House of Heroes

by Mary LaChapelle

  Lakeund let his legs hang over the open tailgate as they drove away from the farm. He felt a familiar sensation in the weight of his dangling feet as the road passed beneath them. When he was a child he used to consider the danger of this. He remembered that Lucy had made a game of the danger and dared Lakeund to try anything she thought he was most afraid to do. Once they had gained speed on their way into town, she’d move a feed bag to block their dad’s rear view of them. Then she would start in with the dares. “Do one foot!” she would say, and show him how to lower a leg closer and closer to the road, until the toe of his shoe was tip-tapping against the pavement.

  He had eventually taken on every dare except one. It was the one where she would hang backward off the tailgate while he held on to her knees. From the position he held her, he could never see how close to the road she dangled. But she would pull herself back up laughing, saying her hair had dragged over it. And once she let the tips of her fingers scrape along the blacktop. When she had come back up, she showed him how her nails had ground down. There were bright beads of blood where the ends of her nails used to be. And they both had looked at her fingers like they’d been changed into something they’d never seen before.

  The road kept coming out from under Roman’s truck, putting a distance between Lakeund and his farm. The farm was a scene now, and whenever it looked that way, whenever there was this distance, the place became a memory, an idea, rather than something he belonged to. The farm was a photograph he wanted to send to Lucy. It wasn’t as small as it had been when she left. There were two new silos, the cheese house, the extension on the milking barn. There was Bernard’s new house and the house Lakeund had restored for his own family. If ever she came home from either direction, she would see the signs that said: KRAMER FARMSTEAD CHEESE—THREE MILES. And yet imagining what she would think when she saw them was partly disappointing to Lakeund. She would never look at them, he knew, without being reminded that the farm had not been her choice of life, and why.

  The Meadow Bell was a roadside bar. It was close to the road with only a small patch of gravel in front. There was room for five cars; any others had to park in the weeds and grass up against the barbed-wire fence that bordered the meadow. Cows grazed in this field all day until evening, and after they were gone, there was still the scent of them in the air.

  A large copper bell hung from a post in front. It had hung there before Peter Kohl had bought the place and named it for the bell. Peter Kohl was Roman’s older brother. He had painted the post light blue like the building, and one year he had paid a man from the city to paint the copper with an American eagle.

  Some nights when a farmer would get drunk, he would ring the bell before he went home. A statement was made. It was just a vibration in the air, and yet it was a unique vibration, something he alone could understand the meaning of. And perhaps hearing the sound resonate over the meadow helped each man feel finished for the night. He walked away feeling he had rung the bell well—that this time he had sounded a clear, good song from it.

  It was cool and dark and musty inside the bar. It was a cinder-block building with a cement floor. There were no windows to speak of, only some places close to the roofline where the blocks had been left out and double panes of glass put there instead. This way, it seemed to Lakeund, the light never touched the room itself but hung in dim, smoky beams overhead. A rectangular plastic lamp that said SCHMIDT hung low over the pool table so that the light was limited there too. It only shone on the blue jeans of the two young men who circled the table.

  As they walked in, Roman stopped in front of Lakeund and Harley. He put his hand to his brow, as if to look past some glare, but there was only the dimly lit bar ahead of him. There was one customer on a corner stool at the bar, a city man wearing a fine suit.

  “Peter, where are you?” Roman called. The city man looked into his drink, as if each ice cube needed consideration. With the stranger there, Roman moved ahead more hesitantly, like a dog in a new yard. He smoothed each of his hands over the sides of his belt. It used to be Roman’s habit, Lakeund remembered, to hitch his pants up across his belly, especially when he was about to meet someone new. Now there was only this small gesture left from the old habit.

  “Pete?” Roman said softly as he peered over the bar.

  “Yeah!” the voice came from down below.

  Lakeund and Harley moved in closer. “What’cha doing down there?” Harley asked.

  “Looking for a thumbtack.”

  “He was going to show me a trick.” The city man looked directly at the two of them.

  “Oooh! The dollar trick,” Harley said.

  The ceiling above the bar was papered with dollar bills. Peter had a way of tossing a bill pierced by a tack so it would stick. Since the locals had watched the trick many times, they already knew Peter could do it. But a stranger would give up a dollar or two just to see something he had never seen before.

  “Ha! Got one.” Peter came up from the bar. He was wearing his usual white shirt. Lakeund always noticed the little plastic case of pens that Peter kept hooked in his shirt pocket, and he thought of Peter setting it on his dresser every night. It never seemed to Lakeund like something a bartender should wear.

  “It’s been a while, Lakeund. Was beginning to think you and your brother never left your land anymore.”

  “Looks like I came in time to see the old trick,” Lakeund said.

  Peter set the tack on the Formica bar and brought some beers and glasses out. The stranger picked up the tack and rolled it between his thumb and forefinger. “Now, how is it we bet on this?”

  Roman and Harley moved up to their beers, and Lakeund came around to the stool to the left of the stranger. He noticed the man had thin black socks. He could almost see the man’s skin through them.

  “Those are the winnings.” Harley pointed at the ceiling. “A dollar a crack. If he misses, you get the quarter.”

  Peter picked up a dollar from the man’s change on the bar. “Okay?” he said.

  “Okay,” the man said.

  Peter stubbed his cigarette out, took a quarter from his pocket, and pressed the quarter against the back of the thumbtack into the dollar. They could all see the point coming through George Washington’s chin on the other side. He walked away, looking up for a clear spot on the ceiling. He folded the dollar around the back of the quarter. “That’s the secret!” Harley bounced a little on his feet. The city man sipped his drink. Peter made an underhanded toss. It went up, the quarter came loose, clinked against the bar. And the dollar, creased in the middle by the tack, came down with a slight flutter like a bird that’s been shot. They all watched it fall. Peter scrambled under the bar to retrieve the quarter. When he found it, he set it before the man. “I’ll bet you a night of free drinks I don’t miss again,” he said.

  “That’s a bargain,” the man said. “Go ahead.”

  He found his spot again. Everyone was quiet when he made the toss, but once again it fluttered down. The quarter clinked down on the floor, and it seemed that everyone was listening to the thin sound of it rolling away. Peter didn’t look for the quarter this time. He brought the dollar back to the man.

  “Bad tack.” Roman rolled it between his chunky fingers.

  “Must be,” Harley said.

  Lakeund decided to look at his beer for a while. Everyone but the stranger seemed crestfallen about Peter’s miss. Now everyone had been put in the spirit of being alone. Even Harley looked drawn into himself.

  Lakeund wanted to say something to make it easier. He wrapped his hands around his beer bottle, as if the cold against the soft center of his palms might shock some words out of him. He always stalled at these times, working up the courage to open his mouth. But the words never came soon enough. He would be almost ready and then realize the opportunity had already passed.

  His hands became cold and damp around the bottle. They had felt the same way in the cheese house this afternoon. He’d been leaning over the vat, pr
essing the curds together with his gloved hands, when he began to feel a numbness in his fingers. He told himself it was impossible to freeze his fingers doing the work. But finally he had needed to tuck his hands in the hollows of his armpits.

  Now he remembered his gloves still hung over the wood of the back fence. He had only gone outside to rest. Eileen had come from the front shop where she sold cheese, then out through the back room looking for him. He hadn’t heard her coming. She slipped her cool hands around him from behind, caused him to shudder a little.

  “Did you lose something?” she said.

  “What?” He hadn’t turned his body to look at her but looked out at the slope of the nearest field, where the first group of cows came walking toward home.

  “Bernard said you came out to find something.”

  “Dry gloves.”

  She went to feel his hands, but he stretched them away from her reach. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Can’t I take a little break?”

  “I didn’t say anything!” But he knew she was feeling anxious about him, and it made him angry. He set his teeth a little and remembered his mother’s expression: “Why don’t you go out and come back in again?” He turned to face Eileen finally. It wasn’t so hard. She was holding a neutral expression.

  “The weeks get pretty long in the summer, don’t they?”

  “Yeah, they do.” Her expression softened, grew a little less guarded.

  He had tried to make peace with her. He talked her into closing the shop earlier tonight, so they could make it to a fish fry, even though it was Friday, and there were so many city people driving north past the farm. Fridays they always sold the most off the road.

  She would be looking for him soon to go to the fish fry. He should be home in an hour, but he already dreaded that he wouldn’t make it, that she would come back out again and those sad gloves would be there.

  “I’d like to see you do that trick again sometime using a sharp tack.” The stranger looked up at the old bills on the ceiling and said this as if to the whole group rather than to Peter alone.

  “And you’d be sure to see it work too,” Roman said.

  Harley smiled at Lakeund. Now everyone was feeling better. “If I’m going to be serving you free for the rest of the night, the least I could get is your name.” Peter wiped the bar in front of the stranger and put a dry coaster in place of his empty glass.

  His name was Bob Lowell. He watched Peter rummage in the refrigerator for another piece of lime to garnish his second gin and tonic. A young man and a woman with long smooth hair came in the door, bringing a square of sunlight across the floor. Then the door slammed shut behind them, and it was dark again in the room.

  The man came up to the space at the bar between Lowell and Roman Kohl. He ordered a beer for himself and a whiskey sweet for the girl. She sat down at a small table against the far wall and leaned her back against the cinder blocks. She pushed the sides of her hair behind her ears with each of her thumbs.

  The shy one on Lowell’s left, the farmer, grew even more still when the girl entered. He was looking steadily at his empty beer bottle as though it was the most important thing at the moment. But Lowell had an idea that he was really watching the girl. He suspected the farmer was one of those taciturn fellows who paid attention to everything but never let on.

  He liked this Wisconsin bar. This was exactly the place he had hoped to run across when he had chosen to drive rather than fly from Minneapolis. It was an opportunity to get a sense of the area.

  Lowell was an engineer, a designer of small airports. It was his intuition about human personality, however, that he held in his own highest esteem. And this quality more than anything else, he felt, made his success as a designer. Airports, after all, were designed for people. He always impressed this upon his clients. The shape of a door handle, a particular grouping of chairs, precisely where the sun would enter a terminal’s window at lunchtime, or sunset—these were things that concerned him: they had to do with realizing people’s needs.

  The girl lit a cigarette, exhaled, took it in again, and blew it out. She surrounded herself with smoke and that defensive look that women seemed to need when alone in bars. Then the young man walked back and sat down in her smoke.

  Roman and the nervous man, who had introduced himself as Harley, were shaking dice together in a plastic cup. They would spill the dice onto the bar, count the roll, then quickly fill the cup up again for another shake.

  One of the pool players brought an empty pitcher up to the bar to be filled. The beer gurgled out of Peter’s tap down the inside of the pitcher. There was a smell of old perspiration from the young man’s clothes.

  The farmer’s hands circled his empty beer bottle. Lowell noticed that they looked very white, as if they had been under water for a long time. His face, however, was a good color. He had fine, square shoulders. Lakeund was what the bartender had called him.

  Lowell had a reverence for farmers. So often he had flown over their farms. Peering out of the small window of the plane, he would reflect on how every man had his square of land. Although he knew it was naive to think so, he liked to think of the farmer as the model man. It was he who most truly and simply made a life in nature. And wasn’t it also he who had the best chance of maintaining his innocence? Because his tasks in life were basic and not so easily confounded by the many anxieties of civilization.

  “Lakeund, that’s your name, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right.” Lakeund turned.

  Now Lowell could see his entire face. He wasn’t wearing a mesh visor cap like the other two. There was something refined about him, something more sophisticated than the others. He had pale eyebrows and an aquiline nose. The kind of nose that princes were given in the illustrations of children’s books. His skin was not rough from the sun, but it was aging, the most delicate lines traced down from the corners of his eyes around his cheekbones.

  “I’ve been guessing that you’re a farmer.”

  “That’s one of my hats.”

  “Let me buy you and your friends another round,” Lowell offered, not sure if he was offering this too soon, not sure why he wanted to do this.

  Near the end of his second beer, Lakeund’s whole body was facing Lowell. His knees were apart, his feet propped up on the rung of his stool. Lowell had already become very fond of him and was gratified to have been brought into such close confidence with a countryman. He was surprised at how much he already knew about him: the second son of a fourth generation dairy-farm family, he had married a local woman and was the father of four girls and a little boy. He was a certified cheese maker. That was the other hat he wore. But it was not an art passed down from generation to generation, as Lowell had assumed. The truth was they had only learned twenty years ago. If there was a beauty in cheese making, Lakeund said, it was in the possibility of naming a price for their own product.

  Lakeund brought his bottle near his lips and kept it poised there. Then, instead of drinking, he tipped it toward Lowell to make a point. “The government gave our milk a price, and after three years of finding a feed bill larger than our milk earnings, we were feeding the cows their own milk. Nothing left to do but think of something else. So Bernard came home one day from a university seminar all about agricultural diversification. Every night he and my dad would argue about Bernard’s plan. My dad couldn’t see beyond the cows and the work he knew. And I would be real quiet at the table because I was younger and wasn’t sure what to think. But Bernard was set, and he brought me into it.”

  “Farmstead cheese,” Peter said, pausing to light a cigarette, “means they use only their own milk for their cheese.”

  Lakeund reached into his back pocket and brought out his wallet. He spread out some family photos on the bar in front of Lowell.

  The girl with the smooth hair had come up on her own to the bar. She wanted a pack of cigarettes. Peter talked to her in a soft voice. The sound of dice stopped.

  “What, you showing
pictures?” Harley called over.

  “Never mind. You’ve seen ‘em all.” Lakeund spoke up.

  He turned slightly away from the group, so Lowell did too. “You can see all my girls together here. This was just a year back.”

  “Is this your wife with them?”

  “Yeah. You see they all have somewhat the same eyebrows. Kind of like question marks. Lord, if I don’t feel like I’m in the middle of a lot of questions sometimes.”

  Lowell laughed, but Lakeund’s face remained serious. Roman and Harley laughed too.

  “Do you have a picture of your boy?”

  Roman and Harley chuckled again. Peter leaned over to hush them.

  “No, no, I guess not,” Lakeund said. “But I can give you an idea. He looks like me, and he looks like her.” Lowell looked down at a small picture Lakeund had slipped from a back slot of his wallet. A girl in her teens. Her style of hair was maybe from the fifties. It was a formal picture printed on something like magazine paper, only the gloss had been worn off. He realized that it had been snipped out of a yearbook.

  “Who is she?”

  “She’s my sister.”

  Lowell took the flimsy square between his fingers. She had darker features than Lakeund.

  “Is your son dark, too?”

  “No, he’s got my color. But around the mouth and chin—that’s hers.”

  Lowell thought it was unusual, even a little alarming, for someone to hang on to such a picture. Had she died?

  Roman leaned forward. “Hey, Lakeund, how ‘bout some talk over here.” Then it seemed Roman was embarrassed about speaking up.

  “Roman wants to buy another round!” Harley smacked him on the back. “Don’t you, Roman?”

  “Where do you come from, Mr. Lowell?” Roman asked.

  “Seattle.”

  “I think that’s where my sister might be,” Lakeund said very softly.

  “What are you doing in these parts?” Roman kept on.

  Lowell knew that no matter how he put it, his job would set him apart from the others. He decided to keep it simple. “They’re expanding an airport in Prentice. I’m helping plan it.”