The Bones of Plenty (19 page)

It was summer and school had been let out the day before. George was seeding the last of the Ceres. A good part of it in his first field was up already. It looked as though it was going to make a fine stand. Still, he didn’t trust Adolph as far as he could throw a steer by the tail. He knew Adolph would get away with anything he thought he could. He could only hope that the seed had been properly treated for smut. It was too late now to do anything about it if it hadn’t. He had paid for treated wheat, but there would be no way to come back on Adolph if it became clear that he had lied, except to take it out of his hide. There were so many crooks a man could never get at.

That big crook J. P. Morgan, for example. The Democratic Senate Committee had been investigating him this whole week, and proving what any sensible man had known for a long time—that if a crook was only a big enough crook, he could get away with anything. Even Calvin Coolidge had been in on Morgan’s stock market manipulations—just two or three months before the crash back in 1929. Ah, but Morgan could dole out a little money here and there, and people thought he was a wonderful philanthropist—“a builder.”

Nevertheless, George knew that things were going to change. He liked to remember what Lincoln had said about how nobody could fool all of the people all of the time. The time was coming—the time when the majority of the people would no longer be fooled. The time was nearly here when there would be enough men like himself to make a stand. Then all of those Wall Street jackals could damn well run to their hypocritical churches and sit and quake in their plush high-priced pews. The little men would be waiting for them outside.

And when the little men were finished, there would be a new economic system. Countless paper transactions could no longer transform this wheat he seeded here in this solid earth to paper wealth that enabled speculators from New York and Chicago to possess even the government without shedding a drop of sweat.

A flock of crows scratched busily at a safe distance behind him.
These
were the robbers he could shoot. The idea of having seed wheat go straight from the drill box into a crow’s gizzard was almost more than he could tolerate. He stopped the team and took his shotgun from a set of hooks he had screwed into the drill. He blasted both barrels into the crows and a screaming “Caw! Caw!
Caw!”
mocked him from behind. He whirled around with the gun and saw Lester Zimmerman sitting on his wagon box, laughing.

“You’re a lucky bastard! If I’d had a shell left in here you’d be full of shot right now!” George roared.

“Caw! Caw!” Lester answered.

George went over to the road and leaned on the wagon. He pushed his hat back on his wet forehead. “In fact, Lester, you use up more luck every week than I’ve ever had in my whole life. That old barn of yours gets a worse lean to it every day. If I was to walk in that thing it’d fall down on me before I so much as picked up a milk stool. But I’ll tell you
one
thing—if I was you and I was in there milking, I’d never aim a sneeze at that south side. Now, for a small fee, I’d jack that thing up for you.” He bowed. “You see before you an expert with a building jack.”

“To hell with you!” Lester said. “You’ll never catch
me
fixing up
my
place for no landlord! And if he goes ahead and kicks me offa there, I’ll fix it so’s that old barn will fall right on his bald pate. That reminds me—how come you got all that hair everywhere but on the top of your head? If a redheaded man gets bald, is he
still
mean?”

“Just twice as mean,” George assured him. “By the time I lose the last hair up here, there isn’t one of you boys that’ll dare look cross-eyed at me.”

Lester started up his team. “I’m gonna butcher that old Jersey bull this fall. He ain’t worth feeding through the winter. You wanta buy a little piece of hide to cover your scalp? It’ll just match. And one of you’s about as ornery as the other.”

“I got a
brain
that keeps my scalp warm!” George shouted after him.

George went back to the field that seemed no more and no less empty than before. The sounds of his neighbor moving away down the road were lost in the sounds that accompanied him around the field—the scraping and creaking of machinery, the monotonous thudding of the sixteen thick hoofs, and the calls of birds and insects. There were so many sounds more indigenous to the prairie than the sound of human speech. By the time he had made one round of the field he no longer heard any echoes of his conversation at all, and he began to sing to himself and the horses.

They were the songs he had heard his own father sing in the field—about the bulldog on the bank and the bullfrog in the pond, the mockingbird, the Red River Valley, and the goose that died with a toothache in her head. He often sang a song about the railroads:

He liked all the songs of American soldiers too, and he would march along to “Yankee Doodle” or “Dixie” or “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” hearing in his head the quick piercing notes of the fife playing above the drums and horns in a parade—martially gay and painful. “How I loved that gal, that pretty little gal—The girl I left be-ee-
hind
me!”

That was the song played by the band of the Seventh Cavalry as Colonel Custer rode out of Fort Abraham Lincoln, heading for the draw above the Little Big Horn River. Custer’s widow had died just a few days ago. She was ninety-one years old, and she had been a widow for fifty-seven years. The
Sun
had carried a long piece about her and the fort and the massacre, and how the steamboat
Far West
had come out of the Yellowstone country and down the Missouri to bring the news to Libby Custer and the other wives waiting at the fort. George had always been proud to be named after the Boy General, and he always paid particular attention to anything he came across in his reading that had to do with him.

Like his namesake, George was a gambler. Nobody could farm that country without being a gambler. One good year, with enough moisture, plus high prices in the fall—that was all it took to make up for six or seven years of failure. There were smart gamblers and stupid gamblers, but every North Dakota farmer was a gambler, and even the smartest one reached a point, every season, where all he could do was stand and watch what happened to his crop like a man watching the spinning of a gambling wheel constructed in Hell. When several good years came along in a row, he cashed in on his lucky streak and put his winnings back into the game, like any other sporting adventurer, by investing in new buildings, new machinery, more stock, more land.

But when the good years came even farther apart than the seven promised in the Bible, perhaps he failed utterly. Then he watched the last days of the earth, while plague after plague was unloosed upon him, with the hailstones as heavy as cannon balls, and the great star falling on the fountains of waters and scorching his unrepentant head, and the grasshoppers as big as horses, with breastplates of iron. Then he stood in the midst of the ruin, smelling the smoke from the bottomless pit, hearing the echoes of the last thunder and the final trumpet blasts, and he did not repent of the work of his hands. He was proud of having played out the game, even though his name be blotted out of the book of life. He was brokenhearted and wounded with the kind of permanent wounds that only the proud sustain, but still he was proud. If he had it to do all over again, he would choose to gamble again.

Lucy sat on the rough, hot boards of the porch. She was all ready to go to town, having sponged off her chest and legs and put on a clean pair of shorts. She was waiting for her mother to finish putting the bread to rise so they could leave. The sun flashed from a rust-free spot on the Ford and in line with that flash was another flash, fifty yards away at the edge of the grove.

She took a languid step from the porch, wondering if she had time for an investigation before the car left for town. She fixed her eyes on the flash and she saw it move as sun reflections never did. She walked quickly but quietly toward it. She stopped when she saw what it was—a straying young jack rabbit, running in short crouching steps, snuffing at the unfamiliar ground.

She wetted a finger and held it up—a trick she had read in one of her mother’s Ernest Thompson Seton books. Good—the rabbit was upwind from her. She was sure she could catch it, for it was hardly more than a baby. It kept its long, kangaroo-like hind legs in tight circles against its flanks, the way rabbits were always drawn in books. She wondered if it was hurt, and thought of how she would love it and pet it and feed it and make it well again.

At last she was so close that her shadow, short as it was in the late-morning sun, passed blackly over the baby’s haunches and turned the circles of brindled fur into miniatures of the galvanic hind legs on a full-grown jack rabbit. It leapt away in short, strong jumps, but it went in a fatal direction. She forced it away from the shelter of the grove, making it dart back and forth in front of her, expending valuable energy, before it struck off across the yard, heading for the wheat fields.

If God had just reached down and suspended the rabbit’s motion for only an instant, she could have caught it easily, for she was always so close that she needed just an extra moment to bend forward, stretch her arm to the ground, and scoop it up. Instead, they went all the way across the yard with neither gaining on the other. As they veered past the house she used the last breath she could spare to shout at the open kitchen window, “I’m catching a rabbit! Don’t go without me!”

Her legs began to ache and something hot swelled and swelled inside her head. But the little rabbit, too, was exhausted and frantic. He no longer tried for distance, but only for deception. He would dart to one side and freeze next to an extra-large clod or a rock, and then, when he saw her stumbling shadow, spring off to find another bit of hopeless shelter.

She fell, finally, and if he had been wise enough to hop away immediately, he could have got the head start he needed. Instead, he remained in his last hiding place, shrunk into the smallest possible ball of grayish, white-tipped hairs, and she closed her hand over his back just as he started to jump away.

He uttered a frightful sound halfway between a squeal and a whistle. The claws of his little hind foot dug into her wrist and scraped down her arm. When the foot came to her elbow, it pushed against her upper arm and catapulted him into the air.

She stood watching him go, scarcely noticing that the blood was beginning to fill the long white scratches, wondering why it was that wild things were so afraid of people. Why didn’t he know—why wasn’t there some way to tell him that she wished only to take care of him and keep him for her own? It was always the same. She had caught wild things before. Once she had followed a little white-breasted nuthatch all over the grove for half the morning. She managed to touch its wings once or twice, but it always flew away to the bottom of another tree and started working its way up the trunk, pecking at the bark with its tiny beak. Perhaps at last it got used to her, for it ignored her an extra split second and she captured it. But when it was in her hands, fluttering its wings and scrabbling its many wire-sharp toes against her palms, she let it go because of her own fright.

It was even worse the time she tried to lift a woodpecker baby out of its mysterious hiding place. She waited till she saw the adult flicker fly out of the hollow tree, and then she stuck her hand inside the hole to feel in the nest. Her defenseless arm was horrifyingly attacked by a beak that drilled holes in wood, and when she finally got her hand out of the hole, another grown bird shot straight into her face. After she got over being scared, she did remember something about the secret house in the hollow tree—it was so hot in there, from the bodies of the birds. And there was still the smell of warm feathers and down-covered babies clinging to her own skin.

It was always the same. She could catch almost anything she went after, if she only tried enough times, but once she caught it she could never hang on to it.

She sat down on the ground and watched the blood still oozing in the scratches. A person would never think a baby rabbit could have such strong legs or such long toenails. Why hadn’t she hung on to him? She could have tamed him—she
knew
she could have.

For two years she had been trying to catch a rabbit, and now that she had finally caught one, what had she done? Let him go again!