The Bones of Plenty (6 page)

In the yard of one house a swing hanging from the branches of a great bare tree played by itself in the wind. In another yard a privy door flapped and banged, and in still another, several paths from convenient approaches crossed to one of the town pumps.

There was only one house beyond the Goodmans’ to the north, but it was far out in a field and not on the street. That was where the Finleys lived, and Zack saw, as he approached Harry’s house, that Mrs. Finley had already got a big Monday morning wash out, to freeze stiff in the wind. He didn’t see how that Finley outfit stayed alive in that big old leaking house. Harry, being the money-grubber that he was, actually demanded rent for the place. Harry owned it the way he owned all the other places, because of a no-good mortgage.

Harry’s own house was set in a yard so full of trees that, living or dead, bare or leafed, they nearly hid it from people passing by. Zack’s knock, muted by his glove, drew no response. He took off the glove and rapped again with the sharpness of his cold knuckles. He twisted the door knob, but it would not turn. Then he kicked the door.

He tramped down the path to the garage. The doors were locked, but he found a window draped with spider webs and dotted with the dry husks of insects. He could see that the car was not there. He heaved himself up the steps of the back porch, and yanked at the screen door, which opened so cordially that he nearly lost his balance. But the porcelain knob on the back door was as resistant as the brass knob on the front door.

He shouted into the house and pounded on a window. He stood for a moment, his glove cupped around his goiter, while he thought. Then he lunged around the house and up the steps of Harry’s neighbor.

Old Mrs. Webber came to the door. She shivered in her long black woolen dress and clutched her shawl around her age-deformed shoulders. “Come in, come in,” she said in a high voice that scratched something in her throat. Zack’s glove went back to his goiter.

“It’s so cold. Come in, so I can shut the door. Martin’s in bed today. His laig and his hip is hurting him. What did you want?”

“Where’s the Goodmans?” Zack shouted. “When did they go away? Have they cleared out for good?”

“I never see nobody in the wintertime,” Mrs. Webber mourned, and her voice scratched on something a notch or two higher. “Just the boy that brings me the groceries and goes down to the pump and fetches me my water. And that old man with the big blue lip that brings the coal.” Mrs. Webber no longer remembered names.

“Them Goodmans haven’t never been neighborly to us,” she went on, and her voice went back down and scratched in the first notch. Listening to it was like watching an old cow bend her head to the side and rake her neck up and down against a knot on a fence post. “Martin says that’s the way them Jews are. When they first come here I went over and called on the missus and took her an angel food cake—
angel food
—with
twelve
egg whites. They’s a lot of people in this town said I used to make the best angel food cake in the county. But that was before my wrists got too sore to beat it right any more.”

“But what about the Goodmans!” Zack cried.

“Why, do you know what she brought back in the dish I took her that cake in? Six rotten little fish! Martin said that would learn me to give something free for nothing to a Jew. We give them fish to the dog.”

“Did you see them go away?”

“Are they gone away?” Mrs. Webber asked.

“They’re
gone
all right! Their
car’s
gone.”

“Well, I swan,” said Mrs. Webber. “Never even said goodby. Just like a Jew.”

Zack ran all the way back to Herman’s store, clumping ponderously down the middle of the road, keeping his arms crossed to steady all the burning, jumping things inside his chest.

“He’s gone all right,” he cried to Herman. “Cleared right out. I
said
he would, didn’t I?”

Johnny Koslov, the youngest of the Koslov brothers, loitered in the rear of the store, hopelessly eyeing a horse blanket that he coveted for the bed of himself and his Hilda. He came forward to the counter and demanded, “Who iss gone? Who iss it?”

“The
banker’s
gone—
that’s
who!” Zack roared. “The little Jew banker. Just like
I
said he would!”

“Oh my!” said Johnny. Johnny had never had any money in the bank and he had not heard about the panic, but he could react to sounds in voices and looks on faces. “Oh my!” he said again.

Zack paid no more attention to him. He despised all Russians. “You find me a Roosian with any brains,” he would say, “and I’ll prove to you he’s probably got German blood in him. And they’ll stand around in your place and spit their filthy-dirty Roosian peanuts anywhere they feel like it—just like they act at home!”

Herman didn’t care about the sunflower seed husks. When he got around to it, he swept them out the front door onto the sidewalk, where they eventually sifted away between the boards. It didn’t bother him when the Russians gathered around his stove, chattering in their foolish language and blowing the salty slivers from their muscular lips. As long as the Russians spent money, Herman didn’t care how many Russian peanut shells they spat.

Herman had dust from a sack of chicken mash in his apron, and he beat at it, raising a yellow cloud that settled over the hairs on his hands. He dangled one of the hands in a small vat of dill pickles and brought up half a pickle which he put in his mouth. “You reckon he’s gone for good?”

“Well, now then, just what do
you
think?” Zack sneered.

“Why, he might just be taking one of them bank holidays,” Herman said. “He maybe will come back when the new President comes in.”

Herman had learned how to handle Zack Hoefener in twenty years of running a store in the same town with him. “You make me sick,” Zack said. “We should go after him with a rope. We should have a good old-fashioned necktie party.”

“You cannot hang a businessman for losing all his money,” Herman observed. “Or for taking a holiday, either.” He was not exerting himself to be fair to Harry but only to infuriate Zack, who flung open the door and charged through it, nearly ramming into the customer on Herman’s steps.

“What ails
him?”
George Custer said, holding the door open and leaning out to watch Hoefener’s departure.

Herman crunched the last of the pickle into his mouth and said to George, “He just found out about the bank.”

“What
bank?”

“Harry’s
bank. He closed it up.”

“What do you mean!”

“He went away. Nobody knows where.”

George took a long breath. “The dirty little Jew,” he said. “The stinking tight little Jew. Who in hell did he lend the money to? The stingy scoundrel must’ve lost it himself! The dirty little swindler!”

George paced to the stove in three enormous strides, and had no more than stuck his cold hands over its searing top than he whirled and paced back again.

The Adam’s apple in George’s neck sawed up and down. “Maybe he’s just took a holiday,” Herman suggested.

“A
holiday!”
George shouted. “A
holiday!
Yeah, out to California, maybe, where it’s nice and warm—and far away! Well, he damn well better stay wherever he’s at. It’ll be plenty warm around
here
for him, you bet!”

“If he took money that is not his the police will catch him, won’t they?” Herman said.

“Sheriff Richard M. Press!”
George scoffed. “He’s just after the little guy that can’t hire himself a shyster lawyer. Oh, the Goddamned little chiseler! He’ll go scot-free!”

Herman shrugged. He himself stood to lose nothing. His only capital was the inventory on his shelves; his reserve was his own corpulence—a product of the tempting shelves and a margin that could well last him for many days should the shelves go empty.

He was curious to know how much George would lose, for it was obvious that he was going to lose something, but Herman would never ask a question like that to a man like Custer. George’s great frame alone was formidable, but the frame housed a violence of soul vastly more formidable than that of flesh. No room into which George stepped was free from tension until he left it again.

“Maybe Harry will come back after Roosevelt gets in,” Herman said.

“Roosevelt!”
George pronounced the “Roo” as in kangaroo. “He’s nothing but another rich man.
He
don’t care if a few million of us lose our shirts. What’s
he
care about a little dinky one-horse bank way out here? There ain’t a thing he could do anyhow.”

He turned away and stared toward the back of the store, with his jaw as hard as ever, but with his eyes drifting out of focus in a peculiar way—almost like a fellow Herman had known who had a case of the falling sickness. It was queer how mean George looked that way. He wasn’t looking at anything at all, and yet he seemed ready to kill anything he might see.

Finally he said, “Better get this stuff for the old lady, I reckon.”

He bought a hundred-pound sack of flour and some little things for which he paid in exact change and bills so limp they felt more like silk than paper. Herman wondered how long those bills had ridden around in Custer’s hip pocket before he had to use them. And he wished he knew how much George had lost in Harry’s bank.

George couldn’t even look up at the house of his wife’s father as he passed below it on the road. He wondered how much the old man was going to lose. He wanted to go up and tell Will about the bank, but he was so angry he couldn’t trust himself. Why had he listened to the sanctimonious ass telling him all about how safe that God-damned bank was? Now the money he’d been saving for seed was gone, and he was sure it was gone for good. Yet he could hardly believe his luck could be so bad. He had thought losing the foal was enough bad luck to last for the next year at least.

He drove the last half mile to his own mailbox and turned into the frozen ruts that led through his fields to the farmyard. The land sloped away from the county road so that he could survey nearly all of the half section as he coasted down the quarter-mile incline to the house. On either side of him were his two biggest fields—eighty acres apiece—which he planted in wheat. These two fields stretched the entire width of the property, and their eastern edges cut the farm in half. The north and south windbreaks of well-grown willows, cottonwoods, and box elders defined the limits of the yard. The groves stopped the wind enough so that the snow was encouraged to settle between them, and thus the Custers paid for their bit of shelter from one element by spending the winter half-buried in another element.

Below the house the long swell dropped more precipitously to a trough of the lowest ground on the farm, and then rose again to form the eastern, rougher part of the property—humped, notched by ravines, and quite rocky. Here George had plotted out his pastures and the fields where he grew corn and a hay crop of sweet clover or alfalfa.

Set just above the final drop of the western swell, the house appeared to command the hill and the buildings at the foot of it. But the appearance was deceptive, for those who lived in the house were really commanded by the hill. Nearly everything went down the hill empty and came up the hill full. Water buckets, milk pails, egg baskets, and wheelbarrows went lightly down to the well or the barn or the chicken house or the compost pile and came wearily back up to the wash boiler, the cream separator, the cooler, or the garden behind the house. Once each morning and evening the milk pails went down full—after the cream was separated and the skim milk went back to the barn to feed the calves and pigs.

The house had begun as one big room with an east and a west window and a chimney on the north. Then smaller rooms had been leaned against the north and south sides of the first one, each with a window to the west. The kitchen stove, the shelf for the water bucket and wash basin, a cupboard, a cooler, and a small work table nearly filled the room on the north. The baby’s crib and Lucy’s cot and a large storage closet filled the room on the south. It was such a simple little house that George felt as though he confronted the inside as well as the outside every time he came down toward it from the western fields and saw the three windows looking up at him—one from each of the three rooms.

In the main room, which they called the dining room, was an expandable round table on which the family ate all its meals, wrote letters, bathed the baby, did homework, cut out paper dolls, butchered, sewed, or spread out catalogs for ordering garden seeds, repair parts, shoes, and clothes. There were four straight chairs around the table, and a high chair. There was a heavy rocking chair covered in black leather, scraped full of furry brown scratches and showing brown rings on the seat made by the springs pressing up through the stuffing. There was an expensive upright piano, a bookcase too small for the books in it, and a clothes rack beside the round heating stove, nearly always hung with diapers and baby blankets. In an alcove curtained off from the rest of the room was the double bed for himself and Rachel.