When George had said he’d left David at the barn this morning, Rachel should have run right down here and gotten him, never mind her eggs and bacon growing cold. She was the one who understood David, and she should have been protecting him. George, with his inherited buildings and his machines, his long straight rows of corn, and his never-ending patience, couldn’t know what desperation she or David felt about this place, which had in no way been destined for them. David was the only person likely to farm these acres after George was gone, after George burned up like this barn or else deteriorated and crumbled away, two years from now or twenty years or forty. She held on to David’s inhaler inside her pocket as if it were the last living part of him.
April May’s Buick approached from the direction of George’s house, and Rachel watched her negotiate around the parked cars and trucks to pull into the driveway across the street. Gray Cat, who’d been sitting on the porch steps, sped away from April May and the barn bird feeder and back to the fire side of the road, where he slunk into the drainage ditch, making it clear he was nobody’s pet. April May got out and leaned against the back end of her Buick to watch another crash send up a wall of fire beside the bigger maple, on which all the remaining leaves dried, curled, and burst into flame. Then walking up the road came the salesman and his little blond wife, hand in hand as though chained together for all eternity. He seemed rosy and ready, eager to reach out and shake with that free hand, while the wife seemed small and hesitant. They approached the fire, and the blonde positioned herself on the far side of the salesman in such a way that Rachel couldn’t see her at all.
Milton Taylor didn’t keep going along the road as the fireman in the driveway indicated he should. Instead he backed up his old truck and cut into George’s field, driving over the drainage ditch, and even when there came a terrible wrenching sound that had to be his exhaust system tearing loose, he just kept coming, his crocheted pink-and-lime crucifix swaying back and forth from the rearview mirror. He mowed down about a hundred cornstalks before stopping near Parks’s county cruiser. He got out and walked with his hands in his pockets and stood beside Parks and George. His shirt read LOVE IS JESUS in loopy cursive, with a reddish cartoon heart over his belly. Behind him, running up the road, out of breath, came George’s punk nephew Todd and one of the Higgins kids, their eyes and mouths wide open. They stopped alongside Milton and stood awestruck. The kids and grown-ups, and the cows and Gray Cat, formed something like a three-quarters circle around the fire, and Rachel felt those bodies calling out that all of them had lost David, not just her. The heat at the center of this fire, Rachel thought, must be phenomenal, and her desire to speak to these people and hear their voices was a cool place inside her. She resisted moving toward any of them, though, telling herself that nobody had known David the way that she had.
“Fucking fire!” she said, and squatted down so that her rifle clunked the ground behind her. She cooled her hands on the earth, then reached out and touched the fuzz on a woolly bear crawling nearby. She was all the while watching George, thinking she didn’t like his looking so thin. She didn’t want to feel he needed protection, and she didn’t want to think of him dying, even though it would mean the land was hers. Really, she didn’t need all the property. She would use the edges, along the road and the river, the windbreaks, the woods, some gardens—that was how the Potawatomi had intended to live with the farmers, she was sure. She was staring at the side of George’s face, thinking he should keep tilling his damned flat fields forever, when he turned and looked at her. From this distance she could see what she hadn’t seen up close: the ghost of Johnny showed in his face, and the ghost of David, who’d loved George way more than George could have known. Even the ghost of Tom Parks was there, though the living Parks stood right beside him. By staying on his farm, George had taken on the spirits of all the people who had farmed here, his grandfather Harold and grandmother, and Rachel didn’t know who else. As she kept looking at him, she saw a reflection of fire there too, flames consuming not just this barn full of straw and hay, but other barns and other houses and acres of crops and woodlands. For the first time she wondered if George might have secrets as terrible as her own.
George was looking back at Rachel as though she were the only thing that could sustain him. Rachel no longer saw or heard anything else, but stared past the fire trucks, into George’s eyes, in a way she’d never done before, as if she too needed this liquor, which might have been too strong were there any less distance between them. Rachel felt more solidly planted than ever, as though a complex of roots was connecting her to George under the topsoil. For a year and a half, she’d told herself she meant only to outlive the man and make his land her own, but now he was turning into land before her eyes. When Parks yelled something Rachel couldn’t hear, George blinked, and Rachel blinked, and it was over. This was not love as Rachel had imagined it might feel—this was an emotion as complicated as a garden, beneath the surface of which roots stretched in all directions to fill a fertile square mile. This was like the fusing of skin and dirt, the coming together of mineral and muscle, something like eternity sped up so that the decay of bones into calcium-rich grit occurred in fast motion. After George looked away, Rachel felt too full of life, like trees that needed to be tapped, like a cluster of seeds ready to burst out of their shells into the stink and decay of rich soil. She dared not look at George again, or even in his direction. Nobody noticed as she left the fire, except Gray Cat, who followed her for a while at about twenty human paces.
29
OLD HAROLD HARLAND HAD ONCE BURNED A BARN TO THE ground, behind the house George and Rachel now occupied. Harold had not been able to bring himself to look across the flames at his wife, however, so he did not know whether the fire made her appear beautiful. There was no cigarette-pilfering neighbor boy to blame, only himself. Henrietta’s family had already farmed here a hundred years, so she had felt within her rights to warn Harold repeatedly against putting damp hay in a barn. When an August rain threatened, however, he could not bear the possibility of losing all that fine hay, and so he had gone ahead and loaded it onto wagons and hauled it to the barn. Even as he and Enkstra pitched the hay into the west end of the loft, Harold heard his wife’s voice in his head and chose to ignore it. The great blaze two months later would serve to remind the whole community of the danger of damp hay, for inside the alfalfa and grass grew mold, and that mold swelled the mounds the way yeast swelled bread, though with a good deal more heat. People said the hay deep inside was probably smoldering for weeks, before the pile collapsed and flames erupted.
With everyone in Greenland sharing stories about the barn and calculating the cost of Harold’s stupidity, shame hung around him like a weighted collar. If he had been a drinker, he would have turned to drink, but he was a working man, so he just kept on harvesting that fall, and he endured the bitterness of his wife, hoping he would eventually be forgiven. Maybe Harold took a liking to Mary O’Kearsy simply because she showed up in town the following year with no knowledge of the barn fire. She was a young widow, a distant cousin of one of the members of the school board, and everybody liked the idea of having an elementary teacher from back east, as though such a woman were necessarily more capable of providing the rules of multiplication and English grammar than a local person. Her being from the east also meant she had a place to return to should this Michigan town tire of her, as it did less than two years later.
A few days after Henrietta Harland and the other members of the school board told Mary O’Kearsy she was no longer in the town’s employ, Harold Harland was working on the barn beside the house she would be vacating. Even though he was glad to be back in his wife’s good graces, Harold was feeling uneasy about having reported to Henrietta what he had seen Mrs. O’Kearsy doing with that fellow Enkstra. The woman would be leaving the following morning, though, and Harold told himself that his feelings about her would be easier to bear when he could not see her every day. Surely he would stop thinking of he
r after she was gone, and then finally he could be at peace with his desires and with God, not to mention with his wife. Harold was grateful that his wife did not ask how he happened to be watching when O’Kearsy met Enkstra in the barn, or how he saw her waiting for the man at the back door. He could never explain that he had felt a surge of confused anger each time he saw Mrs. O’Kearsy with Enkstra and that he had wanted to punish her.
As Harold Harland worked on his oldest remaining barn that morning, he was hoping to get a final glimpse of Mrs. O’Kearsy, so he was not disappointed when she came out and stood on the porch. She continued to watch Harold for a long time, as though he were a great curiosity, such as a puppet show or a parade of interesting automobiles driving along Q Road. She watched him unashamedly, did not peek through a window, the way he had watched her, but stood right out in the open with her hands clasped behind her back. When Harold let himself look up from his work, Mrs. O’Kearsy waved, and so Harold put down his hammer and approached the house, growing more nervous with every step. At her invitation, he sat in one of two chairs on the porch and she took the other. When she sat her skirt rose above her knees.
“I am sorry you have to leave, Mrs. O’Kearsy. I am sorry things did not work out.” Harold stared at the porch floorboards.
“Yes, sir, Mr. Harland, everything here was fine.” She was squinting because of the sun, but he could see her eyes were red-rimmed and bloodshot as though she had been crying, and it gave her a naked look. She was not wearing a hat or handkerchief, but then, Harold reminded himself, covering one’s head was not a hard-and-fast rule anymore. Up close he could see that her hair, which was pulled back and up onto her head, did not lie still, but struggled against its pins and wriggled to loosen itself. Her curls glistened the color of river silt. “I have enjoyed living here very much,” she said. “Michigan has been an adventure for me.”
“Glad to hear that, ma’am.” Harold did not know what she meant by adventure.
“They say you are the one who reported seeing me and Mr. Enkstra together.”
“Yes, I am.” Harold found the discord between O’Kearsy’s tear-filled eyes and her cheerful voice unnerving, and it made him speak more honestly than he had intended. “Why Enkstra, ma’am?” His own words surprised him. “Of all the men in Greenland, why that big dumb fellow?”
Mary O’Kearsy laughed. “That is what everybody is wondering, I suppose. What could he and I have to talk about?” When she looked at Harold again, tears were streaming from her eyes, and she made no attempt to conceal them or wipe them away. “Well, I’ll just say that any two people can find plenty to talk about if they are able to think for themselves. I like Mr. Enkstra very much.”
Harold cleared his throat and made a last attempt to reclaim his indignation. “So you don’t deny you were in a sinful way with Mr. Enkstra?”
“Despite all you self-righteous people, I do not want to leave,” O’Kearsy said. “It is breaking my heart to leave this place, and I cannot fathom why.”
“You could go to Kalamazoo,” Harold said. “Maybe you could get a job teaching there, close by.” Harold was starting to wonder if not seeing her was going to make his longing for her even greater.
“I do not want to be close by. I am going back home to Boston. Or Salem maybe, to visit my aunt. You know, of course, that Salem is where the witches lived.” She smiled.
“I would not want to live in Kalamazoo, either,” Harold said. He did not know what she meant about witches. He knew most folks had not considered Mrs. O’Kearsy pretty, because she had a kind of face where the two sides did not quite line up, but Harold had always liked the look of her. Maybe it was just the look of her and nothing more that had made him watch her through the cracks in the barn siding and made him hate that big man Enkstra for entering the house (Harold’s house!) without knocking, and maybe the look of her was why his heart ached at the thought of her loving a man other than him. Knowing she was leaving the following morning, Harold could not look enough at her—if it would not have been impolite, he would have stared until he had drunk her in completely.
“Maybe before I go on packing,” she said, “I should spend a few minutes with my accuser.” Every sentence from her mouth sparkled like a clear stream, faster and brighter than the creek from which the cattle drank behind the barn.
“There were the children to think of.” Even as Harold said it, he did not believe it. In truth, he thought the children lucky to have such a teacher, if only for a couple of years. All his own teachers had been unpleasant to look at.
“The children,” repeated Mary O’Kearsy, unconvinced.
“Of course, the children all like you,” Harold said. “Little April May says you go to Europe every summer.”
“Would you like to come in and see a few things I have picked up abroad?”
As a curl of her hair sprang loose, Harold squeezed his chair arms. But it would be silly, he thought, not to accept her offer to go into a house he and his wife owned. As he followed her through the kitchen he snuck a glimpse at her slender, belted figure walking and felt guilty about doing so, but he told himself this would be his last glimpse ever, and so he looked again. She led him to the dining room, where three leather trunks stood full nearly to their brims, lids open. She lifted out some framed postcards: the leaning tower of Pisa and the Parthenon. She showed him a walnut-sized chunk of stone, which she said she had taken from Hadrian’s Wall. She handed him a small brass model of the Eiffel Tower, which he turned over in his hands and studied. When Harold asked the identity of the man in the small photograph opposite her in the hinged double frame on the windowsill, she said it was her late husband.
“Do you have a picture of, uh, him?”
“Mr. Enkstra, you mean. Where would I get such a thing?”
She placed the gold-framed photos in her trunk beside the European souvenirs. When she turned to go back into the kitchen, Harold picked up the frames, slid the small photo of her out from behind the glass and put it in his overalls pocket, then folded closed the frame and replaced it in the trunk.
Of the other objects in the house that morning, Harold would most clearly remember something from the kitchen: the white-glazed ceramic marmalade jars imported from England, lined up on the counter with spices, dried flowers, and odds and ends.
“I have a weakness for marmalade,” she said. “It costs too much and I should not buy it.”
Harold could tell by the rims that the ceramic jars had been sealed with paraffin and paper for the transatlantic voyage. He wondered how she could have gone about making the decision to buy such a fancy item so many times. He counted fourteen jars.
“You’ve been a lot of places,” Harold said, when they returned to the porch. He sat again, afraid that otherwise she would expect him to leave. The sun had moved behind the barn, so Mary O’Kearsy no longer had to squint. She was a girlish woman, and yet leaning against the wall, she seemed mannish to him, as well, as though he might actually have something to fear from her if, say, they wrestled.
“Since I first came here,” she said, “I sensed something peculiar about this place, about this piece of land beneath us, something queer. Secretly, you know, I have always called Q Road ‘Queer Road.’”
“Queer Road?” Harold said.
“I had been thinking that maybe I would not go away this June. I thought maybe I would stay and help the families of my students with their summer work.”
“Surely you would rather be in Italy or France.”
Mary O’Kearsy laughed as she sat in the chair beside him, but when Harold next looked at her face she was crying. At first Harold had wished she would make up her mind to laugh or cry, one or the other, but now he found the confusion making sense.
“Why did you report me to the school board?” she asked.
“How could you love Enkstra that way?” Harold said. “So easily?”
“Easily?” She laughed. “Tell me, how can you love this farm so easily?”
“
I don’t know how you mean that.”
“Having this farm probably feels like the most natural thing to you.”
“It was my wife’s family’s farm.” By now Harold was feeling altogether sick in his chest and stomach, and he did not know who he was anymore, or rather he did not know who he had been when he told his wife what he had seen. Harold had made a terrible mistake, and there was nothing he could do to right it. This was worse than burning down the little hay barn; that had merely been innocent stupidity, but this was calculated meanness. Maybe when he burned down the barn, it was the last time he had been himself. Mary O’Kearsy was weeping in earnest now, and Harold felt bad about having sent Enkstra across P Road to plow a field, as far away as possible from this house. Harold wondered how he had let himself become such a mean son of a bitch.
Harold knew he should get up and leave but he could not bring himself to do so. Sitting there with Mary O’Kearsy, his thoughts were clearer than they had been in a long time. He considered the ways he loved his wife, Henrietta. Though he had never felt an inclination to speak the word, he loved her first and foremost for her family’s land, which she shared with him. He loved her for her seriousness, and for her knowing so much about fruits and vegetables and about the seasons. While Harold and the hired men worked in fields, she planted and tended the garden, and she cooked, pickled, and canned in the kitchen, with sweat pouring down her temples and into her freckled cleavage. Harold ate jelly or jam with his breakfast every day of his married life, and it never came from the store, except the time that somebody at Christmas gave him some special strawberry preserves, which did not taste as good as his wife’s—and he had had the good sense to tell his wife as much.
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