Q Road

by Bonnie Jo Campbell

  4

  ON THE MORNING OF OCTOBER 9, 1999, GEORGE WALKED down behind the oldest barn in the township, and around the little pasture adjoining the building’s lower level, to where a set of bedsprings was tied into the woven wire fence. He grabbed hold and shook the rusty metal bedsprings and found the repair stronger than the rest of the fence, the way scar tissue from a wound was usually tougher than the skin around it. The white-faced steer looked up from the hay pile on the barn’s dirt floor to see what the rattling was about. When the cattle had busted down the fence a few days ago, George wasn’t around, so Rachel, resourceful girl that she was, dragged some bedsprings over from the O Road dump and patched the fence herself. Thirty years ago, when George inherited his grandfather’s farm, it was orderly barnyards, freshly painted buildings, neat woodpiles, and taut fences. Today it was quick, cheap repairs and never mind cosmetics. Now that you could hardly buy a cup of coffee with the money you got for a bushel of corn, George knew he had to give up those old ideas about mowed lawns and perfect fences. The bedsprings were an announcement to the world that farming was no longer a sensible way of making a living, and George couldn’t help but also see them as an admission that he himself was no longer a respectable man.

  George’s father had never liked farming, which is how George inherited one of the largest tracts of land in the county at the age of twenty-two. Neither George’s father (now living in Florida) nor Johnny should have been surprised at Old Harold’s decision, since five generations of tradition held that the land should be kept whole rather than being split among heirs. Johnny had claimed he wanted to be George’s partner, but he was bone lazy, often in jail, and George had seen neither hide nor hair of him since an argument they’d had three years ago September. In the last few years, George had been entertaining a hope that his nephew Todd—actually his ex-wife’s nephew—might have an inclination toward farming. That was seeming less likely, though, especially after the broken window this morning. The long and short of George’s life in Greenland Township was that he continually repaired his aging farm equipment, that between planting and harvesting he owed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the bank, and that until two and a half years ago, he’d farmed with the mindlessness of a woolly bear crawling toward hibernation. Two and a half years ago he’d come across Rachel Crane standing in a field near the river, dangling her .22.

  A few minutes before eight o’clock, George walked up the incline to his truck, to wait for David Retakker. He noticed that April May was still sitting on her front steps across the street. For her part, April May noticed David the neighbor boy approaching on his bicycle. Her back had loosened up fine, but the pain in her foot had gotten worse. This was not the usual ache; she must have clunked against something in the barn without realizing, must have hit the exact spot where sixty-five years ago a nail had gone into the bottom of her foot and come out the top.

  Harold Harland had been some sort of cousin to April May’s mother, and when April May was a little girl, the old man often reminded her she was special for being born half in one month and half in the next. Hurting her foot so dramatically the day of the big tornado made her special too, Harold said. The day of the 1934 tornado was the same day that April May’s beloved elementary teacher Mrs. O’Kearsy failed to show up at school, and even the little girls of Greenland knew she would not be back. When the tornado began to roar outside, April May crouched under her desk as she’d been instructed, and in her cramped position she considered that Mrs. O’Kearsy might be causing the storm because the townspeople had sent her away. When part of the schoolhouse roof was torn off and a patch of green sky became visible, April May thought maybe the storm was caused by her own anger about losing her favorite person in the world. When the winds died, the man who’d been filling in as teacher finally let the students go. April May ran outside to find the schoolhouse chimney toppled, and soon she discovered that nearly every building in Greenland Center was damaged. April May did not go straight home, but ran through the streets, alongside downed power wires and mangled fences and outbuildings torn off their foundations and left slumping in the road. She spun through the chaos as though she were a tornado herself. She couldn’t bear to pick her way carefully around the debris after that monstrous coiled wind had sprung open her whole neighborhood. After hours of running, jumping, and climbing trees to look at the wreckage, April May had stepped on a nail stuck to some cabinet trim. She came onto the finishing nail at precisely the wrong angle, stepping straight down so the nail’s tip went all the way through and protruded near her middle toes. When she yanked it out from the bottom, the amount of blood astounded her. She limped home, then waited four drowsy hours with her foot elevated before the doctor arrived to give her the injection. She fell asleep the moment the needle pricked her skin, and didn’t rouse until the following morning.

  This gray morning sixty-five years later, the pain in her foot seemed as fresh as the day of the tornado, and April May thought maybe she was being woken up once and for all. Just then David Retakker reached the driveway leading to the barn, and April May watched him stop and hide himself and his bike behind a clutch of bright red sumac.

  David peered through the branches and tried to catch his breath before approaching the barn. George seemed eight feet tall to him, and though George did not wear cowboy boots—he wore tan steel-toed work boots—David thought he looked the way a cowboy ought to look, tall and straight as a fence post. George did not wear a cowboy hat, but he rested so easily against his truck that he reminded David of the Marlboro man on the poster his dad had hung in the hallway before he left. David had changed bedrooms recently so he could sleep in what had been George’s room growing up.

  David’s dad, Mike, used to work for George, before he moved to Indiana four months ago to live with a woman who had three other kids. The one time David had visited his dad down there, neither of them had known what to do. Mike took him out to a breakfast of pancakes and eggs and bacon, and they stayed there at the restaurant a long time, Mike leaning back into the corner of the booth, sucking at one cigarette after another and blowing out smoke. Mike asked David: How was sixth grade? Was it any different than fifth? and David shrugged and stifled a cough. David waited until after they’d finished eating, then used his breather in the bathroom; otherwise Mike would have said, “You still having to use that old puffer?” or, worse, “I guess I shouldn’t be smoking around you.”

  David glanced across the road at April May’s house and noticed she was sitting on her steps watching him. He straightened his shoulders and tried to pretend he hadn’t been hiding. When she waved, he waved back, then threw his leg over his bike and rode up the driveway toward George.

  “Eight o’clock on the dot. Right on time,” George said, without any reference to watch or clock. “You’re the most on-time kid I know.”

  David was so happy at George’s compliment that any words he might have used to express himself would have embarrassed him. David was grateful it was Saturday and he didn’t have to be at school, glad the leaves on the maples at either end of the barn were blazing orange, and ecstatic that he would be helping George. He didn’t mind that the sky was dreary this morning, or that he was still out of breath. Or that he hadn’t eaten a meal since his free school lunch the day before. The lunch had been chili, a stick of cheese, a square of corn bread with butter and a pear half in syrup.

  “As soon as you catch your breath, you climb up top,” George said. “I’ll throw the bales to you.”

  David nodded yes again and again until he reminded himself to stop. He tried not to smile too much, but when George jostled his shoulder with a callused hand, David almost lost his balance with smiling.

  George looked away from David, figuring it was best to let the kid collect himself. George wasn’t accustomed to this sort of wholesale admiration. Rachel didn’t admire him that way, which was fine with him. Yesterday, Rachel had come into the house and stood by the back door with her arms crossed, watching him
. Watching him was something she had started doing in just the last few weeks. Her gaze was so intense that it seemed to George wise to avoid meeting it too often. George had been paying bills, and he’d muttered something about David’s mother, Sally. Until four months ago, the free rent on George’s other house was part of Mike’s pay as the hired man, but when Mike went away, he left Sally and David here to be George’s responsibility, the way people from the city of Kalamazoo drove out to the country and tossed their unwanted kittens and puppies out of the car near a barn, hoping someone else would take care of them. Since George wasn’t getting a farmhand, he ought to be getting rent for that house. George felt softhearted about David, but he also saw that living out here with his ma wasn’t doing the boy any good. Maybe if they were in town, Sally’d get a job and get some structure in her life, and maybe then she’d take better care of her son.

  “Do you want me to kick the sorry bitch out?” Rachel had said.

  “No.” George’s heart jumped at realizing Rachel might just go over there and tell Sally to leave. “Not yet.” He wanted her gone, but if something bad happened to David as a result of sending them away, George might end up bound to Sally by regret, and he wasn’t ready to take that chance. Anyway, George had listened to his grandfather’s stories long enough that he couldn’t feel right about passing judgment on Sally. Morality, Old Harold said, was a more complicated business than it might seem on the surface, and sending people away was about the worst thing you could do.

  Inside the barn, David scrambled to the top of the wagonload of straw by grabbing hold of the ends of bales. He stood unsteadily atop the wagon, and when he was sure George was watching, he jumped over the five-foot gulf between the loaded wagon and rest of the stacked bales, where he landed on his knees and hands. David crawled to the edge and looked down, terrified and grinning, his chest heaving. David, you scare me, George thought. George climbed the hay wagon slowly and expertly, but he remembered how it was to be a boy, to feel the need to take chances.

  “Are you ready?” George said.

  “Ready.”

  George threw the first bale from the wagon past David, right into place so David had only to push it an inch or so with his knees. Immediately upon asking David to help him yesterday, George had remembered David’s breathing trouble, but the boy had seemed so happy to be asked that George couldn’t take the invitation back. George would do as much of the work as possible himself.

  “Ready again?” George threw the next bale.

  David pushed it into place and stepped aside to await another, and another.

  “Okay, that was four,” George said. “Will you help me out by counting the bales as you stack?”

  David nodded.

  “That would be a big help. Here’s five.”

  “Five,” David said.

  “The beans will be ready to harvest on Friday,” George said. “That means I’ve got a lot of work to do before then.”

  “I can help.”

  “I think I’ve got that knotter fixed, but the power take-off clutch on the Case needs some work before I can bale the rest of the straw.”

  “I can drive the tractor anytime you want me to.”

  “This afternoon I’ll fill the oat bin, put the rest of the oats into the silo outside the stock barn.” George was thinking aloud. There was too much to do, but that was always how it was, and George figured that a person could only work all day long, and he couldn’t work any more than that. Starting next Friday, and continuing through the next two months, every day from six in the morning until midnight, George would be in the field taking in soybeans and then corn. He’d drive the combine, but he needed somebody to haul the wagons south to the elevator in Climax Township as fast as he filled them. Nobody’d answered the ad he’d posted at the grocery, and he didn’t know how he’d pay a person anyway—maybe with a couple of his cows. Rachel hadn’t offered to help, and even if she wanted to help, she didn’t have a driver’s license.

  As he took bale number nine from George, David said, “Would you ever want to go to Southern California?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” George said. “It’s hard to take time off to travel.”

  “I mean to live.” David’s mother had said that David absolutely couldn’t tell George or Rachel she was intending to move them to California, where David’s half brother, Jim, and his wife lived. David barely knew Jim, who was eighteen years older and had a different dad.

  “Must be a nice place.” George threw bale number ten. “An awful lot of people leave here for there.”

  “Are there farms in California?”

  “Oh, I think they grow a lot of grapes. Lots of fruits and vegetables. Avocados.”

  “I mean regular farms like yours.” David adjusted the tenth bale.

  “There’s not enough fresh water. Maybe in parts of Northern California.”

  “Well, I don’t ever want to live out there,” David said. He didn’t know if there were woolly bears or eighty-foot-tall walnut trees or anything else nice in California. He didn’t know how much another place on the planet could differ from this place, and he wished he wasn’t going to have to find out. David knew his mother would make them leave without warning. One day, maybe even today, she’d say the word, and they would pack a few bags and head west.

  George wasn’t considering anything as exotic as travel plans. As he picked up the eleventh bale by the strings and tossed it into place, he worried mostly about getting the grain to Climax. For more than a decade, George had felt he was working under the shadow of a monster perched on the western horizon, a monster that was not a creature but a point in time, a day somewhere in the future, when he would have to sell off pieces of his land to pay taxes or else lose it in one fell swoop, and he knew that all his hard work served only to push that day a little further off. As Milton Taylor always said, the farmers would soon be gone from this river valley the way the Indians were already gone. When George’s ancestors arrived in this spot, there had apparently lived what the settlers called the Horseshoe Clan of the Potawatomi, a group who erected their wigwams around a central fire in a three-quarters circle precisely on the site of this barn. Old Harold said the barn’s construction had buried any evidence of a three-quarters circle, or a fire pit, or a civilization, but George figured that plenty of relics were buried around here, if only a person had the time and inclination to dig.

  Old Harold had become a kind of neighborhood authority on the Potawatomi, and he used to speak with regret about sending those Indians away, as though he himself had witnessed the 1840 exodus. Though the event occurred a half century before the old man was even born, he seemed to feel he had something to do with forcing those folks out of this paradise into a hostile land across the Mississippi. Harold said that so many Indians died along the way that the westbound trail itself became a graveyard nine hundred miles long. As Harold got older and maybe even a little senile, he told two stories over and over again: the Potawatomi being sent away by the U.S. government, and the widowed schoolteacher Mary O’Kearsy being sent away—fired and evicted—for loving one of Harold’s hired men, name of Enkstra. The story of the tornado that destroyed the house and rerouted the creek became part of the schoolteacher story. Harold said he was responsible for the eviction of Mary O’Kearsy, and the tornado’s veering up north onto his property had been a kind of punishment for his self-righteousness, he said, a kick in the rear.

  George figured that in the old days, when farming made sense, a farm could survive the kind of devastation wrought by tornadoes and floods and complicated heartaches, but now farming was a precarious business, and even a small disaster could take George’s whole enterprise, his whole life, down with it.

  “Ready?” George said, grasping the strings on bale number twelve.

  David said, “Ready.”

  5

  ACROSS THE STREET FROM RACHEL’S FARM STAND, STEVE Hoekstra sat at his kitchen table, paging through a windows industry magazine and listening to h
is wife, Nicole, shower. Nine o’clock was about the earliest a man dared knock on a stranger’s door, and Steve liked to start his day, even a Saturday, by reminding himself of prices, mechanical information, and heat loss statistics, and about new products in which he might be able to interest folks. He sometimes offered gutter systems, hot water heaters, even lawn furniture, but those items generally turned out to be ways of making conversation. No matter what came on the market at what price, he mostly sold vinyl siding, vinyl replacement windows, storm doors, and the occasional hollow-core insulated metal door. He loved being able to make houses look better and be more energy efficient, and he was glad to be doing so in his own neighborhood. People loved their houses at least as much as they loved their spouses, which seemed natural to Steve—after all, you didn’t get to remodel the person you married.

  As George and David stacked the first dozen bales to the south, Steve listened to warm water rain upon his wife and thought of her trim, pretty body enveloped in steam. He could just walk into that bathroom and touch her, but he liked the thought of her alone, touching herself, washing herself unmolested. This house was really more hers than his, and it didn’t surprise Steve, for women usually occupied houses more substantially than men; that was why women were more inclined to want vinyl replacement windows and storm doors. When he heard the shower water shut off, Steve collected his materials and slipped out. Before getting into his car he looked around for Rachel, but she’d disappeared. As George threw the fifteenth bale to David in the barn to the south, Steve backed out of his driveway. He paused in the road to search for Rachel once more, and when he didn’t see her, he headed north.

  Steve’s company had a high turnover rate for salesmen, because most people didn’t like the business of traveling door-to-door. Steve himself liked nothing better than stepping out of a cool October morning into a woman’s house, inside of which warmth emanated from furniture and kitchen cabinets. He loved his own perfectly proportioned wife—who must be toweling herself off about now—but he didn’t think he could live without also going into other women’s houses. Not that he had sex with those women, for that happened rarely, only once in the year and a half since he’d been married. His lone infidelity had occurred a month ago, and he’d felt bad about it. Really he liked just being near different women, smelling their perfume and lotion mixed with the scent of potpourri or plug-in deodorizers and Crock-Pot cooking, even the adhesive smell of new construction or a crafts project. Most of the longtime women residents of Greenland Township worked odd hours, on their farms or gardens, or at the greenhouses in season, or part-time as school lunch ladies, so you didn’t know when you’d catch them at home, but Saturday morning was a good bet. The population of Greenland was growing, especially in the new housing developments, but those new people didn’t need windows or siding.