The Bones of Plenty

by Lois Phillips Hudson

  Rose didn’t know, till she heard Stuart come downstairs in the morning and go out to milk, how much she had been wanting him to run away.

  There were some more things she would like to say this morning. There were some questions she would have liked answers to, but they were the kind of questions she could not ask him. Had he even done what that girl apparently said he did on the day his father was buried? Did he remember what he had done? Was he so innocent that he didn’t know that one time rarely caused a pregnancy? Did he think humans bred like cows in heat? Or had it been more than one time?

  A dozen times that day she reversed herself. The girl could not come here. The girl would have to come here, or Stuart would have to leave the farm, and what would become of him then?

  One could not see the girl’s mother in the store or on the sidewalk and not feel pity for her. Rose understood that the Finleys belonged to a class of people that could not be said to have had any real chance in the world, and therefore the whole world was to blame for their condition and nobody in the world was blameless. On the other hand, did she and Will owe their one son to that doomed clan, to make up for the way the world had used them? How could it help the Finleys for her boy to be sacrificed to them?

  When Abraham had piled the wood for the burnt offering and taken the knife in his hand, the Lord intervened for the sake of Isaac, the long-promised son of the aged Sarah—the one boy born to sow the seed of Abraham. The Lord intervened between Abraham and his obedience. But where now was the ram caught in the thicket, the substitution for the human sacrifice? Will You not find some way now, Lord, to save me and my son from our obedience?

  But still no way had been found when she got into the car with George and Rachel and the children to drive into town for the wedding. Every time she looked at George she could not help hating him. It was the fight that had done it. Otherwise they would have got Stuart home after the funeral.

  When they passed Gebhardt’s, Rose knew that either she must be insane or that the world must be insane. Otherwise, how could she be hoping that Stuart was inside Gebhardt’s right now?

  But he wasn’t. The car he had borrowed from a friend for a trip to Bismarck was parked on the road in front of the house.

  They parked behind it and walked up the path. Pearl Finley met them at the door.

  “Come right in, folks!”

  The day was unseasonably warm for the last of March and they sent all the children out to the yard till the ceremony was over.

  Annie had not come downstairs yet. They sat in the parlor without speaking. All of them wondered how much everybody else knew. All of them knew that what anybody else didn’t know he could probably guess. George tapped his feet and looked around the room. He wondered what rent Harry Goodman had charged them. They might not be paying rent to anybody at all, now that Harry was gone. The mortgage he’d taken on the place had probably been tossed out with the other worthless scraps of paper that Harry had been calling assets. From the condition of the parlor ceiling a man might suppose that there was no roof on the house at all, but George knew he had seen the facsimile of a roof from the outside.

  Lucy wondered what they were doing at the house. She had never been to a wedding. She understood that something happened when people got married, so that afterwards the man had the right to boss the woman around. There were other, less forthright things about marriage which she sensed were even more significant, and though she had no idea of what they were, she felt terribly embarrassed about them.

  Getting married seemed like just about the dumbest thing a person could do. As far as she could tell, people always regretted it. She couldn’t understand why people went right on doing something that they ought to know they were going to be sorry for. Whenever she had to stand around in the store waiting for her father to finish a conversation, she never heard the men call their wives anything but “the old lady” or “the old woman,” and they always sounded as though they hated the wives they were married to. It was the same when she listened to the women talk, when it was too cold to play outside on a Sunday afternoon and the men were all out in the barn. Women always said things like, “No matter what I do, I can’t please him,” or “They’re all alike. They’re all alike.”

  “Hey, let’s play tag!” Audley yelled. He rushed at her, socked her on the arm, and veered away. “You’re It. Lucy’s It and had a fit and couldn’t get over it!”

  “No, I’m not! I don’t want to play!”

  “You have to play! Ma said you’re related to me now! You’re just like my sister, and you have to do what I say!”

  He danced up close to her and squatted, daring her to tag him while he was at a disadvantage. “Oh, ho, ho! Lucy couldn’t catch a flea!”

  He began to sing, jumping from one squat to another like a frog:

  My mamma saidee,

  If I’d be goodee,

  That she would buy me

  A rubber dollee!

  Now don’t you tell her

  I’ve got a feller,

  Or she won’t buy me

  No rubber dollee!

  “I haven’t got a feller!” Lucy screamed.

  “Oh, ho, ho! Blue and yeller, got a feller!”

  “I’m not blue and yellow!” she screamed again.

  “Oh yes, you are!” He was delighted at how easy it was to get her goat. All those days last summer when he was herding her father’s cows she wouldn’t even talk to him, she was so highfalutin. But it was all different now. They were related! “Your jacket’s blue and your hair’s light yellow,” he told her.

  “Hair doesn’t count!”

  “Lucy’s It and had a fit and couldn’t get over it.”

  “Leave me alone! I don’t have to play with you if I don’t want to!”

  His excitement turned to fury when he saw that he might not win after all. If he didn’t win now, he would look silly. He had to make her mad enough to chase him. Besides, he had to prove that she had to play with him. He picked up a rope lying on the ground and tied a loop in the end of it.

  “Okay,” he said. “If you’re just going to stand there and never move, I’ll lasso you. I’ll show you how a Texas cowboy ropes himself a steer.”

  Lucy stood her ground. He tried to get the heavy rope to twirl, but he couldn’t manage it.

  “Ho, ho yourself. What a cowboy!”

  “I’ll show you!” he shouted. “Come here, Sandy! That’s a boy!” The big mongrel collie bounded up to him and he put the lasso around its neck. The dog pulled back and the rope tightened, making his thick winter hair bulge out in a ruff.

  “You’re hurting him,” Lucy cried. “You’re choking his neck!”

  “So what. He’s my dog, ain’t he? Come here, you!” Audley dragged him across the yard to a tree. He held the end of the rope in one hand and climbed to the first big branch and sat there, still holding the rope.

  “What do you think you’re going to do now?” Lucy jeered. His little sister was standing beside Lucy, looking up at him. Two females down there—to be shown something.

  “Just you wait and see!” He had no idea himself of what he could do. It had to be something to make them respect him, that was all.

  He jumped off the branch, landing lightly in his black tennis shoes. He saw that Lucy was looking at the big frayed holes around his ankle bones and toes. The rope dangled over the branch, and he gave a yank on it that brought the dog sliding up to him. He yanked again and the dog’s front legs pawed the air and he started to cough for breath. His tongue hung out. It was turning purple.

  “Let him down!” Lucy begged. “You’re choking him! He’ll die!”

  “I don’t have to do nothing a girl tells me to do! Sissy!”

  He hauled on the rope once more and the dog’s hind legs barely touched the ground. Thin foam lay along his black lips, and his kicks spun him around so that he kept losing his footing entirely.

  “Let him down!”

  “Sissy!”

  The dog hu
ng limply. His legs twitched.

  “You’ve killed him!”

  “I have not! I’ll show you!” He let go of the rope and the dog fell to the ground.

  Audley felt for the rope through the dog’s hair and loosened it. A great gulp of air tore down the bruised throat and the dog started to pant weakly.

  Lucy put her hand down to touch the matted hair of his neck, but he made a snarling sound and drew his lips even farther back from his teeth.

  “See! He doesn’t want you! Girls! Sissies!” Audley reached his own hand down to Sandy and the dog snapped his jaws shut over the hand.

  “You fucker!” Audley shrieked. He jumped up and swung the toe of his tennis shoe into the dog’s heaving ribs.

  Lucy rushed away from him. She had never heard anyone say that word before. She didn’t suppose it was ever said—only written and thought. She couldn’t stop hearing it and seeing it in her head. Where could she go? Where could she escape from this boy and that word he had spoken?

  Audley had won. He had won after all.

  George hated getting cleaned up in the middle of a workday for some damn fool reason. And nobody had told him he was going to be expected to eat food coming out of the Finley kitchen, either. He was exasperated at being blamed for this whole rotten mess, and he was damned if he’d hang around and be polite. He took a few bites of the cake and then he caught Rachel’s eye and gave her the signal.

  They could see the signs all over the honeymoon car as soon as they walked out on the porch. Somebody had done a quick job with white calcimine. Lucy was already down at the road reading them, and she was waiting to ask about some of them. They said, “Bismarck or Bust,” “Just Married,” “Whooopee!” “Watch Our Dust,” and “Hot Springs Tonight!”

  “What does that one mean, Mamma?” she asked.

  “Why, I don’t know, dear,” Rachel said. “Maybe whoever painted it thought they were going to go to Hot Springs.”

  George looked at the sign and at Rachel and began to laugh.

  Lucy said, “But it says Bismarck too, so whoever did it must know they’re going to Bismarck.”

  George laughed some more and Rachel felt the blood in her face.

  “Well, what does it mean?” Lucy asked again. “I just want to know.”

  “Nothing!” Rachel said.

  George said, “Come on, hurry along here. If we don’t get back home right away, there won’t be enough time to bother hitching up the plow again.” He stopped laughing. Stuart had a lot to learn—about the beans in the bottle and such things.

  It was the final mortification as far as Rachel was concerned. Of course it was one or several of Annie’s admirers who had written such a thing. A trollop from this filthy world the mother of Will Shepard’s grandchild? Annie Finley the mother of Lucy’s cousin? Unthinkable!

  “Am I related to them now?” Lucy asked.

  Rachel had never seen a child who had such a knack for startling a person who was thinking private thoughts. “Related to who?” she stalled.

  “Them! Audley and all the rest of those kids.”

  It was preposterous. It couldn’t be true. “No,” Rachel said.

  “Now, Rachel, what good does it do to lie about it!” George said. “Yes, Lucy, you are.”

  “In a very distant way that doesn’t count at all,” Rachel said.

  Rose did not speak. They took her home and left her.

  Rachel hurried to change her clothes and do the dinner dishes she had had to leave. Lucy trailed her nervously. Finally she brought it out. “He said a terrible word.”

  “Who? Audley?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did he say?”

  Lucy looked up at her. She would never speak that word to anybody, and especially not to her mother, because she knew that her mother would certainly never have heard of it.

  “Well, what did he say?” Rachel asked again. One never knew what little boys and girls might do together. It was always a worry.

  “A very terrible word.”

  The whole thing became steadily more preposterous. “Well,” Rachel told her, “you must always be polite to him, but you don’t need to play with him. After all, he’s more than two years older than you. If he ever says another terrible word to you, you just walk away and tell him you weren’t brought up that way.”

  Being related to the Finleys was beyond the power of Rachel’s imagination. They were of a different world, a different species. She could never forget how Audley had come and gone so bleakly day after day when he was herding the cows. She had been repelled by his accent and by his strange ways. He represented to her everything in human existence that was rootless and meaningless, and therefore degrading. The one thing she could not bear to think of was to be rootless, to be without well-defined positions, both human and geographical. The Finleys were of that mass of human creatures in the world who were so unbelievably numerous and so unbelievably miserable that one could think of them only in statistics—hordes of Indians excreting, bathing, and worshiping in the Ganges, with a certain percentage of them dying each year from several kinds of plagues; hordes of Chinese in rice paddies along the Yellow River being swept away or made homeless by floods. Plagues, floods, earthquakes, and similar catastrophes—they always seemed to kill such people. One never even knew how they died, there were so many of them. They were simply approximate numbers in the aftermath of calamity.

  The Finleys had been flooded out several times. Once his mother had whimsically remarked that Audley had almost been born in a rowboat. Rachel could not imagine the sort of people who could feel no more concern than that over the birth of a new descendant—an heir. To be connected to such a family? Unthinkable. Stuart married to a girl who had been serving beer in a saloon before she was seventeen years old? Unthinkable …

  All afternoon Lucy marveled over hearing that word said aloud. She had seen it chalked on a culvert and inked on the gray paint of the long corridor leading from the schoolrooms out to the toilets in the shed. The corridor smelled of the toilets and the lime they put down the holes, and she connected the word with those smells, but she really knew that the word Audley said did not stand for either kind of thing that the toilets were for, because she knew those two bad words, too. Whatever did this one mean, anyway?

  Rose was as polite as she could be to Annie. She did not speak much because now there was less to say than there had ever been. Part of the reason she felt so little inclination or need to talk to Annie was that most of the time she could not really believe that Annie was there.

  The girl had certain habits that were distasteful. Every morning upstairs she curled her orangish hair with a curling iron she heated by suspending the handles across the top of a lamp chimney and letting the tongs hang down toward the flaming wick. Every morning a faint smell of burning hair floated down to the kitchen while Rose was cooking breakfast and Stuart was out milking. That was the only time of day when Rose deeply felt Annie’s inescapable presence—perhaps because it was morning and one tended to look for some relief from the new day and there never was any.

  But the girl worked very hard, and she was surprisingly clean. Rose wished, in fact, that Annie would not work so hard, because it left her with less to do herself at a time when she needed more to do. She was already planning on a much bigger garden than they had had last year. That would keep her busy all summer. And next winter there would presumably be a child to keep Annie busy. But the next month or so was going to be difficult, with Annie constantly rushing to usurp tasks that she had set out for herself. If Rose was planning to peel the potatoes at five-fifteen and went into the kitchen only to find that Annie had peeled them at five o’clock, then what was there to do at five-fifteen? However, since it still did not seem plausible that Annie could belong there permanently, the girl seemed more like a misguided helpful elf in the house than anything else. She would inexplicably disappear some night the way helpful elves eventually did.

  One afternoon the Eggers stoppe
d in for a minute. Not many people came to call these days because not many people knew how to act toward a widow whose son had married six weeks after his father died. But Clarence was his effusive self in his congratulations to Stuart, and Elsie was her presumptuous self in her speculations on what a help it was to have Annie in the house.

  It was a kind of relief to see somebody like the Eggers—people who were brassy and unabashed and who could ask, “Well, how are you making out, Rose?” with so little evident awareness of the depth of her griefs that the griefs were not really touched and her self-control was not even tried.

  But from the moment they arrived, Annie behaved strangely. Rose became more and more embarrassed. This was a situation she had not even thought of—how a girl from such a background would embarrass her every time there was company at the house.

  When they were gone, she couldn’t keep from saying, “You seem tired, Annie. Why don’t you rest till suppertime? I wasn’t going to have anything fancy tonight, anyway, and it won’t take a minute to get it.” She thought she would go out of her mind if she had to spend two hours in the kitchen with that girl.

  But Annie stood there staring at her from two round eyes in a freckled face, two freckled arms akimbo, two freckled hands over round hips—looking exactly like a saloon waitress.

  “They’re good enough for you because they’ve got a nice new Chrysler, aren’t they?” the girl said.

  “Why, they brought Will home from Jamestown in that car. It was very nice of them. Of course, they’re ‘good enough.’ We’ve known them all our lives.”

  “Oh yes! You’ve known them all your lives! Well how do you think they bought that car?”

  “What are you getting at? They just have to cut down somewhere else so Clarence can have a car that’s easy to drive, I suppose—it’s hard to drive with one arm.”