The Bones of Plenty (21 page)

It was going to be another hot summer, Rose thought. Here it was still May, and only midmorning, and the sun beating on the tarred roof of the chicken house had already made the air impossible. She would have begun the cleaning much earlier if she had known the day would turn this way. The stench was so strong it hurt her nose. She leaned against the door frame, still sticky with the creosote they had sprayed to get rid of the mites. The fumes of it grew more intense in the heat, like the chicken manure, but a hot breeze brought unpolluted air to her.

What
ails
me, anyway? There’s
nothing
wrong with you! What ails you for
thinking
something’s wrong? You haven’t changed a bit since you were ten years old. You’ve had fifty-four years to learn how to clean a chicken house without dirtying your mind as much as your rubbers, and still you can’t do it. Just think of what you’ve been thinking in there. How much you hate chickens. How much you hate to wash eggs. How much you hate to butcher chickens and smell the filthy brown of their warm intestines in your hand. How you wouldn’t care a bit if the chicken thieves took every last hen in this place the next time they come. How you could watch the whole flock get coccidiosis and die slowly and miserably and never feel a qualm of sympathy. Yes, how you could watch them all, and God knows,
nothing
can look as sick and pitiful as a chicken.

Your own father, Rose Stuart, would have punished you with his buggy whip for saying such thoughts aloud. Is it any better, now that you’re fifty-four years old, to say them to yourself? Now that there is no one to punish you but God? Should you not be thankful, every minute of your life, that you have not had to live the life of your mother and to bear eleven children in a sod hut to a man who would not control either his wicked temper or his evil desires? And should a woman who has been married for thirty-six years, Rose Shepard, be still remembering a dead father’s cruelty—and, far worse, should she be remembering him as if she had not forgiven him long ago? Should there be any hatred in a Christian woman who has had fifty-four years to learn to follow Christ?

You may well ask, Rose Stuart, what ails you when you let your mind be filled all morning with complaints and vicious thoughts. You should thank God for every egg you wash and every chicken you eat. People are starving to death everywhere in the world. You should be on your
knees
before God right here in this stinking manure, thanking Him that you do not have to steal the chickens you eat.

Oh, God forgive me, God forgive me. I don’t hate him any more. No, and I don’t hate the chickens. Don’t let the things come into my head. How do they come there when I have continually commanded them to stay away, when I have prayed for strength to fight them away? It’s the smell; the smell becomes my brain. Now here I am, already pitying myself again, excusing myself, and yet a whole lifetime was given to me so that I could learn gratitude. Forgive me, forgive me.

My back is worse than usual today. That must be what ails me. What was he thinking of, my father David Stuart, when he set me to drawing buckets of water from the deep well, hand over hand, before I was eight years old? Didn’t he know it would bend me so I would never be straight again? He didn’t care, that was all. Stop, stop, stop! I’ve had good health all my life. My back is my only cross and I have always been able to work. What if I had been asked to bear tuberculosis or paralysis or the loss of a limb or insanity? Can I not ever, ever learn to be grateful? I have had enough air. The more I breathe, the more my mind disobeys.

She set to work again, loosening the droppings with her hoe and scraping them into shovel-sized piles. When she had to stop to breathe again, she shoveled a load into the wheelbarrow and took it to the compost pile in the orchard.

They had so carefully cultivated and protected that little orchard. Will had dug a fence deep into the ground to keep out the gophers and other burrowers that would have chewed the roots of the baby trees. They had done everything they could to nurture and guard it; yet a predestined force had prevailed over it—the same force that had overtaken Stuart, when he had gone on a lark with some other boys and they got hold of some bootleg liquor. There was only one way to explain the force. There was only one reason why there should be a difference between what people knew was right and what people did. There was a force far stronger than mortals which intervened between them and their consciences, and that force was Satan.

The burning hellish years had come. Never before had the world been so evil. The thousand-year reign of the Beast had begun, and the mark of the Beast was on all who bought and sold, as it said in the Bible—for if the mark of the Beast had not been on men during these last years when governors and judges and senators had been the open and avowed friends of the bootleggers—even pallbearers, yes pallbearers, for bootleggers who had been shot by other bootleggers—if the protecting mark of the Beast was not on those men, then why had the world not risen up and overwhelmed them?

This drought that slowly stifled the orchard—it was only one of the many symptoms that the Thousand Years had begun. Everywhere among the great and powerful of the earth there was fornication, idolatry, drunkenness, and blasphemy. And her own son had run away into that doomed world—for two years he had been there—dragged there by those whose greed drove them to damn the souls of boys.

She hurried back to the chicken house to finish the cleaning and scatter new straw before she should have to go in to begin Will’s dinner. A hen clucked at her from a nest. It was a warning all too easy to interpret this time of the year. The hen would have to be captured and put in a breaking-up coop before it managed to sneak off and make a nest in the weeds where coyotes would get the eggs.

She leaned her hoe against the wall and walked slowly around the roosting poles. The hen became louder and more quarrelsome. She wished she had her heavy leather gloves. It bothered her to be pecked by a chicken. She shot her hand beneath the warm feathers to grasp for the horny legs. Instead of pecking and standing its ground as she expected it to do, the hen half jumped, half flew at her face, with a startling rush of feathers and venomous exclamations. In her surprise, she missed her chance and the chicken squawked past her and thudded on the floor.

Rose got to the door first and slammed it shut. The hen retreated under the roosting bars and fluffed the feathers on her neck and spread her wings. She stalked about under the poles, uttering low wrathful sounds, and glaring from her red-rimmed, unblinking eyes.

Rose pushed at her with the hoe. The hen shouted savagely from a wide-open beak and zig-zagged under the poles, always out of reach.

Finally Rose stooped quickly, doubled herself under the poles, grabbed a leg, and straightened up too soon, knocking her head against the befouled roost. Dizzy from her sudden move and the blow on the back of her head, she staggered to the door, dangling the screeching chicken from her hand. The hen battled with her wings till Rose flung her through the door of the first empty coop. One more hen that would have to be fed and watered separately for a week or more while she sat on the slats until the air circulating under her superheated breast cooled her nesting ardor. There was no use taking a setting hen out of the breaking-up coop until she had stopped clucking for a couple of days. So long as she clucked, her feeble mind was on nothing but hatching eggs.

Rose went back to her scraping, still dizzy and still determined to be done with this job before she went in to clean herself up and peel the potatoes.

Will wanted to finish drilling his flax field before he went in for dinner, but he stopped the Fordson for a minute anyway, and climbed down from it to lean against the drill box and rest.

Even standing on the ground he still felt the vibrations of the tractor, like a sailor without his land legs. The engine missed badly. He’d have to have it gone over as soon as he could spare it for a day or two. Maybe George could find the time to fix it. It would be a way to put a little cash into George’s two big proud fists. He unscrewed the top of the tank behind the seat and poured gas into it from the five-gallon can stored on the tractor platform. The engine continued to sputter and he thought he better get going again before it stalled and died on him. He didn’t want to have to crank it.

He did finish the field, pushing himself and the Fordson hard, and then he rode the tractor in and left it standing in the shade of the barn. Thirty feet above him, the galvanized blades of the windmill spun a blurred aureole from the beams of the sun.

Everything was in a straight line—the sun with its invisible ring of blazing million-mile petals, the tin flower of the windmill blooming with hot light, the point of the well pipe four hundred feet below the revolving blades, and the middle of the earth. He and his windmill were suspended between two fires—the fire ninety-three million miles away in frigid space and the fire at the core of the planet.

The water came up warm from the well, because it tapped a warm spring in the earth. Rose had never been satisfied with the well. It looked to her as though the men who drilled it had simply been trying to get as much money as they could. They had gone through vein after vein of refreshing, cool water, charging more for each foot they drilled, until they struck this warm, salty, heavy stuff under the layers of rock and clay and sand and gravel. But the supply was inexhaustible. As the drought got worse and worse, Will was more and more thankful that those well-drillers had tried to skin him. It just went to show how often a bad turn really worked out for the best.

Before he had got used to the sharpness of the water, it had only made him the more thirsty when he drank it, but he had learned to like it and so had his family. They had a big cement cistern under the house from which they could pump fresh cold water into the kitchen all year round if only they got enough snow and rain during the wet months. The gutters along the roof caught the water and piped it down through a charcoal filter into the cistern. Then they pumped it back again through a brick filter. But in the years when the cistern went dry during the summer, they all drank the salty water brought up by the windmill, just as the stock did.

The water was flowing now out of the long, moss-lined cattle trough down the hill to the sheep trough, and then out of the sheep trough into the pasture. He hardly ever shut off the windmill, because he had never had the slightest indication that there was any end to the water supply. Still, with both tanks full and the water evaporating so quickly—there was no use tempting fate. He walked under the tower and pulled on the wire leading to the blades. The flower folded shut, the companionable nagging sounds of the rubbing parts ceased, the long rudder behind the blades creaked and drifted in the wind. For a while the salty river where the well pipe drank was free to flow wherever it would—there below the layers and layers of earth.

He walked away from the flashing iron skeleton of the tower and looked up its narrowing height and the ladder that went to the top of it. He shook his head, remembering the day he had had to go all the way up to fetch Lucy back down from that ladder when she was only four. Stuart had pulled the same stunt, too, when he was about the same age.

Stuart was dark now, but he’d been almost as light-haired as Lucy. The two heads had looked very like each other up there—tiny bright flowers a few feet beneath the great spinning flower. And when he climbed up to them, the two expressions had been the same—absorbed, purposeful, astonishingly innocent. The heads that had looked so tiny, so many miles away, looked so big when he got to the top of the ladder with them. Their chests, their stomachs, their narrow little seats were all smaller around than their heads. How did the baby bodies balance the heavy heads? How did the two-inch fingers grip so confidently the wide flat ladder rungs?

Both of them were wounded and bitterly indignant. Neither of them felt the slightest need to be rescued. They had simply wanted to go as high as they could go and see as much as they could see, and it happened that they were not through exploring when he came after them. He grinned and shook his head again.

Rose was pumping up the kerosene stove for a last jet of heat when she heard Will speak to the gold-and-white collie in the shed. He sloshed water from the basin over his arms and face and then he called in to her.

“You know, Rose, every time I read in the paper about how they’re shipping water all over the country on freight trains just to keep the stock alive, I’m mighty thankful for that salty well out there.”

“I suppose we ought to be,” she said. She was not in the mood for conversation. She was exhausted and she felt like a ninny for having got such a knot on her head because of a stubborn old hen. She had a headache now, but she refused to take an aspirin for an ailment that she had stupidly brought upon herself.

Even his first washing out in the shed had taken enough dust off Will’s face to show the whiteness of it, but Rose did not let on that she noticed it. She never gave in to illness herself and she never encouraged anybody else to. There had been only one time in her life when she had almost given in. That was several years ago, when she got pneumonia. Will had brought the doctor, but it was not because of the doctor that she had lived. It just hadn’t been her time to go, that was all. Her mother and her grandmother had died of pneumonia. Weak lungs ran in the family, and her own bout with pneumonia had just been the first sign that she was going to go the same way the rest had.