Читать книгу The Bones of Plenty - Lois Phillips Hudson - Страница 10

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.

In the yard of one house a swing hanging from the branches of a great bare tree played by itself in the wind. In another yard a privy door flapped and banged, and in still another, several paths from convenient approaches crossed to one of the town pumps.

There was only one house beyond the Goodmans’ to the north, but it was far out in a field and not on the street. That was where the Finleys lived, and Zack saw, as he approached Harry’s house, that Mrs. Finley had already got a big Monday morning wash out, to freeze stiff in the wind. He didn’t see how that Finley outfit stayed alive in that big old leaking house. Harry, being the money-grubber that he was, actually demanded rent for the place. Harry owned it the way he owned all the other places, because of a no-good mortgage.

Harry’s own house was set in a yard so full of trees that, living or dead, bare or leafed, they nearly hid it from people passing by. Zack’s knock, muted by his glove, drew no response. He took off the glove and rapped again with the sharpness of his cold knuckles. He twisted the door knob, but it would not turn. Then he kicked the door.

He tramped down the path to the garage. The doors were locked, but he found a window draped with spider webs and dotted with the dry husks of insects. He could see that the car was not there. He heaved himself up the steps of the back porch, and yanked at the screen door, which opened so cordially that he nearly lost his balance. But the porcelain knob on the back door was as resistant as the brass knob on the front door.

He shouted into the house and pounded on a window. He stood for a moment, his glove cupped around his goiter, while he thought. Then he lunged around the house and up the steps of Harry’s neighbor.

Old Mrs. Webber came to the door. She shivered in her long black woolen dress and clutched her shawl around her age-deformed shoulders. “Come in, come in,” she said in a high voice that scratched something in her throat. Zack’s glove went back to his goiter.

“It’s so cold. Come in, so I can shut the door. Martin’s in bed today. His laig and his hip is hurting him. What did you want?”

“Where’s the Goodmans?” Zack shouted. “When did they go away? Have they cleared out for good?”

“I never see nobody in the wintertime,” Mrs. Webber mourned, and her voice scratched on something a notch or two higher. “Just the boy that brings me the groceries and goes down to the pump and fetches me my water. And that old man with the big blue lip that brings the coal.” Mrs. Webber no longer remembered names.

“Them Goodmans haven’t never been neighborly to us,” she went on, and her voice went back down and scratched in the first notch. Listening to it was like watching an old cow bend her head to the side and rake her neck up and down against a knot on a fence post. “Martin says that’s the way them Jews are. When they first come here I went over and called on the missus and took her an angel food cake—angel food—with twelve egg whites. They’s a lot of people in this town said I used to make the best angel food cake in the county. But that was before my wrists got too sore to beat it right any more.”

“But what about the Goodmans!” Zack cried.

“Why, do you know what she brought back in the dish I took her that cake in? Six rotten little fish! Martin said that would learn me to give something free for nothing to a Jew. We give them fish to the dog.”

“Did you see them go away?”

“Are they gone away?” Mrs. Webber asked.

“They’re gone all right! Their car’s gone.”

“Well, I swan,” said Mrs. Webber. “Never even said goodby. Just like a Jew.”

Zack ran all the way back to Herman’s store, clumping ponderously down the middle of the road, keeping his arms crossed to steady all the burning, jumping things inside his chest.

“He’s gone all right,” he cried to Herman. “Cleared right out. I said he would, didn’t I?”

Johnny Koslov, the youngest of the Koslov brothers, loitered in the rear of the store, hopelessly eyeing a horse blanket that he coveted for the bed of himself and his Hilda. He came forward to the counter and demanded, “Who iss gone? Who iss it?”

“The banker’s gone—that’s who!” Zack roared. “The little Jew banker. Just like I said he would!”

“Oh my!” said Johnny. Johnny had never had any money in the bank and he had not heard about the panic, but he could react to sounds in voices and looks on faces. “Oh my!” he said again.

Zack paid no more attention to him. He despised all Russians. “You find me a Roosian with any brains,” he would say, “and I’ll prove to you he’s probably got German blood in him. And they’ll stand around in your place and spit their filthy-dirty Roosian peanuts anywhere they feel like it—just like they act at home!”

Herman didn’t care about the sunflower seed husks. When he got around to it, he swept them out the front door onto the sidewalk, where they eventually sifted away between the boards. It didn’t bother him when the Russians gathered around his stove, chattering in their foolish language and blowing the salty slivers from their muscular lips. As long as the Russians spent money, Herman didn’t care how many Russian peanut shells they spat.

Herman had dust from a sack of chicken mash in his apron, and he beat at it, raising a yellow cloud that settled over the hairs on his hands. He dangled one of the hands in a small vat of dill pickles and brought up half a pickle which he put in his mouth. “You reckon he’s gone for good?”

“Well, now then, just what do you think?” Zack sneered.

“Why, he might just be taking one of them bank holidays,” Herman said. “He maybe will come back when the new President comes in.”

Herman had learned how to handle Zack Hoefener in twenty years of running a store in the same town with him. “You make me sick,” Zack said. “We should go after him with a rope. We should have a good old-fashioned necktie party.”

“You cannot hang a businessman for losing all his money,” Herman observed. “Or for taking a holiday, either.” He was not exerting himself to be fair to Harry but only to infuriate Zack, who flung open the door and charged through it, nearly ramming into the customer on Herman’s steps.

“What ails him?” George Custer said, holding the door open and leaning out to watch Hoefener’s departure.

Herman crunched the last of the pickle into his mouth and said to George, “He just found out about the bank.”

“What bank?”

“Harry’s bank. He closed it up.”

“What do you mean!”

“He went away. Nobody knows where.”

George took a long breath. “The dirty little Jew,” he said. “The stinking tight little Jew. Who in hell did he lend the money to? The stingy scoundrel must’ve lost it himself! The dirty little swindler!”

George paced to the stove in three enormous strides, and had no more than stuck his cold hands over its searing top than he whirled and paced back again.

The Adam’s apple in George’s neck sawed up and down. “Maybe he’s just took a holiday,” Herman suggested.

“A holiday!” George shouted. “A holiday! Yeah, out to California, maybe, where it’s nice and warm—and far away! Well, he damn well better stay wherever he’s at. It’ll be plenty warm around here for him, you bet!”

“If he took money that is not his the police will catch him, won’t they?” Herman said.

“Sheriff Richard M. Press!” George scoffed. “He’s just after the little guy that can’t hire himself a shyster lawyer. Oh, the Goddamned little chiseler! He’ll go scot-free!”

Herman shrugged. He himself stood to lose nothing. His only capital was the inventory on his shelves; his reserve was his own corpulence—a product of the tempting shelves and a margin that could well last him for many days should the shelves go empty.

He was curious to know how much George would lose, for it was obvious that he was going to lose something, but Herman would never ask a question like that to a man like Custer. George’s great frame alone was formidable, but the frame housed a violence of soul vastly more formidable than that of flesh. No room into which George stepped was free from tension until he left it again.

“Maybe Harry will come back after Roosevelt gets in,” Herman said.

“Roosevelt!” George pronounced the “Roo” as in kangaroo. “He’s nothing but another rich man. He don’t care if a few million of us lose our shirts. What’s he care about a little dinky one-horse bank way out here? There ain’t a thing he could do anyhow.”

He turned away and stared toward the back of the store, with his jaw as hard as ever, but with his eyes drifting out of focus in a peculiar way—almost like a fellow Herman had known who had a case of the falling sickness. It was queer how mean George looked that way. He wasn’t looking at anything at all, and yet he seemed ready to kill anything he might see.

Finally he said, “Better get this stuff for the old lady, I reckon.”

He bought a hundred-pound sack of flour and some little things for which he paid in exact change and bills so limp they felt more like silk than paper. Herman wondered how long those bills had ridden around in Custer’s hip pocket before he had to use them. And he wished he knew how much George had lost in Harry’s bank.

George couldn’t even look up at the house of his wife’s father as he passed below it on the road. He wondered how much the old man was going to lose. He wanted to go up and tell Will about the bank, but he was so angry he couldn’t trust himself. Why had he listened to the sanctimonious ass telling him all about how safe that God-damned bank was? Now the money he’d been saving for seed was gone, and he was sure it was gone for good. Yet he could hardly believe his luck could be so bad. He had thought losing the foal was enough bad luck to last for the next year at least.

He drove the last half mile to his own mailbox and turned into the frozen ruts that led through his fields to the farmyard. The land sloped away from the county road so that he could survey nearly all of the half section as he coasted down the quarter-mile incline to the house. On either side of him were his two biggest fields—eighty acres apiece—which he planted in wheat. These two fields stretched the entire width of the property, and their eastern edges cut the farm in half. The north and south windbreaks of well-grown willows, cottonwoods, and box elders defined the limits of the yard. The groves stopped the wind enough so that the snow was encouraged to settle between them, and thus the Custers paid for their bit of shelter from one element by spending the winter half-buried in another element.

Below the house the long swell dropped more precipitously to a trough of the lowest ground on the farm, and then rose again to form the eastern, rougher part of the property—humped, notched by ravines, and quite rocky. Here George had plotted out his pastures and the fields where he grew corn and a hay crop of sweet clover or alfalfa.

Set just above the final drop of the western swell, the house appeared to command the hill and the buildings at the foot of it. But the appearance was deceptive, for those who lived in the house were really commanded by the hill. Nearly everything went down the hill empty and came up the hill full. Water buckets, milk pails, egg baskets, and wheelbarrows went lightly down to the well or the barn or the chicken house or the compost pile and came wearily back up to the wash boiler, the cream separator, the cooler, or the garden behind the house. Once each morning and evening the milk pails went down full—after the cream was separated and the skim milk went back to the barn to feed the calves and pigs.

The house had begun as one big room with an east and a west window and a chimney on the north. Then smaller rooms had been leaned against the north and south sides of the first one, each with a window to the west. The kitchen stove, the shelf for the water bucket and wash basin, a cupboard, a cooler, and a small work table nearly filled the room on the north. The baby’s crib and Lucy’s cot and a large storage closet filled the room on the south. It was such a simple little house that George felt as though he confronted the inside as well as the outside every time he came down toward it from the western fields and saw the three windows looking up at him—one from each of the three rooms.

In the main room, which they called the dining room, was an expandable round table on which the family ate all its meals, wrote letters, bathed the baby, did homework, cut out paper dolls, butchered, sewed, or spread out catalogs for ordering garden seeds, repair parts, shoes, and clothes. There were four straight chairs around the table, and a high chair. There was a heavy rocking chair covered in black leather, scraped full of furry brown scratches and showing brown rings on the seat made by the springs pressing up through the stuffing. There was an expensive upright piano, a bookcase too small for the books in it, and a clothes rack beside the round heating stove, nearly always hung with diapers and baby blankets. In an alcove curtained off from the rest of the room was the double bed for himself and Rachel.

As George neared the house he looked out once more across the fields. He loved and hated them for the same reason: They represented the hope of independence that grew drier and dustier every year. It was bad enough not to own the land he worked, but it was intolerable to pay rent on that land to a city man—a city man who knew enough about buttons and thread and cheap toys from Japan to make money running a store full of junk, and who thought, since he had made the money to buy land which had sold for taxes, that he also knew how to make money with that land. No matter how much surplus wheat was left over from last year or what plagues of drought, disease, and grasshoppers were predicted, he stipulated that George must plant half the acreage in wheat, of which he took a full third of the proceeds—not of the gross, but the net, after threshing, transporting, and all other costs except a percentage of the seed price were borne by George. If George chose not to plant half the land in wheat, he had to make up in cash for what Mr. James T. Vick figured would have been his share.

George had counted on getting a small loan from Harry for this season. Prices the last September had been the lowest in history, and he had got twenty-six cents a bushel from the elevator, minus the penalty for smut. Out of that he had had to pay threshers. Nevertheless, he had managed to keep nearly two hundred dollars in the bank, and another hundred would have seen him through in fairly good shape. But now he would have to go to the office of that city man in Jamestown, pushing his way between the gaudy counters of junk and squeezing through a doorway half blocked by more cartons of junk, and feeling his ignominious way up the few dark stairs leading to the office of Mr. James T. Vick. It was a low, cluttered little balcony where Mr. Vick sat at his desk, which overflowed with the business of a half dozen enterprises, looking out over the store from time to time to see that no hands went from alluring counter to threadbare pocket. His change-girl and bookkeeper sat at a desk nearly touching his, loading coins into the spherical bottoms of the money carriers, screwing them into the heads mounted on the wires, and yanking the handles to send them back to the clerks waiting below. George would have to sit in the presence of that girl while the frenetic carriers hissed back and forth, clanging into the steel rings that snapped shut around them. They arrived with the solid assurance of money come home—money rushing, rushing to come home. And while the girl doled out coins and smoothed bills and stored them away, George would have to beg for cash so he could get in the spring crop. And he would put up, as the only security he had, his muscles and his hope.

He was home—with his good news. He stopped the car near the house, threw the tanned hide from one of his own steers over the heated radiator, and then wedged a rock beneath each of the front wheels. He ought not to have been able to see more than the windows and the roof of the car. It should have been buried in three feet of snow while he drove a sleigh over the white depths that would leave a little water in the ground and at least protect the fields from blowing. He thought of the snows when he was a boy—twenty-foot drifts in some places, packed dirt-hard. He even had a photograph of himself on his pony atop a drift so high that his head was higher than a telegraph pole. And in the spring the snow went back up into the sky and fell again in rain, and the wheat sent long threads of roots down to the water, and in the fall one bushel of Number One wheat would buy a pair of overalls. A farmer got a fair shake then, and a man who was willing to work hard and who used his brains could manage to buy the land he worked and build a fine big house for his family, like Will, or like his own father, whose farm had been clear till he mortgaged it again in order to speculate. But then Hoover had come along as Food Administrator during the war and pegged the price of wheat at $2.18 a bushel while he let the overall manufacturers hike their prices till they were getting $6.50 for a pair of cockeyed denim pants. Ah, yes! The Great Humanitarian, putting a ceiling on wheat because of the hungry people in the world. But just who cared what it cost the man who grew the wheat to put a pair of overalls over his naked rump? Who cared? That was what George wanted to know.

He scooped up the hundred-pound sack of flour as though he would let the Great Humanitarian have the whole hundred pounds right in his crabbed little face. All a man had to do was buy a sack of flour to see who kept right on making money—who shed none of the sweat and made all the money. Since 1929, in less than four years, wheat prices had fallen over sixty per cent. But retail flour had dropped only forty per cent and bread had dropped less than twenty-five per cent. The more middlemen there were to get their sticky mitts on the wheat he raised, the less of a drop in price there was; yet he was the only fellow who had to sweat. Every single time he bought a sack of flour he thought about what Adolph Beahr took at the elevator, then what the railroad took to carry the wheat to the mills in Bismarck or Grand Forks and then to bring the flour back to Herman Schlaht, and finally what Herman took for his share.

When George bought back his own wheat, sold from the harvest fields at a price that scarcely more than paid the threshers and the rent to James T. Vick, he bought it back at a price that made him wonder how much longer his family could even eat bread—yes, how much longer a wheat farmer could eat bread.

And now another city man—a dirty little Jew—undoubtedly had run off with the money George had hoarded all winter for putting in the new crop and buying staples until the next harvest. If he could have got that Jew banker’s neck between his hands at that moment before he had to go into his dark little house to break the news to Rachel, he could have throttled him. He could have watched without remorse while the face turned black above the white grip of his bare hands, and the legs kicked and dug at the frozen ground and then grew limp. And then, when he saw it was done, he could have unwrapped his fingers from the wrung neck, dropped the body, and left it behind him while he walked toward his house and wiped his hands free of corruption on his overpriced “Oshkosh B’Gosh” overalls.

Still trembling with his vision, he stamped his boots on the porch to signal Rachel to open the door.

“What happened?” she gasped, when she saw his face.

“That dirty little Jew has closed the bank.” He pulverized the words with his teeth, letting them drop down to her like chaff dropped by a whirlwind.

Like chaff they blew about her and suffocated her. It took her a moment to put them together. “Oh, he couldn’t have closed it permanently. He couldn’t have. It must just be that he was getting too much of a run and he wanted to stop it. They don’t close just because there’s no money left; they close to protect the rest of us.”

He looked down at her, the sack of flour still squeezed in his arms. “You and your father!” he shouted. “Preaching, preaching! Always preaching! Leave the money in there! If everybody would just leave it in there. Then the banks could loosen up and help out the little fellow again. Oh yes! Just have faith! Support the filthy banks and they’ll be able to help the little guy.”

His tone shifted from fire to ice. “Every one of those damned ignorant Roosians got their money out, if they ever had any in there in the first place. And so did the Germans. Zack Hoefener and Herman and Beahr—they won’t lose anything! You can bet on that. But it was up to us—up to the people that built the country to keep it going. You and your old man! Preaching. Going to church. By God, anybody knows you can’t trust a Jew. That’s what I told you all along!”

Rachel turned back to her bread, hoping he would stop before he woke up the baby. She rarely defended herself or her family when he was like this. She wanted her silence to make him feel that he had won, but instead it defeated him. It left him alone, with his anger gone, to hear again the things he had said, without so much as one culpable word of hers to recall and cling to in his search for justification. He had to bear the guilty aftermath of his rages all by himself. Still he couldn’t stop.

“Well, your old man will get just what he asked for now! He’ll lose a hell of a lot more than we will. I’ll just bet he won’t drop his damned holy tithe in that collection plate next Sunday!”

The table and floor creaked with the rhythmic strong pressure Rachel applied to the bread as she turned and folded it on the board, hauling up the dough and bending it back into itself with a little thump and a whisper of the flour on the wood.

He carried the sack past her and set it on the floor by the lard can they used for a flour bin. It stood beneath the window that looked out on the fields that made the wheat. The frost from the night before had melted and moistened the windowsill, making it smell of old wood and the dust from fields. Some of the wetness darkened the streaked pea-green calcimine on the wall below the window.

He took a penknife out of his pocket and cut the linked red and white strings hanging from the top edge of the sack. He lifted the sack and dumped it carefully into the empty can. He pinched the bottom corners of the bag and shook it to spill the last ounce out of the sides of it, and then he replaced the lid of the can and folded up the sack and laid it on top of the lid. The flour-dulled picture of the girl on the sack looked up at him.

“Dakota Maid,” her grayish-black braids hanging stiffly to her breasts, held out to him a great basket heaped with golden sheaves of wheat. Her too-dainty moccasins were planted much too close together to balance the weight she carried, and her dusty brown face was stretched in a wide Anglo-Saxon smile. The outline of the same improbable Indian maid showed ever so faintly through the faded dye of the curtains at the window.

George straightened up and looked at Rachel. She did not look at him. She held up one end of the dough until it thinned itself out, sliced off a length with the butcherknife, kneaded it into shape, and laid it in the first of the five waiting pans. She filled the other four pans and punched down the dough.

He couldn’t believe it. Surely it must matter to her that they had lost two hundred dollars. Surely she was not going to let him bear the loss alone. Surely she would say something that would commit herself to him. She would express her fear over what would become of them, thus admitting that now they had no choice but to survive together or fail together—admitting that she could not get along without him. She would begin to cry, because of the world’s enormous treachery; he needed to see her cry because he needed to cry himself. And her crying would also be an admission of her weakness and a sign that he would have to be strong for both of them—and he needed the sign in order to be strong enough. Or possibly she would burst into the kind of fury he longed for—the fury that would justify his own fury, and bring them once more together in furious righteousness. What was a wife for? Even if she would simply strike back at him with all the fury she must feel about everything (For she must feel it? She must!), as he had only now struck at her—even then it would be a kind of commitment. What was a wife for, if she let a man bear a thing like this alone?

But though she worked beside him as hard as he worked, all day, every day, and submitted to him silently in the night, she was no longer committed to him. Sometimes he knew why little things went wrong; sometimes he didn’t. He hadn’t the least notion of why the whole thing had gone wrong. If a piece of machinery misbehaved, he watched and listened and tinkered till he found the cause of the trouble, and then he set about fixing it calmly and competently. He was contemptuous of the sort of man who kicked an ailing machine. A machine had no will to defy the man. Why should the man feel emotions about the machine? But it was things like this that made him want to kick something—things like these grievances of hers that went round and round till they lost their beginnings—these grievances that were more important to her than the ruin of them both. An overpowering heat flooded down his legs, as though he was wetting himself in a nightmare. He knew that if he kicked the streaked green wall under the window, he could put his foot right through it.

He hadn’t intended to do it, but once he had the door open, he was afraid he might rip it out of the kitchen—to make her look up from the everlasting little chores that she found so convenient to pile up between them—nevertheless, he had specifically told himself that he would not do it; but when the door was in his hands he did slam it with all his strength. Once again she had won.

Rachel had no idea that she had won. Cathy began to fuss almost as soon as the noise ended. She was that kind of baby. Lucy had been that way too. Some babies, when they first woke, would lie and look up at the ceiling with their wide eyes that seemed never to have been asleep, and they would speak softly to themselves with their tiny soft mouths for a long time before they decided they were hungry. But not her babies. They were like George. The minute they woke they wanted up, whether they were hungry or not. They couldn’t wait for anything. They couldn’t even wait to be born; both of them came nearly two weeks early.

Now Cathy was hungry and Rachel would have to feed her very soon. She considered the bone-colored dough. The loaves needed to rise before going into the oven; on the other hand, she was afraid they might rise too much before she had finished with the baby. If she forgot them for too long, the bread would bake out too airy and dry, with a bubbly crust. If she punched them down again right now, they might not rise enough, and then the bread would be heavy and doughy. George had a fit over faulty bread. At every meal while a bad batch lasted, he would wonder aloud how it was that his mother had always been able to bake perfect bread.

Once she had thought that doing her best to please him would be a joy to her, as it had always been one of her greatest joys to please her father. But now, even if he complimented her, she could not help thinking of the crushing ratio between complaints and compliments. Why, then, did it matter whether a batch of bread ever pleased him again or not?

She came upon the question the way she occasionally came upon a serpent as she was starting the garden in the cold spring. The snake, barely sentient after sleeping so long in the frozen ground, would finally become aware of her and uncoil like a rubber band snapping beneath her hand. And even while she was trying to calm the ridiculous physical reaction she always had when this happened, she was saying to herself, “But I was looking at it all the time! I saw it right there, all the while it was so still!”

So it was with the question. Now that she had seen it, she knew how long it had been there, and she knew that, unlike the snake, it would never go away and let her calm herself again. She would live always with this astonished burning in her chest. The baby’s crying, she thought, the bank, the baby, your father! always preaching! I don’t care, I won’t ever care again.

The baby was hungry. She must feed her. But she didn’t want to be crying while she fed her. That wasn’t good for a baby, to be held and fed while the mother was upset. The bank, the bank, the bank, and why should it matter any more either? It was not going to matter any more. Neither were his shouts.

She remembered how he had been that first year when he was courting her—in his way. His father’s farm adjoined the schoolyard and that was why they had met at all. It was a glorious Indian summer day. She had wanted to eat her lunch outside with the children, but she had to write a geography lesson on the blackboard.

The sounds of calamity sent her rushing to the door. Except for the big boys, the children were flying toward her in terror. Behind them, on the safe side of the Custer fence, stood the big boys, yelling with laughter. A huge Holstein bull fanatically assaulted the other side of the fence. They bellowed and raged at him; they flapped their arms and danced back and forth. One boy took off his shirt and waved it, leaping about in his underwear.

“Boys!” she cried. “Boys!”

She ran out to them, conscious even at such a moment of how short she was beside them, and said all the wrong things.

“Put your shirt on! Get away from that fence! What did you do to him? He could have killed all of you!” They laughed like demons. They showed off for her.

Then the bull, butting at the fence post, hooked a horn under the bottom wire, raised his head, and pulled the post out of the ground.

She didn’t need to tell them to run. They were all far ahead of her, stringing across the schoolyard and pounding up the steps. She had a memory of the giant bull face, twice the size of a cow’s, of the great wall of bone that was his forehead and of the two shining black globes in it, rolling, seeking—glittering as they came to focus on her, seeing her as she would look under his hoofs after the fence came down. She remembered the black leather nose, no more bothered by the ring in it than a boot is bothered by a bootlace. She remembered the blunt profile, descended of Ice Age bison and Grecian bulls—the head, created like those others, to be nothing more than a senseless battering-ram proceeding from an enormous, obscenely male neck.

She remembered, too, how the last boy had slammed the door of the schoolhouse in her face and she had thought, he’s locked me out, and even in her fear, as she ran up the steps, she was furious at this trick to compound her humiliation. Were they going to make her beg to be let in, with a three-thousand-pound bull behind her? But the door was not locked; the boy had only slammed it out of his own fear. Much later, after they were all safe again, she felt hurt that they would not have thought of her at all. Males, she said to herself when the hurt came.

The bull, in his epitome of male savagery, charged to the steps and stopped. Now there was nothing for him to attack with his aroused maleness. He seemed to know that he was ludicrous and to be further enraged. He shook his head at the bottom step, but there was nothing soft and alive to gore. He bellowed steadily. When he saw the children moving at the window he rammed his skull into the wall below.

The bristling flame of a red-haired human head appeared in the window then—the head of a man whose profile pushed out and down from his red pelt with an impatient force of elongated brutish angles. The mouth was long-lipped and excessively arched, and the jaw, instead of ending properly in a civilized chin, jutted out and down as though it never intended to stop. Altogether it was the face of a cave man.

But then when she looked down to see all of him at once, she discovered that the jawline was remarkably straight and that it led back up to an ear that was large but refined. Nor was the skull that of a flat-headed cave man, for it was high and curved behind, and it balanced the jutting jaw on the slender prideful neck. The neck was set on wide shoulders, the shoulders on a potent torso. The torso supported mighty limbs. Then she saw that the face was not that of a male human throwback, but of a young man so overpowering that before she could stop it, the thought quickened and created itself: He looks exactly the way a man ought to look.

He moved carefully but fearlessly, scolding the bull in curiously soothing tones. Either the bull was very much afraid of the man, or else he was no longer so enraged as he pretended he was, and glad to be persuaded to stop smashing his head into the school building. With not more than a minute of quick footwork on the part of the man and half-hearted dodging on the part of the bull, the capture was done. The man had his lead stick hooked in the ring and the bull followed, rocking his massive shoulders and haunches in a gait calculated to crowd the man. But the man had a great stride to match the bull’s, and he kept the leather nostrils stretched into such painful ovals that the bull could not side-step to dislodge the hook. The man never looked behind him. He marched away over the flattened fence, with his straight back no more than four feet in front of the glittering eyes and the cruel secret brain.

The more logical it was to stop trembling, the more difficult it seemed to stop. The big boys took up the siege where the bull had left off. Even after she finally got them to sit down and ostensibly to work, the atmosphere in the one big room, grown stuffy and confining with the warm day, was that of a becalmed ship alive with the vibrations of mutiny. If she asked a question, she was more likely to get an uncontrolled burst of laughter than an answer. She knew they couldn’t be blamed for thinking it was funny to see a teacher run away from a bull—even if it was for her life. What she blamed them for was starting the whole thing—wandering far into a pasture where they had no business and getting an animal worked up like that.

When the man came back to fix the fence, she was grateful and yet angry. Why did he keep such an animal in such a flimsy fence? She could not stop being aware of him out there, digging, pounding, nailing, with the sun glinting on his red-gold arms. Once when she looked out the window, her heart beating with the remnant of her fright and with her exasperation over the laughing savagery of the disobedient males ranged in front of her, she saw the man resting, leaning his arm across the new post, gazing at the schoolhouse, and then laughing until he finally had to blow his nose. He must be crazy, she thought.

After school he came in. She saw his inches of crinkly red hair rub the top of the door. He introduced himself politely enough, but then he said in a severe deep voice, “Now then, Miss Shepard, that was our prize bull out yonder in the breeding pasture.” He did not apologize by his tone or his expression for speaking the words “bull” and “breeding” to a young woman. “In the future we’ll have to ask you to enjoin your pupils from trespassing on our property. After all, it is a schoolteacher’s duty to be responsible …” A belly laugh that rolled from him as though he were a Barnum and Bailey bass drum put an end to the speech he had been working on all afternoon.

He saw me run, she thought, and hated him.

He was often near the school when it let out, and particularly, it seemed, when she needed him. Once her little Ford got snowed in during the day and he pushed her out of the bank. But just as she could feel the wheels getting traction again, the car started to make a dreadful, sharp, rapid thumping. She stopped and let the engine idle. The trouble didn’t seem to be there. Cautiously she let the car move and again the thumping resounded. It was in the back and she got out to see if it was the bumper. But nothing seemed amiss, and she thanked George again for his help, while he stood inclining his head to her with a respectful hand on the bill of his cap. She climbed back into the car and started it once more. This time the banging shook the whole automobile.

She leaned out and called, “Do you suppose it’s the transmission?”

“Could be. Sounds like she’s all froze up somewheres, don’t she?” he said. (She had noticed that he talked much less grammatically when he wasn’t making a speech he had prepared just for her. She found the contrast amusing and foolishly flattering.)

She couldn’t remember any more how many times she started the car and stopped it again in annoyed confusion before his wild laughter gave him away. He was so good with machinery that he knew just how his hands beating on a rear fender ought to sound. After they were married, she had seen him run stooping behind a car as visitors started to leave their yard, playing the awful tattoo, and she knew, by the way their faces looked, how she must have looked herself. His jokes almost always made her feel stupid, and therefore irritated with him, and yet, as the year went on, she was ever more restless on the weekends she spent at home. Sunday afternoons were endless, even though she could play the piano she missed so much all week. Finally she began to be irritated with him because her Sunday afternoons were so dull and empty.

All the while she kept wondering how she was supposed to feel, and how she did feel, and what the truth was about various sorts of physical mysteries. There was the way her body vacillated between an energy so great that she had no peace and could not even digest her food and a lassitude so profound that she had no will and did not care at all what happened to her. And there were more subtle and complicated physical mysteries which caused a recurrence of the shocked feelings she had had about her father when she first knew some things had to be true, as they were true of all men.

Now all she knew was that the feelings of that year, whatever they were, whatever love was, had resulted in a wedding as soon as school ended. All she knew now was that there had been a roomful of bad boys, Sunday afternoons when she was nearly paralyzed by her need for some unknown thing, a snowbank, a snowbank—the bank, the bank, the bank. This must have been a love story and now this must be the end of it. She knew more than she thought she knew. She knew, after all, what love was and how it ended.

The baby was screaming in hunger and outrage. Rachel wondered if some accident had happened while she stood in the kitchen staring at five pans of bread dough through tears that would not stop. Did the baby have a pin scratching her stomach or stuck in her throat? She was afraid even to go and look at the baby.

A few nights before, she had gone to cover Lucy and seen what she could not put out of her mind. The child labored with a heavy cold, and her body was twisted, her head straining back at a broken angle from her neck, while she fought her loud unconscious battle for air. Her braids had come undone and her long hair streamed across her face, covering it in the darkness as hair covered the faces of dead children flopping in their mothers’ arms or gaping in the gutters of Spanish streets. The picture was sometimes static, sometimes moving. Sometimes Rachel saw how it happened to one after another in the procession of mothers carrying dead children. One had looked out her window just as the bomb fell or the grenades exploded or the men, appearing from nowhere, opened fire in the street. This mother would have seen the child fall but she would not have been able to reach it in time. Nevertheless, when she got to its side, she would know how it had been—how her little girl of six had borne alone this agony still on her face, had wondered why her mother didn’t come to explain what was happening to her and to save her from it—for here, on the child’s face, was the terror and grief of dying all by herself.

The next mother did not know; she was searching, but of course this tiny body here was not what she had set out to find, not what she would allow herself to find. The hair tangled over the face hid the features, but this was her shoe, her dress, her jacket. But this was not her hand, no, this was not her face. Another little girl had died here when the men threw the things in the street. But here, under the blood, this was her dimple. (Lucy had dimples, round and sudden now, like pin pricks, but when she grew up they would be deep short lines at the corners of her mouth, like George’s. But no, she would not grow up, for here, under her hair, was the place the blood had come from.)

This, this was the way love stories ended. Husbands killed each other in the streets and wives went out and picked up their babies. Banks failed, nations died, babies starved—this was a fine world, wasn’t it, that men had built to live their love stories in?

Her own baby was screaming. The procession of mothers sank into the weary blackness beneath her mind and the blackness snapped back a maddening primitive retort. Life goes on, it said. Why? she retaliated. Why?—the silly question prompted by the awkward assertions one’s foolish instincts were always making. George for instance, like all males, had absolutely no reasons except those of his instincts for anything he did. That was why it didn’t occur to him not to go on, even now, when they were so obviously ruined.

She had not stopped shaking but she had stopped crying, so she wiped the flour from her hands and went in to pick up her baby.