The Bones of Plenty (5 page)

“I’m all closed up!” he yelled through the partition.

“I gotta have change for tomorrow,” Zack Hoefener yelled back. “You and your damn soft banker’s hours. Open up!” He rapped pointlessly against the bars of the closed window.

Harry unlocked the window and slid it up, pushing almost as high as his short arm could reach. “What do you need, Zack?”

Zack was looking at his hat and scarf. “Leaving a little early, ain’t you?” Hoefener, of course, had never trusted him. He had been one of the first to draw out nearly all of a big savings account when things began to look bad.

“I’m catching a cold,” Harry said. “Never have gotten used to these Dakota winters.”

Zack looked at him again, in that way he had, as though he had a right to stare. He thrust his three crisp twenties at Harry. “All this in pennies and silver,” he said.

“Fine,” Harry replied.

Zack slammed the door the way he always did, and Harry remembered the way he had slammed it after the argument they had had over his big withdrawal.

“I have to have thirty days’ notice for a withdrawal like that,” Harry had protested.

“You and how many
other
men are gonna tell me that?” Hoefener had asked. He had been a little drunker than usual. Harry had given him the money, and after that Harry had had to listen to him brag about what a foolproof and ingenious hiding place he had hit upon. He bragged about it to nearly everybody who came into his store. And then they came out of the store, headed straight across the road to the bank, and made their withdrawals.

Harry buttoned his overcoat and locked his door. Zack was just entering his store. Harry got one more look at the man’s monstrous profile before he turned and headed up the sidewalk, his rubbers thumping on the boards and his satchel swinging heavily from his shaking arm.

“What’s that?” Rose said to Will when he set the cashbox on the table with the groceries.

She had put the lamp on the table to work by, and the light of it made deep shadows in the sockets of her eyes. She was nearly as tall as he was, but thin from the erosions of her austerity, which sought to conquer all hungers. There was little gray in her brown hair, though it was dull with years, and wind-worn like the boards of a house. She wore it in a bun that was thick not from the profusion of the hair but from the length of it. She swept it back so tightly that it seemed to pull at the fine skin of her temples, drawing out the length of her hazel eyes and smoothing the elegant eminences of her cheekbones. Had she known that her stern and simple hair fashion was the best possible one for her face, she might have changed it, for she had devoted much of her life to the mortification of the flesh and to plucking out the eye that might offend.

After she had spoken she waited, her mouth having returned to the position of a mouth which tried never to make frivolous movements. Her jaws were square without being heavy or hard. Their squareness was perfect for the rest of her face, but the perfection made the face seem unapproachable.

It was the kind of face that in her extreme youth had either frightened off a man or challenged him. Most men had been frightened; Will had first been challenged and then he had recognized that she was beautiful. He kept his eyes on her face while he reached under his coat and brought out a roll of fifties.

“Will, what have you done?” she gasped.

He had always had a tendency to grin, nervously and broadly and uncontrollably, when he really wanted to fight or roar with misery. He could feel his lips twitching as he said, “Harry has closed the bank. All washed up.”

“Oh, Will! What will we do?”

“I’ve got it all.” He began pulling the rolls out of his pockets.

The money fell on the steel table-top with little rustling sounds, as of birds alighting and settling upon their evening roosts.

“How will we keep it all?” she asked, when the last roll had fallen. “What shall we do with it?”

His proposal sounded even more outrageous than he had expected it to. “I know it sounds silly, but I suppose we ought to bury it, like everybody else. I suppose it’ll be good as long as there’s anything left of the country.”

Her quick agreement surprised him. “Yes,” she said positively. “It mustn’t be in the house.… Oh, Will, thank God you got it. How did you know? How did you get it?”

He shrugged his shoulders; he hadn’t yet taken off his coat and it was getting heavy. He was beginning to
feel
heavy, too—to sag after the shock. “I
didn’t
know,” he said. “Harry just gave it to me. We didn’t talk about what happened. I don’t know why it happened.”

When they looked at the money again it seemed like less than it had when it was flowing from his pockets. By now Will was getting used to the way the same amount of money could expand and shrink by turns. It lay in loose curls between the slab of bacon tied in brown paper and the twenty-pound sack of sugar slumping in portly wrinkles of lettered cloth.

Neither of them had any impulse to count the bills. They unrolled them and flattened them into the box. Then they closed the lid and flipped the catch in front and tried it in different places in the house. Finally they decided to keep it under the bed for the night.

They sat down to their supper, repeating the Lord’s Prayer together as they did three times each day. Then they thought of George and Rachel.

“Will, do the children have anything in the bank?” Rose asked anxiously.

“I’ve been wondering,” Will said. “I don’t see how it could be much. I wish they would let us make it up to them, whatever it is.”

“George would
die
first!”

“I know.”

“Will, if you rushed back into town now do you suppose you could catch Harry and ask him just for George’s deposits?”

“Oh, no. Harry’s a good many miles away from here by now—that’s a cinch. And nobody knows which direction, either.”

He leaned back in his chair and stared across his plate at the blackness on the other side of the dining room windows. A long crack split one of the windows diagonally from top to bottom. He could not see the crack because of the darkness, but he could see the button in the middle of it, tied through to the button on the other side to steady the fracture and make the window less likely to shatter. Lightning had done it. He had been in the room when the bolt stabbed through the window—hissing, crackling, booming, ripping out his eardrums and blowing the house to smithereens. Still—even as it trundled away—it possessed him; with its own detonations it commanded and contained the detonations of his heart; within the grinding concussions of its bowels it whirled the bursting organs of his own digestion. Finally it mocked him. It tumbled his splitting, craven head back into the room and declined to execute the claim it had established. Then he found, first, that he was alive, next, that the house had not exploded—it was not even on fire—and last, that his eardrums were in their accustomed place, aching.

Why it had let him go he could not guess. While it possessed him he had thought how coincidental and how appropriate. His oldest brother had died by lightning.

Will never fixed the window, though he was not sure why. Perhaps it was for a bond with his brother. Perhaps it was superstition—so long as the window remained cracked, all other bolts would pass by. Perhaps it was merely to remind him of how capriciously death frolicked in a man’s house.

It wasn’t that he was afraid to die but that he hoped passionately, perhaps ungratefully or even irreverently, to live long enough to be assured that things were going to get better. He had fathered two children and worked inhumanly hard to give them what he had never had himself. But neither of them, at the moment, was in anything like the circumstances he had envisioned for them.

“Why did Rachel marry George?” he said to Rose.

“George was a very handsome man when she married him,” said Rose.

“Would a girl with a mind like Rachel’s really marry a man for his looks?” Will demanded.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Who knows why anybody marries anybody?”

“But why in thunderation didn’t she marry that boy in college?” he asked.

“Maybe she was too young. Maybe it was a mistake to send her when she was only sixteen. Maybe if she’d been older …”

“But Rose, there was
nothing here
for her! What else could we have
done?
Kept her on the farm driving a tractor till she was eighteen—till she forgot half of what she’d learned? Once you start an education you’ve got to keep on with it, that’s all.”

Rose was silent. She was right, he thought. Nobody knew why anybody married anybody.

After a while he couldn’t help himself any longer and he had to say it:

“I wonder where Stuart is.”

“We’ll probably hear when he gets short on money again.” Rose pushed away and began to clear the table. Stuart had been gone nearly two years and she still refused to talk about him.

The next morning Will went out early, before the eastern rim of his gray fields had yet rounded toward the sun, and buried his box of money.

He walked through the orchard from the gate—six trees up, two over—and he chopped with his pick on the downhill side of a dead crab-apple tree. As the daylight grew he looked nervously up and down the road. He felt like a criminal or a fool, or both.

He winced a little when he heard the first chunk of frozen earth thud against the box. He filled the hole, brushed the bit of snow back over his digging, and tramped it around a little. He had chosen that particular tree because he knew it was dead. Last summer’s drought and this winter’s sudden plunging freezes had finished it off. He was almost as tall as the tree. He had to admit that it had not done so well as he had promised Rose that it would do, and it certainly was not so hardy as the catalog had told
him
it would be.

Otto Wilkes trotted his showy team of matched dappled-gray Percherons across the railroad tracks, nearly catapulting his two youngest and lightest boys off the back end of the wagon. A gelding and a stallion the horses were, and they weighed a ton apiece. He had hated to geld the one, but the other, being three years older, was already mature and a proven sire, so he had had no choice. Otto didn’t want to try to manage a team of two Percheron stallions.

He pulled up before the dusty window that read “HOEFENER’S EUREKA HARDWARE, Agent for John Deere Tractors & Equipment.”

“All right boys,” he said. “You can come in with me.”

He lifted the smallest of the four, who was scarcely able to walk yet, and they all lined up behind him and followed him into the store.

Zack saw them as they pulled up, and he shoved his dark brown bottle under the cash register. He didn’t know who made him sicker—Otto with his brassy, pickthank ways, or Otto’s numberless, shivering, dirty-nosed children breathing loudly through their mouths.

Otto bought a box of rivets for some harness repair he was doing and some other harness fittings. The whole purchase came to just under a dollar, but Otto wrote out a check for five.

“I’m not no bank!” Zack objected when he saw the check. “Why don’t you ever come in town on a weekday and get your cash over at the bank? Is this thing gonna bounce on me? I’m a pretty mean man when I get a rubber check.”

“Oh come on, Zack. I got to have a little cash. We’re all out of coal and you
know
I can’t get
coal
without cash.”

Zack cashed it, mostly to get the pestilential brood out of his store. He just couldn’t stand to have that grimy bunch of kids fingering everything in sight.

Even though Harry never opened up until ten in the morning, Zack spent almost the entire hour after he opened his own place peering through the backward lettering on his window at the bank across the street. If Otto’s check was no good, he would drive out there that very night and either take it out of the oily bum’s hide or attach his team, which was the only thing he had worth attaching.

At eleven o’clock Zack hung a sign on his door, “Gone to lunch,” and went over to the bank.

It had been such a slow morning that Zack was sure he hadn’t missed seeing Harry come, but still he could not believe it when he found the door locked, Harry had had colds before, but he had always sent his wife down to keep the bank open. Zack went down to Herman Schlaht’s store.

“Where’s Harry?” he demanded.

“How should
I
know?” Herman retorted. “Maybe he ain’t gonna run a bank no more.
You
ain’t worried are you?
You
got
yours.”

“I just thought somebody might’ve been in that knew what happened to him,” Zack said angrily. “By God, I’ll just go on up there myself, right now.”

He stamped out of the store and headed around the corner and up the street. He glared at the empty window of the bank and turned and spat at its steps. The sidewalk ended at the end of the block. Then he walked on the edge of the road, past houses that had once been yellow or white or brown. All of them had columned front porches, gables jutting from their high roofs, and privies set squarely in line with their back doors. But they were not really so much alike as they looked. It was just that the same thing had happened to them all. They were like a double row of unfortunate sisters, who for different reasons all remained gray-haired spinsters, staring at each other wonderingly across the frozen street.