Bleeding Kansas

by Sara Paretsky

  He studied his wife for any encouraging sign. She was bathing regularly. She ate enough to keep her weight steady. Those were the good signs. But, on the minus side, Susan wouldn’t go to church or the farmers’ market. Nor would she talk to people, not even Rachel Carmody, who faithfully phoned every few days. Besides the afghan, now about ten feet long, Jim didn’t know how his wife filled the hours when he was in town or working on the repairs that farm buildings and machinery always needed.

  When Pastor Natalie came over on her promised visit, Susan received her, as she had Gina, in the formal parlor in her black dress with the Gold Star pinned at her throat.

  “Susan, I’m so very sorry for the loss you have suffered,” Natalie said.

  “Our family is used to the senseless shedding of blood in the name of some higher good,” Susan said. “Some alleged higher good. Abigail’s brother Michael died at Peach Tree Creek.”

  Natalie blinked uncertainly, and Jim mumbled, “That was a battle in the Civil War.”

  “July twentieth, 1864, just outside Atlanta,” Susan said. “Mr. Grellier had been murdered the previous August, in the great slaughter committed by Quantrill here in Lawrence. Mr. Grellier was teaching in a school for freedmen, and this, of course, was gall and wormwood to a slaveholder like Quantrill. Abigail said of Mr. Grellier’s death, ‘It is what we came into the Kansas Territory to do. Not to be murdered, but we were called by God to take up His yoke, and we were to count no cost.’ I don’t remember her words more exactly, but Jim, or perhaps my daughter, has hidden her diaries away from me, so I can’t check them for you. They used to be in our attic, but who knows where they are now. The invalid must be protected at all costs from her personal desires.”

  So she had been looking for the diaries. Jim had thought, or hoped, that Susan had forgotten them. If they weren’t in the attic any longer, then Lulu must have moved them. He felt so tense he thought his skin would turn inside out on him, while Lara, dragooned into sitting in on the visit with him, froze: if she told her father what she’d done with the trunk, he’d ground her forever!

  Jim didn’t think he could endure more of the conversation. “I’m going to make some tea, Natalie. Do you want any, or a soft drink?”

  Natalie gratefully accepted the offer of tea, but Susan, sitting pointedly under the portrait of Abigail—dressed, like herself, in black, with a cameo at her throat rather than a Gold Star—shook her head.

  “Is that Abigail?” Natalie asked, looking from Susan to the portrait. “What did she do after she lost her husband and her brother?”

  Susan fingered her pin. “She went on. She had to. She kept this farm going and raised her surviving children.”

  “What kept her going, do you know? Or what’s your guess?”

  “Do you want me to say it was her faith in Jesus?” Susan said with a bark of laughter.

  Natalie shook her head. “I want you to say what you think kept her going.”

  “She’d had a vision,” Susan said listlessly. “She came out here because she’d had a vision. And her faith in her vision helped. Also, she was very close to one of the neighbors, Mr. Schapen, and his mother, and their love sustained her.”

  Lara pinched her lips together. Her mother was behaving in a shocking way—she was playacting at being in mourning. She pretended she didn’t want visitors, but, really, whether it was Gina or Pastor Natalie, or even poor Ms. Carmody on the phone, Susan was enjoying the chance to show off how depressed she was.

  For instance, when Pastor Natalie said, “We miss you. We need you at Riverside Church,” Susan said, “To do what? Show you what happens when the blind lead the blind?”

  “Bogus,” Lara said under her breath. Bogus. She got to her feet and went to the kitchen to help Jim make tea and to tell him what she thought of Susan.

  “I bet if we left Mom totally alone, she’d come around, because she wants an audience.”

  “You think? You an expert now on human psychology as well as nutrition?” He handed her the tea to take into Pastor Natalie so that he wouldn’t have to go himself. “Lulu, where are those diaries? And don’t tell me you don’t know.”

  “Do I have to tell?” she whispered. “I’m taking good care of them, I promise.”

  Jim felt the hair crawling on his scalp. “Don’t tell me you put them in the miracle calf’s manger!”

  “No, Dad, honest—I haven’t been near the calf again. The trunk is safe, okay? I just couldn’t stand it if Mom started going through those old papers again, scribbling notes like she was some clone of Abigail’s.”

  “Oh, Lulu—” He threw up his hands, not knowing what to say, finally finishing weakly, “They should go to the university library. The archivist there has been asking for them, and the library would take better care of them than we can. Bring them home, okay? We’ll take them in together to the archivist.”

  Lara nodded and scurried to the front room with Pastor Natalie’s tea. The pastor didn’t stay much longer. When she’d left, Lara leveled her scorn on Susan.

  “You want us to think you’re teetering on the brink of death because you’re so overwhelmed by losing Chip, but then you dress up as if you were in a play and sit underneath Abigail’s portrait so everyone will see what a martyr you are. You never even wore that Gold Star to Chip’s funeral, or anything, so I know you’re just showing off!”

  Susan looked at her. “Perhaps you’re right, Lara. My feelings are so far away from me that I don’t know what they are anymore, and drama seems a way of at least pretending to have feelings. Do you know where Abigail’s diaries are? You are so alert about what everyone in the family is doing, I’m sure you know where your father put them.”

  It was Lara’s turn to be discomposed, but she said hotly, “Even if I did know, I wouldn’t tell you. I couldn’t bear it if you locked yourself in your room again, studying those old books and writing crap all over the walls. Do you know how long it took Ms. Carmody and the other ladies to clean up after you? Do you even care?”

  After a long pause, Susan said, “I don’t like you shouting at me, Lara. You’re my daughter, not my mother or my drill sergeant.”

  Lara bit her lip and fell silent. Susan undid the Gold Star from her throat and pinned it to Lara’s sweatshirt.

  “I’ll share my loss with you,” Susan said. “We’re a Gold Star family. They tell me in therapy to remember that I’m not the only mourner in the house.”

  Forty-Six

  TALK, TALK, TALK…NO ACTION

  FROM PASTOR ALBRIGHT’S SERMON

  Hope that is seen is not hope, Paul tells us. What was he saying to the Church in Rome? When we say “Our hope is in the Lord, who made Heaven and Earth,” we certainly see the earth, and now, thanks to the Hubble telescope, we see heaven upon heaven, but these don’t take away our hope in the Lord.

  Paul is talking in part about Jesus’ return. Every Christian for two thousand years has been hoping to see Christ come again in glory. We’re like small children whose parents have left us for the day. We fear that they will never return, and the day seems unbearably long. Grandma or Uncle John or whatever unfortunate adult has to look after us hears us whining and panics. Maybe Grandma says, “If you’re extra special good, Mom will bring you a present when she gets home,” or, “If you clean up your room and wash the dishes, Mom will come home.” By the end of the day, we’ve done all our chores, we’ve been as good as we know how to be, and Mom still hasn’t come back. We haven’t been able to influence her behavior. And yet, all the time she’s away Mom is thinking of us. Her love for us never wavers.

  We Christians are like that. It’s hard to believe we can’t make Christ appear in glory. If we go through every prophecy in Revelation, and Isaiah and Hosea and Micah, if we sacrifice that red heifer and rebuild the Temple, surely that will prove how good we are and make Him come home in a hurry. It’s hard to believe we can do all that and still not make God do anything that isn’t in the Holy One’s own good time. It’s hard to believe
Jesus still loves us when He seems so distant. And yet we are obliged to live in hope.

  “Oh, yeah, mothers always come back for their children, don’t they?” Elaine Logan muttered. “Pious hypocrite. As bad as all the other Christians. ‘Whited sepulchers,’ just like the Bible says.”

  Her voice carried to the people in the pews closest to her. One or two giggled, but most of them shifted uneasily in their seats, not wanting to be near someone who was unstable but mindful as Christians that it was their duty to love and respond to her.

  Elaine had hitched a ride into town with Jim and Lara Grellier. When they saw Elaine waving her arms at the crossroads, her face sullen, Lara had urged Jim to drive right on past—certainly, his own inclination as well. But he saw Arnie’s truck approaching from the Schapen farm: Myra, Robbie, and Arnie on their way to Salvation Bible. If they picked up Elaine, she might well tell them everything she knew about Jim, and then he’d supplant news of the miracle heifer on Myra’s website. He told Lara to climb into the back and let Elaine have the passenger’s seat.

  “Farmer Jones, Farmer Jones,” Elaine crooned as she hoisted herself onto the running board. “So you do know how to treat a lady. And is this Mrs. Jones?”

  “No! I’m his daughter, and his name isn’t Jones,” Lara cried, angry with Jim and disgusted by Elaine, whose breath smelt sour. How could Gina stand to have someone so foul on the premises?

  “‘All the animals are very hungry, but where is Farmer Jones?’” Elaine quoted from the children’s book. “Why, he’s rolling in the hay, just like his lovely daughter, isn’t that right? All those old tales, they knew what they were talking about.”

  When books said a character’s “head swam,” it was the literal truth, Lara realized. Shame and anger nearly suffocated her, and the gray fields disappeared in a hazy mist in front of her eyes.

  “If you weren’t such a drunk, you wouldn’t make up stuff and start telling people it was true,” Lara said.

  “You’re so pure, like all good Christians, where what you say matters more than what you do. But something is happening, and I know what it is, don’t I, Mr. Jones?”

  “Where do you want me to drop you?” Jim asked hastily, as embarrassed as Lara and therefore not paying attention to Elaine’s revelations about his daughter.

  Elaine said she’d get out wherever they stopped, so they drove her to the church with them. Jim lost track of her then: he wandered into the church hall for a cup of coffee while Lara went off to Rachel Carmody’s Sunday school class with Kimberly Ropes.

  Jim assumed that Elaine had taken off, but between Sunday school and church she popped up again. He was talking to Rachel at the back of the nave when Elaine rolled in from the porch. She’d found someone to give her a drink in the last forty-five minutes, or maybe she kept a bottle in the cloth bag she carried that proclaimed, in faded letters, WOMEN’S LIBERATION UNION.

  “I’ll be your chaperone, Rachel.” Elaine leered. “You don’t want to be alone with Farmer Jones. He’s a bold man, the farmer. And his daughter’s just as bad.”

  Rachel and Jim both flushed. Jim remembered Elaine’s earlier crack about Rachel being in love with him. Surely, that couldn’t be true? Rachel was such a solid, reliable woman. Jim couldn’t imagine that she’d indulge in a foolish fantasy about a married man—forgetting for a moment that that same married man had a foolish fantasy about a different unmarried woman.

  Fortunately, other members of the congregation were coming in to worship, asking Jim about Susan, talking to Rachel about parish matters. The organ began to play the voluntary. Jim wasn’t sure how it happened, perhaps through Elaine’s maneuvering, but he found himself wedged in a pew with Rachel and Elaine. Lara was sitting farther back, with a group of other teens from Sunday school. At least she was doing better, that was one comfort, to see her with her old friends again.

  “Now you two can be cozy together, and I’ll watch over you,” Elaine said, breathing gin over them.

  As the service progressed, Elaine became more sullen and more belligerent. At first, she grumbled about bad mothers, and then how Jim was a whited sepulcher, but when Pastor Albright spoke about the red heifer and how to think about the prophecies in Revelation Elaine’s grievances turned to Arnie.

  “He thinks he’s the boss of everyone. He’s not the boss of me, not him, and not his murdering mother. They’ll be sorry. They think I’m not good enough for their calf, they’ll see if that calf is good enough for them. Them that takes cakes / Which the Parsee-man bakes / Makes dreadful mistakes. High and mighty Sheriff Arnie will see, just you watch!”

  At that point, Elaine became so loud that Rachel tried to get her to leave the service. Elaine stood and shouted, “You call yourselves Christians, but you can’t wait for the service to end so you can go on with your gossip and your fucking and your drinking. I’m saying out loud what you’re thinking, so you want to throw me out. Well, I’m not going!”

  Congregation and minister were momentarily silent, then he said, “We acknowledge that we are less inclusive than we are called to be. We acknowledge that we sometimes find it difficult to accept the gifts that others bring. Lord, teach us to accept the words this woman brings as gifts, and to learn from them. As all our gifts come from you, help us to give back to you that which you have loaned to us.”

  The congregation took this as an invitation for the offering. Servers leaped up with collection plates, and the organist began a prelude to the offertory anthem at such a volume that Elaine found herself drowned out. Uttering general curses against Rachel, Jim, Arnie, and all Christians everywhere, Elaine strode out of church as fast as her bulk allowed.

  Of course, her outburst was the subject of conversation at the coffee hour. Since Rachel and Jim seemed to be the pair attached to Elaine, they found themselves called on as experts by everyone who wanted to discuss the situation, until Jim, exhausted by the ordeal, grabbed Lara and fled with her to the House of Pancakes.

  The next day, when he came to school to collect Lara, Jim sought out Rachel in the teachers’ lounge first. He apologized for leaving her in the middle of the coffee hour.

  She smiled. “I don’t have your allergy to conversation—or what you always call gossip. Elaine’s situation is troubling, though. I’m glad Gina Haring is offering her a home, but if Gina moves back to New York I don’t know what we’ll do with Elaine. She’s such a strange mix, too. The things she knows or half knows, like quoting from Kipling’s Just So Stories.”

  Jim shook his head, puzzled, so Rachel said, “Those lines about ‘cakes / Which the Parsee-man bakes’—that’s from Kipling. She was clearly an educated woman before she became, well, what she is today.”

  Jim thought of the transcript he’d seen in Gina’s study. “Yes, I guess she was.”

  Rachel smiled at him. “As long as you’re here on school property, Jim, let’s do a little school business. Lara is performing better in most of her classes, but her work in biology and Spanish is very marginal, and the rest of her work is only at a C level. Except for social studies, where she’s doing a major report on Iraq—history, religion, the works.”

  Jim was startled. Lara hadn’t said a word to him about it.

  “She seems happier these days,” Rachel added. “Which is good. But I’d like to see her putting the muscle into her work that she gave it last year. And I don’t want any F’s or D’s on her permanent record, so maybe it’s time for another fatherly chat. I did try talking to Susan about this last week, but she didn’t seem interested. I’m afraid it’s all falling on you.”

  Jim looked around the lounge to see how many people were in earshot. “I—Lara’s spending a lot of time with one of the boys in her class. She’s been grounded for two weeks—this is the start of her second week—so I was hoping she’d pay more attention to her schoolwork.”

  “Do you know who the boy is?”

  Jim leaned forward and whispered Robbie’s name, so that no eavesdropper could pick it up and spread it
around.

  Rachel nodded. “That would have been my guess. I understand why he wouldn’t be your first choice, but he’s a good kid, even a good student, not like Junior. Melissa Austin—she’s in charge of the music program—she thinks he’s a pretty good musician, too. We all imagine Mr. Schapen is an ogre, but he’s supported Robbie’s music, even buying him a good guitar and seeing he has the lessons he needs.”

  Jim was surprised—he wouldn’t have expected that of Arnie—just one more proof of how wrong it was to sit in judgment of your neighbors. “Maybe that’s why Lulu’s started playing her trumpet again.”

  Right after Susan’s hospitalization, she’d thrown it down the cellar stairs, saying she never wanted to see it again. Jim had retrieved it and put it in her room. Three weeks ago, she’d started practicing—she was at band rehearsal right now. He left Rachel to listen to his daughter play.

  On his way to the music room, he ran into Blitz, who was doing his winter stint for the school board. They talked for a couple of minutes, about the winter wheat, about when Blitz might come look at the planter, which hadn’t spread evenly when Jim was putting in the crop, and then Rachel emerged, and Blitz’s face lit up. Rachel smiled, too, not with Blitz’s warmth but friendly enough, Jim saw.

  Jim felt let down, then laughed at himself. “Serve you right, you old porker,” he said under his breath. “You wanted Elaine to be wrong about Rachel being in love with you, then you wanted her to be right. You want a harem, boy, become a Mormon. Otherwise, stay loyal to the one wife you’ve got.”

  On the drive home, he talked to Lara about her school performance. “I’m happy that you’re paying better attention, baby, although I wish you were working up to your real abilities. Rachel—Ms. Carmody—says you’re doing outstanding work on some report you’re preparing on Iraq, which proves that you can do better. I don’t want to nag. I know you’re having a tough time, between losing Chip and the way your mom’s acting, but I can’t have you failing any courses. Will you buckle down in science and Spanish?”