Driftless

by David Rhodes

  She walked across the room, stood next to him, and put her hand on his shoulder.

  Jacob looked up at her. “I’ve known him more than five years, but he was private.” He looked again into the box of photographs and newspaper clippings. “It says here that his wife was murdered many years ago, in Iowa. He never said anything about it. He never told me. Why wouldn’t he tell me?”

  “Are you sure it was his wife?”

  “Not many people are named July.”

  Winnie noticed that several strands of tan thread in the seam of Jacob’s shirt were unraveling in tiny loops. She felt awkward with her hand on his shoulder and took it off, held it in midair, then after a brief crisis of hesitation put it back on his shoulder. It felt better there. Through the bedroom window she watched an old convertible pull into the farmyard, and went downstairs.

  Winnie opened the front door and Gail Shotwell walked into the kitchen.

  “Hello,” said Winnie. “I’m afraid we’ve never been officially introduced. I’m Winifred Smith.”

  “I know. I’m Gail. Is July around?”

  “I’m afraid I have something to tell you,” said Winnie.

  Gail cast an impatient look around the room. Evangelists had trapped her before. “I don’t have a lot of time, Preacher. I’m just here to pick up a pie pan that I left with July a couple days ago. I’m sure I can find it myself.”

  Winnie stood in the doorway of the living room, as though to block her from moving in that direction.

  “Please, sit down.”

  “I don’t want to sit down. What’s going on? What are you doing here? Where’s July?”

  Noises could be heard upstairs.

  “Is that July?” asked Gail.

  “No,” said Winnie. “That’s Jacob Helm. We got here twenty minutes ago and found July by the corncrib. He was killed in an accident and we’re waiting for the ambulance. He’s dead.”

  “That’s not true,” said Gail, confidently.

  “I wish it wasn’t.”

  Their eyes met for the first time and the confidence immediately drained from Gail’s face.

  The house was quiet except for a faucet dripping into the dish-water. Gail sat down. “What’s Jacob doing upstairs?” she asked, and as though in answer something above them smashed against a wall.

  “Jacob’s upset. They were good friends and he’s having a hard time of it.”

  Upstairs, something else was thrown against a wall, accompanied by a curse.

  “Men,” said Gail. “They always think they can grieve with their fists and feet.”

  “We need to call someone to take care of the cows,” said Winnie.

  “I’ll milk them,” said Gail. “And I’ll come back in the morning and milk them. Where did you say you found July?”

  “He’s in front of the corncrib.”

  “I’m going out there.”

  “That’s not a good idea,” said Winnie. “His coat was caught in the power takeoff.”

  “Oh,” said Gail, sitting back down. “Drat, I don’t think I want to see that.”

  Then she began to cry and Winnie sat next to her.

  The ambulance arrived and left with July’s body. The county sheriff’s car came later. Standing in front of the corncrib, Winnie, Gail, and Jacob told the two men everything they knew about July—everything they could think to say.

  After they left, Jacob did not talk again. He set the shovel inside the crib, went to his jeep, and drove away.

  Winnie wasn’t sure what she should do but decided to stay with Gail.

  Gail found three bottles of beer in July’s refrigerator and drank them.

  SELLING LAND

  GRAHM SHOTWELL PULLED A CULTIVATOR THROUGH A FIELD of soybeans. At first he only heard the name, the rest of the announcement obscured by the diesel’s exhaust. He turned up the radio and waited for the next local news cycle. Afterwards, he climbed down from the tractor and stood in the middle of the field, rubbing his hands through his hair and looking at the recently sprouted soybeans. A hot, dry wind blew out of the south and the ground was hard.

  Rain was forecast and it might be a week, perhaps two, before he would have another opportunity. The field had to be finished. He walked around the tractor several times, climbed back into the cab, and continued. He didn’t know what else to do. It seemed he should respond in some way to the news but he couldn’t imagine how. Even sudden, deadening grief had to be absorbed within a nonporous routine.

  When he finished harrowing the field, Grahm left the tractor next to the road and drove his pickup to July’s farm. Perhaps someone would know more about the accident than had been reported on the radio. There were several other cars there, but once he was in the farmyard he could not force himself to climb out of the truck and he drove back home.

  That night he could not sleep and went outdoors before 4:00 a.m. Cora followed him a short time later and he told her to go back inside. He fed the calves, repaired a broken stanchion, ran feed into the bunkers, and milked his cows earlier than usual.

  At ten o’clock he returned to July’s farm. A light rain fell from the sky. His sister’s car and Wade’s pickup stood next to the barn. They were still milking, and he worked with them until they turned the cows into the pasture and drove back to Words.

  Alone now, Grahm walked through July’s other buildings. Everywhere, things that couldn’t move waited for July to touch them again. The Mason jar of arrowheads that July had picked from his fields sat on his tool bench, longing to be reseeded into the ground. Wrenches wanted to be picked up and fitted around a nut. It wouldn’t be long, he knew, before they would be auctioned to someone else, along with the cows and everything else.

  Someone, perhaps Wade, had driven the tractor into the machine shed, where it stood beside the gravity box. He climbed into the wagon and sat with his boots rooted in ears of corn. An owl inspected him from a darkened corner in the rafters, stepped off the beam, and flew out the open door with a single, silent pump of its wings.

  He knocked on the front door of the house, found it unlocked, and went in. It was cooler inside and the air smelled stale. He thought about walking into the living room, but didn’t.

  He opened the refrigerator. The food, he suspected, would be thrown out—even the block of cheese sitting on a plate. No one would want to eat it.

  Outside again, he stood on the front step. The bird feeder in the front yard was empty and he considered finding some grain and filling it. But he wasn’t sure if July fed birds during the summer.

  He went back to his truck and drove away.

  At home, he walked through his own buildings, one after another, thinking about July and trying to imagine how someone might feel if he, Grahm, had died.

  Standing beneath the tamaracks, he watched his children run across the yard, their short legs moving quickly, and he understood something: it was better to be wronged and do nothing about it than to do something wrong and regret it. A person could live with one but not the other. He remembered when he and Gail had run together, faster than the wind, between the trees.

  In the kitchen, Cora was cooking. Grahm stood next to her and took off his cap. They sat together at the kitchen table.

  “I’m going for a walk,” said Grahm.

  “Do you want some company?”

  “No.”

  “The part for the skid-steer came in.”

  “How much is it?”

  “Almost seven hundred.”

  “Do we have that much?”

  “Not until milk check. You want something to eat?”

  “No.”

  Grahm walked through the barn and into the pasture. He continued to the forty acres of old-growth forest that grew along the north boundary of his farm. Walking between the massive trunks felt like being inside a living cathedral. In the shade of the high canopy, he thought about his grandfather and grandmother, and then remembered the evening many years ago when July had stopped along the road where young Grahm was worki
ng and they had piled up dead sumac and set it on fire.

  The memory, oddly enough, seemed uninformed about July’s death. It presented its stored contents in the same manner it had presented them when July still lived. The portion of Grahm’s mind that understood July’s most recent circumstance did not communicate with the rest, and, strangely, his most recent circumstance seemed most in question, overwhelmed by the anecdotal preponderance of the more distant past.

  We never really know another person, thought Grahm. We only have memories. If we really knew them, we couldn’t bear it, so we only have memories.

  The sparks from the burning woody stalks rose into the sky, and Grahm—not yet in his teens—wondered about July, a stranger who had walked into Thistlewaite County with nothing but a canvas sack. No one knew anything about him. He and July had piled up the wood and set it on fire. When the flames calmed down, Gail walked out from the house, wondering why Grahm had not come back for supper. She was not even five years old, and she looked at July as though he had arrived from a different world. The three of them had watched the fire burn into a level bed of coals, and then he and Gail had watched July drive away.

  People never really know each other, Grahm concluded, but the memories they share hold them together enough to keep going.

  Three hours later, he knocked on the front door of his sister’s house. Gail let him in and they sat at the kitchen table.

  “Are you milking at July’s again tonight?” he asked.

  “No, I’m supposed to be at work in an hour. Wade’s going over after he leaves the cheese plant. They’re auctioning the herd in the morning. You want something to drink?”

  “Coffee?”

  “I can reheat a cup.”

  “I sold the forty acres at the back of the farm,” said Grahm. “I want you to have half of the money.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that land belonged to you too, or should have. It wasn’t fair of the folks to leave it to me.”

  “I got this house,” she reminded him.

  “Like I said, it wasn’t fair.”

  “Who bought it?”

  “Some guy named Leasthorse who works for the casino. He’s been trying to buy it for several years. Wants to build a house, I guess.”

  “I didn’t think you’d ever sell those woods, Grahm.”

  “I didn’t either, but he’s wanted it for a long time and he says there’s an Indian mound in there somewhere. Anyway, we need the money. And I thought you’d want to go to music school or something.”

  Gail put a cup of coffee on the table and Grahm set a cashier’s check next to it. She read it, and decided not to go to work.

  “He must have wanted it pretty bad.”

  “He thinks he saw a cougar somewhere near there and I guess the hallucination gave him dreams of unspoiled nature.”

  “I never thought you’d sell it, Grahm.”

  “Things change. Forget the coffee. Let’s go out somewhere and celebrate.”

  INSIDE THE CHURCH

  WINNIE HAD NEVER BEEN IN CHARGE OF A FUNERAL BEFORE. Though the majority of her congregation was old, they had, so far, remained living. To make matters even more stressful, July had not been a member of a church and many attending the service most likely would come from that same persuasion. The language of Christian piety could not be relied upon to convey either empathy or solace, which she saw as her primary responsibility. Yet the trustees and other august members of the Words Friends of Jesus Church would expect her to seize the opportunity provided by the sudden death, assail unbelievers with the absolute certainty of life’s uncertainty, and shepherd the unconverted into Christian membership with hard religious facts.

  She had further reason to worry after meeting with the mortician in Grange. At the request of July’s only known living relative, a cousin in Omaha—who apparently would not arrive in Words until the morning of the funeral—the body had been cremated.

  “Because of pervasive structural damage,” explained Bradley Worthington, looking up from his desk, “the reconstructive costs would have been very high.”

  Winnie tried to picture a funeral without a corpse and casket, without much success. Having the whole body present seemed mandatory. People needed to take leave of the chalky, habitual form. Seeing it in a box provided a fatal blow to the imagination’s revolution against death’s government. After the casket had been closed, rolled away, and buried, people could confidently conclude, “Well, that’s over,” and not have the lingering suspicion that it maybe wasn’t. Traditions worked, praise heaven, and even if particular traditional practices were perhaps absurd and even ghoulish, they had comforting, human value. Through them people could face overwhelming despair—could come together and, en masse, stare it down. Without traditions there would be no expectations; without expectations there would be no rules; without rules there would be anarchy. And anarchy was no good.

  Some older people in her congregation would have an especially hard time with the urn, she knew. For many of them, cremation was an atheist’s last subterfuge in escaping Judgment, and there would be no convincing them otherwise. They would look at the urn and their faces would wrinkle like raisins. Many of them had probably never even seen a cremation urn, unless they had seen one on television, and its compact shape would be upsetting.

  Death, Winnie knew, presented conceptual problems that many people could solve only through extreme attitudes, ritualistically enforced. The need for unity of belief was felt most keenly at these times, yet no unity existed. Dead people were imagined going to heaven, hell, and places in between. They were pictured writhing in flames, dancing among the clouds, living with relatives who had died earlier, dissolving in the belly of worms, vaporizing, and putting on other life forms. Death was also thought to provide lessons in what to do and what not to do, though the lessons varied as greatly as the course offerings of a large university. For many Christians, the death of unbelievers signaled divine condemnation, while the death of believers revealed divine approval. Superstitions and firmly held eschatological fantasies surrounded every aspect of dying, and pastors were somehow expected to find a way to accommodate all views—a job for which little understanding and no sympathy existed.

  “You may take the cremains now or leave them until Friday,” said the mortician.

  Winnie placed the aluminum receptacle upright on the passenger’s seat of her car and was more than a little upset when at the very first corner it toppled over onto the floor.

  You stupid woman.

  It didn’t matter if it fell over. It didn’t matter. It was superstitious to think it did. There was nothing inside but ashes! Everything important was gone and the urn had a screw top to assure against spillage. She hated herself for stopping the car and securing the container in an upright position with the seat belt.

  Winnie decided to keep the urn in the church rather than the parsonage, carried it inside, and temporarily set it in a pew. Orange-tinted late-afternoon sunlight fell through the tall west windows, the air unusually warm and soft. She sat beside the urn and took a Bible from the pew back, searching for passages that she could read during the funeral, but her attention was drawn again to the light on the other side of the room and the surrounding stillness. She set the book back in the pew and just looked at the colors, indulging in the sensuous solitude of the empty church.

  I’ll just lie down for minute, she thought.

  When she woke up, the afternoon light had faded and though a silence remained, its character was no longer peaceful.

  Am I going to be all right? she wondered, and thought about her father, whose death seemed the final confirmation of his disapproval of her. She sat in the pew and wondered when she should submit her resignation. Surely real people of faith never wavered in their beliefs, and never felt this inadequate.

  When the back door to the church opened and slammed shut, Winnie jumped to her feet.

  “I hoped I’d find someone here,” said a voice. A body of flo
wers advanced toward her with two arms wrapped around it. She knew the voice and in the receding light recognized the thick hands, quickly pulled her hands through her hair, and backed away as Jacob Helm set the flowers on the end of the pew. An oily fragrance exploded in the air and she retreated further.

  “Hope I’m not intruding. I thought I’d better come over. Wade and I went through July’s house and I put together some pictures to display at the funeral. They’re in the jeep. I have more flowers outside and was hoping there’d be vases here. Is that it?” he asked, pointing at the urn. “If you want, I’ll get a casket and we can put it inside with the lid shut. It might be less upsetting for the old folks. They won’t have to know he was cremated.”

  When their eyes met, Jacob rushed into the pew. “Winifred, what happened to your hair?”

  “Violet helped me fix it,” she said, backing up, her mind fastened on the sound of her name in his mouth.

  “I hardly recognized you.”

  “I guess I can do what I want with my own hair.”

  He pursued her into the end aisle and followed her around the back. They moved in short, staggered steps, Jacob advancing and Winnie backing up, as though they were dancing to an ultraslow rhythm, and came to a full stop only when they arrived back at the place where the flowers rested on the pew.

  “Of course, excuse me, it’s just, well, it’s just such a big change.”

  He came closer and she backed into the pew again.

  “I’m sure there are some vases in the basement,” she said, “and it’s cooler down there. They’ll keep better.”

  “I can’t get over your hair. It’s almost like you’re a different person.”

  “You don’t like it?”

  “Are you crazy? It’s perfect for you. It makes you look so, well, beautiful—in a more contemporary way than before. I know you don’t like to think of yourself as beautiful, but, well, with that hair I’m afraid you’ll have to get used to it.”

  Winnie conquered a quick smile that rebelled across her face by smothering it with her left hand.

  “I’m sorry about the other day,” said Jacob. “I abandoned you at the farm. I’m sorry.”