The Bones of Plenty (33 page)

Rachel had been trying to prepare herself for the way her father’s farm would look without its barn, but even from the road none of the other buildings looked right. They were sad, mute orphans, cowering around the spot from which the cords of each proceeded and returned—the sheep shed which sent its population to the barn every year to give up the winter fleeces, the granary which held in its bins the corn and oats that went to the horses, cattle, and pigs, the outbuildings housing the machinery that harvested the hay for the vanished mow. Even the tall yellow building that sheltered the farmer and his family looked as bereft as the others. The most stalwart farmhouse was too frail without a barn looming between it and the outstretched prairie.

For thirty years the structure above that hideous bared space had sheltered animals from week-long blizzards. It had penned in soft-haired calves smelling of the milk they drank. It had provided a high, warm, prickly privacy for the births of generations of barn cats. It had provided eaves over the barnyard to be plastered full of the straw and mud nests of the swallows who swooped through the dusk and helpfully devoured the blood-sucking insects drawn by the animal smells. Now the distraught birds fluttered about the roof of the granary. There were no babies to feed this morning.

The barn was the comfortable meeting place of all the dwellers in its precincts. Even those who properly lived in the other houses were drawn by the barn. The poultry strolled in and out to peck at stray bits of grain and to dust in the straw on blistering days and the dog sought out the coolest stall for a summer nap. If a sheep managed to squeeze under the fence around its shed, it would go to the barn, followed by the rest of the flock, to investigate the interesting sounds and smells there. Children went to the barn to watch a row of tiny pink pigs gluttonously nursing a sow, or they went there to hold a bucket of skim milk for a calf or to seek out the newborn kittens whose eyes were so tightly shut and whose fearful claws, like burrs, sought always to implant themselves in the hay or a sweater or a bare leg.

The menfolk would retire to the barn to perch on the rails of the calf and pig pens whenever womenfolk filled the house. City men, because they had no barns to retreat to, almost always became shockingly coarse on the infrequent occasions when they found themselves in a barn with a farmer. Rachel’s father had often remarked on how surprised some salesman’s wife would be if she could hear what came from her scissor-bill husband out there. Once in a while even a preacher could come up with something that set an old hobo on his ear.

A farm without a barn was like a body with its digestion stopped and the warm and sensual lower portions of its brain gouged away.

“Oh, how will he stand it!” Rachel moaned. “How will he bear it? How will he bear it!”

“Oh, now Rachel! Don’t get hysterical, for Pete’s sake! He’s got insurance, hasn’t he?”

Rachel went into the house with the baby; but George saw Lester Zimmerman’s car slowing on the road below, and he waited for him by the porch. Lucy slipped away and went to the place where the barn had been. She had rather expected to see it there this morning. It had
always
been there.

The four cows lay where they had fallen at their stanchions. In a few spots where there had been little flesh between the hide and the bones, the hide had burned completely away, leaving the bones a dark dirty yellow. The legs stuck straight out from the bellies as though the cows were standing on a vertical floor that she could not see. The black gristle of their noses was shrunken, and the thin skin that rippled under their jaws was gone, exposing the appallingly long lines of their yellow jawbones set with the jaundiced teeth that had chewed a cud out in the pasture yesterday morning at this hour. Bone showed all around the great eye sockets, swimming with dark jelly.

She stepped over the shards of two crossed beams and felt the heat from a crumpled black milk pail against her leg. Another bit of metal brushed her and she recognized it as the far, proud weather vane she had so often wished to touch. It was much bigger than she had thought it was.

She began to perceive the enormity of the thing that had happened, and she was afraid they would be angry with her for coming to the barn. They often seemed angry when she understood something that she was not supposed to understand. She ran to hide in the granary before the men coming from the house could find her. She sat inside the door on the powdery, rumpled top of a sack of chicken mash and watched what they did.

Her father drove the tractor down from the shed, towing the stoneboat. The other men cleared away enough of the burned wood so he could maneuver it down the aisle. They looped ropes around the stiff legbones of the first cow and pulled her body toward the stoneboat, resting between spurts of hauling.

“Jesus, I never
seen
an animal burnt up like this,” said Mr. Zimmerman. “A haymow fire don’t usually take off the skin this way. I seen a bunch of horses once that was in a livery stable, and outside of not having no hair left, they could of been just normal. They looked like they just had their hides scraped off and tanned. But I never seen anything like
this!”

“The ceiling give way,” Mr. Greeder said. “I could tell, even from where I was at. It just dropped right down onto ‘em. Probably twenty, thirty tons of hay burnt right on top of ‘em.… Ready!
Heave! Heave!”

When Rose came home from spending the night in the hospital, she refused to go to bed. “I’ve
been
in bed all
morning!”
she said. “
I’m
not sick! Just leave me be, now. Will wants to see the papers right away.”

She sat down at the desk and located a paper that folded and unfolded like an accordion. “I can’t believe this is all we had,” she said. “There must be a later one than this.” She took the papers out of each pigeonhole and finally emptied each drawer. George loitered in the kitchen, wondering if she already knew about the money, and wondering if she would come across the promissory note for his loan, and if she would be surprised. Will must have kept a record of it somewhere.

“Well, I guess this is all. As far as I can see, this may or may not cover it,” she said. “I just don’t know what I’m going to tell him. He thinks we got them all out. I just don’t see how I’m going to tell him. He would have stayed right there and burned up with them, trying to get them out, and he blames himself for the whole thing. He thinks
I
got them out. He doesn’t remember.”

“Do we have to tell him?” Rachel asked.

“Now, Rachel, just stop and think a minute!” George said. “Just where is he going to think they are when he gets back?” George was only too well acquainted with where they were. They were in an enormous hole that he and Will Shepard’s neighbors had damned near killed themselves to dig so that Will would never come upon their stinking carcasses or their burnt bones as he went about his farm.

“How am I going to tell him?” Rose asked again.

Will lay in his room in Trinity Hospital, his cracked shin in a cast, his wried shoulder on a hot pack that aggravated two cinder burns on the skin more than it helped the shoulder muscle, and his smashed thumb wrapped in an oversized bandage. Pills to dull his various miseries were dissolving in his stomach.

“Why did I do it? Why did I do it why did I do it?”

He had said the words to himself so many times that they became as abstract and confusing as the pain in his body. The words ran into each other until they wouldn’t go into the rhythm of a sentence any more. All that day he lay adrift in his abstractions, but that night he slept, and when he waked up the next morning his head was clear again.

A doctor came in and poked at him. “Now let’s see about your middle, here,” he said. “We just want to know that nothing is ruptured down here. We didn’t want to pester you with X-rays yesterday, because what you mostly seemed to need was air. You obviously got a kick or two, if we can judge by these.” He touched a couple of spots that Will didn’t have to see in order to know they were black-and-blue.

“When can I go home?” Will said.

“Mr. Shepard, yesterday you acted like a man with a lot of trouble somewhere. We have to make sure you’re all right before we release you. Tomorrow we have to get some pictures.”

The doctor probed farther down in his abdomen. Will could not stop an agonized reflex in a couple of places.

“I don’t see why it should hurt
here.”
He delved into the bad spots again. “No contusions at all, that I can see.”

Of course it doesn’t show—what’s really gone wrong—Will could have told him. You don’t know what I know and how could you? You know about your microscopic events and I know about
mine.
You can’t see what’s wrong with me, but I understand it. It’s a set of laws working a different way, toward a different end. I thought that if I wasn’t going to save my hay it would be because the laws destroyed it with mold, but the laws destroyed it with fire instead. All perfectly legal—however unexpected, however unprepared for.

That morning I put the hay in—then I saw only as far as those clouds—the half-inch of water that might have fallen from them, the hay grown in a few mortal weeks on a tiny piece of a tiny particle in space, the few mortal days of my own that I coveted as though they were mine alone and not a part of all those laws around me. Now I see that rain, that field, those bits of time—I see them from the other side of the clouds. There was that moment in the hot rain when I was so foolish as to believe that God ought to save me from the laws. But now I can see things in a longer light, from the other side of the clouds. Go ahead and take all the pictures you want.

They took the pictures the next morning and in the afternoon the doctor came again. He looked at the purple thumbnail, felt the shoulder, tapped the cast nervously with his pen.

“Mr. Shepard,” he said. “I want you to go and see a specialist in Bismarck as soon as you can comfortably travel there.” He wrote on a prescription pad and handed it to Will.

“He’s as good a man as there is in the state.”

“When can I go home?” Will asked.

“Probably day after tomorrow, if the leg seems to be doing all right. Of course you’ll have to stay off it for quite a while. But it’s not a bad break and you ought to mend nicely.”

Will looked at the scrap of paper. There was the name of a drugstore on it, and a telephone number. Under that the doctor’s handwriting said, “Oliver Murdoch, M.D. Internist. Bismarck. Mercy Hospital.”

He laid it on his bedside table and then he picked it up to throw it away, but instead he stuffed it into his billfold.

The Eggers came all the way down to get him because their Chrysler was so much smoother-riding than the Custers’ old car. Where Clarence had got the money for it, Will couldn’t imagine. For a one-armed man Clarence drove with amazing skill.

Will had the whole back seat to himself, and he was comfortable enough, but he couldn’t think of anything except how his barnyard was going to look without a barn in it. And he kept trying to remember how he had got all those cows out.

When he and Rose were finally alone, he said, “We got them all out, of course.”