The Bones of Plenty (25 page)

It was still fairly light when George came home from the meeting. He took his rifle out on the porch to clean it. This was what he’d been waiting for. That damned Press thought he was pulling a fast one—starting off with a deadbeat like Wilkes. But Sheriff Richard M. Press would learn a thing or two tomorrow. He might even learn that farmers could shoot rings around his pantywaist deputies with their silly Sunday afternoon target practice. Let those deputies go practice on white jack rabbits running against the glare of a snowfield before they tangled with the men who would be at Otto Wilkes’s place tomorrow.

Inside the house Rachel finished the dishes and put the yeast to set in the potato water for the Saturday’s bread baking. She could smell the fine oil on the rag George attached to the end of the long wire. She saw the way his great shoulders hunched over the rifle and the way his arm bent and straightened as he swabbed the inside of the blue-black barrel, and she saw the brass jackets of the shells he had taken out of the rifle lying behind him on the gray porch boards.

Finally he finished with his gentle twistings of the rag inside the barrel, and he held up the business end of the gun to sight down it into the light showing through from the unlocked breech. Then he wiped the outside of the barrel with the same rag, loaded the shells, snapped the bolt closed, swung the butt against his shoulder, drew a lightning bead on a small tin patch on the barn, and sent a bullet through it.

He twisted around and stared in at her through the screen. “What’s the matter with
you?
” he said. “I can always patch the patch, can’t I? I’ve always wondered if I could hit that little bit of tin from here. And I did it in bad light, too. Did you hear him ring!”

“Are you going to take that gun tomorrow?”

“Sure,” he said. “Might have to get me a crow or a buzzard with it. Lots of mean critters around. A man can’t tell when he’ll be able to pick up a little bounty.”

“Oh, George, please don’t take it,” she begged. What had got into him? He was hot-tempered, yes—but his violence had never before been calculated like this.

“You don’t understand,” he said. “The farmer has to make his own law now. That’s all we’re aiming to do—show the sheriff that those crooked Jews in Jimtown are not going to take over this whole damn county. We can’t wait any more for the government to stick up for us. If the government was going to stick up for us, Harry Goodman would be in jail now—isn’t that so? We
built
this country. We fought for it before and now we have to fight again. You just can’t seem to understand that, can you?”

It was a beautiful morning for mowing hay, lying in a hammock, weeding the garden, having a picnic (watermelons were ripe), or experimenting with anarchy.

George stood in the open screen door. “Looks like it’s going to be another scorcher,” he said. “I‘ll take the car if you’re not going to need it.”

“I don’t need it,” Rachel said.

He put the gun in the back seat and laid an old blanket over it. This was not the first time he had headed for Otto’s place to help him out of some kind of mess. He could never say no to Otto, maybe because he despised him so much. Otto owed him seed corn, a post-hole digger, God knew how many pounds of assorted nails, a couple of butchering days, and weeks of transporting Lucy to and from school to repay him for the transporting he did of Otto’s brood. Oh, the sheriff thought he was pretty safe, all right, picking on Otto. What the sheriff didn’t know was that hayseeds weren’t as dumb as they might look. They understood the principles the sheriff operated on just as well as if they’d been all dandied up in tailor-made suits of clothes.

Although George was Otto’s closest neighbor, he was far from being the first man to arrive. He was surprised to see so many there already, because he was an hour early himself; he’d been too nervous to stay around home any longer. He wondered just what they would all do when the chips were down. After all the big talk last night, were they going to back out at the last minute? It might take only one weak man with one honest bid to upset the applecart. He had the feeling that they were all watching each other. Well, they could watch
him
all they wanted to, by God. Nobody had to worry about G. A. Custer turning yellow.

He looked around for Otto and saw him hovering on the edge of a conversation. They were all going to be tough on Otto today. They were going to let him know that the meeting and the things they were going to do didn’t change a thing—that he was nothing but a loudmouth deadbeat and they were here mainly on account of their
own
skins, not
his.

Somebody tapped his elbow and he whirled around to find Otto’s half-witted nine-year-old behind him.

“What do you want, Irene?
This
is no time for a little girl like you to be pestering around! You get along into the house, now.”

“I just wondered if you brought Lucy to play with me,” Irene said.

“I just
told
you this isn’t a place for little girls to be fiddling around. You get along, now!”

She turned and headed for the house, but she stopped on the steps of the porch to look back to the road. The sheriff’s big car pointed its nose into the driveway, but the men were making no move to clear the way for him.

Treat us like mules and we’ll
act
like mules—so far so good, George thought. The sheriff leaned steadily on his horn and the men began to inch aside. But he didn’t follow behind their slow withdrawal. He waited till the driveway was entirely clear and then he roared up it at thirty miles an hour and braked with the bumper of the car almost touching the steps. A brand-new Oldsmobile followed the sheriff like a scared kid hanging on his mother’s skirts.

Nothing made a farmer any madder than having a city man drive down his private road like it was Highway Number 10. If a city man killed one of the chickens he sent squawking into the dirt, he would try to jew the farmer down to a few cents less than the market price and then go home and complain to his wife about how a hayseed had held him up. George remembered how a lightning-rod salesman had driven into his yard that way and broken a rooster’s leg. Then the fellow had had the gall to ask George why he didn’t keep his turkeys and chickens penned up.

“Well, now then, I reckon they don’t clutter up the yard as bad as birds like you! Those droppings help out the grass a little. What do you do with your
own
manure, besides come highballing in here and try to sell it to me?” George had asked him.

The salesman argued that George could eat “that old hen,” as he called it, and George had delivered the worst insult he could think of on the spur of the moment. “That’s no
hen!
That’s a
rooster!
How come a queer bird like you don’t know a
cock
when you see one?”

Now if the fellow
hadn’t
been a pansy, he certainly would have crawled out of his car then, and let a man get a fair swing at him. But the city men never did get out of their cars.

George knew that every man there had had experience with smart-alecks driving into the yard and nearly clipping a dog or a kid, and even more experience with crazy hunters trespassing on his property and leaving a gate open, or worse—just
making
a gate with a pair of wire-cutters so he had to chase his stock all over the county by the time he discovered the break in the fence. George had a notion that the sheriff’s dust-raising entrance might do just the opposite of what he intended it to do. No doubt he was trying to show off his authority to a bunch of hicks, but George didn’t think anybody was going to look at it that way. No, they were all just going to remember the times when some other city man had done the same thing.

The representative of the law opened the driver’s door and pushed a putteed leg out into the dust settling over the fenders and running boards.

The leg was followed by the rest of Sheriff Richard M. Press, who was nearly as fat as George had expected him to be. His heavy leather Sam Browne belt seemed much more necessary to support his belly than to help hold up the pistol that rode on his left thigh.

Both his deputies were on the thin side. Apparently the sheriff himself got all the graft; the deputies must not have anything on him yet. One deputy climbed out of the other side of the driver’s seat and let the second out of the back. The second deputy was obviously low man on the totem pole; he had to sit in back behind the wire, where there were no inside handles on the doors. George wondered if anybody he knew would be riding in that back seat on the way back to Jamestown.

The second deputy had been riding with the sheriff’s auction block and he lugged it up toward the porch where Irene was still standing, her mouth even farther open than usual. He trod on the prongs of a kitchen fork left on a step by one of the little boys, and when the handle of it flipped up at his leg, he jumped as though it was a rattlesnake, fell against the elegant splintered balustrade, and went through the weak step with his boot heel. Irene began to laugh wildly, clasping her hands over her shiny lips while she staggered back and forth on the porch.

Somebody yelled, “Make him pay for that step, Otto! Don’t let him get away with that! Call the sheriff, Otto!”

George wished he had thought of that crack himself. It sounded like it came from Lester Zimmerman.

The representative of the Big Man in Jamestown climbed out of his Oldsmobile with a whole briefcase full of authority under his arm. George could see him wince when the dust squished up over his pointed, two-toned shoes, perforated in a dandy style. He was wearing a silk suit and a panama hat with a silk polka-dot band around it.

George noticed that both he and the sheriff mounted the steps very respectfully. The sheriff’s star was dwarfed by the size of his chest. He’d probably taken half his hush-money in moonshine for the last thirteen years. He’d probably drunk enough of it to kill a man who wasn’t too mean to die.

The second deputy set up the auction block while the first one hovered near the man in the silk suit, like the rich man’s stooge that he was. All four of them stood in a line on Otto Wilkes’s rotting porch—soldiers of the old order on a rampart of Victorian gingerbread. Behind them, Irene giggled in her corner. The silk suit man scowled and spoke from the side of his mouth to the deputy. The deputy stared at Irene and whispered to the sheriff. The sheriff jiggled his shoulders and grinned. Nobody approached Irene.

Big and fat as he was, the sheriff had a high tenor voice that rose to an almost effeminate pitch when he strained to be heard above the crowd. It was a crime for a man like that to try to run an auction. Take off the bastard’s uniform and what would you have? A potbellied, bowlegged dude that pretty near any man there could lick in a fair fight. His .45 pistol was nothing but a joke in open country where a man could be picked off from a mile away. A gun like that belonged in the movies. It was not guns that made a man like George respect the law—or cease to respect it.

“All right!” His voice cracked. “You men out there! Let’s have it quiet, so we can have a fair and square sale here!” The men quieted at once, as if by a signal decided on beforehand among themselves—a signal that had nothing to do with the sheriff’s order. He seemed taken aback by such prompt obedience, as though he hadn’t quite got ready his next sentence when he was confronted by the silence he had commanded for himself. He took a paper from the hands of the man in the silk suit, listened to a few things the man had to say, and turned back to the auction block. It was clear, all right, who ran the law in Stutsman County—silk-suited moneylenders, that was who.

The sheriff walked back to the front of the porch, looking like the employee he was, and began to read from the paper, which explained that the mortgage-holder, having made due allowances for “conditions,” was now forced to sell the mortgaged property in order to fulfill obligations to stockholders in the insurance company. Not that everybody didn’t already know what it was going to say.

Still, the words of the paper were almost like the words of the Bible, and the ideas were those on which the whole American economic and political system had been built. Anybody would have to admit that hardly a man there could ever hope to own land without the institution of mortgages. George could feel the faltering of the crowd, and he could tell the sheriff felt it, too. Were all those men at the meeting last night going to turn out to be nothing but sheep now, after all?

It wasn’t hard to see how a man like the sheriff got ahead. In times like these there was practically unlimited money behind a man who could run a county. George wondered how far the sheriff was prepared to go today to show the Big Man how well he could run his county.

The sheriff announced that the first offering on the auction block would be Otto’s Percherons. He was a shrewd one, all right. He obviously figured that some weak lover of horseflesh was going to break down and bid on that team. The Percherons, like Otto’s house, were his last legacy from the bonanza-farm days. Old Man Wilkes had owned close to a hundred champion Percherons, and he never sent an eight-horse team into his fifty-seven hundred acres that wasn’t perfectly matched for color. The ancestors of Otto’s team had broken the sod on George’s farm.

But the Percheron strain had proved to be more glorious and durable than the Wilkes strain. To George it no longer seemed appropriate for a Wilkes to own such horses. Otto did not deserve them. It was not hard to figure out that that was just what the sheriff hoped they were all thinking. Almost every day a farmer had to try to think one step ahead of what some mean animal was going to do next. It wasn’t nearly as much of a challenge to figure out what was in the mind of the sheriff as to figure out what was in the mind of an old cow that had hidden her new calf somewhere in a fifty-acre pasture full of gullies and six-foot weeds.

Little thousand-pound Morgans could supply as much horsepower as a man usually needed now that there was no sod to break, and they ate about half of what a two-thousand-pound Percheron required. Nevertheless, if a man couldn’t get rid of feed grain for love nor money, then he might as well feed champion Percherons as Morgans, mightn’t he? The sheriff understood that every man there would be asking himself that question.