“How do I know it’ll be for one year? How do I know you won’t be back here begging for the same deal next year?”
“Mr. Vick, I did not come here to beg! I’m here to offer you a deal that you ought to be able to see is to your advantage. If I don’t farm it, you won’t make anything at all from it this year.”
“I don’t see that you have a thing to offer me, Mr. Custer, besides signing a lease on our usual terms.”
George managed to remind himself once again that the stakes were higher than they had ever been before. “Mr. Vick, I’ve put enough improvements on that farm in the last ten years to pay you two or three years’ rent, and you know it!”
“That’s your business, Custer. I never told you to do them, did I?”
“But the place was unlivable without them! I couldn’t keep stock in a barn like that! It could have collapsed on them in a high wind. You know that!”
Vick shrugged again. “You knew it too, when you rented it. So you fixed up the place because you thought you’d be able to buy it from me. Your option is still good.”
“But it’s worth so much more now than it was!”
“All the more reason it seems to me you’d want to hang on to your lease, Mr. Custer.”
“All the more reason it seems to me, Mr. Vick, that I ought to wring your neck! Right now!”
“Sit down, Custer! Don’t make a fool of yourself again!”
“What if I just sit there on your half section and don’t pay you a god-damned thing next fall? The Supreme Court says Langer’s moratorium is legal, you know. No forced chattel sale to collect your god-damned rent if I don’t want to pay it!”
Vick laughed. “Langer’s got other things to worry about, I’d say! I reckon he’s a little too busy with the Federal grand jury to worry about you, wouldn’t you say? Besides, there are some other people a lot closer to home to worry about me! Dick Press would just love to have a little sale over at your place. He’d just love it!”
“You stinking storekeeper! You think you can always get a crooked potbellied sheriff to do your dirty work for you! You can’t bluff me with that big bag of wind!”
“Well, wouldn’t he just love a sale at your place?” Vick held up his lease. “Sit down, Custer! You’re making a fool of yourself! You know you’re going to wind up signing this paper here, because you always do, don’t you? There’s no place else for you to go, is there? This is no way to do business. You’re making it tough for yourself.”
“There are lots of other places for me to go, Mr. Vick. In fact, I’d just as soon go to Hell, so long as I took you there with me!”
“Oh, cut it out, Custer! I’m not a bit worried by you! You’re not crazy enough to lift a finger to me, and I know it. I know you walked out of Press’s office just like a little red-haired lamb. And that’s the way you’re going to walk out of this office, too. You’re going to sign this lease or I’ll come up there on the first of June and throw you off the property. And you better sign it quick, too, because I’m a busy man and I’m losing my patience.”
He was holding the paper up to George. “There’s no place else for you to go, is there, Custer?”
George’s fingertips began to act without any orders from him. They tightened on the sheets of stiff paper he had accepted from the hands of his landlord and shredded them with rending salvos that reverberated over the clackings of the little cash carriers coming home to Mr. Vick….
The clacking was still inside his head—the little cash carriers were still shuttling back and forth in there, always thumping out the same message from a spot above his right eyebrow. He reached up and felt a great knot hardening on his forehead. He must have finally forgotten to duck when he went out that little low door. It must have almost knocked him out because here he was on the street without any memory of the last trip he would ever make between those disgusting counters.
Rachel did not look up from the pan she was stirring over the stove. “Did you get the glass?” she asked.
“What glass!”
She nodded toward the round-bodied patch clinging to the kitchen window with its adhesive-tape legs.
“The United States Treasury hasn’t got enough money to pay me to pound down another loose shingle nail on this place!”
She looked from the window to him and saw his head. “George! What happened! Were you in a fight? Oh my God! What did you do? Did you kill him?”
“No I didn’t hit him! I didn’t touch him! Because if I’d ever once started on him, there wouldn’t have been anything left of him at all—just a grease-spot here and there.”
“George, what did you do!” He had gone off to sign the lease, the way he always did in the spring. He had come back with a purple lump on his head—out of his mind. “What did you do!”
“I gave him back his lease. I gave back his jacked-up barn and his new chicken house and his new fences and his wheat fields with the rocks hauled out of them and his soil full of manure I spread on it for nine years and his granary with new bins and a new roof on it and his pasture I reseeded for him after the way it was all wore out by sheep when I came here and his new trees I planted in the windbreaks and his god-damned house with a broken window in it!”
Lucy hid in the bedroom while they talked, still hardly able to believe that she had done something so bad when she had never in this world meant to do it at all.
Lucy could hardly wait to get to school. For the first time in her life, she was going to do something important. This would be the morning she’d be so late she barely had time to whisper to Marilyn in the cloakroom before the bell rang.
“We’re going to move!” she said.
“Into town?” Marilyn asked.
“No! Way out West. Maybe to Alaska, even, if they’ll give us a farm up there. Maybe we can even live in an igloo!”
At noon she was so excited she ran outside without her lunch bucket, but she didn’t care because she wasn’t hungry. For the very first time since she had started to school, the town kids were jealous of her. Polar bears, Eskimos, getting to stay up all night in the summertime because the sun never went down, rides on dog sleds, icebergs, whales, walruses. Sure, her father said, there’d be all those things in Alaska if they went. Plus a homestead in wonderful virgin soil. Well, no, he hadn’t promised about staying up all night, but all the rest he had promised.
Nobody thought up any little jokes to play on her today, like when some of the town kids—even Marilyn—would get together and say, “Let’s play hide and seek. Lucy’s It!” Then they would all sneak into the building and leave her to look and look and not find anybody. But no, there wasn’t anything like that today.
Irene Wilkes hovered around the bunch of town kids that were asking Lucy about moving. Lucy knew that if she didn’t have to go home with Irene so much, the town kids would like her better—or at least they wouldn’t always be making jokes about how dumb the farm kids were. It didn’t matter that Lucy herself could always spell them down and read better than they could. There was her next-door neighbor they could always tease her about.
“Go and find your brothers,” Lucy said to Irene.
“They didn’t come today,” she said in her silly voice.
Lucy got an idea—it was just like the ideas the town kids got about things to do to her!
“Well, then, Irene,” she said, “I guess you’ll just have to walk home by yourself.”
Irene looked around and her bewildered face grew even more bewildered.
“What are you waiting around for?” Lucy demanded. “It’s time to go home. I’m going to stay all overnight with Marilyn, so you’ll have to walk home by yourself.”
“But it’s lunchtime, isn’t it?” Irene took the tin lid off her lunch bucket. “Here’s my lunch!”
“My goodness, but you must be hungry,” Lucy said. “You forgot to eat your lunch!”
“Yes, Irene!” Marilyn hurried to join the game as soon as she understood it. “You must be just starving! How co
me you forgot to eat your lunch, anyway?”
It was so good that Lucy could hardly believe it. Here was Marilyn in with her on a trick she had thought up, instead of being in on a trick against her with the rest of the town kids. How was it that she had never gotten an idea like this before, anyway? All you had to do to keep the town kids from thinking up a trick on you was to think up another trick first to play on another farm kid. She really couldn’t imagine why it had taken her so long to figure it out. It was such an important thing to find out that it made her stomach feel funny, the way it felt on Christmas Eve.
“Oh, you’re always losing track of the time, Irene,” Lucy said. “You know that’s what your mother is always saying. You better hurry up now, so you can help take care of Toady. You can eat your lunch on the way home.”
“Yes, but everybody’s still here,” Irene protested.
“That’s because if you live in town, you can stay after school and play,” Marilyn said. “And Lucy is going to stay with me tonight on account of moving.”
“Go on now,” Lucy said again. They had maneuvered Irene toward the gate of the schoolyard. Irene took another backward step and jarred the elbow that was looped through the bail of her gallon bucket. The lid of it fell off and rolled away, wobbling and glinting in the sun. She darted awkwardly after it and two cold, limp pancakes fell out of the pail. They had been stuck together with butter for a sandwich, and they split apart in the dirt. She picked them up and skinned off the dusty butter with her finger. She looked about in her helpless way and then wiped the grease along the inside of her skirt hem.
“Oh, you sloppy slop!” Marilyn cried. “Look at your dress! “Hurry home and change it! Your mother’s going to be mad.”
“Here’s your top,” Lucy said. “Put it on now, before you drop the rest of your lunch.”
“There isn’t any more,” Irene said humbly.
“What’s the matter? Didn’t the relief give you any more apples?” Lucy demanded.
“We only got one box,” Irene said.
“Aw, phooey! My father said you got a whole lot of boxes!”
“I can’t remember,” Irene admitted.
“Ya, you can’t remember anything, Irene!” Marilyn said. “You can’t even remember what time of day it is. It’s time to go home! School is out!”
“We haven’t had arithmetic yet,” Irene said.
“Oh, you have too! Besides, you couldn’t remember! What’s eight times seven!”
“Sixty-three!”
“Oh, dumbbell! That’s nine times seven! Dumb ox!”
“Your mother’s already going to be mad because of your dress. You don’t want her to be mad because you’re late, too, do you?” Marilyn asked.
“No, I don’t,” Irene said. “Well … goodby.”
“Goodby! Goodby!”
Irene smiled her foolish smile, showing her big buck teeth and all of her pale gums below her wet lips. “Goodby,” she said again, in her high sharp voice.
She turned and walked a few steps. “Goodby!” cried Lucy and Marilyn.
“Goodby!” Irene responded, looking back and waving her skinny arm.
“Goodby!” They imitated her silly wave. She kept on walking, occasionally turning to wave and smile. They could tell how happy she was to see that they were always there to wave back at her. She had never been treated so well.
They watched until she was hardly more than two specks of light in the distance—swinging lunch bucket and golden hair under the noon sun straight overhead. Mostly by the way the light spots moved, they could tell she was still turning and waving.
Now that it was over, Lucy did not feel the way she had expected to feel. It had really only been fun while they were doing it—the way Christmas Day was the most fun only till all the packages were opened. All this time she had wanted to be in on a joke with Marilyn, and now this time she had not only been in on it—she had even thought it up. But now it was over.
It was over, and what if they should be caught? What if Miss Liljeqvist found out? What if her mother found out? How awful to have only two pancakes for a lunch. But now Irene did not even have them. They were too dirty. “I know how silly she is,” Lucy could hear her mother saying, “but she likes you so much, and since you both live out in the country, I think you ought to be nice to each other. It won’t hurt so much to play with her now and then, will it? After all, you know how it is to come from a farm too, and the town kids don’t.” Yes, her mother had said things like that a great number of times. Lucy knew she was going to have to tell her mother what she had done. She might not be able to do it tonight or tomorrow night—sometimes she saved up her terrible things for about a week and told them all at once—but sooner or later she would have to tell, because she would feel sicker every day until she did.
“Hey, we have to eat our lunch now,” Marilyn said. “Come on back to the lavatory with me.”
“But I don’t need to go,” Lucy said.
“If you don’t come with me, I won’t teeter with you at recess. And I won’t tell you a secret, either.”
“What’s the secret?”
“Come with me. I’ll tell you when we get to the lavatory.”
“Tell me now.” Lucy didn’t even care much about the secret. The town kids would torment her for days over a secret they got together and thought up when she was at home. Then when they finally told her, it wouldn’t turn out to be much of anything at all—that is, if they really told her the secret they’d been teasing her about.
“You know what Audley Finley told my sister?”
“No. How should I know?”
“Well, you should, because he says he’s related to you now!”
“He is not!”
“Well, you don’t have to get mad at me! You just wait and see if I teeter with you!”
“You just wait and see if I care!” Lucy told her. She felt a hundred times worse than she had ever felt at the end of a disappointing Christmas Day. She had thought for a little while that perhaps she really would get a chance to stay overnight with Marilyn, the way the town kids stayed back and forth with each other and played together every night. Now she wouldn’t even have anybody to teeter with at recess. It was just the way her father always said—city people picked on farm people every chance they got. Even Audley won out over her just by living in town and telling the other town kids whatever he wanted to tell them.
And another thing her father always said was true, too. It was stupid to trust anybody. “Most people will do anything in order to get ahead,” he would say. “They’ll bamboozle their best friend if there’s a dime in it. They’d murder their own grandmother for a few dollars.”
They’d all be your friends as long as they could get you to do something they wanted you to do, or as long as they wanted to get into a game you started, or as long as they didn’t have anybody else to play with.
Friday, May 25
The sale was going to be the next day, and the Custers all went to town to get some canned things and bacon and other provisions for their trip West. Everywhere they went there was a poster about their auction sale. Lucy saw her last name in all the windows, printed in real printing, and smiled to herself to think how much more attention their name was getting than the names of Marilyn or Audley or Douglas or even Roger Beahr had ever gotten. She could hardly wait till the town kids all came out tomorrow so they could see how much money she was going to get and so she could tell them some more about Alaska.
In the hardware store even Mr. Hoefener started talking about all the places a person could see their name.
“Well!” he said. “Looks like Custer’s Last Stand around here, don’t it? Especially over at the bank. Did you see how Churchill plastered them posters all over Harry’s bank?”
“That’s fair enough, I guess,” George said. “Bank might as well be good for something. I wouldn’t be selling out if that bastard hadn’t stole all my money, so we might as well use his building for a few posters,
I reckon.”
“Well what I want to know is, where’s the war? Couldn’t of been six months ago you were telling me, ‘Look out, Hoefener. There’s gonna be blood! Well, here it is! Custer’s Last Stand! Where’s the war, George!” Zack kneaded his goiter and smirked up at George.
“And what I want to know, Zack, is do you want to sell me a piece for my trailer hitch, or shall I go to Jimtown for it? And if a few more men like me clear out, I still want to know who you’re gonna sell anything to. I won’t have to let any blood out of you. You’re gonna sit here in this little burg till you dry right up. There won’t be nothing left of you but that nanny-goat’s bag around your damned useless neck.”
After supper, Rachel didn’t have anything to do. There was not so much as a seed flat to weed and water, and since there hadn’t been any of the usual spring rush of work to keep her busy outside, she didn’t even have any patching or darning to catch up on. She sat down to play her piano for the last time. It was the piano her father had bought years ago when they first began giving her lessons, and it was a very good one. She had always expected to give lessons to her own children on it.
She had packed her music even though the piano was going to be sold. Perhaps at some unforeseeable time there would be another piano—not one as good as this, not one her father had given her and listened to her play—but another piano to go with the boxes of music. She played by ear now—the songs that had been popular when she was in college. She’d always liked Irving Berlin and she stayed with him for a while.
George sat listening and reading the Sun. Three hundred million tons of topsoil had been blown off the prairies and across the Atlantic seaboard since the first of April—or so the experts said. Drought and dust were destroying winter wheat at the rate of a million bushels every day. Textile workers, steel workers, coal miners, auto workers, longshoremen, teamsters, bakers, butchers, and candlestick makers—they all were striking by the tens of thousands, by whole areas of the country at a time. All the unions on the Pacific Coast were striking in sympathy with the longshoremen, and so it went. The Federal Government was supporting sixteen million people on relief.
The Bones of Plenty Page 49