The Bones of Plenty (59 page)
Read The Bones of Plenty Online
Authors: Lois Phillips Hudson
There was a poem that began “Little Orphant Annie’s come to
our
house to stay, and wash the cups and saucers up, and brush the crumbs away,” and Lucy had heard that poem recited at least twenty times at school programs and read it at least fifty times in
The Young Folks’ Treasury.
First Little Orphant Annie had to make the fire and bake the bread and earn-her-board-and-keep, but after she was finished with that, she could tell about what happened to bad children. There was a little boy whose parents sent him to bed away up stairs and when they heard him holler and they turned the covers down, he wasn’t there at all. And there was a little girl that would always laugh and grin and hide and make fun of everybody and say she didn’t care and all of a sudden there was two great big black Things a-standing by her side and they snatched her through the ceiling before she knowed what she was about. And Little Orphant Annie said that the black Things were Gobble-uns, and the Gobble-uns’ll git
you
if you Don’t Watch Out!
Lucy did not doubt that the poem applied to herself in every respect. She grinned, and she knew she wasn’t supposed to. It wasn’t ladylike to grin, especially when a person had such big teeth. Every time she had to have her picture taken, somebody would say, “Smile,” but as soon as she smiled, they would say, “No! Don’t
grin! Smile!”
It was only impolite to grin, but it was terrible to say, “I don’t care!” which was a thing she often said. She sometimes kicked her heels, too, and she hid when she was mad. And she whistled just to provoke her grandmother.
She knew exactly how it would feel to get snatched through the ceiling before she knew what she was about. There were certainly enough reasons why she deserved to have the two great big black Things appear by her side at any moment. As soon as the light was out, they could hide under the table if they wanted to, the way she did herself. Tonight could be the night.
Her father emptied the coal scuttle into the two stoves and turned the dampers in the chimneys. That was almost the last thing he did every night before he put out the light. Oh, if he could only leave it on. Just for tonight.
“You all set in there, Rachel?” he said. Her mother had already gotten in bed with Cathy. If only she was a baby, too, safe in bed between a mother and a father.
“Move the clothes rack,” said her mother. “We’re not getting enough heat back here. I just can’t get warmed up at all—even under this tick.”
“Well this is
some
cold wave,” her father said. “I’d like to see a few of those hothouse flowers in New York out here
tonight!”
He turned down the gas and the hiss of it stopped. The gas left in the mantles made a few struggling sounds, the mantles became two terrible glowing blue eyes in the darkness, and then they went out.
Now there was no protection at all from any attacker—not from black Things or white Things or hands floating around in the air above her. She wondered if a cold wave could make a glacier in one night—like the beanstalk growing to the sky in one night. Or perhaps if a cold wave was cold enough, it
was
a glacier—a wall of ice higher than the grain elevator, rumbling toward them like a thousand threshing machines. She would stay awake and listen, so if it came it wouldn’t catch them the way it had caught the mammoths.
It seemed to her that she could not have slept at all—that she must have spent the whole night wondering where the glacier was, and wondering how the shapes got under the table to lurk and twitch there in the freezing light that recoiled from the marble sky and crept through the window into the warmth of the house. It seemed that she had not been asleep at all when she woke to the sound of whispers—three sets of whispers—and a vagrant flashlight beam glaring and vanishing in the kitchen.
She heard footsteps approaching her bed and she closed her eyes, for she knew that she was supposed to be asleep.
But her mother came to her in the darkness and whispered to her without ever asking if she was awake—seeming to know that she was awake.
“Daddy and I have to go, but we’ll be back as soon as we can. You’ll be a big girl, now, won’t you? And take care of Cathy when she wakes up. Be very careful when you light the lamp.…
“Grampa won’t suffer any more.”
IIILet us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us
Leaders of the people by their counsels, and by their knowledge of learning meet for the people.
All these were honoured in their generations, and were the glory of their times.
And some there be, which have no memorial; who are perished, as though they had never been born; and their children after them.
Ecclesiasticus 44:1-9
Old Testament Apocrypha
There was a wide gate on the south side of Highway Number 10, and attached to the gate was a fence that went along the highway and then around the base of an unusually steep hill that was dotted thickly with big square stones. The gray-white lintel of the gate was scarcely distinguishable from the dusty snow on the hill behind it, but the black letters—CALVARY—stood out upon it. Near the top of the hill, several crouching men leapt to their feet and scattered across the snow, dodging or jumping the few headstones that protruded into their random flights. They dropped to their knees just as the spot near the top of the hill exploded in flying chunks of snow and black earth.
In a moment they ventured back, sniffing the burnt powder. One of them was limping, and he rubbed his leg while he studied the hole. “Thunderation,” he said. “Prit-near broke my leg and it
still
ain’t deep enough. I oughta get paid by the
hour
on this job.”
He was a drifter they called Tiny Tim. Every once in a while he sneaked off a boxcar and over to the Town Hall to try to get hired for some piecework. He hit every town along the main line often enough to be familiar to most men who dealt out piecework.
“Don’t make me laugh,” said the man who had hired him. “If I was paying you by the hour, you’d of got some jack outa me and hiked in to the saloon by now.”
“Sure I would,” Tiny Tim agreed. “I’m too cold to work any more. What do you wanta bury a man when it’s this cold for? No
need
to.
Sixty below,
two-three nights ago. I ain’t been warm since—just thinking about it. All you need to do is let him freeze good and stiff and pound him in the ground.”
“Haven’t you got no feelings at
all
!” the boss cried. “You say anything more like that and I don’t care
how
you beg me, I’ll never give you no more jobs out here!”
“Ya, I got feelings!
Cold
feelings!”
“Go back down to the truck and fetch some more sticks!” the boss told him.
Tiny Tim stumped away down the hill, moving as though he didn’t dare to bend his toes for fear they would snap off.
“Shake a leg! Move a little and maybe you’ll get warmed up! We haven’t got all day! They’ll
be
here in another three hours or so. Come on, get a move on,” the boss urged the men preparing the holes for the next charge. “We gotta clean it up too before they come.” He looked around at the strewing of clods over the snow. “We can’t let ’em see it like
this.
They shouldn’t know about it. Anyway, they shouldn’t
think
about it.”
Once more the spot near the top of the hill erupted and finally it was deep enough. The men squared off the corners as neatly as they could. Their picks rebounded as though they were striking solid rock, but with every jolt to elbows and shoulders a few crumbs broke loose and dribbled down into the hole.
Finally they piled the frozen chunks of dirt in one big mound beside the hole. They did their best to make it look as though the grave might have been dug. They raked up the smaller dirt chunks and rocks, and they separated the larger lumps of snow from the lumps of dirt so the dirt would settle down better.
The boss untied the strings of his ear flaps and pushed his cap back to cool his forehead. “Well,” he said, “I don’t see how it’s possible to work up a sweat on a day like this, but I done it.”
He’d had this job for a long time, but he’d never got over being nervous about it. He still had nightmares about not getting the grave dug in time, or about mistaking the day and having the preacher and the whole funeral procession arrive with the casket and no hole to put the casket in.
“Let’s get out of here. I need a beer. Thank God a man can go get a beer now after he digs a grave.”
By the time they got back to town, the two men who had had to sit out in the truck bed could barely move their lips to speak, even though they had wrapped scarves around their faces. They trailed the boss into Gebhardt’s.
Tiny Tim worked his jaw to limber up his mouth. “Let me have my money. Gotta warm up.”
The boss pulled a dollar out of his back pocket. “That’s more than you’re worth.”
“Aw—for a day like this!”
“I’ll buy you a beer, but that’s all the cash money you get. You know you loafed as much as you could stand to without freezing to death.”
Tiny Tim drained the mug. “Much obliged for the
orderve,”
he said. He headed for the back room.
“Takes a fool to drink that stuff back there,” the boss said. “I ain’t going to touch a drop that ain’t legal. Now don’t get too warmed up in here. We gotta go back out there and fill it in again.”
Lucy felt the tickle of tears on her cheeks, then the salt running over her lips. Then the hymn book in the rack swam away out of sight, after she had managed to keep looking at it for this whole time. She wiped her eyes with her clenched fists, wiped the fists on her coat, and then wiped her eyes again. She stopped presently, and nobody had even noticed that she cried. She was glad that she had not been able to keep from crying, even if it
was
so embarrassing. She even wished that somebody had noticed, because it was lonely not to have anybody know that she too had cried for him.
There were a great many flowers, and more people even than there were for the Christmas program. That was because they all liked her grandfather so much. But not as much as
she
did, not as much as
she
did.
They sang the hymn he liked best. It was “Abide with Me.” Then the men closed the casket and carried it down the aisle. Lucy saw them lift him into the long black car. The people walked past the car to their own cars, bending their heads toward each other and holding each other by the elbows. They seemed as though they could not stand up alone—as though they had to help each other to walk against a strong wind.
The long car started down the street toward the highway and the other cars followed behind. They went very slowly because a few of the people were driving buggies.
He’s not in there, Lucy said to herself. I don’t believe he’s even in there at all.
The pallbearers, shaking with cold, lowered the casket into the grave. Reverend Brant drew from his pocket a handful of dust. It was an old trick of the trade—keeping a little unfrozen dirt in the house. While he was still speaking, the diggers got out of their truck and came in to wait by the gate.