The Bones of Plenty (60 page)

George looked down the hill and saw that one of the diggers kept coming on up toward them and that he wasn’t a digger at all. He was Stuart. George could tell, even from this distance, where Stuart had been during his father’s funeral. A little man ran up and took Stuart by the arm, trying to hold him back.

“They had to dynamite it!” Stuart shouted. “He worked his whole life in the damned dirt, and then it wouldn’t even let him
in!
They had to dynamite it! Took twenty sticks to make him a little hole in the ground! It wouldn’t even let him in! This fella here—he
knows!
He helped ’em
do
it. He
told
me and he
knows!”

Tiny Tim fled to the truck.

Nobody wanted to be the one to keep a son from his last sight of the box with his father’s body in it—no matter what the son’s condition was. Stuart forced his way through the mourners to the side of the grave. He lunged at the mound of frozen clods and straightened up with a chunk of earth the size of his head.

“Dust to dust!” he cried.

He stood with his feet wide apart like an executioner, raised the earthen missile between his hands, and hurled it down into the hole. There was a crash on metal—a gong sounding in Hell.

George was probably the only man there strong enough to handle Stuart without any help. He grabbed him from behind and jerked him from the edge of the grave. Stuart stumbled and lurched as though he could no longer keep his balance. George kept it for him all the way down the hill, scarcely feeling the effort it required. So this was the boy who pretended to be embarrassed when George had his say at the county agent’s meeting, was it? But this boy didn’t mind that the
whole
county would hear about
this
scene, and that of course the whole county would never forget it.

“If you’re looking for a fight, you found just the right man,” George told him. “But if you lift a finger to me, you’d just better kill me the first time!”

“
I
don’t wanna fight
you!
I’m too
drunk
to fight…. I
never
feel like fightin’ when I’m drunk. You know, George,
you
need a drink. Let’s go on back and get a drink. I just thought you oughta know about what this fella here told me.” He looked around for Tiny Tim. “Well
he
told me all about it.
He’ll
have a drink with us!”

“Shut up!”

“Twenty sticks!” Stuart twisted away from George and shouted his words back up the hill.

The graveside group watched, almost as motionless as the man they had come to bury, while the man’s son-in-law struck the man’s son on the jaw.

The minister beckoned to the gravediggers and they moved forward with their shovels. They juggled the clods like teacups on saucer-edges and lowered them into the grave as far as they could before letting them fall. Even so, the gong sounded again and again.

Reverend Brant was accustomed to graveside hysterics of one kind or another, and Prohibition or no Prohibition, there always seemed to be about the same incidence of drunks at funerals. People just couldn’t seem to really believe that the person they loved was not in the casket at all, but far away in a blessed place. He finished reading the short service and sprinkled the dust he had been holding in his hand. Then he waited for the diggers to finish and arrange the flowers over the broken earth.

George pushed Stuart behind the funeral parlor car. Here at last was somebody who needed to be hit.

“Stand up and fight, you bastard! Somebody should have straightened you out a long time ago. Dirty shiftless bastard! Roam around the country—bring the god-damned smut from Texas.
Fight,
you bastard!”

Stuart was laughing harder and harder. “That’s what I call respect for the dead! They haven’t even got him in the
ground
yet and you call me a
bastard!”

George hit him again with everything he had, and Stuart stretched out on the highway without a whimper.

He’d be out for a while but he wasn’t really hurt. George looked over the roof of the hearse and up the hill to see what the crowd was doing. It was scattering and heading down toward him. He grabbed the limp ankles and dragged Stuart to the delivery end of the hearse. He flung open the doors and hauled the unconscious body inside, head first. It smelled strongly in there of the bouquets that had been riding beside the coffin. That flower smell so cooped up and intensified was like the smell of death itself.

“Just
wait
till you come to!” George told the body.

The funeral parlor owner came hopping ahead of the crowd. “I
saw
that! Have you gone out of your mind? Get him out of there! Have you
killed
him?”

“You mewling little shrimp! You mincing little
butcher!
No, I didn’t
kill
him! You haven’t got another customer
yet!
Leave him be! It’ll sober him right up when he wakes up in there. Just give him a ride back to town, you bloodsucking chiseler!” George was aware that he didn’t really want to be shouting.

“I
said
get him out of there!” The little ghoul dressed all in black was so overwhelmed by ordinary human rage that his white face was turning to an ordinary crimson.
“Get him out!”

“You
bugger!
You sawed-off little vampire! You’ve got enough of his cash so you can
afford
to give him a lift back to town. I won’t
touch
him again!”

The embalmer grabbed Stuart under the arms and pulled him out the end of the hearse. Stuart opened his eyes when his feet hit the ground. He stayed on his legs long enough to stumble to the second black car and he sat down on the bumper.

It was necessary to remove him as quickly as possible. Reverend Brant had ridden in that car and he took Stuart’s arm. “Can we give you a ride?” he asked.

Stuart looked around. He distinctly remembered coming out in a truck, but he couldn’t see one now. “Much obliged,” he said, and crawled into the car. He leaned back against the seat and looked up the hill. The bouquets made a last discordant explosion against the colorless snow and sky. It was an explosion that hurt his eyes.

“Why’d you do
that?”
Stuart said. “What makes you think he’d want all those flowers out there just to freeze? ‘When It’s Springtime in the Rockies’—that was his favorite song—‘Springtime in the Rockies.’ How come you did that?”

“We always do it,” the preacher said. “It doesn’t make any difference what time of year it is, does it?”

Stuart did not come home that afternoon, but Rose would not let anybody else stay with her. And since there was no one to see her cry, she cried.

She sat at the little black desk trying to get through the papers in it. They went back thirty years and more—back into the last century. Looking at so many of them all at once made her weep for his life even more than for his death.

He had been carrying much more insurance than she had thought he was. He had always been so much more generous with her than she had been with him. She knew that he had lived his life without some of the things a man ought to have with his wife. But she couldn’t see how she herself could ever have been any different. For thirty-six years she had known well enough what she did. She had held him away from herself and tried to make up for it by working too hard. He had seen what she was doing—he always saw—and she had pushed him farther away because she was afraid to have him see.

I never wanted him to know what was in my mind. But I loved him. But if he knew what was in my mind, I wanted to run away. I never wanted
anybody
to know what was in my mind. But I loved him. But I loved him. But I loved him. But I hide what is in my mind even from God. Even from
God.

Here are so many papers about the fire and the barn. What did I do? What did I do? What did I do when I came from the house just in time to see it blow up? I ran around. I remember running around like a chicken with its head chopped off but I don’t remember what I did. That’s how much good I was to him then. How long was it before I went in to get him? How long did he lie there with the smoke in his lungs and the cinders falling and burning him? Would he be here now if he hadn’t almost died then? What did I
do?

It was Monday we buried him and now it is Wednesday, I believe. Yes, it must be Wednesday and I must get into this empty bed tonight or else somebody will find me asleep somewhere else and they will wonder why it is that I didn’t go to bed—they will think about what could have been in my mind. This empty bed here where I held him off so often—not by anything I even said or hinted—but I held him off. But I loved him. I loved him. Did I ever say it to him? I can’t remember, I can’t remember—stop, God, stop trying to find out if I said it—I won’t let it be in my mind and then
You
won’t know and
I
won’t know—nobody will ever know.

She pulled off her clothes and crept under the blankets. But it was too dark. She got out of the bed and felt on the chiffonier for matches. She lit the kerosene lamp and lay down again, but she could not close her eyes.

The useless black electrical wire stuck down at her from the very center of the ceiling. How many times had she pointed out to him what a waste of money it had been to wire the house and how much nicer the ceiling would have looked without that hole?

“You just wait, now, Rosie,” he would say. (Oh, the sound of his voice!) “They’ll string a line out here one of these days. Then won’t you be the queen? Lights, incubators, washing machine, sewing machine, water pump!”

The lamp was going dry. The oily smoke of the burning wick billowed up inside the glass chimney and coated it with an ever-thickening layer of furry soot. The lamp base was very fancy—an elegant wedding present. The painted flowers and butterflies on the milky white china were all gay and innocent of the murky storm above them. A week ago, and for all the part of her life that preceded that week, she would have run through the whole house to get to a lamp if she smelled it going dry. She could hardly believe that she was lying here watching a lamp burn dry and not even getting out of bed to blow if out; neither could she imagine why she had run through the whole house because of smoking lamps for so many years.

From the Shepards’ new barn George saw that the bedroom had the only light in the house. He wondered if Rose was sick. But he was certainly not going to go in to find out. He had been instructed by Rachel not even to take the milk inside the house. He was to feed some of it to the pigs and bring the rest home. Rachel had said that she couldn’t imagine when her mother would ever be able to look at him again after what he had done. Then she had stopped speaking to him or looking at him herself.

George knew he had done an awful thing. What infuriated him, as he went about doing Stuart’s chores, was that Stuart was not considered to be half so culpable as he was himself. He could tell by Rachel’s attitude that she had already forgiven her brother. That is, she had forgiven him as much as she ever had since the night he took his first drink. A drunkard was never completely forgiven; on the other hand, a drunkard rarely got put in the kind of doghouse
he
was in, either. No matter what things made a man forget himself, alcohol was the only thing that would give him a kind of excuse with even the most bug-eyed teetotaler.

So here
he
was—the strong steady one—doing the work of the weak one while the weak one slept off a binge somewhere. The weak were cared for by the strong, covered up for and apologized for by the strong, and forgiven by the strong. But the strong never forgave each
other,
did they? In the two days he’d been plugging over here and taking care of his wife’s brother’s work for him, had his wife softened up one iota? Not on your life!

The weak might not be respected, but by God they got taken care of! Hell, hell, hell! he said to himself as he dumped the last pail of whole milk into the pigs’ trough and closed the barn door.

The house was dark now. Should he go in and see if everything was all right? To hell with it. He struck off across the field for home, swinging his lantern and treading on the ends of the shadow legs that skipped so freely back and forth in the yellow light on the snow.