by Angela Palm
I’d been forced to go to the funeral so that I would know it had happened. That my beloved boy was in fact a killer. Capital K, facing the death penalty. My refusal to believe it would have to end. My belief in his inherent goodness would have to end. I could not recreate the violence in my mind or reconcile the facts. But they had always given out such good candy, I thought stupidly as I stood at their caskets. And Corey had always been so gentle. I looked in shock upon the lifeless faces of our neighbors, even as I mourned the loss of their murderer, who had been some part of the blurry future I saw for myself. How had I lost him, exactly? How had he lost himself? Leaving the riverbed was supposed to be a good thing, but so far, it hadn’t proven so. How had I clung to this illusion of him for so long?
Everyone else immediately reduced him to his rap sheet. The list of reasons I had that explained his behavior was longer than the rap sheet. Nothing could justify or explain away that level of violence, but I was certain his life leading up to that point was a factor in the life of crime he had sunk into. Standing there, I tried to feel something pure, find something in my bones that I could believe. But instead, there was only the sense that everyone still living knew I had loved him, that it existed outside me now like an extra appendage, and that I loved him still even though he had done what he’d done. Had he known it? I’d never said so. Not even to myself. But there it was. I stood there among the grieving, struck dumb with my own selfish loss.
Generally, the town newspaper was a thing you decidedly wanted your name in or out of, depending on your status. If you were Bridget Trotsma with the brownest eyes and leanest thighs and eagerest stage mother, you wanted to be in. You said, “Look at that. I can’t believe I made front page. Again.” You smiled to yourself knowing full well you’d be on the front page but not knowing that your life would never be better than it was in that moment. If you were Corey, on the other hand, and you had killed two elderly, innocent persons and torched their car in a cornfield, you wanted to be out. You said nothing, if you were smart. But Corey wasn’t that smart. He talked to someone who talked to someone else who talked to the police.
Or, he was smart once, but only had a makeshift upbringing as the fifth of five children, one dead too young, to guide him. This is what I remembered him being told: get out, shut up, go away, your sister is dead, your father is a lie. Growing children, like transplanting spliced plants, is a delicate endeavor. “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men,” Frederick Douglass wrote in the nineteenth century. It is still true. Thugs are made, not born.
I walked the aisles of the grocery story—a mistake, in retrospect. In the bread aisle at the IGA, I heard a man say, “I hope he fries.” Firing squad, another said. In the frozen section: “Those people living in the old riverbed ought to be self-incorporated, if you ask me. Those people ain’t never been fit for this town. Draw a line between the northern farms and the river and be done with them.” Some folks are born evil, someone said. “Ain’t nothin’ you can do about it.” But that wasn’t true, was it? Hadn’t lots of kids from more well-to-do families smoked weed, stolen, and joyridden in their parents’ cars? I was a regular reader of the police blotter, and it almost never contained the name of a Dutch teenager. If Corey hadn’t spent four of his formative years in juvenile detention centers for crimes that rich kids had been let off for, would it have gone this far?
His case never went to trial. His attorney, I learned later, advised him to plea-bargain to avoid a jury trial for the death penalty. So Corey confessed and pleaded guilty. He confessed, too, because he was not at heart a person who would do what he had done. He would not sit in front of a judge, the room full of the victims’ family members, and disgrace them by pretending he was innocent. I was sure of that, no matter what anyone else hypothesized. It was true that his actions were horrifying. But somehow I held out hope against hope in Corey’s civility, in his true self before he shattered, over time, into other broken versions of himself. I knew his soft lips and lean body, those tender hazel eyes, his childlike laugh, his kind heart, his benign presence in my own bedroom on countless occasions. There was light and love at his core, and I had known it as my own. It had corrupted, somehow, dividing and dividing, rooting low, far from the sun.
A prison would take his body, and my parents would take his name. “You’ll never say that name again in this house,” my father said. It was if he’d never existed at all. As if he hadn’t stayed over, eaten meals with us, laughed with us. Loved us. Loved anywhere but his own home. I didn’t even talk about it with Marcus, not for years. They could not take everything from me, though. Hidden in my closet I kept:
A white and purple striped hat that Corey’s mother had knit Twenty of Corey’s Nintendo games, including a Game Genie His cassettes and CDs
Corey’s paperback copy of Stephen King’s It
His walkie-talkies
His soccer ball
A stuffed turtle he won for me at the fair
His Rollerblades, men’s size 12
I could not reclaim my own innocence, bodily or otherwise, to add to the collection, but in my mind I returned to the night we’d gone to the county fair two summers before the murders. Around and around on the Ferris wheel we went, teenagers a little bit in love, our faces alight under fluorescent bulbs and our bellies aching with laughter. I wanted to stay there with him, looping that moment forever to keep him from all the wreckage that was to come. We had stayed at the fair that night until we puked, sick on too much sugar and grease. We two never knew when to quit.
Corey was sentenced in winter, at the end of February. A leap year. The newspaper showed the judge, a middle-aged white man, grimly doling out his sentence. I couldn’t look at his picture in the paper. I already knew the last of the light in him had faded. I convinced myself that whatever I thought I knew about him, whatever closeness we had shared, had been one-sided. Contrived from my loneliness, made of my girlish fantasies. The night at the fair. The almost night in bed. So many moments before those. I smeared the parts of the newsprint where my tears had landed with my thumb, then with two fingers, then my whole palm, until I’d botched up every word they had.
I drove to the field, four towns away, where he’d spent some of the last free moments of his life. The soil was frozen, charred. A petrified crime scene. I said his name over and over, calling him back to ground he’d never set foot on again. I wondered if life would ever grow there again, what corn or wheat could sustain itself in his waste, what mutations would fester as consequence after a plow turned the black dirt brown again.
MAP OF CORN
In 1997, before Monica Lewinsky was the punch line of jokes, before zooming was a thing you could do on a phone with two fingers, before organic was a word in my daily vocabulary that referred to my groceries, I was living in the middle of a test field of genetically modified corn. I had no idea what this meant, other than the fact that seed alterations of both a chemical and a physical nature were involved. We had moved three miles down the road from my first home, and flat farmland replaced our view of the Kankakee River. The river was still near—half a mile due north, beyond a row of trees at the end of a field. We were out of the floodplain, but barely.
Life along the riverbanks would not shake off so easily. Corey’s life had already been cut short, but mine extended into a horizon that I couldn’t see. It was strange leaving a place where I’d lived for fourteen years—where virtually everything I knew about life had happened. We’d moved from the swamp to the fields, which was the equivalent of up, according to my parents. Only poor people lived by the river, and my dad was climbing the economic ladder of the construction industry. This was a symbolic move as much as a practical one. Flood insurance had been pricey. My parents could now actively save for my college education, which would commence, somewhere, in a few years. But it seemed like too much work for such a short distance because not a lot was different at the new house, except for an increased isolation and the view from my wind
ow. Corey was gone—from my window and from my life. Falling asleep became more difficult. I had gone to sleep watching his window for ten years. I was like a baby who’d lost her security blanket. That was the worst of it. There was nothing but stars and silos outside my new window. I interpreted the stars and silos as possibility, as an uncertain future.
My father tried to convince us that this rural home, with only one neighbor in sight, was a good thing. I liked the house, but I didn’t buy his reasons. The move was a reflection of his personal improvement, his success. Maybe things will be better. Maybe a new place would make us into new people, better people. By the initial changes, it seemed to be true. We ditched the Sox and became Cubs fans. The law office my mother worked at provided third-base-line tickets, and we went to games as a family.
Our new road had only numbers for a name—an intersection of directional coordinates that was not like the attractive names of the roads in the subdivisions closer to town, where my would-be friends lived and where I wanted to live. Names like Michelle Drive, Poppy Lane, and Daisy Street suggested a place where life was beautiful and sanguine. Where families were knit close, and mothers and fathers stayed up late laughing and drinking Manhattans and popping maraschino cherries into one another’s mouths after their children were tucked into bed. Pies cooling on kitchen tables on Saturday mornings, casseroles for after-school supper, and such. A place where teenagers weren’t privately grieving the loss of a friend to a prison sentence. Did moving slightly closer to town bring us closer to that ideal?
I had no real love for the cornfields, no appreciation for the systematic coordinates of their gridded, numbered roads. The fields bore no marks of the land’s history, like the riverbed had. A sense of the origins of my surroundings had been constant at the river—where clam shells sprouted from the dirt and arrowheads were readily unearthed with my fingertips. To recreate that reassurance here—place as lifeline—I had to go two miles down the road to Aukiki, a preserved portion of wetland that lay beyond the shoulder of a state road. Marked with only a brown-and-white state park sign and a narrow gravel road, the land opened up beyond the first bend: water-filled gravel pits for fishing, wildlife preserve, and protected forest. I felt at peace when I visited it, removed from the agricultural fair of progress we had moved into, thrust into an authentic representation of the land where blue herons stood long-legged in the shallow water as they had for eons.
The fields that surrounded my new home were laden with a history that I could not yet unpack. They were neither romantic nor scary. They were nothing but flat strips of earth, dotted with the occasional rise of silo or telephone pole, barn or irrigation machinery. I felt nothing about those fields, or those human-made structures, until later. Our new house did, however, have three stories to it, and that was a palpable difference. The old farmhouse sat on an acre of grass that was plunked down in a gigantic cornfield. It was supposed to be part of the larger surrounding farm, a mother-in-law’s residence, I was told, but it wasn’t anymore. It had been sold off, piecemeal, like so much else in that town. And now it was ours—tacked onto an operating farm.
The world, of course, was bigger than us and our new little plot of land. In 1997, Bill Clinton was president and times were good, in general. The country was not at war, for one thing. Farmers in the Corn Belt, where I lived, were reaping benefits from the Freedom to Farm Act that granted them windfall subsidies in 1996 and 1997. These monies were given in addition to the regular Farm Bill subsidies that meant, basically, that no matter what happened, the farmers would be guaranteed profits. Fields previously kept idle to meet subsidy requirements were now abundant with soy, corn, or wheat, depending on each field’s stage of the soil rotation. Some years, the fields seemed to be filled with mostly corn, which reached high above our heads and enveloped the property. In 1997, whoever owned agriculturally zoned land was raking in dough. Farmers bought expensive new equipment and repainted their barns. They bought condos in Florida for their mothers. The heartland was new and shiny and colorful. A place, much like a family, could reinvent itself, distance itself from the past. So could a government, or a nation.
Most everyone who owned huge tracts of land in our town was Dutch, and by Dutch, I mean many of them had parents or grandparents or other extensions of family still living in the Netherlands. People of Dutch descent owned not only most of the land, but also most of the local businesses. Their collective identity defined the town. They were the teachers and coaches in our school district. Their children constituted most of the varsity sports teams, their last names emblazoned on plaques and pendants above the basketball court. They were the handful of professionals the town boasted, as well as the school board. They took annual family vacations to Disneyland and to see national landmarks like the Grand Canyon and Yosemite National Park. I had never myself seen a national park. I used the Dutch as an association to help me pass my high school history test: they were the rural American bourgeois, rich people who had everything and could decide things; river people, who had nothing and held no power, were the working class proletariat. Bourgeois equaled them, proletariat equaled me. Easy A. I broke down meaning in this way a lot, because history, as it was taught in high school textbooks, made no sense to me. It was a half truth, a culled record of facts.
There was a saying around town: “If you ain’t Dutch, you ain’t much.” Every time I heard it, it reminded me that this town wasn’t ever meant to have me in it. Nor them, since the land had been taken from Native Americans in the 1800s. But what did anyone care about that now? Kids who went to school in the towns bordering ours, which may as well have been foreign countries, called us “clickers.” It was meant as a derogatory term having to do with wooden shoes—a derivative of a Dutch cultural relic whose meaning and use was several generations removed from us. It grouped us all together. But how, I wondered, could I be a clicker if I was not Dutch? I had always thought that our community was a vestigial culture, the last remaining small part of something that existed before. We lived on land that was stolen. Our social mores were Dutch colonial holdovers. Our laws and penal system were adapted from English common law. Federal subsidies initiated by government officials who were no longer in office benefited the land-rich. The soil was hauled in from elsewhere, filling in the dune sand that had once been covered in wet marsh. I still had the river in me. Still had Corey on my mind. Yes. We were vestigial, at best.
My father’s first order of business at the new house was planting a garden. During the first weeks at our new house, my dad began tilling a rectangular section of the soil in our backyard. I helped him. I couldn’t wait to stop eating vegetables from cans, though it would take a while for my taste buds to recognize fresh produce as food at all. Our new neighbor, Amos, who owned the big house on the adjacent farm and whose family had leased the surrounding fields for generations, noticed my father working and walked over to us. He put his toes right up against the property line, which extended invisibly from a row of Italian cypresses that marked the eastern edge of our acre. It was probably strange for him, too. It was his mother who had lived in our house before, and he had lived in it as a boy. I knew how unsettling it was to watch other people inhabit a place that had been yours and begin to change it. I had met the new family that moved into our house by the river. Our emotional connections to property were more complex than the legal transactions that transferred it from one person to another.
“Putting a garden in?” Amos was a Deere man, which means a lot was fancy with him despite his being a third-generation farmer. He had gone to college, then come back to the fields, like many of the town’s wealthy farmers. They were educated laborers and small-business men.
My father was a member of a carpenters’ union local based near the South Side of Chicago, but on the Indiana side. He had no college education, which meant there was nothing fancy about him except for the things he built with his hands. You learned after a while that there were two kinds of workers in this town: union and nonunion.
The union workers commuted to the politically Democratic cities in the more industrial northwestern corner of the state—Gary, Hammond, East Chicago—where union labor jobs were more common, while the nonunion workers were employed locally. It was the union job that had allowed our family to move away from the river. The pay was good, as were the benefits. If I kept my grades up, which was a sure bet, they would even provide a scholarship for my college education.
I stopped what I was doing, stabbed my hand shovel into the dirt next to where I was planting our freshly spliced hostas, transferred from our old yard to our new one along with our above-ground swimming pool. I got a fistful of black soil in my hand and moved it around slowly, sifting it through my fingers as I listened. We had had the dirt hauled in. If you dug down a bit past the topsoil, you’d find that the ground was largely still comprised of sand and clay, remnant of the Lake Michigan dunes to the north and the former marsh. I came across a white grub and sent it flailing across the grass with a flick of my index finger.
“You can’t put any corn in it,” Amos said, still on his side of the property line that he had once crossed freely.
My dad stopped tilling and stood up straight, squaring his shoulders. “Why’s that?”
Amos wiped sweat from his forehead with a faded handkerchief. “It’s a genetic test field. Federally funded.”
He proceeded to explain the detasseling process, which sounded a lot like sex to me. The female stalks had openings into which the male stalks’ seeds would blow and seep to begin the fertilization process. That kind of thing. I turned red and rocked nervously on my feet, which were tucked under me in a way that would leave a wild, itchy pattern of grass marks on my skin once I stood up. But nobody was watching me. They didn’t even notice that detasseling was about corn vaginas and corn sperm. More than that, though, I couldn’t believe that corn could be manipulated at the gene level. The most I could figure out was that it must have been like making blue eyes brown with the fine tip of a needle.