Q Road

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Q Road Page 11

by Bonnie Jo Campbell


  “Do you want a ride home?”

  David shook his head no.

  “I can put your bike in the truck.”

  David shook his head again.

  “You’ll be okay on your bike, then?”

  David nodded.

  “Pull the big door closed when you go, will you?”

  It was clear to George that David wanted to be left alone, and George believed in giving people their own time, kids included.

  David watched George leave the barn and listened to his feet on the gravel outside. Concentrating on George, imagining George getting into his truck and turning the key and gripping the steering wheel, helped David regain control of his breathing, and within a few minutes he was able to climb down. He had done it, had kept going through the whole wagonload of straw without resting, and without anything terrible happening.

  He walked across the loose straw on the barn floor and went outside to retrieve his bicycle, which he leaned against the barn doorway. He sat beside the bike and closed his mouth over his white plastic breather, inhaled, and counted slowly to ten. The doctor had said he should avoid dust, but David had a different plan. Just as he was developing calluses on his hands, he wanted to build calluses inside his lungs. He imagined his lungs looking like his wrists and lower arms—red and torn, but getting tougher.

  David saw Gray Cat pad around inside the barn, then exit through a place at the bottom edge of the wall where the wood had rotted away. A few months before, in this same barn, David had seen George’s nephew Todd whip an orange kitten around on the end of a clothesline. There had been a soft pop, like the air escaping from a can of cola, as though life were a gas when it left the body. Todd hadn’t seemed to care any more about the orangie than he would have at busting up a pumpkin, and afterward he’d tossed the kitten, rope and all, out into the ditch alongside the road. David hadn’t been able to look at cats the same way since. Nowadays a cat just seemed like a fur-covered collection of body parts from which life could be yanked.

  David inhaled his medicine again and held his breath, this time for fifteen seconds. The plain haze of a day like this felt like all the days of a person’s life mashed together, but he didn’t know what his whole life could add up to if he had to leave everything good behind and go to California. Beyond the door of the barn and the foundation of the old house, the cornstalks stood perfectly still, waiting. If David lived with George, he’d have gotten in the truck and gone home to breakfast as usual, and on the way they would have talked about harvesting plans. If they lived together, George would think of David’s breathing as a regular part of David. If he lived with George, he’d get up early every morning and feed the animals. David would go to school if George insisted, but he would make it clear he’d rather stay home and help with farm work. David could use shovels and axes in the daytime, and he wouldn’t have to worry about putting them away in the exact positions he’d found them in. He wondered whether, if George had a son, he would let him get a dog.

  14

  AS GEORGE TURNED NORTH ON QUEER ROAD, GRAY CAT noted the fluttering of a goldfinch near the barnyard fence. The goldfinch was pulling at a thistle, and the last of the thistle seed spilled in a pile onto the ground. Wary of predators, the goldfinch knew not to stand on the ground for more than a second, so it landed and alighted, landed and alighted, grabbed several seeds at each visit, perched again on the thistle stalk or the bedsprings or the woven wire fence, then went back to the ground. Though it was wary, this goldfinch was ignorant of the approach of Gray Cat, who’d been dropped here nearly a year ago, along with the rest of an unwanted litter. The rest of the kittens—the other gray, the calico, and the two orangies—were dead. Two had been smashed under the tires of cars within a week and had their bodies pecked apart by crows. A third was killed and eaten by a raccoon, and the fourth was done in by George’s nephew.

  The surviving gray kitten, however, who had avoided people from the start, had sped away from the boys who’d grabbed his orange littermate. But Gray Cat had not avoided this barn, which provided mice and shelter, nor had he avoided April May Rathburn’s place across the street, where he found that he could steal chunks of dry dog food from a dish in the side yard while the shepherd slept stupidly inside the doghouse to which he was lashed every afternoon. Just once, Gray Cat had eaten cream he’d stolen from a bowl set outside, before April May chased him away. From the other side of the road, he’d watched for a chance to take more, but then one of the woman’s cats showed up, licked the cream, and was taken inside. It had been a trap, Gray Cat realized, and he felt clever for having avoided it.

  Gray Cat was not considering humans now, for his eyes were set upon a yellow body that flickered down to the ground, then up into the air, and back down, not as bright a creature as earlier in the season, but summer-fattened and no less tasty for being mottled with greenish brown. Gray Cat hugged the ground and approached the bird and thistle so slowly and smoothly that he might have been a serpent slithering or a liquid pouring itself in the direction of the bird. And when he was close enough, he reached out with a paw that stretched farther from his body than any bystander would have expected and pulled the bird to earth. The move was tornado quick but so smooth it could have been a light breeze. The curled claws pulled the bird down with a strength that was greater than seemed possible for a creature that had moments ago licked its paw and neatly brushed its head. When the bird tried to stand, the cat reached out and slammed the feathered body down again.

  The bird did not peep or scream but flapped its wings and lifted itself, only to have the cruel paw thrust onto it a third time. Black finch eyes turned toward the sky, toward flight, in the direction the bird meant to travel—up, up—but when it began to lift itself, Gray Cat swatted it to the ground again with a force that broke one of the bird’s legs. But legs were nothing compared to wings, and the bird jumped into the air on one leg, never mind the other. Before the bird could launch itself, though, Gray Cat struck hard enough to break the bird’s wing. Still, the goldfinch fluttered its one good wing upward, calling to the air where it had lived, to the hazy sky, which tomorrow might be clear. “Sky, pull me up,” the bird cried with its almost weightless body, but could only flap its unbroken wing, swishing to no effect. Gray Cat held the bird down, occasionally letting loose in order to circle, stretching out a paw again when the bird began to shift. Eventually the bird did not move, but only stared up at the sky, then into the gray eyes of Gray Cat, then again at the sky, yearning, alighting in its mind the way it had alighted ten thousand times from the ground or from a thistle or fence or from a feeder built to resemble a barn. Never before had the bird known that to desire flight was not the same as to spread wings and rise. The cat sent his claws through feathers, into nerves. The bird’s yearning thinned, along with its breath, thinned to something like a whisper of smoke, and the bird was extinguished.

  15

  HAD THERE BEEN A WAY TO DRIVE WITHOUT RUNNING OVER woolly bears on his way home from the barn on the morning of October 9, George Harland would have done it, but killing some of them was inevitable. He kept his eyes focused farther along Queer Road, so at least he didn’t have to see any particular caterpillar before crushing it beneath the worn tires of his four-wheel-drive pickup. He turned in to his driveway but didn’t see Rachel. He also didn’t see the State of Michigan sign that was usually displayed on two posts in front of his house; George thought probably Rachel had taken it again, to help support her produce table. Somewhere beneath her turban squashes and the bushel of apples would be the green sign, engraved with the message

  Michigan Centennial Farm

  Owned By The Same Family Over One Hundred Years.

  The state historical commission had presented the sign to George because his family had arrived here before Michigan was even a state, purchased their acreage at the land office in Kalamazoo, and built this house. Like other settlers from the civilized east, George’s ancestors had quickly learned that property rights were
different out here. The Indians felt free to hunt most anywhere, whether a person owned the land or not, and the settlers followed suit. In the beginning, even the relatively well off suffered from periodic scarcity, so folks adopted communal habits and shared with their neighbors: their kettles and churns, their shovels and plows, even their mules. Folks borrowed with humility and loaned with the hope that their tools would be returned in the same condition in which they were borrowed. These folks may not have considered the Potawatomi their brethren, but neither did they deny them sustenance from their modest stores. “Bukutah” or “Bke de” was a Potawatomi man’s way of saying “I’m hungry,” and a fellow might make such an announcement before coming into a house. When food was scarce, that utterance filled the woman of the house with dread, but she would then remind herself that it was always an Indian who returned her milk cow when it got loose and wandered into the woods, and it had largely been the strength of Potawatomi arms that had raised the first barns in the township.

  Harold Harland was not born into ownership of the farm, but came to it by marrying Henrietta, the only surviving child of an otherwise prosperous farmer. Harold learned the history of the place by listening to his father-in-law and the other old men in the neighborhood. In the next generation, Harold’s own son had no interest, so by the time his grandson George was old enough to listen, Harold was nearly desperate to teach the boy all about farming and to tell him what he had learned about the 1830s, when the white settlers first arrived in Greenland. There hadn’t been more than a few dozen poor farmers around when Henrietta’s great-grandfather started building this house, and Harold said those farmers had disapproved of the man’s constructing a little window room up above the southern roof to provide a view south, east, and west. Those neighbors scoffed at the frivolity of the room the way the Potawatomi scoffed at all wooden structures built upon stone foundations, when surely wigwams should have sufficed.

  After the Potawatomi were marched away west, and as wealth increased in the region, people gradually stopped depending upon the churns, tools, and mules of others and were expected to take care of their own needs and build their own fences strong enough to contain their cows. Within a single generation of white settlement, the Indians were gone, and the farmers stopped caring about such things as whether or not a neighbor wasted his time building a window room. Within a generation, a white man’s stupidity had become his own and was no longer an attribute of the community.

  George was ten or eleven when his grandpa started telling him such things, and one summer afternoon Harold proposed the two of them install new glass in the old window room, long boarded up. At the prospect of such a waste of time, George’s grandmother Henrietta mumbled a complaint about what sort of fool she’d married. George himself would never have questioned his grandfather’s wisdom about the window room or any other thing.

  From the second floor landing, George had followed Old Harold up the wall ladder into a six-by-six-foot room and sat beside him on the built-in wooden bench. The first thing his grandfather did was remove a small yellowed photograph from under the edge of the window frame. Harold looked at it a long time before handing it to his grandson. The photo of the young widow at first frightened George, because in her faded form she seemed as much ghost as human. George was squinting to study the photo when Old Harold wrenched loose that first piece of plywood. The light hit the photo so suddenly that the woman seemed to burst into flame. Through the empty window frame, its edges rimmed with glass shards, Harold pointed out the river, and the path alongside, on which, he said, a line of thousands of Potawatomi had walked toward Kalamazoo in 1840. He pointed out the big barn with no house, silo, or shed beside it, and said that right after Mary O’Kearsy was sent away by the school board, the sky had turned green and a twister had spun up across the Taylors’ grazing land to Harold’s own land, knocking down trees and even rerouting his creek. The tornado tossed dirt into the air with a force that would embed pea-sized stones deep in a fellow’s flesh as it did to Enkstra, the man with whom the schoolteacher had the affair. That tornado pushed one way and then another, Harold said, digging trenches across newly planted fields, moving rocks the size of rabbits effortlessly, killing with such a rock a curly-tailed yellow dog with a lame hind leg who’d stood on the ridge barking at the wind as though it were an animal intruder.

  As the tornado roared toward the barn, vertical siding boards he had nailed down just the previous day sprang loose. Harold himself lay nearby, facedown in the narrow ditch beside Queer Road with his hands covering his head and his face in poison ivy. Hail peppered his body, growing from the size of corn kernels or blood-engorged ticks to reach the size of husked walnuts. When he looked up from the ditch, he saw a railroad tie pierce the silo, saw the wind blast the tower to bits, flinging glazed blocks out into the field as though they were as light as straw. The tornado seemed about to pass through the barn siding the way the tines of a pitchfork passed through sand, seemed poised to transform the barn to swirling rubble, but then it turned away from the barn and moved toward the unoccupied house and instantly and thoroughly demolished it. The front door ripped itself free and the oval of glass never broke while the door was in the air. The door rose for several long seconds, then spun, parallel to the ground, its window pointing at the sky, like a mirror showing the sky to itself, the oval reflection as calm as a green pond, before spinning toward the earth and, upon impact, splintering.

  Harold had sat for a long while in the barn doorway, he told young George, anticipating the onset of poison ivy and contemplating the destruction God had wrought for his betrayal of Mrs. O’Kearsy. God had tolerated all of Harold’s other mistakes, but apparently He had taken offense at that one. On that day in 1934, Harold Harland had sat alone until dark, finally concluding that the people in his church were wrong, that God was not the picket-fence spirit they worshiped. Harold’s God was the wrathful God of the Old Testament, an awesome God and a vengeful God. Harold knew then, he said, sitting in that barn, that life is both too short to have enough joy and too brutally long for a man who regrets what he has done. Ever since then, Old Harold said, he had tried to refigure the world from scratch. Up in the window room, Harold told George that the tornado changed everything. George didn’t understand all of what the old man was talking about, but he knew he’d believe it once he figured it out.

  “It’s too late for your thickheaded papa, but it’s not too late for you,” Harold told George. “You may as well know the truth about this place. Only don’t tell your grandmother. She’s not interested in the truth. She just wants everything to stay the same.”

  “I won’t tell,” George whispered.

  Harold took the photograph from George’s hands and studied it some more.

  “Mary O’Kearsy didn’t hurt anybody,” Harold said. “She stood on her porch and watched for that big dumb fellow Enkstra to come walking along the path. I had no right telling other folks about who she loved.”

  “You told on her?”

  “And don’t think that was the only mistake I made. I’ve made plenty. And the one thing I’ve learned for certain in this life is that there’s no sense in judging people.”

  “Did the lady become a teacher someplace else?”

  “She wanted to stay here,” Harold said, “and we should have let her stay.”

  “Were her students sad about her leaving?”

  “Everybody was sad after she left town. And those people knew afterwards that they shouldn’t judge a woman so harshly.”

  In truth, apart from Enkstra, Harold was the only grown-up person who seemed to care about Mary O’Kearsy after she left, but Harold wanted his grandson to think that people could change, that they could learn to be kind. Harold had sighed and looked away from the faded little photo, toward the barn to the south. He said, “That woman was as beautiful as the day is long.”

  On the morning of October 9, two stories below the window room, George started a pot of coffee, unwrapped pale green butc
her paper from a pound of bacon and dropped thick slices into the biggest cast-iron frying pan he’d inherited, along with this house and the rest of the farm, from his grandparents. George was realizing already that he should have insisted David come eat breakfast. That regret would grow larger throughout the day, but for now he satisfied himself by deciding that tomorrow, after they baled straw, he would insist David come to supper with him and Rachel. He couldn’t pay the kid much money for helping him, but maybe later today he could give David and Sally some steaks and hamburger he had in the freezer. As the streaks of fat became translucent and then golden, George removed each slice of bacon with tongs and placed it on a paper bag flattened on a Blue Willow plate. With his right hand, George cracked and emptied the shells of two, three, four eggs, letting each slide over his thumb and into the bacon grease. He almost couldn’t stand the pleasure the smells of bacon and coffee gave him these days, enough to sustain him eight or ten hours, even in the heat or cold. Breakfast was Rachel’s favorite meal too, George was pretty sure.

  Sometime in the future, Rachel would undoubtedly tell him whatever she’d told David about the Potawatomi Corn Girl. Probably some day Rachel would talk about her mother, about what it had been like to grow up on a boat with an eccentric woman, and someday Rachel might tell him why she’d called him Johnny in the barn and solve a dozen other mysteries, but George didn’t want to rush into conversation. He and Rachel had lived together a year and a half, and they’d been married six weeks, but George still felt shy around her. He figured there was plenty of work to keep him occupied for the next few months, and anyway the dead of winter would be a better time for talking.

  George went out the back door and through the porch, which he had screened in at the request of his first wife, and he followed the trail out to Rachel’s garden. George used to keep this side yard mowed, but last year Rachel had suggested they stop wasting time and gas, and George hadn’t been able to argue with her logic. He’d let the brambles, weeds, and wildflowers grow last year, and then this July the smell of the blackcap raspberries had been like a liquor. It had given him a weird satisfaction, though, the several times he’d seen Rachel out there yanking burdock, ragweed, and garlic mustard.

 

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