The Bones of Plenty (58 page)

He folded the paper and wrote on the outside, “For Lucy.” He’d have to sneak it into an envelope if he could, and seal it up and write the name and the birthday. Meanwhile he wrapped it in another piece of paper and wrote “Save” on it.

He took two pills then, and lay down for a nap before supper. “Do you want to go to sleep right now?” Rose asked. “I was just going to fix you some more soup.”

“I think I’ll feel a little more like eating after I’ve rested. I’ll have the soup just before I go down for the night. It’s a luxury just not to have that blamed tray coming in at five o’clock every afternoon.”

He always got woozy fast on an empty stomach. The room began to go around almost before she had left it and the pills made a fast pounding in his ears. Then the faces began to go around, like the planets, and words began to go around—pealing, thundering words he had heard so often, and said so often, too, but he could not tell if it was the faces or the planets or only the pounding in his ears reciting
We give thanks to Thee for Thy great glory, O Lord God, heavenly King, God the Father Almighty
… He felt as though he might even be speaking the words himself—saluting the fireworks without bothering to wonder why. …

Lucy was looking for faces in the catalogs. She had already cut out the best ones from the old “Spring and Summer” catalogs, and there weren’t many good ones left, but in two more weeks the new “Spring and Summer” books would come and then she could cut into the “Fall and Winter” catalogs. It was after supper and her father was yelling out to her mother about things in the newspaper the way he did every night.

“Remember, Rachel, I read to you the other night how they took over all those rich landlords’ property in Cuba and opened it up for the poor people? Well, it says here tonight they took over the big electric company and they shut off all the power till the Americans signed the company over to the Cubans. Served them right. American money should stay in America.”

“Well, I guess that’s the way they feel in Cuba,” her mother answered. “I suppose they don’t like to have Americans taking all the money from things like that out of the country.”

“We don’t like it
here,
either!” said her father. “We don’t like having the money from this state all going back to Wall Street any more than the Cubans do. And one of these days, we’re just going to take a lesson from those people down there.”

He read another story about John Dillinger finally getting shot in Chicago. All the boys that sold newspapers ran to where he was lying with blood coming out of all the holes the bullets made. They dipped pieces of their papers in the blood and sold the pieces for a quarter each. “Imagine that! Two bits for a piece of bloody paper!”

“Oh, George! Don’t read things like that aloud! They give Lucy nightmares!”

“No! I want to hear it!” Lucy cried.

“Phooey!” her father said. “She’s got to find out what kind of a world she’s in, doesn’t she? Imagine that, Lucy!
Five
ice-cream cones! More than you get all summer long! For a piece of paper with a little blood on it!”

“George!”

“All right! … Here’s a funnier story anyway. It was the coldest day in the history of the Weather Bureau in New York City yesterday. Now just guess how cold it was—go ahead and guess.”

“A hundred below!” Lucy guessed.

“Rachel?” he asked.

“Oh, twenty-five below, or thereabouts, I suppose,” she said.

“Fourteen!” her father cried. “A measly fourteen! Why, fourteen below is nothing but shirtsleeve weather! Oh, how they suffered! Says here they closed the schools and the hospitals were full of people with ‘frostbite.’”

“What’s frostbite?” Lucy asked.

“Why all that means is they froze their face a little, or their toes. That’s all—just like
you
do all the
time
when you’re out in the wind a while. Freeze their noses and go to the
hospital
to get a little cold water put on them! Why they don’t know what the word ‘cold’ means back there! Imagine that! Temperature goes down to fourteen below and they close the schools.… Well, let’s see here—Germany and Poland signed a ten-year agreement against war.”

“Why don’t they ever have
grand
fathers in the catalog?” Lucy called out to the kitchen.

“What!”

“Well, they have lots of babies and brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers, and there’s a lady that could be a grandmother here, I guess, but they never have any grandfathers. I even found a dog. There’s a little tiny man here, that looks like he could be a grandfather, but he’s all stooped over a machine. How come they never have regular grandfathers with the coats or the underwear?”

“Well, dear, I really can’t think why. I guess maybe grandfathers are just too busy to have their pictures taken. Could you cut out the one you found and just put him a little ways away from the rest of the family so it would look as though he was out working in the barn? You know how people look tiny when they’re far away?”

“Yes, but I can’t make any clothes for him.”

“Well, I’ll tell people to watch for grandfathers in magazines.”

Lucy especially liked to cut her families out of the underwear pages because that was the way real paper dolls came—wearing underwear. Then when she had drawn and colored and cut out clothes for them, she could feel that they were all properly dressed. But sometimes if the best face was on a person wearing a coat or ski pants, she would take that person and just pretend he didn’t already have on outside clothes underneath the clothes she made for him. Her families were always very large and usually there were no girls at all—just babies and boys. But if there was a girl, she would be sure to have a twin brother so her father would not be disappointed when she came.

When Rachel finished the dishes, she went in to start Lucy to bed. The child was sitting with her back to the window and her meticulously cut out family was lined up in front of her across the oilcloth. One or two of the family were in full color, for she hoarded the colored pages and disciplined herself not to use them all up at once. She was such a queer combination of thrift and abandon. Even the black-and-white, brown-and-white, and occasional colored scraps were neat and small, for Lucy was careful not to cut into any more space than she had to in order to get out a particular figure. Again, she was ostensibly an odd combination of coordination and lack of it. In school, Alice Liljeqvist often told Rachel, Lucy’s awkwardness was always causing accidents. Rachel couldn’t help wondering if the ineptness Lucy displayed in school might not be just as deliberate as this neat pile of scraps.

Rachel bent over her to look at the family. “All boys again?” she asked.

Lucy nodded, without looking up from the snowsuit she was making. Rachel shivered. The air from the window could have been coming straight from a polar ice cap.

She put her hand on Lucy’s shirt and felt how cold it was. Then she pressed her wrist against the back of Lucy’s neck, which still seemed so narrow and defenseless beneath the oversized oval of her skull and the great shock of hair on it. Her neck was like ice—her neck with the constant sore throats and the enlarged tonsils inside it—her thin little neck with the glands on either side that swelled into hard aching lumps every time she caught a cold. No, she was not nearly so healthy as George thought she was, and here he had sat in this room with her all evening and never noticed how cold she was getting. And of course
Lucy
would never notice. Lucy never knew when she was cold. All children were that way to some degree but Rachel was sure that Lucy was the worst she had ever seen. On a cold day she had to go outside and hunt her down every half hour or the child was liable to disappear for hours and come back wet with snow and so chilled she couldn’t stop shaking. It was too bad that all her intelligence seemed to go toward making her difficult. The Custers were an exasperating lot.

“Honestly, Lucy, couldn’t you feel how cold you’ve been getting?” she said. “George, why didn’t you notice that she had got herself clear over here against the window? She’s just like ice.”

“Well, now, Rachel, she should certainly know how to look after herself by now. The longer you fuss around over her like this, the longer it’ll be before she learns to take care of herself.”

“
I’m
not cold,” Lucy said. When she began to think about it, she
was
cold, but she didn’t want either her father or mother to be right.

“Oh, no,
you’re
not cold! It makes me cold myself to feel how cold you are. Now gather up those scraps and put them in the coal scuttle, and then get your sleepers and bring them out here and warm them up.”

When Lucy opened the door to the bedroom where Cathy had already gone to sleep, the wave of frigid air struck against Rachel’s legs with an impact as definite and powerful as if it had been a wave of water.

“George! It’s
freezing
in that room! We
can’t
put the children in there tonight!”

“Rachel, what in the world is
eating
on you tonight! You’ll give us
all
the heeby-jeebies if you keep this up!”

“
You’ve
been sitting two feet from the stove all night and I’ve been keeping warm working. I tell you, it’s terribly
cold!
Just go out and look.”

George dropped his feet from his stool and took the kitchen lamp out so he could see the thermometer. The cold gust that blasted into the house was like a personal attack from the universe. He ducked back inside, shaking his head a little, looking as though he had glimpsed whatever the thing was that had been waiting on the porch behind the kitchen door.

“It’s almost forty below,” he said. “I can’t ever remember seeing it this cold this early in the evening. What’ll it be by morning, I wonder?”

Rachel felt the attack and the strange sentience of the cold. It was as though the cold was feeling
her,
as much as she was feeling
it.
There was just too much to fight. How could anybody fight it all? “What shall we do?” she cried.

“Rachel! Will you stop acting like a flea on a hot stove! Relax! Before you drive us
all
crazy!”

“All right, all right. What shall we do? I’m just asking you what we ought to do.”

“There’s not a heck of a lot we
can
do about a cold wave except keep ourselves warm in here, now is there?”

“They mustn’t sleep in that room,” Rachel said. “We’ll have to move Lucy’s bed out here and Cathy will have to sleep between us. It doesn’t matter how many pins I use, I can’t trust that baby to stay covered on a night like this.”

If there was anything George hated, it was sleeping with a baby. He was horrified by the thought that he could be wet upon and he was almost as worried by the smaller possibility of rolling on the baby in his sleep. A baby as big as Cathy would probably squirm out from under him, as a shoat or a puppy always seemed to do, no matter how big and stupid its mother. But still, if he rolled on her, she might squall in his ear like a mashed cat and finish him for the night. “Fiddlesticks!” he said.

“Help me move the cot. Lucy must get to bed.”

“You’re just making a mountain out of a molehill.”

Rachel’s only answer was to rip up their own bed and spread a rubber sheet under the cotton sheet-blanket. Then she blocked off the light by moving the loaded clothes rack across the wide door of the alcove. She lifted the baby from the crib and managed to transfer her into the big bed without waking her.

George said no more either, as he helped her carry out the cot and fit it into the narrow space between the table and the piano bench.

“You get in bed, now,” Rachel said to Lucy. “By the time you’re settled, we’ll be ready to turn out the light.”

There were drafts on Lucy’s back as she stood in the corner by the stove to put her sleepers on. She crawled in between the blankets of her cot. They were very cold and did not seem to have warmed at all since being moved to the dining room. She began to feel afraid. Her mother was right: There was something wrong.

It didn’t seem as though she would ever be able to go to sleep with her head almost under the oilcloth this way. She looked in under the table. It was a landscape she knew well, since she always played with her blocks under there. There was the thick round center stem which split apart in the middle when the table was pulled out for extra leaves and there were the four broad feet, like gently spreading roots, sloping down and ending in the casters that stood in such lovely round glass dishes. She always thought it a pity that those little dishes were buried under the table where she was the only one to appreciate them. But no matter how well acquainted she was with the underside of the table, it wasn’t normal to have her head under there when she was trying to go to sleep. She knew her head wasn’t
really
under the table, but it
felt
as though it was under the table. And her feet began to get cold. They were too close to the window. She shuddered and turned on her side and bent her knees up tight against her stomach.

Her mother noticed. “Are you cold?”

“Kind of.” She would admit it now that it wouldn’t be her fault any more.

“George, we’ll have to give Lucy our quilts and use the feather tick.”

“You
are
hysterical!”

Her mother dragged the feather tick out of the closet and dumped it beside the stove in a wheezy rumple of sliding feathers and yellowed ticking. A stale, vault-like smell came from it. She took two quilts off the double bed and tucked them around Lucy.

“Better now?”

Lucy couldn’t notice any difference, but she didn’t know what else to say, so she said yes. She didn’t really know whether she was cold or not, especially after listening to her mother and father telling each other that she didn’t know. She stared into the deep shadows under the table. She knew that once the light was out, she would see all sorts of shapes there that
could
not be there, and she was trying to make herself believe that they
would
not be there. It was always that way when she slept in a different place. Even in the tiny room where she had slept all her life, she saw thousands of shapes that could not be there, but it was always much worse in a new place. She would have to lie there all night reminding herself that it was only the underneath parts of the table she was seeing.