The Bones of Plenty (22 page)

“Rose, do you suppose George would have a fit if we gave Lucy a pony for her birthday this summer?”

“Why, Will, I’m
sure
he’d never let her have it. He’s even mad every time I give Rachel some old thing to make Lucy a coat or a jumper out of. I declare, what
ever
made you even
think
of such a thing?”

Will leaned against the wall, still rubbing his hands and forearms with the towel. “Well, maybe it hurts his pride to think that he can’t buy new clothes for Lucy. Maybe he’d look at a pony in a different light.”

“Everything
hurts his pride,” Rose said. “No, I’m
sure
he wouldn’t hear of it. It would just make trouble.”

“I wish there was some way for her to have a pony,” Will said wistfully. “Wouldn’t it be fun to watch her come galloping over to visit us? She’s such a wild little cuss. I bet she’d get a horse all lathered up just bringing in the cows.”

Will ought not to encourage Lucy’s turbulent behavior. It seemed to Rose as though she herself was the only one in the family who cared whether or not Lucy grew up to be a lady. Even now it was a fight to get her to wear a dress or to keep her legs together when she
was
wearing one. Rachel was working too hard to think about what Lucy’s behavior might turn her into, and George and Will both did their best to make a tomboy out of her. It was awful. What would become of the child? After all, she
was
a girl. Every day she walked more like George, with long, unfeminine strides. “Whistling girls and crowing hens always come to some bad ends,” Rose often told her.

Lucy would either sulk at this or laugh impertinently and whistle loudly. The child was a caution.

“Maybe it’s just as well if she
doesn’t
have a pony,” Rose said. “She’d probably just kill herself on it.”

“Oh, no,” he argued. “She’s really a pretty sensible little girl, I think. She’d handle a horse all right.”

“Well, George would never hear of it and you know it. Come and eat.”

It was one of those smoldering spring days that just kept getting hotter and hotter—a foretaste, Rachel feared, of another scorching summer. In the middle of the afternoon she sent some water to the field with Lucy.

George saw the nimbus of her light hair, brilliant against the black earth, as she came over the rise of the hill toward him. There she was again, with nothing better to do than run over the fields. Why hadn’t she been a boy?

He had not been too disappointed when she was first born, because he realized that one girl was an asset in a farm family; otherwise the mother had a hard time keeping up with the housework and the other babies as they came along. But no other babies had come for six years, and finally, after long months of hope, there was Cathy.

And the older Lucy got, the more it seemed to him that she should have been a boy. She was running so easily now that he could see she had no notion that she was coming up a hill. She brought him a quart of water in a gallon lard pail. A tin cup rolled and thumped around the bottom of the pail.

“You should have carried the cup in your other hand,” he told her. “This way we have to reach our dirty hands down through the drinking water to get it.”

He noticed the way something set in her face and it angered him. A man couldn’t even make a contribution to the practical education of his child any more without having the child act abused. He handed back the drinking cup. She set off for the house again, picking up momentum as she began to go with the hill. When she was twenty or thirty feet away, he called over his shoulder, “Much obliged.” He couldn’t tell whether she heard him or not.

She put the pail in the kitchen and then she went and sat in her swing. She pulled the bandage aside to peek at the end of the longest scratch the rabbit had made. Then she stood up in the swing and began to pump. She wedged her feet against the ropes and shoved mightily. Higher and higher she went, until the long swing ropes stretched out almost parallel to the ground and she stiffened her body to keep from flying out at the forward end of the arc. Then the ropes would snap with a dangerous jolt and she would begin the descent and the backward curve that pulled on her back and legs and made her feel as though her stomach was dropping away behind her. At the other end of the arc she would be suspended for an instant, nearly horizontal, unable to breathe, looking down, like a bird, with just time to wonder before she started down again, if this was the moment she finally was going to fall.

There was a tantalizing branch at the end of the arc. She could almost touch it with the swing board, but not quite. Every day she tried it. Every day, when she had pumped up till the ropes went lax and free for that moment when she knew she might flip clear back over the branch from which the swing hung, she would begin to chant, “Please …” on the way up, “God …” on the way back, “make me …” on the way up again, “a boy,” on the way back. There had to be the awful jerky moments at either end of the arc before she could begin the prayer. One had to be very brave to bear the sight of those ropes buckling and rippling with indecision. Every day she proved to God that she was worthy of being changed into a boy.

Will sat reading the
Jamestown Sun
in the scuffed brown leather chair he had sat in almost every night for as long as they had lived in the tall yellow house. Rose filled half the living room with a quilting frame. The quilt was a generous double-bed size—five large white squares across and eight down, separated by wide bands of pale green. First she had quilted it all, in two-inch squares standing on their corners like diamonds, then she began stitching in the sunbonnet children. They were pleasingly conventionalized, with long flaring dresses cut from various scraps of print and huge sunbonnets of different solid colors. Even while she worked, Rose thought of how near the end of the world might be, and she wondered why it mattered to her to leave a thing like this behind her. This quilt, when it was finished, would be washed to brighten it after the long hours under her working hands, and then packed away in a trunk. When Lucy was married it would be given to her, and then, when her first daughter was married, to that daughter.

“Well, they’re still after J. P. Morgan,” Will said. “Seems they uncovered another railroad he got control of by shady means. That’s what I try to tell George. A man’s sins will be found out sooner or later. I’ve always believed in the justice of this world. Here … here’s another piece here. Did you read this piece about Henry Wallace’s speech, Rose?”

“No,” she said. “I want to finish this square tonight. I probably won’t get to the paper at all. Why don’t you go ahead and read it to me?”

“Well, there’s just a little bit here, but here’s what he said, and he said it to a bunch of bigwigs, too. Just goes to show you that selfish men don’t always run the government in this country. Here … he says, ‘How much more socially intelligent it would be to redistribute purchasing power in such a way as to put it effectively to work. Unemployed purchasing power means unemployed labor and unemployed labor means human want in the midst of plenty.’ There, now, isn’t that just what ails us in a nutshell? That’s mighty well put. Whatever you say about Roosevelt, this is quite a change from Hoover.”

Rose nodded grimly. “I suppose they’ll start finding out things about
Hoover,
now,” she said. “Just the way they have about Coolidge.”

“Oh, I think Hoover’s probably an honest man,” Will said. “Just scared to do anything for fear of getting on the wrong side of his Wall Street friends. I don’t know that there’s anything a Republican could have done. The country was just going crazy, that’s all.

“Say, I was just going to tell you how I got hold of some shearers today and here I see the Happy Farmer wrote his poem about that. Says, ‘Along about wool-clipping time, I’m jealous of the sheep, Who skip away and leave their clothes, Behind them in a heap.’ He makes it sound awfully easy. Sometimes I wonder if he ever lived on a farm, you know that? But other times he hits it right on the nose. Well, anyhow, I was going to tell you, I talked to a gang of fellows today over at Larsen’s, and they said they can come day after tomorrow. There’s four of them, and they look pretty fast. They think they can do the flock in a day and a half, so that will be just a few meals for you to cook. They figure on finishing Larsen’s tomorrow, and he had nearly six hundred. I didn’t get much of a chance to talk to Larsen about them, but I gathered he was satisfied.”

“They’re all alike,” Rose said.

“Well, I can tell you one thing, they were making
him
hump. He ought to have hired himself one more man—two helpers aren’t enough, with four shearers. I’ll get Ralph and George, I guess. I imagine George won’t have quite so much to say this year about what a mistake it was for me to feed the flock all winter.

“Why, just think! Last summer we got seven cents a pound—that was hardly fifty cents a fleece—minus ten or fifteen to get it sheared. But the way the prices have been going up, by golly, it wouldn’t surprise me if we’d get around two dollars this summer. I bet it’ll be two bits a pound by the time they get around to paying us for what we ship. And Hoover’s been blaming the low prices on the wool-growers. Too much wool, he said, that’s why there’s no market. But Roosevelt comes along and gets things to rolling again, and all of a sudden it looks like there
is
a market after all!”

And it wasn’t taking another war to move prices either, the way a lot of people said it would. In fact, there was good news of peace in the paper. Italy, Britain, France, and Germany had just signed a Four-Power Peace Pact at Rome. It was a treaty to last ten years and then be renewed.

“I think maybe the world is starting to get some sense, Rose. It looks like maybe people are finally going to spend money on something besides war. What do
you
think?”

“I think,” she said, “that we’re living in the Thousand Years of the Beast, right now.”

He tried to josh her out of it, or think of something else to talk about whenever she said that. “Oh, Rose! Well, then, if you think that, let’s take a vacation! We’ve never had one in our lives! Let’s
go
somewhere this winter. When the boom was on, everybody else took their big wheat checks and went off to Florida or some place. But we just stayed right here in the cold and snow. It’s cheap down there now—two or three dollars a day would get us a luxury room and meals. Come on, it’s
our
turn now.”

“Oh, Will, you don’t know what you’re saying! Ever since Harry closed the bank you’ve had one crazy idea after another! I couldn’t enjoy myself for one minute spending money we ought to leave the children.” Rose thought and then added, “George won’t take it now, but I don’t imagine he’ll be quite so proud after we’re gone and can’t see the good it’s doing them.”

“Oh, Rose, he’s not that way! He doesn’t want to
spite
us. He’s just an extra proud young man, that’s all—but I wish he wasn’t so blamed stubborn.”

He gazed at her quilt a minute. “You wait and see. George won’t let me pay him what I pay the shearers. ‘They’re skilled men,’ he’ll say. A skilled man is worth twice as much as a helper.’ And then he’ll work harder than any other man here, all day long.”

He searched for his glasses and then, remembering that he hadn’t been out of his chair, felt on the top of his head and flipped them back down to his nose. “I haven’t had such itchy feet for forty years,” he said. “I’d sure like to get a look at that Chicago fair.

“Says here, ‘The most spectacular event in the opening of the Century of Progress Exposition was the turning on of the thousands of lights in the Hall of Science. By some highly scientific process, which has to do with a photoelectric cell, the light which left Arcturus, a fixed star of the first magnitude, was caught at four observatories in the nation and beamed to throw the master switch at the fair when Postmaster General James A. Farley pressed a button. The light which threw the switch had been traveling through space for forty years to reach the planet Earth.’ Isn’t that remarkable, Rose? Think of it! Think of the things man has discovered just since the turn of the century. It hardly seems possible. By golly, I sure would like to go to that fair.”

“I suppose Mr. Farley thinks God made all the firmament so that
he
could push a button that was connected to a star some way.”

“No, no,
that’s
not the idea! The
light
was
there!
It was there all the time! And men just now figured out how they could use it.”

“Of
course
the light was there all the time. And now man thinks he can step up to the throne of God because of some puny trick. I tell you, the days are at hand. We will
all
see how puny we are.”

It depressed him when she was like this, and he felt as though he ought to do something about the terrible way she felt. He knew it was Stuart that made her feel this way. But he just felt too tired tonight. He shuffled his feet back into his slippers and wandered out the kitchen door. The full moon hurtled across the sky, riding over a wind-scattered flock of softly gleaming translucent clouds. The moon looked the way it looked through the wide-open door of a breezy boxcar when he rode it across the Kansas plains forty years ago.