The Bones of Plenty (2 page)

I

For nine years George Custer had picked rocks out of the three hundred and twenty acres he rented from James T. Vick, but still the wheat fields were not clear enough to suit him. Nothing made him madder than to hook into a big rock with a freshly sharpened plowshare or mower sickle. This late in the winter he had finished all the odd jobs that he saved for cold weather, and on a morning like this, with no special chores at hand, he hitched the team to the stoneboat and hauled rocks down the hill to the pile he was accumulating at the edge of the south grove. Every rock he took out of the best soil in the world made that soil even better. If it weren’t for drought and rust, this half section would be producing sixteen bushels to the acre. He was only a year older than the century, but he could remember when North Dakota soil yielded twenty or more.

An early thaw the first of the week had finished most of the snow, but a hard freeze last night had turned the earth back into iron. He had to use a crowbar to get the big ones loose. With rocks, a man couldn’t win for losing. During the times of the year when the ground wasn’t frozen, he was too busy doing other things with it to be taking rocks out of it.

He intended to make something with the rocks—a cool little well house, maybe, or a creamery. A man could build almost anything with rocks if he had the time. George had always wanted a house of stone. He wouldn’t build it, though, till he could buy the farm from Vick. He had already sunk so much cash and labor in this place that if Vick ever tried to push him off without making a decent settlement with him, he would be obliged to take a few thousand dollars out of the old man’s hide.

Crossing the field toward the small gray building that Vick called a house, he could see how it would look if it was his own house of stone, with the smoke from the two stoves drifting up from the broad stone chimney, and the white of fresh paint gleaming from the deep-set window casings.

He halted the team in front of the house and went in. “Man! It’s colder than a banker’s eye out there,” he told his wife. He scooped half a dipperful from the pail of drinking water and poured it into a cup. “That ground is so hard you couldn’t drive a spike into it with a sledge hammer. One of these days we’re gonna have enough rocks to build a house with, though. Warm in winter, cool in summer. How’d you like that?”

“I’d like it if we could just get the money to make a down payment on this place,” said Rachel.

“Well so would I! But just because we haven’t is no reason why we shouldn’t think ahead a little, is it?”

He shut the door harder than he really meant to and stomped back to the team. They were matched sorrels, a gelding and a mare, both young horses. The mare would drop her first foal in another three months, and he was working her this morning instead of one of his other two geldings because the weather had kept her from getting sufficient exercise lately. In spite of the outrageous fee, George had bred her to Otto Wilkes’s champion Percheron stallion, because with a dam like Kate it was silly not to use the best sire around. Besides, he wanted a colt that would grow to be considerably bigger than Kate, but still be possesed of her intelligence and fine disposition.

Between the horses he could glimpse the distant rock pile, and his eyes focused themselves on the spot, seeing how solid and eternal a stone house would look there, set beneath the thin black crisscrossing limbs of the grove. He was barely conscious of the four peaked ears dutifully bobbing up and down in the vague foreground of his sight, and at first it seemed, when two of the ears precipitately disappeared, that he had only got a flutter in his left eye.

Then he was running, yelling.

“King!
Kate! Whoa!
Whoa!
King you bastard, King!”

A shrieking mindless thousand pounds of horseflesh, his calm and sensible mare, wallowed in its harness, half buried in the earth.

Dragged down by the strap hooking them together, King pulled back into his collar and reared his front legs as high as he could lift them. Every time his great shoes came down, they struck away clods of frozen earth and the hole widened.

George unsnapped two hooks and the freed horse leapt away before there was time to turn loose the reins.

And here was the mare at his feet, rolling white-ringed eyes, bubbling foam through her gaping pink lips. If she didn’t already have a broken leg, she would in the next few minutes—if she didn’t die of fright first.

He squatted at the edge of the hole. The thawing and freezing of the last few days had buckled the top crust of earth covering an old, poorly filled well. His trips with the stoneboat over that spot had further weakened the ground. He could not even guess how deep the well was, but he knew there could be other gaps in the shaft. Another six-foot drop of the ground beneath her and Kate would be beyond all help.

She was head down, lying on her side, craning her neck up against the wall of the shaft, with her hindquarters twisted and jammed up above the rest of her body in such a way that none of her terrible struggles could possibly bring her to her feet.

“What on
earth!
What on
earth
happened?”

Rachel was running to him, with the fool dog bouncing and barking beside her.

“Why it’s an old well, of course!” he shouted. “Now go fetch King while I get some planks.”

George dragged some timbers up from the granary and slid them into the hole behind the mare. He hooked her traces and King’s into a heavy ring.

“Now lead him straight back,” he told Rachel, “and when I tell you, hit him a good one on the rump so’s he’ll start out fast.”

“How can I hit him on the rump if I’m up in front leading him?” Rachel said.

“Oh, Rachel! For God’s sake, haven’t you got any imagination at all?”

Rachel hauled on King’s bridle. The horse made her pull his head and stretch out his neck as far as it would go before he moved his feet. He laid his ears back and bugged out his eyes, trying to look around his blinders and see what George had hitched him up to.

When the slack was out of the traces, George yelled, “Get up, King! Back, Kate, back!”

The mare wrenched and hurled herself dangerously and uselessly. The traces pulled from the wrong angle. Then the ring broke and leather snakes whipped back around King’s legs.

“Hold
him!” George cried. “For the love of Mike, what did you let him go for? My God!”

He sprinted after the horse. King did not stop till he reached the barnyard fence. George grabbed his bridle and ran up the hill with the gelding snorting and side-stepping behind him.

“Now
hold
him here!” He thrust the bit into Rachel’s hands. She bent a cold fist around the cold steel at the horse’s jaw. The gelding tossed his head roughly, yanking her arm up as far as she could reach. She had always been afraid of him.

“Oh, he’s just
bluffing
you!” George said. “He knows he can get away with it, and he’ll try it again. Now hang on to him!”

George ran to the porch and returned with a clanking pile of chain. He reached down into the hole and raised up Kate’s thick black tail. He tied the tail to the chain with a knot that took the whole length of the tail.

“Oh, George!” Rachel was appalled. “That will
kill
her!”

“Oh pshaw!” he yelled. “Women!”

George snapped the gelding’s traces into the chain. “Now make him
pull!”
he ordered.
“Wallop
him one!”

“Get up!” Rachel cried.

George let himself down into the hole, squatted with his legs braced wide apart, cupped his hand around the curve of the mare’s thigh, and shoved from his shoulder. Coupled with King’s pulling, the shove steered her leg on to the planks.

“Dammit!” he shouted.
“Smack
him one! Keep him going!”

Kate was lifted and righted enough to get her front legs under her. Then her hind feet were digging and sliding on the boards.

King leaned into his collar. George vaulted out of the well, grabbed the chain, and set himself as anchor man at the edge of the hole.

Between heaves he shouted, “Back up, Kate! Whoa back!
That’s
a girl!”

In a monstrous, sickening, leg-breaking scramble, the mare wrestled herself up out of the hole, nearly trampling George and causing King to plunge ahead in an access of released power. Rachel lost her hold on him again and stood, numb and shaking, waiting for George to tell her what to do.

But his concern now was for the mare. “Whoa back, Kate,” he said. “Back.
That’s
a girl.
Back
now, Kate.” His voice was low and gentle, and his hands held her bridle lightly and stroked her wet neck with compassion.

The horse trembled but she stood still, with her weight squarely on all four legs. It was hard to believe he had been so lucky. She might go lame, but no bones were fractured. Now if she just wouldn’t cast the foal.

“There, now, Kate,” he said. “There, now, old girl. That wasn’t so bad after all, was it? Not so bad as you and a lot of other people
thought
it was going to be, was it? You never even felt it, did you? You’re just lucky it was me that was around, you know that? Yes, sir, Kate. You’re just a lucky old nag, here. You’re going to be just as good as new once I turn loose your tail.”

He went back and disentangled the chain. Swatches of long black hairs were strung through the links. He pulled out a handful of hairs and held them up to Kate’s nose.

“See that?” he said to the horse, but loud enough for Rachel to hear. “Now, then, that wasn’t much of your tail to lose, was it? Some people around here thought I was going to pull the whole thing right off.” He rubbed her ears and ran his hands over her legs. “You’re not going to go and get a gimpy leg on me now, are you, Kate?”

Rachel said, “Do you need me for anything else?”

“No, you might as well go on back in. I guess I’ll throw this load of rocks into this damned hole here, after I unhitch.” He led the horses down to the barn.

She walked back to the house. The baby was fussing in the other room, but Rachel did not go in to her. She sat down on the kitchen stool and leaned her elbows on her thighs so she could hold up her head with her hands. She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again the odd dots kept on falling through the blankness for a moment and then her vision returned. She got up and washed her hands in water she dipped from the bucket on the washstand into the mottled blue graniteware basin. She dried them on a terrycloth towel as thin and bare and flat as flour sacking.

What if they had lost Kate? She didn’t see how they could ever have bought another. Without a four-horse team George would never get the wheat in. She couldn’t stop thinking about how bad it could have been.

George had apparently recovered by the time he came in for another drink of water. “You know,” he said, “a lot of men that don’t treat their horses right never could have done that. Their horses wouldn’t have trusted them enough. I know some men that would have lost that horse. They would’ve just had to shoot her, probably, if they couldn’t get her out before she broke a leg. You’ve got to know how to handle a horse, and you’ve got to really like them.”

He rested his hands on his hips, straightened his shoulders back, and took a great breath that swelled out his chest. “Well,” he said, “I reckon I better get out there and fix up that hole some son-of-a-gun left for me.” He gave her another moment to tell him what an astounding rescue he had made and to admit that hooking on to Kate’s tail was the only scheme that would have worked in time.

“Thank God you got her out,” Rachel said.

He dumped the last of his water into the wash basin and walked out. He began rolling the rocks into the well. He figured Kate had probably tromped it down pretty well, but a load of rocks was a good bet to cause it to collapse as much more as it was going to. He’d just have to leave it that way till the ground thawed out. Then he’d be able to tamp it down some more and fill it in properly. When he’d emptied the stoneboat he went down to check on Kate.

He was prepared to find that she was going to cast the foal, but even though he was prepared, it made him sick. After the first eight months had gone so well—to have her lose it with only three more months to go. It was queer how an animal as big and powerful as a horse was so hard to breed and so liable to abort at almost any time.

“Oh, Kate,” he said softly. “Now what do you want to go and do
this
for?”

Any mare he’d ever known wanted privacy at a time like this, so he went back to the cows’ end of the barn and sat on a milkstool. He thought of the stud fee he’d paid that deadbeat Otto, and felt sicker.

He sat down on a milk stool and rolled a cigarette. The match glimmered brightly in the gloom of the barn, and he watched it till the flame reached his fingers. Damn the son-of-a-bitch that would leave a hole like that. Didn’t a man have enough trouble from enemies he already knew about without being dealt a blow like this from some idiot whose name he would never even know?