Q Road

by Bonnie Jo Campbell

  David climbed atop the pile again and began kicking bales off onto the floor. He knew it would take him all day to restack these once he found the glowing ember, but it was better than the alternative. If George drove back down here with Officer Parks, David would say the cigarettes were his mother’s and that he’d accidentally knocked the bales off, or else he just wouldn’t say anything. Two more bales busted open as he tossed them down. There were now about twenty bales in a pile below him, and David decided if there were any ash, it was now probably in one of the bales on the floor. He jumped down onto the pile of straw, slipping on one of the bales, twisting his ankle completely this time, with a crunching sound. He’d sprained that ankle last year, when he slipped in a woodchuck hole, so he knew that it was going to swell and ache. He told himself that the damage would be his punishment for having gone into the barn with a cigarette, and he hoped that the pain would be bad enough to equal his stupidity. He pulled a bale away from the pile on the floor and threw it up onto the wagon and checked it all over for signs of burning. He tore at a second bale and tossed it onto the wagon, but it rolled off the other side. The strings of a third bale snapped open and that bale blossomed into flammable sections, but still no fire arose. He pushed another up onto the wagon and checked all its sides, and then he rested. When he could move again, David lifted a fifth bale, discerning no sign of smoke, fire, or ash.

  For a long while, there was nothing, no hint of smoke, no reason to think the lost end of the cigarette had done anything but burn out. There would be no fire, he told himself, and he sat on the hay wagon to rest before starting to replace all the bales he’d knocked down; his twisted ankle and bruised shin would be punishment enough. He would rebuild the stack, one bale at a time, with his bronchial tubes constricting, releasing, and constricting again. Even if it took all night, he was grateful, for he’d been spared this time. David felt like crying in relief. “Thank you, God,” he said, though he hesitated to speak louder than a whisper, and he hesitated to move much for fear of losing this second chance he was getting. He would never smoke another cigarette—in order to toughen his lungs he would hang his head over the side of the oat bin and inhale the dust. He sat very still and tried not to cough, because the planet now stood in precarious balance.

  David moved into the threshold of the barn for some fresh air and was surprised to see Parks’s cruiser still there in the driveway, pointed at April May Rathburn’s house, as though waiting for traffic to clear, though there was no traffic. David tucked himself against the wall inside. He slid to the ground with his arms around his knees and closed his eyes.

  He couldn’t have said how long he was asleep before waking into the smell of smoke. When he first blinked his eyes open, he told himself that the smell was merely a ghost of some memory of smoke, but when his eyes adjusted he saw smoke rising from the edge of the bales stacked above him. Favoring the foot with the twisted ankle, David slowly hoisted himself up, and when he looked into the space between two bales, he thought he saw a red glow at the bottom of a thickening puddle of smoke. The red spot disappeared and smoke rose from the bale the way warm swamp fog rose into winter air over the O Road marsh. David’s muscles threatened to freeze, but he moved slowly and was able to pull a few bales down onto the pile alongside the hay wagon. The smoke thinned and then seemed to be coming from several places around him. As he began to drag a smoking bale toward the door, a bale above began to blaze. He ran back and pulled that one down and dragged it outside, then returned to find another was burning one level below, blazing because of the oxygen he’d just fed it. He burned his hands as he pushed it down and then across the floor, where it lit a trail of flame in the loose hay and straw. David pulled apart a triad of burning bales on the floor, two of which burst their strings. The flames grabbed at the loose sections, and the fire flattened and spread out a few yards across the sea of loose hay, toward the front wall of the barn. Gray Cat appeared briefly in the doorway, dangling a headless yellow bird body, then sped away. David dragged another bale to the front of the barn and outside. He planned to wave his arms and call Parks over to help him, but Parks was no longer there—his car was headed north. David couldn’t catch his breath and his brain felt muddled. If he could just rest for a second and think, he’d figure out what to do. He pulled at his breather but had to exhale before the medicine could work. Meanwhile, the flames before him sucked up the bales as though they were lighting and smoking giant cigarettes in long, slow draws. In the flames, there appeared to David a ghostly vision of curly-tailed yellow puppies, like one killed on the road this summer and buried in Rachel’s garden. Then the flames were orange cats writhing and strangling. David saw a flock of translucent yellow birds hover, then grow as indistinct as puffs of smoke. When he searched the air above him, he saw a hundred more fluttering animal shapes. Already, David thought, he was dead enough to see the dead.

  He fought to stay alert, but the brightness of the flames made the corners of the barn seem dark, and he couldn’t tell if he was dreaming or awake when he saw a chasm opening beside him like a grave, a hole that reminded him of his mother’s mouth as her hand drew a cigarette near, and the mindless stares of his friends as they watched television screens, and the pit of his own hungry belly. He imagined he could see inside his own lungs, with their tiny alveoli gasping for oxygen. Within the crackle of flames, he made out the dull pop he’d heard when Todd swung the kitten, a sound that might be necks breaking or maybe souls being discharged from bodies one by one. David reached into his pocket and grabbed his breather and was surprised when his hand refused to move to his mouth. As he clutched the white tube, he concentrated on George, held on to a pure vision of George leaning against his truck, and his hunger faded and the hole before him shrank and disappeared. David saw, curled on a bale of hay surrounded by fire, a single peaceful orange kitten. If David could have moved, he would have reached his arm through the flames to rescue it.

  As David’s body slowed and tried to adjust to less oxygen, he watched the fire rise and consume the kitten. David made a last attempt at crawling on his belly toward the barn’s open door, and when he looked up, he saw before him a watery vision of a black-haired girl like Rachel. Behind her milled a hundred ghost figures, the spirits, probably, of the people buried on George’s land, of the animals killed here by Rachel and her mother and the Indians. David focused instead on the black-haired girl’s face. He reached out to her, palm upward in order to be saved, but she only smiled and poured kernels of corn into his hand.

  18

  WHEN NICOLE HOEKSTRA NOTICED HER HUSBAND’S THUNderbird pulling into the driveway across the street, she thought maybe Steve was going to ask George Harland about buying a piece of land next to that barn. In her excitement, she got up and put on her jacket and went out the sliding glass door onto the deck without even double-checking her hair or makeup. As she followed the driveway to the road, she was focused so intently on Steve that she didn’t notice a crow descending until it landed right in front of her, claws downward, on a flattened squirrel carcass. Nicole shrieked at the bird’s sudden blackness, at the sharpness of its beak. Her shriek was not unlike the caw of a crow, and the crow scrawked in answer and flapped off, as though relinquishing the roadkill to her. Nicole looked around, embarrassed, and was glad that no one had heard her make that noise. A woman in a fifteen-year-old Buick passed her going north, then made a U-turn and eased off the road beside the farm stand.

  Nicole continued across the road and past the Buick and the vegetables toward Steve, but as she reached the pumpkin wagon, she stopped. A woman was getting out of the passenger seat of Steve’s Thunderbird, a small woman with uncombed blond hair wisping around her head. For a few seconds Nicole couldn’t breathe. She thought she might burst out crying, for surely this was the woman Steve had been with a month ago. Nicole looked around for a knife, looked for the rifle that Mrs. Harland wore over her shoulder, but the only weapons available were the sword-length Brussels sprout spears standing
upright in buckets. Nicole took a deep breath, told herself this might be a different red Thunderbird, except there was the Teddy bear she’d put in Steve’s back window. Nicole didn’t know whether to turn around and run back home or keep walking toward the car, so she stayed where she was. The tall old woman who’d been driving the Buick appeared beside her. The woman picked up one pumpkin, and another, and a third, studying each in turn, and said, “They have so much personality, don’t they?”

  This question jarred Nicole from her thoughts of Steve and the blonde. Who had personality? The woman seemed to be awaiting a response, so Nicole attempted a “hmm” sound of agreement, but instead she grunted, sounding to herself like a farm animal, somewhere between a cow and a pig.

  “The pumpkins,” said the woman, who apparently wasn’t shocked by Nicole’s grunt. “They have personality, don’t they?”

  Of course, the pumpkins. “You’re right,” Nicole said, and let slip a laugh of relief that sounded to her like a horse’s whinny. Nicole picked up a tall, stretched-out pumpkin and laughed again because it reminded her of her mother’s brother. “This one is my uncle,” Nicole said, and she was about to go on to describe him, but when the woman didn’t look up at her, Nicole stopped herself abruptly. “Bawk,” she said, like a chicken.

  The tall old woman continued to fondle pumpkin after pumpkin, remaining silent for what must have been minutes before turning to Nicole and saying, “I’ll bet you’re Steve’s wife.” The woman looked at Nicole as though she hadn’t ignored her earlier. Perhaps she hadn’t. “I’m April May Rathburn from down the road. Your husband found me just the right window.”

  Nicole’s heart opened up like a little storm cloud.

  Mrs. Harland appeared before them in long black braids, and Mrs. Rathburn said, “Good morning, Rachel.” At least three times a week, Nicole bought fruits, vegetables, and flowers at the farm stand, always sliding the exact change into the slot in the honor box, but never while Rachel Harland was actually standing there. Up close, Rachel Harland’s young face seemed ghoulish in its round nakedness. Her dark eyes were too close together, and her thin black eyebrows angled nearly straight down into the bridge of her nose. None of the words Nicole had for the looks of women seemed to fit Rachel Harland, and because her face didn’t succumb to any other description, Nicole decided that she was ugly. No wonder she’d married such an old man.

  “How are you enjoying October?” April May Rathburn asked.

  Nicole meant to answer, but at the last second she worried that Mrs. Rathburn was asking the question not of her but of Rachel Harland, and Nicole quacked instead of answering. Nicole wanted to cry out that she didn’t usually make these strange sounds. She felt like weeping because she knew she would never explain the noises and because every woman in Greenland Township was happy and content except herself—even old women and ugly women were happy and content. Nicole did not want this to be the day she broke down completely. She looked across the street and saw creepy old Mrs. Shores staring out the window, and for a moment the woman’s long face looked sort of inviting.

  “The pumpkins this year have so much character,” April May Rathburn said, unashamedly repeating to Rachel Harland the words she’d spoken to Nicole. Nicole wished that she herself had spoken to Rachel Harland in an enthusiastic, neighborly way.

  Rachel Harland ignored Mrs. Rathburn, but Mrs. Rathburn didn’t seem to mind.

  “That’s all I want to do at this time of year,” Mrs. Rathburn said, catching Nicole’s eye. “I just want to carve faces in these things with a butcher knife.”

  Nicole felt her body go rigid. Mrs. Rathburn must have seen her with the knife earlier, stabbing the air of her kitchen as though it were her husband. Or Mrs. Shore must have been watching Nicole, and she must have called Mrs. Rathburn, and now the whole neighborhood knew that Nicole was crazy and violent.

  Mrs. Rathburn said, “Oh, I just love to carve pumpkins.”

  Nicole told herself that the mention of the butcher knife must have been a coincidence. When Nicole relaxed and let herself remember carving a pumpkin as a child, she felt better, and her relief swelled until she concluded that she needed to buy pumpkins. Her mother had bought pumpkins for Nicole the girl, but Nicole had never bought one for herself. Tonight before dinner she and Steve could sit outside and carve together, then set the finished heads in the front window and on the deck to grin at passersby. She’d call her family and tell the people at work they had to drive by in order to see her jack-o’-lanterns. She imagined her house beginning to glow soft orange, becoming like a jack-o’-lantern, with candlelight flickering off the walls, giving the new white paint a creamier tone. That would be a house that was a home; that would be the place that inspired love and a contentment that could last and deepen over a lifetime and would make her forget she’d ever considered disemboweling Steve.

  “I’ll take six big ones and four of these little gourds,” Mrs. Rathburn said to Rachel Harland, and Nicole knew she too wanted six big ones and four little ones, but she thought it would sound dumb to parrot Mrs. Rathburn’s request. As Mrs. Rathburn was paying Rachel Harland, Nicole heard a low croaking hum, but she didn’t realize it was coming from her own throat until both women turned to look at her. Nicole swallowed. She was fine with her mother and she was fine at her office at the hospital, where she could lean across her desk and shake hands and make small talk before getting down to the business of insurance coverage, but out here in the open with her neighbors she felt awkward, even afraid, because anything could happen in such an unscripted environment. Life should be like a wedding, she thought, so you always knew what to do and say next.

  “Let me get some goddamn change,” Rachel Harland said, and went off toward the house.

  Around the dilapidated farmhouse grew bright mums in orange, yellow, and purple (albeit thinned out from Rachel Harland’s cutting and selling them), and it didn’t seem fair to Nicole that such a run-down old place should look so cheerful. Nicole knew she had to buy and plant mums. Nicole’s mother grew dozens of clusters of mums, and Nicole suddenly didn’t know how she had lived without them. No one driving by could possibly know how tastefully she had arranged the inside of the house unless she decorated the outside as well. She’d go into town later and buy mums. They’d be cheap with only a month left to finish blooming. She’d plant flame-colored mums around the front of her deck, to foreground the fire inside her jack-o’-lanterns. She chose her first two pumpkins, the one with her uncle’s long face and another that was small and perfectly round with a long stem, before realizing that she didn’t have any money on her.

  When Steve finally stepped out of the car, he looked not toward Nicole but at the farmhouse, and he seemed to appraise and admire the house as though he wanted to live there, just as he had appraised and admired their own house upon first seeing it and, come to think of it, her mother’s house, too. It distressed Nicole to think that her husband might appreciate all houses equally. Steve adjusted the belt holding up his creased khakis and walked toward Rachel Harland, who was now standing by the side door with a bushel basket. Steve’s hand was outstretched to shake with her, but when Rachel Harland did not accept his hand, Steve let it fall away, and Nicole felt sorry for her husband.

  The blonde beside the car turned enough that Nicole saw her face and realized she was an older woman, as old as Nicole’s mother, fifty maybe, and her hair was gray and silver rather than truly blond. Nicole told herself that Steve couldn’t have any interest in such an old woman. Everything, then, was fine, for here was Steve giving a woman a ride and stopping at a house along his route in an attempt to sell windows, possibly with the ulterior motive of buying some land for their dream home. Even Nicole could see that the Harland house needed new windows. Nicole could imagine the drafts coming through the old windows, creating a breeze strong enough to extinguish any flames burning inside, whether they were jack-o’-lanterns or romantic dinner candles.

  Nicole did not consider that fresh cool air
slipping in from outside might actually make flames burn brighter and hotter than they would burn in Nicole’s own well-insulated house.

  19

  BEFORE PULLING ONTO QUEER ROAD, TOM PARKS HAD SAT in the barn driveway and stared across at the Rathburn place, which looked so similar to the house in which he’d grown up: two stories, porch stretching halfway across the front, white-painted clapboards. The new bay window in the dining room seemed like a sensible addition. The Rathburns had always found ways to improve their house, while the Parkses had been so busy farming that they hadn’t even kept theirs up. His uncle Larry Rathburn, his mother’s brother, was a handy fellow, always fixing or building something. Parks got a kick out of that barn-shaped bird feeder Larry had made and the way the birds fed at the doorways like miniature feathered cattle. Parks’s family house used to have a big sugar maple in front that turned orange and red in autumn. Being out here made Tom Parks long for his family—not for his ex-wife and kids in Texas, but for his parents and siblings.

  On an autumn day like today, they’d all have been picking the remaining vegetables from the garden or raking leaves, maybe helping the Harlands bring in hay. The Harlands had seemed an opinionated and energetic lot back then, compared to the quiet Parkses, but for some reason it was the Parks family men who died unnatural and unquiet deaths. As a teenager, Tom Parks’s older brother had crossed the tracks at Queer Road without looking, and a freight train had dragged his car a quarter mile toward Kalamazoo. One of Tom’s uncles had been shot on opening day of deer season. Then Tom’s father’d had the heart attack while driving the tractor and crashed into a tree over by the pond. If Tom Parks had been superstitious, he might have suspected his family carried a curse of some kind. He was careful around guns, railroad tracks, and heavy machinery, but he’d chosen a profession in which there were plenty of violent ways to die. Parks knew he had to stop thinking this way, not so much because he feared death, but because the death of a man whom no woman loved seemed wretched.