Home Sweet Home

by April Smith

  “Vote for my dad!” shouted Lance and Jo, giving away cookies.

  “Vote for my husband!” Betsy said, handing out recipe cards for her Western Hamburger Sauté.

  At precisely noon, the rally climaxed with a parade of the air force convoy through downtown Rapid City on its way back to Oahe Dam. By then the streets were lined with cheering shoppers and office workers. A polished jeep carrying Master Sergeant Vance stopped in front of Cal and they ceremonially shook hands. The Rapid City Journal ran a story that evening calling Cal Kusek a “visionary politician” and comparing him with another prairie lawyer, Abraham Lincoln.

  After the polls closed, Stell, Fletch, and Robbie drove out to the Lucky Clover Ranch. Win or lose, at least they’d be in good company. They gathered in the living room. The wives set out canapés and Cal mixed a pitcher of martinis. He put a classical station on the radio, but everyone protested it was too depressing, so he switched to KPIX, which was playing big band music, putting everyone in a rebellious, sexy mood.

  “I wish we were all in a wonderful jazz club in the Village right now,” Betsy said nostalgically, curling up on the couch next to her husband.

  “Do you miss New York?” Stell asked.

  “When I think about it, yes, terribly. My sister, Marja, still lives there. I keep hoping she’ll come out for a visit.”

  “My family never visits. His parents stay forever. They think we’re running a hotel,” complained Stell. “Heavy drinkers,” she mouthed to Betsy.

  Fletch raised his martini glass. “I’m going to bet Cal Kusek takes the race by a mile!” and they all started knocking wood on everything within reach.

  The women went to the kitchen to check on the food and came back holding fresh drinks.

  “Dinner’ll take a while,” Betsy said.

  Stell sat on Fletch’s lap. “We forgot to turn on the oven,” she confessed.

  “You two are easy dates,” Fletch said, giving her a squeeze.

  “When are we going to hear something?” Stell demanded.

  Cal looked at his watch. “I hope soon. Verna said she’d call.”

  “Sit tight, it’s going to be good news,” Fletch said.

  “Shh! Don’t jinx it!” Stell cried, pulling his ears.

  “What have you boys been talking about?” Betsy asked.

  “Your husband regaled me with political intrigue. Did you tell Betsy about the fund-raiser?”

  Cal rolled his eyes and smirked. “Thanks, old buddy.”

  “What fund-raiser?” Betsy asked.

  “When he was on the road, some grizzled old guy in some grizzled old town hands Cal Kusek a fistful of cash—for the campaign—a donation, you follow me? How’d he get it? Runs a whorehouse.”

  Betsy stared at Cal. “You took money from prostitutes?” she said with mock outrage.

  “Yes, dear, but it’s better than them taking money from me!”

  Even through their raucous laughter they could hear their children screaming. The jokes stopped. They put their drinks down and pulled on shoes.

  “Where are they?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did they take the horses—?”

  As they scrambled outside the phone began to ring. For a moment there was confusion—should someone answer it?—but the young, shrill cries were urgent so they kept on going, breaking up to search the yard, the barn, the henhouse, and the corrals, and that’s where they found the two boys, Robbie and Lance, standing outside the rails and Jo on the ground inside, kneeling beside a motionless calf.

  “Ruby’s dead,” Lance said solemnly.

  Cal climbed in with the cows and squatted beside Jo, who was sobbing brokenheartedly. The calf was lying on its side. The mother had already mourned it and abandoned the corpse.

  “Leave me alone,” Jo cried.

  “I’m sorry, Jo,” Cal said.

  “He shot Ruby and nobody stopped him.”

  “Now come on, Jo. Nobody shot Ruby,” Cal said.

  “He said he’d come back for us.”

  Lance’s fingers tightened in his mother’s hand.

  “Do you know what your sister is talking about?” Betsy asked.

  The boy’s lips twisted in wretched indecision but he shook his head. They’d made a blood pact not to say a whisper about the rustler.

  “How could anyone get in here, anyway?” Robbie asked. “With the dogs and all—”

  Stell told him to hush.

  The phone inside the house began to ring again.

  “I’ll go,” said Fletch.

  “While you’re there, turn off the oven,” whispered Stell as Fletch took off toward the lighted porch.

  “What are you talking about, Jo?” Cal asked gently.

  “I can’t tell you,” said Jo.

  Betsy squeezed her young son’s hand. “What is going on, Lance? You can tell us, nobody will be mad.”

  After a moment his mother’s reassurance overcame his fear, and he confessed. “We saw them stealing cattle,” Lance said.

  Jo burst into fresh tears. “They told us not to tell or they’d kill everybody on the ranch. You and Mama and all the animals,” she said, throwing her arms around her father’s neck.

  He crouched there with his little girl and held her tight.

  “Who were they?” he asked.

  “Cowboys!” she snapped, a dead giveaway that she was hiding what she knew.

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” Betsy asked Lance.

  “We were scared,” he said.

  “Nobody’s going to hurt anybody,” his mother promised.

  “Don’t tell. Don’t tell the police!” Jo wailed.

  In the faint light coming from the house, the adults exchanged looks of outrage and determination. But the first thing was to calm the children.

  “I want to show you something, honey,” Cal told Jo. “Nobody’s going to harm you or your brother, and this is why. You don’t have to be afraid. Look at Ruby. See? There’s not a mark on him. They might have been bad guys, but they didn’t shoot this calf.”

  His concerned face was close to his daughter’s; her cheeks were bright pink and her clear blue eyes shiny as stones in a creek washed over by endless waves of transparent tears. Cal’s heart broke with hers as he examined the carcass. Its neck was blackened and covered with blue-green flies.

  “Honey, look—he died of natural causes. Those are called blowflies. They lay eggs and the eggs are called screwworms. If there’s a wound anywhere on the animal, those worms get in there and cause big trouble.”

  He spared her the fact that the worms survived by eating the living flesh of the host.

  “I don’t want to see,” said Jo.

  “That’s fine, honey. Just know that nobody’s going to hurt you. They didn’t kill this calf.”

  He gently helped her to her feet and turned her toward her mother’s embrace. What the girl didn’t see wouldn’t cause nightmares and self-recrimination. He could tell from the maggots that the infestation had started around the navel, probably not cleaned properly at birth. Jo and Lance had been so proud of attending to the newborn.

  He climbed out of the corral after his daughter.

  “Please don’t put him in that big pit with all the cows,” she begged.

  “We have to, honey, so the disease doesn’t spread.” Then he told Betsy, “We have to call the vet. Right now.”

  She nodded, worried. “I know.”

  “Why do you get to decide everything?” Jo protested. “He’s just another animal—money in the bank to you. I want to bury him special, not in the pit!”

  “I’ll take care of it—” Cal began.

  “You say you’ll take care of things, but you never do!”

  The screen door slammed. Fletch was walking toward them from the house with a big smile on his face.

  “That was Verna on the phone. Congratulations. You won, Cal. You won the election by a hundred fifty-seven votes! Hurry up, we have to get back to town—your supporters
are gathering at the hotel.”

  The adults hugged, their mood softened by the children’s sorrow.

  “Your daddy is a state representative!” Stell told Jo.

  “Who cares?” said Jo. “I hate it here.”

  She ran ahead, with Robbie and Lance close behind.

  The others paused on the lawn in the paradox of twilight. Cal took his wallet from the pocket of his jeans and from a certain fold removed a one-dollar bill and waved it back and forth.

  “This was my first campaign contribution! It was given to me by the wife of the Democratic chairman in the thriving metropolis of Ardmore, South Dakota. She had to be ninety. Sharp as a tack. Her husband was building a carousel.”

  “You are out of your mind!” Fletch said, laughing.

  “It was his life’s work, dammit! Piece by piece, just like this campaign. I’m going to frame this dollar and put it on the wall of my office in Washington, D.C.”

  “Listen to him!” said Stell. “Washington!”

  “Why not?”

  “Come on,” Betsy said. “We have to call the vet.”

  —

  That week the theme of Thaddeus Haynes’s sermon on The Hour of Truth was pestilence.

  “There’s pestilence in this land,” he intoned into the microphone set up on the card table in the hotel ballroom. “I refer not to the tragic loss of cattle that all of us have borne, but the most dread disease of our time—totalitarianism! Don’t be fooled! These are the exact circumstances that Communists exploit when good people are looking for answers to their suffering. Be on your guard! This is a criminal band of immoralists trained to penetrate the hearts and minds of citizens at this time of despair.

  “Friends, we must stand together against the gods of absolute power. We must be alert to their smear words and crooked shenanigans. We must seek out these strange and twisted personalities and expose their true intentions. Narrow is the gate and straight is the way of eternal life. You have a precious soul, and that soul will be judged only by God. What are you doing for your soul today? We pray for the people of Russia who bend their heads to Stalin, because we bend our knees to God!”

  Times were bad and the ballroom was filled to capacity. They’d had to bring in more folding chairs. The people of Pennington County were reeling from a barrage of plagues that had evaporated the water from their land and buried their animals in snow, cursed them with deadly flies and whipped their houses with winds surely sent by the devil. In those unnatural and mysterious times, conditions had ripened for Thaddeus Haynes and his kind.

  MERCY MEDICAL CENTER

  DECEMBER 26, 1985

  2:00 P.M.

  “So!” said Jo. “You’re married!”

  Robbie blushed. It was endearing that at the age of forty he could still blush.

  “I’m married to Sherry Ingles. You might not remember. She was two years behind you.”

  “I know Sherry. She was in homeroom with Lance.”

  “That’s right,” said Robbie.

  They were alone in the hospital cafeteria, a depressing place at any time, but especially the day after Christmas, with dime-store decorations taped to the cinder block and smelling of stale pea soup. Sipping their coffees, they smiled awkwardly and looked away, searching for something to talk about that wasn’t upsetting.

  “What are you doing in Portland these days?” Robbie asked.

  “I’m a landscape designer. I’m with a company that does work for the city.”

  “Like landscaping city hall?”

  “No, just the opposite. Our goal is more open space. There’s a district in Portland called the Pearl that right now is a bunch of warehouses and abandoned old railroad yards, but we’re going to redevelop it into three parks, all connected by a waterway. The district will still have historic character, with cobbled streets and the original loading docks, and there’ll be retail shops and housing and all that, but what’s really exciting is that the waterway will sustain wildlife and become an urban refuge for birds and, well, all kinds of animals. That’s the part I’m involved in, and I love it.”

  Robbie looked unimpressed. “I’m not surprised.”

  “Really? I was. That I landed there.”

  “Come on, you grow up in the wide-open spaces of the prairie, and now your job is to make a big park in the middle of a city? Pretty darn clear to me. You couldn’t get out of this place fast enough, but you ended up taking it with you.”

  Jo laughed, rephrasing the old saying: “Home is the place you can never leave, no matter how hard you try.”

  “Tell me about it,” Robbie said, and sighed.

  His eyes shifted to the big-screen TV in the cafeteria, where an attractive woman with long black hair and bangs was doing a newsbreak. In silence, because the sound was off.

  “Know who that is?”

  Jo glanced over.

  “Oh my God!” she squealed, and put her hands over her mouth. “Is that Irene Nassiter?”

  Robbie nodded complacently. “That’s Irene. I used to date her,” he added. “After you left.”

  “She’s cute,” said Jo.

  “She’s a cokehead.”

  “Are you kidding? She looks so midwestern.”

  Robbie’s eyes were back on Jo. “You look good,” he said.

  “Me? I’m a mess.”

  He paused. They were two people who could still speak to each other from the heart.

  “What would have happened if it never happened?” he asked.

  “You mean the trial?”

  “Everything. Would you have stayed here?”

  “No, hon. No, I would not.”

  Now it was her turn to expect an honest answer.

  “Are you happy?” she wanted to know.

  Robbie Fletcher grimaced. Shrugged.

  “What can I say, it’s the freaking Rapid City Journal. I’m still chasing stories about the ghost in the Alex Johnson, doing front-page exposés on weather.”

  “What about Sherry?”

  “She’s a real estate agent, but she works for a big company. She could get a job in Denver.”

  “Is that the plan? Denver?” Jo waited. “Maybe The Denver Post? It’s a good paper.”

  Robbie didn’t answer. His eyes went to the TV screen and back. “I had such a crush on you,” he said.

  Jo was touched. He’d left for college when she was still in high school, but they’d been a hot item at the time.

  “Speaking of the prairie, remember the Spooky Place?” she ventured.

  He smiled depravedly. “I certainly do!”

  “Look at you, you’re turning red!” Jo said.

  “Look at you.”

  They finally let go and laughed together, comforted by the tender feelings that arose.

  “No, it’s good,” he said, meaning his marriage. “It’s really good.”

  “Me, too,” she hastened to add.

  “I’m happy for you.”

  “You were my first,” she told him. “There will never be another.”

  “The road not taken, I guess.” He grinned sheepishly. “I’m trying not to look too mournful here.”

  “You’re not.”

  The news had switched to a live shot. A seedy-looking middle-aged man with a beard, baseball cap, filthy parka, and shorts despite the cold, was being interviewed in front of a run-down house.

  “Remember him?” Robbie asked.

  “Who is it?”

  “Tyler Jones. Local lowlife drug dealer. We used to call him Honeybee.”

  Just seeing her tormentor—even without sound—caused a chemical reaction in Jo’s body. She had a flashback of Honeybee pulling Lance off his horse and dragging him through the snow. Fear spread from her gut to her fingertips. She felt sick.

  “He did it!” she cried. “He always had a vendetta against us!”

  “Tyler Jones?”

  “He went to prison.”

  “I remember.”

  “I’m the one who told on him. Lance and I
caught him stealing cattle and I picked him out of a lineup.”

  “You think he broke into Lance and Wendy’s house?”

  “He’s crazy!”

  Robbie considered. “It doesn’t look like he’s a suspect.”

  “How do you know?”

  “No cops in the picture. He’s not under arrest, see? It’s just the camera crew and he’s just talking—”

  “Listen to me.” Jo gripped his arm. “Honeybee said—he actually said this—he said he would come back for us. If he’s not a suspect, he should be.”

  Robbie’s journalist instincts took over.

  “I’ll talk to my sources and find out what’s going on,” he said. “Will you be okay?”

  “Honestly? I’m scared to death of that guy.”

  “Hang on. I’ll find a deputy to stay with you,” Robbie said, and got up and ran for the lobby.

  THREE

  HATE

  15

  Cal guided the Piper Apache in a wide circle over the Lucky Clover Ranch. The pretty white plane with the yellow stripe was the former air force pilot’s pride and joy, and also a necessity. Just as Fletch had predicted, Cal had been elected to the state legislature three times, and was now running for the U.S. Senate. The plane extended his reach beyond Pennington County to every part of the state, giving him an important edge over his opponent, Thaddeus Haynes.

  The Kuseks were prospering. After a decade of hard labor, Cal and Betsy had mastered the art of cattle ranching. They were a working family now. Jo was a freshman in high school and Lance a seventh grader, capable of making up for their parents’ absence when Dad was at campaign headquarters in Pierre and Mom making her rounds as a visiting nurse or working the ELECT KUSEK storefront office in town. Their success had added luster to the household. People wanted to do business, donate money, be sociable, serve beside Cal and his wife on committees—anything to get into the good graces of a man on the rise.

  Cal was generous in giving rides in the Piper Apache to folks in need, but today his passengers were special cargo. Betsy’s sister, Marja, and her new husband, Dr. Leon Winter, were stopping for a visit on their honeymoon to San Francisco. They’d taken the train from New York City to Sioux Falls, where Cal had met them at the airport. It was not only their first trip out west, but also the first time for both in the air. Bucking the prairie wind in a light airplane was an alarming introduction. Marja gripped the fine, slender fingers of her surgeon husband’s hand—the eye surgeon who had restored her sight—while he sat rigidly in the seat, afraid to look out the window. They passed over forests turned red, destroyed by beetles that had infested the dying trees.