The Bones of Plenty (30 page)

The man hurried toward them. Once they saw him skitter sideways and take a few running steps while he watched behind him.

“Scared of a garter snake!” George shouted.

“Good morning,” the man said. Then they knew for sure he was from the city. Nobody in the country said that, just as nobody in the country would say lunch for dinner or dinner for supper.

George swung his fork down and planted the tines a good two inches in the rock-hard ground, gripping the handle with only one fist. The tines struck into the dust very near the man’s shoes. “You know, Mister, nobody ever sold me a thing by trespassing on my property and tramping down my wheat, but bigger men than
you
have got in trouble for provoking me a lot less than you just did. This here is private property, and I reckon you just better take whatever it is you want to sell me and get right back to your car. And you better walk
around
that wheat this time or I’m liable to hit you on top of your head so hard you’ll have three tongues in your shoes.”

The man seemed surprisingly unworried—insolent, in fact. George wished the fellow would do something that would justify hitting him. “
You
must be George Custer,” he said in a peculiar way.

“That’s
me,”
George said, “and that’s George Custer’s wheat you just walked through.”

“Well, this must be for
you,
then” the man answered, smiling up at him.

He thrust an envelope into George’s hands and walked away across the hayfield, almost running.

“Now just a minute!” George yelled after him.

“It’s self-explanatory, Mr. Custer!” the man yelled back. “That is, if you can read!”

“Why you little yellow …” George took a half step after him and then stopped to look at the letter. It might be a telegram or something.

The return address impressively printed on the outside was enough. He knew what it was. It was trouble from the office of Sheriff Richard M. Press in the courthouse of Stutsman County. Well, the sheriff had to make it seem as though he was doing his job. Since the law was already working for the really big crooks, it was forced to look hard for some legitimate business.

George watched the little city man backing his car out of the lane. He didn’t even have the guts to drive on down and turn around in the yard. They were all yellow when they weren’t on their own territory. They had to get him alone, down on their own ground, before they dared to go to work on him. He wondered what would happen if he didn’t go. They’d probably come after him with a posse twice the size of the ones that used to go out after Jesse James. That would be gratifying. He’d think about it. After he saw that it was a kind of subpoena, he stuck it in his overall bib pocket and jerked his fork out of the ground. He would have to tell Rachel about it because Lucy would tell. She was looking down at him now from the hayrack.

“Is it a telegram?” she asked. They had got a telegram once when somebody had died. She could barely remember it.

He didn’t really read it until that night after supper. Then he showed it to Rachel. It seemed to him that it was oddly worded. He wished to God he had the money for a lawyer or the time to read up on subpoenas himself. He was positive they were pulling a fast one on him. It ordered him to appear the next Monday as a material witness in a sheriff’s investigation of conspiracy to obstruct the due processes of the law. All the fancy language was there, but that didn’t mean that this was a really legal subpoena.

“What do you think would happen if I didn’t go?” he said, feeling her out. Was she willing to back him up now? To go to war?

“Oh, George,” she said miserably. “For heaven’s sake, do what they say. They’ll fine you, probably, and if they have to come after you, they’ll fine you even more. And besides, how awful that would be—if they came and took you away in one of those cage cars! Oh,
why
did you do it?”

“Oh now, Rachel! They’re not going to do anything like
that!
You’re just hysterical. And I did it because once in a while a man has to take a stand and act the way he believes!”

“I don’t think you acted out of any belief at all!” she cried out. “You did it because you got mad, that’s why!”

“That just shows all you know about it. Women!”

George rushed through his chores and breakfast and then changed his clothes. He was supposed to be at the courthouse at ten o’clock, and he wanted to be on time. He didn’t want to give them an excuse to add additional penalties to any they might now have in mind. The one thing that terrified him was a fine. He didn’t think they’d dare to lock him up; that would arouse the rest of the men too much. But a fine could easily take at least a month’s extra checks.

He put on the only suit he had—the one he had bought to get married in. It was still new-looking; it had maybe too many buttons on the sleeves, or maybe not enough—he didn’t worry about such things. It fit the way it fitted nine years ago, except that it was a trifle looser here and there. Rachel had starched his collar as stiffly as she could, to make it survive the heat as long as possible, and he wore a smart-looking figured maroon tie to set off the suit.

If only he had a summer hat. He needed it to complement the rest of his outfit. He bent to see the top of his head in the mirror over the washstand. His hair was thinning in an unattractive way, with kinky, sandy wisps straggling over the sunburned skin of his scalp. His neat instincts were bothered by the way his hair was going. He wouldn’t have minded being completely bald so much as he minded this. He felt that he had always looked very youthful for his age. It wouldn’t matter if he did get bald young. But he needed a hat to make himself look really snappy, and cover up that ragged hairline.

“Well, Mrs. Custer,” he said. “You have to admit I make a good-looking jailbird. I’ll be the best-dressed con in the hoosegow.”

He had a way, it seemed to her, of always refusing to admit that things were as bad as they were. He could conceivably be on his way to signing away every bit of cash they would get from the wheat before it was even harvested. How could he joke?

She
had a way, it seemed to him, of deflating every effort he made toward rendering an impossible situation possible. All she needed to do was to look up at him the way she looked now.

He knew he couldn’t kiss her goodby. She would turn away. So he turned himself away first.

On the way to Jamestown he decided to buy a hat. He’d get a good one, too, by God—one that went properly with his suit. He’d show them that just because a man wore overalls to get in his hay, he wasn’t any hayseed. In another few weeks he’d show everybody, when he harvested the Ceres. The smutty whiffs he got from the wheat didn’t mean anything. One smutted head in a square yard of healthy heads could stink up the atmosphere. He wasn’t going to worry about it. The well was a more immediate problem.

He paid two and a half for the hat—more than half of a week’s cream checks. To hell with it. Maybe the hat would scare them into giving him his legal rights, whatever they were. He walked up the steps to the second floor of the courthouse and presented himself at the sheriff’s door at exactly ten o’clock.

A sweating, red-faced woman sat before a typewriter at a desk on the other side of the counter from George. Her breasts appeared to be rolled, like thick wads of heavy cotton batting, and they were haphazardly and precariously straining the thin silk blouse.

George took off his hat.

“What can I do for you?” she said. She acted as though anything she did for him would be a very big favor that would put him forever in her debt. Political job, of course, George thought. She probably had something pretty good on Sheriff Richard M. Press. Otherwise he’d have a
pretty
girl behind that desk.

George pushed the subpoena across the counter. She scudged back her chair and hauled herself out of it. The contrast between the amorphous weight in her pink blouse and the straight narrowness of the skirt encasing her thighs was enough to make a man wonder what she would look like—not that it would be especially desirable. She studied the subpoena—or whatever it was. George could have sworn she knew it was at least questionable, if not downright illegal.

“I see it’s for today,” she said finally. “Couldn’t you serve it yet?” He had a pleased moment, knowing that she did not take him for a criminal, but then he was irritated at having her class him with the little weasel who had served the thing to him.

“No, this is
me
,” he said. “
I’m
George Custer!”

She looked at him with a different expression—the one she used for people she could browbeat with impunity. He looked back, and he thought he could see her deciding not to browbeat
him.

“Well, I don’t know what he aims to do about it,” she said. “He ain’t in any special place that I know of, so I expect he’ll show up around here sooner or later. He usually checks in around lunchtime. You might as well just set and wait for him.”

The picture was not developing the way George had expected it to. He looked around for a hatrack, but he saw none, so he sat down on a bench and laid the new summer hat beside him. He read the subpoena once again, and wondered for the hundredth time if he could just walk out of the office and forget the whole thing. He reconstructed the picture the way it should have been. He walked in, looking so dapper and polished that the sheriff didn’t recognize him. He handed the subpoena to the sheriff in the envelope so that the sheriff had to take it out himself. The sheriff looked fat and awkward as he fumbled with the envelope. George looked down at him, composed and waiting.

When the sheriff looked back up at him, George would be able to detect his surprise. He would be expecting a chastened farmer in sweaty overalls; instead he would be looking up at a well-dressed, self-possessed man of the world in a new hat. He would realize he didn’t dare go very far with this fellow. George would watch that realization dawning on him. Then they would have a little talk, with the sheriff blustering out of the mess he had got himself into, and George would leave, after letting the sheriff know that he had taken up the time of a very busy man.

And when wheat was pushing three dollars a bushel again, and the rain came again, the picture enlarged with the inspiring clarity of a movie closeup. He would have his own lawyer in Jamestown then, and he would simply pick up his telephone and tell his lawyer to fix everything up—the way his enemies did. But of course they never tried to pull anything like this in the first place with a man who could afford a lawyer.

George picked up the front page of the morning’s
Jamestown Sun.
It was wilted and used, the way his suit and shirt were beginning to look. In New York State the farmers of four counties were refusing to ship milk into the city at the rates set by the Milk Control Board. They stopped trucks and dumped the milk into ditches, just as the men along Highway Number 20 had done last fall in Iowa. Babies in New York City were dying of malnourishment while the roads leading into the city ran with milk, said the paper. A Pennsylvania coal striker was killed by the state militia. Those poor devils—27,000 of them out on strike while their families starved. The mine-owners who controlled the militia knew damned well their whole ill-gotten empires would collapse if those miners ever
really
started marching. A five-day heat wave in New York City was blamed for fifty-one deaths. Phooey! In the first place those fifty-one people probably just
starved
to death, and in the second place those pantywaist Easterners didn’t have the vaguest idea of what a heat wave was.

Noon came and went. The secretary took a sack lunch from her desk drawer. “He probably won’t be back now till after he’s ate,” she said. “You might as well go on out and get a bite yourself. I’ll tell him not to leave till you get back.”

“I’ll wait,” George said.

“Suit yourself.” She shrugged her flabby shoulders and the movement wobbled down the front of her blouse. George went back to the paper.

At a quarter of two the sheriff walked briskly through the door. He nodded toward George and said to the secretary, “Any mail worth looking at?”

“Well, just these. But I think they can wait. This man here —”

“I got some phone calls to make,” the sheriff said. “I’ll get around to him in a while.” He disappeared behind the frosted glass in the door of his office.

George sat for another half hour. A man came through the door behind him, chirped, “Hiya, Toots,” to the secretary, and walked into the sheriff’s office without knocking. Presently Toots’s desk buzzed and she said to George, “You can go on in now.”

Both men sat waiting for him. “Close the door,” the sheriff said, before George had quite managed to get through it. “You wasn’t born in a barn, was you?”

George slammed it hard. The sheriff turned to the man sitting with him behind the desk. “I reckon maybe he
was,
at that.”

“You
are
Custer, aren’t you?” he said. “You ain’t dressed quite the way I remember you, but I never forget a face.” George felt as though he was in overalls again. “This here’s the county prosecuting attorney,” he went on, pointing with an elbow at the man beside him.

“Mr. Custer,” the lawyer said.

“A pleasure,” George said savagely.

“Now then, Mr. Custer,” the sheriff began. “We’re busy men—the county attorney here and me —”

“I’m a busy man
myself!”

“Well, fine, then, we’ll start right off understanding each other, won’t we?”

“You
bet!”
George said.

“The attorney here, and me, have the lawful duty to collect money that rightfully belongs to holders of delinquent mortgages. If a sale of chattel property is the only way to do it, then it’s our lawful obligation to hold a sale. When something goes wrong at a sale, we got to have an investigation, see? We got to have
records
to show just how things went. And we got to have witnesses to them records, so’s nobody can come around later and say to us, ‘No sir, I just don’t believe that’s the way that happened at all. You must’ve been in on that swindle yourself, Sheriff Press.’ Just suppose, now, that Mr. Burr has sent in his report on the sale—just suppose that a man from the head office out in Hartford was to come out here and put it to me—suppose he was to say to me, ‘You’re the man this county elected to enforce the law. What have you done about it?’ So you see, we try and get these records all fixed up while everything is still fresh in everybody’s mind. Do you follow me?”