The Bones of Plenty (39 page)

Roger held up a little white paper bag and began to run. Douglas went after him.

Lucy watched them run up the wooden sidewalk. She wondered what it would be like to live in town and to be a good friend of Roger Beahr, who always had pennies.

“Where’s the Sinclair boy?” her father asked.

“He went home. The sissy.”

“What’s the matter? Didn’t you act nice to him?” George said. “You can’t expect to have any friends if you’re not nice to people.”

“I don’t like him.”

“Oh, now, Lucy, that’s not any way to talk. You’ll
never
have any friends if you talk like that.
Shame
on you!”

Lucy felt her throat start to swell and she got up on her knees to look out the window in the rear of the cab. As the truck turned she could see the two boys coming back down the sidewalk, heading for the elevator. It must be nice to have your father own an elevator. Even from a distance she could see that both of them had a cheek puffed out with a jawbreaker.

When they got back home it was nearly six o’clock. “Time for you to get at your chores,” her father told her. “You haven’t done a lick of work all day. Probably a good thing your boyfriend didn’t come back.”

“He’s
not
my boyfriend! I
hate
boys!”

“Gonna be an old maid, huh?”

“No!”

It seemed to her that a man or a boy had been laughing at her all day in the wheat fields. How mean, mean, mean they were. And if you didn’t want to marry one of them, they made you always be alone and called you horrible names.

She had a hopeless, forsaken feeling in her stomach as she scattered the corn for the chickens, cleaned and filled their muddy water pans, and looked in the nests for eggs that might have been laid late in the day. She wondered if Douglas would come back with Giles in the morning.

After supper the men went back to the field to smoke and then to spread their blankets on the straw and sleep. Stuart walked out of the kitchen with them.

“Stuart!” Rachel said. “Are you going to sleep in a
field
when you’re half a mile away from your own bedroom?” If he did this, then she would have to give up. How could she drive over and tell her mother and father that now they could know where their son slept? They could know, but he couldn’t be bothered to come home. He was answering her, speaking in a casual sensible way.

“Wouldn’t be the
first
time,” he was saying. “Used to do it all the time. I’d be so hot in that old upstairs I couldn’t go to sleep at all, so I’d go out in the field. You’d be surprised. Twenty or thirty degrees cooler out there. Try it some time. After the thrashermen have gone, of course!” He walked away.

She had read stories about men who disappeared from their homes in crowded tenements and moved into little windowless apartments a block away and so lived out their years. She had always thought that such a pathetic insanity was proof that cities perverted the human race. People felt so hemmed in by each other that they couldn’t stand even their families any longer; yet they were so timid that they could not move away from the spot where they had always lived—nor could they go home again. What could make a boy like Stuart behave like these mole-hearted men in the slums of cities?

What did he want, anyway? Did he want his mother and father to come to him in the stubble tonight and beg him to come home, just as they had once exclaimed in the barn, “Oh,
there
he is!” She was afraid, now, to go over and tell them that he had come, for there was nothing in the world she could say or do to make him stay.

George had gone to bed long before she finished the dishes. She lay down as far away from him as she could and clung to the edge of the mattress all night. It was possible that she would do something awful if he so much as touched her. She might scream in his ear or slap him. She could still feel the cats’ tails in her sweating hands. She wondered if it really was thirty degrees cooler out there where those bestial men were sleeping beside her brother.

Stuart knew that he would not have to lie awake long—not after the way he had spent the last twenty-four hours. Still, it would be too long. One minute under this home sky was too long. If he were able to travel, he would not be here to see the sun come up. Well, that was the way he had done it all along. He either stayed or moved on, depending on what shape he was in when the feeling came. It was always the same feeling: He was alone among people he knew. The only relief, outside of liquor, was to hurry somewhere else, so he would only be alone among people he
didn’t
know. For two years he had told himself that this feeling would go away when he was home again. It was silly to ask himself why he had not come home before, if he really believed that. It was sillier still to wonder how two years had gone so quickly. It was silliest of all to pretend, like a baby, that he didn’t know how ridiculous he was—out here in the stubble.

It was funny how sky over one part of the prairie could be different from all the other skies. It was the things you could see from the corners of your eyes that
shaped
the sky you knew so well—nothing about the sky itself. It was the low blackness of hills and the lines of windbreaks. And trains sounded different in different places. Oh, he was
home
all right. Every night when he went to sleep like this in some farmer’s field, he knew how silly that son in the Bible felt. Yes, almost every night he had gone to sleep wondering why he wasn’t in his own bed in his father’s house. Now he wondered whether he would be in that bed tomorrow night or not. He couldn’t see how he was going to do it. There would be only one way to do it.

Has the cat got your tongue? What’s the matter? People always used to say that to him and he always hated them for it. But he’d said it himself today, because he hadn’t known what else to say. Was that why people had always said it to him, too? Did people go around all their lives saying things that didn’t mean anything just because they thought they ought to be saying something? Was that all they cared for each other?

Supper the second night was more rushed than the first night because they were going to move on to their next field after they had eaten and get set up to go the first thing in the morning. Before Rachel realized they were leaving, George and all the men had left the porch and gone back to the field.

It was nearly dark when George came back into the kitchen. “Well—that’s that for
this
year. Boy, I think I’d rather be the thrasherman than the farmer—they sure get paid more for an hour’s work than
I
do.”

“Oh, George! You haven’t paid them already!”

“Rachel!
For God’s sake don’t
jump
at me like that! You’d startle a man half to death! Of course, I paid them. Why wouldn’t I?”

“Oh, I didn’t want Stuart to have any money. He won’t go home now, I know he won’t! Oh, dear! What can we do?”

“Rachel, it beats me the way you can carry on! We can’t do
anything,
of course! He’s a grown
man!
I’ve said to you a thousand times before—if a man wants to drink himself to death, no power on earth is going to stop him.”

Somewhere he found enough that night to take him the rest of the way home. Just before dawn he banged open the kitchen door. Rose scurried out, clutching her nightgown about her, afraid that the dog had been frightened by something to make him crash in the door that way.

“Is that you, Mom?” came the crucifying voice out of the darkness.

She had been preparing herself for it, but no preparation could stop in time her first horrified gasp. Nor could she stop her first words to him.

“You’re
drunk!”

“Gone for two years and that’s all she has to say to me,” he remarked, as though there were a third, more sympathetic person in the room.

Will lay in bed listening. He was able to get around now, but he did not go out to the kitchen. He had seemed to know exactly what was happening the instant he awoke. That was the way it was with your children. They possessed you forever, from the moment they were born. The two and a half years of his absence might never have been. It could have been the same night—the first night that Stuart came home that way. In a way it was always the same night they had been living with for three years. It was really no shock at all now to hear him speaking again in the belligerent, chaotic sentences they had heard before he left. Will’s strongest feeling was one of weariness. He knew he’d never get back to sleep that night. Why couldn’t the boy have waited till morning, if he was going to come in this way? When he realized what his first thought had been, he knew how sick he must be. He hoped to God that Stuart had come back to stay.

He got out of bed and stood in the hall, but he did not say anything. Stuart was still meandering on; he talked more when he was drunk than in all the rest of his waking hours put together. Rose had not lit the lamp and Will hoped she wouldn’t. It would be enough to get through till rising time with the memory of his sounds; let there not be a memory of his looks to go with it. He had been waiting for two years to see his son, but not this way. There was a paradoxical, disorganized doggedness—a kind of animal forcefulness—in the boy when he was drunk that was nowhere in evidence when he was sober. One sight of him drunk established a more lasting image than many sights of him sober.

Finally Will said, “Your bed is all made up for you, Stuart. You sound tired to me. Why don’t you go crawl in?”

“Why, Dad, I couldn’t sleep in that bed without a bath! I’m nothing but a filthy thrasherman!”

“The sheets are washable,” his mother told him. “Go on up.”

In a few hours he was sober again, and as much of him as had ever been there had come back.