The Bones of Plenty (34 page)

He knew, because she wouldn’t look at him.

“How many?” he asked.

“Four. Four cows. All the pigs got out.”

Four cows tortured to death because
he
had locked them in stanchions under hay
he
had put away knowing that it was too green.

But it had been harder for Rose than for him. He had been lying in a hospital, not having to know, while she had been here alone with the knowledge, with the cleanup, with the night memories and the screams.

“You ought to have told me right away,” he said.

“What good would that have done? Do you want to go to sleep now?”

For four days he had been fighting to extricate himself from the clawing images of the fire. Every time he closed his eyes he was like a fly trapped in an infernal kaleidoscope. He was surrounded by the multiplying images of flame and torture and guilt and condemnation that fell together and then fell apart as the garish triangles spun and spun. Even before he knew about the cows, he had wondered when the mirrors would slow in their spinning—when he would be allowed to crawl to their convergence and escape through the long empty eye of forgetfulness. But now he knew that the kaleidoscope would never let him go. No, he did not wish to close his eyes just now.

“No, I think I’ll just catch up on the
Sun,
if you saved the back copies.”

The Custers did their own chores early and came over to help Rose and to have supper with Will. After supper George lingered in the bedroom while the women did the dishes, waiting for Will to mention that the loan would come in handy now, for the doctor and the hospital, not to mention finishing the new barn.

I should simply bring it to him, George thought, but since he had no idea of where he could get what he had spent of it or how he could last through the summer without the rest of it, he continued to talk of nothing and to sit with his kitchen chair tipped back against the dresser, his wrists dangling at his sides, his fists curling and uncurling around the rungs of the chair. He was positive that Will knew what he was waiting for. Why didn’t the old man go ahead and spring it?

But Will was thinking of the boy last heard from nearly eight months ago in Arizona. Would he come home in time or not?

Finally George let down the front legs of his chair and stood up. “Well, take ‘er easy,” he said. He went out to the kitchen to start the family moving toward the car. He couldn’t stand it any longer.

After they had gone, Will called out to the kitchen. “Rose, do you think if we could get in touch with Stuart he’d come home?”

“I think he’ll come home if and when he feels like it. He’ll come home if he runs out of money or if he gets sick. We wouldn’t have heard from him the
last
time or the time before
that
if he hadn’t needed money to get out of trouble—or to spend on liquor! Where does he always find it? What good are the
laws,
anyway?”

George lay awake in the stagnant air of the low little house. A man might as well try to sleep in a fireless cooker as a one-story house after a day of so much sun. The house, like the cooker, absorbed heat all day long and cooked all night.

The old man expects me to bring it to him, George thought, but he’s not going to ask me for it. After he practically forced it on me in the first place. What if he needs it to get his wheat threshed? He must have finished off his Jimtown account to bail himself out of the hospital. Now Rachel will have to know. Damn him—if he needs it he ought to ask for it. How am
I
supposed to know what to do? God-damn it, this is what comes of borrowing from a man’s inlaws.…

A small futile sound escaped from his throat. From the way Rachel moved, he knew she heard it and was not asleep either. He rolled over to her roughly, and roughly took what was his.

Afterwards, like the man in the desert whose last reckless strength has brought him running to an illusion, he was more alone than ever. What the hell had made her change so much, anyway? He’d never forgotten the joke his brother had made when he got married. “You just remember what I say, Georgie-Porgie. Put a bean in a jar for every time during the first year, and then take one out for every time
after
the first year. I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts you’ll never get all them beans back out of the jar again.”

Rachel didn’t wake up until just before five, and she hurried to make a fire in the kitchen range. “Monarch” was stamped in the nickel-plated frame around each of the warming-oven doors at her eye level. She wondered idly, as she had a thousand times, what could possibly be royal about the black monster that dominated her life. She doubted that the manufacturer had meant quite the quality of dominance she had in mind. She lifted out the two lids, each as big around as the bottom of her gallon teakettle. Lately in the mornings her wrists had been so weak and achy that she had to use both hands on the lifter. By the time she went out to get the first bucket of water she was usually all right, but still it made her desperate to wake in the morning and not have her joints work properly. The only hope left was in the strength of their limbs. The strength of the land was wasting away, and they had to make up for that depletion with their own strength.

She went out to the porch to get the boiler and she saw how the weeds that had managed to survive in the afternoon shade of the house seemed to be wilting already in the morning sun. It was going to be a bad day to wash, but there were no clean diapers left for the baby.

She was just ready to start down the hill for water when George came into the kitchen.

“I’ll fetch you a couple of pails full,” he said. “Just as soon as I tie up my shoes here.” He guarded the well now, even from her. He was like a dragon brooding over a magic fountain. If he was attentive enough, the temperamental fairy in the fountain would feel propitiated; she would not give the order that dried up the fountain.

He came back up with the two buckets and dumped them in the boiler for her. Then he brought two more, but he dumped only one into the boiler.

“Can you get along on that?” he said.

While he was milking she started wringing out the diapers she had had soaking in the wash tub on the porch. She unfolded them and dropped them into the boiler, poking them down into the warming water and stirring the soap around to try to get a little suds. Then she dipped the mop pail full of the soiled water in the tub and carried it out to the garden where she poured it gently around several hills in a row of beans. It was not good to do any watering now, early in the morning, because so much would be lost through evaporation, but she had forgotten to wring out the diapers the night before and now she had to empty the tub so she could put clean rinse water in it.

George came up with the milk as she was returning from the garden with the empty bucket. “My God! You’re not watering
this
time of day?” He was almost hysterical. He acted as though he might strike her.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know I should have emptied the tub last night. I was too worried about Dad to be able to think straight.”

“Honestly, Rachel, I just don’t understand why you can’t keep a thing like this well on your mind
all
the time! Just what do you think we’re going to do if we run out of water, anyway? Do you think I can just say abracadabra and produce an unlimited supply of water for you to waste?”

“Oh, George, you
know
I don’t waste water!”

“You
are
wasting it—right now! Just deliberately wasting it! I can see with my own eyes, can’t I?”

He went into the kitchen but she stayed on the porch till she got control of herself. After nine years he could still wound her by saying things they both knew weren’t true. She wondered why it was that his wildest, most farfetched accusations were the ones that hurt the most. They were the ones she ought to be able to forget entirely, weren’t they? She emptied the last pail of fresh water into the tub and watched while the sun flitted over its agitated surface and then settled into the trembling rings of light made by the galvanized ridges around the bottom of the tub. It was a hot light—as though the sun would drain the tub before she could come back out and rinse her clothes. Wherever she looked, she saw the greedy sun. Would the sun never be satisfied till every well in the world was dry?

After breakfast George took a hoe and went out to the potato patch. As he walked along the edge of the wheat, he couldn’t help noticing that the fishy odor of smut was getting stronger. “Must be the way the wind’s blowing,” he thought.

Lucy came too, carrying her gallon Karo pail with a cup of kerosene sloshing in its bottom. She knelt at the end of the row he was hoeing and began plucking the striped potato bugs from the leaves and dropping them into her kerosene. Some of the leaves were eaten away to the delicate lace of their skeletons; they were quite pretty, those leaf skeletons; but if there were too many of them the plants no longer breathed, and then the potatoes would be no bigger than pullets’ eggs, and sacks and sacks of them together would never feed the family through the winter.

She had to watch, too, for the deposits of eggs glued to the undersides of the leaves, though there were not so many now as there had been earlier in the summer. The eggs were bright yellow, like the yolk of a hen’s egg, and rather soft. Any leaves with eggs on them had to be picked off and dropped into the kerosene along with the black-and-yellow bugs. Most horrid of all were the fat squishy larvae which had not yet grown their hard beetle shells. They were made of nothing but mashy insides that popped all over her fingers.

Potatoes and potato bugs. They were about equally monotonous. After attending to ten plants she had the bottom of her pail almost covered with the bodies of bugs in both stages, a mixture of segmented larvae and striped beetles, like buttons in a drawer. They all died the moment they sank beneath the kerosene. She could scarcely bear the feel of their legs struggling against the ball of her thumb and because of that awful feeling she was not sorry that they had to die, but it did make her a little sick to have to drop them into her noxious pail. Why hadn’t they gone ahead and died when her father sprayed them with the Black Leaf 40?