The Bones of Plenty. Lois Phillips Hudson
He would pack up the whole family and head West before he would let Rose hear him ask Will for money.
“I’ll call him,” she said. “He’s out in the sheep shed, I think.”
She pushed up the window and yelled, “Will? Will?” The way she would start on a high note and then let the one syllable of the name slide down her throat, straining and gargling to get volume from an “l,” was enough to make a man come running to see what awful thing had happened. George was certainly glad that Rachel didn’t call him that way. Not that he would have stood for it.
“Why, I’ll go find him, Rose,” George cried.
He started for the shed, hurrying to head Will off. Sheep were one of the things he and Will disagreed about. George wouldn’t have a sheep on his place. He simply couldn’t stand the beasts, and besides, they ruined good pasture land. Will was putting salve on the ewes’ teats so they wouldn’t crack and chap in the freezing nights. He, too, was a little surprised to see George at that time of day. He pulled a blue bandanna out of his hip pocket and wiped his hands on it. “How’s it going, George?”
“Pretty fair,” George said. “Rachel thought I might as well pick up that brooder you folks don’t need. Rose can’t seem to find it.” He thought Will looked relieved. Was that because Will had had second thoughts about the loan?
“Oh, I meant to tell her,” he said. “I left it out in the granary. Let’s go get it.”
Even after the sliding door had stopped its grumbling and echoing, they could still hear the scraping flight of rodents. “Damn the vermin!” Will said. He had to be really exasperated to swear, and he was. He had stored as much wheat as the granary would hold rather than sell at last fall’s prices. But the rats and mice and insects had seemed to converge on him from the whole country. Their multiplying and marauding had gone on despite his traps and poisons, and the price rise he had been waiting for was still so slight that it would hardly finance the war he had been carrying on, let alone make up for the wheat he had lost.
Will had read the Bible through more times than he had counted—the first time before he was twelve, the age of Jesus in the temple at Jerusalem. And one of the verses he had memorized from early childhood was the one that whispered above the scuttling of the mice each time he opened the granary door, as though the grain spoke from the heavy cold bins: Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal.… Take no thought for the morrow.… Consider the lilies of the field.… Wasn’t a man supposed to look out for his family the best way he could? It was certainly hard to know.
They walked into the room where he kept the sacks of feed and chicken mash, and he pulled the brooder away from the wall.
“Some of the braces have to be fixed,” he said. “You’ll have to find some kind of top for the water jar and clean up the burner a little. It’s really in perfectly good shape, but we just can’t use it this year. We got too many chicks last spring. A big flock don’t hardly pay its way now, anyhow.”
George could see that it wasn’t going to occur to Will to bring up the subject. “Well, now then,” he stalled. “I reckon it won’t take too much to get her in shape.” It was now or never.
“I figured I could make a deal with Vick for the seed wheat and the thrashers,” he said, “but the damn fool won’t let me put in any feed and hay if he lends it to me. I had—most of it in the bank.”
“How much do you need?” Will asked.
“Two hundred and fifty would do it, I guess.”
“Are you sure that’s enough? I can spare you three hundred without hurting myself at all.” Will felt that he hadn’t said that the way he wanted to. It sounded as though he was rubbing it in.
“Two hundred and fifty will be a great plenty, and I’ll be much obliged,” George said icily. He’d taken it the wrong way, of course. “I’ll pay you the same interest Goodman would have charged me—the dirty little kike.”
Will wished he could defend Harry, but he didn’t dare.
“I’ll get it here the first of the week and we’ll write up a little note,” Will said.
George picked up the brooder and Will followed with the glass accessories. They were loading the brooder in with the two empty cream cans when Rose came out with a pan of hot cinnamon rolls covered with a dish towel. She put the rolls in the front seat and George climbed in beside them. “Much obliged, folks,” he said.
They watched him go. “I can’t see why George is so set on Ceres,” Will said. “I bet I’ll beat him with Marquis this year, just the way I beat his Marquis last year. Seems like there’s a couple new hybrids every year, but they never do anything except right in the spot where a bunch of Fargo professors are coddling them along in a little kitchen garden. Look at what happened to Clarence Egger when he planted Hope. That just about ruined his hopes for good—that’s what Hope did. Ceres probably won’t work out a bit better, either, but then, you can’t make a young man see things like that.”
George was irritated by the banging of the brooder against the cream cans, but he was even more irritated by the spicy smell of the hot bread. He was sure that Rose was always sending food to his house because she felt his family might not be properly fed.
He walked back into his house carrying a new burden now—no longer of anticipation but of fulfillment. The burden of humbling himself was past, but the burden of debt was just begun. For him the debt was by far the easier burden of the two. Still, if he didn’t get a harvest, there was absolutely no place left to turn. He had already gone to the man he had managed to avoid going to ever since he had married that man’s daughter.
“I got the brooder,” he said to Rachel. And then, as gratuitously as usual, it seemed to her, he added, “I’ll bet your dad has lost a hundred bushels of wheat this winter. That granary is a regular breeding ground for pests. I told him he should have gone ahead and got rid of some of that wheat. I’ve never known the time that that man has listened to reason.”
He stopped to hear what was coming over the radio. Then he guffawed bitterly. “Well, somebody’s happy somewhere today! Beer and wine over the counter! Roosevelt better look out. All the bootleggers’ll be voting Republican next time. Yes, sir! Roosevelt—the friend of the forgotten man! No more Goat Whiskey and Indiana Red Eye. What in the world will the politicians and cops do for graft money now? Why, even your little brother can go on a legal bender today—that is, if he’s in one of the right spots. Where was he, did you say, when he sent the last letter?”
“Arizona. On a ranch.”
“Well! He’s in business then. Did you hear it? Arizona was all ready for Roosevelt. Stuart can go on a nice safe drunk, without losing his eyesight or paralyzing his hands and feet. And he won’t have to guzzle any more canned heat nor antifreeze.”
“Oh, George, why do you hate everybody in my family so much!”
“Because they’re hypocrites! Lucky hypocrites that just happened to get born at the right time. They got in when the getting was good and now they try to tell me it wasn’t luck—it was their hard work and their God-damned religion!”
In a few more weeks Lucy would be promoted to the third grade, beginning the next fall. And still she would be in the same room where she had been this year and last year, and probably have the same old teacher. There would not be a single new thing to look forward to except the miseries of multiplication. She had finished the third-grade reader before she was out of the first grade.
If there had been anybody at home to play with, Lucy would have preferred