Q Road

by Bonnie Jo Campbell

  “Maybe I’ll make two cakes, one for us.”

  Steve said, “Did I ever tell you I took home ec in school? We made cakes, pizzas, cookies, you name it.”

  “You took home ec?”

  “Just the cooking part. I was about the only guy in the class.”

  Nicole said, “I don’t know if we have all the ingredients.”

  “Flour, baking powder, sugar, milk, butter.”

  “Eggs. Chocolate, maybe.”

  They went inside just before Rachel came out from the side door across the street.

  37

  RACHEL CARRIED HER GUN THROUGH THE KITCHEN AND mudroom. When she opened the side door, cold air rushed her. Standing three steps below her was the spirit she’d conjured up, the ghost of David Retakker. Though the haze had hung on through the day, the night sky above the stock barn and pasture was dark and clear, hungry for its new moon. David Retakker’s ghost looked pale and grubby. It was breathing hard, and it scratched its armpit, looked at the ground, and said nothing. For a moment, Rachel herself couldn’t breathe, but then she inhaled the cold air too deeply and choked. She didn’t look away because she didn’t trust this silent apparition not to disappear. It refused to look up at her. She lifted her rifle and looked at the ghost over the sights.

  “Damn you, David!” Rachel said. “What the hell were you thinking?” She had no intention of firing, but when she heard the raccoon rustling near the mouth of the stock barn where the pumpkins and apples were, her sighting, shooting, and pulling the trigger were all one motion. Because she hadn’t been prepared to fire, the shriek of the bullet made her jump.

  “Don’t kill me!” David screamed. And in the same moment, the raccoon beyond him squeaked and died. The shot must have missed David by inches. Rachel threw the gun down onto the wet grass.

  She descended the cold cement stairs in her bare feet and when she reached David she hauled off and smacked his dirt-smeared face. He was solid. He stumbled and regained his balance and then looked at her as though willing her to smack him again, so she did. As her hand struck his ear he yelped. David’s long-sleeved T-shirt was covered with burrs and sticktights. He still wore no jacket, though it was cold enough that breath poured out his nostrils and mouth. Her relief at his being alive threatened to buoy her, but she pushed that aside. She grabbed his shoulders and began to shake him. “Damn you!” She couldn’t think of what to say. “And what about the cows?” she said, and with both hands thrust his body to the ground. David lifted himself onto his elbows and looked up at her from the grass and dirt. She kicked him twice in the ribs with her bare foot, and the second kick must have hurt him because it hurt her middle toes. Though he squirmed away from her, he did not fight back. She kicked him again, in the hipbone, and this time hurt the top of her foot enough that she’d have a bruise.

  David knew that if he could endure Rachel hitting and kicking him, he could stand anything. He wouldn’t defend himself, and he wouldn’t complain or cry. Except that he already was crying. He could hardly inhale and his ankle throbbed and so did the lump on his shin. His wrists and armpits had started to itch already from the poison ivy; his chest muscles ached. He hoped Rachel would not pick up her gun and shoot him.

  “Stand up!” she yelled. “Stand up, you little son of a bitch!”

  When he stood, Rachel slapped his face again, though with little force. “How could you?” She shook his shoulders. “How could you?”

  Only when she noticed he was crying did Rachel realize that she was crying too. She stopped shaking him and said, “You ruined everything. You have no idea about that barn.” Yet it sounded dumb, what she was saying, because really she’d been thinking that David himself had been in that barn, that he was the great loss. Now that he was resurrected from the fire, she could see how the barn had been nothing more than a sorry-ass building, a giant wooden grave marker, a rotting blemish on the otherwise perfect landscape.

  “I’m sorry,” David said.

  “You’re sorry.” Rachel laughed and looked up at the moonless sky. “You burn down a hundred-and-thirty-year-old barn full of straw and hay and a wagon and nearly kill your goddamn self and you’re sorry. You’re the sorriest kid I ever knew.” She was thinking about the other bedroom on the second floor—not the one with the Indian garden drawings, but the one with less junk. They’d need to put plastic on the windows before winter, because it had been cold in there last year. She and David could do that.

  Rachel’s bare feet were growing numb from the wet grass. She was thinking that if George died in his sleep, she could walk down the hall and push open the door to the room that would be David’s and wake David up and sit on the edge of his bed, and when she told him what they were going to do next, then she would know.

  David, for his part, felt exhausted, more exhausted than ever in his life, as if his body no longer had the energy to expand his lungs or to distill the oxygen from the poorly mixed air of this night, and he told himself again that if he could survive tonight, he could survive anything, even living in the woods eating berries and walnuts and wild creatures. When Rachel let go of his shoulders, he braced himself to be punched, but instead Rachel pulled his face into her shoulder and hugged him, and David took comfort in her warmth and in the smell of George that permeated the flannel shirt she was wearing.

  Rachel felt stupidly happy with her arms around David’s shoulder blades and backbone. She felt happy despite her mother being gone, probably forever, despite the wreckage of the fire, despite knowing that George would die beside her. She just felt glad standing here on the land she loved, hugging this sorry kid brought back to the living.

  Rachel said, “Since you destroyed the cows’ barn, you’ll have to help me make a new cow pen. And we’ve both got to somehow help George bring in the corn and beans because he can’t do it himself.” After all, Rachel thought, Corn Girl harvested corn.

  “I’m sorry,” David repeated, now bawling in earnest, gagging and wheezing, struggling against Rachel’s arms to lift his face and breathe. “I’m so sorry.”

  Rachel loosened her embrace and rested her chin on top of David’s head to look behind the house toward her garden mounds, where pumpkin stems lay tangled. She envisioned David’s big-knuckled hands reaching down and cutting the stems with the small machete and carrying them up to the wagon one by one, his body straining. She hadn’t been all that strong at twelve either, she supposed. This winter David could help her build a new Indian garden in the shape of a wagon wheel. He’d stand in the center, holding the end of a fifty-yard length of twine, while Rachel measured out the spokes of a giant wheel, maybe beside the river, or maybe on the site of the burned-down barn. Rachel imagined David weeding her garden and driving tractors across hay fields, eating dinner with her and George at the round kitchen table, passing the potatoes, busting up the silence of their meals with stupid questions and stupid comments.

  She decided to leave the dead raccoon on the ground. She didn’t feel like skinning out anything tonight. If it was still there in the morning, she’d bury it in her garden.

  “Are you hungry, David?” she asked. “You look pretty damn hungry.”

  38

  GEORGE HAD LEARNED OVER THE YEARS TO RELAX WHEN he couldn’t sleep, to lie still and let himself drift, to let his body recover for the next day’s work. Tonight he lay quietly and tried not to think about his barn and David. Instead he thought of the day his first wife left him, thought of all those buttons on the yellow dress she wore. There were twenty-two buttons, he remembered, because instead of listening to her he’d counted the tiny black buttons, which he thought made her look like a cluster of black-eyed Susans. Back then he’d assumed that once you got married you stayed married. After Carla left the first time, she did return, but then she just kept on leaving until she was finally too exhausted from all that leaving to come back.

  When Rachel got up and left the bed, George kept his eyes closed so he wouldn’t see her walk out. There had been one bit of good
news coming out of this day: Parks had stopped just shy of pointing out that Margo and Johnny must have run off together. Despite himself, George had always suspected that Rachel had killed and buried her mother, and his feeling about it grew every time he saw her digging in her garden with a round-end shovel. He could well imagine a scenario in which Rachel’s killing her mother would have been justified, but he was relieved that he no longer had to. It made all the sense in the world that Johnny was somehow responsible for Margo’s disappearance.

  If Rachel were still beside him, he’d stop faking sleep and turn to her, wrap an arm around her and smell her hair, and she would move closer and put one of her strong arms around him. Even if she didn’t love him the way he loved her, she seemed at times to desire his body as simply and wholeheartedly as she desired this piece of land beneath them. When Rachel didn’t return to bed right away, George figured she’d gone outside. She would have no part of lying still and faking sleep. When she couldn’t sleep, she wanted to be fully awake, making love or working or just sitting in her garden waiting for an animal, as she sometimes did all through the night. He never followed her outside on those nights. He felt too much for her already, and if he watched her sitting silently in the dark, his heart might burst.

  Just as he raised his arms to adjust his pillow, he heard a rifle crack so close outside that he thought he’d been shot. He lay still until he heard Rachel’s voice below the window, then he switched on the bedside lamp and got up slowly so as not to lose his balance, as sometimes happened when he stood quickly. George went around the bed to the window, opened it, and rested on the sill, letting cold air into the room. He continued to hear Rachel’s voice but saw only the glimmer of her rifle lying in the wet grass. George pushed up the window screen and stuck his head out in time to see Rachel push David down beside the concrete steps. As the boy lifted himself onto his elbows, she kicked him. At the realization that David was alive, George felt a kind of congestion leave his chest, the way a mouthful of horseradish cleared the sinuses. George thought David was too good a boy to be treated the way Rachel was treating him. George had never in his life attacked another person, and he would never hit David. But it made sense for somebody to be angry. David had destroyed something irreplaceable. David, at his tender age, had already done something he would always regret.

  George thought that a boy who knew regret might listen to the kind of stories Old Harold used to tell, and might even make sense of them in a way George never had been able to. George might try telling David that the people around here had been wrong to send away the Indians a century and a half ago, and that the school board had been fools to send away that widowed teacher, because she might have taught those people something new, might have inspired them to see things differently, the way Rachel had inspired George. George would tell David that if this place was going to survive, the farmers needed a new way of seeing, a new way of farming, maybe a new crop, because clearly with fellows in Iowa getting double his yields, corn and bean farming wasn’t long for this region. George wondered if maybe there was a way to combine farming and gardening; he knew some farmers were trying green beans. And there were the oddball crops he’d read about in the farming magazines—organic carrots, hybrid apples, ginseng that grew in the woods. Hadn’t he heard something about a special kind of popcorn? Beneath the window, Rachel kicked the boy again.

  George had always figured that when corn and beans failed, it would signal the arrival of that monster he’d been watching for at the horizon all these years. He’d always imagined the monster reaching out for him in winter, in the form of bills he couldn’t pay, and he’d never considered that he’d do anything other than admit defeat. But maybe he could put up a fight. If he could slay this beast, or if he tried his damnedest, anyhow, then he might survive into the future. Maybe the future would arrive silently and mysteriously, the way Rachel had arrived outside his door on that spring day, full of anger and possibility. Perhaps the future wouldn’t knock, but would just stand out there waiting to be noticed, maybe was standing there now. If the future were here, then it could be time to start harvesting those walnut trees his grandmother had planted. How much would they be worth now? A few hundred dollars a piece? A few thousand for the taller, straighter ones? George wasn’t surprised when Rachel stopped kicking David, helped him up, and hugged him.

  After Rachel and David went inside through the mudroom door, George put on his jeans. He intended to join the two downstairs, but when he reached the landing, he looked up and noticed that the access panel to the window room had been moved. Instead of following the sound of voices, he climbed the wall rungs as he hadn’t done in years, shoved the panel aside, and pulled himself up into the dark room. He looked south, to the end of the line of roadside walnut trees, where a pool of orange coals glowed. From here the barn’s disappearance was as shocking as the river slithering away downstream, never to return. He looked south and west and assured himself he could make out the length of the dark serpent, but he knew this house was not the same without that barn. Beyond the burning coals glowed the lights of Greenland, which seemed to stretch farther in all directions than he remembered. A string of lights headed west along M-96, toward Kalamazoo. George ran his hand along the bottom of the window frame and found that the picture of the teacher was still stuck where his grandfather had left it decades ago. George didn’t bother to look at it in the dark; he remembered the woman well enough.

  George considered that he might rebuild that barn after all, just for the hell of it. What was involved in building a barn besides more money and more work? His great-great-grandfather had been a mere mortal. So what if it would take George ten years? So what if they never painted the house or got insulated windows or an electric clothes dryer? So what if the new barn could go up in flames just as quickly as the old one? Tom Parks would undoubtedly get a kick out of George’s building a new old-fashioned barn. Milton would help too, so long as he was allowed to see the new barn as a sort of museum. George would tell Milton that Greenland was becoming the town of born-again barns, and surely Milton would appreciate the holy implications of that! If George’s grandfather were still alive, he would help. After all, Old Harold was the man who replaced and glazed these windows forty years ago. And for what practical purpose? A 270-degree view of what was gone and what remained? A man like Harold could forgive George for loving Rachel. His grandmother would not forgive him. For his grandmother, George would plant new walnut trees, two or three for each one he harvested to pay for building the new barn.

  Of course, an identical new barn wouldn’t really be the same as an old one. While the original had been built as a practical affair, George’s rebuilding the same would be a defiant act. Frivolous, even, the way that keeping cattle had seemed frivolous to the deer-hunting Potawatomi, the way that building a window room had seemed frivolous to neighbors in 1834. George had always considered himself a practical person, but the practical thing now would be to sell the place for subdivisions. If the future was going to be Rachel and keeping the land, then it was also bedspring fences, crazy Indian gardens, overgrown lawns, experimental crops, and all kinds of disapproval, from neighbors new and old. Now, George thought, if he could find enough of them, he’d build a new cow pasture out of nothing but bedsprings.

  39

  SHORTLY AFTER SHE WENT TO BED IN THE SPARE ROOM AS usual, Elaine Shore heard a sharp noise like a gunshot. She got up, put on her bathrobe, turned on the hall light, and went and sat again in the breakfast nook. Across the street, in the dim light at the Harland’s side door, she made out the black-haired girl. She wore a man’s shirt that hung almost to her knees, and she was hugging a boy, hugging him as though he were a lost son who’d been abducted by aliens shortly after birth and who had finally been allowed to return home. As tightly as she clutched the boy, Elaine figured that the girl didn’t realize she had to be careful with abductees, for they’d been through a kind of physical trauma the rest of us could not imagine. It was miraculo
us that he’d even survived the crash, let alone made his way down the road to the Harland House. In the upstairs window, Mr. Harland was backlit by a small lamp, looking down on the two below. Elaine felt a spark in her chest, which expanded into a lightness she had not experienced in years. Maybe Elaine could help the boy somehow, advise the Harlands how to care for his delicate condition. She watched until the two went into the house and Mr. Harland pulled his head inside and closed the window. Afterward, Elaine could not hold on to her feeling of lightness, and before long she wasn’t even sure what she’d felt. She got up and stood before the wooden spice rack over the stove, and her chest swelled with anger toward those glass-stoppered bottles. She never used mace in anything. Not fennel either. Even chili powder seemed suddenly useless. She wanted to throw those bottles down with enough force to break the glass, but instead she carefully placed them all in the garbage receptacle, tied up the quarter-full bag, and walked outside to place the bag in her trash container. As the kitchen light came on at the Harlands’, Elaine stepped back into her own house, wiped her terry-cloth slippers on the mat, locked the door behind her, and sat down again. She crossed her arms over her chest to hug herself as she planned her escape from this place. She did not want to be a pioneer; she wanted to be comfortable. She clutched a breast in each hand and gently squeezed.

  40

  OFFICER PARKS HAD DRIVEN BY THE HARLAND HOUSE, intending to tell George the good news, that he’d seen David, but the lights were out and he didn’t want to wake George if he was managing to sleep after all this. When Parks later came across Sally walking up Queer Road from the direction of the Barn Grill, he turned the cruiser around, stopped beside her, and reached across to open the door. She got in automatically, as though she had been expecting him to come by. As she slid onto the seat, her silvery hair flashed in the dome light and she seemed to Parks like some element of nature, like the woolly bears migrating, like birds traveling mindlessly south. When you picked up a spider, it showed no sign of surprise, but just kept walking on your hand and then up your arm if you let it. Sally was an animal that had ended up in Greenland Township the way a woolly bear might get stuck in some kid’s science project shoe box. Parks was glad nobody else was on the road, because giving someone a ride was against the rules and, strictly speaking, nobody but another cop should sit in the front seat of the cruiser without prior approval.