The Bones of Plenty (41 page)

They could all hear the train now, and they knew how fast it would be coming, but Old Man Adams had fooled them. Like Aesop’s tortoise, he had managed to get far enough down the tracks so that he looked no bigger than a blackbird, with his speck of a bright red flag.

The train flashed past the waving red speck. It was coming too fast; it would never be able to stop. The engineer’s slowly waving glove passed so high above them. They were down beside the great rods pushing back and forth, up and down. It was so eccentric and yet so regular—that blinding-fast up-and-down, back-and-forth of the rods circling the centers of the wheels. One could never keep track of the motion. Everything went by too quickly—the wheels, the lunging rods, the rolling drivers, the earsplitting steam, the waving glove.

Yet each swaying car uttered lower, slower squeaks, each blurred line of windows became more nearly separate, and each whiteness behind them became more nearly a face. And all at once the faces
were
faces, and the brown man vaulted out with his little yellow step. Lucy often wondered why everybody else in the world was white except for those brown men with their yellow steps.

Stuart got there just in time. He handed the suitcase to the brown man while the conductor yelled, “Board!” in the offended voice he used at flag stops.

Her grandmother and grandfather climbed up the iron steps of the car. When they reappeared at a window they looked almost like all the other strange faces.

Lucy lost track of which car had been theirs and when she looked back from the distant train, the platform and the rails below it seemed so alone and useless—as though there would never be another train. But there would, of course—to take her to Jamestown when she learned her 8’s.

“Well, it’s kind of a hot day for a trip,” Mr. Adams said to her father. “Awful hot for this time of year, isn’t it?”

“Yes it is,” her father said. “Well … see you later. Let me know if there’s anything you need, Stuart.”

“You bet,” said Stuart.

They got in the car to go back to school. Lucy was in the back seat, but she could tell when her mother began to cry. The baby kept pulling at the handkerchief she held over her eyes.

“Now, Rachel,” her father said, “you’re probably just
borrowing
trouble for yourself. You know what a tough old buzzard he is—as tough as he is stubborn. There ain’t another man his age in the county that would have come out of that fire alive. You ought to try to think reasonably about this.”

Her mother never cried unless something was as bad as it could be. Lucy had tried not to notice all the other signs, but she knew for sure, now, that something bad was going to happen far away in Bismarck.

Will settled back in his seat for the seventy-mile ride. “Mighty skinny bunch of cows out there,” he said, looking past Rose’s fine thin profile. “I wonder if they’re some of Egger’s.”

“Probably. I don’t see how those poor things will get through the winter. They look half dead now.”

“Nobody anywhere in the country can get a price for feed and yet the animals have to starve to death,” Will mused. There seemed nothing more to say after he’d said that.

Presently Rose asked, “Do you really think this Murdoch is the best doctor we could get? Maybe you should be going to Fargo instead. Or back to Rochester.”

“Oh, he knows as much as anybody knows, I think,” Will said. “Lawyers, doctors, politicians. They’re all good talkers. Who knows what they know?”

He was so unlike himself, she thought. He was like an injured animal, snapping at people it had always trusted. It was because he was so hungry.

After a while she said, “My, I’m surprised it can be so hot in here.”

He looked out at the telegraph wires running in liquid lines against the sharp blue sky. “Liable to get cold tonight though. I hope Stuart remembers to put the mare in.”

“And I hope he remembers to turn that lock on the chicken house all the way down. The weasels are worse, now that the birds are gone.”

They passed through Driscoll, Sterling, McKenzie, Menoken, slowing just enough at each station to snatch the mail sack from its post. Then they began to lose speed as they entered the outskirts of Bismarck. The train tracks crossed and multiplied into numerous sidings. They made a widening wasteland of cinders between the elevators and mills and cylindrical storage tanks. There was an air of prophetic antiquity about that cindered wasteland. The towering white columns could have been remnants of desert temples built by generations of slaves. Now the white pillars simply stood there, bursting with wheat—monuments left over from a system that had once had significance.

This very morning’s
Sun
said that the domestic wheat stocks on hand came to over a hundred and fifty million bushels. That was not counting any of the grain already bought by millers, or any of the new crop en route to the mills. That was counting only the grain committed to storage—floating in ships and barges on the Great Lakes or sealed up in those tall white pillars.

“ ‘Whited sepulchers,’ “ Will thought. He didn’t know exactly why the phrase had come to him, but he could not let the thought go. They
were
like tombs. Why? Perhaps it was their estrangement from the brown, billowing land. They were so white and vertical against it. They seemed more like urns filled with death than reservoirs filled with life.

A year ago the lowest prices in history had been blamed on the wheat in storage—the wheat going begging. This year prices were a little better but there was still almost as much wheat in storage. He did not believe that the drought had cut away the surplus enough to have any lasting effect on prices. The drought had scared the speculators into raising their bids a little, that was all. Soon prices might very well drop again. Except for the farmer, almost everybody who made his money from bread profited by having those white cement cylinders always filled with wheat. It made a man wonder if this government could ever change things enough to move the wheat out of the sepulchers.

At the hospital he showed the woman behind the admission desk the paper Murdoch had filled out for him. “In cases like this we require an advance deposit of fifty dollars,” the woman told him. He didn’t like to carry cash around, and fifty dollars was more than he had with him. He wrote her a check, wondering as he did so what she meant when she said, “in cases like this.” Probably nothing at all. That was the way with people who sat behind desks all their lives. He had noticed it before. They all had a few things they always said in almost any situation. She looked at the bank name and his name and said, “It’ll be just a few minutes. Why don’t you sit down?”

They sat on a hard leather bench that was fenced away from the desk by a high-growing potted plant. It made Will think of the plant in a Chicago hotel lobby in a movie he’d seen about bootleggers. In the foreground of the movie scene, next to the leaves of the plant, would be a closeup of the scarred jaw of one of the bootleggers. He would be hiding behind the plant, waiting for signals from the crooked desk clerk. Finally there had been a battle in the hotel lobby between the bootleggers and the prohibition agents, and the stalks of the plant had been severed by the invisible line of machine-gun bullets. It had been a ridiculous show, which the theater had run for some reason in place of the Will Rogers picture he had expected to see.

He heard his name called and he made his way around the plant back to the desk. “Now, Mr. Shepard,” the woman said, “if you and Mrs. Shepard will both sign this release, you can go right on up.”

The release appeared to absolve the hospital of all responsibility for exactly the sort of calamities Will had thought a hospital existed to prevent. But before he could protest, a nurse stopped beside them with a wheel chair and asked him if he wanted a ride. And before he could say no thank you, she was helping him into the chair.

She gave it a twirl, pushed him into an elevator, bumped him out again, and zoomed into a ward. Was it because he hadn’t eaten that everything was double-time? Even his heart was double-time. This was all silly. There was still time to turn around and go back home—where he belonged.

“Now, then, I’ll let you get yourself into bed, Mr. Shepard, if you think you can manage.” She pulled the sheet curtains around the bed. “While you’re busy I’ll just take Mrs. Shepard back down and see if we can find a room for her. But I’ll bring her back again, don’t you worry.”

He sat down on the white chair to take off his shoes. The sheets brushed his forehead as he bent over. It was a mighty small space they gave to a man for the amount of money they charged. He laid his black pants across the back of the chair and fitted the empty shoulders of his coat over the pants.

And there was his black suit—getting along without him much better than
he
could get along without
it.
Would he wear it home tomorrow or two weeks from now, or only for that final dressed-up occasion when it would not matter at all to
him
what he wore? And should he not put the suit back on and go home now, before this hospital made his heart step up to triple-time and caused him to fall into a panic that would make him forget again all the things about the laws that he understood perfectly well?

Yet, while he had been contemplating his suit, he had irrationally removed his underwear. That was why the hospital employed a nurse like the one who brought him here. She hypnotized a man with her hurrying, and hurried him into bed before his good sense could reassert itself.

Suddenly her voice pounced at him from the other side of the sheet. “Mrs. Shepard is just getting herself settled. She’ll be right along.”

Will pulled the blankets around his neck. Without more warning the nurse drew back the sheet-curtains. “Now I want you to meet your new neighbor,” she said. “This is Mr. Oblonsky. Mr. Oblonsky, this is Mr. Shepard. Mr. Oblonsky talked so much to his last neighbor that the poor man finally moved to a private room. Now I want you to let Mr. Shepard rest.” She turned from one to the other of them as she talked.

The man contemplated her from under brows so long and droopy that hairs hung out over his eyes. He did not speak at all, as if to make a liar of her. “Just tell him right out when you want to be left alone,” she told Will.

Rose appeared in the doorway of the ward, hardly able to bear being in the presence of so many men in bed.

“How is your room?” Will asked her.

“It’ll be just fine. It’s right near the maternity part. There were two babies in the nursery, but there’s ten baby beds. I guess people have quit coming to have their babies in the hospital. They can’t afford it any more, I suppose.”

“Well, sometimes I wonder,” he said, “if it’s a normal birth and all, if a woman needs to go to a hospital anyhow. It’s never made too much sense to me to take a new little baby away from its mother for a couple of weeks right after it’s born. Why, a foal would die of fright if you did that to it. We don’t do that to lambs or any other little babies except for calves, and I always hate to do it to a calf. Remember when we went to see Rachel when Cathy was born, and Cathy was all the way down the hall in the nursery, crying so hard she was purple? It just didn’t seem sensible to me. Rachel was just sitting there in bed with nothing to do except listen to that woman next to her. She’d a lot rather have been with that new baby, wouldn’t she?”

“You are absolutely right,” came a polished voice from the next bed. “It is foolish and barbarous, but even so, it is less barbarous than a thousand other practices of this great American civilization.” It was a carefully shaped sentence and delivered as though it was broadcast over the radio. There was no doubt that Mr. Oblonsky had been shaping it, and listening in, throughout the entire conversation.

Will looked at him, without being able to think of anything to say. The man’s name, his coarse features, his bushy hair—nothing had prepared Will for the voice or the language. He had been steeling himself to tolerate the incomprehensible accents of a foreigner who would rattle on at a great speed, expecting him to answer as though he understood.

Dr. Murdoch came in and stuck out a freckled hand to Will. He had so many freckles on his face that they made a solid brown rim around his smiling lips. A bright green tie hung out over the lapels of his white coat and one tube of his stethoscope dangled from a big square pocket.