The Bones of Plenty (63 page)

Audley had won. He had won after all.

George hated getting cleaned up in the middle of a workday for some damn fool reason. And nobody had told him he was going to be expected to eat food coming out of the Finley kitchen, either. He was exasperated at being blamed for this whole rotten mess, and he was damned if he’d hang around and be polite. He took a few bites of the cake and then he caught Rachel’s eye and gave her the signal.

They could see the signs all over the honeymoon car as soon as they walked out on the porch. Somebody had done a quick job with white calcimine. Lucy was already down at the road reading them, and she was waiting to ask about some of them. They said, “Bismarck or Bust,” “Just Married,” “Whooopee!” “Watch Our Dust,” and “Hot Springs Tonight!”

“What does that one mean, Mamma?” she asked.

“Why, I don’t know, dear,” Rachel said. “Maybe whoever painted it thought they were going to go to Hot Springs.”

George looked at the sign and at Rachel and began to laugh.

Lucy said, “But it says Bismarck
too
, so whoever did it must know they’re going to Bismarck.”

George laughed some more and Rachel felt the blood in her face.

“Well, what
does
it mean?” Lucy asked again. “I just want to know.”

“Nothing!”
Rachel said.

George said, “Come on, hurry along here. If we don’t get back home right away, there won’t be enough time to bother hitching up the plow again.” He stopped laughing. Stuart had a lot to learn—about the beans in the bottle and such things.

It was the final mortification as far as Rachel was concerned. Of course it was one or several of Annie’s admirers who had written such a thing. A trollop from this filthy world the mother of Will Shepard’s grandchild? Annie Finley the mother of Lucy’s cousin? Unthinkable!

“Am I related to them now?” Lucy asked.

Rachel had never seen a child who had such a knack for startling a person who was thinking private thoughts. “Related to who?” she stalled.

“Them! Audley and all the rest of those kids.”

It was preposterous. It couldn’t be true. “No,” Rachel said.

“Now, Rachel, what good does it do to lie about it!” George said. “Yes, Lucy, you are.”

“In a very distant way that doesn’t count at all,” Rachel said.

Rose did not speak. They took her home and left her.

Rachel hurried to change her clothes and do the dinner dishes she had had to leave. Lucy trailed her nervously. Finally she brought it out. “He said a terrible word.”

“Who? Audley?”

“Yes.”

“What did he say?”

Lucy looked up at her. She would never speak that word to anybody, and especially not to her mother, because she knew that her mother would certainly never have heard of it.

“Well, what did he say?” Rachel asked again. One never knew what little boys and girls might do together. It was always a worry.

“A very terrible word.”

The whole thing became steadily more preposterous. “Well,” Rachel told her, “you must always be polite to him, but you don’t need to play with him. After all, he’s more than two years older than you. If he ever says another terrible word to you, you just walk away and tell him you weren’t brought up that way.”

Being related to the Finleys was beyond the power of Rachel’s imagination. They were of a different world, a different species. She could never forget how Audley had come and gone so bleakly day after day when he was herding the cows. She had been repelled by his accent and by his strange ways. He represented to her everything in human existence that was rootless and meaningless, and therefore degrading. The one thing she could not bear to think of was to be rootless, to be without well-defined positions, both human and geographical. The Finleys were of that mass of human creatures in the world who were so unbelievably numerous and so unbelievably miserable that one could think of them only in statistics—hordes of Indians excreting, bathing, and worshiping in the Ganges, with a certain percentage of them dying each year from several kinds of plagues; hordes of Chinese in rice paddies along the Yellow River being swept away or made homeless by floods. Plagues, floods, earthquakes, and similar catastrophes—they always seemed to kill such people. One never even knew how they died, there were so many of them. They were simply approximate numbers in the aftermath of calamity.

The Finleys had been flooded out several times. Once his mother had whimsically remarked that Audley had almost been born in a rowboat. Rachel could not imagine the sort of people who could feel no more concern than that over the birth of a new descendant—an heir. To be connected to such a family? Unthinkable. Stuart married to a girl who had been serving beer in a saloon before she was seventeen years old? Unthinkable …

All afternoon Lucy marveled over hearing that word said aloud. She had seen it chalked on a culvert and inked on the gray paint of the long corridor leading from the schoolrooms out to the toilets in the shed. The corridor smelled of the toilets and the lime they put down the holes, and she connected the word with those smells, but she really knew that the word Audley said did not stand for either kind of thing that the toilets were for, because she knew those two bad words, too. Whatever did this one mean, anyway?

Rose was as polite as she could be to Annie. She did not speak much because now there was less to say than there had ever been. Part of the reason she felt so little inclination or need to talk to Annie was that most of the time she could not really believe that Annie was there.

The girl had certain habits that were distasteful. Every morning upstairs she curled her orangish hair with a curling iron she heated by suspending the handles across the top of a lamp chimney and letting the tongs hang down toward the flaming wick. Every morning a faint smell of burning hair floated down to the kitchen while Rose was cooking breakfast and Stuart was out milking. That was the only time of day when Rose deeply felt Annie’s inescapable presence—perhaps because it was morning and one tended to look for some relief from the new day and there never was any.

But the girl worked very hard, and she was surprisingly clean. Rose wished, in fact, that Annie would not work so hard, because it left her with less to do herself at a time when she needed more to do. She was already planning on a much bigger garden than they had had last year. That would keep her busy all summer. And next winter there would presumably be a child to keep Annie busy. But the next month or so was going to be difficult, with Annie constantly rushing to usurp tasks that she had set out for herself. If Rose was planning to peel the potatoes at five-fifteen and went into the kitchen only to find that Annie had peeled them at five o’clock, then what was there to do at five-fifteen? However, since it still did not seem plausible that Annie could belong there permanently, the girl seemed more like a misguided helpful elf in the house than anything else. She would inexplicably disappear some night the way helpful elves eventually did.

One afternoon the Eggers stopped in for a minute. Not many people came to call these days because not many people knew how to act toward a widow whose son had married six weeks after his father died. But Clarence was his effusive self in his congratulations to Stuart, and Elsie was her presumptuous self in her speculations on what a help it was to have Annie in the house.

It was a kind of relief to see somebody like the Eggers—people who were brassy and unabashed and who could ask, “Well, how are you making out, Rose?” with so little evident awareness of the depth of her griefs that the griefs were not really touched and her self-control was not even tried.

But from the moment they arrived, Annie behaved strangely. Rose became more and more embarrassed. This was a situation she had not even thought of—how a girl from such a background would embarrass her every time there was company at the house.

When they were gone, she couldn’t keep from saying, “You seem tired, Annie. Why don’t you rest till suppertime? I wasn’t going to have anything fancy tonight, anyway, and it won’t take a minute to get it.” She thought she would go out of her mind if she had to spend two hours in the kitchen with that girl.

But Annie stood there staring at her from two round eyes in a freckled face, two freckled arms akimbo, two freckled hands over round hips—looking exactly like a saloon waitress.

“They’re
good enough for you because they’ve got a nice new Chrysler, aren’t they?” the girl said.

“Why, they brought Will home from Jamestown in that car. It was very nice of them. Of course, they’re ‘good enough.’ We’ve known them all our lives.”

“Oh yes! You’ve known them all your lives! Well how do you think they bought that car?”

“What are you getting at? They just have to cut down somewhere else so Clarence can have a car that’s easy to drive, I suppose—it’s hard to drive with one arm.”

Why was the girl all upset? After the way that girl had been acting all afternoon, she
herself
was the one who had a right to be upset!

“All right! I’ll
tell
you what I mean! Ma said not to, but she didn’t
know
… how it was going to
be
out here! If you wasn’t such
teetotalers,
you’d
know
where Stuart gets his booze. You’d
know!”

There were tears falling down the girl’s cheeks—tears!—tears on the face of the harlot whose hand had held the golden cup full of the abominations and filthiness of all the world—tears on the face of the Devil’s own cupbearer, whose hands had given Hell into the hands of a ruined boy.

Rose felt the explosion in her chest, the flames coming out of her mouth.

“
You! Annie Finley! You
ask me whose hands gave it to him!
Your
hands gave it to him!
Slut!
The mark of the Beast is on you—all of you—you and Jake Gebhardt—all of you will go down to Hell together!”

The face of the purple and scarlet whore looked down at her from the stairway and the mouth shrieked, “Then why is Clarence Egger your friend? Don’t you know? Don’t you know he
always
made it? He
makes
it! He makes all of it for Jake and for anybody that comes to his
door!”

Rose sat down at the kitchen table. After a while the fire in her chest was gone, but it felt now as though her lungs might be made of cinders. She was not going to die—nothing essential to her body had exploded after all. No, she was going to have to go on for a while because her body was going to go on.

Presently she could even think again. Where
did
the Eggers get the money for the car? The Eggers lived several miles away; they and the Shepards were friendly but not intimate by any means. Certainly not intimate enough so that Rose had ever even slightly concerned herself with the way they managed their money. But where
did
he get the money? The Eggers had always had new cars, even during this last dozen years when farmers did not buy new cars.

And the liquor
did
have to come from somewhere, didn’t it? She herself had asked the question a thousand times. “Where does the boy get it? Where did he
get
it that first night?” But she had never conceived of a specific answer to the question. She herself had no more idea of what liquor looked like than what the Devil looked like. They were both intangible. She saw the effects of the Devil’s machinations everywhere around her but she had not seen the Devil. She saw the effects of liquor but she had never seen it. But she
had smelled
liquor; the boy
had
drunk it. Yes, liquor
was
tangible, even if the Devil was not. Yes, the liquor
did
have to come from some specific place, didn’t it?

The girl must know what she was talking about. For one thing, she was certainly in a
position
to know. And Rose knew she must have been telling the truth. That strumpet with tears on her cheeks—she was telling the truth.

Thank God Will didn’t know. Thank God Will wouldn’t ever have to know that a man he had always thought of as a friend was manufacturing Evil and selling it to his son. Was there no limit to what people would do to each other in order to survive? Were the new cars so important to Clarence Egger’s one-armed survival? Would all the little members of the human race go on betraying each other until no one was left?