The Bones of Plenty. Lois Phillips Hudson

      George couldn’t even look up at the house of his wife’s father as he passed below it on the road. He wondered how much the old man was going to lose. He wanted to go up and tell Will about the bank, but he was so angry he couldn’t trust himself. Why had he listened to the sanctimonious ass telling him all about how safe that God-damned bank was? Now the money he’d been saving for seed was gone, and he was sure it was gone for good. Yet he could hardly believe his luck could be so bad. He had thought losing the foal was enough bad luck to last for the next year at least.

      He drove the last half mile to his own mailbox and turned into the frozen ruts that led through his fields to the farmyard. The land sloped away from the county road so that he could survey nearly all of the half section as he coasted down the quarter-mile incline to the house. On either side of him were his two biggest fields—eighty acres apiece—which he planted in wheat. These two fields stretched the entire width of the property, and their eastern edges cut the farm in half. The north and south windbreaks of well-grown willows, cottonwoods, and box elders defined the limits of the yard. The groves stopped the wind enough so that the snow was encouraged to settle between them, and thus the Custers paid for their bit of shelter from one element by spending the winter half-buried in another element.

      Below the house the long swell dropped more precipitously to a trough of the lowest ground on the farm, and then rose again to form the eastern, rougher part of the property—humped, notched by ravines, and quite rocky. Here George had plotted out his pastures and the fields where he grew corn and a hay crop of sweet clover or alfalfa.

      Set just above the final drop of the western swell, the house appeared to command the hill and the buildings at the foot of it. But the appearance was deceptive, for those who lived in the house were really commanded by the hill. Nearly everything went down the hill empty and came up the hill full. Water buckets, milk pails, egg baskets, and wheelbarrows went lightly down to the well or the barn or the chicken house or the compost pile and came wearily back up to the wash boiler, the cream separator, the cooler, or the garden behind the house. Once each morning and evening the milk pails went down full—after the cream was separated and the skim milk went back to the barn to feed the calves and pigs.

      The house had begun as one big room with an east and a west window and a chimney on the north. Then smaller rooms had been leaned against the north and south sides of the first one, each with a window to the west. The kitchen stove, the shelf for the water bucket and wash basin, a cupboard, a cooler, and a small work table nearly filled the room on the north. The baby’s crib and Lucy’s cot and a large storage closet filled the room on the south. It was such a simple little house that George felt as though he confronted the inside as well as the outside every time he came down toward it from the western fields and saw the three windows looking up at him—one from each of the three rooms.

      In the main room, which they called the dining room, was an expandable round table on which the family ate all its meals, wrote letters, bathed the baby, did homework, cut out paper dolls, butchered, sewed, or spread out catalogs for ordering garden seeds, repair parts, shoes, and clothes. There were four straight chairs around the table, and a high chair. There was a heavy rocking chair covered in black leather, scraped full of furry brown scratches and showing brown rings on the seat made by the springs pressing up through the stuffing. There was an expensive upright piano, a bookcase too small for the books in it, and a clothes rack beside the round heating stove, nearly always hung with diapers and baby blankets. In an alcove curtained off from the rest of the room was the double bed for himself and Rachel.

      As George neared the house he looked out once more across the fields. He loved and hated them for the same reason: They represented the hope of independence that grew drier and dustier every year. It was bad enough not to own the land he worked, but it was intolerable to pay rent on that land to a city man—a city man who knew enough about buttons and thread and cheap toys from Japan to make money running a store full of junk, and who thought, since he had made the money to buy land which had sold for taxes, that he also knew how to make money with that land. No matter how much surplus wheat was left over from last year or what plagues of drought, disease, and grasshoppers were predicted, he stipulated that George must plant half the acreage in wheat, of which he took a full third of the proceeds—not of the gross, but the net, after threshing, transporting, and all other costs except a percentage of the seed price were borne by George. If George chose not to plant half the land in wheat, he had to make up in cash for what Mr. James T. Vick figured would have been his share.

      George had counted on getting a small loan from Harry for this season. Prices the last September had been the lowest in history, and he had got twenty-six cents a bushel from the elevator, minus the penalty for smut. Out of that he had had to pay threshers. Nevertheless, he had managed to keep nearly two hundred dollars in the bank, and another hundred would have seen him through in fairly good shape. But now he would have to go to the office of that city man in Jamestown, pushing his way between the gaudy counters of junk and squeezing through a doorway half blocked by more cartons of junk, and feeling his ignominious way up the few dark stairs leading to the office of Mr. James T. Vick. It was a low, cluttered little balcony where Mr. Vick sat at his desk, which overflowed with the business of a half dozen enterprises, looking out over the store from time to time to see that no hands went from alluring counter to threadbare pocket. His change-girl and bookkeeper sat at a desk nearly touching his, loading coins into the spherical bottoms of the money carriers, screwing them into the heads mounted on the wires, and yanking the handles to send them back to the clerks waiting below. George would have to sit in the presence of that girl while the frenetic carriers hissed back and forth, clanging