The Bones of Plenty (49 page)

Before packing each turkey, George hooked its feet to a scale. The biggest tom weighed thirty-six-pounds—nearly three times what the young hens weighed. “Look at that! I
told
you they were going to be big, didn’t I?” He read the numbers to Rachel and she wrote them down. If he got gypped on the weight, he wanted to know about it. Last year he had shipped to a local wholesaler, but the price had been so low that he decided to try this New York outfit which had quoted him a much more reasonable rate—twelve cents a pound live, and thirty cents dressed, if the birds were top quality. Of course there would be nothing he could do about it if the buyers called these birds low-grade or even unsalable. They would be fifteen hundred miles away from him and they could shyster him any way they wanted to. But they wouldn’t get any more turkeys from him next fall, either. That was the only retaliatory weapon he possessed—not to do business with somebody who had cheated and exploited him. He could find somebody else to cheat him next fall.

They packed two barrels that totaled nearly four hundred pounds. Conceivably they could get a check for a hundred and fifteen dollars for this batch and another check at least as big for the batch they planned to ship next week.

George rolled the barrels back out to the porch. The birds were too warm and too well insulated to freeze, but the temperature was perfect for refrigeration. He would haul them in to the depot tonight after the chores were done and supper was over. It was already dark—time to go and milk.

After supper Lucy fell asleep in the rocking chair. Her mother came and woke her and undressed her and put on her soft, fuzzy new sleepers. It was a comforting feeling to be dressed as though she was still a baby like Cathy. Sometimes if she fell asleep in the car at night her mother would make her father carry her into the house and then she would put her to bed this way. Lucy always tried very hard to fall asleep in the car so she could have this happiness of being so drowsy, so unable to do anything for herself, of having somebody else doing everything for her. Then she would lie awake after she had been put to bed, just enjoying the feeling.

On this night it was her mother who carried her to bed, and after she was tucked in, she heard her father saying, “Rachel, what are you doing, waiting on a big kid like that and lugging her around?”

“She was so tired,” her mother said. “She had to work too hard today. Those turkeys were too heavy for her to hold on her lap all day. A child her age should
play
on Saturday. Play and read.”

“Phooey! She can’t do
half
the work I could at her age. I tell you, this isn’t the way this country was
built!
Kids her age helped make
wheat
farms out of this tough old prairie
sod.”

Lucy lay listening to them talk about how the country was built. They both talked about it a lot, especially when they talked about what
she
should be doing. She often wondered just how a country
did
get built. After a while the song that had been in her head all day crowded out their voices.

It was a song the primary room had been learning for Thanksgiving from the green books Miss Liljeqvist passed out every Friday afternoon.
Little Songs for Little Children,
it said on the cover. The Thanksgiving song went:

Once more she went over all the things about the song that confused her. For one thing, she had never seen a turkey that seemed gay. And she was annoyed that the person who wrote the song thought that “farm” and “fan” rhymed, and she wondered, as she wondered about so many songs and poems and stories they had in school, why it was always
Grandpa’s
farm and never
Daddy’s
farm. And why did it seem to be making fun of the grandfather and why did it sound as though there was only one turkey on the farm?

And something else about the song bothered her much more than these other things—bothered her so much that she always felt a little sick to have to sing it. She didn’t know why it was, but the turkey in the song seemed so different from the ones she had worked on all day. She always felt so bad about that one turkey, but never about any other turkey.

Will was feeling enough better to dare to hope he would be home by Thanksgiving. The wound which had threatened to burst apart with every cough now appeared to be holding together after all. The nurse helped him get out of bed and into a chair for the first time since he had entered the hospital.

He found he had to concentrate rather desperately on relaxing some muscles that screamed for relief and tensing others that would hold him up and balance him. “Five minutes,” said the nurse on her way out the door.

Oblonsky looked across the bed at him. “One becomes grateful for such small things, eh, Mr. Shepard?”

“Yes sir, you put your finger on it,” Will panted, gripping the arms of the chair. It was too stiffly padded and it was a little too high from the floor for him, but still he was grateful for that chair, even though its overstuffed back felt like a bushel basket between his shoulder blades and its rounded, unyielding seat like a granite mountain-top.

“It is part of the instinct,” Oblonsky said. “The only instinct that really has anything at all to do with the course of the world. The one that is such a complete handicap to most of us and such a necessary and profitable advantage to the very few of us. The instinct that makes us accept any degradation so long as we can continue to exist.”

Not being a professional talker like Oblonsky, Will was always finding himself saying something that came out so different from his thoughts.

“Well, while there’s life there’s hope,” he said.

“I suppose that is one of the most successful slogans ever used by any class of exploiters—governments, rich men, preachers, doctors—especially doctors. Yes, we are all so grateful to all these people for giving us hope to live, so that they can continue to exploit us.”

Will hadn’t had any idea of how weak he had become. The nurse had said five minutes. It must be twenty by now. At last she came and helped him back into bed.

Oblonsky waited till she was gone. “Ah, now, Mr. Shepard, I’ll wager ten to one that you are nearly smothered in gratitude for being back in the very bed that you were so grateful to escape from a few minutes ago. Am I right? You are grateful once more to the exploiters?”

Will was too exhausted to argue; he let the words go out on a breath that was going out anyway: “You might say so.”

That afternoon Murdoch came in. “Never hit a man when he’s down,” he said. “At least wait till he can sit up.”

Will had been waiting. “Another little ride?”

“Yep. I need to do some more pretty carving.”

“No you don’t. I’m not going to fool with this any more. I never would have got into this if I’d had any sense.”

“Yes you would. You might have held out for a few more weeks. Then you would have had no choice at all.”

“There’s never a time in his life when a man doesn’t have a choice.”

“There are
thousands
of times when a man doesn’t have a choice! They would have brought you in here too weak to sit up and we would have put you to sleep and I would have operated.”

“
Who
would have brought me in!”

“Your family, of course.”

“Why don’t you just tell my family what ails me and send me home for Thanksgiving?”

“Because I don’t
know
for sure what ails you. I may know after this second look. We’re going in from the other side this time. Now let me take a little listen here.” A doctor with a stethoscope could always stop any argument—temporarily at least.

After he was gone, Oblonsky said softly, as though he didn’t want to say it but he had to, “I
told
you that you would go for another ride any time they decided to take you. It’s this disgusting instinct, isn’t it? And it doesn’t even have anything to do with
hope,
does it?”

“How do you know I’ll go for the ride?” Will asked.

“Why do you keep on saying things you do not believe!” Oblonsky blurted angrily. He unfolded his newspaper and put it up so that Will could not see his face. Will wondered, as he did every day, how the man could read the gray blur that his shaking hands must make of the newsprint. Oblonsky was the only person Will had ever known besides George who memorized the daily paper.

It seemed to Will that today’s news was scarcely the sort of thing for a sick man to be memorizing. A cloud of dust ripped up from the prairies was darkening the sky above New York State for the third day now as it passed over on its way to sink into the Atlantic. The United States Government was buying up a million bushels of wheat and thousands of bales of cotton to try to halt the falling farm prices—yes, they were falling again, the way he had had a premonition they would, looking out of the train windows at the whited sepulchers filled with wheat, that day so long ago when he came to see Dr. Murdoch. There was another farm strike in North Dakota, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. The farmers struck for higher prices while the government bought surplus farm produce that nobody else wanted or would buy at any price. Things could look mighty ridiculous from a hospital bed.

And while American politicians were making thousands of speeches to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of the Armistice signed in Versailles, the Germans had other ways to celebrate this November eleventh. The German Reich withdrew from the League of Nations, the disarmament conference at Geneva, and the World Court.

Will had heard all this and more on the radio next to his bed. The world was as sick as he was. Why should a man fight to live in such a world? But that was the question Oblonsky was always asking. He himself was supposed to have different views. He was a grateful man. All his life he had been grateful for the world. All his life he had fought to preserve life, to nurture it. But he knew well enough that there were many things a man could do nothing about.

Every year he helplessly watched a great many things die. In every batch of incubator eggs there would be at least one that would crack as it was supposed to under the attack of the little beak inside and then look no different, for a long time, from the other cracking eggs in which little chickens worked, then rested, then worked some more. But after a while it was clear that all the other eggs which had begun to hatch at the same time as this particular egg were now broken and the new chicks were out, drying their wet fluff and looking hungry. If one listened, pressing the unhatched egg to his ear, he could hear the fragile sounds of the lonely struggle inside. It was the kind of sound that made it hard for the listener himself to breathe. And the feeling in the listener’s chest made him say to himself, “Perhaps this is an unusually tough shell this poor little mite is trying to fight his way out of. Perhaps even I myself am to blame for feeding his mother too much oyster shell so that this egg she laid is too hard and thick. I’ll watch this fellow, and if he is not out in a little while longer, I’ll see if I can help him a bit.” Then the listener would mark the shell, lay the egg down again, and go away.

When he came back he would pick up the egg and the anxiety caused by such violent motion would make the prisoner pip feebly at its prison. Thus assured that the prisoner was still alive, the benefactor would decide to free it. He would peel the shell away from the soggy thing inside, taking care not to bruise it with his big thumbnail.

The chick would lie in his hand, sometimes able to squat by bracing its little yellow breast against its tiny pink legs that would not stand up. The benefactor would feel the weakness of the stringy toes. The chick’s round, damp head would droop to one side; the quarter-inch pink beak with the pinholes for nostrils would hang open a little to reveal the sliver of hard, innocent tongue. Sometimes there would be a bit of slightly bloody excrement glued beneath its tail. Sometimes there would be a smear of blood on the pink toes, but it would nearly always be impossible to find the source of the smear. Often there would be nothing at all to show why this baby was different from his stronger brothers who were already flapping their cotton wings, already bullying each other, while this one hung his head and could not keep the round white lids from drifting down over his eyes.

Not one of all the babies that Will had felt compelled to help out of their shells had ever survived. True, it took some chicks a little longer to chip out than others, just as some chicks would grow faster than others and learn quickly to boss the others around. But any chick that could not get out of its shell by itself would not live.

He looked around at the beds in the ward filled with whiskery, tired lumps of men like himself. It was very silly to compare men and baby chickens—that’s what Murdoch would tell him—and he would have to admit that if there was one thing these men did not look like, it was baby chickens.