The Bones of Plenty. Lois Phillips Hudson
dug her toes into her shoes all day long, waiting for the big clock over the door to release her. After she had had a pair of shoes for two or three months, the innersoles were worked up into ridges between her toes and the ball of her foot.
By this time of the year the humps were as big as they could get and she could feel the shapes of all her toes in them. She had torn away all the lining from the uppers by scraping at them with her toenails, and large holes were wearing up through the soles, layer by layer, to meet the holes she made with her toes. It was because she skipped so much, her mother said, that she was so hard on shoes, and Lucy tried to remember not to skip, especially in gravel.
Now, with the winter wind suddenly gone and the heated gravel making the bottoms of her feet warm, she felt a hateful itchiness under her skin when she thought of being trapped in the second-grade row, between the first- and third-grade rows, for this whole first day of spring. All day long she had not got over being mad at her father, either, and she had hunched over her papers so Douglas Sinclair couldn’t copy from her. If boys were so much smarter than girls, why did any boy she had ever sat behind always want to copy her papers? If only she dared ask her father that question! And she could chin herself more times than Douglas could, or than either of the other two boys in her grade. She had told her father that, and he had said that was because the boys lived in town and weren’t like the farm boys he had in mind. But he would see, now, how much faster she could walk home than Douglas Sinclair ever could.
Right here, however, she had to walk slowly and make as little noise as she could, for fear of Mr. Greeder’s mean bull, and she put her hot coat back on because she was wearing a red blouse.
It was not polite to say the word bull, or even to think it. In fact, it was practically a sin. Lucy had begun to wonder, lately, how a person was supposed to keep impolite or even terrible words out of her head. She even knew two words that were so bad people only wrote them in different places and never said them, but still the words said themselves in her head; they were very simple words and she knew how they would sound, even though she didn’t know what they meant or why they were terrible.
She couldn’t see the cow, she said loudly in her head, but still she did not dare to unbutton her coat. Two things were sure to make a cow sense your presence, no matter how far away from the road he was. The two things were running or showing something red. It was just the same thing as having a dog smell you if you were afraid.
Finally she reached the foot of the long hill with her family’s mailbox at the top of it, but just as she was starting up, she heard the horses and the creaky buggy behind her. She knew who it was, without looking, by the buggy and the voices. The buggy was so old that there were no more like it in the world. Its black leather top flapped and tilted over a trio of struts coming up on either side of the seat. Behind the double triangles made by the struts sat the stiff black figures, strangely flat and hazy, as though they were hiding in a very old photograph from which they would jump out and come alive at any instant.
At once the sounds of being under water began inside Lucy’s head, and that showed she was afraid, even when she had made up her mind that she wasn’t. It’s only Gid and Gad, she said. Sissy! Sissy! SISSY!
But they looked exactly like every picture of a witch she had ever seen. One appeared to be skinny and the other fat, but all the skin and shape of a woman that ever showed on them was their faces. From their chins down they were heaps of black tassels of shawls and cloaks and heavy black cloth of sleeves and swooping skirts. The buggy drew closer and the sounds of being under water became loud and continuous in her ears.
They’re not witches. They’re just old maids. That’s all that ails them, Daddy said. But they’re mean. Horses don’t pick up their feet that way, so high and fast, as if the ground was afire under them, if they haven’t been trained with chains looped around their legs above their fetlocks. And it’s even against the law to bob their tails like that. Daddy said so. It’s too cruel to cut off a horse’s tail. But they just have horses like that because their family used to be rich and rich people always used to have them. That’s what he said. Gid and Gad were too good for the men around here, they thought, and now they’re nothing but old maids. Old maids are nothing but grown-up women who don’t get married. Not witches.
Anyway, why would real witches need real horses? But perhaps the horses were not real either. A clock could chime or a magic bugle could blow and the horses could turn back into something else.
“Let us give you a ride!”
She had been going to jump into the ditch and run for it if they came after her, but her legs just stood there.
“Put your foot on the step there. There’s lots of room.”
She could feel the way the bones under the black cloth were swaying and pressing together in order to fold her in. At the level of her eyes a pointed shoe stuck out from under the cloth. A line of black fasteners ran down the side of its wrinkled instep. It was impossible to imagine a foot inside the shoe.
“I just go up there,” she whispered, waving her hand at the tiny mailbox so far away.
“But that’s the hardest part of the walk. Hop in here, and we’ll take you up. Do you climb inside, now, and see if the oven is warm yet.”
“Oh, please let me go!”
The witch shut her mouth and her lips disappeared as if she had eaten them. She slashed the horses with her long black whip and the team went into a gallop from a standing start.
Lucy was afraid to move till they were halfway up the hill, still at a gallop. Then she began to run. She didn’t stop until she had turned into the driveway. By then the need of her lungs for air and the underwater sounds in her head were as bad as they were the time last summer when she jumped off the dock into the James River before she knew how to swim. A laughing high-school girl whom she still hated had reached into the water, finally, and pulled her out by the straps across her back. At first she had been thankful, but then she had become embarrassed as she stood there coughing and coughing and coughing, surrounded by laughing people. Sometimes at night, and often when she had done something silly, she would think about that laughing girl who saved her life and grit her teeth trying to stop the embarrassment from burning her face and prickling her eyes with terrible dumbbell sissy tears.
She was beginning to feel it now. Her mother had told her always to be polite to Gid and Gad and not hurt their feelings, because they were sad not to have any little children, and not ever, ever to say they were old maids when they could hear her. Polite, polite. Bull, bull, bull! Old maid, old maid! “Oh, please let me go! Oh, please let me go!”
The mimicking noise in her head could just as well have been Douglas Sinclair running after her, mimicking that unbelievable scream. It went on and on, no matter how many impolite words she shouted back at it.
And still, with all the noise in her head, she thought of how horrible it would be to be an old maid. And then came the thought that even made her stop running. Could she ever marry Douglas Sinclair in order to keep from being an old maid? There was only the one hope left—the miracle she prayed for every night—that God would turn her into a boy so she wouldn’t have to be an old maid, or marry a man either.
“Hello!” her mother said. “You’re home so soon. Did somebody give you a ride?”
“Just ran,” Lucy said.…
It was getting cool in the shadow of the house, but it was warm in the pasture. Lucy slipped under the gate by the barn, straightened up, patted the two little celluloid ducks in her overall pocket to make sure they hadn’t spilled out, and started for the far corner of the farm, running again.
Long before she rounded the hill that stood between her and the slough, she heard the innumerable, unceasing calls of the new flock of blackbirds that had come there to nest. She stopped to listen and watch for a minute. There was at least one bird on every cattail or bit of brush