With your wife and son?
He could’ve been sick.
He could’ve been on the run.
It’s a nice enough impulse but my God. You got to be more careful than that these days.
Could’ve been a thief, a drunk, or worse.
Could’ve been a foreigner.
He looked like a foreigner.
Anything could have happened.
They tsked, they looked at each other with faces of wonder. They never could understand John Walker or what seemed to be his lifetime of poor decision making. The backward code he seemed to live and work by—his entrepreneurial failure somehow as perpetual as it was absolute. It was as if each of the Walkers in his time was choosing again and again, every morning in his workshirt with his first cup of coffee, to fail. They worked for free, or seemed to; they forgot or neglected to bill their neighbors; they worked so many hours a day, but scarcely profited by it at all.
What other, secret work did these Walkers live on?
People wondered. People talked.
John Walker. Just look at the guy.
That long, lean frame, the patched workshirt, the steel-toed boots. And that look in his eye, as if he had seen right behind your face and into the inner workings of your brain and had decided, upon seeing everything there was to see about you, to say nothing. A nod of the head.
And Gordon. Did you ever see a more serious eighteen-year-old?
Works harder than three grown men put together.
Abnormal, tell you what.
Yeah but he’s got Leigh Ransom’s attention.
A knowing look, a groan.
In such a small town she seemed a great beauty, her hair long and brownish gold and tumbling over her shoulders and down her back the way the g and the h fell with bulky grace through the letters of her name.
Gordon must be hung like a bull, someone said.
Everyone laughed.
That girl is vain about her hair.
All women are vain about their hair.
And then there was John Walker’s regular disappearance out of town, presumably to tend remote customers up near Three Bells or Horses, customers who, if they really existed, were probably not paying him for his work, either.
Walkers used to run a farrier service out of their old trucks, someone remembered.
Yeah, but no one up north has horses anymore.
No one up there has anything anymore.
Nothing up there but an old gas station. Used to belong to that Indian guy with no teeth.
Gerald. But he wasn’t an Indian. He’d make you an RC with whiskey.
Sharp as a tack.
Whatever happened to him?
A shrug.
Well anyway, gone now. Nothing and no one up there.
See then? Walker’s visiting Boggs. Got to be.
More laughter.
So had they sometimes jokingly cast John Walker as the unlucky Good Samaritan of local legend in which a man and all of his sons and grandsons were bound through the generations to tend an immortal, wounded pioneer, one Lamar Boggs, purportedly left for dead by his nineteenth-century companions who were racing west like hell for leather after a better life. The first Walker in the region found him, nursed him, and set him up safe and sound in a tiny hut on the mesa. One you could still find if you drove north, and were really looking for it.
And truth be told, the joke sort of stood to reason. In over a hundred years—in spite of all rationale and opportunity as their neighbors fled drought, dust, influenza, auctioneers, grasshoppers, fire, boredom, and disappointment—the Walkers never left Lions. If there were other stragglers in town, it was because they didn’t have the means to leave, or weren’t staying permanently, but working various financial stratagems to land someplace better. Denver, say, or Boise. They liked to say to each other in Lions that those who had come to America and come west, as their families had, did so because they were risk takers and big dreamers. But what, they wondered, had been the Walkers’ dream? For what had they taken the risk of coming out here and then, against all reason, decided to stay? They might have thrived somewhere else, but were riveted to the plain, it seemed, couldn’t leave if they’d wanted to. If old Boggs was really up there, the Walkers were certainly the men to tend him.
“No one else would stick around to do it,” Boyd Hardy said. He stood behind the bar with arms folded in front of his chest, a bottle of Bud Light in one hand, leaning back against the counter.
“Tell you what,” Dock said, and pointed his beer bottle in Boyd’s direction. “If they weren’t the best men in the county I’d say you had it wrong.”
“Maybe he just goes north to be alone,” May Ransom said from behind the bar, where she often ended up after closing her diner across the street. She refilled her own glass of boxed white wine.
Boyd stared outside, not moving. “Seems to me there’s alone enough to be had right here in town.”
When weeks later Chuck told them about the stranger’s stop at the Walkers’ that night—the shower, the cocoa, the buttered toast—everyone shot accusatory looks at Boyd, who by that time was a little hangdog, his thick silver mustache a little ragged, his own truck oiled up and ready to pack and leave Lions for good.
“You all saw him,” Boyd said.
Yes, they’d all seen him.
But that evening in the Walkers’ kitchen, the man had bent over the table with John and Georgianna and spooned scrambled eggs into his mouth, perfectly sound, perfectly human, if the Walkers and Chuck could be believed.
They’d talked about the country, Chuck reported, and the stranger spoke like a stranger indeed, full of questions about what they grew in town, and for how long, and how it was that this little place tacked to the high plains had managed to survive.
“Does it look like it survived?” Georgianna asked, and smiled.
According to Chuck, they talked snowmelt, irrigation, alfalfa, hog feed, and welding. The man had a cousin who was a metalworker, and who would have envied John’s setup to no end.
“A metalworker,” John said, grinning and displaying his evenly gapped teeth.
The man wiped his index finger across the plate to get all the yolk and licked it clean. “Beg your pardon, ma’am.” He set his hands in his lap. “Been hungry.”
Georgianna was back up at the stove. She set two warm hard-boiled eggs on the counter beside her. “For your Sadie,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“And another couple for you coming up, no arguments.”
“Thank you so much.” He spread his long hands open on the kitchen table and stood.
To the west the sky was slowly darkening to blue-black and the box elder branches were beginning to circle and twist in the increasing wind.
“Warming up to rain,” John said, “but it won’t rain.” It had rained a week earlier, a thin and drizzly sputter that would turn out to be the last until mid-October when a cold and wet turn of weather would freeze into sheets of jagged glass across the plain.
John and Georgianna stood beside each other inside the window, watching the man carry both eggs in one hand across the grass to his dog. She wagged her tail as the man approached and took each egg, one at a time, into her mouth. Then the man stooped and spoke to her, scratched her ears. John put his hand on the small of his wife’s back.
When the man returned to the house he thanked them again. “Feels good to give your traveling companion something good to eat.” Then he ate four more eggs—eight eggs in that single meal.
“Been out in the snow and weather much?” John asked him.
“Some.”
“You have the things you need? Want a thermos? Got an extra in the shop.”
“A warm hat,” Georgianna said.
The man raised an open hand in their direction and shook his
head. “Something I can do for you?”
Outside in the wind and last light he helped John move a pile of corrugated steel scavenged from a demolished farmhouse and its outbuildings twenty miles north, in Horses. They both wore heavy gloves and sidestepped through the new weeds until the pile was in the pole barn. They put the scrap angle iron and rectangular tubing on racks. The dog circled the men and pounced on field mice and loosed a skein of red-winged blackbirds that lifted up over the house and settled again behind it. Back in the kitchen the men washed their hands in the sink and a cold blast of wind blew the curtains in. Georgianna reached across the stranger and closed the window with a long, freckled arm. “Looks like you found us just in time,” she said. “Why don’t you bring your dog in?”
“In the house?”
“We’ll set you up on the cot in the bunkroom for the night,” John said. “It’s nothing fancy but it’s got a stove. We have another room in the house but it’s Gordon’s.”
“Our son,” Georgianna explained. “He’s out with his girl.”
The man glanced at her, then John. Their open faces, their warm, comfortable home.
“I think best,” he said, “if we keep moving.”
Georgianna gave him two peanut butter sandwiches, a bag of dried apple rings, and a can of tuna fish for the dog, and put it all with his clean clothes in a plastic bag.
He looked down at the coveralls.
“You keep them,” Georgianna said. “Might have a string of cool nights here. Those are sturdy.”
John gave the man a ten-dollar bill. By full dark he was walking down the frontage road straight toward town.
At the bar and in the diner, however, given what they learned later, they could hardly believe the man’s visit at the Walkers’ had been as civil as Chuck’s reports indicated it was.
Over the following few weeks, reports of what happened next rushed in whispers like wind through the grass. Edie Jacks, who lived in the house behind the alley, said the man left his dog on a little brown square of withered grass right by Boyd’s bar, and opened the door. From her kitchen window where she stood watching, the light inside the bar narrowed to a ribbon and went out.
That evening, Gordon Walker and Leigh Ransom were out in John’s truck. Gordon turned north, then west on a narrow county road, and drove straight over a vacant field. The old, blue Silverado bounced and he and Leigh swayed in the cab, but the MIG welder and toolbox were fixed firmly in the bed. In the distance before them, the dark red form of the empty sugar beet factory was set on the ragged edge of town, backed up against what had once been the westernmost edge of fertile tallgrass prairie, then beet fields, and was at last cast aside as hard ribbed ground grown wild with weeds and bristling forbs not even sheep would graze on.
Gordon and Leigh could hike to the factory on foot from their adjacent backyards, but they’d driven out to Burnsville this evening—the closest city, where their high school was—to buy butter burgers and french fries. In the back of the truck, in a cooler, they had a stash of canned beer from Boyd’s bar. Leigh ate the last of the fries with her bare feet braced against the passenger door, her head in Gordon’s lap so she could see the birds and bats darting above. She reached up with every other fry and popped it into Gordon’s mouth as he drove. With each one, she listed something they would have in the fall, in college, that they did not and could not have in Lions.
“People our age,” she said.
He glanced down at her. “I only have eyes for you.”
“Movie theater.”
“Overrated.”
“Real restaurants.”
“Overpriced.”
“Beautiful houses. Museums. Schools. Kayaking. Hiking. Snow on the mountains.”
Gordon tossed his hand, dismissing all of it. “Admit it. You love it here. Nowhere else will ever compare.”
She pinched him. “Stop. I know you want to go.”
He ran his fingertips along her jaw and rested his hand on her shoulder. “I do,” he said. “Of course I do.” He slowed the truck to a stop, turned off the engine, pulled her up, and kissed the sides of her face.
To get inside the factory they went not over the razor wire, but beneath a curled lip of chain-link that as children they’d disguised by tacking it back down with a railroad spike in a hole that took all day to pick out, the pale dirt so hard and dry it was no more fertile than moon rock. They say in its first years of being tilled there were nearly a hundred kinds of wheat growing in the county, and fifty kinds of oats, and flowering fields of green and white alfalfa of such prodigious harvests that at the World’s Fair grand prizes for both comb and strained alfalfa honey went to Lions. They say the nights were uniformly cool and the days were full of sunshine, that there was no such thing as mud or dust, only loamy black soil the consistency of dense chocolate cake, and root vegetables as big as your head. Some of the old-timers, however, might snort and tell you such stories don’t amount to much more than how a sense of loss can lead a person to imagine an overabundant past. If for a short time the story people told themselves about the place involved bushels of grain, melons big as wagon wheels, and ten-pound sugar beets, so much the worse for the ground that yielded them. Where once there had been wild onions and yams, buffalo, antelope, bears, and streams of fish, Lions’ earliest residents envisioned cattle, wheat, hog feed, expansive homes. When the former were decimated, the place became inhospitable, the sun hostile, the dirt shallow and as fine and dry as chaff. Their mistake was not in failing to see how difficult it would be to turn the place into a garden, but in failing to see that it had already been one when they arrived.
Sometimes when Leigh stepped inside the dim and rosy light of the empty factory, she felt something touch the back of her shoulder as if to warn her away. She was conscious of whispers and shadows moving across the wall, pricked by a nagging feeling not so much of alarm, or of fear, but of naked longing. The kind of feeling you get when you see the taillights of a single car disappearing over the curved ridge of earth in the last light of day. Wasn’t it pulling something of yourself along with it? There was a powerful spirit in the factory, she tried to tell Gordon. Something unsettled, a darkness that felt alive despite its stillness. He asked her to point to it. She slapped at him.
What had been the second-story floor had begun to buckle and crack, so that sun and moonlight splintered at odd angles in strange, bright patterns overhead. It was old flatiron construction, with massive beams of riveted steel. Broken slatted boards were nailed and rotting over long, narrow arched windows. On more than one occasion the feeling the place gave Leigh raised the hair on her forearms and scared her outside. Once Gordon not only laughed at her, he planted his feet, threw his head back, and asked whatever was there if it wouldn’t show its face. Come out of hiding.
“It will kill you,” she whispered from the doorway.
“If it’s so important,” he said, “ignoring it will kill you.”
Only one man’s story from the factory survived from the days before it finally shut down, if you could trust Marybeth Sharpe, now ninety-three years old and still living above her junk shop next to the bar. The man was from Rushville, Nebraska, or maybe it was Valentine or Alliance, Marybeth couldn’t quite recall, but some small town up there where she had cousins on her father’s side. The factory and fields employed scores of men and women to crawl on hands and knees from April to November thinning and blocking the rows to make space for big beets, to maximize teaspoons of sugar per vegetable—it was crippling work—but the Rushville man was lucky. He was neither a Mexican nor a German-Russian immigrant, so his job was inside.
The factory was the same maze of pipes, diffusion cells, flumes, and tanks you’d find in there today, but all the steel now rust-bitten and corroded was at that time a bright blue metal. Rushville’s job was on the first floor of the north side, where great agitators blended sugar beet juice with lime. H
e was to produce the lime rock in a massive coke oven. Around him in stacks of red brick and twists of metal were narrow metal staircases and fires, hot water, towers of steam. The decaying beet mash in the plumbing stank like hellrot, and where it landed outside of the plumbing it slicked every walking surface with slime. On a day when the graining screens malfunctioned, which was common enough, Rushville was on shift. He shut off the steam and began disassembling the heating drum, but when he unfastened the bolts, gallons of scalding water poured out over him from above.
You can imagine the screams of steam, the screams from the man, the terror in the hearts of his fellow workers, who would have been torn between helping and shielding themselves. Outside in the fields, the men and women stopped crawling over the bony soil and listened. The sun roared down on them.
In most versions of the story, Rushville did not die. Years after the accident, after he had healed from the immediate burns and skin grew over him in a sheen of pink plasticky flesh, his face unrecognizable, his hands missing most of their fingers, his wife birthed a baby girl.
It was the bundle of these last few details that haunted Gordon and Leigh, the white ovals of their faces uplifted in the dusty junk shop as Marybeth described the strange little family and the long, low, dilapidated potato barn they inhabited. Thinking of the transformation of that man, of all the mornings he woke without a face anyone would recognize as human, missing pieces of his hands, his arms immobilized by hardening scar tissue. Imagine him, this man, making love to his wife. What mettle or faith must have been required of her? And not just required of her, but of him, and of their daughter, too, who never left them, and, it was said, was buried beside them?
“Staying power,” Marybeth Sharpe said, her twisted-up hair already white as bone. “This was a good man,” she said. “You understand? And a very good woman.” She pointed her eyes and nose at each of them, one after another. “OK. Get out. That’s all you need to know.”
Sometimes in the factory with nothing better to do, as tonight, Leigh remembered Rushville in a ceremony of her own design, in order to ward off such tragedy. It was not so much an act of faith as part of a bargain: in exchange for the time the ceremony took from her life was a promise that things would go well for her, that all the rumors of abundance and health and wealth and progress would be bestowed upon her. Good fortune would come to her precisely because she had taken the time to perform this liturgy, one that would keep her safe and happy because she’d written it that way.
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