The Bones of Plenty (62 page)

Stuart got away from Annie and her mother as soon as he could, but it was nearly ten o’clock when he went out and climbed into the truck. Mrs. Finley wanted them to have a regular marriage in her house. She wanted all his family there. He himself just couldn’t quite see George there—or his mother either, for that matter.

In fact, whenever he tried to see himself doing
anything
in the future, he felt a queer numb blankness in his head. It was like having the whole empty prairie sky inside his head—and the trouble was that he himself was nowhere at all in that sky.

From the time he could remember, people had said he didn’t have any ambition. He’d never been mad when they said that—only when they hinted that he was lazy along with it. There was a difference between having no ambition and being lazy. He’d never been lazy; he liked to work. He just didn’t like to work in order to get a perfect score on an examination. Nobody had ever proved to him that it made any difference whether he got a perfect score or not.

Sometimes people told him he didn’t have any self-respect. He’d never been able to figure out what self-respect
was.
Did it mean being willing to fight a bum who called
you
a bum? Did it mean sweating all day and worrying all night to try to get hold of some land you could call yours? Did it mean being able to see yourself somewhere in that blank sky in your head that people called the future?

If it meant doing something you said you’d do, then he at least tried to have self-respect. If there was something in the future he knew he had to do, he didn’t try to imagine it; he just tried to keep himself from running away.

It was only the time at hand—the solitary present—that was unendurable. Like this time right now, when the truck kept slowing and slowing as it came nearer and nearer to Gebhardt’s. He knew that if he could get past Gebhardt’s for the next few days, he would find himself doing what he’d said he’d do—standing beside Annie Finley and promising Reverend Brant that he would join his whole empty future with hers. And what difference would it make? It was just the present that he couldn’t get through.

Rose didn’t know, till she heard Stuart come downstairs in the morning and go out to milk, how much she had been wanting him to run away.

There
were
some more things she would like to say this morning. There were some questions she would have liked answers to, but they were the kind of questions she could not ask him. Had he even done what that girl apparently said he did on the day his father was buried? Did he
remember
what he had done? Was he so innocent that he didn’t know that one time rarely caused a pregnancy? Did he think humans bred like cows in heat? Or had it been more than one time?

A dozen times that day she reversed herself. The girl could not come here. The girl would have to come here, or Stuart would have to leave the farm, and what would become of him then?

One could not see the girl’s mother in the store or on the sidewalk and not feel pity for her. Rose understood that the Finleys belonged to a class of people that could not be said to have had any real chance in the world, and therefore the whole world was to blame for their condition and nobody in the world was blameless. On the other hand, did she and Will owe their one son to that doomed clan, to make up for the way the world had used them? How could it help the Finleys for her boy to be sacrificed to them?

When Abraham had piled the wood for the burnt offering and taken the knife in his hand, the Lord intervened for the sake of Isaac, the long-promised son of the aged Sarah—the one boy born to sow the seed of Abraham. The Lord intervened between Abraham and his obedience. But where now was the ram caught in the thicket, the substitution for the human sacrifice? Will You not find some way now, Lord, to save me and my son from our obedience?

But still no way had been found when she got into the car with George and Rachel and the children to drive into town for the wedding. Every time she looked at George she could not help hating him. It was the fight that had done it. Otherwise they would have got Stuart home after the funeral.

When they passed Gebhardt’s, Rose knew that either she must be insane or that the world must be insane. Otherwise, how could she be hoping that Stuart was inside Gebhardt’s right now?

But he wasn’t. The car he had borrowed from a friend for a trip to Bismarck was parked on the road in front of the house.

They parked behind it and walked up the path. Pearl Finley met them at the door.

“Come right in, folks!”

The day was unseasonably warm for the last of March and they sent all the children out to the yard till the ceremony was over.

Annie had not come downstairs yet. They sat in the parlor without speaking. All of them wondered how much everybody else knew. All of them knew that what anybody else didn’t know he could probably guess. George tapped his feet and looked around the room. He wondered what rent Harry Goodman had charged them. They might not be paying rent to anybody at all, now that Harry was gone. The mortgage he’d taken on the place had probably been tossed out with the other worthless scraps of paper that Harry had been calling assets. From the condition of the parlor ceiling a man might suppose that there was no roof on the house at all, but George knew he had seen the facsimile of a roof from the outside.

Lucy wondered what they were doing at the house. She had never been to a wedding. She understood that something happened when people got married, so that afterwards the man had the right to boss the woman around. There were other, less forthright things about marriage which she sensed were even more significant, and though she had no idea of what they were, she felt terribly embarrassed about them.

Getting married seemed like just about the dumbest thing a person could do. As far as she could tell, people always regretted it. She couldn’t understand why people went right on doing something that they ought to know they were going to be sorry for. Whenever she had to stand around in the store waiting for her father to finish a conversation, she never heard the men call their wives anything but “the old lady” or “the old woman,” and they always sounded as though they hated the wives they were married to. It was the same when she listened to the women talk, when it was too cold to play outside on a Sunday afternoon and the men were all out in the barn. Women always said things like, “No matter what I do, I can’t please him,” or “They’re all alike. They’re all alike.”

“Hey, let’s play tag!” Audley yelled. He rushed at her, socked her on the arm, and veered away. “You’re It. Lucy’s It and had a fit and couldn’t get over it!”

“No, I’m not! I don’t want to play!”

“You
have
to play! Ma said you’re
related
to me now! You’re just like my sister, and you have to do what I say!”

He danced up close to her and squatted, daring her to tag him while he was at a disadvantage. “Oh, ho, ho! Lucy couldn’t catch a flea!”

He began to sing, jumping from one squat to another like a frog:

“I haven’t got a feller!” Lucy screamed.

“Oh, ho, ho! Blue and yeller, got a feller!”

“I’m
not
blue and yellow!” she screamed again.

“Oh
yes,
you are!” He was delighted at how easy it was to get her goat. All those days last summer when he was herding her father’s cows she wouldn’t even talk to him, she was so highfalutin. But it was all different now. They were
related!
“Your jacket’s blue and your hair’s light yellow,” he told her.

“Hair doesn’t count!”

“Lucy’s It and had a fit and couldn’t get over it.”

“Leave me alone! I don’t have to play with you if I don’t want to!”

His excitement turned to fury when he saw that he might not win after all. If he didn’t win now, he would look silly. He
had
to make her mad enough to chase him. Besides, he had to prove that she had to play with him. He picked up a rope lying on the ground and tied a loop in the end of it.

“Okay,” he said. “If you’re just going to stand there and never move, I’ll lasso you. I’ll show you how a Texas cowboy ropes himself a steer.”

Lucy stood her ground. He tried to get the heavy rope to twirl, but he couldn’t manage it.

“Ho, ho yourself. What a cowboy!”

“I’ll
show
you!” he shouted. “Come here, Sandy! That’s a boy!” The big mongrel collie bounded up to him and he put the lasso around its neck. The dog pulled back and the rope tightened, making his thick winter hair bulge out in a ruff.

“You’re
hurting
him,” Lucy cried. “You’re choking his neck!”

“So what. He’s
my
dog, ain’t he? Come here, you!” Audley dragged him across the yard to a tree. He held the end of the rope in one hand and climbed to the first big branch and sat there, still holding the rope.

“What do you think you’re going to do now?” Lucy jeered. His little sister was standing beside Lucy, looking up at him. Two females down there—to be shown something.

“Just you wait and see!” He had no idea himself of what he could do. It had to be something to make them respect him, that was all.

He jumped off the branch, landing lightly in his black tennis shoes. He saw that Lucy was looking at the big frayed holes around his ankle bones and toes. The rope dangled over the branch, and he gave a yank on it that brought the dog sliding up to him. He yanked again and the dog’s front legs pawed the air and he started to cough for breath. His tongue hung out. It was turning purple.

“Let him down!” Lucy begged. “You’re choking him! He’ll die!”

“I don’t have to do
nothing
a
girl
tells me to do! Sissy!”

He hauled on the rope once more and the dog’s hind legs barely touched the ground. Thin foam lay along his black lips, and his kicks spun him around so that he kept losing his footing entirely.

“Let him down!”

“Sissy!”

The dog hung limply. His legs twitched.

“You’ve killed him!”

“I have
not!
I’ll
show
you!” He let go of the rope and the dog fell to the ground.

Audley felt for the rope through the dog’s hair and loosened it. A great gulp of air tore down the bruised throat and the dog started to pant weakly.

Lucy put her hand down to touch the matted hair of his neck, but he made a snarling sound and drew his lips even farther back from his teeth.

“See! He doesn’t want
you!
Girls! Sissies!” Audley reached his own hand down to Sandy and the dog snapped his jaws shut over the hand.

“You fucker!” Audley shrieked. He jumped up and swung the toe of his tennis shoe into the dog’s heaving ribs.

Lucy rushed away from him. She had never heard anyone say that word before. She didn’t suppose it was ever said—only written and thought. She couldn’t stop hearing it and seeing it in her head. Where could she go? Where could she escape from this boy and that word he had spoken?