The Bones of Plenty (54 page)

The gray window behind a wreath of Minnesota evergreen was growing darker. The smells of food arriving in the hall mingled with the smell of disinfectant already there. Christmas dinner was coming earlier than regular dinners. The nurse brought in the first tray, decorated with a tiny Christmas tree in a red stand. Made in Japan, George thought.

When the nurse came to Oblonsky, she asked if he would like her to pour his cream.

“I don’t need any help from
your system!”
he cried. But his hand shook terribly. Lucy was fascinated and awe-struck to see how his hand shook. She had never seen anything like it. He dumped cream all over his tray, and he swore and swore.

“Well,” George said. “Time we get a bite to eat and one thing and another—those old cows’ll be wondering where the heck we are—so, better say Happy New Year and be on our way, I reckon.”

People always moved when George spoke. Will was grateful to see Stuart helping his mother with her coat. The boy could be so mannerly when he wanted to. There was simply no understanding him.

Lucy remembered the clever way her town friends had all yelled goodby at school before Christmas vacation started. “See you in nineteen thirty-four!” she said.

All the while they were in the room, all the while they walked down the halls, Stuart knew it would come to him. He would be able to say something so plausible that they would have to let him go—go on some plausible errand for his father, go to see an old friend, go … go somewhere, somewhere that would take too long so that he could not go back with them, go,
go
—

They were outside the hospital, his mother had hold of his elbow, she was slipping him a bill, she was whispering like a mad goose in his ear, “Now I want
you
to get the check,” and she was flitting ahead of him in that way she had. “Now, George,” she was saying, “I know a reasonable little place to go—just down the street where they wait on you right away and the food is good and clean. And I just want you to order whatever looks
good
to you, now, and let
us
take care of it. After all,
you
transported us up here and now it’s
our
turn.”

I can outrun them all, if it comes to that, Stuart thought. If it comes to that. But it never came to that. No plausible thing to say came either, and he was sitting with them in the Hospital Café, looking at a menu that said GREETINGS OF THE SEASON across the top. His brother-in-law ordered beef stew.

“Out of a can,” his brother-in-law said when it came. He sniffed it as though it were carrion. “They just hang a piece of suet on a string over a forty-gallon-kettle at the Libby factory down in Argentina, and then they boil some dried-up old carrots and spuds in the kettle and call it—watch that
kid
there!”

His niece had almost got a fist into his mother’s coffee. People were starting to look at them because of the loud rube things his brother-in-law said. When the meal was over, he could find nothing but pennies in his pockets. “Mom, have you got two bits for a tip?” he said.

“Tipping!
That’s for
Frenchmen!
It’s not American,” his brother-in-law said. “Over
here
we believe in paying a man what he’s worth and letting it go at that. We don’t believe in making a fellow toady to us to get paid for what he does.”

Maybe he would fight his brother-in-law now, and then he would have a plausible reason not to ride another seventy miles in his car. “If we don’t tip, the waitress just loses out, that’s all,” Stuart said. “She doesn’t make any wages. If you want to pay what she’s worth, then we ought to give her a dollar just for cleaning up after the baby.”

“If
no
body tipped, then they’d have to start paying a fair wage!” George said loudly.

“Yes, but everybody
does
tip, so we have to do it the way everybody else does.”

“Says
you
and how many
other
guys! I never do
anything
just because everybody else does!” His brother-in-law grabbed up the check and was gone with it.

Now the problem was not how to get away from his family, how to get out of Bismarck, how to get far away from North Dakota—it was how to escape from the Hospital Café. Even the car with the boarded-over window had not been this bad. How was it that no matter where he was, he always felt like somebody had hold of him by the hind leg? If it wasn’t his mother, it was his brother-in-law. If it wasn’t a damned schoolteacher, it was a doomed father. If it wasn’t a car with a board for a window, it was a circle of grinning people and a mad waitress. If it wasn’t a field with a fence around it, it was a field
without
a fence around it.…

For a long time nobody said anything in the car. The baby was asleep and everybody wanted her to stay that way.

Finally Rachel said, “My, I’m so happy that Dad has that interesting man for company. It’s wonderful to have some help to keep your thoughts occupied when you’re lying in a hospital day after day.”

George was wounded. How could his own wife go out of her way to say something flattering about an old fool that had managed to involve him in a scene? Where was her sense of loyalty? “Rachel, are you talking about that hare-brained old Wobbly?” he exclaimed. “Why he’s as crazy as a bedbug!”

A joyful flash of understanding exploded in Lucy’s mind. So
that
was what ailed that shaking man! He didn’t have leprosy or something dreadful and catching like that after all! He was just a Wobbly.

No matter how fast Lucy was running when she banged open the door from the icy bedroom, the cat always caught her. Every morning he waited for her. He would spring up, hook his claws into the seat of her sleepers, and skid on his hind legs—still hanging on to her—all the way across the dining room linoleum.

And every morning it made her mother laugh when she came jumping into the kitchen with Puff hanging on behind. This morning her mother laughed and then said, “Happy New Year!”

“Happy New Year!” Lucy said, wondering what a person did to make herself feel as though one piece of time was all gone and another piece was just beginning. She wondered if she would feel more different this morning if she had been allowed to stay up last night the way the town kids did—until twelve o’clock when the number changed. She wondered if seeing the clock hands on top of each other over the twelve was the way a person recognized that she was now living in a new number—in 1934. She was sure that staying up till midnight on just any old night, let alone New Year’s Eve, would be exciting in some way that she couldn’t imagine, but her father had made her quit begging about it. When she was
ten,
he said, then she could stay up till twelve o’clock on New Year’s Eve.

Staying up late was the only thing she could think of that would make New Year’s any fun. Otherwise all it meant was that school started again on the next day. She had one last day to play in the snow instead of sitting in a desk.

The snow was banked up against the south side of the house clear up to the eaves. Lucy would lie in her bed at night and think of that snow way above her on the other side of the wall. It made her feel like an Eskimo. The day after Christmas her father had dug her an Eskimo cave in the bank, leaving benches of snow around the walls and a square platform in the center for a table. The snow had been a lot deeper when he was a boy, he told her—much higher than it ever got now, not to mention a lot cleaner.

There was another bank in the yard that came nearly to the top of the clothesline post nearest the house. The clotheslines crossed the yard at a different angle from that followed by the bank down the hill so about half the lines were usable. Today was washday and she and her mother had a race every time her mother finished hanging up the batch of clothes she carried out in Cathy’s oblong bathtub. Her mother sat in the tub and she rode her sled. They used the top of the buried clothesline post for a starting place and pushed off for the barn with all their might. The trouble with her mother’s tub was that it wanted to go round and round, but Lucy had her own handicap, too, because her steering bar was broken. All in all, they had some fairly even races.

After the clothes were hung up, they took a dish and the tin sugar scoop and dug until they found some clean snow. They mixed it with cream, sugar, and vanilla, and set it out in a snowbank to freeze again. It was good ice cream as far as the taste went, but this year it was the grittiest it had ever been. No matter how many spots they tried, the snow always had dust in it.

For weeks there had been continual strong wind, and it had long since bared the high spots in the plowed fields. It used the burning hard snow to rub off the layers of frozen dust and then it used the particles of dust to wear away more dust and then it drove those black particles all through the snow. The wind scooped canyons that widened from shallow V’s into troughs two feet deep, and every canyon was black along its floor. A thousand wavelets ribbed the sides of each narrow curving dune and along the crest of every wavelet the wind had left its black pencil line.

Lucy was sorry to see the dust come and sully the great clean world. When she lay on a dome of snow to peer into the hollow beneath its summit, or turned on her back to make a snow angel, she smelled the drought of the summer. It was the odor of heat and labor and loneliness and it was stronger than the cold, thin fragrance of the snow …

The waves rolled on over the prairie, ebbing and flowing in patterns without meaning to her because she had to view them from such a little height over such a great distance. The patterns had meaning only to the wind high over them all and to the hidden stratagems of the undulating earth below. Ruled like the sea and the desert by contours of air and land, the snow was both kinds of wasteland, besides being its own kind. Sometimes it was a desert, and she hid in the grooves under the dunes while a hostile caravan passed by without ever suspecting that she was there. Sometimes the dog followed her trail into the wilderness and sniffed her out with the mad excitement of a hungry beast.

Sometimes it was the sea, and she was Jesus walking over the water to the sinking disciples. She could see them there, far away, disappearing and reappearing between the waves. She would run then, forgetting that all she had to do was say, “Peace, be still,” and leap from wave to frozen wave, altering her direction without realizing it as the currents of the waves changed, so that when she stopped running she did not know where she had started from or where she had last seen the fishermen’s boat or where she had left the shore behind her.

Sometimes it was a glacier and she was terrified little Gluck, slipping and clambering across the black ice while the torrents gurgled and howled beneath her and the splintered ice-people looked with their tortured faces and filled the air with screams and moans. But when she got to the top of the mountain and stood over the headwaters of the Golden River, she was cruel Hans, casting the stolen holy water into the river, feeling the icy chill shoot through her limbs, staggering, shrieking, falling into the river as it rose wildly into the night and gushed over THE BLACK STONE.

Or it was the miles-deep glacier that had once surmounted this land to press the dinosaur bones down into the ground and swallow up the long-haired mammoths. She was the solitary creature on it—misplaced there so many ages before it was her turn to live.

Eighteen thousand dairy farmers in the Chicago milkshed began the new year by dumping six hundred thousand quarts of milk to keep it out of the city in protest against the low prices there. The Supreme Court of the United States upheld a Minnesota law that provided for a moratorium on mortgage foreclosures.

It seemed to Will that the new year already looked very much like the old year. It wasn’t just that three rides had left him knowing exactly where he stood. It was partly that he’d had time to do a lot of thinking. And he had to admit it, Oblonsky had forced him to think in some ways that he had never thought before. And all of his thoughts and all of Oblonsky’s words added up to an overwhelming conviction that things were going to get worse for the small farmer, no matter how many moratoriums were proclaimed by vote-seeking governors, be they Republican, Democratic, or Progressive. The moratoriums only proved that the small farmers were now in a hopeless position. The very word simply meant
delay —
as Oblonsky said, it came from a Latin verb meaning “to delay.” Oblonsky had the kind of education Will had yearned for all his life, and Will had admitted to him that he was right about that word and about what it meant for farmers. Will had conceded defeat in a number of arguments with Oblonsky, but he stuck to his guns on the only one that really mattered any more. He still believed that a man could die like a man.

He knew that he was feeling as good as he would ever feel again. He was in pain, but he had learned how to take a lot of it. He could sit up and read and he could eat enough to keep up as much energy as he needed for a while. And his mind was perfectly clear when he hadn’t had any shots or pills. Now was the time to go home, and he was going.

“You know,” Murdoch told him, “you never gave me half a chance.”

“I took three rides.”

“
One
ride taken in time might have done it. Why didn’t you come in before?”

“On the other hand, why did I come in at all? Almost everything I had in the bank is gone. Let me out of here while I can still pay my bills.” His mind was filled with the sight of Harry Goodman’s distraught face and the sound of those words—
Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth.…
But the treasures had not been for
him —
only for his children, and their children—so the thing called life could be always a better and a nobler thing.

Murdoch held out his hand. “All right. I think I can say this to you—I think you’re a man who hates waste enough … These rides—they aren’t all for nothing. Each time we learn. And—you’ll make it the rest of the way just fine. That’s one thing I’ve had to learn how to tell about.… Some of us make asses of ourselves; some don’t. Maybe that’s all there is to it.”