The Bones of Plenty

by Lois Phillips Hudson

  “I don’t need it,” Rachel said.

  He put the gun in the back seat and laid an old blanket over it. This was not the first time he had headed for Otto’s place to help him out of some kind of mess. He could never say no to Otto, maybe because he despised him so much. Otto owed him seed corn, a post-hole digger, God knew how many pounds of assorted nails, a couple of butchering days, and weeks of transporting Lucy to and from school to repay him for the transporting he did of Otto’s brood. Oh, the sheriff thought he was pretty safe, all right, picking on Otto. What the sheriff didn’t know was that hayseeds weren’t as dumb as they might look. They understood the principles the sheriff operated on just as well as if they’d been all dandied up in tailor-made suits of clothes.

  Although George was Otto’s closest neighbor, he was far from being the first man to arrive. He was surprised to see so many there already, because he was an hour early himself; he’d been too nervous to stay around home any longer. He wondered just what they would all do when the chips were down. After all the big talk last night, were they going to back out at the last minute? It might take only one weak man with one honest bid to upset the applecart. He had the feeling that they were all watching each other. Well, they could watch him all they wanted to, by God. Nobody had to worry about G. A. Custer turning yellow.

  He looked around for Otto and saw him hovering on the edge of a conversation. They were all going to be tough on Otto today. They were going to let him know that the meeting and the things they were going to do didn’t change a thing—that he was nothing but a loudmouth deadbeat and they were here mainly on account of their own skins, not his.

  Somebody tapped his elbow and he whirled around to find Otto’s half-witted nine-year-old behind him.

  “What do you want, Irene? This is no time for a little girl like you to be pestering around! You get along into the house, now.”

  “I just wondered if you brought Lucy to play with me,” Irene said.

  “I just told you this isn’t a place for little girls to be fiddling around. You get along, now!”

  She turned and headed for the house, but she stopped on the steps of the porch to look back to the road. The sheriff’s big car pointed its nose into the driveway, but the men were making no move to clear the way for him.

  Treat us like mules and we’ll act like mules—so far so good, George thought. The sheriff leaned steadily on his horn and the men began to inch aside. But he didn’t follow behind their slow withdrawal. He waited till the driveway was entirely clear and then he roared up it at thirty miles an hour and braked with the bumper of the car almost touching the steps. A brand-new Oldsmobile followed the sheriff like a scared kid hanging on his mother’s skirts.

  Nothing made a farmer any madder than having a city man drive down his private road like it was Highway Number 10. If a city man killed one of the chickens he sent squawking into the dirt, he would try to jew the farmer down to a few cents less than the market price and then go home and complain to his wife about how a hayseed had held him up. George remembered how a lightning-rod salesman had driven into his yard that way and broken a rooster’s leg. Then the fellow had had the gall to ask George why he didn’t keep his turkeys and chickens penned up.

  “Well, now then, I reckon they don’t clutter up the yard as bad as birds like you! Those droppings help out the grass a little. What do you do with your own manure, besides come highballing in here and try to sell it to me?” George had asked him.

  The salesman argued that George could eat “that old hen,” as he called it, and George had delivered the worst insult he could think of on the spur of the moment. “That’s no hen! That’s a rooster! How come a queer bird like you don’t know a cock when you see one?”

  Now if the fellow hadn’t been a pansy, he certainly would have crawled out of his car then, and let a man get a fair swing at him. But the city men never did get out of their cars.

  George knew that every man there had had experience with smart-alecks driving into the yard and nearly clipping a dog or a kid, and even more experience with crazy hunters trespassing on his property and leaving a gate open, or worse—just making a gate with a pair of wire-cutters so he had to chase his stock all over the county by the time he discovered the break in the fence. George had a notion that the sheriff’s dust-raising entrance might do just the opposite of what he intended it to do. No doubt he was trying to show off his authority to a bunch of hicks, but George didn’t think anybody was going to look at it that way. No, they were all just going to remember the times when some other city man had done the same thing.

  The representative of the law opened the driver’s door and pushed a putteed leg out into the dust settling over the fenders and running boards.

  The leg was followed by the rest of Sheriff Richard M. Press, who was nearly as fat as George had expected him to be. His heavy leather Sam Browne belt seemed much more necessary to support his belly than to help hold up the pistol that rode on his left thigh.

  Both his deputies were on the thin side. Apparently the sheriff himself got all the graft; the deputies must not have anything on him yet. One deputy climbed out of the other side of the driver’s seat and let the second out of the back. The second deputy was obviously low man on the totem pole; he had to sit in back behind the wire, where there were no inside handles on the doors. George wondered if anybody he knew would be riding in that back seat on the way back to Jamestown.

  The second deputy had been riding with the sheriff’s auction block and he lugged it up toward the porch where Irene was still standing, her mouth even farther open than usual. He trod on the prongs of a kitchen fork left on a step by one of the little boys, and when the handle of it flipped up at his leg, he jumped as though it was a rattlesnake, fell against the elegant splintered balustrade, and went through the weak step with his boot heel. Irene began to laugh wildly, clasping her hands over her shiny lips while she staggered back and forth on the porch.

  Somebody yelled, “Make him pay for that step, Otto! Don’t let him get away with that! Call the sheriff, Otto!”

  George wished he had thought of that crack himself. It sounded like it came from Lester Zimmerman.

  The representative of the Big Man in Jamestown climbed out of his Oldsmobile with a whole briefcase full of authority under his arm. George could see him wince when the dust squished up over his pointed, two-toned shoes, perforated in a dandy style. He was wearing a silk suit and a panama hat with a silk polka-dot band around it.

  George noticed that both he and the sheriff mounted the steps very respectfully. The sheriff’s star was dwarfed by the size of his chest. He’d probably taken half his hush-money in moonshine for the last thirteen years. He’d probably drunk enough of it to kill a man who wasn’t too mean to die.

  The second deputy set up the auction block while the first one hovered near the man in the silk suit, like the rich man’s stooge that he was. All four of them stood in a line on Otto Wilkes’s rotting porch—soldiers of the old order on a rampart of Victorian gingerbread. Behind them, Irene giggled in her corner. The silk suit man scowled and spoke from the side of his mouth to the deputy. The deputy stared at Irene and whispered to the sheriff. The sheriff jiggled his shoulders and grinned. Nobody approached Irene.

  Big and fat as he was, the sheriff had a high tenor voice that rose to an almost effeminate pitch when he strained to be heard above the crowd. It was a crime for a man like that to try to run an auction. Take off the bastard’s uniform and what would you have? A potbellied, bowlegged dude that pretty near any man there could lick in a fair fight. His .45 pistol was nothing but a joke in open country where a man could be picked off from a mile away. A gun like that belonged in the movies. It was not guns that made a man like George respect the law—or cease to respect it.

  “All right!” His voice cracked. “You men out there! Let’s have it quiet, so we can have a fair and square sale here!” The men quieted at once, as if by a signal decided on beforehand among them
selves—a signal that had nothing to do with the sheriff’s order. He seemed taken aback by such prompt obedience, as though he hadn’t quite got ready his next sentence when he was confronted by the silence he had commanded for himself. He took a paper from the hands of the man in the silk suit, listened to a few things the man had to say, and turned back to the auction block. It was clear, all right, who ran the law in Stutsman County—silk-suited moneylenders, that was who.

  The sheriff walked back to the front of the porch, looking like the employee he was, and began to read from the paper, which explained that the mortgage-holder, having made due allowances for “conditions,” was now forced to sell the mortgaged property in order to fulfill obligations to stockholders in the insurance company. Not that everybody didn’t already know what it was going to say.

  Still, the words of the paper were almost like the words of the Bible, and the ideas were those on which the whole American economic and political system had been built. Anybody would have to admit that hardly a man there could ever hope to own land without the institution of mortgages. George could feel the faltering of the crowd, and he could tell the sheriff felt it, too. Were all those men at the meeting last night going to turn out to be nothing but sheep now, after all?

  It wasn’t hard to see how a man like the sheriff got ahead. In times like these there was practically unlimited money behind a man who could run a county. George wondered how far the sheriff was prepared to go today to show the Big Man how well he could run his county.

  The sheriff announced that the first offering on the auction block would be Otto’s Percherons. He was a shrewd one, all right. He obviously figured that some weak lover of horseflesh was going to break down and bid on that team. The Percherons, like Otto’s house, were his last legacy from the bonanza-farm days. Old Man Wilkes had owned close to a hundred champion Percherons, and he never sent an eight-horse team into his fifty-seven hundred acres that wasn’t perfectly matched for color. The ancestors of Otto’s team had broken the sod on George’s farm.

  But the Percheron strain had proved to be more glorious and durable than the Wilkes strain. To George it no longer seemed appropriate for a Wilkes to own such horses. Otto did not deserve them. It was not hard to figure out that that was just what the sheriff hoped they were all thinking. Almost every day a farmer had to try to think one step ahead of what some mean animal was going to do next. It wasn’t nearly as much of a challenge to figure out what was in the mind of the sheriff as to figure out what was in the mind of an old cow that had hidden her new calf somewhere in a fifty-acre pasture full of gullies and six-foot weeds.

  Little thousand-pound Morgans could supply as much horsepower as a man usually needed now that there was no sod to break, and they ate about half of what a two-thousand-pound Percheron required. Nevertheless, if a man couldn’t get rid of feed grain for love nor money, then he might as well feed champion Percherons as Morgans, mightn’t he? The sheriff understood that every man there would be asking himself that question.

  When the two deputies gingerly descended the steps and headed for the barn, every man knew they would not come back without the horses, because Otto had been complaining ever since the sheriff had come out and laid down the law about what chattels were to be where. But no man was really prepared for what the deputies led out of the gloom beneath the high open doors. Otto must have risen even earlier than any of the rest of them. He had curried the last bit of chaff and manure from the dark-gray fetlocks and polished the last loose hair and speck of dust from the enormous dappled rumps. He had tied their clipped manes into red-ribboned soldiers marching up the mountains of their necks. He had braided their tails with red ribbon, too, but it was the frivolous parade of tiny ribbons arching over the magnificent necks that emphasized, as nothing else could have, the four thousand pounds of horse perfection that were being offered for George and Otto’s other neighbors to bid upon.

  George’s heart leapt as though he had been transported into the show ring of a great fair. Here was a team such as men like him had yearned for all their lives—ever since they had been three-year-old boys at the fairs, standing as close as they dared to the stalls in the Equine Building, breathing in the sweet smell of hay and sweat and horse. They had all spent hours looking up at those horses and they each possessed an infallible image of such a horse from every possible angle. They had begun their loving admiration when they were so short that they still stood far beneath the horses’ bellies and their eyes were but a few inches above the splendid hocks—marvelous peaks of bone, majestic as the knuckles of God. Every fall at the fair their eyes had been a little higher, and they had committed to unfading memory a little more of a champion’s configuration.

  George remembered the feeling of stepping worshipfully aside when the owners came to lead the nervous animals from their stalls, and he remembered how it was to follow along and watch what happened in the hot, brilliant ring before the grandstand, where the judges paced back and forth with dazzling white spats over their shoes, swinging their canes, cocking their white straw hats, writing on score cards. Otto’s Percherons were the kind of horses that wore the ribbons away from the ring.

  The sheriff turned his head from the horses to smile at the silent men. He was a man, George thought, lower than a worm’s belly button.

  “I reckon you men all know these horses!” the sheriff yelled. “You all know they’ve won some prizes at the State Fair! A beautifully matched team. Who’ll start in at one and a quarter for the team? One and a quarter, one and a quarter!” He was trying to sound like a professional auctioneer, but he wasn’t very convincing.

  Not that he needed to be convincing. There wasn’t a man there who could not have scared up a hundred dollars or so by selling his two best horses. They were shabbily dressed men and they all had to go home to stricken farms after this shindig was over. How could they help lusting after the glory of that team?

  “All right, men,” the sheriff shouted. “If I don’t hear one and a quarter, I’ll up it to one and half before I even hear the first bid. Now who’ll give me one and a quarter?”

  George felt an earthquake unhinging his legs and rattling his head. He lifted his voice over the crowd. “It’s an insult to fine horseflesh for us men here not to bid on an offer like that! I’ll give you one and a quarter—one dollar and a quarter, I bid—one buck and two bits. That team is worth that any day!”

  The tremors still fluttered in his stomach. Now, surely, somebody would jump in after him and help to break this thing up quickly before the sheriff hypnotized them all.

  There was a fair amount of nervous laughter, but nobody said anything. The men were dazed, as though they had wakened from a beautiful dream to find the dream standing in front of them. Nobody could take his eyes off the Percherons.

  Both of them were restive under the fearful hands of the city men. They couldn’t use their braided-up tails against the flies swarming over them, and the muscles of their thick hides flickered steadily over the ribs and shoulders and down the legs. The deputy holding the gelding apprehensively eyed the dappled skin rolling over the mammoth planes and joints of his horse, but the deputy holding the stallion had much greater worries.

  He looked very small and impotently urban. The brim of his hat came below the stallion’s nostrils and the broad chest of the animal was like a wall behind him.

  The stallion was in a state of monstrous excitement. It was the kind of moment to bring a fleeting wistfulness to the purest of men—the kind of moment that had for centuries inspired cave paintings, tile murals, and ceremonial costumes. It was the kind of moment that the deputy was scarcely qualified to deal with.

  The men emerged from their dream to become conscious of a mare standing by Lester Zimmerman’s wagon. She was making feverish signals to the stallion and Lester had both hands on her halter. Otto looked over toward Lester and gave him a quick grin.

  Lester had prudently unhitched the mare as soon as he arrived, and now he let her go. She sp
rang away from him to meet her muscular prince.

  The stallion plunged and knocked the deputy off balance. The man yanked himself back to his feet by the halter rope and ran with the horse. He bounced behind the driving shoulders like a man tied to a locomotive. The stallion, as unhampered as a locomotive, had forgotten all about the man attached to his halter. The rope burned out of the deputy’s grip and he fell aside without even a wound to show for his disgraceful efforts.

  The men who had demurred so long in letting the sheriff’s car up the drive took no time at all to clear a path from the stallion to the mare.

  George wondered at the ignorance of the deputy in trying to manage such a horse with nothing but a halter. Had the fellow thought a halter was a bridle? Didn’t city people know that no man could ever trust any stallion? Didn’t they know the world was full of stallions so mean they’d as soon as bite your arm off as look at you? Wilkes himself had a goat running around the farm that had climbed into a Percheron stallion’s manger for a peaceful summer afternoon’s nap. When the horse returned to his stall from the day’s work, he went in after the goat and took the tip of its face off in one snap of his jaws. Otto’s goat had no nose now, but its nostrils were still there—just holes in its blunted muzzle. It had recovered, but it was a funny sight—and a memorable one.

  Didn’t city people know that out on the range with nobody to get in their road, the mustang stallions ripped each other to the bone with their big yellow teeth and commonly fought till one was killed? This little city man was probably damned lucky that the mare had been there to distract the stallion before he got other ideas.

  The horses thundered away together, the mare’s harness jangling and sliding from side to side. It was a cumbersome, workaday wedding garment. Watching them fleeing toward their assignation, Lester remarked to George that it was too bad about the crupper strap, but probably it wouldn’t bother a pecker like that too much. Oscar Johnson heard him and passed the remark on to his neighbor.