south, following the emerald heads of the mallards; let the sun go so far away that the green blood of plants froze black.
He
had
red
blood himself, and he would be there, ready for the sun when it came north again, waiting to hear the first mallard cries volley through the cold spring air.

He had read one of the Happy Farmer’s musings on Indian summer only a day or so ago: “By gosh, I see the time is here, Again to feel the traitorous cheer, Brung by Old Sol, that Indian giver, Who laughs to see us sweat, then shiver.”

The weak resignation of the poet offended him; there ought to be something better than that to say about Indian summer—something about how good it was for a man to sweat and then to shiver.

Stuart was humming a tune that sounded so familiar, yet so far removed. At last Will recognized it as a variation of a song from his own roving days—a song about some monstrous escapades of Paul Bunyan. It had the kind of words that helped a young man to get through the years of living in a womanless world. He had an impulse to start singing along with Stuart, but Rose was sitting there between them. He felt such a bond with the boy, knowing that the same words went through both their heads at the same time.

“Are they going to bring Lucy to the station?” he asked Rose. He’d never seen a prairie child who didn’t love trains, but he thought Lucy must love them more than any child he’d ever known. She made him tell her, over and over, the stories of his own boxcar riding days. She even had dreams about trains.

“I think so,” Rose said. “One of these days you ought to take her on the train to Jamestown. She wants to ride on one so much.”

“I’ll
do
that! I wonder why I never thought of that! I’ll do that the first Saturday I can spare the time!” Will was elated. He’d hit upon a fine thing to look forward to.

When they got to the station, Old Man Adams was still dozing over his telegraph keys. Stuart lifted the suitcase out of the back of the truck and set it on the long platform. The sight of the mail sack already hanging on its hook threw Rose into a near panic. “For heaven’s sake,” she cried. “Let’s get him waked up!”

Millard Adams heard their voices and straightened up in his chair, looking fully awake at once. He had spent his life as a telegraph operator, and he knew how to listen in his sleep for the things that mattered—mostly the sound of keys. He had a white moustache that fanned out over his face and made him look like a Civil War general. He did always claim that he had been a drummer boy for the Union. Otherwise, the only outstanding event in his life had been the time when, as a loyal employee of the railroad, he had gone out on one of the posses that failed to catch that notorious train robber Jesse James.

He had grown so small and thin now that his railroad watch seemed as big as an alarm clock when compared with his body. He wore a black suit and a white shirt.

He stepped out into the tobacco gloom of the depot and smiled. “Why, by golly, I clean forgot!” he said. “The railroad has got passengers today. I better get out my flag, hadn’t I? How are you? Good to see you, Stuart. You been getting some free rides from my company?”

Stuart had to smile too. “I reckon,” he admitted.

“How are you, Will?” Adams asked again.

“Fine, just fine,” Will said, but in the shadow of the waiting room his face had the same luminous whiteness as Millard’s moustache. It was because he was so hungry, Rose told herself. She nudged him, when Millard went to get the flag. “I
told
you he’d forget!”

“He’s getting on,” Will agreed. “I don’t hardly remember when he didn’t seem old to me.”

“Let’s go back out now,” she said. She hadn’t noticed his paleness so much before, she decided, because he had just gradually bleached out from being inside the house nursing his leg.

Will had finally caught Rose’s nervousness. The sight of the red flag did it. His heart quickened and climbed up under his collarbone. He looked around the town. From where he stood he could see the boards across the windows of Harry’s bank. A broken-down wagon hitched to the two most beautiful horses in the county stood in front of Ray Vance’s garage. Otto must be in there dickering for some old scraps to patch something with.

A half-familiar man came out of Gebhardt’s Pool Hall, obviously already full of beer. He seemed to float from town to town along the railroad. Just about the time one had forgotten him completely, he reappeared. He was very small; that was why one remembered him at all.

Mrs. Finley came out of Herman’s store carrying a sack of groceries that was so heavy she had to balance it against her hip as she would a two-year-old child. Her head leaned to the side opposite the grocery bag to compensate for it. She had the look of an apologetic beast of burden which felt the shame of its weakness. Will couldn’t stand to watch her.

“Stuart,” he said, “there’s lots of time yet. You take the truck and go ask Mrs. Finley if you can give her a lift home. Go on, quick! And watch the brakes or you’ll smash the eggs!”

Will watched the truck move to a stop behind Mrs. Finley. It slipped and squeaked at the last minute and made her give a little jump. She looked up when Stuart leaned out of the cab toward her. They talked for a moment; she was protesting, of course. The poorer she got, the prouder she acted. But Stuart got down, took the groceries, put them in on the seat, and handed her up as though she was his best girl.

What a fine boy he really was. Whatever made a boy like him drink, anyway? He ought to be out squiring some pretty girls around once in a while—some girls as pretty as he was handsome. Will wondered if there
were
any pretty girls around. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed that the only pretty girl he’d seen in a long time was Lucy. Girls were a little like young apple trees, he thought. They could stand only so many years of drought.

“Here they come,” Rose said.

Lucy was running to him, leaving the rest of the family behind. “Where is Mr. Adams’s flag?” she said.

“Stuffed right in his hip pocket,” Will said. He squatted down to pull her between his knees and talk to her. It was remarkable how she was growing lately—how far above his head her face was.

“How would you like to take a train ride with me?” he said. “And have Mr. Adams flag the train just for us?” She looked at her mother. “Can I
please!”

Rachel looked at George and George looked at Lucy. “I don’t think she ought to get a treat like that unless she does something to deserve it,” he said. “She doesn’t even know her table of eights yet.”

“I’ll know them
tomorrow! —
Oh, it’s coming.”

Old Man Adams came out and put his ear to the tracks, kneeling down carefully, balancing on his hands and knees and toes to keep his sharp old shins from pressing against the ties. He stood up, nodded at Will, and started down the tracks with the slow shuffle of a railroad man, never stepping between the ties, never trying to take two at a time.