Driftless

by David Rhodes

  “Oh,” she said, moving to her left, “excuse me.”

  Grahm stepped forward and captured a Styrofoam cup of coffee with his rough-looking left hand. They stood together without speaking for several minutes, sipping from their drinks. Grahm noticed the perfume evaporating from Cora’s neck, and Cora discovered an interesting pattern of swirling thread in his jacket sleeve, next to the button.

  Left alone, they could discover no conversation. But out of the crowd, fate provided two young boys chasing a third. The pursued—running pell-mell in the direction of the exit door—was more concerned with his pursuers than with what lay directly in his path and was busily engaged in knocking chairs to either side of him and scrambling around them.

  It seemed inevitable that all three would rapidly collide with Cora, who put out her one free hand in a pallid imitation of stopping traffic and grimaced in anticipation of being driven onto the field of drinks in an undignified collision of overwhelmingly social significance. Instinctively, she closed her eyes and held her drink away from her dress, and in that selfsame instant felt herself grasped about the waist, lifted into the air, and set down again. When she opened her eyes, she was on the other side of the bearded young man, while he absorbed the combined force of the rushing boys, gathering them into his arms and ushering them off again in another direction with the reproof, “Don’t run indoors, boys.”

  Though her drink had not spilled, something was decidedly overflowing. Her first sensation issued from just above her hips, where she retained the impression of two gripping hands rearranging her place in the world. The next came from the realization that the man had taken time to set his own drink down, and now he drew it back to his mouth, his eyes twinkling in amusement.

  “I can’t breathe,” she said, unsure if this was either a legitimate concern or an appropriate topic of conversation.

  He smiled, unable to find anything to say.

  “I’m Cora,” she said.

  “I’m Grahm Shotwell,” he said, and his voice expanded like summer.

  “Pleased to know you,” said Cora. She offered her hand. Grahm took it, entangling them in a mutually inquisitive texture of fingers and palms. The most primitive parts of themselves immediately began speaking to each other, without permission. Their imaginations entered caves deep in unexplored forests, and joined painted bodies dancing around orange fires. The thin membrane keeping the watery world of dreams from diluting the hard substance of reality stretched to breaking. Through a quick organization of bodily fluids, Grahm’s face turned bright red, and Cora tried to pull her hand away but found she couldn’t move it.

  “Oh, no,” she said.

  “Let’s find a place to sit down,” said Grahm.

  So began an acquaintance that in many ways proved too strong for them both. And though they fought bravely against falling foolishly, pointlessly in love, they remained hapless victims. Even their most venomous arguments, accusations, declarations, and final good-byes resulted only in bringing them closer together, clinging to each other in exhausted defeat. Episodes of soaring exhilaration were succeeded by evenings of heroic despair—depressions so dank, clammy, and dark it seemed they would live the rest of their lives underground.

  The one hundred miles of expressway and sixty-eight miles of back roads separating them became so familiar that it sometimes felt as though they lived in vehicles. During one emotionally momentous month Grahm drove to Milwaukee twenty-one times.

  There was always something left unsaid. Telephone bills arrived in envelopes with extra postage. Their need for each other grew at a pace impossible to appease, like disease feeding on its own symptoms. They tried to save themselves by making rules: times to call and topics never to discuss because they contained labyrinths of meaning. They bought candles and vowed to let the burning of them determine the boundaries of their lovemaking, hoping in this way to leave room for all the other things they weren’t getting done. But they always forgot to light them, or ignored them when they burned out.

  Cora hoped to be able to transplant Grahm from his rural surroundings into her clean, comfortable, and convenient urban apartment. But Grahm could not be separated for very long, it seemed, from his 246 acres of rocky, hilly ground and forty black and white spotted cows. It was as though he had been born with two umbilical cords—one attached to his mother, successfully severed, and the other to his great-grandfather’s farm.

  Farming provided Grahm with a mission as urgent as it was unquestioned. The duty to save the family business infused him with an unwavering sense of his own importance, and he never struggled with problems of identity or other social anxieties. He was indispensable to his own quest. It was as if his ancestors gathered on an hourly basis to communicate from the Other Side: We’re counting on you, Grahm. Even the land seemed to conspire with the dead to gain his unconditional loyalty, and as a result he simply revered the forty-acre stand of old- growth maple trees at the back of his farm and walked through it as if it were an ancient cathedral.

  “It isn’t fair,” she complained. “My work, friends, family, everything that is me is here. Why should your life be more important than mine?”

  “It isn’t,” he said. “But I have cows. You can’t just put out food for them as if they were cats.”

  “When will I see you again?”

  “I’ll call tomorrow.”

  “Don’t leave now.”

  “I have to.”

  “Wait, I don’t want you to drive alone.”

  It seemed the only way to end the madness was for Cora to move out of Milwaukee and into the farmhouse, which she did. She gave up her job with the insurance company, gave up her apartment and the friends she had made over the years but never saw since attending the performance by the Barbara Jean Band. She even gave up her family name, not wanting to be bothered with a hyphenated future, yet had every intention of going back to work after settling into her new home.

  But settling took longer than she had anticipated. All of a sudden there were two children two years apart and enough responsibilities to fill two lifetimes. A natural process that began with vague, alluring images on the back wall of her mind ended in the numbing details of daily living, the currency of dreams spent on cooking meals, doing laundry, and making ends meet. Whatever remained of her youth evaporated in the worried heat rising from unending physical movements.

  GATHERING EVIDENCE

  CORA TOOK OVER THE FINANCIAL AFFAIRS OF THE FARM AND AT once became alarmed when she examined the records, which Grahm kept in shoeboxes in the bedroom closet.

  “We’re going broke!” she exclaimed.

  “Farming isn’t easy,” said Grahm, trying to coax her back to the bed and away from the ocean of papers spreading over the bare wooden floor like great sheets of sea foam.

  “Grahm, stop. We aren’t being paid for our work. For crying out loud, who sets the price of our milk?”

  “It’s complicated,” said Grahm.

  Over the next several months Cora decided to find out how complicated it was, and she began pouring over receipts and canceled checks and consulting with the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection and the local chapter of the National Farmers Union. The answers seemed clear enough: a century of government policies directed at favoring industry at the expense of the rural economy was still achieving its goal, reducing farmers from 70 percent of the population to 2 percent. And what the government did not accomplish through laws and regulatory boards was completed by giant agribusiness.

  She confronted Grahm in the barn as he went from cow to cow attaching the milking machine to the animals’ soft, leathery udders.

  “It’s all wrong,” she said, balancing her daughter—an uneasy child—between her right arm and hip. “Our milk prices are set by the people buying it, with government help.”

  “It’s always been like that,” he said.

  “It’s unfair,” said Cora. “Every year the price of milk in the stores goes up while the
farm price doesn’t change. The people selling to us and buying from us are making money. We aren’t.”

  Grahm looked at his hands. He tried to keep his life manageable by limiting his attention to things he could control. Open discussions of government agricultural policies caused him great discomfort. His otherwise reasonable and beloved grandfather had been so sure that the big chemical and seed companies were single-mindedly undermining his livelihood and his health that he occasionally exploded in apoplectic fits of red-faced fist waving at the dinner table. In his declining years his grandfather imagined corporations taping his telephone conversations, filming his trips into town, and discussing his farming methods behind mahogany desks in St. Louis.

  Cora returned to the house to make supper. The next day she began looking for work, and babysitters. The following week she took a part-time job as a waitress. Two weeks later she found full-time employment at the American Milk Cooperative, a nationwide farmer-owned organization that marketed milk from more than 40,000 dairy farms, including theirs. Within the first year, she was awarded two pay increases at the branch office in Grange and the following year became an assistant bookkeeper.

  Their situation improved. Though much of the money Cora earned went toward the farm operation, they now had a fairly reliable automobile, a roof that did not leak, and a refrigerator with a self-defrosting freezer compartment.

  At the same time, their lives became more hectic, a frantic race from one workstation to another. The children were alone, they feared, too much. Cora often found reason to believe that Seth and Grace had grown bigger—grown up—during the space of a single day away from her.

  In an effort to lower debt, Grahm added five more cows to his herd. He began leaving the house at 4:30 a.m. and did not return until after 8:00 p.m. They no longer kept a garden and had little time on the weekends for anything other than chores they neglected during the week. And for Grahm, weekends merged seamlessly with weekdays, as indistinguishable as links in a chain. Like most of their neighbors, they came to accept a state of perpetuating fatigue.

  In April, Cora returned from work and found Grahm in the machine shed kneeling beside a grain drill. He set down the grease gun, with grease scrolling out of the nozzle’s end like a red transparent worm, and went to her.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Grahm, they have a second set of books. There was a discrepancy in the shipping sheets. When I reported it to my supervisor, I was told I could find the correction in the main building in Madison. I drove there this afternoon. There’s a second set of records in back of the main office. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to see them. I don’t know—I’m just an assistant bookkeeper—but there’s a whole wall of file cabinets.”

  Grahm stared mutely forward.

  “I told my supervisor, but he told me not to worry about it. He said it only concerned upper management and they had a different accounting system.”

  “What does this mean?” Grahm asked, feeling much like he had when he’d learned Cora was pregnant, both times. There seemed to be nothing for him to do. Something was happening that greatly concerned him but he had no way to assure that everything would turn out all right, and this somehow seemed like a personal failing.

  “Maybe there’s another explanation. Maybe it’s just a mistake.”

  “It’s no mistake, Grahm. With one hand they steal from us farmers and with the other they lie to the government. They’re breaking the law and it’s not right.”

  Cora decided to gather enough information to prove her suspicions. The next evening she brought home two Xeroxed spreadsheets, folded and tucked into her purse. And she continued collecting evidence.

  She also began having difficulty sleeping, migraines, and finally a doctor prescribed pills. But even then she often could not sleep.

  Grahm and Cora’s intimacy dried up like attic furniture.

  Grahm felt increasingly frustrated. Voices in his mind told him to do something, but he had no ideas. Like most of his neighbors he had devoted his life to farming. He liked farming. All he wanted to do was farm. Farmers had a long, proud history of avoiding social, economic, and political issues. They enjoyed nature, work, and solitude, and they eschewed everything that might be considered grist for the nightly news.

  But after a lifetime of successfully defending his private life from the baneful affairs of the world, his wife had rolled a pestilential army of scandalous problems through the front gate. And now they were in his house, in a cardboard box beneath their bed.

  One afternoon he drove his pickup to July Montgomery’s small farm, several miles away. Grahm didn’t remember exactly when Montgomery had moved into the area. He’d arrived unnoticed and blended in so well with his surroundings that it seemed he’d always lived in the old brick house, taking over a farm that had been for sale for a long time. Tim Pikes, the drunkard and former owner, had lost the battle against bank payments when Grahm was a small child. Most of the land had been sold off, and the remainder with the buildings—only a hundred acres—didn’t seem like enough for a viable farm, but apparently it was for July.

  His place was easy to identify, with MONTGOMERY JERSEY FARM painted in large white letters across the upper front of the red barn. Each word sat on its own board, and the third board had recently come loose on the “m” end and now hung perpendicular to the ground.

  Grahm pulled into the driveway just as the middle-aged man in a checkered shirt came around the side of the barn with a double-hung aluminum ladder. He planted the metal feet and pulled on the rope, hoisting the upper half of the ladder into its uppermost position. When the ladder was fully extended, the highest rung came within a couple feet of the hanging board, twenty feet in the air.

  Grahm got out of his pickup and walked to the barn. “Hello, July,” he said. “Can I help?”

  “Do you have a hammer?”

  “Sorry, no.”

  “Then I guess you can’t help,” said July and headed up the ladder.

  “I can hold the ladder.”

  “Good, you do that,” he said.

  Watching him climb, Grahm wondered about July. He seemed odd somehow, and because he didn’t look especially out of the ordinary or deformed in any way, Grahm imagined the reason for this impression must come from something July had experienced beyond the normal range of what most people experience. His history, in other words, contained a deformity. And for some unknown reason this made him easier to talk to. He never seemed to be passing judgment.

  Standing on the next-to-highest rung, July reached the errant board and worked it underneath the ladder. When it reached the horizontal level of MONTGOMERY and JERSEY, he took a nail from his shirt pocket and drove it into the wood. Then he dropped the hammer into the denim belt loop and climbed to the ground.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  They collapsed the ladder.

  “You got a minute?” asked Grahm.

  “Sure. You want some coffee?”

  “No thanks, coffee makes me too nervous.” They carried the ladder over to July’s machine shed and hung it on an inside wall. July leaned against the back tire of his Minneapolis-Moline while Grahm paced back and forth over the dirt floor.

  “I didn’t know who to talk to. I think we’re getting into trouble, my wife and I. I mean I think we really are.”

  “We’re all in trouble,” said July. “We’re farmers.”

  “Cora and I ship to American Milk, and Cora works in the office.”

  “I ship to them too. Not many independent plants left. American Milk bought up most of them.”

  “Cora says they keep two sets of books, and there are other things. One big farm is shipping watered milk; several others routinely test positive for antibiotics and listeria but are accepted anyway. Cora’s making copies of shipping and accounting sheets—stacks of them. She says they will prove everything, and she won’t stop.”

  July took off his hat, rubbed a hand through his short brown hair, put his hat back on, and said, �
�Look, Grahm, this is serious. AM is a Fortune 500 company. The people who run it are wealthy and powerful, and it’s better to just leave them alone.”

  “They’re not above the law.”

  “Maybe not, but they’re not as far beneath it as we are.” In some ways he looked more worried than Grahm.

  “My grandfather and some others started American Milk during the Depression. He was a charter member and it wasn’t a crooked outfit back then.”

  “No, maybe not,” said July.

  Grahm continued pacing.

  July once again took off his hat and rubbed his hand through his hair.

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” he said. “Make more copies of the copies your wife brings home. Put them somewhere safe. Everything depends on them. If those papers get out of your hands, you’re done. Show them to people you trust. Do you have a lawyer?”

  “We don’t need a lawyer.”

  “I think you need a lawyer.”

  “We can’t afford one.”

  “Then maybe you can’t afford to be involved with this.”

  “We shouldn’t need a lawyer. We haven’t done anything wrong. This is the United States of America.”

  “No country is immune to human nature.”

  Grahm reached the end of his desire to talk. He regretted coming. Talking to people was difficult enough, even in the best circumstances. Now he felt angry, and he drove away.

  THINK LESS, DO MORE

  JACOB HELM CLIMBED INTO THE JEEP, BACKED OUT OF THE GARAGE attached to the side of his log home, and drove the eight miles into Words. He had bought the Words Repair Shop building soon after moving into the area, converting it from what had once been a creamery. At the time he’d known little about running a business, but he needed a new beginning. After Angela’s death, he’d quit his job of eleven years (he’d been an engineer for an electrical component company), sold their suburban property, and left Sheboygan. He ended up here, determined to immerse himself in anything that bore no resemblance to his past.