Forty-Three
MORNING AFTER
THE SKY WAS still dark when Jim left the house an hour later. This was usually the hardest hour of the day for him, the long wait for sunrise after the autumn equinox, but today he was grateful for the protection from his neighbors. The Schapens would have finished milking by now; Myra or Dale were often leaving with milk deliveries about this time, and Arnie might well be returning home from his sheriff’s deputy shift.
Gina had made Jim a cappuccino before he left, and between the richness of the coffee, the pleasure of her body, the guilt of lying with her, he felt light—light-headed and light on his feet. He jumped onto the tractor, so light that not even his dirty boots dragged him down.
He had put his own dirty clothes back on. In case either Lara or Susan was up when he got home, he didn’t want to compound his guilt by making up a story about Mr. Fremantle’s pajamas. He had the engine going and was bouncing down the drive, singing “Froggy went a-courtin’ and he did ride,” when he thought he heard someone cry out. He braked hard, sure it was Gina, and turned around.
It was still too dark to see, but he heard the cry again over the tractor engine and swung down from the high platform. It wasn’t Gina at all but Elaine Logan.
“What do you think you’re doing, Farmer Jones?” she snarled. “Trying to break every bone in my body? Why don’t you ask people if they want to get yanked all over the country before you drive off with them?”
She was struggling to push herself upright, but a piece of chain had come loose and was lying across her stomach, as Jim realized when he got close enough to see her in his taillights. He burst out laughing, which made her even angrier.
“I could sue you, you and every rotten motherfucker out here. That Schapen and his calf that he won’t let anybody see, his murderer of a mother, all of you, getting together to destroy my life.”
“When you put it that way, I can see we’re a bad bunch,” Jim said, still laughing but lifting the piece of chain from her and trying to help her out of the cart. She had wrapped herself in the plaid comforter and lain down in the middle of the foam rubber he’d brought along; her weight had wedged the foam so tightly into the cart that he couldn’t get underneath her or the foam. He was beginning to think he’d need to drive her back to his barn and use his crane to hoist her out when she grabbed his arms and managed to free her own shoulders. He quickly knelt, got his hands under her, and shoved. She fell onto her left side but was finally able to push herself upright.
“You’re going to hear from my lawyer, Farmer Jones, leaving me outside all night, laughing your head off while you molest me. I’ll go to the sheriff, I’ll talk to that Sunday school teacher, the one who’s in love with you, you’ll see what trouble I can cause when I put my mind to it.”
“I’m sure you can,” Jim said. “Can you also find your way back to the house?”
“Without help from you.” She turned and waddled up the drive, very much on her dignity.
The Sunday school teacher who was in love with him, he thought as he climbed back on the tractor. She must mean Rachel Carmody. He started to laugh again, thinking how embarrassed Rachel would be by such an accusation. He was a molester, Myra Schapen a murderer, and Rachel a would-be adulterer—unlike Jim himself, who was the real thing.
He was still laughing when he pulled into his own yard. Lara was up, leaning against the counter, eating blueberry yogurt out of a carton. Susan never allowed that kind of sloppy habit, but Jim didn’t feel like correcting her, especially not this morning when he’d been so incorrect himself.
“What’s so funny?” his daughter demanded.
“Oh, Elaine Logan. I told you last night how I went over to dig Gina out of the bunkhouse. Turns out Elaine crawled into my cart and slept there. When I started up the tractor just now, she woke up and began hurling insults at me. I was afraid I was going to have to get the crane to pry her off the tractor. She thinks Myra Schapen murdered her baby, and a bunch of other stuff. And she kept calling me Farmer Jones.”
“It doesn’t sound very funny to me,” Lara said coldly. “And it’s wrong to make fun of Elaine just because she’s fat. You told me that yourself.”
“I know, I know. I can’t help it, sweetie. I don’t know what’s got into me.” And he gave way to another loud burst of laughter, collapsing onto one of the kitchen chairs.
Lara stared down at him, her lips pinched in disapproval, looking as forbidding as the sepia photograph of ever-so-great-grandmother Abigail in the front room. “Are you drunk, at seven in the morning?”
He forced the laughter down his throat. “No, Lulu, just light-headed from too little sleep. Is your homework done? Are you taking off? What do you have on today?”
“I have basketball practice until four-thirty. Then me and Kimberly are going to work on our science project.”
“Which is what?” Jim asked, not wanting a meeting with Kimberly to be a cover-up for a date with Robbie Schapen.
“We’re taking swabs from doorknobs in the girls’ and boys’ bathrooms and culturing them. Then we’ll compare them to see if one has more germs than the other.”
“You don’t need a science project to do that. You can write up the results here in the kitchen. Boys are filthy creatures who should keep their hands in their pockets at all times. You certainly don’t want one of them touching you.”
“You are acting really strange this morning!” she cried. “What happened over at Fremantles’? Did Gina put a spell on you?”
“She was too tired and beat-up to do much witchcraft—she was trapped in the bunkhouse for about two hours before Elaine wandered by and heard her yelling for help. Elaine walked all the way here to find me, so you’re right, it’s very bad to laugh. Elaine’s the real hero in this story. Gina was darned lucky that Elaine came out to the bunkhouse and that I was home. That center beam missed killing her by about an inch.”
“What was Gina doing there, anyway?” Lara demanded.
“She’s decided to write a book about the kids who used to live in the bunkhouse. She was hoping they left something unusual behind. Ludicrous, really—there’s nothing there but rotting furniture. The old enamel kitchen table was still there but all rusted out. I cut my shin pretty good on it when I was crawling in after her. Those hippies had a name, which I never knew. They called themselves the Free State Commune.”
Jim didn’t think Lara needed to know Gina was really searching for human remains. He went over to the counter and started the coffeemaker just for something to do, something that wouldn’t betray him when he talked about Gina. “Your mom up?”
“You know she never is, this time of day. Are you going to stay home tonight? Should I count on eating here? Because if you leave me with the zombie again, I’ll spend the night at Kimberly’s.”
Her crudeness told him she was worried that he’d slept with Gina. He wasn’t going to lie to her, swear he hadn’t done what he had, so he settled for a partial truth.
“Lulu, by the time I got Gina out of that wreck I was so beat I couldn’t move. I have to confess that she gave me a drink, and after that brandy hit my empty stomach I was too woozy to drive the tractor home, so she let me sleep on the couch.”
“Oh. That one in her study?”
He forgot his own embarrassment. “And how do you know about that couch, missy? When were you in Gina Haring’s study?”
She fiddled with her yogurt carton. “Uh, when Mom and I—”
“Lulu, were you the person who taped a roach to that poster on the wall?”
“She was so mean to Mom, getting her all stirred up against the war, then not even coming over to say she was sorry Chip died! I figured she could suffer a little.”
Jim suddenly felt the ache in every muscle he’d strained last night. “You were breaking into the house when I expressly told you to stay away, and you promised you would.”
“I never promised!”
He took her shoulders. “Lara. No more of this. If Junior had fo
und you when you hid in the Schapens’ manger, he’d have beaten you so hard you might not ever see again or walk again! What will it take for you to stop sneaking into people’s private spaces?”
She scowled, fighting back tears, then broke away from him. “I’ll be late for school, and we can’t have any more of that, either, can we? Tardiness and making up excuses and not doing homework. Are you like Mom? Do you wish it was me who died in Iraq and Chip who was here?”
He grabbed her again. “You’re out of line here, Lara Abigail. I wish Chip was alive but he’s not. And I’m glad you’re here, you’re the bright spot in my heart, which is why I don’t want you making mistakes so big that you can’t correct or undo them. You hear?”
She muttered an apology and started for the door, but Jim blocked her path. “One last thing, Lulu: where did that roach come from that you put on Gina’s poster?”
“I’m not smoking dope. That was one that Chip left behind. I found it in the piano—Gina hasn’t touched anything in the parlor, you know—it’s all thick with dust.”
Jim sighed, his light mood evaporated, but he let her pass. He didn’t know if he could believe her or not, and he hated that more even than the idea of her smoking. If he’d so alienated his daughter that she wouldn’t tell him the truth, what was he going to do? He watched her climb into her old pickup, the dinosaurs on the side too covered with mud for him to make them out.
When she’d taken off in a great spray of gravel, he poured a cup of thin, watery coffee and took it upstairs to Susan, who was lying awake in the dark.
“Come on, Suze,” he coaxed. “Get up, have breakfast with me. I’m laying down nitrogen for the winter wheat today. I’d love it if you’d go over the field charts with me, make sure I’m choosing the right varieties and the right acreage.”
She turned over. “Not today, Jim. I’ll look at them later. I’m not ready to get up.”
He sat down next to her in his dirty clothes. “I went over last night to rescue Gina Haring from the bunkhouse. Silly woman had been poking around in there looking for bones from the hippie who died in the fire there.”
“That was noble of you,” she said, not moving. “Was she hurt?”
He recounted the rescue, trying to make a drama of it, trying to make a comedy of Elaine’s behavior, but he’d never been much of a storyteller, and his wife’s passive back made his voice peter out. He sat looking at her unkempt hair, again feeling Gina’s soft white hands on his back, her silken skin next to him in the Fremantles’ creaking bed. No stretch marks from childbirth, no roughness from too many days in the sun.
“Will I see you again?” he’d asked at the door. She’d only smiled, brushed a hand across his cheek, and said, “Thank you for helping me last night, Jim. You saved my life, and I’m truly grateful.” Which he took to mean that this morning was a thank-you gift, that he shouldn’t expect to go back for seconds. The thought produced an ache beneath his ribs sharper than the soreness in his muscles.
Finally, he went downstairs, not bothering to change. His clothes were unbearably filthy, but he was going to spend the day in the fields, so why put on something clean now? He fixed himself peanut butter sandwiches to eat later, filled a thermos with the watery coffee, and scrambled four eggs, which he ate out of the pan.
Lulu and I, we’re reverting to a state of nature, not bothering with plates and sitting down at the table. Pretty soon, if he wasn’t careful, the house was going to look like the Burton place. Tonight he would make a proper dinner. Even if Susan lolled apathetically in the family room, he would shower, would sit down at the dining-room table with his daughter and eat like a human being.
He took his lunch box and drove the tractor to the equipment shed, so he could unpack the cart and attach the spreader to the tractor. Grandpa had taught him that you halved your workload if you put everything away as soon as you finished using it. That way your equipment was ready when you needed it. If it needed repairing, as it inevitably would if you hadn’t put it away, you could fix it now.
He dragged the chains to the far wall and slung them over giant hooks. He folded the plaid comforter and left it by the door so he’d remember to take it back to the house. As he hung it over a sawhorse, a square of paper dropped from the blanket. It was a photocopy of an old newspaper clipping so folded and faded that it was practically illegible.
Jim held it directly under the light, trying to make it out. It had been cut from the Douglas County Herald, but the date wasn’t clear. The headline was melodramatic:
TRAGEDY TAKES SECOND LIFE
Lawrence, Kans. Last week, the violence that has rocked Douglas County for the past eighteen months took the life of one of the hippies who have been squatting on empty farms in the area. We reported on the fire that killed a boy who had been living in a bunkhouse on the Fremantle land, five miles east of town. The other youths in the commune managed to flee, but the dead boy had apparently passed out and didn’t wake when the others cried out to him.
Neighbors are divided as to whether the hippies were part of the Weather Underground and blew themselves up in a homemade bomb; the sheriff says it was an accident from too many candles and too much dope. Sheriff Delano assured us that the fire was a pure accident. He says there is no evidence the hippies in the bunkhouse had firearms or were toying with explosives. Delano also says there is no evidence of arson. Nonetheless, University of Kansas students poured into the streets claiming that local right-wing groups actually set the fire.
Yesterday, that fire claimed a second life. The shock of last week’s fire sent one of the girls living in the bunkhouse into premature labor; she miscarried and came close to bleeding to death herself.
“We put all the girls into the back bedroom to spend the rest of the night,” Mrs. Fremantle explained, “but we didn’t even realize one of them was pregnant until one of the girls came to get me, worried by how badly her friend was bleeding.”
The Fremantle house is a historic mansion, with a Tiffany chandelier, silver drinking fountains, and all kinds of hiding places where runaway slaves hid in the decade before the Civil War.
Liz Fremantle, 67, and her husband Walter, 78, had outraged a number of area farmers when they let seven hippies move into an unused tenant house behind their mansion.
See our editorial, “Where Will the Violence End?” on p. 21.
Jim sat down on one of the sawhorses. Elaine Logan was saying her baby had died in the fire; he had to assume that this was what she meant. She must have been the girl who miscarried in the Fremantles’ back bedroom. Why else would she carry the article around with her?
He’d have to take the clipping back to the Fremantles’. If it was this precious to her, she’d be missing it. Unspoken, in the back of his mind, was the thought of Gina. If he took Elaine’s clipping back, Gina would come to the door. They would—do nothing.
His watch beeped. Jesus Christ! Nine in the morning, and he hadn’t even put the nitrogen in the spreader. Enough of all these women: his wife, nursing her grief like an old sock; his daughter, gambling with sex and missing school; and his—not his lover, not after a single embrace—call her his neighbor. And that damned drunk Elaine. Enough of all of them. He put the cart away, hitched the spreader to the tractor, and began filling it with sacks of fertilizer.
Forty-Four
PUPPY LOVE?
WHEN HE REALIZED how much media attention circled around the calf, Junior Schapen started coming home more often. He was thinking partly of his future. The pros didn’t scout Tonganoxie Bible, and someone with connections in the NFL might see him here on national television. At least, that was one of Junior’s excuses to Myra—that, along with his pious duty to help her and Arnie with their sacred charge.
“He’s so bogus,” Robbie complained to Lara. “How come Dad and Nanny don’t see through that whole pious bullshit line he feeds them?”
Robbie figured his brother’s real reason for coming home so often was the chance to bully people visiting th
e farm. One Thursday, the animal rights group ARK—Animals R Kin—were picketing, as they had each day since learning the Schapens were raising an animal just to slaughter her. Junior had attacked them as though they were the opposing line, or even the anti-Christ. He’d actually given one woman a concussion and broken her arm.
The woman had threatened to sue, but Arnie said the people from ARK were trespassers who’d been asked to leave more than once. He, his mother, and Gail Ruesselmann were all witnesses to the fact that the ARK people had acted as though they were about to attack Junior first.
“Junior loved the whole event,” Robbie told Lara, “and Nanny was as proud as if he’d saved America from Osama bin Laden. Then she was on my butt about where had I been. Of course I didn’t tell her that!”
Lara giggled, because he’d been with her, as they were this evening, in their new hideout: the loft of the old Fremantle barn.
In the beginning, starting with the Sunday the crowds first swarmed to the Schapen farm, they met in Lara’s truck; she parked it on the track in the X-Farm and they sneaked away from their separate homes to meet. They sat in the cab, sheltered from any prying eyes by the towering sunflowers, grabbing hungrily at each other, exchanging bits of news about their discordant families in breathless whispers.
That refuge lasted only a short time. After Lara tried burning the sunflower packages, her father felt so stricken that he asked Curly to salvage what he could of the seeds. Curly cleaned the hopper, combined the field, and disked under the stalks. When Lara got home from school, Jim showed her the yield: only sixteen hundred pounds, less than ten percent of what they would have gotten if they’d harvested on time! Lara was so upset by the small crop that it was easy to hide her dismay at the loss of her secret place.
That evening, she and Robbie embraced furtively in the open field and then sped home before anyone spotted them. Lara spent that night putting the meager harvest into what remained of Abigail’s Organics bags. She could sell these at the farmers’ market, even if the harvest was too small to market on the scale she and Susan had envisioned when they put the crop in. Then next year, unless Dad had to sell the X-Farm, people would at least recognize the name.
Bleeding Kansas Page 36