Free The Bones of Plenty by Lois Phillips Hudson Page B

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.
Saturday, March 4
    The drifts of the blizzard around the steps of the Eureka Bank were all undisturbed, so that it could as well have been tenantless for two years as two weeks. But not even having every other bank in the nation for company could make it look less lonely.
    The President had closed them all. Harry Goodman’s Eureka Bank—assets $78,000, liabilities undetermined—was no more tightly closed than the biggest, oldest bank in New York. On that day the Eureka Bank was no more of a failure than any of the others with their good and bad mortgages and other kinds of good and bad paper.
    The President’s inaugural address came over Herman’s radio in the forenoon, and the store was filled with men who had come to hear it. Some of the men had radios at home, but they came to Herman’s store anyway, so as to have company while they listened. Even George was there, standing far back against the shelves, not joining the men around the stove or the ones who leaned on the counter, hovering over the radio, so possessed by the voice in it that they forgot themselves and let their hopefulness and their anxiety show in their faces. George, standing apart from them all, ground his teeth and wondered how they could be so taken in. He didn’t like the phony accent and he didn’t like the highfalutin language and it was just too much when the President said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” By God, what rich man was going to accuse him of being afraid and get away with it, anyhow? He hardly heard any of the rest of the speech, he was so angry at being called afraid.
    When the speech was over and the first murmurs began, he said loudly, “I’d like to get that hothouse pansy out on a farm for just one hour. I’d like to watch him pitch bundles into a thrashing machine when it’s around a hundred and ten in the shade—or wrastle a bull calf that’s taken a notion he just don’t want to grow up to be a steer!”
    Zack Hoefener began to laugh, holding his goiter with his hand, as though he must not lose track of the upsetting vibrations of his laughter and his heart beating there. Otto Wilkes laughed too, and so did Wally Esskew and Lester Zimmerman. Even the Koslovs began to laugh, though George doubted that any of them could understand what was funny about giving a man with that accent the chore of emasculating a calf.
    Clarence Egger, whose arm had been gobbled up by a threshing machine, waited for them all to stop. “Don’t you sheep brains know that the guy can’t even walk? He had infantile paralysis, for Christ’s sake!”
    George was not going to be made a fool of by Clarence Egger. “Well, he got a great big infantile silver spoon, too, didn’t he?”
    “I’ll take walking any day,” Clarence said. He was the only man in the room who dared, because his right arm was gone, to stand up to George. At times when he was drunk enough, Zack would do it, but nobody else ever did.
    Nevertheless, George felt that they were displeased with him for making them laugh