The Bones of Plenty. Lois Phillips Hudson
“I just thought somebody might’ve been in that knew what happened to him,” Zack said angrily. “By God, I’ll just go on up there myself, right now.”
He stamped out of the store and headed around the corner and up the street. He glared at the empty window of the bank and turned and spat at its steps. The sidewalk ended at the end of the block. Then he walked on the edge of the road, past houses that had once been yellow or white or brown. All of them had columned front porches, gables jutting from their high roofs, and privies set squarely in line with their back doors. But they were not really so much alike as they looked. It was just that the same thing had happened to them all. They were like a double row of unfortunate sisters, who for different reasons all remained gray-haired spinsters, staring at each other wonderingly across the frozen street.
In the yard of one house a swing hanging from the branches of a great bare tree played by itself in the wind. In another yard a privy door flapped and banged, and in still another, several paths from convenient approaches crossed to one of the town pumps.
There was only one house beyond the Goodmans’ to the north, but it was far out in a field and not on the street. That was where the Finleys lived, and Zack saw, as he approached Harry’s house, that Mrs. Finley had already got a big Monday morning wash out, to freeze stiff in the wind. He didn’t see how that Finley outfit stayed alive in that big old leaking house. Harry, being the money-grubber that he was, actually demanded rent for the place. Harry owned it the way he owned all the other places, because of a no-good mortgage.
Harry’s own house was set in a yard so full of trees that, living or dead, bare or leafed, they nearly hid it from people passing by. Zack’s knock, muted by his glove, drew no response. He took off the glove and rapped again with the sharpness of his cold knuckles. He twisted the door knob, but it would not turn. Then he kicked the door.
He tramped down the path to the garage. The doors were locked, but he found a window draped with spider webs and dotted with the dry husks of insects. He could see that the car was not there. He heaved himself up the steps of the back porch, and yanked at the screen door, which opened so cordially that he nearly lost his balance. But the porcelain knob on the back door was as resistant as the brass knob on the front door.
He shouted into the house and pounded on a window. He stood for a moment, his glove cupped around his goiter, while he thought. Then he lunged around the house and up the steps of Harry’s neighbor.
Old Mrs. Webber came to the door. She shivered in her long black woolen dress and clutched her shawl around her age-deformed shoulders. “Come in, come in,” she said in a high voice that scratched something in her throat. Zack’s glove went back to his goiter.
“It’s so cold. Come in, so I can shut the door. Martin’s in bed today. His laig and his hip is hurting him. What did you want?”
“Where’s the Goodmans?” Zack shouted. “When did they go away? Have they cleared out for good?”
“I never see nobody in the wintertime,” Mrs. Webber mourned, and her voice scratched on something a notch or two higher. “Just the boy that brings me the groceries and goes down to the pump and fetches me my water. And that old man with the big blue lip that brings the coal.” Mrs. Webber no longer remembered names.
“Them Goodmans haven’t never been neighborly to us,” she went on, and her voice went back down and scratched in the first notch. Listening to it was like watching an old cow bend her head to the side and rake her neck up and down against a knot on a fence post. “Martin says that’s the way them Jews are. When they first come here I went over and called on the missus and took her an angel food cake—angel food—with twelve egg whites. They’s a lot of people in this town said I used to make the best angel food cake in the county. But that was before my wrists got too sore to beat it right any more.”
“But what about the Goodmans!” Zack cried.
“Why, do you know what she brought back in the dish I took her that cake in? Six rotten little fish! Martin said that would learn me to give something free for nothing to a Jew. We give them fish to the dog.”
“Did you see them go away?”
“Are they gone away?” Mrs. Webber asked.
“They’re gone all right! Their car’s gone.”
“Well, I swan,” said Mrs. Webber. “Never even said goodby. Just like a Jew.”
Zack ran all the way back to Herman’s store, clumping ponderously down the middle of the road, keeping his arms crossed to steady all the burning, jumping things inside his chest.
“He’s gone all right,” he cried to Herman. “Cleared right out. I said he would, didn’t I?”
Johnny Koslov, the youngest of the Koslov brothers, loitered in the rear of the store, hopelessly eyeing a horse blanket that he coveted for the bed of himself and his Hilda. He came forward to the counter and demanded, “Who iss gone? Who iss it?”
“The banker’s gone—that’s who!” Zack roared. “The little Jew banker. Just like I said he would!”
“Oh my!” said Johnny. Johnny had never had any money in the bank and he had not heard about the panic, but he could react to sounds in voices and looks on faces. “Oh my!” he said again.
Zack paid no more attention to him. He despised all Russians. “You find me a Roosian with any brains,” he would say, “and I’ll prove to you he’s probably got German blood in him. And they’ll stand around in your place and spit their filthy-dirty Roosian peanuts anywhere they feel like it—just like they act at home!”
Herman didn’t care about the sunflower seed husks. When he got around to it, he swept them out the front door onto the sidewalk, where they eventually sifted away between the boards. It didn’t bother him when the Russians gathered around his stove, chattering in their foolish language and blowing the salty slivers from their muscular lips. As long as the Russians spent money, Herman didn’t care how many Russian peanut shells they spat.
Herman had dust from a sack of chicken mash in his apron, and he beat at it, raising a yellow cloud that settled over the hairs on his hands. He dangled one of the hands in a small vat of dill pickles and brought up half a pickle which he put in his mouth. “You reckon he’s gone for good?”
“Well, now then, just what do you think?” Zack sneered.
“Why, he might just be taking one of them bank holidays,” Herman said. “He maybe will come back when the new President comes in.”
Herman had learned how to handle Zack Hoefener in twenty years of running a store in the same town with him. “You make me sick,” Zack said. “We should go after him with a rope. We should have a good old-fashioned necktie party.”
“You cannot hang a businessman for losing all his money,” Herman observed. “Or for taking a holiday, either.” He was not exerting himself to be fair to Harry but only to infuriate Zack, who flung open the door and charged through it, nearly ramming into the customer on Herman’s steps.
“What ails him?” George Custer said, holding the door open and leaning out to watch Hoefener’s departure.
Herman crunched the last of the pickle into his mouth and said to George, “He just found out about the bank.”
“What bank?”
“Harry’s bank. He closed it up.”
“What do you mean!”
“He went away. Nobody knows where.”
George took a long breath. “The dirty little Jew,” he said. “The stinking tight little Jew. Who in hell did he lend the money to? The stingy scoundrel must’ve lost it himself! The dirty little swindler!”
George paced to the stove