Bleeding Kansas

by Sara Paretsky

  Robbie hated Teen Witness. People laughed at him enough because of his weird clothes, his cow milking, his angry father, and Nanny, who posted all her neighbors’ problems on the Web. She had made Robbie teach her to use the Internet, then was always coming to him for help in putting photos and stuff on the Schapen Web page. If he tried to argue with her, she and Arnie both got on his ass about the Fifth Commandment.

  Most weeks, Robbie avoided Teen Witness because of the farm’s milking schedule, but, for some reason, this fall Nanny had decided that Robbie wasn’t showing his faith strongly enough. It was something complicated, something to do with her anger at the Jews’ not letting her near Soapweed’s special calf, or her anger with Robbie for not being a muscular blond clone of Junior, whom she missed, even though she drove over to Tonganoxie Bible every Saturday to watch him play football. Or maybe she was just getting senile. Ever since school started, she had forced Robbie to race home on Wednesdays to do his share of the evening milking, then drive back to town for Teen Witness.

  “Junior never had to do this,” Robbie said to her.

  “Junior had football practice.” Myra’s false teeth clacked like a snapping turtle, as if she wanted to stick out her neck and snap off Robbie’s head.

  “I have band practice.”

  “You spend enough time making that racket. You’re doing Teen Witness for Jesus and you’re doing it so the valley can see we’re a Christian family, not like some out here. Jesus is showing the Grelliers the error of their ways, all right.”

  “Isn’t it enough that you wrote it up and put it out on the Web?” Robbie shouted. “How do you think Lara feels having you point a finger? Didn’t Jesus say, ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged’?”

  Myra hit him so hard across the mouth that his lip split.

  “Don’t you try quoting Scripture to me. You’re this close to the pit, Robbie Schapen. If Jesus returned this minute, with your disrespect fresh in your mouth, you’d be left behind with those Grellier heathen you’re so fond of.”

  Robbie recoiled, not so much from the blow but from the fear that she’d divined his longing for Lara. He was so careful with the songs he wrote for her, to keep them taped inside his biology notes, between two pages of formulas for carbon derivatives. When he went upstairs to change, he double-checked the notebook. The pages seemed secure. Anyway, Myra wasn’t subtle: if she’d found his love poems, she would have been screeching about them.

  He took a quick shower, and put on a jacket and tie, but stood in his room for a time, staring out at the fields. Too many trees and barns lay between his house and the Grelliers’ for him to know what Lara was doing.

  The day after they took Mrs. Grellier to the hospital, Lara had stayed out of school. She’d been coming the two weeks since then, although in the classes they had together, biology and Spanish, she hardly seemed to be doing any homework. Robbie worried that she might start failing her classes. He imagined offering to have study sessions with her. The one time he’d tried to approach her, she’d looked at him with so much contempt that his blood froze and he backed away without speaking.

  Of course, that was because of Arnie and Myra. Naturally, Arnie had learned about Mrs. Grellier taking a drug overdose when he went on duty at the sheriff’s office that night. He’d been ecstatic at more bad luck befalling Jim Grellier, gloating that now Jim would know what it felt like to try running a farm without a wife to help him out.

  “And that daughter of his he’s always been so proud of, mark my word, she’ll be next, drugs or pregnant, or maybe both. Grellier has always looked down on me, but when he sees Nasya—sees this miracle calf the Lord sent me—and when he sees how my boy is making a success over there at Tonganoxie Bible while his own son is burning in hell, he’ll be eating my shit and wishing it was his. Like the Bible tells us, ‘Pride goeth before destruction.’”

  No wonder Lara looked at Robbie like he was a plague of kafir ants. He turned gloomily from the window and went back down the stairs.

  Myra came out of the kitchen to look him over, to make sure he wasn’t wearing his BECOMING THE ARCHETYPE T-shirt. “I called over to Amber Ruesselmann’s mother and told her you’d be by for Amber in twenty minutes. So, mind you, step lively now. And remember, Amber’s a good Christian girl, so don’t try any nastiness with her.”

  Since you think I’m a faggot, Robbie thought, why do you imagine I’d try any nastiness with a girl, especially one as butt-ugly as Amber. And how dare you set up a date for me without talking to me first? But he kept that, and the rest of his rage, to himself, too scared of his grandmother to risk another confrontation this afternoon. Instead, he slammed the door as hard as he could, ignoring her clacking and hissing behind him about the sin of using objects to do his swearing for him—that will send you to hell just as sure as taking the Lord’s name in vain. He knew the litany by heart.

  Robbie drove slowly down the long side road that connected the farm with the county road. Arnie had stopped maintaining their end when old Mrs. Fremantle died, and it was as rutted and hole-filled as the Fremantles’ side. When Robbie asked why they couldn’t get a load of gravel, at least for their side, his father answered incomprehensibly, “I won’t give Jim Grellier the satisfaction.”

  Robbie turned south toward the highway but stopped to look at Mrs. Grellier’s experimental farm. He had joined Junior and Chris Greynard in making fun of her and teasing Lara when Mrs. Grellier had started the farm four years ago. Now he felt ashamed, especially since no one was looking after it. The dying organic-sunflower crop was one more thing Arnie was gloating over.

  Blackbirds and meadowlarks were helping themselves to the seeds. As he watched, he spied Lara. She had draped herself in a sheet and was running down the rows, flapping her arms. The birds rose and squawked as she approached but settled back down on the flower heads as soon as she moved to the next row. They bent the sunflowers almost to the ground as they helped themselves to the seeds.

  Robbie pulled his truck as close to the ditch as he could and climbed down from the cab. By the time he had picked his way through the ditch, on the east side of the road, and reached the field, Lara had disappeared. He felt a sharp contraction under his ribs. She had seen him coming and taken off for home. Just as he turned to leave the field, though, he caught sight of her: she was sitting in the middle of the field, her white-draped arms over her head like a tent.

  He walked up to her slowly. “Lara? Lulu?” His voice came out in an embarrassing squawk, as if it were still breaking in the dreadful way it had done all last year.

  “Go away!” Her own voice was muffled by the sheet.

  He squatted next to her, his right hand out, palm up, as if she were a meadowlark herself that he was trying to coax. “Lara, it’s me, Robbie. I was driving by, and I—uh, I saw you here. Do you need some help? With the birds, I mean?”

  “What, so you can laugh at me, and put it on your family’s website? ‘Some of our neighbors have grandiose ideas, but God hates them and is punishing them by letting the blackbirds eat their crop while their mother tries to kill herself’?”

  He turned crimson. “I wouldn’t ever do that, Lara, honest. It’s my nanny, her and my dad. I tried to make them stop, but they don’t listen to anything I say.”

  She finally pulled the sheet free of her head and looked at him suspiciously. She’d been crying so hard that the dirt on her cheeks had turned to mud. Somehow that made her look all the more vulnerable, all the more appealing. He leaned over and put his arms around her. She smelled of dirt and sweat, not fresh grass as she had when he was crouched behind her in Chip’s Nissan last winter. He didn’t care. He couldn’t believe it, she was in his arms, she wasn’t fighting him off or calling him “cowpoke,” or “milkboy.” She was leaning against him.

  “You’re all dressed up,” she said. “Now your good clothes are dirty. Will your gram be pissed off?”

  “Probably. I’m supposed to be—” He broke off, reddening again, ashamed to tell her
about Teen Witness.

  “Supposed to be what? Going to church?”

  “Sort of,” he muttered. “We’re supposed to do this witness thing, you know—”

  “Oh! You’re part of that group!” She pulled away from him.

  “Not really. I mean, really, yes, I am. I go to Salvation Bible, and it’s part of the youth ministry. But, well, I hate Teen Witness. Only my grandmother, she’s on me like my underwear. Sorry, I mean she’s always nagging at me, like I’ll go to hell if I don’t do what she says. Of course, she thinks I’m hell-bound, anyway, because of my music and me not playing football. I don’t know why she thinks Teen Witness will save me.”

  Lara giggled. “So you’ll be there with me and my mom and—and Chip, because she says us Grelliers are hell-bound, too.”

  “But—but I don’t think Chip is in hell,” Robbie stammered.

  “Of course he isn’t!” Lara’s face turned round and red with anger. “Only an ignorant—dickhead—would believe something so mean and stupid.”

  “Don’t be mad at me, Lara,” Robbie begged. “I can’t stand you to be mad at me.”

  And then, without knowing exactly how it happened, they were lying on the ground, wrapped up in Lara’s dirty sheet, and she was crying and telling him how angry Jim was with her, how he told her she wasn’t carrying her weight on the farm.

  “He acts like I’m this total loser because I don’t look after my mom. But how can I look after someone who doesn’t talk to me or eat or—or even take a bath?” She laughed nervously, thinking the idea of Susan not bathing was so gross he’d run away in disgust.

  But Robbie was kissing her teary eyes, and she was letting him kiss her mouth, letting him put his hands underneath her sweatshirt and feel her skin, which was softer than anything he had ever imagined. She didn’t wear a bra. He couldn’t imagine any of the girls in Teen Witness going out of the house without a bra on: it was part of being a modest Christian girl. The thought made him even more excited. He cautiously touched one of her nipples. She moved her breast away from him but let him keep his hands on her back. He found himself telling her how his grandmother thought he was a total loser because he didn’t like sports and wasn’t big and blond like Junior and Arnie.

  “But you look interesting, like—like one of the old Delaware Indians, who used to live north of the river.” In the midst of all Abigail Grellier’s papers were some old photographs of leaders of the Delaware Indians who came to the aid of the anti-slavery pioneers.

  “Yeah, my mom’s mom was part Indian—Munsee, I think it was—but I don’t really even look like my mom. At least, I just have three pictures of her. Nanny and Dad burned all the others when she ran off—I don’t remember her face after all this time. I know your mom is kind of, well, not doing too good right now, but—but at least she’s still here.”

  “Maybe. But it’s like Chip was her only child,” Lara burst out with all the hurt and anger she’d been feeling since Susan retreated to her room. “And even before Chip died, she was already abandoning the X-Farm. I had to do all the work with the organic-certification board. And now, now Dad won’t help me with the crop because he’s bringing in the corn and the sorghum, so I can’t use the combine. And, anyway, how are we going to pay Mom’s hospital bills? He might even sell the X-Farm.”

  Robbie held her tighter. He wanted to say he’d help her bring in her crop, but he couldn’t quite imagine telling his father he was using the Schapens’ combine to help out the Grelliers.

  The October twilight was closing in around them; the birds had stopped eating the sunflowers and gone off to their nests. Lara’s cell phone rang. She looked at the screen: it was her father.

  She didn’t answer it. “He wants to know where I am—he’s afraid I’m breaking into the old Fremantle house.”

  The phone call silenced them both. Robbie started to wonder what he could say to Nanny—why hadn’t he picked up Amber Ruesselmann? why hadn’t he been to Teen Witness? why were his clothes dirty?

  “You’re supposed to be going out with Amber?” Lara giggled again.

  “Nanny thinks she’s a good Christian girl for me, that if I start praying with her I won’t go to hell,” Robbie said gloomily. “If she knew about you—I mean, about how I feel about you—she’d be furious, because you’re a Grellier. And, anyway, she’d never believe someone as pretty as you could ever like me.”

  Lara didn’t say anything. As pretty as she? As pretty as someone with tiny breasts and a pimple on her chin, with mousy hair, covered in dirt? Susan thought worrying about appearance was a ridiculous waste of time, maybe because Susan’s mom spent all her spare time, and money, on skin treatment and makeup; she’d even had eyeliner tattooed on her eyelids. If Lara worried about her mousy hair or her pimpled skin, Mom would say, or at least she used to say, “It’s the content of your character that counts, Lara, as Dr. King said, not your hair or your skin.”

  “Why not tell your gram you got a flat tire?” Lara suggested.

  Robbie was appalled at the thought of out-and-out making up a story, but when Lara reminded him of all the lies his grandmother had told him—about his mom, about him, about the Grelliers—he felt a thrill almost as pleasurable as the excitement of being with Lara herself.

  It was completely dark when they finally got to their feet. “I—when can I see you again, Lulu?”

  “In biology, tomorrow,” she teased.

  “No, I mean, well—”

  “After school,” she suggested. “We could go to that park in town down by the river. No one we know ever goes there.”

  He started to agree, eagerly, then remembered that tomorrow was when the Jews were coming to look at the calf.

  “You mean there really is a magic calf on your place?” she demanded. “I thought it was just the way people talk around here.”

  “It’s not magic,” Robbie said. “It’s just special. It’s all red, see, and the Jews need a perfect red heifer if they’re ever going to build the Temple again in Jerusalem. And Jesus can’t come again unless the Temple is standing, and—”

  “Robbie, you can’t make Jesus come by doing stuff!” Lara cried.

  “No, of course not. But God won’t rebuild the Temple, the Jews have to do it themselves. And if we can help them do it, then the end of days will be that much closer.”

  Lara shivered and pulled away from Robbie. Pastor Albright at Riverside United Church of Christ didn’t preach about the end of days. Vague images of devastation flitted through her head. The X-Farm, its sad rows of sunflowers, would look like the photographs of Iraq she studied on her computer where the bombs had torn big holes in everything. “Serves you right,” she would whisper through the screen to the Iraqis, “serves you right for blowing up my brother.”

  In the cold gray light of the new moon, the field already looked desolate. Did God really want that, to destroy the whole farm, just so people like Robbie’s grandmother could be in heaven?

  “I don’t want the end of days,” she said.

  “Not want the end of days? But—don’t you want to be with Jesus in glory?”

  “Oh, Robbie, it’s—it’s—” She spread her arms so that the dirty sheet billowed around her like the feathers of a bedraggled peacock. “I’m living in the end of days right now. I want the farm alive, I want my mom out of the hospital, I want my brother alive, I don’t want any more people dead and the farm burned down.”

  Her phone rang again: still her father trying to track her down. She again stuck it back in her jeans without answering it.

  “But don’t you want to be with Jesus?” Was Nanny right, were the Grelliers already damned? How could you not long for the end of days?

  “Maybe you should have gone to Teen Witness with Amber,” Lara said, trying her best to be hurtful. “I don’t want a sermon from you or anyone in your family, telling me how my brother and my mother are damned. You and Amber can pray over me to your heart’s content.”

  “Lara, no!” Thoughts of t
he end of days, the building of the Temple so Jesus could come in glory and kill all the Jews, along with people who pretended to be Christians, people who worshipped with their lips but not their hearts, vanished. Instead, he thought of Amber’s pasty, acne-scarred face and the soft skin of Lara’s back underneath her sweatshirt. He grabbed her and pulled her to him, but she pushed him away.

  “I have to go home,” she said. “My dad is freaking. The next thing you know, he and Blitz will be out looking for me, and then they’ll see your truck.”

  As if to prove her point, her phone rang again. This time, she answered it. “I’m in the X-Farm…Yeah, I heard it ring, but I was trying to stop the birds from eating all the seeds…Yeah, I’m on my way…No, don’t. I’ll walk.”

  She headed toward the road, wrapping the sheet tightly about herself. Robbie jogged after her.

  “But Lara—Lulu—I want to see you again.”

  “I’ll be in biology tomorrow.”

  “But I want to see you alone, be with you alone. Would you come to my youth group tomorrow night? We could go out for a Coke or something after.”

  “After you’ve finished worshipping your cow?” Her words were still mean, but her tone was softer, more provocative.

  “Well, after these Jews from Kansas City leave we have supper and then I go back to town for youth night.”

  “Let me come and see the golden calf with you, and I’ll ride along to your youth group,” she said.

  “No, you can’t, the Jews say not to let any women near it, not even Nanny is allowed.”

  “Robbie! What is with you and all this stuff? If you think women are so evil they’ll destroy your stupid calf, then I’m so evil you can’t be alone with me.”

  “Oh, Lara, I don’t think that, please. I don’t even want them to use the calf, and she’s so lonely, shut up all by herself, it’s cruel. But even if I said you could come, my dad would be there, he wouldn’t let you anywhere near the calf, and if I tried to show her to you by myself my nanny is always checking on me. It just isn’t possible.”