They had reached the train tracks. Just over the ridge, Robbie could see the lights of the Grellier house. Even though he knew Lara’s mother was ill and her father upset with her, the house still looked warm and cozy to him. Arnie and Myra did nothing to fix up the Schapen house, except keep the roof shingled and the gutters cleaned, but they never even painted it, while, inside, they still used the old lights and furniture Robbie’s grandfather had grown up with in the 1930s.
Even from the outside, you could see that the Grelliers cared about making the house look inviting. It was painted a soft cream—although, of course, you couldn’t tell that in the moonlight—and the shutters were a dark, rich green, and when he’d sneaked into the yard in the dark early one morning after milking, trying to guess which room was Lara’s, he’d seen the modern lamps in the family room, and the kitchen, with its bright-painted cupboards. Jim Grellier had come to the window that morning, coffee cup in hand, staring at the sky as he tried to guess the weather, but Robbie had felt sure Jim had seen him. He’d backed away, run home, and never tried spying on Lara again.
Robbie ached with so many desires he didn’t know which was uppermost in his mind—to be part of Lara’s family, to be inside the Grellier house, to kiss Lara, to touch her again, to make her respect him and his music. If Lara walked across the tracks without kissing him, she would disappear from his life forever. He put a tentative hand on her sheet-draped arm.
She stood rigid for a heartbeat, then turned to look at him. “What time do the Jews come?”
“They get there around four-thirty and stay for about an hour. Does this mean—”
“I’ll be here by the tracks at six-thirty.” She brushed his cheek with her lips and darted into the yard around her house.
Thirty-One
PENNED IN
CARS BEGAN ARRIVING around four while Robbie and Dale were starting the afternoon milking: first Pastor Nabo with three of the elders, then some dedicated, avid church members, all male. They went into the house through the front door, not the kitchen.
From her perch in the crotch of the oak tree, Lara could see Myra Schapen through the kitchen window. Arms folded across her chest, she was walking back and forth, her jaw snapping up and down, as if she were biting holes in the air. Lara pulled her legs up underneath her. Myra’s wild face was frightening. If she went to the window, if she saw Lara dangling there—Lara pictured Myra with a pitchfork, a shotgun, a backhoe, knocking Lara out of the tree, mutilating Lara, Myra snapping her jaw all the while.
As soon as she got home from school, Lara had run into Chip’s room to rummage through his box of effects. When the Army sent them back, Susan had taken Chip’s sweats, and Jim his iPod. He liked listening to his son’s music while he was alone on the tractor. Songs he’d hated when Chip was alive now made him feel close to his dead son. Jim had let Curly help himself to whatever he wanted, even though it meant he took the fielder’s glove Chip had carried with him to Iraq. Lara hadn’t even wanted to go near the box before, but this afternoon she rummaged through it until she found Chip’s desert fatigues.
The uniform was miles too big on her. Just as she had her fabric shears poised over the pant legs, ready to slash four inches off the bottoms, she realized it would be a desecration to cut them. Instead, she made a deep hem, and basted a series of tucks into the waistband. Even so, she had to cinch a belt pretty tightly to keep the pants from sliding down her hips. The shirt was also big on her, but that meant she could wear a sweatshirt underneath to keep warm. She pulled her hair back on her head with a clip, then tucked it inside Chip’s camouflage cap.
The clothes still smelled of Chip, his sweat, the aftershave Janice Everleigh had put into the first and only care package the family had sent. Lara paused at the top of the stairs, suddenly feeling queer, putting on her brother’s clothes to sneak up on Robbie’s house. Then she thought of the night three years ago when Chip had slithered through the ditch and into Arnie’s barn, draping all the cows in toilet paper because of some fight he’d had with Junior.
Lara giggled, remembering Myra’s fury. She’d been sure it was Chip who did it. She’d come to the Grelliers’ kitchen, screaming bloody murder at Jim and Susan, who only stared at her in bewilderment. Susan had even said, “Myra, you’ll damage your heart if you keep getting this exercised.” Lara and Chip had had to run to the barn before they exploded with laughter and gave away the whole story. Chip would approve of her mission; he would send her luck. “From up in heaven, you snot-filled Schapens,” Lara hissed.
Jim had started bringing in the corn, which meant he was with Blitz and Curly in the field closest to the house. Lara watched them from the window on the landing. It was almost four. The light would hold for two more hours, so they weren’t likely to take a break anytime soon. Even so, she crouched low to the ground as she left the house, sticking up an arm to open the door to her pickup, then sliding into the driver’s seat—she didn’t care if they saw her leave, but there’d be buckets of questions if they saw her in Chip’s uniform.
She parked her truck on the service track that ran between the X-Farm and the Ropeses’ sorghum field, out of sight of the road and her own house. Mr. Ropes had cut his sorghum. He might see her truck from his back window, but he would just think she was working the X-Farm.
The October sky was a dull gray, an iron sky pressing down on the earth. It didn’t hold rain, just a chilly dreariness. The blackbirds and meadowlarks were still working furiously at the sunflowers. As Lara walked along, she swung Chip’s cap at them. The sight broke her heart, all that hard work disappearing into their greedy little bellies, but she didn’t take extra time to try to chase the birds away.
“An exercise in futility, anyway,” she said under her breath, repeating the phrase she’d heard Gina use last summer.
Thinking of Gina made her wonder how she’d get back into the Fremantle house now that Jim and Blitz had nailed shut the door between basement and kitchen. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” she whistled. “Tomorrow the sun may be shining, although it is cloudy today.”
Her mission this afternoon was easier, since she only had to sneak onto the Schapen land, not break into the house. It was also riskier. If Gina found her at Fremantles’, she would be cold and nasty but not frightening. If Myra or Arnie Schapen found her on their land, they’d hurt her. Physically, probably, while grinning and saying they were beating the devil out of her. They’d go after Jim, too, maybe sue him for trespassing or some shit.
“So be careful,” she admonished herself when she reached the county road.
She knelt in the ditch until she was sure no one was around in the fields or on the road, then crossed the road and dropped down into the ditch on the far side. She’d worried that Chip’s light fatigues would stand out against the dark autumn landscape, but, once in the ditch, she saw that they blended perfectly with the dead grasses and leaves around her. When she reached the Schapen buildings, she stuck her head up cautiously. She saw Robbie in the distance, calling up the cows from the south pasture.
She poked a hole in the ground with her finger. Her feelings about yesterday were too complicated for her to understand. The pleasure of having someone care about what she was thinking and feeling, that had been a balm to her sore spirits. The physical thrill of being touched in that way, that was new to her. Oh, yes, her own hands on her own body. But not a boy’s hands. Huddled in the ditch, watching Robbie, she ran her fingers lightly over her arms and shivered from the memory of his touch.
But he was a Schapen. Even if he was obviously different from Junior and Arnie and Myra, he still was one of them, went to that bizarro church where they thought they could make Jesus come again by breeding a red calf. And because he was a Schapen, did she want to spend more time with him really? Was that why she was sneaking over here really? To spy on his golden calf just because he’d said she couldn’t, was that a way of saying she didn’t care what he thought or said?
Robbie disappeared
from her field of vision, but he’d be back soon with the cows. She’d have to move now. She picked out a big bur oak near the driveway as her spy’s perch, double-checked the outbuildings for any sign of Arnie or Myra, then crawled across the rough-cut grass to the tree. Arnie came out of the house, and she froze against the ground, but he was heading for the new enclosure, the little round house he’d built for his golden calf. Lara couldn’t actually see the special pen from here, but she’d watched Arnie building it last winter, before the corn and sorghum grew high enough to block the view across his fields from Highway 10.
Lara jumped up, grabbed a big overhanging branch, and hoisted herself up, quickly, smoothly, no mistakes allowed here. A second later, she was in the tree crotch, shielded by the branch from house, barn, and road.
Pocahontas Grellier, champion tracker. Too bad 4-H didn’t have a category in that at the county fair; she’d take the grand prize every year.
She’d gotten to her roost in the nick of time: Robbie’s pastor drove up seconds after she’d found a place flat enough that she could sit. After him and the four cars with other church members—or so she guessed the men to be; except for Chris Greynard’s dad, they were strangers to her—there wasn’t any action on the road. She watched Robbie and the Schapens’ hired hand working the cows in and out of the milk barn; she saw Arnie leave the circular enclosure and go back into the house.
She could see the details of the kitchen, the industrial clock on one wall, the corner of the old-fashioned range, its enamel chipped, and then Arnie and Myra talking. Arnie disappeared and Myra turned to the window, but only to fill a teakettle, Lara realized after a nervous moment: the sink was probably under the window where Lara couldn’t see it.
She began to understand how isolated Robbie’s life was. The county road running past her own house carried traffic all day long. She could see the Ropeses’ from her bedroom, and even bits of the Fremantle place. But the side road dead-ended here at the Schapen farm. People only drove up this way if they were going to Schapens’, and Arnie and Myra were so mean no one ever just dropped in on them the way they did Jim and Susan.
Poor Robbie! How could he stand it, cows for friends, a witch and a warlock running his house, a bully for a big brother? Maybe in the hospital the nurses had made a mistake, given his mother an Indian woman’s baby. Maybe over on the reservation, there was some big blond lunk who thought he was a Pottawatomie. Lara almost giggled out loud at the image.
Another car was coming up the road now. A dusty Dodge van turned in to the Schapen yard. Lara stretched out along the branch to get a better look as three men climbed stiffly down. These must be the Jews. There were Jewish teachers at Lara’s high school and a number of Jewish kids in her class, but they were all like Lara’s friends, worrying about how they looked, what people thought of them, who was going out with who, how they were doing in their classes. These three men were exotic, not just foreign in space but in time as well. Like Robbie, when he first saw them last winter, she recognized the strange clothes from pictures in her history book. They were wearing the round, hard black hats, the long black frock coats, the corkscrew curls—like the men from the Lodz Ghetto who were killed in the Holocaust.
Arnie came out from the front of the house with the pastor from Salvation Bible Church. Lara couldn’t hear any of the conversation, but she could see Arnie strutting, as if he were trying to prove that he, not these strange, bearded men, was in charge. After another minute, the other men joined them, and they headed toward the special calf’s round enclosure.
The Schapens’ hand emerged from the milk barn and got into his beat-up Chevy. A few minutes later, Robbie came out and headed to the house. He passed through the kitchen, where Myra snapped her jaw at him. He seemed to be ignoring her—he passed on through a swinging door without stopping to look at her.
A light came on upstairs. After a time, Robbie reappeared in the kitchen, his hair wet, wearing his sports jacket. At this distance, Lara couldn’t tell if he’d been able to get yesterday’s dirt out of it.
When he opened the back door, Lara heard Myra screeching, “Did you hear me, young man? I told you to fetch the coffee cups from the parlor. You’re not a man or a church elder, you don’t belong out there in Junior’s place. I’m not here to wait on you hand and foot. You do as I say.”
In the dull twilight, Lara could see Robbie slump over, as if Myra’s words were rocks hitting his shoulders. She stifled an impulse to jump down from the tree and race over to him, to put her arms around him and console him.
Robbie slouched his way across the yard, passed the milking shed and other outbuildings, and disappeared from Lara’s view. Myra stood in the back door, hands on hips. Probably her jaw was still snapping even now that she’d shut up. She finally returned to the house, pausing at the window that overlooked Lara’s tree, but, after a time, she went through the swinging door into the room beyond.
Lara took a breath, tightened her stomach muscles, swung over the branch, and dropped into the yard. Keeping low to the ground, she moved around behind the milking shed, hopping around the cow patties that were splattered everywhere. In the gray half-light, she couldn’t avoid them all. “Sorry, Chip,” she muttered to her brother, “I got your brand-new fatigues all stinko.”
On the far side of the milking shed stood equipment sheds. Beyond them, the lagoon for collecting wastewater glimmered purply black in the fading light. She paused at the main barn, where Arnie kept his combine and his tractor. The golden calf’s special pen lay another hundred yards beyond it. The troop of visitors was so big they couldn’t all fit into the enclosure; a half-dozen men shoved for position in the open doorway, craning to see what was going on inside. Lara could hear their voices, raised in excitement, but could not make out the words.
The ground between the main barn and new pen was rough, open terrain. The only possible cover was a set of small sheds, about eight in all, where new calves were tied up. She didn’t know anything about dairy farming, and couldn’t understand what the calves and sheds were doing there, but they were her only way of getting close to the golden calf’s enclosure.
It wouldn’t be dark for another hour, so she had to hold her breath and get close to the ground, inevitably putting hands and knees both smack into cow shit. She swallowed a gag and got behind the nearest of the little sheds. The calf bawled in misery when it saw her. Its hair was wet and tufted, like a newborn kitten’s; it couldn’t be very old. Lara wiped one filthy hand in the dirt and petted the calf.
“You poor little thing, where’s your mom? She take an overdose of drugs and end up in the ER, that you have to be tied up like this all alone, crying?” she murmured, stroking it.
The calf tried to suck on her fingers, and she saw there was a bucket of milk at its feet. She dipped her fingers into it, momentarily forgetting her main goal, and let the calf suck the milk from her fingers. A louder cry from the men startled her. Lara glanced over at them, but they were still looking into the enclosure; they hadn’t seen her. Still, she was pretty exposed out here. She patted the calf’s rump and darted behind the next shed, working her way toward the golden calf.
She felt triumphant when she reached the last shed in the row without detection. This one didn’t have a calf tied to it; she backed into the dank, musty straw covering the ground inside and studied the closed pen. It wasn’t sealed, the way it had appeared in the distance: the roof was raised about a yard from the walls so that air could blow through. The wall was also six inches or so from the ground to make it easy to sluice out the pen. Arnie had put in a series of skylights in the roof, which Lara could see because the interior lights were on, but the sides didn’t have any windows. Poor calf, Lara thought. No mom, no fresh air, no buddies to talk to.
She was only fifteen feet away now and she could hear the excited voices of the men crowded into the doorway: “It said what?” “How can they tell?” “What does it mean?” “Shut up so we can hear for ourselves!”
At th
at moment, her cell phone rang. Her heart almost stopped, so great was her fear, but the men were too intent on what was happening at the pen.
She looked at the screen. Her father. Oh, no! Not checking up on her now! She backed into the empty shed again and answered.
“Lulu, where are you?”
“Just out, Dad, I’ll be home pretty soon.”
“Where is ‘out,’ young lady?”
“I’m at a friend’s house. I’ll call you in a minute. Got to go!”
“Don’t hang up! I’m going into town to see your mother, and I want you to come with me. Tell me where you are!”
She hung up and turned her phone to VIBRATE, which she should have done before she left the house. If she told Dad what she was doing, he’d have ten fits. Besides which, she didn’t want to see Mom. Anyway, she had a date with Robbie—sort of a date. Seeing Robbie would be way better than looking at her mother’s dead-alive face and listening to a lecture from Dad.
She could feel the phone vibrating. Her father called her three times while she stared at the phone face. It was six o’clock. She should go home and wash up so she’d be on time to see Robbie, but—then she’d get sucked into going into town. And, besides, she was this close—she had to see the calf.
Thirty-Two
PHOTO OP
LARA SCUTTLED AWAY from the empty shed. She made a wide circle around the miracle calf’s pen, moving so close to the waste lagoon that she heard the frogs and insects chirping at its edge, then crawled through the field to the back of the pen. She lay flat on the ground, which was wet and smelly from a recent sluicing, and peered under the raised wall. The men inside the pen were shouting now, some yelling at the others to shut up, but all of them creating so much racket that Lara couldn’t make out individual words.
Bleeding Kansas Page 26