Q Road

by Bonnie Jo Campbell

  By the time Rachel came along, Margo was already well established in Greenland as a local crank and hermit about whom the neighbors knew little, apart from what she had made clear to them, that she preferred to be left alone on the homemade houseboat. The farmers were grateful to her for taking out the woodchucks, raccoons, and deer that otherwise ate their crops, and so they didn’t bother her with inquiries. Margo knew herself well enough to seek isolation, and she certainly had not meant to have a child, but during those several passionate days with the stranger who showed up on the riverbank, her mind hadn’t focused on consequences, nor on anything else about the man, such as his name or where he lived. Nine months later, Margo’s hands were covered with her own blood as she disentangled herself from her baby. Throughout the all-night ordeal, Margo had thought that one of them might not survive, but Margo herself had no intention of dying, and the child was an angry red thing who was not giving up either.

  After a few days, Margo had bundled the baby and walked to Greenland Center, then took a taxi to Bronson Methodist Hospital in Kalamazoo to get a birth certificate, Social Security number, inoculations, and the other indignities society forced on human beings. A person would be mistaken to assume that Margo was unable to navigate the society she rejected. She kept her boat registered, paid for a post office box in Greenland, and regularly updated her comprehensive lifetime license for trapping. She knew that if she avoided the formalities involving the baby, there would be inspections and probation periods and yammering social workers. Margo arrived at the hospital dressed in clean, dark clothes, her reddish hair gathered elegantly at the back of her neck. Margo charmed those nurses with a story about being stranded without car or telephone, and gave as her address 2271 Q Road, the address of the big Harland barn, where she got her fresh water from a hand pump. When a nurse seemed wary, Margo noted her name tag. “I’m calling the baby Rachel,” Margo said. The nurse Rachel softened.

  Though Margo hadn’t wanted a child, she never considered giving her daughter up for adoption. She was determined to give nothing to society, and that included the flesh of her flesh.

  Mother and daughter lived together on the Glutton in relative if unconventional peace until Rachel was fourteen. That was when Johnny Harland, younger brother of George and just out of prison, started coming around. Upon his return, Johnny found himself unable to comprehend the bizarre fact that George, after his divorce, had deeded a triangle of land between the creek, the river, and the Taylor farm to eccentric Margo Crane, while refusing to give him any. This was the first Rachel had heard about any land being owned by her mother, who had always said she didn’t care about owning anything; she lived on the river, she’d said, precisely because no man could own the river. Margo scoffed at Johnny’s complaints, but he kept showing up, alternately flirting and demanding the deed, behaving just as Margo said the worst of men behaved. Rachel thought Johnny was fascinating, with his lazy gait and the way he smiled and winked at her while arguing with her mother. Margo’s threats would have struck fear into most men, but Johnny didn’t even flinch the time Margo leveled her rifle at him. Margo was so upset at his lack of response that hours later, when their mild-mannered neighbor Milton Taylor walked by on the path, she pointed the gun at him and said she’d shoot him if he came near the boat again.

  When Johnny left empty whiskey bottles on the riverbank, Rachel couldn’t resist opening them and sniffing the liquor, which she thought smelled rich the way aged meat and aged manure smelled rich. One September evening, not more than a week after the Milton incident, her mother looked up from skinning a skunk on the picnic table and saw Rachel on the riverbank, tipping a bottle to her mouth. A skunk hide could be worth up to twenty bucks, because few people could skin one the way Margo could, without busting open the scent gland.

  Margo stopped cutting and yelled over, “Put that bottle down!”

  Rachel drained the last bit of whiskey before dropping the bottle at her feet.

  “Are you sure you’re a daughter of mine?” Margo said.

  “Maybe I’m a daughter of my father,” Rachel said, returning to a common theme in their recent arguments, but in a voice more rebellious than she’d used before. “Maybe you should tell me who he is.”

  “All right. Maybe you deserve to know.” Margo made a quick turn with her knife, and the air became poisonous with skunk musk. “Are you listening?”

  “You did that on purpose!” Rachel held her nose, but the scent came in through her mouth and eyes.

  “Your father wasn’t hardly even a man to me,” Margo said. “Your father was more like a ghost. He came drifting in here talking about the land of his ancestors. That’s all men ever think about is property, whether it’s a woman they want or a truck or some land. At first, I told him stay away, but then I became as stupid as any woman ever was.”

  The combination of the stink and her mother’s words made Rachel feel faint, shell-shocked. She squeaked, “But why did he come here?”

  “He came to see where his ancestors lived, and he spent four days here on the river, and I started thinking he was better than other men, but I was wrong.” Margo resumed skinning as though there were no blinding stench.

  Rachel gave up holding her nose. She tried to speak but couldn’t.

  “He told me he’d found a Potawatomi grave,” Margo finally continued. “He said it was the grave of a girl from his tribe, a girl who grew corn. She died not long before the Indians were sent away. So he said.”

  “Are you saying my father was an Indian?” Rachel wished the moon would pass in front of the sun or the river would dry up or something else huge would happen.

  “It’s obvious to anybody but a damned fool that your father was an Indian—just look at you.”

  Rachel wiped at her eyes. “Why did he care about a girl who grew corn?”

  “That’s the kind of crap the man spouted,” Margo said. “He told me this girl didn’t want to get married, so she threw herself out of a tree and the river washed her ashore. He said the girl was the sister of an ancestor of his.”

  “And she killed herself?”

  “Who knows? The man was drunk half the time I knew him. He dropped his empty whiskey bottle the same way you just did and he claimed he could feel the body of that girl beneath the soil. As if a man could feel anything,” Margo said. “If men could feel anything at all, they wouldn’t all want to own women.”

  “Not all men want to own women. What about Milton?” Rachel’s thoughts were all scrambled, but she wanted to argue somehow against her mother. “Why did you have to go and threaten Milton?”

  “You watch out for Milton,” Margo said.

  “He gives me clothes from the church box,” Rachel said, “and plants, and he doesn’t want anything.”

  “That kind of man doesn’t want a woman for himself. But you watch out—he’ll hand every woman he can get over to Jesus. Milton’s a damned pimp for Jesus.”

  “Where did he go when he left? My father.”

  “He had a train ticket back to his wife, to I-don’t-know-where.”

  “He was married?”

  “I didn’t care then.” Margo clutched the knife more tightly. “And I don’t care now.”

  “Where was the grave of the girl?”

  Margo didn’t look up.

  “What was my father’s name, at least?” Rachel looked at her mother’s face and imagined she could see through her skin to the blood flowing beneath.

  Margo spat out, “I thought I could raise a girl to be something on her own, but you act no better than a creature clawing its way up the riverbank to get caught in somebody’s trap. And now you can’t live without a damned father.” The birds had stopped chirping, either because of Margo’s anger or the stench. The bloody knife was pointed toward Rachel.

  Rachel turned and ran barefoot away from her mother, up the creekside path, gulping fresh air. Before reaching the road she splashed through the creek, then slipped into the lower part of George Harland’s
barn where it was cool and smelled of dusty mold, a comforting dry land scent. She sat alone for a long time, until the sun was setting. She knew from experience that the foulness of skunk would remain at the boat for days. The knowledge of her father felt like some kind of wound inflicted on her. How could words, the simple truth, cut through you like the bitterest cold or the fastest river current?

  As long as Rachel had known the big Harland barn, it had been empty of animals, except the occasional stray cat, but on this evening she found six dark hens. The barn’s lower level seemed to Rachel a dumb place to put chickens, since they could likely escape under the rotted bottom edge of the siding, or else raccoons or foxes could squeeze in and grab them. Rachel sat up on the higher wooden rail of the central stall and watched the chickens cluck, fuss, and settle in the fading light. She had often climbed through the trapdoor and slept in the barn’s upper level in order to get away from her mother’s snoring and to escape the slapping, slurping river sounds. She figured the Kalamazoo River was nothing more than a swirling, muddy, factory-poisoned starting place. To make any sense of the world, a person had to first drag herself up onto dry land. And furthermore, Rachel told herself this evening, her mother was crazy.

  Rachel heard lazy footsteps approaching the barn, and she knew it was Johnny. Normally Rachel would have hidden, but she thought listening to Johnny might make her laugh, might make her feel less raw. With each approaching footstep, though, she imagined some new ravaged thing: the burned smell of river fog, the carcass of venison now hanging on the Glutton, trap jaws snapping shut in the distance, an Indian girl’s body washed up along the river. If Rachel’d had her mother’s rifle, she might have aimed it at the door of the barn just to see how Johnny would respond to finding himself in her sights. A few paces away from the barn, the footsteps stopped, and Rachel heard the sound of piss on dirt for what had to be minutes. She envisioned the stream of urine flowing toward the creek, which then flowed down into the river beside the Glutton. The door opened and Johnny dropped a burning cigarette in the threshold and crushed it with his shoe, and did not even bother to close the door behind him, despite the chickens being able to get out. When he noticed there was somebody sitting on the fence rail, he stopped and squinted into the dimness, and then grinned when he apparently recognized the somebody as Rachel. He kicked a rust-colored chicken out of his way, and amidst squawks, he walked around the pen and came up behind Rachel. He slid both arms around her.

  Rachel stiffened against his arms, intending to pull away and jump down, but the sensation of another human body holding her was rich. Her mother hadn’t ever done that, and the boys at school had grabbed other girls, not her. Nobody had told Rachel that an embrace was going to feel as nice as resting in cool woods on a hot day. Rachel had watched those other girls at school twist away from boys, and now she understood that their protests were false at each turn. Johnny’s arms encircled her with such certainty that it seemed having another person hold your body was the most natural thing in the world.

  “What’re you doing out here in my barn, girl?” he whispered. His breath was smoky and alcoholic. Usually after Rachel picked up his bottles near the riverbank and smelled the whiskey, she tightened the caps and tossed them into the water to watch them float downstream; she sometimes thought about putting messages in them, but there wasn’t anything she wanted to say. Johnny, up close like this, had another smell too, the sharp musk scent of a trapped animal. She imagined her mother down by the boat, gutting some new dead thing as the sun set, gutting and gutting and gutting.

  “Were you waiting for me?” Johnny said into her neck. “Is that why you’re in my barn? Or were you going to steal my new chickens?” Rachel reached out and held the wooden rail on either side, in case Johnny suddenly let go of her.

  “This isn’t your barn,” she said. “It’s your brother’s.”

  “So the little creature can talk, after all,” he said. “But I guess your ma wouldn’t never have taught you to be nice to a man.” Johnny pressed his bristly cheek against her shoulder, and the whiskers poked through her flannel shirt. Johnny said, “This barn and everything else will be mine sooner or later when George gives himself a heart attack from working so much. For now I just want that piece of land my brother give your ma.”

  “That land is ours.” Rachel had meant her words to be hostile toward Johnny, but instead, her voice came out soft, and even the word ours seemed to forge a connection between her and Johnny.

  “I can’t figure why my brother would give your ma that land. If you looked a little more like George I’d know why, but you sure as heck aren’t his.”

  His comments swam through her undigested, and Rachel felt herself being swept into a quicksand of bodies embracing and words that didn’t matter. Rachel wished Johnny would cover her whole back with himself, and her front too, and yet she was scared and even felt a little sick. She didn’t want Johnny to leave or let go of her, but she wanted time to slow way down so each second was large enough to move around in, while she figured out what was happening. This was not cows jumping onto each other’s backs with their sharp hooves at the Taylor farm, and it was not tomcats yowling outside April May’s house while her girl cats purred on the windowsills. And yet it was like those events, and like carp leaping on each other in the overflow marsh on the other side of O Road. Rachel stretched her bare toe toward the ground, but found herself too high up to touch.

  “There’s something about your face,” Johnny said, “that could drive a man crazy.” He moved his whiskered cheek to her other shoulder and kissed her neck.

  Rachel said nothing, only breathed deeply in her attempt to slow time and to fight this new sort of nausea. Her body seemed to be growing softer, the pores of her skin seemed to be opening, and the sharp smell of animal was now coming partly from her.

  “I’m guessing you haven’t been spoiled by other men yet. I’m guessing I could still teach you something.”

  “Go to hell,” Rachel whispered. She liked the feel of saying “hell.” She also liked the sensation of her own long hair brushing her neck and shoulders. Rachel knew her mother would be so mad, madder than ever before, if she knew what was happening.

  “Do you know this is the oldest barn in Greenland?” Johnny whispered and slid his warm hands beneath her flannel shirt.

  Rachel felt she might vomit, but her skin rose in bumps to meet his hands.

  “My great-great-grandfather built this barn,” Johnny said, “chopped down his own trees to make the lumber. Where the guy got the energy for that shit, I don’t know. I guess he stayed sober like George, the damn dull, penny-pinching son of a bitch. Me, now, I can relax and be generous.”

  Rachel was thinking of saying “What do you got to be generous with?” but she was no longer sure what Johnny did or didn’t have. She was considering that a person’s body was something to know the way a stretch of woods or a sandy place was something to know.

  When Johnny slid his arms out from around her, she felt bare. He stepped through and around the rail, and Rachel grabbed his arm to pull him toward her on the other side. Johnny laughed and unbuttoned Rachel’s shirt. He unwrapped her shoulders to reveal the hint of breasts. She didn’t help him undress her, but neither did she resist. Johnny rubbed his whiskers against her flat chest, and when he kissed her mouth, Rachel did not kiss him in return, did not even know how, but just kept concentrating on slowing time, on lengthening all those seconds in which she might become accustomed to his smell. He yanked off his cowboy boots, tossed one, then the other, into the straw. A chicken squawked and flew up.

  “Maybe I should wait for you to get a little older.” Johnny dragged his pants off. “But I’m the sort of guy who might not be around here long.”

  Rachel gasped as he laid his warm body on hers on the barn floor, gasped not because the man was too heavy but because he was moving too fast. She had the sense that weight and speed were somehow the same thing, that even a small woman could lie with a giant, just
so long as he moved slowly. Despite his experience with dozens of young girls, Johnny didn’t understand the way a girl needed the adventure to progress more slowly. For Johnny, such girls were like the illegal swimming holes he used to sneak into as a teenager—even as he was undressing and diving in, his mind was set on getting away without being caught.

  Johnny was not as muscular as Rachel, and when she felt his ribs slice against her chest she placed her hands on his sides to protect herself. Rachel never closed her eyes and neither did Johnny. He stared into her face, while the brief stab of pain she felt inside dissolved into a kind of easy weightlessness. Johnny’s hair fell forward, his face relaxed, and some drool on his lip gave the impression of melting. When Rachel screamed “No!” she was not expressing pain, and she was not afraid of what was happening to his face, nor was she alarmed at the cool sensation of a blob of chicken shit that had soaked through the straw beneath her. She screamed because the footsteps approaching were those of her mother, now standing in the doorway with the .22. There would be hell to pay, Rachel knew. As Johnny moaned, “Oh God, girl,” the air exploded. Feathers flew up, and Johnny’s body slammed hard onto hers as though another man had jumped onto his back.

  “You animal!” Margo yelled.

  Rachel tried to pull away, but her mother fired three more times and Rachel felt a bullet drive her shoulder into the barn floor. Her lungs emptied beneath Johnny’s weight, and she had to fight for the strength to push him off her. Johnny’s body was lifeless, and a chicken lay dead beside him. Rachel smelled skunk and looked up at her mother, then back at Johnny and the dead chicken. She couldn’t grab hold of what had just happened. She could only wonder what the hell that chicken had been doing so close.