The Bones of Plenty. Lois Phillips Hudson
slab of bacon tied in brown paper and the twenty-pound sack of sugar slumping in portly wrinkles of lettered cloth.
Neither of them had any impulse to count the bills. They unrolled them and flattened them into the box. Then they closed the lid and flipped the catch in front and tried it in different places in the house. Finally they decided to keep it under the bed for the night.
They sat down to their supper, repeating the Lord’s Prayer together as they did three times each day. Then they thought of George and Rachel.
“Will, do the children have anything in the bank?” Rose asked anxiously.
“I’ve been wondering,” Will said. “I don’t see how it could be much. I wish they would let us make it up to them, whatever it is.”
“George would die first!”
“I know.”
“Will, if you rushed back into town now do you suppose you could catch Harry and ask him just for George’s deposits?”
“Oh, no. Harry’s a good many miles away from here by now—that’s a cinch. And nobody knows which direction, either.”
He leaned back in his chair and stared across his plate at the blackness on the other side of the dining room windows. A long crack split one of the windows diagonally from top to bottom. He could not see the crack because of the darkness, but he could see the button in the middle of it, tied through to the button on the other side to steady the fracture and make the window less likely to shatter. Lightning had done it. He had been in the room when the bolt stabbed through the window—hissing, crackling, booming, ripping out his eardrums and blowing the house to smithereens. Still—even as it trundled away—it possessed him; with its own detonations it commanded and contained the detonations of his heart; within the grinding concussions of its bowels it whirled the bursting organs of his own digestion. Finally it mocked him. It tumbled his splitting, craven head back into the room and declined to execute the claim it had established. Then he found, first, that he was alive, next, that the house had not exploded—it was not even on fire—and last, that his eardrums were in their accustomed place, aching.
Why it had let him go he could not guess. While it possessed him he had thought how coincidental and how appropriate. His oldest brother had died by lightning.
Will never fixed the window, though he was not sure why. Perhaps it was for a bond with his brother. Perhaps it was superstition—so long as the window remained cracked, all other bolts would pass by. Perhaps it was merely to remind him of how capriciously death frolicked in a man’s house.
It wasn’t that he was afraid to die but that he hoped passionately, perhaps ungratefully or even irreverently, to live long enough to be assured that things were going to get better. He had fathered two children and worked inhumanly hard to give them what he had never had himself. But neither of them, at the moment, was in anything like the circumstances he had envisioned for them.
“Why did Rachel marry George?” he said to Rose.
“George was a very handsome man when she married him,” said Rose.
“Would a girl with a mind like Rachel’s really marry a man for his looks?” Will demanded.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Who knows why anybody marries anybody?”
“But why in thunderation didn’t she marry that boy in college?” he asked.
“Maybe she was too young. Maybe it was a mistake to send her when she was only sixteen. Maybe if she’d been older …”
“But Rose, there was nothing here for her! What else could we have done? Kept her on the farm driving a tractor till she was eighteen—till she forgot half of what she’d learned? Once you start an education you’ve got to keep on with it, that’s all.”
Rose was silent. She was right, he thought. Nobody knew why anybody married anybody.
After a while he couldn’t help himself any longer and he had to say it:
“I wonder where Stuart is.”
“We’ll probably hear when he gets short on money again.” Rose pushed away and began to clear the table. Stuart had been gone nearly two years and she still refused to talk about him.
The next morning Will went out early, before the eastern rim of his gray fields had yet rounded toward the sun, and buried his box of money.
He walked through the orchard from the gate—six trees up, two over—and he chopped with his pick on the downhill side of a dead crab-apple tree. As the daylight grew he looked nervously up and down the road. He felt like a criminal or a fool, or both.
He winced a little when he heard the first chunk of frozen earth thud against the box. He filled the hole, brushed the bit of snow back over his digging, and tramped it around a little. He had chosen that particular tree because he knew it was dead. Last summer’s drought and this winter’s sudden plunging freezes had finished it off. He was almost as tall as the tree. He had to admit that it had not done so well as he had promised Rose that it would do, and it certainly was not so hardy as the catalog had told him it would be.
Saturday, February 18
Otto Wilkes trotted his showy team of matched dappled-gray Percherons across the railroad tracks, nearly catapulting his two youngest and lightest boys off the back end of the wagon. A gelding and a stallion the horses were, and they weighed a ton apiece. He had hated to geld the one, but the other, being three years older, was already mature and a proven sire, so he had had no choice. Otto didn’t want to try to manage a team of two Percheron stallions.
He pulled up before the dusty window that read “HOEFENER’S EUREKA HARDWARE, Agent for John Deere Tractors & Equipment.”
“All right boys,” he said. “You can come in with me.”
He lifted the smallest of the four, who was scarcely able to walk yet, and they all lined up behind him and followed him into the store.
Zack saw them as they pulled up, and he shoved his dark brown bottle under the cash register. He didn’t know who made him sicker—Otto with his brassy, pickthank ways, or Otto’s numberless, shivering, dirty-nosed children breathing loudly through their mouths.
Otto bought a box of rivets for some harness repair he was doing and some other harness fittings. The whole purchase came to just under a dollar, but Otto wrote out a check for five.
“I’m not no bank!” Zack objected when he saw the check. “Why don’t you ever come in town on a weekday and get your cash over at the bank? Is this thing gonna bounce on me? I’m a pretty mean man when I get a rubber check.”
“Oh come on, Zack. I got to have a little cash. We’re all out of coal and you know I can’t get coal without cash.”
Zack cashed it, mostly to get the pestilential brood out of his store. He just couldn’t stand to have that grimy bunch of kids fingering everything in sight.
Monday, February 20
Even though Harry never opened up until ten in the morning, Zack spent almost the entire hour after he opened his own place peering through the backward lettering on his window at the bank across the street. If Otto’s check was no good, he would drive out there that very night and either take it out of the oily bum’s hide or attach his team, which was the only thing he had worth attaching.
At eleven o’clock Zack hung a sign on his door, “Gone to lunch,” and went over to the bank.
It had been such a slow morning that Zack was sure he hadn’t missed seeing Harry come, but still he could not believe it when he found the door locked, Harry had had colds before, but he had always sent his wife down to keep the bank open. Zack went down to Herman Schlaht’s store.
“Where’s