The Bones of Plenty

by Lois Phillips Hudson

  On Tuesday, though, the state of Michigan had been treated to Governor Comstock’s Valentine, and that had made Will a tiny bit nervous. Michigan’s governor was not the first governor to close all the banks in his state, but Michigan seemed closer to North Dakota than any of the other states.

  Will walked up the three wooden steps and opened the door of Harry’s bank. Harry came to the window.

  “Hello … hello, Mr. Shepard! I’m … so glad you came by today.”

  “Hello, Harry.” Will was embarrassed. He was afraid Harry knew why he came so often for such petty business. “I’m just going to get a little cash. Ten dollars will do it.” He began to write out the check.

  “Mr. Shepard—wait a minute. Just let me check your balance here. Just a minute.”

  “My balance?”

  “Mr. Shepard, you and I have been friends a long time, right? Ten years, right? You’ve been a good friend of mine … here. Here it is. It’s all up to date. Two thousand, eight hundred and sixty-seven. That’s your balance—checking and savings. Make it out for that!”

  Will couldn’t understand it. He’d been Harry’s friend; now Harry wanted him to withdraw his entire account. Was Harry so deeply offended just because of these frequent small checks? Will was horrified to think that his petty fears had so injured a man for whom he felt nothing but respect and sympathy.

  Harry began counting out bills from his drawer and Will opened his mouth to beg Harry’s pardon. But he closed it, in shock, as he would recoil from the lung-searing breath of a blizzard wind. The window with the terrible face in it was the window that had opened at last between him and the storm burying the world. There was nothing at all to say.

  Harry scuttled to the vault and came back with more bills. “I’ll make it all twenties and fifties,” he said. He jammed his finger into a rubber tip and began sliding off the fifties into a pile on Will’s side of the window.

  The bills slapped down so fast that Will could not begin to say “a half of a hundred dollars” to himself as each one dropped. He lost count after the first three or four and just watched.

  “Hurry up!” Harry said, and Will finally understood what he ought to be doing. It wasn’t counting. He peered back over his shoulder into the empty street and began rolling up the bills and tucking them into his inside pockets. He finished writing the check for whatever records Harry meant to leave just as Harry finished counting out the last full hundred. Then Harry threw out three twenties, paused an instant, and tossed out another twenty instead of hunting up the seven.

  “It doesn’t make any difference!” he cried, waving his hands in the air. “What is it all now? Paper! Just paper!” Shocked as he was, Will was shocked anew at hearing a banker say what he himself had always thought about money.

  He stowed away the last of the bills and pushed the check across to Harry. He laid down the bank’s pen and awkwardly took the short white hand trembling and reaching for his beneath the barred window. Already the guilt of his special treatment was between him and the little man.

  “You’re a good friend,” Harry insisted again.

  Will had to get out before he was seen. “So long,” he said. He knew he ought to say something else, and before he could stop it, a bit of parting advice he frequently gave to Harry slipped out. It was like a nightmare in which he heard himself speaking obscenities and then more obscenities every time he tried to apologize for himself—all the while comprehending what he was doing, but never able to react in time.

  “Don’t take any wooden nickels,” were the words that leapt out of his mouth.

  He touched the bill of his cap in a last helpless salute and furtively closed the door of Harry’s bank. The frozen boards of the sidewalk creaked and snapped; they rumbled beneath him, sent alarms ahead of him, and echoed behind him. It was all he could do to keep from looking back or at least stopping suddenly to trick the man following him into taking two more thundering steps than he took himself. And all the while he knew the street was as empty as it was when he walked out of the bank. It seemed impossible that the rolls of stiff new bills did not show right through his sheepskin coat or that it was not written on his face that Harry was going to close the Eureka Bank that Friday afternoon. It had been about fifty years since Will had been a party to any sort of conspiracy. Harry was closing the bank, but Harry was going to keep a few “friends” from suffering. It was no more real than a boyhood game.

  After all, Harry had hung on for so long. It was true that the real crisis had finally come. Hoover was waiting out the last weeks of his term like a man tied across the railroad tracks in front of an express train.

  Still, he couldn’t understand why Harry Goodman had managed all this time and then failed. If he had been speculating with the deposits, he ought to have gone down long before this. His extreme conservatism had made the farmers who needed loans hate him bitterly, but it should have brought him through, too. Will remembered the last statement of assets he had read, and if it was correct, Harry was stable enough. Harry had a total of seventy-five thousand dollars or so in cash deposits, and his loans seemed to be in about the right percentage. But perhaps even Harry had not been conservative enough to protect himself against the terrible deflation of property values. Men had mortgaged their farms in order to speculate in meaningless paper stocks, and when their property declined by more than half, many of the mortgages were only meaningless paper, with figures written on them that represented more than the farms could be sold for. It was all paper—just paper.

  Will became aware that he was shaking his head—he felt his day-old beard scratching against his high coat collar. People he would pass in the street would wonder if he had gotten his, and he would wonder if they had gotten theirs, and he would never again be free of the knowledge that he possessed, mostly by sheer chance, a little bit of the money that belonged to at least half of his friends and neighbors. Will wondered how bad the failure was—would the depositors get back fifty cents on a dollar? Forty? Two bits? A dime?

  What ought he to do with the money? The only thing he could think of was to bury it. Why put it in another bank? He’d already used up more luck than he could expect to see in the rest of his life. He decided to buy a metal box to bury it in. When he came to a notch knocked through the bank of frozen snow, he stepped down off the sidewalk and crossed the street to Zack Hoefener’s hardware store.

  He thought, as he opened the door, that Zack would be sure to ask him what the box was for, but the thought came too late. He entered just as Zack came in through the rear door. Zack had been burning packing paper in the dented oil drum he used for an incinerator. His face, a complex map of abused capillaries, was purple with cold, and he smelled of smoke and whiskey. Where did he get it all the time, Will wondered. Drunk or sober he was ornery, but he owned the only hardware store within twenty miles.

  Will said, “Hello, Zack,” and Zack replied with a bob of his head that sent a quiver through the massive goiter hanging from his neck.

  Zack made fists of his smudged hands and leaned on his knuckles on the counter. He always made his customers ask for what they wanted; he never asked them. He wasn’t any god-damn waiter, he often said to himself.

  “Have you got some kind of a good strong metal securities box—about like so?” Will measured with his hands.

  “Need it to keep all those gold-mine stocks in? Save ’em for your grandchildren?” Zack demanded.

  “Well,” Will said, “I’ll grant you I haven’t clipped any coupons for a while. But there’s no use starting any fires with them yet. Never can tell. Roosevelt just might get some things to moving again.”

  Zack hunched his shoulders, sending another spasm through his goiter.

  “Roosevelt won’t be alive ten days after he’s in office,” he said, “even if he lives long enough to be sworn in at all. Somebody else with better aim will get him.”

  “Oh, you know that fellow that tried to shoot him was as crazy as a June bug.”

 
“Who cares how crazy he was! A bullet is a bullet, no matter who shoots it. You wait and see. He’ll never make it.” Zack bulged his eyes at Will. Then he turned and stalked to the back of the store. He plucked a small black box from a shelf, hooked two broad fingers under its dusty nickel handle, and dangled it toward Will. “Big enough?” he asked.

  “It’s fine,” Will said. He reached cautiously into a pocket, trying to remember where he had put the twenties. He didn’t want to give Zack a fifty. It was quick thinking for Harry not to have given him anything bigger than fifties, but even fifties were mighty rare birds. He fell behind Zack while they walked to the front of the store and managed to get a look at the bill he had pulled out. It was a twenty.

  “By God, you could buy me out with that!” Zack expostulated when he saw the money.

  “Well, I’ve finally got to break it,” Will said.

  “I won’t hardly have no change left,” Zack complained. “This here is the third big bill I’ve broke today. If I can’t get to the bank I won’t have no change for tomorrow.… That’s one-eighty-five out of twenty—for God’s sake.” He scraped the coins out of the little metal compartments and slid bills out from under their wire holders.

  Will wondered if any of the other big bills had appeared for the same reason his had, and if so, who Harry’s other lucky friends were.

  “See you later, Zack,” Will said. He drew on his gloves and tucked the box under his arm. Zack nodded his head once and then fell to stroking his goiter, thoughtfully, as though he could not quite believe that it was there.

  Will bought the groceries on the list Rose had given him. They came to $5.87. That plus the cashbox came to $7.72. Subtract that from $2880 and it left $2872.28—more money than he had had in the bank in the first place, thanks to Harry’s haste and ruin. He said goodby to Herman and hurried around the corner and back up the street toward his truck. He passed Gebhardt’s Pool Hall with the hotel rooms up above, where the Gebhardts lived. It was the only two-story building on the block, and it made the bank look very small and fragile down below it. The whole bank probably had no more floor space than Will’s parlor, though it had never occurred to him before to think of it that way.

  He slid his hand under his coat to pat the springy round rolls in the pockets of his shirts and overalls. When the money had been in that little building it had seemed like so much more. Before it became paper in his pockets it had been a varying number on the statements sent out from that building; then it had seemed like an entity that could be expected to exercise some care in its own behalf—not a helpless abstraction, totally dependent on the conventions and caprices of men.

  Will looked down as he passed the bank and did not look up again till he was aware of the darkness of his figure mirrored in the window of Gus and Ruby’s Café-Restaurant. The sky was a little grayer with the advance of the afternoon. It was possible to believe that the sun had gone another ninety-three million miles away. It was possible to believe almost anything.

  He climbed into the truck and started around the block to head for home. But more commanding than the few simple lines he had to look at in order to drive was the persistent image of his last view of Harry’s bank. There was the partition across the center of what was really only a single room. On the customers’ side of the partition were the greasy floorboards, a shelf suspended from the wall, and a hatrack. The shelf held pen, ink, deposit slips, and blank checks. Over it hung the calendar for 1933 with only the January sheet torn from it. The calendar bore the picture of a tall, narrow building more than half a continent away. The building was the headquarters for a life insurance company. Around its top radiated the beams of a halo that culminated in the legend THE LIGHT THAT NEVER FAILS.

  But humble as it was, the bank had been a three-dimensional reality, and it had imparted the illusion of reality to the abstraction it housed. Now there was nothing more to the abstraction than the thin paper in Will’s pockets. If the boom had been all on paper, why couldn’t the collapse be all on paper too? That was what he hadn’t been able to understand for years.

  He had never had so much cash in his possession before, and it seemed as though it would hardly make any difference at all if two or three fifties fluttered out of his pockets and whirled away through the holes around the pedals.

  Halfway home he began to feel a cold ache in his fingertips and he realized he was squeezing the wheel as if it was the only thing left on earth to hang on to. It had been a frightful week. First there was Governor Comstock’s Valentine; on the very next day the President-elect—the country’s last hope—had nearly been killed by the six bullets fired at him by a crazy man; and two days later Harry Goodman closed the Eureka Bank.

  He drove up his graveled approach and past the house to the shed. He patted two or three of his pockets once more, gathered his purchases in his arms, and walked toward the lamplit kitchen to tell Rose that the final disaster had come to Eureka, too.

  There was less than an hour to go for Harry after Will left. He finished doing what he could with the books. It was just a safe minimum of juggling that he did. After all, any man had a right to the means for a fresh start for himself and his family. A couple of thousand one way or another could not do nearly as much for his depositors as it could do for him.

  He doubted that any of them had given him any credit at all for keeping the bank going after the crash, or even for saving some individual necks, too, when the crash came. In all the years he had been here, he and his family could count on their fingers the number of times they had been invited out for Sunday dinner. But if a man wanted to get into banking this was the only kind of place he could do it—if he was a Jew. Back East they would laugh if a Jew even applied for a teller’s job. They would tell him to go open a hock shop. He sometimes wondered if the people here in this godforsaken town thought he had come here because he couldn’t think of better places to live.

  Well, almost all of them had done their bit to finish him, and now they would suffer as much as he would. If they were going to run him out, he could take a little along and still be fairer to them than they had been to him. They had tried to borrow money against damaged crops, rotting barns, starving cattle, and worthless machinery. They came into his bank smelling of manure and they spat all over the outside of his cuspidor.

  The final respite from his doubting twinges had come when he figured out how to fix up Will and some other decent ones. He felt cleared and justified—and exhilarated. It was the only time in his life he had ever possessed real power, and it didn’t matter that his power came from his ruin. The important thing was that he could reward and he could punish.

  The fourth time he hauled his watch from its pocket under his belly he saw that at last it was time to close. He pulled down the wooden window and locked it from the inside. Then he slammed the door of the vault and turned the knob on the dial. He adjusted his silk scarf around his neck and he was putting on his overcoat when he heard the door slam.

  “I’m all closed up!” he yelled through the partition.

  “I gotta have change for tomorrow,” Zack Hoefener yelled back. “You and your damn soft banker’s hours. Open up!” He rapped pointlessly against the bars of the closed window.

  Harry unlocked the window and slid it up, pushing almost as high as his short arm could reach. “What do you need, Zack?”

  Zack was looking at his hat and scarf. “Leaving a little early, ain’t you?” Hoefener, of course, had never trusted him. He had been one of the first to draw out nearly all of a big savings account when things began to look bad.

  “I’m catching a cold,” Harry said. “Never have gotten used to these Dakota winters.”

  Zack looked at him again, in that way he had, as though he had a right to stare. He thrust his three crisp twenties at Harry. “All this in pennies and silver,” he said.

  “Fine,” Harry replied.

  Zack slammed the door the way he always did, and Harry remembered the way he had slammed it after the
argument they had had over his big withdrawal.

  “I have to have thirty days’ notice for a withdrawal like that,” Harry had protested.

  “You and how many other men are gonna tell me that?” Hoefener had asked. He had been a little drunker than usual. Harry had given him the money, and after that Harry had had to listen to him brag about what a foolproof and ingenious hiding place he had hit upon. He bragged about it to nearly everybody who came into his store. And then they came out of the store, headed straight across the road to the bank, and made their withdrawals.

  Harry buttoned his overcoat and locked his door. Zack was just entering his store. Harry got one more look at the man’s monstrous profile before he turned and headed up the sidewalk, his rubbers thumping on the boards and his satchel swinging heavily from his shaking arm.

  “What’s that?” Rose said to Will when he set the cashbox on the table with the groceries.

  She had put the lamp on the table to work by, and the light of it made deep shadows in the sockets of her eyes. She was nearly as tall as he was, but thin from the erosions of her austerity, which sought to conquer all hungers. There was little gray in her brown hair, though it was dull with years, and wind-worn like the boards of a house. She wore it in a bun that was thick not from the profusion of the hair but from the length of it. She swept it back so tightly that it seemed to pull at the fine skin of her temples, drawing out the length of her hazel eyes and smoothing the elegant eminences of her cheekbones. Had she known that her stern and simple hair fashion was the best possible one for her face, she might have changed it, for she had devoted much of her life to the mortification of the flesh and to plucking out the eye that might offend.