The Bones of Plenty (67 page)

Lucy could hardly wait to get to school. For the first time in her life, she was going to do something important. This
would
be the morning she’d be so late she barely had time to whisper to Marilyn in the cloakroom before the bell rang.

“We’re going to
move!”
she said.

“Into town?” Marilyn asked.

“No! Way out West. Maybe to Alaska, even, if they’ll give us a farm up there. Maybe we can even live in an igloo!”

At noon she was so excited she ran outside without her lunch bucket, but she didn’t care because she wasn’t hungry. For the very first time since she had started to school, the town kids were jealous of her. Polar bears, Eskimos, getting to stay up all night in the summertime because the sun never went down, rides on dog sleds, icebergs, whales, walruses. Sure, her father said, there’d be all those things in Alaska if they went. Plus a homestead in wonderful virgin soil. Well, no, he hadn’t
promised
about staying up all night, but all the rest he had promised.

Nobody thought up any little jokes to play on her today, like when some of the town kids—even Marilyn—would get together and say, “Let’s play hide and seek. Lucy’s It!” Then they would all sneak into the building and leave her to look and look and not find anybody. But no, there wasn’t anything like that
today.

Irene Wilkes hovered around the bunch of town kids that were asking Lucy about moving. Lucy knew that if she didn’t have to go home with Irene so much, the town kids would like her better—or at least they wouldn’t always be making jokes about how dumb the farm kids were. It didn’t matter that Lucy herself could always spell them down and read better than they could. There was her next-door neighbor they could always tease her about.

“Go and find your brothers,” Lucy said to Irene.

“They didn’t come today,” she said in her silly voice.

Lucy got an idea—it was just like the ideas the town kids got about things to do to
her!

“Well, then, Irene,” she said, “I guess you’ll just have to walk home by yourself.”

Irene looked around and her bewildered face grew even more bewildered.

“What are you waiting around for?” Lucy demanded. “It’s time to go home.
I’m
going to stay all overnight with Marilyn, so you’ll have to walk home by yourself.”

“But it’s lunchtime, isn’t it?” Irene took the tin lid off her lunch bucket. “Here’s my lunch!”

“My goodness, but you must be hungry,” Lucy said. “You forgot to eat your lunch!”

“Yes, Irene!” Marilyn hurried to join the game as soon as she understood it. “You must be just
starving!
How come you forgot to eat your lunch, anyway?”

It was so good that Lucy could hardly believe it. Here was Marilyn in
with her
on a trick
she
had thought up, instead of being in on a trick
against
her with the rest of the town kids. How was it that she had never gotten an idea like this before, anyway? All you had to do to keep the town kids from thinking up a trick on
you
was to think up another trick
first
to play on
another
farm kid. She really couldn’t imagine why it had taken her so long to figure it out. It was such an important thing to find out that it made her stomach feel funny, the way it felt on Christmas Eve.

“Oh, you’re always losing track of the time, Irene,” Lucy said. “You know that’s what your mother is always saying. You better hurry up now, so you can help take care of Toady. You can eat your lunch on the way home.”

“Yes, but everybody’s still here,” Irene protested.

“That’s because if you live in town, you can stay after school and play,” Marilyn said. “And Lucy is going to stay with
me
tonight on account of moving.”

“Go on now,” Lucy said again. They had maneuvered Irene toward the gate of the schoolyard. Irene took another backward step and jarred the elbow that was looped through the bail of her gallon bucket. The lid of it fell off and rolled away, wobbling and glinting in the sun. She darted awkwardly after it and two cold, limp pancakes fell out of the pail. They had been stuck together with butter for a sandwich, and they split apart in the dirt. She picked them up and skinned off the dusty butter with her finger. She looked about in her helpless way and then wiped the grease along the inside of her skirt hem.

“Oh, you sloppy slop!” Marilyn cried. “Look at your dress! “Hurry home and change it! Your mother’s going to be mad.”

“Here’s your top,” Lucy said. “Put it on now, before you drop the rest of your lunch.”

“There isn’t any more,” Irene said humbly.

“What’s the matter? Didn’t the relief give you any more apples?” Lucy demanded.

“We only got one box,” Irene said.

“Aw, phooey! My father said you got a
whole
lot of boxes!”

“I can’t remember,” Irene admitted.

“Ya,
you
can’t remember
anything,
Irene!” Marilyn said. “You can’t even remember what time of day it is. It’s time to go home! School is out!”

“We haven’t had arithmetic yet,” Irene said.

“Oh, you have too! Besides, you couldn’t remember! What’s eight times seven!”

“Sixty-three!”

“Oh, dumbbell! That’s
nine
times seven! Dumb ox!”

“Your mother’s already going to be mad because of your dress. You don’t want her to be mad because you’re late, too, do you?” Marilyn asked.

“No, I don’t,” Irene said. “Well … goodby.”

“Goodby! Goodby!”

Irene smiled her foolish smile, showing her big buck teeth and all of her pale gums below her wet lips. “Goodby,” she said again, in her high sharp voice.

She turned and walked a few steps. “Goodby!” cried Lucy and Marilyn.

“Goodby!” Irene responded, looking back and waving her skinny arm.

“Goodby!” They imitated her silly wave. She kept on walking, occasionally turning to wave and smile. They could tell how happy she was to see that they were always there to wave back at her. She had never been treated so well.

They watched until she was hardly more than two specks of light in the distance—swinging lunch bucket and golden hair under the noon sun straight overhead. Mostly by the way the light spots moved, they could tell she was still turning and waving.

Now that it was over, Lucy did not feel the way she had expected to feel. It had really only been fun while they were doing it—the way Christmas Day was the most fun only till all the packages were opened. All this time she had wanted to be in on a joke with Marilyn, and now this time she had not only been
in
on it—she had even thought it up. But now it was over.

It was over, and what if they should be caught? What if Miss Liljeqvist found out? What if her mother found out? How awful to have only two pancakes for a lunch. But now Irene did not even have
them.
They were too dirty. “I know how silly she is,” Lucy could hear her mother saying, “but she likes you so much, and since you both live out in the country, I think you ought to be nice to each other. It won’t hurt so much to play with her now and then, will it? After all,
you
know how it is to come from a farm
too,
and the town kids don’t.” Yes, her mother had said things like that a great number of times. Lucy knew she was going to have to tell her mother what she had done. She might not be able to do it tonight or tomorrow night—sometimes she saved up her terrible things for about a week and told them all at once—but sooner or later she would have to tell, because she would feel sicker every day until she did.

“Hey, we have to eat our lunch now,” Marilyn said. “Come on back to the lavatory with me.”

“But I don’t need to go,” Lucy said.

“If you don’t come with me, I won’t teeter with you at recess. And I won’t tell you a secret, either.”

“What’s the secret?”

“Come with me. I’ll tell you when we get to the lavatory.”

“Tell me now.” Lucy didn’t even care much about the secret. The town kids would torment her for days over a secret they got together and thought up when she was at home. Then when they finally told her, it wouldn’t turn out to be much of anything at all—that is, if they really told her the secret they’d been teasing her about.

“You know what Audley Finley told my sister?”

“No. How should
I
know?”

“Well, you
should,
because he says he’s
related
to you now!”

“He is
not!”

“Well, you don’t have to get mad at
me!
You just wait and see if I teeter with you!”

“You just wait and see if I
care!”
Lucy told her. She felt a hundred times worse than she had ever felt at the end of a disappointing Christmas Day. She had thought for a little while that perhaps she really
would
get a chance to stay overnight with Marilyn, the way the town kids stayed back and forth with each other and played together every night. Now she wouldn’t even have anybody to teeter with at recess. It was just the way her father always said—city people picked on farm people every chance they got. Even Audley won out over her just by living in town and telling the other town kids whatever he wanted to tell them.

And another thing her father always said was true, too. It was stupid to trust anybody. “Most people will do anything in order to get ahead,” he would say. “They’ll bamboozle their best friend if there’s a dime in it. They’d murder their own grandmother for a few dollars.”

They’d all be your friends as long as they could get you to do something they wanted you to do, or as long as they wanted to get into a game you started, or as long as they didn’t have anybody else to play with.

The sale was going to be the next day, and the Custers all went to town to get some canned things and bacon and other provisions for their trip West. Everywhere they went there was a poster about their auction sale. Lucy saw her last name in all the windows, printed in real printing, and smiled to herself to think how much more attention their name was getting than the names of Marilyn or Audley or Douglas or even Roger Beahr had ever gotten. She could hardly wait till the town kids all came out tomorrow so they could see how much money she was going to get and so she could tell them some more about Alaska.

In the hardware store even Mr. Hoefener started talking about all the places a person could see their name.

“Well!” he said. “Looks like Custer’s Last Stand around here, don’t it? Especially over at the bank. Did you see how Churchill plastered them posters all over Harry’s bank?”

“That’s fair enough, I guess,” George said. “Bank might as well be good for something. I wouldn’t be selling out if that bastard hadn’t stole all my money, so we might as well use his building for a few posters, I reckon.”

“Well what
I
want to know is, where’s the war? Couldn’t of been six months ago you were telling me, ‘Look out, Hoefener. There’s gonna be
blood!
Well, here it is! Custer’s Last Stand! Where’s the war, George!” Zack kneaded his goiter and smirked up at George.

“And what I want to know, Zack, is do you want to sell me a piece for my trailer hitch, or shall I go to Jimtown for it? And if a few more men like
me
clear out, I still want to know who you’re gonna
sell
anything to. I won’t
have
to let any blood out of you. You’re gonna sit here in this little burg till you dry right up. There won’t be nothing left of you but that nanny-goat’s bag around your damned useless neck.”

After supper, Rachel didn’t have anything to do. There was not so much as a seed flat to weed and water, and since there hadn’t been any of the usual spring rush of work to keep her busy outside, she didn’t even have any patching or darning to catch up on. She sat down to play her piano for the last time. It was the piano her father had bought years ago when they first began giving her lessons, and it was a very good one. She had always expected to give lessons to her own children on it.

She had packed her music even though the piano was going to be sold. Perhaps at some unforeseeable time there would be another piano—not one as good as this, not one her father had given her and listened to her play—but another piano to go with the boxes of music. She played by ear now—the songs that had been popular when she was in college. She’d always liked Irving Berlin and she stayed with him for a while.

George sat listening and reading the
Sun.
Three hundred million tons of topsoil had been blown off the prairies and across the Atlantic seaboard since the first of April—or so the experts said. Drought and dust were destroying winter wheat at the rate of a million bushels every day. Textile workers, steel workers, coal miners, auto workers, longshoremen, teamsters, bakers, butchers, and candlestick makers—they all were striking by the tens of thousands, by whole areas of the country at a time. All the unions on the Pacific Coast were striking in sympathy with the longshoremen, and so it went. The Federal Government was supporting sixteen million people on relief.

The county agents and the preachers were setting aside official prayer days for people to go to church and pray for rain. Farmers were moving their stock by railroad, truck, and hoof to try to find pasture and water or to sell the animals before they became so emaciated that they would be condemned for use as human food. Minnesota, North Dakota, and Wisconsin had all banned shipment of livestock across their borders, and National Guardsmen were out patrolling state lines.