The Bones of Plenty (70 page)

Rachel couldn’t believe he had meant that the way it sounded. She kept seeing “Hot Springs Tonight” painted on the car in front of the Finley house. An auctioneer wouldn’t make a joke like that in front of her neighbors—men and women together—not a joke like that about the bed of her marriage. But her face began to burn and burn and burn.

On the very day of the auction she had behaved like a Finley. On the very day of the auction she was publicly and lewdly joked about. It had never seemed possible that a person could become a Finley in one day.

People were packing away things they had bought and rounding up children. They came up to Rachel asking for pardon behind the words they actually spoke—pardon for the offenses they had felt obliged to commit. (For if a man needed a good cow, and a good cow was going cheap, well, after all, he couldn’t afford
not
to buy, could he? Not and still compete with
another
fellow who was going to get
another
good cow for a third of what she was worth.)

There had been a farewell party for the Custers, but now everyone came once more to say goodby—Going to miss you folks a lot … Your mother’s going to be lost without you, Rachel … Who’s going to play the piano for church now, and Epworth League? … Good luck … So long now … Drop us a card now and then; we’d hate to lose track of you … Take care of yourselves … So long … Let us
know,
now, how you make out … Stake out a claim for
me,
if you run across anything … So long … Good luck.

Thus lightly did each parting neighbor give a little shake to the roots that had lain dying in the sun all afternoon. The last globules of drying earth, held in the last hairy root-endings, pulverized and vanished in the wind. It took but a little time, in such a sun, for uncovered roots to perish and to pass away as though they had never been.

Everyone was eager to escape. Every time somebody sold out the rest heard the hammer knocking, as impartial as death. Still, there would be a little less competition now—perhaps a little more chance for the rest….

They were, indeed, eager to escape. They must get home as soon as possible and do their chores.

Everyone but Rachel and George had chores to do. For the first evening in almost ten years they had no chores to do—not so much as one old hen waiting for somebody to throw her a handful of corn.

Rachel had left the suitcase open in the dining room so she could add a last stray diaper or dish towel. She went in now and snapped the locks. The only other thing in the room—in the house, for that matter—was the piano. And the piano bench. Somebody she didn’t know had bought it. They would come for it tomorrow, when she was already far away.

If I go over and touch it now—just touch the middle C above the golden lock—if I should just let myself strike that middle C again and remember the day the men brought it to the house while my father stood in the wide arch between the dining room and the parlor—smiling because he loved me and because he loved music. If I should just touch that middle C above the golden lock again, I would be turned to a pillar of salt; I would never walk out of here and get into the front seat of the car beside my husband, where the world says I belong. Even my mother says I belong there. She has changed, hasn’t she, since my father died? Before, she would have said I ought to come home—that we all ought to come home—that my husband could come home or go wherever he pleased.

And now my husband and my babies and I will sleep in my home tonight and never again. And we will still have this last goodby with her tomorrow morning, though we cannot take the time to go to the grave again. How will she keep her sanity now? With my father gone and that girl in the house? How will I know about her? How she is? How she feels? How will I say goodby to her? How will I say goodbye to that only place where I was safe? How will I climb into our car and shut the door—as though we had just stopped in on our way home from town—and ride down that hill? That hill I ran down when I was little, like Lucy, to fetch the mail or to put a letter in the box or just because, at the bottom of it, where the drive joined the county road, there was a sudden small mound over the culvert that bounced me into the air?

What shall I say to my mother tomorrow, when I tell her goodby? What shall I say to my brother, who will try to make money from my father’s farm, now when the whole world is dying? He is going to send me half of the profits that aren’t essential to keep the farm going. (What will half of nothing be?) Will I think of something to say to his wife? That girl who is wholly related to me now….

Long before sunset, the last cow—lowing to her pasture and stall companions—had been loaded and jolted out over the dusty ruts between the gray-black fields.

There were several things that had not been sold—a drag, held together by wire and not much else, some household items, some parts of things that seemed so worthless, separated from their wholes, as to be a disgrace to the earth. And Lucy’s sled was still there. It hadn’t been sold for a nickel after all.

Otto Wilkes prowled the yard. Like the damned yellow jackal he was, thought George, who wondered if he’d be able to talk to him without smashing his face in for him.

“You folks aim to do anything with these here things?” Otto asked deferentially.

George looked away from him, down the hill toward the empty barn, the empty pasture. It didn’t seem possible that they had made so little. “Take it! Take it!” he said. “Take any of it and all of it!”

Lucy pulled at his pants leg. “Can’t
we
take the sled? I thought somebody bought it for a nickel, but it’s still here.”

“Oh, now, don’t be silly! We couldn’t pack that sled in that trailer. It isn’t worth it. Besides, there probably won’t be enough snow to bother about, where we’re going.”

“But Alaska is practically
all
snow! We could get a sled dog and tie him to this sled.”

“I said don’t be silly! Besides, we probably won’t get to Alaska at all. I’ve been trying to
tell
you that! We’ll probably just wind up on the West Coast somewheres. You gotta be somebody’s brother-in-law—you have to have some pull back in Washington to get hold of that homestead land in Alaska. They’re probably saving it all to give to the railroads.”

They put the last things in the trailer. George dropped some change into Lucy’s hand. She counted it out. Ninety-eight cents. Her ice-skates had been sold for fifty cents. “Minus commission,” he said, and he laughed. “Tie it in your handkerchief and let Mother keep it for you. You’ll have fifteen hundred miles to think about how to spend it.”

The car started slowly up the hill. Lucy could feel how her mother and father both worried about the car and how they were afraid it would never haul the trailer all the way.

The mouth of the thirsty sun fastened on the dry brow of the hill beyond the road and began to drink the dust of the late sky. The black fields of James T. Vick grew pinkish as his tenant, George Armstrong Custer, drove out over them for the very last time.

Lucy got up on her knees to look out the rear window. The house was growing smaller and smaller, but she thought she could still see, in one of the three panes of fiery glass, the round dark spot of cardboard over the hole her ball had made in the kitchen window.

In 1933 this nation was closer to political collapse than it has ever been since the Civil War. In these present days of affluence it is hard to believe that so many of us could have been so poor less than a generation ago. The war-tainted prosperity that began in 1941 makes the preceding dozen years seem shorter and farther away than they really are. This abnormally elongated perspective with which I must deal has led me to employ some verbatim reminders. The more outrageous the scene, the more closely it may follow an unimpeachable source. For instance, most of the words of County Agent Finnegan are verbatim statements from contemporary publications of the United States Department of Agriculture.

I have moved the dates of several actual but minor events by as much as three months, but there are no other conscious deviations from historical truth in the book. If I say that the price of spring wheat went from two dollars and seventy-six cents in 1920 to twenty-six cents in 1932, that is exactly what it did. If I say that in 1925 a farmer got thirty cents a dozen for eggs and in 1933 he got thirteen, these are exactly the prices he and millions of other farmers were paid. Seven thousand American banks, most of them rural, failed between 1920 and 1930 — before the final three years of panic liquidated another seven thousand. In 1933 alone, three hundred and fifty thousand farmers lost their farms. The Great Depression began for farmers in 1921, almost a full decade before it began for the rest of the nation. And for the lower half of the farm families in the United States today, who produce only ten per cent of the nation’s agricultural wealth, the Great Depression has never ended.

Nor have the other farm problems I try to deal with in this book. On the contrary, almost all of those problems have become worse, and new problems have been added to the old ones. The price supports instituted by Herbert Hoover in 1929 helped to create, one year later, a surplus that horrified his administration. Yet today our wheat surplus makes that surplus of 1930 seem small indeed. Wheat acreage has been cut by a third since those days, but the surplus has swollen until the storage costs for it run to well over a million and a half dollars a day. Now as then the wheat nobody can buy is our most troublesome surplus. And now even more than in 1933 technological advances create surpluses at the same time that they put farmers out of work.

The accuracy I have insisted upon is the minimum of respect I would pay to the people I write about. It is hard for us now to believe that these things ever happened; even while they were being annihilated, the farmers themselves could not believe what was happening. They kept on believing that things would be better soon. There was a time within their own memories when “one good year in seven” would see them through. For three times seven years they waited for that one good year with the nearly indestructible faith of the most dedicated gamblers.

If a tenant farmer included in the value of his wheat the most menial wages for the work of himself and his family, it cost him a dollar and eighteen cents to produce a bushel of wheat in 1933. But he was lucky to sell that wheat for eighty-five cents in the fall of 1933. A man who owned his farm could pay himself these wages and just break even. But for the tenant, the deficit ate into the sinking fund of his strength and faith more deeply every year. And every year more owners became tenants again, after struggling half a lifetime to become owners. When a farmer finally discovered that he was living on faith and nothing else, then faith could sustain him no longer. Too proud to admit fear even to himself, a farmer ran ahead of disaster till he lost the race, and then he went down to defeat in silence and isolation.

Each farmer believed that the combination of wars, booms, famines, crops, weather, prices, and six million other farmers would operate like a vast game — a game too complex to outguess, but too reasonable to cut him out on every single play. But it happened that the world did not function with the vigorous, harsh logic of a planetary gaming house after all; instead, it simply endured, as indifferent as that world the psalmist looked down upon from his dry hillside….