Q Road

by Bonnie Jo Campbell

“That’s what it is when somebody gets a piece of land that way.”

  Rachel gritted her teeth, but she didn’t actually feel anger toward the salesman. She was already accustomed to his soap smell, just as every year she got used to the pig shit smell of spring fields. George always smelled of sweat and grain and sometimes alfalfa. She wished he were close to her now. Rachel said, “So where’s your damn wife?”

  “Nicole wanted to go home,” Steve said. “She seemed pretty sad about the fire. She always enjoyed driving past the barn.”

  Rachel reached into her pocket to assure herself the inhaler was still there. She wouldn’t try to burn it in the woodstove; she’d have to sneak back after everybody was gone and toss it onto the barn’s coals.

  “Sure hope George has insurance on that barn.” Steve just kept on smiling pleasantly as though everything were fine, as though Rachel hadn’t cursed him and told him to leave, as though David weren’t dead. “Man, oh, man,” Steve said. “This boat would sure make an excellent hideaway. I’d give it a good scrubbing for starters.”

  Rachel tried to make the salesman disappear by imagining David’s body burned to cinders and spread over where Johnny’s skeleton lay curled in its grave. But her mind still wouldn’t make room for David’s death.

  “It’s so cozy here.” Steve stood between the two narrow bunks and reached up and opened one of the cupboards above Margo’s bed. Rachel heard mice paws scrambling. She knew her mother would not like the window salesman, but that was an easy call, seeing as how Margo didn’t like anybody—Rachel wasn’t even sure her mother had liked her. She ought to throw this guy off the boat, but she didn’t have the energy. She needed to be out in her garden, among her pumpkins, squash, and Brussels sprouts, those plants that cold hadn’t yet killed. She jumped off the deck of the boat and climbed the riverbank and yelled to him from there. “You’d better get the hell off my boat before I come back.”

  Rachel wished she were already home, watching George from her garden. Around dusk, George often split firewood. He chose from among three kinds of iron wedges, then swung the maul over himself in an arc as though carving a protective circle out of the air. If she sat in plain sight and did not hide, then maybe when he finished he might come into her garden and enfold her in his arms. The desire she was feeling for George was like her body turning inside out, like swallowing herself whole. She didn’t know what she was supposed to do with these feelings piling up, blocking out David’s death. She picked up the fresh-looking Jim Beam bottle from the riverbank, unscrewed the lid, and sniffed the last drops of whiskey.

  “I wouldn’t have guessed you for a drinker.” Steve grinned at her from the doorway of the boat.

  “Fucking idiot.” Rachel threw the bottle down hard, but it bounced and did not break on the soft, tangled roots.

  31

  THE RAILROAD TRACKS RUNNING ALONGSIDE THE KALAmazoo River have long been part of the train line between Detroit and Chicago, and sixty years ago, tramps and hoboes came by the Greenland farmhouses and asked for food. Those men—and the odd woman—rode the rails or walked across the land and knew its shapes instinctively or by memory or anecdote, and didn’t care whose fields they crossed or slept upon but traveled to satisfy a need, not unlike belly hunger, to feel mile after mile pass beneath their feet. Perhaps such a traveler stole a chicken or caught a rabbit to roast over a campfire or else picked a few ears of a farmer’s soft young field corn. George’s grandmother Henrietta, as a young woman, was reservedly sympathetic to these lost creatures of God, for their not being more firmly planted, but she feared that if she gave them food they’d have some way of marking the road or the house to say as much, and so she fed them only after they’d done some work. In the early summers of her marriage, she kept certain jobs unfinished in order to have work to offer such men. She might have asked a man to mow her front and back yards with the hand mower, to sweep out a shed, or shovel manure from a barn. Sometimes a man went away angry at the suggestion of work; other times Henrietta had difficulty getting rid of a fellow who said he wanted to stay and become a hired hand. Even back then Henrietta had always made certain her barns were locked on nights when such transients were about, for fear of their carelessly starting fires.

  The speed with which the October ninth fire devoured George’s oldest barn would not have surprised Henrietta Harland, not after she had watched the barn behind her own house go up like so many cigarette papers. She would, however, have been shocked at the speed with which a home could now be erected atop a poured concrete foundation by the importation, on two trucks from Indiana, of a prefabricated structure, the halves of which were lifted by cranes onto that foundation, bolted in a few hours to the base, and further secured with pneumatic nail guns and caulk tubes of adhesive. A Potawatomi wigwam of sticks and skins could hardly have been constructed more rapidly than one of these modern homes equipped with luxuries such as central air-conditioning, wall-to-wall padded carpeting, and double-pane thermal windows.

  In autumn of any year of her adult life, before or after her husband’s foolishness cost her family their oldest barn, George’s grandmother would have been canning tomatoes and squash. She would have guessed accurately when the first hard freeze was coming, and on that evening she would have gone out into the field and picked well into darkness, perhaps not really even noticing the darkness since her eyes would have adjusted gradually to the dimming light. Using her fine, natural night vision, George’s grandmother would have picked even the greenest tomatoes and placed them on the back porch table. During the day the tomatoes would ripen in what sun they could capture, and at night Henrietta laid an old sheet or tablecloth over them to protect against freezing.

  Henrietta not only preserved for each winter but planned further ahead, to future generations. Like her mother before her, Henrietta planted walnut trees, several dozen a year at least, as gifts to her descendants. She knew that in hard times a walnut tree could give food, furniture, and, at the very least, excellent firewood. She sprouted them in her garden, and transplanted seedlings to the windbreaks and to the edges of woods and the roadside, wherever the men did not farm. Like all women of her time and situation, she had children, and she expected them to pitch in and help with the work, and she did not often wonder if she had chosen the right life’s work for herself. Women such as George’s grandmother knew perfectly well that men married them for their farms, and Henrietta had intended to choose for her husband the man who would best care for these acres, but instead she fell for the most foolish man in Greenland, and then she had gotten pregnant one of those several nights with him in the barn and was thus forced to marry the man she loved. For the first decades of her marriage, she tried not to remind Harold too often that she knew a great deal more than he did about a great many things, but after he burned down that barn, she could no longer forgive her own stupidity.

  Henrietta had not always been a hard woman, but in the last thirty years of her life she found herself growing hard in response to her husband growing soft. After the barn fire and the schoolteacher business, Harold was no longer willing to blame or condemn anybody. Henrietta worried that the man might lose this farm, should he outlive her. A man gone soft would daydream until crops failed and would neglect to prepare for the following year. She knew that a person had to be tough to resist breaking up a place, to resist selling or dispersing land among siblings. Henrietta did not understand how her husband had come to defend everybody against every unkind word, as though he were Jesus Christ himself. While a woman might love Jesus well enough, only a naive girl would want to be married to Him. For had He not advocated love of Himself above all things, especially beyond love of one’s property, and had He not demanded His disciples stand ready to abandon their land and riches and follow Him?

  Henrietta felt that, despite life’s injustices, people needed to accept their places and live with what they had. In her mind, it made no sense to lament not going to college or not taking the train to visit Chicago. Life laid o
ut your work for you like a set of clothing, and you could either put the garments on or go around naked until you found another suit that fit, but you wanted to hurry, because you could not do much while naked, and no one was going to take you seriously. If you did not get to do everything you wanted, say, if your husband died young, then at least you ought to live righteously and not flaunt your freedoms. Mary O’Kearsy should have known that in moments of weakness every woman longed for a big, quiet fellow like Enkstra. But if they had not sent her away, O’Kearsy would have gotten pregnant, and that was no kind of example to be setting as a teacher of children. What if those girls and boys in her charge grew up thinking they should steal together through the fields at night, and into barns? What if they grew to adulthood with no mind for tending crops on the farms their families occupied? What if instead of buying new equipment for planting and harvesting they spent their meager incomes on travel to Europe? What, then, would have been the justification for wrenching this land away from the savages a century ago? Henrietta could have grabbed that little O’Kearsy by the shoulders and shaken sense into her the way her mother must never have done.

  There were still hungry transients and homeless people in America on the day David Retakker burned George Harland’s barn, but they had become, for the most part, city people. When they felt restless, they did not set off along river trails or into freight yards, but collected returnable bottles and cans; they begged and recycled until they scraped together the money for bus tickets to get to homeless shelters and downtown missions in other cities. Though salesmen in this day and age were comfortable traveling door-to-door offering vinyl siding and vacuum cleaners, homeless folks knew that the people who lived in the country nowadays were suspicious of a traveling man who had nothing to sell. And most of those unsettled folks had themselves grown lazier, too lazy to trek into unpopulated areas. They were unskilled in the skinning and gutting of rabbits, unpracticed in the stealing and plucking of chickens, and they might have lost for good the knowledge and instinct about which parts of an animal were edible, or which unripe crops, or which mushrooms.

  32

  DAVID RETAKKER LAY ON HIS BELLY IN A DITCH ALONGSIDE Queer Road, several hundred feet from the fire, as quiet as a corpse but alive and watching his life dissolve. The only one to notice David was Gray Cat, who ran across the street from April May Rathburn’s house and slunk into the ditch a few feet away, waking David from something sounder than sleep. As soon as he awoke, David began to wish he’d died, because the fire before him was destroying even the possibility that George could want him around. David no longer had any right to hope that things between them would ever be as good as they had been this morning. In one careless moment he had negated the whole history of himself and George.

  David didn’t know how he’d gotten out of the barn. He’d continued trying to put out the fire, and at one point he was on his knees, and then he was dragging a bale toward the door through heat and smoke. He’d stopped to use his breather, and afterward he’d been unable to move. He had a dim memory of a girl who looked like Rachel offering her hand, and then he’d dreamed he was propelled by something like a gang of bigger boys grabbing his shoulders and tossing him outside the barn, where he lay on the ground. Maybe his body had been possessed by electricity like Frankenstein’s monster or the severed limbs of frogs, or maybe the arms of the fire itself had thrown him through the air. As he lay panting outside the barn, he’d yearned to be strong enough to walk back in. Dying within those walls would have been easier than facing the shame he’d now have to face with every hour of every day for the rest of his life. When cars and trucks had approached the fire, David had crawled a few dozen yards farther away and into the ditch.

  David now lifted his head out of the ditch and spotted George standing with Officer Parks. David knew he would never again visit the Harland house but would only watch George from a distance like this. The fire had been chewing at the roof for some time, but without warning, the roof collapsed into its center. David had been keeping an eye on the weathervane at the top, holding on to the slim hope that the big hoses could put out the fire, but as the roof collapsed and the weathervane sank, the fire roared like an engine and sent a round of sparks fifty feet from the building. Since the firefighters were watering the flame at the base, the fire grabbed strength at the top. The tar and asphalt burned off as dense black smoke, and the corrugated sheets of tin beneath glowed red and slid inward as though the roof were a ship sinking into a sea of fire.

  George looked away from the barn, in David’s direction. David ducked but he figured George could sense exactly where he was hiding, the way he’d sensed where the cows were the time they got loose and went down to graze by the Glutton. George had known just where to find the nest of woodchucks that were destroying a section of his soybean crop this August—Rachel staked out the area for two weeks and shot five. To avoid being seen, David pushed his face deeper into the ditch. When he opened his eyes, he saw poison ivy. The ditch was carpeted with its flaming red leaves. Because he was extremely allergic to poison ivy, he usually took care to avoid it, especially after the terrible case he’d gotten all over his feet and legs in June. George had given him capsules to take every four hours and Rachel had wiped lotion on him in a way that was so plain and medical, it wasn’t even embarrassing. David had stared at her while she was rubbing it onto his ankles, and even after she stopped, he didn’t look away from her face. He tried but couldn’t. She was only five years older than him, but he’d wished in that moment that she were his mother.

  “You’re a goddamn jerk for getting in poison ivy again,” Rachel had said. “Will you try not to scratch it, at least?”

  He’d nodded yes, still unable to look away, as though she needed to utter some magic words in order to release him. But she hadn’t seemed to know the words either, and finally she shoved the tube of cream into his hand and picked up her rifle and walked off toward the garden, leaving him sitting on the section of wooden fence beside the stock barn.

  Now David stared into the ditch, at the leaves like small poisonous flames. This morning had been so perfect, and tomorrow he and George would have baled more straw, and because driving the tractor didn’t get him out of breath, he could have accepted if George invited him to dinner. Damn! he whispered. Goddamn! But swearing didn’t work for him the way it did for Rachel. David longed for his skin to sizzle, longed for a pain worse than any he’d known, a pain that would dwarf the throbbing of his ankle and his shin. Such a pain would be over quickly enough because the fire would steal the last of his oxygen. Then George might know how sorry he was, and that he couldn’t bear to live for what he’d done. If David’s body had burned, George might at least have known that David had tried with all his strength to stop the fire. If David did somehow die tonight, he hoped that it would be George who came upon his body in the morning, and he hoped George would carry him away in his arms. David grabbed the woody stalks of poison ivy with both hands and tugged upward, squeezing, breaking, and pulling loose the triple red leaves, then crushing them and wiping them on his arms, neck, and face. He would give himself the worst case of poison ivy ever. The combination of itching and pain would be unbearable. He might go blind. He broke off more leaves and rubbed them under his long-sleeved T-shirt, onto his chest, against his ribs and stomach, until he had to rest from the exertion.

  On some bright days, David used to imagine that the barn was so full of energy it might take off like a rocket ship, but he had always intended that after flying into space, it would return whole to its place on George’s land. A big support beam collapsed with a whoosh of flame, and David felt the fire’s heat on his skin, and the air grew thinner.

  33

  THE TAYLOR COW BARN HAD NEVER BEEN PAINTED SO bright a red or with such virgin white trim as it was now, with BARN GRILL lettered on each side. It was a theme park version of a cow barn, of course, no more useful farmwise than those Rust-Oleumpainted implements displayed on the float stones around
the outside, constituting Milton’s farm museum. As Steve the salesman approached the Barn Grill, however, he thought he’d never seen a place so old-fashioned and inviting. That was why he’d moved out here to the country, after all, to take comfort in buildings and objects that had histories, and to get in touch with a more traditional life. He’d stayed alone on Rachel’s boat for hours enjoying the smallness of the space, fantasizing that Rachel would come back and make love with him. He’d been imagining himself living both at home with his wife and on the boat with the girl, imagining that each time he arrived at either place, the woman there would be glad to see him. As dusk fell, though, he’d grown restless and hungry, and by the time he made his way along the river and under the golf course fences, he was ravenous. A sign tacked to the front door read, BE RIGHT BACK, but all that contemplation of a new polygamous life made Steve feel as though anything were possible. If he no longer had to make love to only one woman, then he shouldn’t have to wait for a sandwich, either. When he noticed a side window propped open a few inches, he found an old metal milk crate to stand on and pushed the window the rest of the way up. He tapped at the screen until it came loose and fell out, and then he jumped up and dragged his belly over the sill. He lowered himself, then fell to the plank floor, face first. He recalled such acrobatics being easier years ago, and he swore he smelled animal dung while his face was in the floorboards. He stood up, straightened his pants, and replaced the screen, and only then registered that he’d just committed breaking and entering. Milton should have engaged the safety-lock feature, Steve told himself. Before he could consider going back out the window, though, somebody was unlocking and opening the front door.

  “Surprised to see you,” Milton said. “Did I lock you in when I left?”