The Bones of Plenty (47 page)

“These men watch their babies starve when the owners shut the mines; they see their comrades murdered—
murdered,
Mr. Shepard, by the
hundreds,
because the owners will not go to the expense of installing the simplest safety devices. Yet those owners have been able to persuade these men that they are alive.… You don’t think that
you
can be persuaded to believe
you
are alive when your whole mind tells you that you are
not?
Wait! Wait till they come and ask you to go for another little ride. You will go!”

“No. I won’t.”

“Yes, you will—let me give you a hypothetical man—he is only hypothetical because he is two or three generations in one. First he is a proud, rugged, independent farmer—the backbone of the country, poor but free. Then the bank takes away his farm and he becomes a tenant—a sharecropper. If he is not too dazed by hunger to be able to think, he knows he is no longer free, but it never occurs to him to think that he is no longer alive. But then the soil is worn out and there is too much cotton, anyway. So the sharecropper must become a picker—wandering over ten states, picking whatever the exploiters want him to pick, for whatever wages the exploiters want to pay him. And he will fight other pickers for a job—for a chance to earn fifty cents a day. Isn’t that a funny joke? He is not alive; yet he will kill another man in order to continue his existence. We were all born to eat each other in obedience to the commands of our disgusting digestions—I imagine you
do
find your digestion wearisome, do you not?”

“A little,” Will whispered.

“But you will take as many rides as they tell you to take, Mr. Shepard, in order to keep your tortured digestion alive, because as long as you keep your
digestion
alive, you will think
you
are alive.”

The last hypo was wearing off. The nurse had told him he must begin to stretch the time between them, or he would become addicted to morphine. He had thought that he had got some idea of what pain was in the past six months, but now he knew that the pain going before had been only a primer. Another day, perhaps, he could tell this man that he too knew something about these laws of living and existing.

“I think I’ll have to sleep,” Will said.

“I am sorry. I did not mean to get so carried away. This battle with the exploiters—it is so much more important than you know—it is my
life!
… I, too,” he mused, “must still believe myself to be alive.”

The Mundane Meridian that was the road rolled southward and upward, and the latitude of a fence line that began on an eastern hill invisibly crossed the road and rolled on to the west, down around the earth into the celestial meridians of sunset color brilliantly ascending the horizon. Along the mundane meridian a point that was Lucy dogtrotted almost the whole three miles between the points that were school and her father’s farm. If she hurried, there would still be time to help her father with the corn picking before it got dark.

Changed into her overalls and play coat, she ran through the north grove to the edge of the cornfield where the rise of land lifted the long rows up to the sky. Her father was far enough on the other side of the rise so that she could not see him, but she could hear the sounds of the hard corn ears thumping against the high backboard he had attached to the side of the wagon. She knew he was trying to finish the field today.

She ran up the slope between the two rows of dead stalks, kicking into the rich litter of ripped husks and piles of silk. The yellowed husks were softer than they looked—much softer than fallen leaves—and the fine strands of red-brown silk compressed beneath her feet into a springy cushion over the hard ground. The cushion made her feel as though she must be bounding up into the sharp air like a jack rabbit. She had a picture of her long ears silhouetted against the skyline as she took her great leaps of alarm, scanning the hillside for the coyote she scented.

When she reached the top she saw her father just beginning another row, starting back toward her from the end of the field. He saw her, too, and waved a glove at her.

“Well, Pickle-puss,” he said when they met, “what’s new?”

“Don’t call me Pickle-puss!”

“Why not, Snickle-frits? You like pickles, don’t you?”

She decided not to answer. “Can I drive the team?”

“Just be sure you keep up with me.”

She walked beside the horses and led them by their bridles. Her father twisted an ear from the stalk with an echoing crack, whisked off the husk with the help of a small hook he wore over his heavy leather glove, and then, without ever looking behind him, even while he was reaching for the next ear, he tossed the husked ear squarely against the center of his backboard. Lucy couldn’t understand how his aim could be so good. He never missed once, all the way up the row.

She herself was not working hard enough, and she was getting cold for lack of exercise. If she had not been guiding the horses, she would have been running up and down the hill, ridding herself of the deadly hours of sitting at a desk and smelling chalk dust and radiators. Here was the smell for her—a blend of many smells surrounded by the cold smell of the air itself. The silk had a smell, and so did the husks, the bruised stalks, the hard ripe corn kernels, and the chaffy cobs. And there was the smell of the horses, too, and a trace of smoke from some distant outdoor wood fire—somebody perhaps was rendering lard, feasting on cracklings.

The compound fragrance meant the complex thing that excited her so much, even though she could not have said why she was excited. This fragrance signified the rush of the harvests and the sun hurrying the winter and the winter hurrying the people, and the mystifyingly close connections of so many disparate things. Here was the corn that would go to make next year’s pig, like the one they had just butchered, and the corn that would be ground for her to feed to the baby turkeys next spring. This year’s turkeys would be slaughtered in a few more days now. But even though this corn went to raise so many creatures for death, still the smell of the field was the smell of being alive.

She held Kate’s bridle up tight under her jaw. The horse’s soft nostril, lined with dewy hairs, was only a few inches from her fist and nearly as big. From where she walked beside the mare, Lucy could see only the nostril on her side, and it was so active that it almost seemed like a small separate animal. The moist breath came out of it very warm on her bare hand and wrist, and then a cold breath went back in, passing over the moisture on her hand and making it feel half frozen. Then the next breath would come out warm again, heated by all of the big body behind her. Kate’s coat was already thick and brushy for winter, and it would not be sleek again until summer.

When they reached the end of a row which was still some distance from the unfinished end of the field, her father looked up at the darkening sky and decided to quit. They climbed up on the wagon wheels and swung themselves in on top of the corn. Her father untied the reins and handed them to Lucy.

“Now take it easy. This ain’t hay! This is
heavy.”

He sat back on the corn, lifting up an ear here and there and working off the kernels with his thumb to see how deep and hard it was. Considering the drought, it was a good crop. The ears were pretty well filled and they were fairly heavy. Some of the corn crops he had seen this year had ears that were kerneled only a third of the way along the dried cobs. This corn was only mildly afflicted with ear rot, which meant it would store fairly well. He had switched to the Diplodia-resistant hybrid strain a couple of years ago, and the results had been nothing short of astounding. Yet now, only two years later, there were some still better hybrids on the market. His neighbors who had not switched were not getting anywhere near the harvest he was and now they were buying seed from him. Why hadn’t the Ceres vindicated his judgment the way this hybrid corn had?

They stopped next to the corncrib between the barn and the house. “No time to unload now,” her father said. “I’ll just unhitch and leave it here till the morning. You run to the house and fetch me the milk pails.” He led the horses away.

After she had taken him the pails, Lucy stopped to look up at the wagon and try to guess how many shelled bushels there might be in it. She
did
love bringing in the corn. There were no bugs and snakes in it as there were in gardens and in wheat and hay fields. She was not afraid of snakes, but it startled her to have a long fat garter snake come wriggling out at her from under a haycock or a shock of wheat. If her father saw her jump, he would laugh at her and she would know that he was thinking a boy would not have jumped. She herself knew that was not true because she herself had picked up a garter snake in the schoolyard once and scared Roger Beahr half to death with it. But with a corn harvest there were no such situations that caused a person to act afraid of something when she really was not. The snakes and bugs were all gone for the winter.

Right from the start, corn was a lovely crop. Nothing was prettier than the first bright green rows of long, slender leaves arching out against the black earth. Nothing except wild prairie roses—delicious pink Dixie cups standing up along the thin, rare briars on the barren ground, passing away too soon to have been real, but leaving the memory that they had smelled like raspberries and spice—nothing except those roses had a sweeter, more delicate fragrance than young corn. And then in the summer nothing but corn gave such high shade in its long warm rows while the slender leaves tittered and shushed each other in the wind.

Corn made such a solid, definite harvest. The kernels were big enough to be significant one at a time. The yellow stream from the spout of the sheller quickly filled bushel basket after basket while the ragged cobs spewed out to be hauled away in her red wagon for fuel or fertilizer.

The corncrib itself was a satisfying edifice—so simple, so symbolic of abundance. It was a circle of the tallest snow fence wired together to make the walls that were held up by the corn inside. The dull red slats against the gold were like treasure-house bars around real gold. When she was smaller Lucy had wondered if there might not be a little elf like Rumpelstiltskin somewhere who could be captured and coaxed to turn all the corn in the corncrib into piles of gold pieces.

For some reason she did not want to go back into the house. The night was as dark now as it would get—much darker than it would be when the harvest moon rose up a little higher. Already the clear stars swarmed over the sky and flowed into the white deluge of the Milky Way. This was like so many nights accumulated in her memory—this coming in to the little warm house from a harvest field, chilled and heroic and victorious. Those other nights before this one had already massed themselves into a nebulous yet familiar structure—a vast house of time all around her, reassuring her and enchanting her and reminding her—now that she had wandered inside without knowing what she did—that she had been here before. And the little warm house with the lamp on the dining room table called her to come and shut the door on the vast heroic house, and the regret she felt at leaving the vast house was part of the memory too.

After supper that night they spread out the catalogs and began figuring out their winter order. They usually sent to Ward’s, because her father had proof that Sears Roebuck was run by Jews, but once in a while if there was a great discrepancy in price or if Sears offered a brand line not available at Ward’s, they made out a little order from the other catalog. It was necessary to compare the prices and offerings of both before committing oneself to the order blank on any particular item.

They usually sent no more than three orders during the year—one at Christmastime and one in the spring and the fall. For the last two years when the fall order went out, her parents had argued over whether to order high-topped shoes or oxfords for Lucy. She had worn the high ones until she went to school, but then her mother had told her father that girls didn’t wear that kind of shoes to school any more and that Lucy ought not to be the only girl wearing them, especially since she lived on a farm.

“How many times do I have to say that what the other fellow does shouldn’t make a particle of difference? If everybody else went
barefoot
all winter, would you let
her,
too? You’re always worrying about all the colds she gets. Why not try the proper shoes for a change?”

“Oh, you always exaggerate! You
know
it’s her tonsils and not her
shoes
that make her get these bad colds!”

Lucy sat at the edge of the table looking sideways across the two catalogs opened at the shoe pages. Would her mother desert her this time before the argument was won and order a pair of hideous black high-topped shoes? She stuck her thumbnail under a tiny raised piece of oilcloth peeling away from the sticky webbed backing.

“You’ll just spoil her silly, that’s what you’ll do.” He picked up the paper and said no more. Lucy had three or four bits of oilcloth off by then, and she was horrified when she realized how greatly she had enlarged the little hole that had started her in the first place. She looked at the newspaper shielding her from her father’s face and quickly swept the bits into her hand. It was a good thing they were going to order a new one tonight. Maybe nobody would notice.