The Bones of Plenty (57 page)

“Will, we
are
in good shape. How many farmers own their farms outright?”

“I tell you, you’re not thinking right. That’s the way
George
thinks. He’s always talking about how he’s in the top
fifty
per cent. You and I are in the top
ten
per cent, and we
still
haven’t made anything for
years.
It’s like—well it’s practically like being in the bustle business! If you can’t sell bustles, what good does it do to be in the top ten per cent?”

“People have to eat.”

“There’s enough wheat just in Minnesota elevators to feed everybody in this country for a year. Actually, if Mr. Wallace’s figures mean anything, you and I were in the top
five
per cent last year, with a measly little net of twelve hundred dollars or so. Just ask yourself how many new tractors and combines you’re going to buy with twelve hundred dollars and still have anything left over for all the other things we need. But there’ll be enough for
you,
though, if you sell at the right time.”

“Well—I’ll have to see what Stuart wants.” She said it to please him, he knew. That was all right. It would take her a while to see it.

“Can you lay your hands on that AAA contract now?” he asked. “We ought to get it taken care of.”

He held the government papers on a breadboard propped against his knees while he figured on sheets of yellow scratch paper. As he filled in blanks and laid out acreages for wheat and for all the other crops, he saw the black land of his snow-covered square mile around him, and then he saw it as it had been in Indian summer. He could feel the midmorning sun soaking into the heavy suit he hadn’t worn back from Bismarck after all. Then he saw it as it was in April. He could feel the air in a field just before a spring rain and he could smell the fragrance that rose from the dust as the first drops kissed it. He’d always wondered what created that wonderful smell. It was like an offering of praise and thanksgiving from the earth herself. He could see his blue field of flax blooming below the blue field of the sky. He could see all the black, brown, green, blue, and gold fields and pastures under his square mile of snow—just as he always saw them while he waited for the winter to pass.…

He finished the contract and signed it in writing that was beginning to show how his hand shook. He called Rose to take away the papers and help him lie down. He was straightening out his legs, slowly, so as not to use any of the muscles across his abdomen, when he heard his other child and her children coming into the kitchen.

The only thing worse than to be Stuart in these times—to be feeling the first disillusionment natural to a boy of twenty in even the best of times—was to be Rachel or George—to be losing the most productive years of life to the worst years the country had ever known. Even Will’s frequent exasperation with George did not keep him from having some idea of what the man was going through.

And these children of his older child—they seemed already doomed to be sacrificed like the bright and beautiful innocents of myths. They were already marked for the monster. Or monsters. The ones who sprang from the ground that had been sown with dragon’s teeth, who grew two heads for every one cut off, who leapt up stronger every time they were felled to the earth—inscrutable monsters whose existence was never quite explained by the myths. But they were there, nevertheless, to count off the procession of the hecatombs into their bone-filled caves while the country around echoed with the lamentations of their fathers and mothers. What myths, what monsters, would Lucy and Catherine have to be given to? Oblonsky had thought he knew. Oblonsky had called “free enterprise” the myth, capitalism the monster. Will could not forget how sure Oblonsky had been about these children’s world—about the myths that created the monsters and the monsters that perpetuated the myths.…

He stretched out his hands to Lucy—his very white hands with the new green-black ink stains—and pulled her to the side of his bed with one thin arm around her waist. It was odd; he hadn’t really thought about how thin he had got. Before, it was always her ribby little chest that had seemed thin to him, but when he felt how hard his arm was against her, clear through her jumper, he knew how he had fallen away from himself. He vaguely remembered the feel of the jumper. Then he realized it was made from an old tweed suit of his that had been packed away for so many years, ever since it had got too tight for him. They had thought Stuart might get some good out of it, but he was much too tall for it by the time he could have worn it.

It bothered Will to see such rough, thick material on Lucy. A little girl like her ought to be dressed in something much lighter and gayer. It seemed to him that his granddaughters ought both to wear fairy clothing of summertime things—of flower petals and corn tassels—things that would call to mind a warm wind pushing through a flax field, or the sweet, milky, infant heads of green wheat. He didn’t know how their dresses ought to look, only how they ought to feel. In his weakness and fatigue, he felt a remarkable projection of his vision—a much broadened, if misty, grasp of all the things that had composed his life, from the time when he was Lucy’s age through all the years up to Lucy herself, right now. It was a panorama—like the jigsaw puzzle he had gone away without finishing. All the pieces of his life were here now. None were missing, still to come. But even with all the pieces right in front of him, he still couldn’t quite see what they made when they all went together.

“Say, I’ll tell you what,” he said to Lucy. “On Saturday you come over here and we’ll work on that big puzzle all day long and finish it and find out what it’s a picture of. What do you say?”

Her taut little face blazed with the smile he saw when he let her beat him at checkers or when he yielded and said yes, he’d tell a story, or when he told her she could ride standing up in the back of the truck, or when they went to feed the lambs. He tried not to think of how she would not smile because of these things any more. The important thing was the smile. Who ever saw the smile but him? Lucy’s face had had a distance about it ever since she was a baby. By the time she was five, she could look as preoccupied, as unapproachable, as her grandmother had looked at eighteen when he first met her. Lucy at five—her head tilted thoughtfully downward, her hair half out of her braids, the outline of her small cheeks so pure and precise beside the straying platinum hair, the curves of her chin and mouth and nose so tiny and so separate, the gaze of her eyes under the brows and lashes so dark for her hair (for her hair would darken to match her brows, as Stuart’s had)—the gaze itself so dark when she was five. Now at eight the gaze was darker. That was one of the reasons why the smile was like the sun.

He had the same desperate feeling about that smile that he once got about the problem of whether or not there could be a sound in the forest if a tree fell and no one was there to hear it. Of course there was a sound, he had insisted—whether any human being heard it or not. A certain combination of things occurred and they produced a sound, and that had to be all there was to it. But when he had first come up against that problem, he had wanted to rush to all the places in the world where a tree was falling, just to make sure that there would always be a sound. Now here was a smile that supposedly could always be smiled, but would it? Would somebody be sure to see it for him when he couldn’t see it any more for himself? Above all, would somebody make sure that the smile was never lost?

She was a very beautiful child when she smiled. He wondered if everybody else knew it. He began to see that there might be so many things that he knew and that nobody else knew. He would have to try to tell everybody while he had the time.

Then the blazing smile died, the sun set. “Mamma says not to pester you to play with me,” she said soberly.

“You just let
me
worry about that,” he said. They were protecting him, trying to force him into more idleness. They were still trying to save him.

“Well,” he went on, after waiting for somebody else to speak, “tell me the news. Has the sheriff been around to badger Wilkes any more?”

“Otto never has said,” George told him. “But if I know Press, he won’t be around again till summer. Mr. Press likes to stick close to home in the winter, where it’s nice and warm and he can feather his nest with the pickings around town.”

“How’s Edith?”

“I don’t see how she keeps going,” Rachel said. “She’s up and around now, and she doesn’t seem to be any worse off than she was before. The baby seems to be all right, too.”

The visit did not last long. They could all see how tired he was and they refused to stay. Lucy gave him a refreshing conspiratorial look as she left. He and she were fooling all the others once more.

He thought about how unfair he had been in his thoughts about George. All the credit for a child like Lucy could not be given to Rachel or to her side of the family. George had given Lucy some of her intensity and courage, and not a small share of her intelligence. Will was astounded to think that it had never occurred to him before to be grateful to George for Lucy and Catherine. His unfairness to George could not be excused just because George had been unfair to him, too. It came to him that rarely was a man really fair in his life. Not till a man was dying could he afford to see things as they really were. All these years he had blamed George for the hard life that Rachel was obliged to live; yet in good times George would have been a highly successful farmer. He was sensible about farming, and he worked as hard as any man Will had ever known.

There would never be the time nor the means for making amends to George, he knew. But on the other hand, he never could have seen that there were amends to be made until the time for making them was gone. He had been angry with George for insisting on repaying the loan; now he had to admit that he never could have respected a son-in-law who hadn’t repaid him. He had been annoyed with George for refusing even to think about taking relief of some sort; now he had to admit that he never would have respected a son-in-law who went on relief. Now he could see … now that he was about to be interrupted.

He had struggled so hard with the tiredness he felt while his grandchildren were visiting that now he had a feverish second wind. His mind was leaping from one spot to another in an undisciplined way, and he had neither the strength nor the desire to try to control it. He felt as if he were in the midst of a fireworks display, with extravagant shapes and colors exploding all around him. If he tried to trace out the trajectories of one particular burst, he found himself staring at nothing but thin wiggly lines of smoke that swiftly expired in the darkness. It was better simply to float from burst to burst—fireworks were not meant to be pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle on a card table. But he would return from the fireworks and try to do something about the smile—something to bridge the coming interruption, the way his stories used to be bridges. He asked Rose to bring the breadboard and some paper back to him.

She bent over close to him while she helped him sit up, and his mind went from Lucy’s smile to Rose’s face—Lucy looked a little like Rose, he thought, even though she favored George’s side of the family more than Rachel’s.

He wondered if it was possible to love anybody without loving that person’s face. People talked about loving another person’s spirit, and he supposed there was something about the people he loved that could not be seen or touched, but whatever that something was, might it not easily be a thing he
constructed
for himself out of what he
could
see and touch?

What made a face, anyway? A face was made out of the same elements that were in the earth and the air and the water—the same elements that made wheat and wool—the same elements that fed man and buried him, watered him and drowned him, illuminated and burned him—the same elements that spangled the sky with the white-hot gas of stars or that circled him in the cold planets hiding in their long dark billion-mile orbits. It still excited Will to think about Pluto. Pluto’s remote existence was first suggested when Rachel was so small she was barely talking. When Rachel was studying astronomy in college, Pluto was still only a highly acceptable hypothesis. But men had sought it across space until Will’s granddaughter was bigger than his daughter had been when Pluto was first proposed. And four years ago a man had finally aimed a telescope in just the right spot at just the right time and caught it slipping by in its two-hundred-and-forty-eight-year circuit of the sun’s nearer children.

Only God knew how long Pluto had been out there. What Will knew was that for the fifty-four years that Rose had existed, Pluto had been there, too, no matter whether
men
knew about it or not, and the same elements that made the face of Rose had also been out there whirling past them on that lifeless ball—or, more accurately—he and Rose had been whirling past Pluto.

What was to be said, then, about the face of Rose and the planet of Pluto? Were the muscles that manipulated the powdered lids of Rose’s eyes and the careful shapes of her lips, that articulated the anxiety of her mind in the lines of her forehead—were these muscles simply nothing but different arrangements of the same elements that made Pluto? Could a face really be made from nothing more than a particular arrangement of molecules in space? An arrangement dense and stable enough so that a man’s own eyes, being close enough, yet removed enough to encompass it, had become accustomed to it, had made of it a unique creation, and had endowed it with all the meaning it had? Could the eye of God likewise create a face from the molecular arrangement of the Milky Way or a glass of water?

He wrote on his paper, “For Lucy to read on her …” (She mustn’t be too young or she might not understand. She mustn’t be too old or she might have forgotten.) “… on her thirteenth birthday.” He remembered Rachet at that age—so thoughtful and yet so young—Rachel, ewe, his Rachel with a lamb now, who must not forget. “A smile is one of the things that makes your face different from other faces.” That wasn’t exactly what he wanted to say—well … “I hope you will always smile, with your grown-up face, the way I have seen you smile when you were little.” (She was so alive now, in her existence as an eight-year-old, that it was impossible to imagine her five years from now.) “I hope you can remember the way you always smiled at the lambs, because …” He wanted to say, “… because that smile always made me so happy,” but that would not be so relevant five years from now. What would? “… because your face is the very prettiest that way.” Once it was written, it didn’t sound important enough. He crossed it out heavily back to the word “lambs” and left it at that. It was probably enough anyway. She could never forget the lambs, could she?