The Bones of Plenty (61 page)

Stuart had gone some place to clean up before he came home. Rose had been trying to prepare herself for the two most probable alternatives—either that he would never come back again after what George had done to him and after what he had done to himself, or that he would come home as he always had before, looking so unlike himself, filthy and unshaven. Having him come home sober and normal-looking was the one thing she was not prepared for, and perhaps that was why, in a way, she was more disturbed than if he had come the way she had been expecting him to. He spoke even less frequently than he had before, as if he wished her to understand that she would never know where he went, what he did, or why he came back.

When he did speak, it was often in such a low voice that she was sure, despite the way her ears had been behaving, that he
was
speaking in an abnormally low voice. Did his manner indicate that as soon as he could decently do so he would leave forever? Or perhaps he would leave
before
he could decently do so.

Every day there seemed to be less to talk about. They worked together to keep up with the jobs that never let up, even for death. One day she asked him if he planned to go to school in the fall. It would be necessary to start making applications.

“I’ll see,” was all he said.

It had been exactly one year and a day since the new President made the broadcast telling the people to take their money back to the banks, assuring them that everything was going to get much better very soon, and that the money situation, in particular, would be improved in a peacefully revolutionary way.

“And I told you then, didn’t I, Rachel, that Roosevelt was just another rich man talking through his hat? A few more people
believe
me now, too.

“Now here he reduces the amount of gold in the dollar to sixty per cent of what they set it at in nineteen hundred. So now the dollars are
‘cheaper’
and he claims the U. S. Treasury is worth three billion dollars more than it was yesterday! What nonsense! Just some more playing around with numbers on paper—that’s all it is.

“Says here that Panama bounced a check for a quarter of a million dollars back to the U. S. Treasury. Can’t fool
them
either. They want the rent for the Canal Zone in
gold.
Uncle Sam can’t even pay his rent with his paper money any more! On the other hand, who says
gold
means anything?”

“Well,
something
has to mean something, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah, but why does the
something
always have to be decided on by the guys who already have a lot of it?”

He noticed a filler of interest. “Sixty-five million Chinese made homeless last year by wars, famines, droughts, and floods. That’s a lot of Chinamen. But they just keep right on breeding, don’t they? I tell you, in another hundred years there isn’t going to be room to turn around without stepping on somebody.”

No matter how dry this prairie got, at least there was still some air to breathe and a man had a decent amount of privacy. There were a lot of things to be said in favor of living here, even in the very worst of conditions. But still the box on the front page concerned George a good deal.
Normal Moisture to date,
1.29 inches;
Received to date this year,
.36 inches. Last year the box had given normal figures up to this time in March. Yet last year his well had almost gone out on him.

Stuart had spent the afternoon in town, and after he had done the chores and eaten his supper, he stood up, pushed in his chair, and said, “I’m going to get married.”

They talked so little to each other that Rose assumed this was simply another sentence of the conversation that was taking place over a period of weeks instead of minutes. She had been living in a world where time was changed, along with almost everything else. Only work was the same, and so she worked—worked so hard that the unreality of the slow-motion communication, or lack of it, between Stuart and herself was almost superseded by the reality of the accomplishments she could believe in as she fell into bed at night.

“Well, of course you’ll get married,” she said, getting up and starting to clear the table. They couldn’t talk at all to each other unless the talk was only an ostensibly unimportant accompaniment to action. It was as though they both spoke into some neutral space between the gigantic crags of their private agonies. They let a few words go out to that space from time to time, but each let the other choose whether or not he would reach out into the space and have anything to do with the words.

“I mean I’m going to get married right
now
—you don’t need to look like that. I’m the same age as Dad was when
he
got married, and I’m
older
than
you
were when
you
got married.”

It was the first time since the funeral that he had sent out any words into the space which appeared to ask for reaction from her.

“You don’t
know
the girl yet, do you?”

“She
says I know her
plenty
well. I want to know if I should bring her here to the farm.”

“What girl would be in such a hurry to marry you that she can’t wait till your father is cold in his grave? What kind of wife would she be? Think how people would talk!”

“That’s just what
she
said. ‘Think how people will talk!’ ”

“Stuart, what’s
happened?”

“Women!” he cried.

“I asked you what happened!”

“I
told
you! Do you want me to bring her here to the farm or not? I mean, do you want me to stay here to run the farm—to help run it—or do you want me to get out? I have to support her now, one way or another.”

“What do you
mean,
you have to support her!”

“Because she says
I
did it, that’s why.”

His words out in the neutral space were perfectly understandable. She couldn’t pretend they were not there; she couldn’t pretend they did not describe the sort of thing that happened every day in a doomed and filthy world. Nor did she try to pretend that the words she set beside his in the neutral space were consistent with the things she had tried all his life to teach him. The words were atrocities of contradiction; she recognized each word as an atrocity with which she would answer the world’s atrocities.

“It happened after the funeral, didn’t it? You
know
you aren’t responsible for anything you did then. Whoever the girl is, she’s a tramp, and you’re not beholden to her.” Rose was hardly even surprised at herself for being so calm—so clear-headed. She felt just the way she felt watching the lamp burn dry.

“I asked you a question,” Stuart said. “Do you want me to stay around here or not?”

“Who is it?”

“Annie Finley.”

“Stuart! Whatever you’ve done, you
couldn’t
owe that girl a
thing!
Annie Finley! She’s a
tramp.
She’s from a
family
of tramps. She’s nothing but scum!
No
decent girl would work in a place like Gebhardt’s. You don’t owe her a
thing!”

“A decent girl might work at Gebhardt’s if she made twice as much money there as she could make anywhere else. A decent girl might work there if she was watching her family
starve!
She gives everything she
earns
to her mother!”

“Yes, but
how
does she earn it!”

“She gets big tips in Gebhardt’s. She’s just a
kid!”

“And what do you think
you
are?”

He didn’t offer any words in answer. He only looked at her, and the look made her remember that he had been a man for a long time.

“Do whatever you want,” she said. “If you bring her here, you can have the upstairs. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter.”

“I better go back in town and tell her,” Stuart said. “She just told her mother and her mother’s all worked up…. It’s terrible, Mom, how they live! And they
try!
You’ll
see
how
clean
she is —”

“How CLEAN she is!”

Finally what he said was so preposterous that she understood how preposterous it was even to be wasting their breath talking about something so irreversible and so insane. She was sane again and now she could see that he was out of his mind. He even thought he cared about this girl. That was why he had said what he just said. If it pleased him to be insane, then there was nothing she could do about it, except to try to remain sane herself. Nor could she forbid him to bring his wife, any legitimate wife, to the farm that would be half his in a few more years. She could not tell Will’s son to keep off the farm his father had left him.

He had turned away when she cried out at him—turned away as though he had been expecting her to make a show of sympathy for a whore. He was going out the door now, and everything that would ever need to be said had been said. He had passed his twenty-first birthday. He was free to come or go as he pleased. Every soul in this world lived by some kind of order. Each person chose how he would live. Stuart had thought he was escaping from order, if he thought anything at all, when he began to drink. But there was the tightest of all orders in apparent disorder. When a man gave himself to it, he gave himself to only one path, only one end. Why should she even be surprised at his next step down that path? After all, he had taken the first step three years ago. Now it was time for the second.

For a little while she hated him.

She even let God see that she hated her son. She went to bed before he came back from town. She didn’t even wonder about what he was doing for so long. What difference did it make?

He had always surprised her. He surprised her even by being born so long after she and Will had thought that Rachel would be their only child. And he had been so different from Rachel. Boy babies were more different from girl babies than she had supposed they were. Their chests were so wide, their hips so narrow, their feet and hands and heads so big. By the time they were three or four years old, their bodies were so much harder than the bodies of little girls. She remembered how hard his little legs had felt when she pulled his stockings over them, how hard his little buttocks had been when he sat on her lap.

She remembered how she had prayed and how she had nursed him when he got blood poisoning. She remembered how he looked when he began losing his milk teeth. She remembered how he had run about the house on winter days making his lips buzz like the sound of a tractor. She remembered how he would say his own prayer before a meal, the way she and Will did. He was about three then, and the prayer was a loud, rapid “Clarence-shut-the-ice!” It had taken them a long time to figure out that there must be a little boy in his Sunday-school class who was named Clarence and who would not shut his eyes when the teacher had them pray.

Oh, God, how could a boy raised so decently do a thing like this? I know now how much I loved him—before he turned his back on me. Go ahead and see, God, how much I loved him. Nobody else will ever see. I raised him to be decent and now his decency is his downfall. Nobody but a decent boy marries a slut because she’s pregnant. Was he born only to wander, God? Should we not have raised him to obey the rules that civilized people live by? Then he would not marry this girl, God. Yet what sort of a world would we have if the same rules were not supposed to apply to everybody?

And I know, God, I know that it is unthinkable for a man raised by these rules not to marry a girl of whom he has carnal knowledge—no matter
who
the girl is. I should be proud that my son finally seems to understand that he must be responsible for his acts.

I can’t help it, I can’t help it—I want him to run away again. Just until it all blows over. I can’t help it, God. Make him run away again, God. Do this one thing for me now. Make him run away.

All through the night she couldn’t make the one blasphemous thought leave her alone. The thought had a will of its own, stronger than hers: By raising her boy to be decent, she had only made him more vulnerable to the evil of the world. What chance did a boy like him have in this shameless generation?