The Bones of Plenty

by Lois Phillips Hudson

  “I’ll tell you what, I’ll give you a little bit of all three, shall I?” Annie asked.

  That was almost too good to be true. “Okay,” Lucy said.

  “I’ll tell the boss,” the worst boy said.

  “Mind your own business,” Annie replied.

  Lucy noticed the way the boys looked at her as she walked away from them. They certainly acted as though they liked having her talk back the way she did. Lucy couldn’t understand it. She couldn’t imagine a male liking to have a female sass him.

  Annie held out the cone in a freckled hand. Lucy still felt as though it must be a gift, since she had not paid any money. If the boss came back he would probably not let her have it. She took the cone and got out as fast as she could. Once in Jamestown she had had an ice cream sandwich, but that was the only other time she had ever had all three flavors at once. That Annie was certainly confusing. She was obviously not a nice girl, but who else would ever dish up a three-flavored ice cream cone?

  Lucy remembered, as she walked back to the field, licking first one flavor, then another, how people had talked last spring when the Finleys came. At first everyone had thought they were gypsies. They talked with an odd Southern accent and they were living out of an old truck they parked along the railroad right-of-way. At first people weren’t going to let them get water from the town pumps, thinking that would make them move on in a hurry, but then Mr. Finley had gone and stood with the other men who lined up in front of the Town Hall, waiting to get hired. Then people knew the Finleys were not gypsies, because gypsies never worked—just passed through in their wagons or old trucks, camped for a little while, stole anything they could, and disappeared again.

  But Lucy also had bad feelings about the whiskery men who were not gypsies and proved it by standing in the Town Hall line—leaning back and bracing a heel against the dry boards, hooking their thumbs in their pockets, and staring off across the street. She didn’t like to walk past them. Once, when she was only four or five, she had asked a man, “What are you standing there for?” When he hadn’t answered, she had asked again. She had been with her grandfather, and he had grabbed her hand and tried to pull her on past the man. She had pulled back and asked the question once more, loudly.

  The man’s face got red. “I’m waiting to get hired,” he said in a funny voice.

  “You must never ask those men why they’re standing there!” her grandfather said when they got back to the truck. “That’s an awful thing to do! You made that poor man so embarrassed, and you embarrassed me too! You should have come right along when I took your hand.” Her grandfather stayed mad all the way home, and it was the only time in her life that he had ever been angry with her—absolutely the only time—and that was why she had bad feelings whenever she thought about any man standing in front of the Town Hall.

  And another thing about the Finleys—they had come to town only a few days after a terrible thing had happened that everybody was talking about all the time. People had been looking everywhere for a little boy that had been stolen from his house and they had finally found him, but he was dead. She had heard her mother and her grandmother and her great-aunt talking about it and about all the kidnappings that were happening everywhere. Her aunt had told, two or three times, about how she had heard that they found human skin under the little boy’s fingernails. That showed how hard he had fought and fought while he was being killed. He scratched so hard that the skin of the man who killed him was still stuck in his fingernails.

  Everybody knew that gypsies were kidnappers. They would steal any child for a little bit of money. And Lucy had never quite got over thinking of the Finleys as gypsies, because of the way they had camped out until they moved into that big falling-down house. They were shiftless, at the very least. They admitted they were on their way to Canada when their truck gave out in Eureka. That was what came of living on a big highway, Lucy’s great-aunt said. You never knew who was coming through your town. Look at all the bums and tramps they had to worry about! It seemed like every day, through the warm months, there would be one at the back door of her house for a handout. That was partly because there was a town pump in her yard where they came for a drink, and partly because she had one of the nicest houses in town and they thought she was made of money.

  Lucy spotted her mother and father standing with the crowd listening to the hog-callers. “Sooo—eeee! Sooo—eeee! Hog! Hog! Hog!” Oscar Johnson began his call with drawn-out syllables, and then finished with three short ones, imitating the quick snorting grunts of hogs shoving each other back and forth along the trough. Lester Zimmerman was next, and he went “Ho! Pig pig pig! Ho PIG!”

  “Look what Annie Finley gave me!” Lucy said, pulling at her mother’s arm.

  “Why, wasn’t that nice!” her mother said.

  “But you said she wasn’t a nice girl,” Lucy said.

  “Sshh! You mustn’t say that. I never said that. I just said it wasn’t nice to wear so much make-up. I don’t want you to do that, ever.”

  Lucy had her face stupidly buried in her ice cream cone when Miss Liljeqvist came sneaking up behind her for the second time that day, and before she knew it she was trapped in the circle of six legs belonging to her mother and her father and her teacher, who went on and on smiling and talking above her, dropping down little sayings to her that she was supposed to think were funny, pretending that Miss Liljeqvist had never kept her in at recess, never made her stand in the cloakroom, never given her a D in Deportment, never made her copy over perfectly good papers because they weren’t neat, never punished her for wiggling a loose tooth with her tongue and making Douglas Sinclair laugh, never written her name on the board for whispering, even when she wasn’t, or never made everybody laugh at her by telling her that she had the messiest desk in the room. Oh, no! None of those things had ever happened, had they? It made Lucy sick, the way grownups always pretended around Miss Liljeqvist.

  Four more weeks of school after May Day and another whole year in the third grade. Lucy sometimes even used up a good wish on a first star in order to wish that somebody would marry Miss Liljeqvist, but she couldn’t imagine who ever would. Some day Miss Liljeqvist would be just like Gid and Gad—only worse.

  Sunday, May 14

  It was a day that would have been too hot except that Lucy still remembered winter so well that no day could be too hot. Besides, the day was the color of spring, not summer. Nothing was brown yet.

  They were driving to her grandfather’s house from church and she was watching the wheat grow. The fields that were newly seeded would look black, but if you stared at them without blinking, sometimes they would turn suddenly from black to green. Then you would know that you had seen the wheat grow. You had seen the little green blades from millions and millions of wheat grains all come cutting through the black ground at the same time. It might happen that after you blinked the field would seem black again, but if you squeezed your eyes and stared a minute, you would see that the green was there after all, and the millions of tiny wheat sprouts were growing away.

  They were going to have dinner with her grandmother, and the table was set with the beautiful pure white Bavarian china that was kept for Sunday. The kitchen was hot because of the oven, but the dining room was cool and dark, shadowed by the half-drawn blinds. The cherry desk in the corner was closed to cover the pigeon holes full of papers, and the only light spot besides the table itself was the white cloth across the high sideboard. On the cloth stood a big clock in a case made like a building, with pillars holding up a peaked roof and brass lions’ heads looking out—far out, to the North Pole and to Africa.

  Lucy liked to go in and stand in the readied room while everybody else was still in the kitchen. The damask cloth hanging halfway to the floor, the massive white dinner plates, the slim gravy boat, the cut-glass relish dish full of precisely arranged dills, bread-and-butter pickles, and spiced beets, the platter waiting for fried chicken—these all had a Sunday cleanness, and a reassuring pl
enitude after a long starving morning in church.

  Her mother was feeding Cathy and her father was talking the way he always did. One realized, when one was far enough away so that his voice didn’t sound quite so loud, that he said some things that were funny.

  “Those Hindus,” he said. “A whole country full of grown men wearing diapers. That’s just what they are. There’s a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand of them to every British soldier in the country. Who knows how many? If they can’t get rid of the British by fighting, what kind of yellow-bellies are they? The Mahatma and his hunger strikes! We got rid of the British when we felt like it, didn’t we? Phooey!”

  “Well, what do you think of Roosevelt’s new inflation bill?” her grandfather said.

  “What’s the matter with that idea?” her father said. “Nine billion dollars the farmers owe in this country—in deflated money. If you don’t want the banks and insurance companies to take over every last farm in the country, what else are you going to do, besides inflate the money again?”

  “Well, anyway,” her grandfather said in that voice he used when he was trying to make her father stop shouting, “this parity idea of his is a good one. Getting the farmer back to where he was with the city man before the war.”

  “Pshaw!” her father shouted louder than ever. “What does it mean, anyhow? Just words! It won’t have the least little effect on the mess in this country. You wait. It’ll be so bad over here, it’ll make Spain look like a Sunday school picnic!”

  “Who are you going to be fighting, George?” her grandfather asked.

  “It’s ready,” said her grandmother.

  They came in and sat down around the table. They all bowed their heads and shut their eyes, except for her father. Her mother and her grandmother and grandfather said the Lord’s Prayer together.…

  Will had a stabbing pain in his abdomen; nevertheless, his mind was fixed on Lucy. He watched her now, staring out past him without seeing him—her eyes fixed on the button in the window as though she were willing herself out of the room—willing herself free and alone in the fields wherever the button floated ahead of her. She was doing something with her eyes, narrowing them and then letting them go out of focus to make the button move one way and then another. He could remember when Stuart had done such tricks with his eyes. Although Lucy had an undeniably strong resemblance to George, Will could see so much of his own line in her too. Her mouth was like Rachel’s and her lips were chapped, the way Rachel’s always used to be. She bit them unconsciously, as she stared out the window. Rachel had done that, too. And Will saw that she seemed to be doomed to wandering the prairie alone during her childhood, like Rachel, with a baby sister too much younger to be company for her—if anybody would ever be company for her. And the world she must enter, if she was ever to be less lonely, was moving always farther away from her.

  Will could not see how George and Rachel would ever manage to put her through college, and yet college would be the only door that would ever open to the world she ought to be in. He believed she had the intellect to win a scholarship some day, but by the time that day came, the stubborn, defiant streak she had inherited from George might well have so alienated her teachers that her record would in no way reflect her true capabilities. He knew—now that it was too late for the knowledge to do any good—that something like that had happened to Stuart. He would hate to have Lucy’s chance at college depend on her winning of a scholarship, and so he had drawn up a tentative will that would see both her and Cathy through. But he had never gone ahead and had the will made legal because things had been so uncertain the last few years. He had to think of his children before he thought of his grandchildren, and he had to think of his wife before he thought of his children. He wanted to leave Rose a little more than just his life insurance, and Rachel and Stuart might need the money long before it was time for Lucy to go to college. And there was the possibility of other grandchildren—either Rachel’s or Stuart’s children. He wanted to be fair to them all.

  “Who wants to come and help feed the lambs?” he said.

  “Me!” Lucy cried. That was another thing he remembered—how Stuart had once been able to come back into a room instantaneously when there was something he wanted to come back for.

  They filled three baby bottles with morning’s milk and Will slipped the black nipples over them. When the lambs were smaller, he had warmed the milk, but that wasn’t necessary any more.

  One of the lambs was an orphan and the other two were twins their mothers wouldn’t own. Sometimes a ewe did that—just bunted away one of the twins when feeding time came around. In the natural state, that lamb would simply starve to death. Will could never understand such an apparent distortion of the maternal instinct. What other instinct was stronger? He’d always wondered the same thing about those human twins born to Isaac, that other keeper of flocks. Why had the mother loved Jacob and not Esau? In the case of the ewe who pushed away one twin, did she choose between them for such obscure and female reasons as caused Rebekah to choose between Jacob and Esau? Or was there some practical instinct working—did the ewe know that she had only enough milk to raise one lamb, and did her instinct force her to push away the weaker one, even while her mother’s heart bled that the world must be so?

  When he thought of Jacob and Esau, Will thought of Rachel and Stuart. It was impossible to believe that he had not loved them equally. Surely, surely, he had loved them equally. Why then, had one of them run away, bitterly renouncing his birthright? Esau had at least cried out to his blind father. (Hast thou but one blessing, my father? Bless me, even me also, O my father!) But never once had Stuart spoken of the things that troubled him. He had simply run away, leaving his father to wonder, for two tortured years, what terrible blindness of his own had driven his son away from him.

  They stopped a little way from the sheep shed and the lambs came running, crying in their high baby voices. Will held a bottle in each hand and stuck them through the fence.

  He let Lucy have the third bottle. “Now hang on with both hands,” he told her. “When he gets ahold of that, he’ll really wrastle it!”

  The bottle throbbed in her hands from the pulsations of his hungry little tongue. His small black jaws never let go, no matter how fast the milk came. She could see it welling and bubbling at the corners of his mouth, but never a drop rolled out on his chin. It wasn’t that way with Cathy at all. She could swallow only so fast, and after that the milk poured down her neck. But the lamb had no trouble at all. He could waggle his little black tail, and do a dance with his twinkling black legs, and butt his head up and down, as though he was nursing his mother, and pull at the bottle—all at the same time. He finished the bottle before Cathy would really have got started, and then he pulled harder than ever.

  “Take it away, now,” her grandfather said. “He’ll chew up the nipple.”

  Lucy put her fingers next to the little black muzzle and pulled out the nipple. The lamb bleated for more.

  “What a little pig you are!” he laughed. “Look how full he is.” The lamb’s stomach was bulged out under its thin baby wool.

  “All babies are little pigs, aren’t they?” Lucy said.

  “They sure are,” he agreed. “They’d never grow up if they weren’t.”

  The smell of the milk had seemed like the soul of the gentle, fertile day itself. Now that the milk was gone, it was as if they still smelled it in the soft south breeze—a wind so soft that it scarcely seemed to be there, but still it was—as elusive but as alive as the pushing wheat in the fields. Lucy said hopefully, “Have you got time to tell me a story?”

  She was as hungry as the lambs. He felt it. He wondered how it was that he knew so many things about her, and how it was that sometimes a child could be closer to the parents of its parents than to its own parents. His own grandfather had been full of Indian stories and Civil War stories, and Will now had his grandfather’s medal, hung on a red-and-blue ribbon, packed away in the trunk along wit
h the other Civil War things. That seemed so long ago. Yet his own father was already twelve years old when the war ended, and his own father remembered when Lincoln was shot.

  But Lucy was not interested in war stories, nor in Indian battles, though she liked stories about Indians in the forests or on the prairies, so long as there were animals in the stories too. She could not tell him what she expected from his stories, but he had begun to understand that she looked to him to build a plausible passageway between the two disparate and distant places in which she lived.

  The two far-apart places were irreconcilable. The first was the world of the little dark house set between its two narrow groves in the prairie. The other was the world in her head that changed and expanded as she grew, and slipped ever farther away from the first. Many years ago, when Rachel was only a year or so older than Lucy, he and Rose had bought the books that now made Lucy’s second world. The set was called The Young Folks’ Treasury, and it ran to twelve thick volumes bound in red, generously adorned with heavy shiny color pages full of beasts, giants, fairies, princesses, and heroes of legends.

  After several years of being read to by her mother, Lucy was now working her own way through them. She was presently in the stage where the enchanted world was intertwined with the religious one. She believed that if she only wished hard enough for something, and worked hard enough to deserve it, she would surely get it. She wanted stories from him that proved she was right. She was getting harder and harder to tell stories to.