Lara turned from the stove to stare at him. The idea that her own actions might make her father cry—she’d never imagined she had that much power. She spooned out the chili and brought a bowl to him, nudging him to move over in his chair. She wedged her tall, skinny body next to him, and they ate together in silence.
In the morning, Jim drove Susan to town for her appointment with a social worker. The social worker was a man, which seemed odd to Jim, but the guy was experienced and easy to talk to—at least, easy for Jim to talk to. Susan wasn’t saying much to anyone.
The social worker pulled Jim in for a few words at the end of Susan’s session: he wanted Jim’s perspective on how Susan was functioning at home. Jim said things weren’t as bad as they’d been in the first month after Chip’s death. Susan hadn’t started writing again and she was eating, but she wouldn’t talk to him. It wasn’t the way it had been before, when his wife was inhabiting some remote place where she didn’t hear him. She just didn’t care about anything.
“She needs an occupation, she needs her friends to visit her,” the social worker suggested.
When they got home, Jim tried getting Susan to look at the farm accounts. She had always maintained the books, had known down to a penny what their cost per acre was, and how to decide when it was better to bet on soybeans, when on corn, but now she just looked at him and said, “Oh, Jim, it’s too much for me right now. You got the corn in, you can take the time now to add up these numbers. Or maybe Lara…” Her voice trailed away; she started picking apart the threads on her sweater.
Lara was angrier than Jim and therefore more ruthless with her mother. When she got home from school, and her father reported on the social worker’s comment, Lara dragged her mother to the X-Farm.
“Look at this field: the birds have wrecked it, but there’s still something here to harvest. We could do it together. I can clean out the hopper on the combine so it meets the organic-certification standards, and I’ll drive the wagon if you’ll run the combine.”
Susan looked at the sunflowers, then turned without speaking and slouched back to the house. Lara, beside herself with fury, followed her, shouting, “The X-Farm and the sunflowers were your idea, but it was me who made them come true! I put in the crop and saw we got certified while you were dancing around bonfires with Gina Haring and Elaine Logan. So get off your butt and help me save the seeds. Even if you wish it was me over in the cemetery and Chip standing here, you can pay attention to the crop.”
Susan stopped and turned to look at her daughter. “Lara, it’s me I want over in the cemetery, not you, so leave me alone.”
Lara watched her mother move on her dead legs back to the house. So enormous was her rage that she went out to the supply shed and found the crates with the packages she’d designed.
“Abigail’s Organics, Abigail’s Orgasms, Abigail’s Colonics,” she shouted, thinking of as many hateful words as she could. She dragged the crates into the middle of the drive and set fire to them. But they were packed too densely and wouldn’t burn.
Jim had seen the drama develop from the equipment barn, where he was straightening a disk that he’d bent when he drove the harrow over a tree root down by the river. He ran out as the yard grew thick with smoke. Looking from his daughter’s tight, angry face to the crates, which he himself had marked FOR THE X-FARM last June, he finally said, “If you want to burn them, you need more oxygen on your fire. But if you think you might want to use them next year, I’ll put out the fire and help you salvage them.”
“You said you were going to sell the X-Farm to pay Mom’s medical bills!” Lara screamed. “This was my only chance for a crop, and it’s too late, it’s ruined, and she doesn’t give a rat’s tailbone.”
“I’m sorry, baby.” Jim put his hands on his daughter’s shaking shoulders. “I should have let you have the combine for a day, but all I was thinking about was the corn crop and how you’d need Curly to help you clean the rasp bars and the hopper up to the organic board’s standards. I wish I could promise you I’d make it right next year, but I’m not sure I can. I’ll have to run the numbers in a month when I have a chance to see—”
He broke off the sentence without finishing it—when I have a chance to see if Susan is ever going to recover. To see whether I have to sell my acres to a developer. Peter Ropes might want to buy, but a developer would pay five times as much. There were plenty of builders, Curly’s cousin among them, who coveted land out here for mansions, as Kansas City’s commuters moved farther and farther afield.
Curly’s cousin had come around one morning, offering Jim a price on the X-Farm that would just about cover Susan’s medical bills. Which meant Curly had been gossiping to his cousin, and the whole county by extension, about Susan’s condition and Jim’s finances. Jim was angry and chewed out Curly. When Blitz heard about it, he came so close to beating the younger man to a pulp that he went home to cool off. Curly prudently lay low for several days.
If Jim sold to Curly’s cousin, Peter Ropes would hate it, having city people living out here; they’d start wanting to zone the place to keep noise down. And Arnie would be furious, because the first thing city people did was shut down animal operations—too much smell too close to them. They moved to the country for peace and quiet, by which they meant golf courses around their houses, not working farms.
Friday afternoon, after helping Lara put out the fire and telling Curly to see how many of the packages were still usable, Jim walked over to the X-Farm; he hadn’t been there since Chip died. Despair, fear, anger with his wife, all these had turned him against the organic farm.
As he lifted the drooping sunflower heads and saw the damage the birds had done, he wondered if his impulse to sell the X-Farm stemmed more from anger with Susan than a need for money. Not that her medical bills weren’t a huge and mounting worry—but he could sell the half section he farmed down by the Wakarusa. It would be good pasturage for Arnie’s cows, for instance, and easier to maintain as a grazing pasture than a crop field. Assuming Arnie would even buy Grellier land; he’d be sure there was some hitch to it if Jim offered it to him. Maybe Jim could set up some elaborate scheme where Arnie would think Jim was cutting him out of the picture—then he’d want to buy.
Arnie was so sure this calf of his would make him rich—even Jim had heard that talk, down at the grain elevator, or at the coffee bar in town where he went sometimes to talk with other men his age. Not that he ordered their expensive cappuccinos and whatever, any old java of the day would do him fine. He’d nurse one cup for half an hour while he caught up with people from church, or Peter Ropes and Herb Longnecker, who also stopped in there.
The thought of cappuccino made him walk to the east edge of the sunflower field to stare at the Fremantle house. Gina, bundling him out of the way as if he were a tiresome two-year-old and letting that horrendous Elaine Logan move in. Surely, they weren’t—his stomach turned at the thought—it was hard enough to accept Gina with Autumn Minsky from the bookstore. Riverside was an open and accepting church, but sometimes he thought they went too far.
Thirty-Nine
MURDER ABOUT
IT MIGHT HAVE CONSOLED Jim to know that relations between the women at the Fremantle house were strained if not downright cold. Gina had asked Elaine to stay on an impulse: the naked longing on Jim’s face was more than she could take. It was the look her husband used to wear, hoping against all odds she might be in love with him, and she didn’t like the reminder of the life she used to lead, when she’d buried herself deep in the closet so she could have access to beautiful clothes, rare art, splendid travel.
When her uncle offered her the use of the house while she got back on her feet, Gina thought she’d have some welcome privacy in the country, time to recover from the pity or scorn of the people she’d lived around in the six years of her marriage. She’d imagined exploring her interest in Wicca, coming to terms with her lesbian self, all in a remote but comfortable home.
Privacy, comfort—bot
h had been fantasies—and if she’d been able to celebrate Wiccan holidays and sleep openly with other women, she’d also done so in the middle of mold, cold, and open warfare from the neighbors. She’d arrived in Kansas full of good resolutions: she’d rebuild her old career in public relations. She’d try to write a novel, a long-standing fantasy that had faded in her years of marriage. Instead, although she busied herself with Wicca, with lovers, and with the anti-war movement, the isolation made it hard for her to organize herself.
Networking via the Net was possible in theory, but of course the Fremantle house didn’t have a broadband connection and the old phone wires were too uncertain for dial-up. She had to do her business via BlackBerry, which cost a fortune, or go into town to an Internet café. Both made it hard for her to restart a career that seemed more remote every week.
In the summer, she started work on a novel—romance and social commentary, about the upscale closeted women of New York. She managed to write eight pages in the month of August, and when she read them over the language felt brittle and phony. Perhaps she was choosing the wrong setting; perhaps she needed to write about the people around her right now.
When Elaine Logan had come out for Midsummer Eve, she kept prattling about her baby who died in the fire. Elaine was such a mix of fantasy and fabrication that Gina hadn’t believed her. While the Grelliers had told her about the fire, all those years ago, and the youth who had died in it, they’d never mentioned a baby.
In fact, at the midsummer fire Elaine had a fit when Susan Grellier said there’d been no babies in the bunkhouse. “And you were there, Missy Know-It-All? You think because you know the War Between the States, you know the Civil War, too. But you don’t. And I do. Because I lived through the real Civil War.”
Arnie had arrived with his fire truck a short time later, putting an end to any squabbling among the Wiccans, but the tale began to worry Gina. She wanted to see what lay inside the ruined bunkhouse. If a baby had died there that no one knew about, maybe it would explain why Elaine had become the tiresome drunk she was today. Maybe that would be Gina’s book, Murder on the Plains. She could visualize the cover and the reviews. The book would be unusual; it would let her reclaim her dead Manhattan life.
The day that Rachel Carmody came out to see her about Elaine, Gina had decided to dismantle the old bunkhouse, to see whether she could find any relics from the fire. When Elaine showed up during the storm later that night, Gina thought Elaine might be able to give her more details about the baby or the fire. She also thought Elaine would provide company of a sort, a buffer against the intruding eyes of the Schapens, Burtons, and Goddess Knew-Who-Else. She’d been afraid, too, after seeing the roach taped to her poster. Even with the bolts and bars Jim and Blitz screwed to the windows and doors, the house was too isolated, too easy to break into. Gina had thought another human in the place, even one as strange as Elaine Logan, might make her feel safer.
The decision proved as confused and fruitless as all the other choices Gina had made this past year. When Gina asked about the baby, Elaine would put a finger along her nose, like a caricature of a movie spy, and say, “Dead men tell no tales,” or whine that no one believed her.
She wouldn’t help out, even with the minimal housework Gina required, and Gina had to hide her wine, which made Elaine snarl abuse. She bewildered Gina by her rapid swings, from hurling ugly insults at her to clinging to her, as if Gina were her own mother. One morning, Elaine fumbled in her trash bag of belongings and pulled out a crumpled copy of her college transcript.
“You’re writing a book, aren’t you? I read some of your pages. You’re not making much progress, are you? And you’re trying to write about my old commune. You should let me help. I got A’s in English, see?” She thrust the transcript at Gina, who was furious that Elaine had been snooping into her papers and embarrassed that this drunken homeless woman could so easily recognize the bare bones of her story.
Gina called Rachel Carmody to see if the church could help find another placement, but that proved a vain hope. Gina certainly wasn’t going to call the sheriff for help, not when it was his deputy who’d caused most of her problems, so she settled into a kind of cold coexistence with the older woman.
Most days, unless it was raining, Elaine walked the quarter mile to the county road and hitched a ride into town. All the people flocking out to see the Schapen calf made it easy for her to get a lift. In Lawrence, she’d make a circuit of her usual haunts, finishing at Raider’s Bar if she’d been able to panhandle enough money for liquor. Most nights, she found someone, often Turk Burton, to take her back out as far as the crossroads.
Gina refused to give her a key to the house. If Elaine returned after Gina had gone to bed, she wouldn’t get up to let the older woman in. Elaine screamed venom up at Gina’s window: “If some farmer you want to impress comes by, then you’ll get up, but not when it’s me, a helpless little girl!”
Whether Gina even heard her, Elaine didn’t know, but she spent one cold, wet night in the Fremantle barn. Elaine had hated it, because of the rats and the fact that the roof leaked, so the next time she got drunk and lost track of time she stayed at a drop-in shelter in town.
Gina hoped that meant she was gone for good, but later that afternoon Elaine returned, pouting and grumbling. The next morning, she announced she was going over to see the Schapens’ calf.
“Everyone’s talking about it in Lawrence. Why don’t you come with me? A cow that speaks Hebrew. That’d give your book something no one else is writing about.”
“Arnie Schapen may choose to involve himself in my affairs, but I have zero interest in his. Besides, haven’t you seen that women aren’t allowed in the calf’s enclosure?”
“Can’t you at least give me a lift? No one ever helps me out, and I’m such a tired little girl.”
“Because you’re hungover,” Gina snapped.
Pouting, grumbling, Elaine set out for Schapens’ on foot. She had to rest half a dozen times, leaning against trees or fence posts since it was a major effort to get up from the ground. At the county road she hoped someone would stop and give her a lift, but it was the middle of a weekday, the slowest time for traffic going out to see the calf. She waited twenty minutes at the intersection, before finally puffing her way up the rutted track to the farm.
Arnie and Myra were going about the usual business of the farm; Arnie was disking his sorghum field, Myra had driven over to Wiesers’ with the midweek milk delivery. Dale, the cowman, was tied up with extra work for the calf. Arnie had told him to knock together some benches for visitors to sit on, and to put up fencing to keep them out of the main milking and grazing sections of the farm.
Myra’s spreadsheet for the calf began to include expenses she hadn’t anticipated for wear and tear on the land. She wanted to up admission to $7.50, but Arnie was afraid people would accuse them of caring more about money than the Lord’s anointed.
As it was, they needed volunteers from Salvation Bible to help with the pilgrims. Weekdays, when traffic was light, one of the church elders who was a retired heating contractor waited outside Nasya’s pen to let in any men and boys who wanted to see her. Gail Ruesselmann took care of collecting admission.
On the morning Elaine showed up, Gail was sitting in her SUV, doing needlepoint, ready to hop out to direct traffic. Only ten cars had arrived that morning. Gail had sent the men and boys to look at the calf, while the women went to the kitchen for cider, or at least some warmth.
Pastor Nabo was in the kitchen. He drove out to the farm most days, hoping for more television cameras—he had new points on his side of the red heifer debate that he wanted to project to a worldwide audience. However, the big entertainment companies had moved on to newer stories. Only the reporter from the Douglas County Herald was there, and she had already heard everything the pastor had to say thirty or forty times. The reporter moved into the chilly front room, leaving the female pilgrims to study photographs of Temple artifacts, all created accord
ing to biblical precepts, that the pastor had loaded onto his laptop. These included a vessel for collecting Nasya’s blood, when the day came to sacrifice her, a picture that always roused an appreciative squeal of horror from Nabo’s audience.
When Gail Ruesselmann saw Elaine stagger into the yard, in her bright pink sweatshirt with the Pink Panther outlined in sequins, she climbed down from her SUV and asked if she could help.
“I want to see this cow everyone’s talking about,” Elaine puffed.
“We all do,” Gail smiled brightly. “But we women are not allowed near the calf.”
“Why not?”
“It’s one of those mysteries that we don’t question. Why don’t you sit down for a minute”—Gail pointed at a rough bench that Dale had just finished hammering together—“and I’ll get you a cup of cider. Where did you park your car?”
“I don’t have one. I walked. I’m entitled to see this cow. If she’s going to bring about the end of the world, the way they’re saying on TV, I have a right to see the cause of my doom.”
“If you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, His love and His sacrifice will take you straight to His bosom in heaven. You won’t have to worry about your ‘doom,’ as you put it,” Gail said. “Have you accepted Jesus as your personal Savior?”
“Oh, fuck all that religious shit,” Elaine said. “You holy hens and your everlasting preaching make me want to puke. If God made this world, He did a sorry-ass job of it. Now, let me see this one perfect thing you claim He created.”
“Even if I wanted to let a woman break the Law of God, it wouldn’t be someone who’s taking His name in vain,” Gail said. “Women are not allowed into the enclosure with the animal. There’s no argument about it.”
Bleeding Kansas Page 32