Bad Axe County
Page 30
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Sheriff Ken Skog doesn’t seem all that surprised when Ron and Darlene White’s headstrong daughter, supposedly missing, exits the house fully dressed in barn clothes. Or when she effs him off on her way to open the pasture gate. Skog has yellow crime-scene tape across the wide barn door, but Ophelia leads her ladies right through it and into the milking parlor—twenty stanchions, twenty-one cows, the slow one, Duchess, standing in the doorway splat-shitting as if to keep official Crawford County from following into the barn. Skog backs off.
Heidi White walks under the beam where her dad keeps his old Colt revolver and his box of Whiz-Bangs. She doesn’t think about these items then. What Sheriff Skog says happened did not happen and she doesn’t even think about proving otherwise, seeing if the gun and bullets are still on the beam. Of course they are. She can see deputies beyond the strangely lit doorway to the milk house. She does not believe her mom and dad are in there. Or ever were. Not together anyway. It is a small tight room that her dad deals with alone. All of this is bullshit.
At Cress Springs Farms they milk the old-fashioned way. She shoves her head into Mistress Quickly’s warm flank and paints her teats with Purell and squeezes the far pair and gets started. Her dad always plays the radio, the public station from Prairie du Chien, but the radio is off. It’s a long time before she realizes that what she is absorbing instead—the same way she has always soaked up stories about elections, about Iraq, about arts and interesting people—is the sloppy casual chatter of the officers working in and around the barn. They gossip and joke, yawn and complain. They evaluate yesterday and forecast tomorrow. In a while, after she has milked a half dozen cows, one deputy takes a smoke break, checks in with his wife on the phone. “Yeah, I don’t know, I guess it’ll go up for sale. The land is worth a bundle. Except if you farm it, I guess. You watch, some lawyer from the Twin Cities is gonna buy it so he can shoot his Bambi once a year.”
She finishes Cordelia. She effs off Skog again and goes past the milk house into the back barn. Knowing that all of this is a bullshit lie, that her dad never owned more than one firearm that wasn’t a hunting rifle, she stops beneath the beam and puts a hand up. The Colt, the Whiz-Bangs, gone.
It chills her, the vacant dusty spot atop the beam. Her dad’s gun is gone. It confuses her. Did he use it? But the whole box of Whiz-Bangs is gone.
She has cows left to milk and she does it, weeping silently into their flanks. Later she stands in fireflies on the black expanse of the south pasture. She is sorting out what will never be true, and what will be true forever. She understands the farm is lost. She believes that she is lost. All of her relationships, to every place, to every thing, to every person and creature, including to herself, she believes that these are lost forever. She can’t imagine how or why to live.
She gets a warm, wet nuzzle. The bell cow, old Ophelia, has found her. She doesn’t know it yet. She wouldn’t believe it. But the old cow has found her, keeps finding her, and the nuzzle tells her something she will finally come to remember: beloved girl, someday you’ll be OK.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To those bravely there from the very beginning: Ben Leroy, Blake Stewart, and Alison Dasho; to all the friends and colleagues who generously gave time and attention to some phase of this book along the way: Bob, Mike, Craig, Osman, Kristy, Michelle, Keir, Linda, Natasha, and Larry; to the best editorial team I could have asked for: Sean Delone and Peter Borland; to my outstanding agent, Joanna MacKenzie, whose faith, patience, and vision made it all come together; and, for their loving forbearance against the mostly invisible work of the writer, to Joe, Sam, and Ya-Ling, . . . thank you.
More from the Author
The Nail Knot
Red Sky, Red Dragonfly
The Blood Knot
The Clinch Knot
The Wind Knot
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JOHN GALLIGAN is the author of the novels Red Sky, Red Dragonfly, The Nail Knot, The Blood Knot, The Clinch Knot, and The Wind Knot. He lives and teaches writing in Madison, Wisconsin.
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ALSO BY JOHN GALLIGAN
Red Sky, Red Dragonfly
The Nail Knot
The Blood Knot
The Clinch Knot
The Wind Knot
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ISBN 978-1-9821-1070-3
ISBN 978-1-9821-1072-7 (ebook)