The Bones of Plenty. Lois Phillips Hudson
was what he hadn’t been able to understand for years.
He had never had so much cash in his possession before, and it seemed as though it would hardly make any difference at all if two or three fifties fluttered out of his pockets and whirled away through the holes around the pedals.
Halfway home he began to feel a cold ache in his fingertips and he realized he was squeezing the wheel as if it was the only thing left on earth to hang on to. It had been a frightful week. First there was Governor Comstock’s Valentine; on the very next day the President-elect—the country’s last hope—had nearly been killed by the six bullets fired at him by a crazy man; and two days later Harry Goodman closed the Eureka Bank.
He drove up his graveled approach and past the house to the shed. He patted two or three of his pockets once more, gathered his purchases in his arms, and walked toward the lamplit kitchen to tell Rose that the final disaster had come to Eureka, too.
There was less than an hour to go for Harry after Will left. He finished doing what he could with the books. It was just a safe minimum of juggling that he did. After all, any man had a right to the means for a fresh start for himself and his family. A couple of thousand one way or another could not do nearly as much for his depositors as it could do for him.
He doubted that any of them had given him any credit at all for keeping the bank going after the crash, or even for saving some individual necks, too, when the crash came. In all the years he had been here, he and his family could count on their fingers the number of times they had been invited out for Sunday dinner. But if a man wanted to get into banking this was the only kind of place he could do it—if he was a Jew. Back East they would laugh if a Jew even applied for a teller’s job. They would tell him to go open a hock shop. He sometimes wondered if the people here in this godforsaken town thought he had come here because he couldn’t think of better places to live.
Well, almost all of them had done their bit to finish him, and now they would suffer as much as he would. If they were going to run him out, he could take a little along and still be fairer to them than they had been to him. They had tried to borrow money against damaged crops, rotting barns, starving cattle, and worthless machinery. They came into his bank smelling of manure and they spat all over the outside of his cuspidor.
The final respite from his doubting twinges had come when he figured out how to fix up Will and some other decent ones. He felt cleared and justified—and exhilarated. It was the only time in his life he had ever possessed real power, and it didn’t matter that his power came from his ruin. The important thing was that he could reward and he could punish.
The fourth time he hauled his watch from its pocket under his belly he saw that at last it was time to close. He pulled down the wooden window and locked it from the inside. Then he slammed the door of the vault and turned the knob on the dial. He adjusted his silk scarf around his neck and he was putting on his overcoat when he heard the door slam.
“I’m all closed up!” he yelled through the partition.
“I gotta have change for tomorrow,” Zack Hoefener yelled back. “You and your damn soft banker’s hours. Open up!” He rapped pointlessly against the bars of the closed window.
Harry unlocked the window and slid it up, pushing almost as high as his short arm could reach. “What do you need, Zack?”
Zack was looking at his hat and scarf. “Leaving a little early, ain’t you?” Hoefener, of course, had never trusted him. He had been one of the first to draw out nearly all of a big savings account when things began to look bad.
“I’m catching a cold,” Harry said. “Never have gotten used to these Dakota winters.”
Zack looked at him again, in that way he had, as though he had a right to stare. He thrust his three crisp twenties at Harry. “All this in pennies and silver,” he said.
“Fine,” Harry replied.
Zack slammed the door the way he always did, and Harry remembered the way he had slammed it after the argument they had had over his big withdrawal.
“I have to have thirty days’ notice for a withdrawal like that,” Harry had protested.
“You and how many other men are gonna tell me that?” Hoefener had asked. He had been a little drunker than usual. Harry had given him the money, and after that Harry had had to listen to him brag about what a foolproof and ingenious hiding place he had hit upon. He bragged about it to nearly everybody who came into his store. And then they came out of the store, headed straight across the road to the bank, and made their withdrawals.
Harry buttoned his overcoat and locked his door. Zack was just entering his store. Harry got one more look at the man’s monstrous profile before he turned and headed up the sidewalk, his rubbers thumping on the boards and his satchel swinging heavily from his shaking arm.
“What’s that?” Rose said to Will when he set the cashbox on the table with the groceries.
She had put the lamp on the table to work by, and the light of it made deep shadows in the sockets of her eyes. She was nearly as tall as he was, but thin from the erosions of her austerity, which sought to conquer all hungers. There was little gray in her brown hair, though it was dull with years, and wind-worn like the boards of a house. She wore it in a bun that was thick not from the profusion of the hair but from the length of it. She swept it back so tightly that it seemed to pull at the fine skin of her temples, drawing out the length of her hazel eyes and smoothing the elegant eminences of her cheekbones. Had she known that her stern and simple hair fashion was the best possible one for her face, she might have changed it, for she had devoted much of her life to the mortification of the flesh and to plucking out the eye that might offend.
After she had spoken she waited, her mouth having returned to the position of a mouth which tried never to make frivolous movements. Her jaws were square without being heavy or hard. Their squareness was perfect for the rest of her face, but the perfection made the face seem unapproachable.
It was the kind of face that in her extreme youth had either frightened off a man or challenged him. Most men had been frightened; Will had first been challenged and then he had recognized that she was beautiful. He kept his eyes on her face while he reached under his coat and brought out a roll of fifties.
“Will, what have you done?” she gasped.
He had always had a tendency to grin, nervously and broadly and uncontrollably, when he really wanted to fight or roar with misery. He could feel his lips twitching as he said, “Harry has closed the bank. All washed up.”
“Oh, Will! What will we do?”
“I’ve got it all.” He began pulling the rolls out of his pockets.
The money fell on the steel table-top with little rustling sounds, as of birds alighting and settling upon their evening roosts.
“How will we keep it all?” she asked, when the last roll had fallen. “What shall we do with it?”
His proposal sounded even more outrageous than he had expected it to. “I know it sounds silly, but I suppose we ought to bury it, like everybody else. I suppose it’ll be good as long as there’s anything left of the country.”
Her quick agreement surprised him. “Yes,” she said positively. “It mustn’t be in the house.… Oh, Will, thank God you got it. How did you know? How did you get it?”
He shrugged his shoulders; he hadn’t yet taken off his coat and it was getting heavy. He was beginning to feel heavy, too—to sag after the shock. “I didn’t know,” he said. “Harry just gave it to me. We didn’t talk about what happened. I don’t know why it happened.”
When they looked at the money again it seemed