There’s Meat on These Bones

the Bones of Plenty by Lois Phillips Hudson (1962, 1984. Borealis Books. ISBN 0-87351-175-1)

One of the benefits of being asked to participate in Buffalo State University’s Rural Lit R.A.L.L.Y. blog discussion of bygone novels depicting America’s agrarian past is that, from time to time, you stumble onto something you’ve never read, never heard of, by an author you never even knew existed. As part of my affiliation with the Rural Lit blog site, the administrator of the blog sent me a used copy of the Bones of Plenty to read in preparation for an upcoming discussion. Similar in texture and tone to Minnesota author Herbert Krause’s epic tales about northwestern Minnesota (Wind Without Rain and The Thresher), Bones follows the successes and considerable failures of the tale’s red-headed protagonist, George Armstrong Custer (not the ill-fated general but a ND grain farmer named for the Indian fighter) during the Great Depression. It’s all here: the farm auctions where men from the surrounding community show up and bid so low, the sheriff escorting the banker gives up and leaves without completing the sale; the Jewish lender who, because he lost his neighbors’ life savings in speculative investments, vanishes under the cover of darkness; sickness, disease, and death; tragic farm accidents and dust storms that blot the sun.

At times poetic, Hudson allows George (and some lesser characters) to get a bit preachy, ranting for or against the men of power who control the strings of the populace’s existence to the point of distraction from the characters themselves. That’s the only real drawback to the writing and it is but a minor flaw. For the most part, Hudson, who was a professor at a number of colleges (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lois_P._Hudson for details) hits the nail squarely on its prairie influenced head. The female protagonists in the story, including Lucy (the eldest of George and Rachel Custer’s two daughters); Rachel Custer (George’s long suffering wife); and her mother, Ruth; are all extremely complex personalities as drawn by this author. So too are the men: George has a temper and is prone to corporal punishment of Lucy in brutal and rash ways and routinely cuts his wife to the quick; but somewhere behind his deep seated mistrust of society and the system he is bound to (he’s a tenant farmer on someone else’s land), George Custer loves his daughters and Rachel, a college educated woman who gave up teaching school for a life of hardship she never envisioned.

In looking for novels by Hudson (she’s the sort of writer you want to hear more from), I was disappointed: The only other book available on Amazon.com by this author is Reapers of the Dust which appears to be a collection of essays about Hudson’s childhood in North Dakota. While such real-life snippets of turmoil and angst might be someone else’s “cup of tea”, I was hoping for more fiction from this forgotten chronicler of the prairie. Sadly, this appears to be the only novel Lois Hudson finished before her death in 2010.

And that, given the quality of the prose in Bones is all of our loss.

4 and 1/2 stars out of 5. Readily available on amazon.com.