The Bones of Plenty (27 page)

George took his elbow out of the window and swung his foot to the ground and straightened up. He looked around the crowd. Didn’t they all know that if Press got some city bidders out here, the jig was up? Nobody made any overt move to back him up; on the other hand, the men had pushed in around him and the deputies, so that there was no chance for the sheriff to worm his way through to them.

A gigantic double-barreled shotgun materialized like a thunderbolt in the fidgety grip of Wallace Esskew. Nobody ever knew what to expect from Wally. He had a funny high laugh that was more scared guinea hen than it was human. He wasn’t married—just lived at home with his parents and brothers. More than any man there he could afford to get himself out on a limb.

Wally let out his funny deranged laugh. The deputies jumped when they saw the cannon. “Nothing but rock salt in here,” Wallace giggled. “I was just afraid one of these little Wilkes kids might get at it there in the car. I just remembered I had it cocked and ready to go because I was aiming to chase down them chicken thieves the next time they come back to our place.” He grinned and respectfully bobbed his head again and again at the deputies, while the gun wavered in his uncoordinated hands. Nobody claimed that Wally was crazy—just peculiar. Nobody ever knew what was in his head.

No man considered that giving a rock-salt lesson to a chicken thief was really shooting him. The sheriff and the deputies obviously understood that the thought of filling official pants with rock salt would appeal to almost every man in the crowd. The sheriff had come to perpetrate a farce, not to be the hero of one. It might be disastrous to his reputation if he had to drive back to Jamestown with his pants full of rock salt. If all the men there had rock salt in their guns and he fired into the crowd, it would be said that he returned lead for salt. Farmers still had one vote apiece, and they took their votes seriously. And if any rock salt should find its way into that silk suit …

It seemed to George that they had him. He probably had a couple of tear-gas bombs in the car; he could use one to show the Big Man that he was doing his best. But that might be the best way to stop a load of rock salt—fired, of course, by a man who was so blinded he couldn’t see what he was doing. He could place them all under arrest, but George didn’t imagine they would all just climb in their cars and follow obligingly along to the clink. He could start taking their names and addresses, but he would probably have to do that at gunpoint, and it would hardly be sensible for him to encourage any more gun-thinking with the kind of reinforcements he had at the moment. He could come back with a posse, but he might find himself confronting a troop of state militia. Who knew what Wild Bill Langer might do? They were only seventy miles from Bismarck, and Langer had only been governor for a few months—he might still be crazy enough to do what he had said he would do.

In any case, George reasoned triumphantly, if Sheriff Press left and came back, it was certainly more likely that he would find the militia waiting for him than that he would find any of the men facing him now, with the exception of Wilkes, of course.

Like most politicians, the sheriff had got elected because of his big broad smile that forced people to smile back at him. He smiled his way through the tight crowd, and he was still smiling when he looked up at George. The man in the silk suit was so close behind him that he might have been joined to him, like a Siamese twin.

“Stare him down, George,” somebody said.

“I never argue with a fellow this big,” the sheriff said lightly. “I just ask him if he’ll kindly move aside so I can get in my car and go home.”

George hesitated and then stepped back. Sheriff Press climbed into his official car and started the engine to show that he meant what he said. The deputies found room to pass through the crowd then, and got into the front seat with him. Everybody forgot about the real villain till it was too late to give him a scare—the man in the silk suit was already sitting behind the wheel of his Oldsmobile. He had his window rolled almost up, and it was a safe bet that he had the door locked.

The sheriff took off his cavalry hat and leaned his head out the window. “I reckon
you’ll
have to back out first, Mr. Burr,” he called tactfully. Mr. Burr did not need to be coaxed.

Once again the dust took a long time to settle over the crowd but this time the dust proved that little men, not the moneylenders, were in control. The little men had shaken off the county sheriff with as much impunity as that impetuous stallion had rid himself of the useless deputy.

The law was an abstraction, like money, that functioned only so long as the majority partook of it, possessed it, believed in it, and felt committed to it. The law seemed quite as insubstantial now as the numbers they had once believed in—all the numbers that represented what they thought they had safely stored in Harry’s bank.

What had happened this morning in Otto Wilkes’s squalid yard proved that the system of the whole nation was so rotten it was on the very edge of collapse. It was too late to try to restore the system in pieces, with Roosevelt’s bureaus and bureaucrats.

“Well, we did a good morning’s work, boys!” George said. “There goes a couple of weasels that found out it’s going to take more than a damned piece of paper before they can kick a man off his land.”

He wanted to make a speech. He wanted to say, “We are fighting in defense of our homes. Our petitions have been scorned; our entreaties have been disregarded. We entreat no more; we petition no more. We defy them.” It had been a long time since William Jennings Bryan said that. He’d been dead for nearly ten years now. George had memorized that speech for his oration when he graduated from the eighth grade. A man never forgot things he memorized when he was young. Kids nowadays didn’t do anywhere near enough memorizing. They didn’t even have to learn the Declaration of Independence.

“Now that we know how to do it,” George said aloud, “we have to stick together and break up the
next
sale, too. We can’t let let them get the jump on us again. This revolution is fifty years overdue now.”

“By God, that was the funniest thing I ever seen!” Clarence Egger was nearly beside himself, carried away by the morning’s entertainments, not by what had been proved and accomplished. Talking about vaudeville shows. Lapping up other men’s fights. The bleating little sheep. He kept pounding Wallace Esskew on the back with his one arm. “Old Dick Press really thought you was going to pepper his ass with rock salt!”

Wally’s blankness could be comical.
“What
rock salt?” he said.

II

Every day the temperature climbed a little higher. At four in the morning the house was already hot enough to wake the bluebottle flies and send them buzzing and bumbling over the faces of humans trying to sleep. The pastures were dry and brown.

At dinner George said to Lucy, “I’ve got a good kid job for you this afternoon. I want you and the dog to take the cows over to Oscar Johnson’s land there, across the road, and watch so they don’t run away or get out on the road. I saw Oscar over town yesterday, and I promised him I’d fix up his car for him this winter if he’ll let us get whatever pasturing we can out of that section of his. He isn’t going to use it anyhow. There’s a lot on the hillsides there that doesn’t get burned too bad in the afternoon. It’ll give our pastures a little rest. Maybe if we’d get one rain we’d get some more grass yet. Anyhow, we’ll see how it goes for a couple of weeks over there.”

“Oh, George,” Rachel said. “She’s too little to do such a long hard job as that! She’s not even eight yet!”

“
I
herded cows when I was
five!
And not just in the afternoons, neither. I got sent out as soon as the morning’s milking was done and I got told not to come back till it was time for the evening chores. And I knew what I’d get if I came back too early, too! They gave me a piece of bread and a bottle of water and packed me off! That’s the
trouble
with kids nowadays. They’re spoiled and lazy and good-for-nothing. I’m not
asking
her to go out all day—just afternoons!

“I saddled my first horse when I was five. By the time I was her age I’d be out in the barn of a morning, harnessing up the team, while my dad finished the milking. I had to stand up on a block of wood to reach over the horse’s back, but I harnessed up a
team,
I tell you. I don’t expect anything like
that
of a
girl,
but she can certainly herd a few milch cows for a few days. It’ll be the best thing in the world for her. Why, I learned how to keep myself from ever being bored—I could watch a bunch of ants working for hours—or a hawk trying to catch a gopher—or—any one of a hundred different things.…”

Rachel did not argue. She walked into the kitchen and started the dishes. George sat whittling a match down to a fine enough point so it would get at a spot that a toothpick wouldn’t reach. Lucy was numb and still. When her parents quarreled over her this way, she realized that she was the cause of all the trouble in the house. If only she were not here, there would be nothing for them to fight about. And if only she had a dappled-gray pony like her cousin’s. She would love to herd cows with a pony like that.

The cows were gathered under the spreading box elder tree, chewing their morning’s cuds while they lay in its shade. They kept the ground bare beneath it, and the dust they kicked up heavily coated its leaves. They had come in for water around noon, as they did almost every day now, and they would not head out to the pasture again for an hour or so—and then only out of desperation. George was already supplementing what they foraged for themselves with his precious hay, but he hated to be using it up when there was still a little pasture available anywhere. They never produced as well without green stuff, and since the price of butterfat was staying up so high this summer, he felt it was worth a great deal of effort to get as much cream as possible.

“I’m going up towards the road myself, so I’ll help you get them started,” George said. “Looks like they’re a little low on water. We better give them some first.”

He primed the dry leather and began to pump. The cows walked eagerly to the stream of water. What little water they had left was thick with red box-elder bugs and other insects drowned in the feathery slime on the bottom of the tank and when the water was like that they would blow into it, trying to push the bugs aside before they drank. When the tank was half full, the pump began to strain and then came the sound of sand rasping against the leather. The water choked off into spasmodic, discolored, thin spouts. George let go of the pump handle.

“Is it going dry?” Lucy asked anxiously.

“Well, now, that’s a silly question!” George said. “Of course not! You can see we got water, can’t you?”

“Let’s go,” he said. When they reached the edge of the wheat, he turned off to go and hoe in the potato patch.

“Just go on up and straight across the road, and let them go anywheres on that unfenced section. All you have to do is keep them off the road and bring them home at chore time.”

Lucy went on behind the cows. A leaning barbed-wire fence along the driveway kept them in line and out of the wheat. There was no challenge to the job. Their hoofs were almost silent in the deep dust but the air was full of insect noise—mostly of grasshoppers. Without the indifferent cows ahead of her to deflect them, the grasshoppers that rose in hordes from their feasting in the wheat would be rattling through the air, smacking their hard-shelled bodies against her own nakedness. She would feel the whining of their long, brittle wings, and some of them would become entangled in her hair or hang on her bare arms and legs and chest, half stunned by the force with which they had struck her, clinging frantically and spitting their filthy brown juice in big drops on her skin.

She would flail her arms at them, and jump up and down, and brush herself all over, and run to get out in the open again. Even in winter when she walked between the fields she remembered how it would be when summer came again. Even in winter she had nightmares in which an endless stream of thick bodies flew at her and pressed their millions of resined feet into the flesh of her neck.

She wondered if there could possibly be as many grasshoppers all through the acres of wheat as there were along the lane. It seemed as though all the grasshoppers for miles around must be concentrated along that one stretch of wheat, just waiting for her to have to pass them every day to fetch the mail or do other errands.

Her mother had explained that they flew up at her because she scared them. Well, then, why didn’t the silly things just stay where they were and mind their own business, since she was just as afraid of them as they were of her?

She followed the cows across the county road, and she noticed that their pace quickened as they scented the new pasture. Even here the grass was withered and sparse, but still it was much more appetizing than the worked-over remnant that had been their pasture for the last month. They were no trouble at all to herd, for they set to work hungrily, moving slowly and not spreading away from each other too much.

They no longer grazed the way they had early in spring, flitting from one place to another, unable to settle at one spot because the grass was so new and green everywhere. Now they sank their noses into whatever turf they could find and tugged at the very roots of it till they had cleaned out every blade and leaf.

Still they would not touch the pungent rosinweed. Perversely, its gummy leaves grew lush and healthy beside the dying edible weeds and grass. From the porch in the early morning the smell of the nearest rosinweed patch was fresh and clean, like sagebrush sprinkled with cinnamon. But later in the day the smell altered and intensified; the weed exuded a sour mustiness. Then the strong fragrance that accompanied the glad sounds of birds at their breakfasts and the gentle touch of the only cool moments of the day became instead the reeking adjunct of hot sticky skin and dust that crawled in her scalp. She could see why the cows might try eating rosinweed once and then resolve to starve to death before they would touch it again. She had been so surprised, herself, to find that the same thing that sent the beautiful smell blowing across the porch in the morning could also give off such a rank and nose-burning stench in midafternoon.

“You can start them home when the sun is about there in the sky,” her father had said, pointing to a place above the northwestern horizon. “It’ll be about six o’clock then.”

But the sun seemed to have caught, today, on an invisible snag in the sky. She had read the story of Icarus, and she could imagine, with the sun on her shoulder blades, how it must have felt when the wax began to melt away from the feathers of the boy’s wings and the sun just got hotter and hotter. There was no shade except the short shadow at the base of a huge rock that was half the size of their house. The last time she had sat there she had been too near a hill of fierce red ants nearly half an inch long. She had gone home full of bleeding welts. This time she decided she would climb the rock instead, but it blistered her hands even to touch it.

All these rocks had been left here by the glaciers, her mother said. The giant rock hung restlessly on the brow of the hill, brooding over the smaller strays below it. Her mother had told her that the earth had worn away from it—that it never would have just stuck there that way of its own accord.

It was hard to imagine a glacier on this parching hill. The rocks shot flecks of gold and silver into the sun. Lucy searched around for a while, thinking that some time she would surely have to find a gold nugget. Her father had told her that gold nuggets did not look at all like gold; they did not shine that way, and that without knowing what a gold nugget looked like, she could walk past a million dollars’ worth of gold and never know it. It was the same with diamonds. The biggest diamond in the world had been mistaken for a clod of earth. But she had a feeling that if she ever got near that much gold or that big a diamond she would surely know, somehow, that it was there. After all, God wouldn’t let her get that close when they were so poor and not let her find it, would He?

What was it that her father said he had done when he herded cows—all those things that were so interesting? There were the ants to watch—foot-high cones of deathly dry pulverized earth, blank and smooth on the outside but horribly populous on the inside, with rooms full of tiny eggs and big pupae, and hallways up and down where millions of ants rushed about on mysterious errands. She could see all the ants anybody could ever want to see if she just poked a stick into one of those cones. She could watch them—terrified and angry—scrambling over the ruins of their city, rescuing the long white bundles encasing their next generation. One had to respect the organized speed with which they could disappear when there were so many of them. Still, she did not really like ants well enough to want to watch them all afternoon. What else had her father done? Watched a hawk after a gopher, he said. She searched the sky for a hawk, but it seemed too hot up there even for birds. She couldn’t even hear the call of a meadowlark. She couldn’t think what else he said he had done. It was easier to imagine that she was in Africa than to try to think of the things her father had done when he was a little boy.

Compared to glaciers, African animals here were perfectly believable. In fact, she needed only to think of them and they populated the rolling hills, hiding behind the rocks, treacherously blending their stripes and spots and tawny skins with the clumps of thistles and weeds that made wavering black shadows in the wind—it
was
really only the wind moving, of course. She sat down on the highest curve of the hill and looked down to where there was a draw which was mostly hidden from her by another ridge above it that ran along the big hill. The draw was a moist, cordial little place in spring, blooming with crocuses, and later with buttercups. It was the kind of place she would have picked to live in herself if she had been a wild animal. There was a rocky ledge a bit above the bottom of the draw, and once she had found the skull of a rabbit there. A hawk had probably got it, her father told her.

In summer the ledge was sparsely tufted with rough brown grass, and it looked savage and strange, like a ledge pictured in the
National Geographic Book of
North
American Mammals.
A yellow-eyed cougar waited on the ledge in the picture. He peered down in feline concentration, holding his haunches tightly and leaning on his forelegs, making the muscles of them swell against the white chest that seemed, even in the picture, to breathe with the lion’s lungs and to throb with his heart. She wondered if a cougar could have eaten the rabbit that belonged to the skull she found, instead of a hawk.

Or why not a real
African
lion or tiger? She had been to a movie once, in Jamestown, after she had had to go to the dentist there. It was a Tarzan movie, and it had all the animals in it, alive, that she had studied in the pictures in a book on Africa. People should not be so sure that there could be no such animals around here. Circuses and carnivals went through on the highway all the time. They never set up their shows any closer than Jamestown, but thirty miles was no distance for an angry lion to travel. Animals could escape from those flimsy red cages. There was plenty of unfenced room around her for every single animal she had seen in the movie or in the book or ever even imagined.