The Bones of Plenty. Lois Phillips Hudson
rocking his massive shoulders and haunches in a gait calculated to crowd the man. But the man had a great stride to match the bull’s, and he kept the leather nostrils stretched into such painful ovals that the bull could not side-step to dislodge the hook. The man never looked behind him. He marched away over the flattened fence, with his straight back no more than four feet in front of the glittering eyes and the cruel secret brain.
The more logical it was to stop trembling, the more difficult it seemed to stop. The big boys took up the siege where the bull had left off. Even after she finally got them to sit down and ostensibly to work, the atmosphere in the one big room, grown stuffy and confining with the warm day, was that of a becalmed ship alive with the vibrations of mutiny. If she asked a question, she was more likely to get an uncontrolled burst of laughter than an answer. She knew they couldn’t be blamed for thinking it was funny to see a teacher run away from a bull—even if it was for her life. What she blamed them for was starting the whole thing—wandering far into a pasture where they had no business and getting an animal worked up like that.
When the man came back to fix the fence, she was grateful and yet angry. Why did he keep such an animal in such a flimsy fence? She could not stop being aware of him out there, digging, pounding, nailing, with the sun glinting on his red-gold arms. Once when she looked out the window, her heart beating with the remnant of her fright and with her exasperation over the laughing savagery of the disobedient males ranged in front of her, she saw the man resting, leaning his arm across the new post, gazing at the schoolhouse, and then laughing until he finally had to blow his nose. He must be crazy, she thought.
After school he came in. She saw his inches of crinkly red hair rub the top of the door. He introduced himself politely enough, but then he said in a severe deep voice, “Now then, Miss Shepard, that was our prize bull out yonder in the breeding pasture.” He did not apologize by his tone or his expression for speaking the words “bull” and “breeding” to a young woman. “In the future we’ll have to ask you to enjoin your pupils from trespassing on our property. After all, it is a schoolteacher’s duty to be responsible …” A belly laugh that rolled from him as though he were a Barnum and Bailey bass drum put an end to the speech he had been working on all afternoon.
He saw me run, she thought, and hated him.
He was often near the school when it let out, and particularly, it seemed, when she needed him. Once her little Ford got snowed in during the day and he pushed her out of the bank. But just as she could feel the wheels getting traction again, the car started to make a dreadful, sharp, rapid thumping. She stopped and let the engine idle. The trouble didn’t seem to be there. Cautiously she let the car move and again the thumping resounded. It was in the back and she got out to see if it was the bumper. But nothing seemed amiss, and she thanked George again for his help, while he stood inclining his head to her with a respectful hand on the bill of his cap. She climbed back into the car and started it once more. This time the banging shook the whole automobile.
She leaned out and called, “Do you suppose it’s the transmission?”
“Could be. Sounds like she’s all froze up somewheres, don’t she?” he said. (She had noticed that he talked much less grammatically when he wasn’t making a speech he had prepared just for her. She found the contrast amusing and foolishly flattering.)
She couldn’t remember any more how many times she started the car and stopped it again in annoyed confusion before his wild laughter gave him away. He was so good with machinery that he knew just how his hands beating on a rear fender ought to sound. After they were married, she had seen him run stooping behind a car as visitors started to leave their yard, playing the awful tattoo, and she knew, by the way their faces looked, how she must have looked herself. His jokes almost always made her feel stupid, and therefore irritated with him, and yet, as the year went on, she was ever more restless on the weekends she spent at home. Sunday afternoons were endless, even though she could play the piano she missed so much all week. Finally she began to be irritated with him because her Sunday afternoons were so dull and empty.
All the while she kept wondering how she was supposed to feel, and how she did feel, and what the truth was about various sorts of physical mysteries. There was the way her body vacillated between an energy so great that she had no peace and could not even digest her food and a lassitude so profound that she had no will and did not care at all what happened to her. And there were more subtle and complicated physical mysteries which caused a recurrence of the shocked feelings she had had about her father when she first knew some things had to be true, as they were true of all men.
Now all she knew was that the feelings of that year, whatever they were, whatever love was, had resulted in a wedding as soon as school ended. All she knew now was that there had been a roomful of bad boys, Sunday afternoons when she was nearly paralyzed by her need for some unknown thing, a snowbank, a snowbank—the bank, the bank, the bank. This must have been a love story and now this must be the end of it. She knew more than she thought she knew. She knew, after all, what love was and how it ended.
The baby was screaming in hunger and outrage. Rachel wondered if some accident had happened while she stood in the kitchen staring at five pans of bread dough through tears that would not stop. Did the baby have a pin scratching her stomach or stuck in her throat? She was afraid even to go and look at the baby.
A few nights before, she had gone to cover Lucy and seen what she could not put out of her mind. The child labored with a heavy cold, and her body was twisted, her head straining back at a broken angle from her neck, while she fought her loud unconscious battle for air. Her braids had come undone and her long hair streamed across her face, covering it in the darkness as hair covered the faces of dead children flopping in their mothers’ arms or gaping in the gutters of Spanish streets. The picture was sometimes static, sometimes moving. Sometimes Rachel saw how it happened to one after another in the procession of mothers carrying dead children. One had looked out her window just as the bomb fell or the grenades exploded or the men, appearing from nowhere, opened fire in the street. This mother would have seen the child fall but she would not have been able to reach it in time. Nevertheless, when she got to its side, she would know how it had been—how her little girl of six had borne alone this agony still on her face, had wondered why her mother didn’t come to explain what was happening to her and to save her from it—for here, on the child’s face, was the terror and grief of dying all by herself.
The next mother did not know; she was searching, but of course this tiny body here was not what she had set out to find, not what she would allow herself to find. The hair tangled over the face hid the features, but this was her shoe, her dress, her jacket. But this was not her hand, no, this was not her face. Another little girl had died here when the men threw the things in the street. But here, under the blood, this was her dimple. (Lucy had dimples, round and sudden now, like pin pricks, but when she grew up they would be deep short lines at the corners of her mouth, like George’s. But no, she would not grow up, for here, under her hair, was the place the blood had come from.)
This, this was the way love stories ended. Husbands killed each other in the streets and wives went out and picked up their babies. Banks failed, nations died, babies starved—this was a fine world, wasn’t it, that men had built to live their love stories in?
Her own baby was screaming. The procession of mothers sank into the weary blackness beneath her mind and the blackness snapped back a maddening primitive retort. Life goes on, it said. Why? she retaliated. Why?—the silly question prompted by the awkward assertions one’s foolish instincts were always making. George for instance, like all males, had absolutely no reasons except those of his instincts for anything he did. That was why it didn’t occur to him not to go on, even now, when they were so obviously ruined.
She had not stopped shaking but she had stopped crying, so she wiped the flour from her hands and went in to pick up her baby.
Saturday, March 4
The drifts of the blizzard around the steps of the Eureka Bank were all undisturbed, so that it could as well have been tenantless for two years as two weeks. But not even having every other bank in the nation for company could make it look less lonely.