Nicole understood about a perfect marriage and a tragic divorce, but she didn’t know what could occur in between. She stared at the side of Steve’s face, at a sideburn that was slightly longer than she remembered it. When Steve finally turned toward her, he looked straight into her face and smiled, but for a moment he didn’t seem to recognize her as Nicole, merely smiled and looked at her in the stupidest and friendliest way without recognition, looked at her as he might look at any woman.
He walked toward her, still smiling. When he reached her, he said, “Nice squash.”
Nicole looked down at the hard, misshapen green thing and wondered how in the world she had ever considered cooking and eating it.
“We should go down and see what’s on fire.” Steve picked up a pumpkin from beside Nicole and turned it in his hands. Its roundness gave Steve a vision of his wife bulging in pregnancy and that thought cheered him.
Nicole looked away from Steve’s weird grin and saw Mrs. Rathburn standing on tiptoes for a better view. Nicole noticed Mrs. Shore across the street, staring sadly out her window. As weird as the woman might be, Nicole had a feeling that Mrs. Shore would sympathize with her hurt in a way Mrs. Rathburn never would.
“I want some pumpkins,” Nicole said.
“We’ll get some pumpkins then,” Steve said. “First we should go down and see that fire.”
“I don’t know.” Nicole’s vision was blurring from tears. She had the idea that Steve would be just as happy with any woman as he was with her. She said, “I just don’t know.”
“Don’t know what?” Steve asked Nicole, meanwhile smiling in a friendly way at April May Rathburn.
As soon as April May realized, based on her view through the trees, that her own house might be on fire, she knew that her house being on fire wouldn’t bother her. The morning had been so gray and overcast that she relished the possibility of a fire burning away the heaviness of the air, at any cost. As a kid in the 1930s and ‘40s, she’d been to bonfires behind the high school on the nights of football games. Everybody had been welcome at those bonfires, and she had loved the way people’s faces glowed as the night grew dark. “They burn up lumber. They waste good wood,” her father complained, which showed the difference that could exist between a German immigrant and his American children.
When April May stretched up on tiptoes as high as she could, anxious to see the blaze that was her house, the pain in her foot suddenly disappeared. Like magic, the pain of sixty-five years was gone, as quickly and completely as a spell being broken.
April May left the window salesman and his wife at the vegetable stand and carried the first two of her six pumpkins to the Buick, walking on the balls of her feet, feeling more buoyant than she had in decades. She liked the salesman, and his self-conscious wife seemed like a sweet girl. April May was also glad to be seeing more of Tommy Parks lately. She had always attended the township meetings, and she wondered if maybe Tommy could talk to George, get him to start coming to those meetings again. The conservative farmers would forgive him eventually for marrying Rachel, and really he shouldn’t care if they didn’t—the farmers’ numbers were dwindling, and they needed him badly enough to overlook his impropriety. Seeing all those people in the same room, even if they were at odds, always made April May think that the farms and new homes could coexist, if houses lined the roads and the farming took place in acreage behind the houses, if new people would be tolerant of the realities of farming, and if the farmers wouldn’t automatically resist change. April May saw how they could all fit together as one community, if only everyone would be sensible and tolerant.
Despite this neighborly feeling for her township, April May didn’t mind the thought of her home reduced to a burned-out shell. If her house of fifty years were on fire, she thought, she’d stand out there with the neighbors and watch it burn. Well-constructed celebration bonfires were lovely, but it was also good sometimes to be at the mercy of uncontrollable forces. Like the tornado that destroyed a swath of the town when she was seven, disasters brought everybody together and gave them something to remember, put them in a common awe, the way God used to. April May returned to the vegetable stand and retrieved her third and fourth pumpkins. Wherever she had to live now, she’d take her pumpkins with her. How crazy that she wasn’t distressed, how incredible that she wasn’t in pain. How liberating this lightness!
By the time Larry got home tonight, their house would be in ashes. All his woodworking and her family photos and murder mysteries would be dust. But maybe instead of rebuilding with the insurance money, she and Larry could buy an RV and travel the year round, having their Social Security checks direct-deposited, withdrawing money from machines throughout the Lower Forty-eight, maybe even heading up to Alaska. April May had never used an automatic teller machine, but she could learn how. They’d take it slow in the beginning. On the first night they’d park their RV on a sandy lookout over Lake Michigan, and from there they’d go west. Before they’d even consider coming back east, she would have to see a desert, a mountain, an ocean, northern lights, and a glacier. After she carried her last pumpkins and the gourds to the Buick, she slammed the trunk shut.
April May thought of her little barn bird feeder, imagined it blazing atop its metal pole, and she knew she was kidding herself. She knew this half-mile stretch of road as well as anyone, and even without her driving glasses she knew that her cats and cookware and decades of accumulated knickknacks were fine, because the fire was in the Harland barn. As a way of distracting herself from the disappointment of not losing everything, she thought about having a Halloween bonfire this year. She’d pile twigs and broken limbs into a wigwam-shaped affair and set them ablaze in the dark. April May had been planning to celebrate Halloween with cider and snacks as usual, but maybe this year she would have tricks instead of treats. Or perhaps she’d send Larry to the store, shoo the cats outside, and light her curtains with a jack-o’-lantern. Then she’d step out herself and stand with the kids to watch the fire devour her house. Young ghosts, witches, and costumed superheroes would gather as witnesses. Their eyes would glisten in the dark, and when they realized the house itself was afire, they would scream. And after the destruction of her furniture, keepsakes, and cookbooks, she and Larry would take to the road, roam all over the country to see what they hadn’t seen while sitting here in one place. She wouldn’t say she’d wasted her life in Greenland—nothing like that—but she had been simmering here on low heat an awfully long time.
Now as she watched George Harland’s barn burn in the distance, she could imagine herself running toward the fire, high on the balls of her feet, the way she had chased after the tornado as a child. April May lifted her arms over her head to twirl, but her grown-up body resisted. Throughout the last half century, she had trained herself to walk straight, and it was going to take a while to undo that damage. April May saw Rachel at the fence line and thought she’d like to grab hold of the girl and hug her, transmit through her skin everything Henrietta had taught her about gardening, about bush beans versus pole beans, about using manure in autumn rather than spring. By passing it on, she would free herself from that earthy knowledge. April May looked across the street and saw the long face of Elaine Shore staring out as if yearning to be set free. April May looked in the other direction to see Sally Retakker puffing a cigarette, smiling as though she had a plan. April May smiled back.
Sally saw the smoke rising out of the old barn halfway to the Barn Grill and she wondered once and for all what the hell she was doing here, at this farm, in this town. Maybe like the clothes George and Rachel hung on the line to freeze-dry, Sally would just dehydrate if she stayed through the bitterness of another Michigan winter. Her small body and brittle bones might be crushed beneath the weight of even one more season of lake effect snows. She wanted to be in California, and she didn’t care if she was staying with her oldest son or begging outside a liquor store, and she didn’t care what she’d have to do to get there, and she didn’t even mind if the
traveling took a long time, just so she was moving in the right direction. She’d leave now, and not even bother to stop at home. Reminding herself that she didn’t care about anything made her feel hopeful. She might as well be aiming a pistol and shooting these people one by one, because shortly hereafter, she told herself, she would turn her back and never see them again. She needed a drink, so she’d stop at the Barn Grill on the way out of town. From the Grill, she’d walk to the highway and hitchhike. Sally didn’t care what was burning to the ground, and for a brief, blissful moment, she didn’t think of David.
David would be fine, she decided, after the thought of the boy imposed itself. David would be fine without her.
25
OVER THE COURSE OF THE MORNING, ELAINE HAD FELT HER hair growing, and now she would swear it was creeping down from her scalp like a living parasite. Elaine watched across the street as people’s heads, one by one, turned and looked south, toward some vision that might change their lives forever. Elaine couldn’t look south, because that side of the house was her bathroom and utility room and had no windows. When the Homestead Homes representative first presented the plan to her, Elaine had thought it peculiar to have an entire wall without windows, but the representative had convinced her that this would improve the house’s overall insulation value, which would lower heating costs, and Elaine agreed that she’d have plenty of views in the other directions.
Though Elaine no longer read romance novels, she recalled that each story included a special moment in which a meeting of eyes changed everything. A woman noticed a brilliant background glowing behind her lover, and Elaine liked it when the lover became a silhouette as he approached, his feet no longer seeming to touch the ground. Now instead of romances, she had the tabloids. She marveled that a woman saw Elvis in her laundry room, that a cow birthed a three-headed calf, that a baby was born quoting the Bible. Sometimes the revelations were not pleasant, for one could not say that being abducted and taken to a spaceship as the subject of an experiment was pleasant, but at least you became part of something larger than yourself, and you rose above the mess surrounding you down here. At least when the aliens came, they would be clean and organized, and if they hurt you with their dental surgery and probes, at least there would be an order to it all, a master plan into which each needle prick and each moment of agonizing pain fit precisely. Sometimes reading those newspapers made Elaine feel queasy, because reading about the discoveries and salvation of other people was nothing like having those experiences yourself.
In the same way, the sight of all those people looking away at something made her feel shabby. That unknown vision to the south beckoned her from her breakfast nook as a dark-eyed lover might call a virgin girl with alabaster skin from her bedroom on a hot summer night. Though she hadn’t even left the house in eight days, Elaine stepped outside through her kitchen door and traveled across the lawn until she could see the distant smoke, gray-white, pouring from what she knew must be an alien crash site. She cupped her right breast in her left hand and held it there warmly, and gradually worked her right hand over her left breast. A siren blared. A pickup rattled along the road, then slowed and pulled next to the farm stand to wait for a wailing fire truck to pass. Elaine knew with the certainty of death that the aliens had failed this time in their attempt to reach the planet safely. The newspaper tomorrow would say that a small plane had crashed or a house or barn had burned, and nobody who hadn’t seen it with her own eyes would know otherwise. Though the alien takeover of the planet was going to involve a lot of disruption and pain, Elaine still felt disappointed that the aliens had failed this time.
A four-wheel-drive truck with a portable flashing light above the driver’s seat raced past her toward the crash site. The faces of the people standing in Harland’s driveway were still turned south, with the exception of the pretty wife from next door, who was looking back across the road at Elaine. Elaine looked down at herself and noticed that her frayed, quilted bathrobe was shorter than the threadbare nightgown she wore beneath it. Her grayish feet looked foreign to her in their worn terry-cloth slippers. She became aware of her own arms crossed over her chest and her two hands, each squeezing a breast, only neither the chapped hands nor the soft, sagging breasts seemed like her own, and she let her arms drop to her sides. The pretty wife waved awkwardly to her from across the street, and Elaine lifted her arm in response, but the arm felt heavy and uncertain, and her hand on the end of it seemed to flail. She knew this was her opportunity to walk over to the farm stand and say hello to her neighbors, to ask what was going on. Or better yet, she could go down there and see the tragic blaze of that spaceship for herself, marvel at the explosion of the volatile fuels, perhaps even glimpse through the flames the remains of an alien. But not like this, not with these people, not today. Instead, she turned and walked a straight line to the kitchen door.
Back in her nook, she opened the Pelican Retirement Corporation folder. She soothed her eyes on the sameness of its metal trailers, on the smallness of its rectangular lawns, on the pleasant neatness of the people seated on decks with cups in front of them. She read the brochure and found that, yes, there was a hair salon on the premises.
26
THAT A MAN’S HANDS BUILT THE BARN MEANT NOTHING. That the man dragged stones from the river and woods, split the stones with a fifteen-pound maul and laid a foundation of them into the side of the hill he’d built up, that he did such work between cuttings of hay and harvests of corn, wheat, and oats, and calving his herd and repairing his mule-drawn machinery, all meant nothing to the fire now blazing. That a man felled the trees which he carved into supports, that for vertical siding he chose from among his own whitewood which he milled into imperfect boards, which he did his best to fit tightly against one another. That he worked every day, in the blistering sun or bitter wind and in all but the heaviest rains and snows, also meant nothing. Nor did it matter that every year folks from his and succeeding generations filled this barn with hay and straw, just as George and David had been doing this morning. None of this mattered to the fire any more than it had mattered to the tornado that destroyed the house beside it. The fire cared no more about this barn than the Federal Land Office cared at the point of sale in 1834 that this site had been the favorite summer camping ground of a group of Potawatomi, who belonged to the Wolf and Bear Clans (and who had no idea why the farmers kept calling them the Horseshoe Clan).
In the eyes of the federal land officials, the ancestor of George Harland who purchased this property did so fair and square. And when such a man had the money and wanted to farm a great stretch of land, he would have been a fool to hesitate, because if he didn’t buy the land, at a dollar and a quarter an acre, somebody else would. Decades after the purchase, however, George’s great-great-great-grandfather did grow to have an uneasiness that became a kind of tax on his ownership. As he farmed his fields in the years after 1840, he often imagined an endless line of men, women, and children marching single file west along the river. In truth, few of those people crossed his property; rather, the Woods Potawatomi slowly gathered to the west to prepare for their nine-hundred-mile trek. Like all the farmers, George’s great-great-great-grandfather had thought he was glad to see the Indians go, and he traveled to Kalamazoo to witness the exodus. For hours he heard the wailing and watched the slow movement of families lugging their sleds and packs and babies. Two decades later, when the farmer’s son built a barn on the abandoned Potawatomi campsite, the aging farmer told about those heartbroken people; the vision had been burned so deeply into his mind that he saw them crossing his own land, tramping on his own riverside path. He described that sad departure often enough to his grandchildren that they would pass the story down, along with the maps he had drawn of the Indian gardens. All the years that George’s great-great-great-grandfather lived, he saw that barn his son built as a plain, practical wooden memorial to the gone people of a queer, fertile swath of land.
The fire blazing did not care that Harold Harla
nd had learned about the mythical endless line of Potawatomi from his father-in-law or that Harold himself had stood in the barn after the big tornado and thought with regret about a schoolteacher he admired and about losing touch with God. And certainly the blaze did not care that the teacher had made love in the barn with a man who was not her husband. Nor did the fire care that more than a hundred years before the big tornado, a Potawatomi girl who didn’t want to go away and marry had wept on this site before she disappeared into the woods. The fire did not give a damn who’d been killed in this barn or buried beneath it, so one could not very well expect such a fire to spare an asthmatic child messing around with a cigarette. On October 9, 1999, with no apparent concern for the life, the livelihood, or the desires of mortals, this fire clung to the hay-strewn floor and also climbed into the rafters of the barn and burned and burned.
The fire ate up the swallows’ nests at the ceiling even as it gnashed piles of hay and bales of straw on the barn floor. Fire raged where, for 135 years, boys and girls had played and worked and slept. Flames now writhed across loose hay where some men and women had writhed together—George Harland’s parents, for starters, months before they were legally married. And Mike Retakker and Sally got drunk together right here on the night they conceived David, creating the very spark that would thirteen years later set the barn afire. And Margo Crane lay here with a man who’d been raised on a reservation in Oklahoma, a man whose passion for the ferocious white woman seemed to him the only outlet for the bitter and sweet longing he felt toward this place of his ancestors.
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