The Bones of Plenty (69 page)

But there was still time to save themselves. George must rush off to the auctioneer. They must put up a sign at the mailbox reading
AUCTION CANCELED
. Then George could go down to Vick on Monday and say he had decided to go along on the same basis after all.

Then they would descend, unless things changed more radically than she could imagine, into that ineluctable bankruptcy that waited for them—recognizing that each swing of the hoe expended a part of the only currency left to them—their lives. But it would be a bankruptcy—a death—that was not so different from the deaths of all those who were committed to making great expenditures in order to live and die in dignity—as the father from the tall yellow house had died. For it was necessary to die beside one’s investments, borne up by one’s roots, in order to die with dignity.

She and George would stay here with their investments and die as her father had died. But if they had made this hideous mistake—if they had become wandering Finleys, then what commitments would they show to staring, disdainful people? Above all, what commitments would they give their children to live by? Lucy and Cathy would speak and think in the way Annie and Audley spoke and thought. The Custers would live out their lives in a way that would make aristocrats even of the Wilkeses in their consumptive ancestral home.

How was it that she had ever listened to George, even for a moment? She had got the stovepipe back in, for she intended to cook dinner over a regular fire. Now she was starting on the chairs, for they were never going to eat a meal that was not eaten from a table by people sitting on chairs.

George came out of the barn and saw her walking to the house with a chair in each hand. He ran up the hill to her.

“Rachel! What on earth are you doing?”

She never stopped walking toward the house—the little dark house that had always shamed her so.

He grabbed her arm. “Put those chairs
down,
for Pete’s sake!” It was frightening to live with a person for a decade and find out that she was totally different from what he had ever dreamed she could be.

“We’ve got to
stay!”
she cried. “We can’t go away. There’s nothing in the world for us
anywhere,
except what’s right here. We’ve worked too hard here. And besides there’s
nothing
anywhere else. The roots are all we’ve got left—just roots!”

Up the hill between the two fields George had plowed and never planted, they saw a car raising a half acre of dust behind it.

“It’s the auctioneer, for God’s sake! Churchill is here. Put those chairs down!”

He wrenched them from her hands, twisting her wrists savagely. She swung a smarting arm at him and slapped his face hard.

He couldn’t believe she had done it. Neither could she. It was not like anything else she had ever done in her life—except one thing. She had a memory of herself, flinging the cats away from the porch. She had a memory of her voice saying, I’m losing my mind.

“I’m losing my mind.” She was saying it aloud now. I’m losing my mind. Only Finley men and women hit and slapped and swore at each other. She was a Finley already, and they hadn’t even sold the stove and the table and the bed yet.

She walked toward the house, dazed, shaking her head, wiping the tears from her eyes with her fists like a child, streaking her cheeks with the dust of the yard. I’m losing my mind. I’m losing my mind.

She heard the men coming and she went into the bedroom. She listened to them grunting and adjusting, panting directions to each other. “A little to your left, there. Will she make it through this door?” “Sure, she will! Came
in
through this one—it’s the only door there
is.”
“Easy now, easy does it. Just let me get clear through here first.”

A prolonged clanging of a lid lifter falling and banging against the side of the stove. Then, “Might as well leave the pyana set right here?” “Ya. No sense to move it till it’s sold. They can come on in here to try it out.”

She came out after their voices had gone. There was a square discolored place on the dining room linoleum where the tin pad for the four legs of the heating stove had been. A few little rolls of lint that had been snagged in it were now liberated and wandering absently about.

She felt lightheaded—no more steadied by the pull of the earth than were the rolls of lint. There was another blackened spot on the kitchen linoleum where the range had stood. Without the big stove there to be always walking around in the tiny room, to guard babies from, to stoke and shake and clean, to bake bread in and boil washings on—without that Monarch ruling her life, she felt more weightless than ever, as though now she were not standing on this blackened rectangle of floor but hanging above it.

When they took the stove away they took the coal scuttle back to sit beside it in the yard. That seemed, somehow, to settle the course of the rest of her life.

She went out to stand on the little porch where she had scrubbed diapers for two babies. The washboard and the tubs and the washstand with its wringer were already packed in the trailer—the only parts of the porch that could go with them.

It exhausted her to contemplate even the tenth part of the work she had done on that porch—the quarts of beans and peas she had snapped and shelled there, the dishpans of tomatoes she had peeled there. And when the hardest work had not been on the porch, still there was a connection between that work and the porch. The barbarous crews of threshers lined up on its narrow little floor to wash and wait to be fed. And the iron scraper by her foot—how many thousands of times had she used it to scrape the droppings of the chicken house or the balled mud of the potato patch from the blade of her hoe and the niches of her heels?

How many times had the four of them—or the three of them, before Cathy came—stood on this porch in the darkness calling goodbys to friends as they left after spending a long Sunday afternoon and evening, or after a butchering day, or after they had come to sing to her playing?

And there had been other times when they had stood together on this porch watching a cloud spurt up over the horizon, waiting to see which way it would go. Only twice had the cloud come near enough so they could see clearly the shape of the long curved funnel swirling along, feeding the insatiable appetite above it—a black appetite even blacker than the black sky. Only once had the cloud come straight toward them, and then they had gone down the steps and closed the flat cellar doors over themselves and listened for the sound of the house being sucked away into the black appetite, but the funnel had swung away again like the aimless snout of an overfed animal, leaving them to sit in their damp unlighted cave smelling of potatoes and turnips till they could finally believe that they had been spared.

There were years of investments fixed in the paintless boards of this porch. Strangers would soon see the four of them in their car, dragging behind them a ludicrous trailer made from a wagon box, and the strangers would think they were seeing only another shiftless roving family. Strangers would think they were seeing a man and a woman who would breed without responsibility for the children they produced, a man and a woman who had never been willing to make commitments, never been willing to labor and sacrifice for roots. The strangers would never be able to know about the porch.

And all the people who had been her neighbors and her father’s neighbors, the friends whom she had greeted on this porch and sat with on this porch—they would pass by on the road, but they would never see the smoke of her fires again.

And she was leaving this porch and the people who cared about her and her family and allowing her husband to take them all where nobody wanted them. For no matter where they went, there would be no place for them. She could teach again someday, perhaps, when Cathy was bigger. But teachers constituted the largest group of unemployed professional people in the country. She could never get a job now. Thousands and thousands of teachers were already ahead of her on waiting lists that were four years long. School districts all over the country were bankrupt. The enormous Chicago school district owed months of back pay to every teacher in the city. No, there would be no place for them, no matter where they went.

She leaned against the side of the house, more tired than she had thought it possible to be, as though she was bearing in that one moment all the hours of the work of the porch and the fields.

She could hear Cathy’s abandoned baby laughter echoing in the grove where Lucy was swinging her. Lucy had been so quiet all morning, as though she understood what a terrible thing was happening, but she had been so sweet too, keeping Cathy happy and out from underfoot. And if it was going to be bad for the mother not to have a porch or a stove, how was it going to be for the children not even to have a tree of their own again—a tree to climb into and to hang a swing from? I’m losing my mind. I’m losing my mind.

She went back into the house and desperately scrubbed her face, but the ache in her throat made such a pressure that it kept squeezing the tears out of her eyes. She couldn’t understand where the tears kept coming from, but they were always there, ready to be pushed out whenever the ache got too big for the throat.

Cars were arriving now; she heard them stop and the people get out and talk to each other. The sound of a car driving into a prairie yard—Rachel had always thought that was one of the loveliest sounds in the world—until today. She looked out the window to see the people poking about in the accouterments of her life.

It felt a little like being naked before them, but it was really the opposite of being naked. Bodies were all alike without clothes, and lives, too, were all alike without their differentiating accessories. So it was more like putting out all the secrets that enclosed her nakedness. It was the uniqueness of her life that she had been obliged to lay out for all to appraise in the shadeless noon. They could all discover now what price they would put upon her uniqueness—upon the jumble of worn chattels that distinguished her from them. They would all know all her secrets now, and be so much better than she was, because she would not know all of theirs—just as millions of people could look at the pictures in their newspapers and know all about Finleys on rooftops floating over floods with all their remaining possessions piled around them, but those millions who had newspapers delivered each morning to their safe dry doors could still keep their own secrets from the Finleys.

Helen Sundquist, her face gleaming and blushing in the sun, nodded self-consciously when Rachel came out on the porch. It was hard for everybody when somebody had to sell out. People who had gone to church together, eaten Sunday dinner together, butchered together, harvested together—they found themselves unable to face each other when one had to sell out and the other had to bid. But there was no place for them to hide from each other. Everybody understood that the bidder was the survivor and that he would take the spoils that went to survivors.

Rachel began to feel that the sale would never commence. She would stand here in this naked nightmare forever, while her neighbors fingered her babies’ toys, her husband’s stock, her coal scuttle and her piano. The only thing that mattered to her now was release.

The auctioneer began with the household things. It was the only way to sell them at all, since most of the people had come for the stock or the machinery. A good auctioneer was hired to sell them things they hadn’t come to buy, but it wasn’t easy to sell people things they hadn’t planned to buy—with cash as scarce as rain.

The crib and mattress went for a dollar and a half. The Monarch went for ten before Rachel had even recovered from the shock of hearing it put up for five. The coal scuttle did sell, after all, for ten cents, and the round heating stove that had preserved them through nine winters went for seven dollars. Even George gasped over the buyer. It was Otto Wilkes.

Lucy was hiding behind a tree at the edge of the grove to watch while he sold her toys. Her father had told her she could keep the money from them to buy new toys when they got settled out West or in Alaska. If they went to Alaska, she was going to buy a sled dog.

Her tricycle went for twenty-five cents. Well, she had had it for a long time and there was no more paint on it to make it look new. Still, she had supposed that any tricycle would be worth more than that. But she couldn’t understand at all when her wagon was bought for another quarter. It was still not so very rusty on the metal around the outside. She was having a very hard time following what Mr. Churchill said, and she made up her mind not to worry about it, because she was sure that in all the confusion she had simply missed hearing what she was actually going to get. Then he held up the sled. He swung it up into the air in an effortless way that made it seem too light to be worth anything. It had always seemed much heavier than that when she dragged it up the hill after a race from the clothesline post with her mother.

First he shouted about ten cents being the tenth part of a dollar, which everybody already knew, and then he started saying, “Do I hear a nickel? Do I hear a nickel? The twentieth part of a dollar? Nickel, nickel, nickel,
nickel!”

He let his hammer fall and handed her sled to a helper. Had her sled gone for a nickel? Even with a broken steering bar it must be worth more than that. So far she had fifty-five cents, if her sled had brought only a nickel. What could she buy out West for fifty-five cents?

She went over and sat down in her swing. She wished she had an ice cream cone. But she couldn’t imagine how many years it would be before she even dared ask for one. Ice cream cones were very special treats for very good little girls who never had to be asked, even once, to stop bouncing a ball inside the house.

The auctioneer moved over to the bed springs and frame. “All right! Here we have a fine, solid bed. Good tight springs.” He banged the coils with the flat of his hand.
“Comfort and kicks!
Who’ll start at two dollars for the works? Two dollars? Two, two, two, two, two?”