The Bones of Plenty (64 page)

The world was sunk even deeper in filth than she had believed it to be, and the filth was so much nearer and more deceptive than she had thought it was. Not an hour before, her son had sat in this house and eaten cake and drunk coffee with the man who bought new cars from the profits of his service to the Devil. Her son had politely accepted the man’s congratulations on his marriage. No one even seemed surprised at how closely Evil surrounded them all.

She would have to learn how not to be so surprised, too, or else she would never be able to be in the same room with Clarence Egger again. When she was alone she would pray that some day she might be able to forgive him.

And the weeping harlot upstairs—what was surprising about
her?
She was only another child grimy with the world’s dirt—no less at home in this house than in any other. Rose even had a brief impulse to go up to her. But she knew that such impulses were never followed by other impulses telling her what to say or do, so she did not go.

George was disking his south eighty acres when the northwest horizon began to go black. He had a clean white handkerchief in each hip pocket and when he had filled both handkerchiefs with dust, he headed in. He unhitched and put the team in the barn, letting them stay in harness until after he had run in the cows. By the time he was through in the barn he could not really see the house at all. He sensed its small, buffeted presence on the hill above him.

It was only when he stepped into the kitchen out of the wind that he realized how raw it had made him. He was eroding, like the land itself. The tears torn out of his eyes made rings of mud around his eyelids. His nose smarted. It seemed always full of dust, no matter how hard he blew it. Dust was the only thing he could smell.

Rachel was stuffing wet rags around the window. By now she had a special set of gray rags for catching dust. She washed out the rags after the storms and used them over and over. She held one up, wrung out enough to keep it from dripping. “Are you going out again, or shall I put this under the door now?”

“Go ahead,” he said from his gritty mouth. “I’m not going out in
that
again till I
have
to. We should have kept Lucy home from school today. It’s going to be quite a trip.”

Rachel waited for him to begin railing against the guilty ones, especially the immigrant Russians and the absentee landlords who mismanaged the land through selfishness, stupidity, and greed, and made it behave this way. She waited for him to point out that even the government experts were advocating fall plowing up till a year ago, when they finally realized that fall plowing was a major factor causing the land to blow. She waited for him to tell her how if they would get a few men who really knew the land back there in those soft jobs instead of getting men who knew somebody’s brother-in-law….

But he said nothing more at all. He went into the dining room and slumped into his chair. He stared out the window into the darkness, thumping the chair arms with his fingers, making each fingertip follow the next, like soldiers marching over a cliff. He made no other movement for at least five minutes. Then he leaned forward and unlaced his shoes. His socks were black with dust and his toes were lined with it.

“Reckon I’ll wash my feet,” he said.

After he’d got his feet clean he went into the bedroom to get a pair of fresh socks. There was already a film of dust on the wooden drawer knobs, and the starched white dresser scarf was almost the color of the socks he had taken off.

“For God’s sake, Rachel! This window in here is open at the top! What a mess! If I can round up all the stock and get them into the barn, can’t you even see that the windows get closed?”

“I
did
close it! Sometimes it falls back down again. See how it slants to one side? It never
would
lock. It’s the outside window. All I can do is go outside and prop it up from the bottom with a stick just the right length, and I
had
a stick but the wind blew it away.”

She walked in to face him while she talked, bringing a pan full of wet rags to put around it. “
You
know it needs fixing! Why don’t you ever fix it? I notice you always get around to fixing up things
outside!
There was dust at the corners of her eyes even though she had not been out of the house since the storm began.

“And what are
you
complaining about, anyway!” she continued. “I’m the one who’ll have to clean it all up and haul water and wash the sheets and take the quilts outside and beat the dust out of them. Just what are
you
complaining about!”

George went into the dining room, lit the gas lamp, and sat down to read the
Sun.
There were the usual kidnappings and lynchings, and a story about the big blow to the south of them which had dusted South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, and more states below them. The twenty-five million dollars worth of Texas dirt which blew into Nebraska a year ago was blown back into Texas again, but the Texans did not welcome it. There was a filler beneath the story that he must have read a dozen times in the last year, but still he counted the commas and the zeros to see if they always came out the same. They always did, but that didn’t make them right. There was no way to prove they were right as far as he could see.

The filler was credited to the United States Department of Agriculture. These
experts
who were so foolish as to make such unprovable statements. Of course he could not prove they were wrong, any more than they could prove they were right. He had reason to know that a lot of dirt could be moved in a mighty short time, but even so, how could anybody know whether it was billions or trillions or millions? And wasn’t it ridiculous to say it was not twelve, or fourteen, or sixteen, billion, but
fifteen and a half billion?
Were they trying to scare every prairie farmer off his farm with their pigheaded assurance that there would soon be no soil left to farm?

If they were so concerned back there in Washington, with their fat rear ends in cushioned chairs and their feet on their desks, monkeying around with slide rules and statistics from the other side of the world, why did they do nothing better for him than to send out guys like Finnegan to tell him to build an inside bathroom in his house? Why didn’t they get some laws with teeth in them to get rid of all the barberry bushes so there wouldn’t be any host to get the damned rust spores through the winter? Why didn’t they scrape up some Federal money to get rid of the grasshoppers?

No, they’d rather sit back there and play with their numbers and send out their millions of fillers and press releases, whether it was the Treasury Department, the Department of Agriculture, or any of the other departments. He opened his mouth to call out to Rachel about the hard-working statisticians the farmer had plugging for him in Washington, but he decided not to talk to her after all. She was acting so peculiar, what was the use? He scratched his head. His scalp crawled as if it was full of vermin, but there was no use washing the dust out of his hair till the storm was over.

This was the third storm they had had since plowing began. He had sat idle for three days while the tops of the acres he intended to plant in wheat blew away before he even got them planted.

Rachel kept making noises in the kitchen. What in the world could she be so busy about? What
was
there to do, with the land blowing out from under them? He went out to see what she was doing. She had the whole set of glass dishes down from the top shelf of the cupboard and she was teetering on the kitchen stool, wiping the dust from the shelf.

“What on
earth
are you doing? What good will
that
do? You’ll just have to do it all over again. I wish to God you’d quit acting like the south end of a northbound horse!”

“What do
you
care what I do! What
should
I be doing? This is the second time in two weeks I’ve had to wash every dish in the house and all the pieces of the separator and all the sheets on the beds, besides the stove and the windows and the cupboards and the woodwork. Now just what
should
I be doing?”

“Rachel! There’s no use flying off the handle at me just because I ask you a civil question! It just looks to me like you’re wasting energy, that’s all. Now just calm down a little and don’t jump at people like that!”

“Just go and read your paper and don’t provoke me then!”

He kept coming to things in the newspaper he wanted to read to her, but he knew she wouldn’t talk, anyhow. He came to
one
thing he
didn’t
want to read to her. They were having another so-called “wheat conference” in Rome—this world wheat conference seemed to meet in a different foreign country every month—and they had just adopted another United States motion for more curtailing of wheat production. It was nice to be told every other day that you were superfluous. It was nice to sit down and read in the paper how you were paying your taxes so a bunch of politicians could joy-ride around the world and send back statements from Rome about how superfluous you were.

And speaking of politicians, Governor Langer had got himself indicted by a Federal grand jury in Fargo for misuse of Federal relief funds. He must have thought up all his baloney just to cover up his real uses of his office. At least none of his baloney had accomplished anything—not the moratorium on foreclosure sales, not the embargo on wheat shipments (pressure from the railroads had got him on that one in less than three months), not, in short, any of his proclamations and proposals.

The
Sun
could always make a story out of the weather. His newspaper explained to George, as he sat in the noon darkness, that his worst problem was being so far behind in moisture. Last year, for instance, they had got only ten inches of precipitation, whereas sixteen was normal. This year to date they had received .89 of an inch, whereas 2.69 inches was normal. This year, the experts with the slide rules said, George’s fields probably would get even less moisture than they got last year. But last year the well had almost gone dry.

George had made up his mind long ago that he was never going to plant a crop he didn’t harvest. He got up and went out to the kitchen again and lifted his account books down from the cupboard. The books were black with dust and he borrowed Rachel’s rag to clean them off. He tried to open the drawer where the pencils were kept, but it stuck. He squatted down and yanked at it.

“Why don’t you put some soap along the bottom of this drawer?” he asked.

“I did. The soap is full of dust.”

He spread out his books on the dining room table and opened the first one at random. Turkeys—thirty-five cents a pound in 1930, thirty cents in 1931, twenty-eight in 1932, nineteen for one batch last fall—the New York outfit had slickered him. But every year it cost him just as much labor and feed to raise them and get them to market. And every year the railroad charged as much or more for hauling them and every year the middleman took a little more for getting them to the consumer. The farmer was the only man who bore the shock of the dropping prices.

He looked out the window toward the barn, but all he could see was flying topsoil. Speak of unimaginable numbers—of billions of tons of dust, of galaxies a hundred thousand light-years away, of the number of atoms in the universe—just try to imagine how many particles of dust passing between him and the barn it took to blot that barn completely out of sight at a quarter of one in the afternoon. He couldn’t even make out the clothesline posts a few yards from the house. There was nothing out there but screaming blackness.

It was hard for a man to shake off the feeling of being buried alive when he had to sit out a dust storm in a little trembling, groaning house, with the wet rags at the windows growing blacker and blacker, and the air ever heavier to breathe. If he blew his smarting nose, plain mud was deposited into his handkerchief. How far back into his head and how far down into his lungs could it go, anyway?

The drought was commencing its tenth year now, and the deep root-systems were long dead. There was nothing to hold the land against the wind. Until a few years ago he and Rachel had always subscribed to the
National Geographic,
and he remembered all too clearly the articles it had run on various places in Asia and Africa—places that had once been rich in trees and grassland and now were deserts. Hundreds of years before Christ, the deforested and overgrazed hills drained by the Tigris-Euphrates river system had lost so much soil that the silt from the rivers had filled in the Persian Gulf for a hundred and eighty miles. A fellow named Woolley had been digging around way out there in the desert and discovered a buried seacoast town—a seaport one hundred and eighty miles from water. And now that whole stretch of land between the ancient and modern mouths of the rivers was mostly dunes made of sand from the ruined hinterland. What had happened there could happen here too. Maybe the professors would be excavating what was left of this house from a sand dune some day. Maybe this house would have to be excavated after this one storm, if it got much worse and lasted much longer.

He didn’t need to look at the wheat records in his books—he knew by heart how the wheat disappeared into smut, rust, drought, grasshopper gizzards, middlemen’s pockets, and the vast bank account of James T. Vick. He was a little better off than he was last year at this time, with all his savings suddenly gone, but he was afraid this year was going to bring him more expenses than last year had.

Rachel was probably right about Lucy’s tonsils, and Lucy ought to go to the dentist this summer, too. And he had to fix up the car a little and make some machinery repairs that should have been done last year. If he had to sink another well this summer, the cost of that alone could wipe him out. Talk about the “cost-price squeeze” that was doing in the farmer! There had been plenty of talk about it all right—fifty years of talk—centuries of talk—but he noticed the squeeze got worse every year, just the same.