The Bones of Plenty. Lois Phillips Hudson
must feel about everything (For she must feel it? She must!), as he had only now struck at her—even then it would be a kind of commitment. What was a wife for, if she let a man bear a thing like this alone?
But though she worked beside him as hard as he worked, all day, every day, and submitted to him silently in the night, she was no longer committed to him. Sometimes he knew why little things went wrong; sometimes he didn’t. He hadn’t the least notion of why the whole thing had gone wrong. If a piece of machinery misbehaved, he watched and listened and tinkered till he found the cause of the trouble, and then he set about fixing it calmly and competently. He was contemptuous of the sort of man who kicked an ailing machine. A machine had no will to defy the man. Why should the man feel emotions about the machine? But it was things like this that made him want to kick something—things like these grievances of hers that went round and round till they lost their beginnings—these grievances that were more important to her than the ruin of them both. An overpowering heat flooded down his legs, as though he was wetting himself in a nightmare. He knew that if he kicked the streaked green wall under the window, he could put his foot right through it.
He hadn’t intended to do it, but once he had the door open, he was afraid he might rip it out of the kitchen—to make her look up from the everlasting little chores that she found so convenient to pile up between them—nevertheless, he had specifically told himself that he would not do it; but when the door was in his hands he did slam it with all his strength. Once again she had won.
Rachel had no idea that she had won. Cathy began to fuss almost as soon as the noise ended. She was that kind of baby. Lucy had been that way too. Some babies, when they first woke, would lie and look up at the ceiling with their wide eyes that seemed never to have been asleep, and they would speak softly to themselves with their tiny soft mouths for a long time before they decided they were hungry. But not her babies. They were like George. The minute they woke they wanted up, whether they were hungry or not. They couldn’t wait for anything. They couldn’t even wait to be born; both of them came nearly two weeks early.
Now Cathy was hungry and Rachel would have to feed her very soon. She considered the bone-colored dough. The loaves needed to rise before going into the oven; on the other hand, she was afraid they might rise too much before she had finished with the baby. If she forgot them for too long, the bread would bake out too airy and dry, with a bubbly crust. If she punched them down again right now, they might not rise enough, and then the bread would be heavy and doughy. George had a fit over faulty bread. At every meal while a bad batch lasted, he would wonder aloud how it was that his mother had always been able to bake perfect bread.
Once she had thought that doing her best to please him would be a joy to her, as it had always been one of her greatest joys to please her father. But now, even if he complimented her, she could not help thinking of the crushing ratio between complaints and compliments. Why, then, did it matter whether a batch of bread ever pleased him again or not?
She came upon the question the way she occasionally came upon a serpent as she was starting the garden in the cold spring. The snake, barely sentient after sleeping so long in the frozen ground, would finally become aware of her and uncoil like a rubber band snapping beneath her hand. And even while she was trying to calm the ridiculous physical reaction she always had when this happened, she was saying to herself, “But I was looking at it all the time! I saw it right there, all the while it was so still!”
So it was with the question. Now that she had seen it, she knew how long it had been there, and she knew that, unlike the snake, it would never go away and let her calm herself again. She would live always with this astonished burning in her chest. The baby’s crying, she thought, the bank, the baby, your father! always preaching! I don’t care, I won’t ever care again.
The baby was hungry. She must feed her. But she didn’t want to be crying while she fed her. That wasn’t good for a baby, to be held and fed while the mother was upset. The bank, the bank, the bank, and why should it matter any more either? It was not going to matter any more. Neither were his shouts.
She remembered how he had been that first year when he was courting her—in his way. His father’s farm adjoined the schoolyard and that was why they had met at all. It was a glorious Indian summer day. She had wanted to eat her lunch outside with the children, but she had to write a geography lesson on the blackboard.
The sounds of calamity sent her rushing to the door. Except for the big boys, the children were flying toward her in terror. Behind them, on the safe side of the Custer fence, stood the big boys, yelling with laughter. A huge Holstein bull fanatically assaulted the other side of the fence. They bellowed and raged at him; they flapped their arms and danced back and forth. One boy took off his shirt and waved it, leaping about in his underwear.
“Boys!” she cried. “Boys!”
She ran out to them, conscious even at such a moment of how short she was beside them, and said all the wrong things.
“Put your shirt on! Get away from that fence! What did you do to him? He could have killed all of you!” They laughed like demons. They showed off for her.
Then the bull, butting at the fence post, hooked a horn under the bottom wire, raised his head, and pulled the post out of the ground.
She didn’t need to tell them to run. They were all far ahead of her, stringing across the schoolyard and pounding up the steps. She had a memory of the giant bull face, twice the size of a cow’s, of the great wall of bone that was his forehead and of the two shining black globes in it, rolling, seeking—glittering as they came to focus on her, seeing her as she would look under his hoofs after the fence came down. She remembered the black leather nose, no more bothered by the ring in it than a boot is bothered by a bootlace. She remembered the blunt profile, descended of Ice Age bison and Grecian bulls—the head, created like those others, to be nothing more than a senseless battering-ram proceeding from an enormous, obscenely male neck.
She remembered, too, how the last boy had slammed the door of the schoolhouse in her face and she had thought, he’s locked me out, and even in her fear, as she ran up the steps, she was furious at this trick to compound her humiliation. Were they going to make her beg to be let in, with a three-thousand-pound bull behind her? But the door was not locked; the boy had only slammed it out of his own fear. Much later, after they were all safe again, she felt hurt that they would not have thought of her at all. Males, she said to herself when the hurt came.
The bull, in his epitome of male savagery, charged to the steps and stopped. Now there was nothing for him to attack with his aroused maleness. He seemed to know that he was ludicrous and to be further enraged. He shook his head at the bottom step, but there was nothing soft and alive to gore. He bellowed steadily. When he saw the children moving at the window he rammed his skull into the wall below.
The bristling flame of a red-haired human head appeared in the window then—the head of a man whose profile pushed out and down from his red pelt with an impatient force of elongated brutish angles. The mouth was long-lipped and excessively arched, and the jaw, instead of ending properly in a civilized chin, jutted out and down as though it never intended to stop. Altogether it was the face of a cave man.
But then when she looked down to see all of him at once, she discovered that the jawline was remarkably straight and that it led back up to an ear that was large but refined. Nor was the skull that of a flat-headed cave man, for it was high and curved behind, and it balanced the jutting jaw on the slender prideful neck. The neck was set on wide shoulders, the shoulders on a potent torso. The torso supported mighty limbs. Then she saw that the face was not that of a male human throwback, but of a young man so overpowering that before she could stop it, the thought quickened and created itself: He looks exactly the way a man ought to look.
He moved carefully but fearlessly, scolding the bull in curiously soothing tones. Either the bull was very much afraid of the man, or else he was no longer so enraged as he pretended he was, and glad to be persuaded to stop smashing his head into the school building. With not more than a minute of quick footwork on the part of the man and half-hearted dodging on the part of the bull, the capture was