The Bones of Plenty (56 page)

Meanwhile, until this afternoon when his boy had aged enough to be only one generation away, how was he going to get close enough to know what the boy was saying? How was he going to know what the boy had just said when he spoke the words, “I said it was your farm and you’d be back and you ought to sign”?

Was he being optimistic? Was he saying, “I knew you’d come home”? Or was he restating his determined remoteness? Was he saying, “I am not involved or committed here. I will not make any big decision that might imply that I am”?

Handling one’s children was not so different from planting a wheat crop, Will thought. A man just had to go ahead and plant, and then believe and pray that the forces he could not see or predict would be a little bit cordial, a little bit reasonable, a little bit responsive.

“All right,” Will said. “I’ll fill the thing out this afternoon. I’ll cut the full twenty per cent the government’s going to allow, because I want the cash for you, Stuart, and I don’t want you tied down here. We put Rachel through college and now that you’ve got the gypsy out of your blood, we want to put
you
through.”

“But I never finished high school!”

“Oh, you did too. You don’t have a piece of paper that says so, that’s all. You didn’t have bad grades. It’s just that they weren’t perfect, like Rachel’s.”

“That’s not what you
used
to say!”

Will felt as though Stuart had struck him. Had he really so wronged the boy?

“We didn’t say that
you
should get the grades Rachel got. We
couldn’t
have
ever
said that. All we ever wanted was for you to do the best you could, and it never seemed to us like you did. Did you?”

“I suppose not. I never could see the point.”

“Do you see the point now? After two years of working the way you did? I’ll tell you right now,
I
would have seen the point after I put in
my
time with a thrashing crew!” Dammit! that wasn’t the way he had meant to put it at all! Will knew well enough that no father
ever
ought to say, “When
I
was your age …” Especially when the father was lying helpless in his bed looking up into the distant face of a powerful young man.

He tried to make a new start. “They have entrance examinations at Jamestown College,” he said. “I know you could pass them with room to spare.
You
know it, too.”

“I’d never go where Rachel went.”

“All right, fine! Go to Fargo. It’s cheaper anyway.”

“What should I take? Agriculture? So I could be one more college boy for the farmers to laugh at? Like Jim Finnegan?”

Will reminded himself—a man had to plant—once he was committed to a farm, he had to plant. Once a man fathered a son—“Take anything you want,” he said. “For heaven’s sake! You’re good with machinery—take engineering. Take chemistry. Take agriculture.
Farm,
if you want to, but have something else you can do too. This farm is yours, and you know it. But I don’t want you to be tied to it, that’s all. I don’t want you to
have
to farm even if the whole blamed bottom falls out of farming.”

“If the bottom falls out of farming, what good is a college education going to do me? I was just reading in the paper about how a bunch of guys in New York have got together in a no-job club. They’ve
all
got college educations and they figure there’s ten thousand college graduates just in New York City that don’t have jobs. A lot of those guys are from fancy places, too, like Harvard, and they’re out on the sidewalks shining peoples’ shoes. If a man with a sheepskin from Harvard can’t use it for anything besides shoe-shining, what chance have
I
got?”

Will had read the same papers. When Russia advertised six thousand jobs in engineering and a hundred thousand American engineers applied for the six thousand jobs, there wasn’t much incentive for a son of his to go through four years of engineering study at the State College in Fargo, was there? When men with Harvard engineering degrees were waiting in line to go to Russia or to be handed a free bowl of soup?

And a man could certainly shine shoes without going to college. Will had read it often enough in the last three years so that he had to believe it—thousands and thousands of men in cities were actually trying to earn a living by shining the shoes of other men who were not so much better off than
they
were—seven thousand shoe-shiners just in the streets of New York. Not to mention Chicago, Boston, Detroit, Minneapolis, or Seattle. To a man like himself—or like Stuart—an improved, furnished, and unmortgaged square mile of even the driest land in the world looked a good deal better than a shoe-shine kit.

Was it possible that there simply was no place to go in the whole wide world? Where was there to go in America? Fourteen million people were out of work in this land. This land said to fourteen million people, “You have no place, no purpose in the world.” And the cardboard Hoover Towns and Hoover Valleys in the big cities were inhabited by a goodly number of college men.

Above him stood his boy, looking out into the streaks of snow blowing between the house and the solid new barn. It would be hard to pick a worse time to be twenty years old, wouldn’t it? But it would be hard to pick a worse year, too, in which to die—to leave so many obligations unfulfilled, to abandon so many precious plantings to the drought and the wind.

If only he could start this boy back to school before he had to leave. In school Stuart would find himself. How could a man not find himself if he were busy getting the most important thing in the world—education? “All right, then,” Will said. “If the bottom is out of everything, and the farmer can’t get a price for anything, what else is there for you to do besides go back to school? Things’ll probably be booming again four years from now, when you get out, and then you’ll be ready for the boom when it comes. You’ll be twenty-four years old—just old enough to have a little sense—and you’ll have your pick of jobs.… And another thing—farming’s going to take more and more capital, for machinery and enough land to make the machinery pay. And there’s going to be a bigger and bigger surplus of farmers, too. We’re going to be a drug on the market—just like our wheat. Get into something where you don’t need so much cash and where you don’t have so many other men competing for the same fat middleman’s skinflint prices.”

“You know,” Stuart said, “a lot of other guys are sitting out this mess by going to college, too. They’re all figuring it just the same way
you
are.”

“They’re all figuring it
right!
I’m telling you, four years from now, you won’t have
half
the competition from college graduates that you will from farmers.”

Stuart stretched his arms up from his shoulders. His fists clenched and worked back and forth from his wrists as though he was manacled to the wall behind him. “You want me to get a desk job?”

Will confessed to himself that it was a little hard to see a starched collar set over those shoulders or white shirtsleeves around those thresherman’s wrists. It would be too bad to put such a man behind a desk or behind a window. Could a boy who had ridden in box cars for two years settle down to polite explanations of Pullman schedules to old ladies? Or could he stick out those flashing perfect teeth in a shoe salesman’s smile for nine hours every day? Whether he could or not, Will would rather think of him pitching bundles. But there must be other alternatives.

“You don’t have to sit at a desk just because you’ve got a diploma. You could build dams or look for oil or—
I
don’t know what all. That’s what you have to go to school to find out. If you’ll just start in, I know you’ll find something to suit you, and I know there’ll be a job waiting for you when you get out—unless things get even worse.”

“Well, they
are
getting worse, aren’t they? It doesn’t look to me like there’s any law that says just because things have gotten bad, now they have to get better again. They can just as well get worse and worse and worse. And there won’t be a damn thing I can do about it if they do.”

“All right, if it turns out that one guess is as bad as another, at least you’ll have an education. They can’t take away what you’ve got in your head, but they can take away just about anything else.”

“I gotta go clean out the chicken house now,” Stuart said. “Looks like we might be in for it before morning. Weatherman says so.”

The young man, the twelve-year-old boy, was already out of the room and into the hall. “Stuart! Don’t spend your life scraping droppings out of a hen house and selling eggs for thirteen cents a dozen!” Will couldn’t tell whether Stuart heard him or not. The only thing he could catch from the kitchen was the sound of dishes in the dishpan.

From what meal, Stuart wondered—from what meal could his mother possibly be doing the dishes? Not from that ancient meal they ate sitting at the card table—that first meal they ate after his father came home in the Mercy Hospital ambulance—not that meal?

His mother kept her head turned away from him. She was too provoked with him even to speak to him. She was mad because he wouldn’t say he’d go back to school.
She’d
been trying to get him to say it, too. He sat down with his back to her and pulled his rubber boots on over his leather ones.

He forced his feet into them, standing up before his heels were down, hobbling to the door with one rubber leg still twisted and caught on one leather heel. He closed the door, jerked his coat from its hook in the shed and pushed his arms into the cold sleeves. The cold back of it raised the tight goose pimples on his shoulders, and when he buttoned the cold across his stomach, the lump of that meal he had eaten so long ago froze under the goose pimples on his belly. And it would always be there now—this lump of the dinner he ate on the day his old, old father came home to die.

He wondered if there was any chance at all that he could get through it without some liquor. His mouth watered as though he was going to throw up, he needed a drink so much. He couldn’t quit salivating even after he began scraping and shoveling out the chicken house, and after a while his throat wouldn’t swallow the saliva any more, or else there wasn’t any more room for it down there on top of the lump, so he had to spit it out. Back and forth he went, from the chicken house to the compost pile in the orchard, spitting and spitting into the dirty straw and the dusty snow.

Rose made the dishes last as long as she could because otherwise the tears would have outlasted the dishes, and if she finished with the dishes before she managed to finish with the tears—well, she just didn’t know what she would do with herself then. She powdered her face and whitened her eyelids as well as she could and went in to Will. “Do you think we can get him to go?” she asked. “Do you think it would straighten him out?”

Will couldn’t believe how tired he was. But he roused himself again. Talking made his belly hurt worse, but it was going to hurt anyway. To hell with his belly.

“We’ll have to go slow with him. And I think you ought to sell the farm as soon as prices go up again. I don’t want to think of him tied to it if he doesn’t want to be, and I certainly don’t want to think of
you
on it here alone. If George wasn’t so ornery, you could figure out something—but he is, so that’s out.”

“I’ll never sell this farm. We
built
it.”

“You
must
sell it. You must
promise
me you’ll sell it. You can’t compete now, anyhow, unless you’ve got machinery. Every year these state colleges come up with new hybrids and new fertilizers—and the machinery makers come up with high-priced new gadgets to cut out manpower. But nobody anywhere comes up with any new markets. And the men that are going to make a living out of farming are the men that can buy the fancy seed and machinery and the new livestock. You can’t hire five Ralph Sundquists to take the place of one of these new corn harvesters they’ve got. If you and I were young, and we owned this place free and clear, and the market was any good—if, if, if … Or if we hadn’t used up so much of our cash, if I hadn’t used up so much of our cash—you’d be in pretty good shape—you and Stuart could gamble a lot of it on a combine and a better tractor. Even then it would be a gamble. When is there ever going to be a decent price on wheat again?”