The Bones of Plenty (28 page)

The most terrible thing in the movie had been the way, time after time, the great mane and wide-open jaws of a white-toothed lion could emerge from the empty grass. The grass in the movie had been very like the grass that grew in this abandoned grazing land. The grass in the floor of the draw was especially tall because the shade of the hill protected it from the drought. Plenty of room for whole prides of lions down there. They would be asleep, for it was too hot to hunt unless they were disturbed, just as a house cat or a dog would sleep in the shade on such a day as this.

At home she had a four-year collection of illustrated Sunday-school papers that she liked to look through on stormy days. The very best picture of them all was the one of David when he was only a shepherd boy, hardly bigger than she was. The picture showed him on a hillside that looked like her own hillsides under a hot blue sky that was like her own sky. His sheep were spilled down the hill around him, like her cows, and a huge lion was jumping over a rock at him.

On the inside of the paper were the Bible verses telling about it. “Thy servant kept his father’s sheep, and there came a lion, and a bear, and took a lamb out of the flock.” Here the teacher had explained that the lion and the bear did not both come at the same time. “And I went out after him, and smote him, and delivered it out of his mouth: and when he arose against me, I caught him by his beard, and smote him, and slew him.” The memory verse that was printed in black type at the end of the lesson read “The Lord hath delivered me out of the paw of the lion, and out of the paw of the bear.”

David, of course, was a boy. How much more wonderful if she, a girl, should manage to triumph over such a lion as that one in the picture. She kept an eye on the entrance to the draw, which was in deep shadow now, though the sun was still fairly high. The cows had all disappeared in it, as she had known they would. She had to keep a sharp look around her all the time. Bing was so hot and sleepy he probably wouldn’t smell a lion even if it came right up behind them. What good was a dog anyway? No dog could kill a lion, and especially not Bing. He was part Boston bull and part terrier and he wasn’t any bigger than Cathy.

Occasionally she would hear a sound and whirl about on her knees, her heart banging, to see what was behind her. Then she would whirl back again to make sure the sound behind her wasn’t just a queer echo of a danger in front of her that she had somehow missed seeing.

If she lay on her stomach, so that the next hill rose up against the sky in her line of sight, the sun was low enough. She manuevered stealthily down the hill and over the little ridge, keeping close to the ground. Bing was close behind her. She started running the last lap down to the cows. Bing rushed after her, yipping and begging to play. She whispered frantically to him. “Shut up! Shut up! Be quiet!”

But he was determined to play. He ran at one of the cows and barked straight into her face before she had time to raise her startled head out of the grass. She tossed her stubs of horns at him and he jumped at her face again. Lucy shouted at him to stop. But Bing never minded anybody except her father.

The cows broke into a sham stampede. Bing barked and nipped at their flying heels, and Lucy ran far behind them—the straggler, the helpless one with the delicious human blood, and no one at all behind her to divert the lion for even a moment. The grass shivered and rippled. Shadows leapt from thistles to hollows to rocks.

Bing worried the herd into an honest gallop. They labored up the hill and Lucy began to gain on them, but when they reached the top they shot over the crest and down toward the road, making a beeline for the faraway barn. They tumbled madly into the ditch, clattered across the dusty gravel, tumbled in and out of the next ditch, and bunched up in the driveway.

Shoving and bumping against one another, they snapped one of the posts of the weak fence. Lucy got to the ditch on the far side of the road just in time to see them jumping over the fallen wires and fanning out through the wheat field.

George looked up from his potato row. He dropped his hoe and ran along the edge of the wheat. By the time the first cow reached him, the dog was far behind in the grain, taking extra high leaps into the air to get his bearings. George headed off the cow and turned her toward the barn. The rest slowed down and followed her, leaving their meandering, trampled swaths behind them.

“Bing! Come here!” The dog slunk toward him, showing teeth in a half-grin, half-snarl. George swung his fist down into his ribs, holding him by the scruff of the neck while he beat him.

Lucy had lapsed into an exhausted trot and she stopped far down the road when the dog began to howl.

“Get along here!” It was the same voice that had called the dog. He was waiting for her. When she came to him, he grabbed her arm just below her shoulder. She could feel how his fingers went around and lapped half way around again. All of her arm—bone and flesh from shoulder to elbow—was contained so easily and so tightly in the palm of his hand. When he took hold of her like that, she knew what would have to come next, just the way Bing had known. She felt as though her arm no longer belonged to her. He hurried her along toward the house, shouting down to her, “What in the Sam Hill did you think you were doing?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“What do you
mean,
you don’t know? Haven’t I told you never to run a cow when she’s got her bag full of milk? Never run a cow
any time.
It’s a wonder they haven’t all got their legs broke in the gopher holes. And they’ve gone and tromped down forty bushels of wheat into the bargain.”

He was holding her arm so hard and lifting it up so high that she felt as though her feet did not touch the ground at all. This was the first part of the nightmare—this swift movement toward the beating when she did not tell her feet to take the steps they took, when a force rushed her through the air to the pain that she would finally not be able to bear without screaming, even though the humiliation of screaming was worse than the pain.

She hovered above the porch steps and felt herself flung toward the door.

“Get the razor strop!”

“No! It wasn’t my fault!”

“I’ll
teach
you to talk back to me!”

The feeling came back into her legs as he tore open the door to get the strop, but before she could take one step the strop was swishing, flaming, cutting. The bare skin of her thighs and back burned away and still the strop rose and fell, still it branded her with its own passionate torment.

At last the sounds she could not stop became the screams that showed she had learned what he wished to teach her. He let go of her arm and kicked her away like a loathsome thing. She ran into the house.

He did not go back through the door. Instead he hung the razor strop on the outside nail where he kept his straw hat. Then he walked down the hill to let the cows back into the worn-out pasture.

He lifted the pump handle and then let it drop. It was too soon to try it again. If it had really gone dry, he didn’t want to know it yet.

The beans and peas and the root-cellar vegetables—carrots, beets, turnips, rutabagas, onions, parsnips—were far enough along to produce something without more irrigating and the potatoes would probably make it without much more water, but it would be a hard thing to watch the tomatoes die. Tomatoes took so much water that he had already begun to wonder if they weren’t a luxury this summer. But they took the place of fresh fruit through the whole long winter. Rachel always put up quarts and quarts of them.

They were more work than anything else to raise. They had to be started in flats, transplanted, staked, tied, irrigated, and conscientiously weeded. Nine-tenths of the work of growing them had already been done. It would be hard to watch them die now, but if the well acted up any more, he wouldn’t dare to water them and they would dry up long before they produced anything. He had to think of the human and animal needs first, and the hottest, driest month was still before him.

Rachel came back from a trip to town for canning rubbers and took up where she had left off with her pea canning. She already had one boilerful of jars nearly processed and she wanted to get the next load ready to go before she had to stop to fix supper. The baby played about her feet, chewing on an empty pea pod and always being in the wrong spot when boiling water had to be poured or a few hot peas from the parboiling pan escaped and plopped on the floor. She wore only her diapers and her skin was as red with the heat as if she had been scalded. Up above the stove, Rachel felt as scalded as the peas. It couldn’t be quite so bad in the rest of the house. She walked the baby into the dining room, hoping she would decide to stay there.

A little later, when she heard the baby making happy exclamations of discovery, she thought she had better make sure the discovery was not the button drawer in the sewing machine or Lucy’s paper dolls. In the bedroom she found Cathy peering under Lucy’s cot. That was the place Lucy had hidden ever since the first time, when she was barely three years old.

“Lucy! What happened? What did you do? Come here to me!”

The only sound from under the cot was an indrawn breath, fighting its way into her lungs against the spasms of her chest.

“Lucy!
Please!”

But this child was already so proud. She would keep her shame under the cot rather than bring it out with her and come for comfort.

Rachel was afraid even to stoop down to her, knowing how that would shame her. She wanted to roll under the cot with her and sob with her and never come out again.

How many times had he done it since that first time? Twenty? A hundred? Five? How was it that she had gone on living with a man who could turn into an insane wild beast? She couldn’t believe it.

She could never believe it when the man she had married became a beast. He would not come back to the house until he was in control of himself again. Then he would look like a man, speak like a man. She would pity him as a man. He would be her husband; he would not be a beast. He would explain how he had beaten his child out of his love for it—out of his obligation to rear it properly. What was there to do? End her marriage? Go back to her father and the farm that joined this land? Watch from there while the man she had promised to cherish forever went ahead and killed himself trying to keep possession of the place to which they had both given nearly a decade of their lives?

He had not been this way in those first years. He had truly loved Lucy when she was Cathy’s age. While Lucy was still creeping she would scramble to the door when she heard him scraping his boots on the porch. She would make little baby shouts of excitement waiting for the door to open. He would throw her in the air. He would swing her up and down on his foot while she held his fingers in her fists and clamped her strong, tiny legs around his instep. He had been so powerful, the baby so confident. They had reveled in their combination of power and confidence. They had laughed hysterically together, and even then it had been so easy to see how much they were alike. And it had been so charming to see how the giant red-haired father and the elfin platinum-haired baby were so alike, how they both loved what their bodies could do, how they could intoxicate each other with the wildness of their spirits.

When they played that way, she, the mother, the one who had brought the spirits together, had herself felt a wild gaiety that was new and exquisite, as though a great and remarkable thing had come to pass because of her. It had been such an unexpected feeling. Always before, her life had been spent watching on the edge of something and never understanding what it was, but then suddenly, with the bass drum rolling and the miraculous bell pealing, with the laughter of the man and baby all around her in the house, she saw that she had been caught unawares and made a part of the very mechanism of the universe. Paradoxically, she felt that she had already accomplished what she had been put on earth to do, and yet she also knew that her life had only just begun. The hand of God moved her and her own will submitted as it had never done before, and yet she was necessary to the will of God in a way that she had never been before. That was how it was when a woman had her first baby. Every day was filled with unprecedented, humbling, exalting paradoxes.

In those days could the beast have been in the father of the baby? Was the beast in him the day he led the three-thousand-pound bull away from the schoolyard? Did a man have to have a beast in him to deal with such a beast? If the beast had been in him then, why hadn’t she seen it in time? If it had not been in him then, where had it come from since, and why had it come? What was there to do? What was there to do?

And now this child was still like him, so much more than he knew. Now she was proud and there was never anything to say that did not make things harder. The worst part of the beating was not over, but only beginning. It was the humiliation that hurt now, and it was the humiliation that would remain. Long after the welts had gone down and the last greenish-yellow mark of an old bruise had disappeared, the humiliation of a child would defile the house. What was there to do?