They turned onto a country road and white gravel dust flew up behind them. The land was now very hilly. They plunged into a parklike area, deep in beech trees and shade, with ravines first on one side of the road, then the other. They crossed ravines on old iron bridges. Old farmhouses were decaying in every hollow.
"There's your picnic table, from the map," she told him when they came into a picnic ground. "Geneseo community maintains this for the state. Pretty good job, eh?"
Soon they came up out of the trees. There was a gate and a simple handpainted sign: "Geneseo, Intentional Community, founded 1968." Several kids came running to the gate. Jerome was now leaning forward in his seat, watching. Two swung it open and the others clamored up around the car, smiling and shouting at Janet.
"Hi, Mick," Janet said to one of them. "Is Stephen here today?" The air felt so good coming in through Janet's window that Jerome rolled his own down. As he did so, he heard the gate swinging and craned his neck just in time to see it latch shut again behind them.
The little boy pointed toward several barns clustered in the distance, off to the right across the grassy field. "At the dairy barn," he said.
"Thank you. You're getting very big," she told him. "Where's Barbara?" she asked, and the boy gestured back in a different direction. "Thanks, Mick," she said to him.
All the buildings seemed scaled down. There was something new about most of them. They were made of rough sawn wood on the outside, stained dark, with decorative detail that seemed almost nineteenth century in style. Janet was driving across the large field toward the barns on a two-rutted grass path, grasshoppers jumping on the hood and butterflies scattering. The grass was brushing hard underneath the car. It was nearly noon and the sun was warm, the sky blue as crystal. For a distance the children chased along behind them, laughing loudly. Jerome could hear a bell ringing, like the yard bells they used to have on farms.
Presently Janet pulled up to one of the barns and stopped the car. She stared at the big double doors, closed, and took a deep breath. "He's in there," she said. "I'll be back in a minute."
She climbed out, disappeared into the cool, abrupt shade of the building. The sunlight on the windshield and dash was so bright Jerome couldn't look toward the barn. He stared off to his right, to a stand of trees in the distance.
After a few moments, a tall clean-shaven man came out with Janet. He seemed very friendly to her, chatting as they walked toward the car, laughing warmly at one point, his hand on her shoulder, her arm around his waist. He came to Jerome's side of the car and leaned down.
"Hi. I'm Stephen. Brought Janet back to us, looks like." They shook hands. Jerome didn't say anything, but smiled cordially at him. "Maybe you'd like to come in and get some water or something, look around? We've got to head over and find Barbara and her dad."
"I'd like him to come along," Janet said.
"Look," Stephen said to Janet, speaking over the roof of the car, "this is a family thing. There's no problem with Barbara leaving, far as I can see. But it's Will—we should be sensitive to how he feels about this."
For a moment everyone was still, saying nothing and not moving. Then Stephen opened Jerome's door, and Jerome found himself almost automatically climbing out of the car, Stephen sliding in. He looked up at Jerome. "Half an hour, give us. We won't be long."
Over the top of the car, Janet told Jerome, "I'll be right back." He was looking for some signal from her. Nothing came. She was absorbed now.
He stood outside the barn. Stephen looked large in the passenger seat, next to a very thin and frail Janet. He leaned back, his arm reaching all the way behind her on the back of the seat. The white Camaro slowly turned around in deep grass and headed off the way it had come, the exhaust rising up out of the grass behind it.
Jerome went into the barn. Inside were several cows, and on the other side it was open to a large pasture where many more dairy cattle were grazing. There was a pump and a tin cup like he hadn't seen for years. He pumped himself a drink of cold water, then a second one, washing away the sour taste of the morning beer and coffee. The cows watched him as he looked around. After a while he went outside. The south side of the barn had a painting of John Lennon on it, painted in dots like a Lichtenstein, only in black and white. "In Memoriam" was printed at the lower edge. Each dot was the size of a silver dollar. Jerome needed to get off a ways in order to really see the picture. He decided to head toward the clump of trees. The sun was warm on his back as he walked. Erica, his ex-wife, came into his mind. If they had lived in a situation like this, maybe they'd have survived. No, he thought, she depended on the city, and, really, so had he back then. Judging from the amount of work he was getting done these days, maybe he still did. He thought of the painting he had going right now, felt a wave of discouragement about it. Right now it felt a little irrelevant.
At the edge of the clump of trees he looked back at the Lennon painting on the barn. It was a close-up of the last Lennon we knew, gaunt, amazed at being forty, wire rims on the long bony nose, singing into the microphone, eyes half shut.
Looking into the woods, Jerome spotted a small pond among the trees and a house on the other side. The house seemed large and peculiarly modern, but sunken in among the foliage as though it too had grown there from roots. He sat in tall grass at the edge of the pond, in a large square of sun light blazing down, high noon. He watched the house and occasionally looked back toward the barn, half a mile behind him, to see if the car had returned. He thought about little Barbara. This was what she knew, had always known. It was sad to be a part of showing her the larger world. It was bound to disappoint.
Presently Jerome heard the bell again, ringing off beyond the barns, and soon after that two men came out of the house and hurried along a path that led right toward him. He couldn't tell whether they had seen him or not. His heart sped up, and he bent farther down until he thought he might be completely obscured by the tan grass. The two men passed him, heading out across the field. They seemed like monks, their hair short, their work clothes ill-fitting. And there was something about their silence as they walked fast, side by side, first among the tall trees, then out into the sunlight, crossing the field toward the distant rise.
He walked closer to the house. It was a large cottage, older than the other buildings. As he approached, a woman came out. Right away he thought he might know who she was. She was wearing an old dress that was long.
"Hello," Jerome said, going to meet her. "I'm here with Janet."
"I know," the woman said. "I can see the gate from the other side of the lodge. Her famous white car." A smile. The two of them were standing under gray beeches, oaks red and brown. Jerome could sense their branches arching high above him.
"Am I trespassing? That bell rang and I thought . . ."
"The bell is how we put out word if someone is needed," she said. "You aren't trespassing. I love the sound of it, don't you? You can hear it for miles. Stephen got it from a school that was being torn down in Rockford. It was made in the Netherlands. The new school probably uses buzzers." She looked at him. "Did you find Stephen?" Maybe there was some tension in the question.
A woman appeared in shadows on the steps of the cottage, another at the window. Jerome felt as though he'd come into a herd of deer. Any sudden move might cause them to leap away.
"Well . . ." He gestured back toward the dairy barn. "Stephen and Janet went off that way somewhere, to find Janet's husband, I think. Stephen was at the barn—they went off that way." Jerome pointed again. "They wanted me to wait."
"We all know to find Stephen at the dairy barn if it's a workday," she said.
"Why's that?"
"It's just true. The cattle are his project. Will's not well, I assume they told you." She extended her hand to him. "My name is Madeline Eisley. I'm called Clay City here." She smiled. "It's so your old boyfriends won't ever find you. That's what we always say among ourselves."
"Like Sister Mary Fatima?"
"Exactly," she
said. She looked around. She gestured toward the other women, watching from the cottage. "We almost never get visitors. Can you tell?" She tried to wave them out into the yard, but they wouldn't come. "Janet's name here was Geneseo. Somehow it fit. You get used to things."
In the awkward pauses, Jerome looked out over the pond. Clay City looked back toward the cottage, where her friends continued to watch.
"We know you're here for Barbara," she said. "Is that right?"
Jerome nodded. "Yes."
"It took Janet longer to come for her than we thought it would."
"Yes," Jerome said. "She misses you all."
"She was unhappy here. What's your name?" This directness was much like the assuming way Stephen Boyce had taken Jerome's seat in Janet's car. When Jerome paused a beat too long, she went on. "I don't know what all Janet's told you . . ."
"I'm Jerome. She's talked about her daughter—and, of course, her husband. She talks a lot about the old days, this place. She misses this life, I think."
Clay City looked over her shoulder to the women watching. She stared out at the pond.
"Don't let me keep you from anything," Jerome said. "Maybe I'll walk back to the barn. I'd have stayed but the cows made me self-conscious. Those big brown eyes." They both laughed.
"Will's been having trouble lately. I don't know how much you know."
There was no telling what this lady meant or what she was assuming. Jerome watched her eyes, and what he saw was that she was watching his. After a while he pointed out over the pond, down a long slope to a cluster of rough shacks. "What's that?" The ground around the shacks had been bulldozed.
"We've been doing some clearing down there," she said. "When visitors come—or 'temporaries,' we call them, somebody who might want to join—they stay there. Might end up down there several weeks before they're allowed to come up and stay in the lodge." She indicated the house. "That's the lodge. A lot of kinds of people used to think they wanted to live here . . ." She smiled again. "And we, of course, would never know if we wanted them. Now nobody's coming at all," she added after a moment. "Mostly, we're losing people." She avoided his eyes. "Some of them, when they leave it's in the middle of the night. Like they feel they've failed." The pond whipped up a little in an afternoon breeze. She led him down to the edge of the water, where there was a sort of log bench. "Mostly we would get the young ones. They would always be disappointed that certain things here were about the same as in the world."
"Such as?"
"Such as the raggedy ways people relate."
The woods were very quiet except for the gentle wind. He checked back toward the barn.
"You go through times when this life out here is all you need." She shyly laughed at herself.
"I can understand why someone might want to come here to live," he said.
"We're awfully isolated."
"Isolation can be good sometimes, can't it?" He realized as he said it that he'd never lived in any real isolation in his life.
"Stephen thinks we're almost gone. He compares us to an endangered species—he says that at some point the animal gets the hint and begins to aid in the process of its own extinction." She stood up. "Want to look at the river?"
"Maybe I'll walk back to the barn," he said. "I think we should stay close."
"It is close," she said.
A cat came out of some bushes nearby, a small gray cat, carrying in its mouth a baby rabbit. The rabbit was kicking. The cat found some soft grass and sat holding the rabbit tight until finally the kicking stopped and it stretched out softly in a bent U-shape hanging from the cat's mouth.
"C'mon. It'll pass the time," she said, and she turned to the women who were still watching from the lodge. "I'm going to the gazebo," she called to them. She kicked off her leather sandals and tossed them toward the porch. The women disappeared inside.
The path arched around the pond and deeper into the woods. "The pond is quite important here at Geneseo," Clay City was saying. She was walking ahead of Jerome, her soft old dress flowing off her hips and down almost to the ground. It dragged among the burrs and scrub, and when something caught on the skirt it pulled away, revealing for a moment her bare feet, reddish and rough.
"Little places like this depend heavily on symbols, and the pond is one of ours. So's the bell, I guess. The pond is spring fed. The spring is back there in the trees somewhere. Stephen and some of the other early ones used to give talks at the pond. The idea was to inspire the group to the ideas that founded us. One guy taped most of the pond talks and typed them up. Some have actually been published in magazines. I've never read them, but so they say. This is the cemetery." She indicated off to the left of the path. "We don't mark the graves. One man got sick or something, way back when. There's two babies, and some others. We buried a soldier out here in 1974. He arrived in one of those aluminum cans. Nobody knows who he was. They had an extra body, I think."
As he listened, Jerome thought of the sad story of Clay City which Janet had told him. He sensed that the immediacy of the death of her sister was gone. He looked back into the woods. The dead mouldered under this ancient stand of trees.
"Owl," she said. A big bird lifted up out of the treetops to their right. Its shadow passed over. She was talking straight ahead of her. They came into an area of birches, a wonderland of white and yellow amazingly different from the part of the woods they'd just been in. The birchwood, she called it. Then they came out of the trees high above the river. The gazebo was a round, porchlike structure, covered, enclosed at the back. The walls were a gleaming white wood lattice letting the light through in small diamond shapes which gleamed on the green floor.
"We just repainted it last week. Isn't it stunning?" she said. "I wanted to show it to you because Will built it. He's our best builder. He has all the best ideas." From the gazebo platform, she pointed out over the river to the village of New Boston, and the other way toward what she called Lock 17, a dam.
Jerome sat on the bench in the gazebo and looked out on the river.
"Did you see the sign?" she said. There was a small hand painted plaque over the threshold of the gazebo, on the inside. It said "Save the Earth." "Seems a little dated now. When he came, he was one of these big ecology people. You can about estimate the date of his arrival knowing that—1972, right? He had T-shirts with that green ecology flag, remember? Turned out he was more complicated than that. But we're glad he came to us. For a long time he and Geneseo were very close—but he got worse. He beat her up." She looked at Jerome. "Janet—when things started coming apart with Will and all, so did she. She's an alcoholic. Has she told you all this?"
"No," he said.
"Maybe I should shut up. I'm sorry—I keep wondering how you fit in."
Good question, Jerome thought but didn't say.
She laughed. "You're friends with Janet? That's all?"
Jerome shrugged, feeling a little helpless. "I don't mean to be coy, but isn't being friends enough?"
"Yes." She said it quietly. "I mean," she said, "I guess. We'll see."
"I paint," he said. "I've been teaching some out at the college, in Tuscola. And I do a little carpentry with a local construction crew, to pay the rent. I'm not a craftsman like this guy, though." He indicated the gazebo.
"Well, you must have noticed that Janet drinks a lot. People die of it when they have it like she does."
Jerome stared out across the river from the bluff where they were standing. Iowa.
"Tell me," she said. "Do you think she's stable enough for Barbara to be with her?"
Jerome sat there. He did not answer her. He wondered if they hadn't now struck upon the whole reason for this walk.
"What's Janet doing to eat? Does she have a job?"
Again he said nothing.
"Look," Clay City said, "we love this little girl. She's frail, like her mother. She has a lot of friends here who are as close as brothers and sisters. We can take care of her. Don't take her if Janet isn't ready yet." When he di
dn't say anything, she pressed on. "I'm trying to talk sense with you. We love Barbara very much. We don't know where she's going."
"I understand you," he said. He held up his hand for her to stop. She stepped away from the gazebo and stood looking out on the river. He wanted her to trust him, and he knew she didn't at all. He felt accused of being a party to Janet's problems. He had to think about that one. He realized he would like to have been a friend of Clay City, wouldn't ever be.
"There are only twenty-seven on this land now," she said. "Nine children. There are eleven men and seven women. We've lost eight in two years. We're definitely the whooping crane."
Jerome looked at her. He tried to imagine her, how she'd look and what she'd be like if this commune had not been part of her life.
"A couple of the originals are here. Stephen is the main one. He says he'll be the one to close the door and turn off the lights." She smiled, perhaps having noted that Jerome's guard was up and trying to relax him. "Well, anyway, that's the Mississippi. There are other pretty places I could show you if you had the time. A painter could love this area. I suspect you don't have time, right?" Her tone was cooler now.
Down below, the river stretched before them. At that distance there was no sense of the water flowing, although in the sunlight it gleamed and flashed between colors of blue and brown. She was leading him back toward the lodge, a different route. For some distance, they were climbing uphill. At one point, she passed between Jerome and the sun. He caught a flash of her brown hair in the wind and saw the silhouette of her legs through the veil of thin cotton she wore around her. From the top of the high bank they had climbed, he saw that the Camaro had pulled up to the edge of the trees. Stephen and Janet were sitting on the log next to the pond. Standing off from them, along the edge of the pond, was Barbara. On the hood of the car was a large cloth bag.
When they got to the pond, Clay City hugged Janet, held her a long time. Janet had been crying, and now she was again. Her hair was messed. She was utterly apart from Jerome—it was clear that he didn't belong there at all.
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