“I hope that’s what she’s doing,” Jim said to Susan. “Rachel says her schoolwork is marginally better. But she’s spending too much time with Robbie. I’d like to know where! I don’t want her having sex in a ditch with a boy. Could she have found someplace over on the Fremantle land? Do you think we should talk to her about it?”
Susan shrugged. “If you think it’s the right thing to do, go ahead.”
“She’s your daughter, too, Susan. I don’t want her destroying her long-term happiness just because she’s feeling lonely and abandoned right now.”
“Maybe Etienne would still be alive if I hadn’t argued with him about his life choices. I’m not going to kill our other child by arguing with her.”
Jim, like his daughter, wanted to scream with fury, but he picked up the remote and turned on the football game. Susan stared vacantly at a recent issue of Farm Family Living.
They were both startled to hear Elaine Logan yelling from the kitchen, “Farmer Jones? Farmer Jones, I know you’re around here someplace.”
“Elaine Logan.” Jim got to his feet, wondering if—hoping—Gina had gotten into trouble again.
“Farmer Jones, don’t think you can hide. I’ve seen the spies you and Myra Schapen set on me, murdering bitch. Don’t think I haven’t. And don’t think I’ll put up with it for one second longer!”
Elaine appeared in the doorway between the kitchen and the family room. Burrs covered the legs of her turquoise polyester pants; her faded yellow hair was matted with leaves she’d picked up resting on her way from the Fremantles’ to the Grellier farm. Her appearance startled even Susan, who dropped her magazine.
“What are you talking about?” Jim demanded.
“I need to sit down, and you could give me something to drink. Just because I’m not ready to take off my pants and wave them in your face doesn’t mean I don’t deserve to be treated as politely as Gina.”
Jim looked nervously at his wife, wondering what she would make of Elaine’s comment, but Susan only said, “Sit down. You are as welcome as any other visitor to our home.”
Her cold, languid voice didn’t sound especially welcoming, but Elaine went to the couch, sinking into a heap of afghan. Susan exclaimed angrily and tried to extract her handiwork, but the burrs on Elaine’s pants stuck to it. Elaine made no offer to help Susan clean the blanket but reiterated her demand for a drink. When Jim offered tea, coffee, or juice, Elaine gave him a sour look, but said juice would do.
She swallowed the orange juice in one long, loud gurgle, slammed the glass down on the coffee table, and announced, “I’m tired of your daughter and her lovebird boyfriend spying on my home. I have a birthright to that house, Myra Schapen only has a death right to it. The farmer’s daughter and the murderess’s grandson better get used to it.”
Jim looked at her in blank bewilderment. A birthright to the Fremantle house? Did Elaine have some delusion about being a secret Fremantle heir? Then he thought of the newspaper clipping Elaine had dropped in his cart. If she had miscarried in the Fremantles’ back bedroom, maybe that’s what made her think she had a birthright to the house.
Jim went back to the kitchen and found the clipping buried in his printout of planting charts. “Is this what you’re talking about?”
Elaine snatched the paper from him. “How did you get that? Did your lying, whoring daughter steal it for you?”
“Elaine, you can’t come in here calling everyone in my family names and hope to get any support from us,” Jim said. “You dropped it in my cart when you slept in it two weeks back. I’ve been too busy to return it.”
Elaine kissed the article but stared at him belligerently. “Where is my picture?”
“What picture?” Jim said.
“Don’t act naive with me, Farmer Jones. I kept them together, my baby’s picture and my story. Now, where is it?”
Jim shook his head. “I don’t have it. You can come out to the barn with me to see for yourself.”
“No you don’t, mister. You don’t go dragging me off to your barn and shut me in that cart overnight again. You produce that photograph now!”
“What does it look like?” Susan asked, interested despite herself. “If we knew what you were looking for, it would be easier to find.”
“Oh no you don’t,” Elaine said. “If you knew what I was looking for, you’d use it against me. I bet your butter-won’t-melt-in-her-mouth Sunday-school daughter knows what I’m talking about.”
“My daughter doesn’t steal people’s private papers,” Jim said stiffly.
“Of course you’d stand up for her against me. But you ask your darling daughter what she’s doing in that old barn, her and that boy from the murdering Schapens. If she’s hiding my papers up in that loft, you tell her I won’t put up with it. I’ll call Sheriff Drysdale and get her arrested for trespassing. Then we’ll see what kind of song you sing.”
“Are they hiding in the Fremantle barn?” Susan asked. “Did you interrupt them in the middle of fucking?”
Jim winced at the coarseness of his wife’s language, but Elaine hissed, “They were up the ladder, spying. They think because I can’t climb up after them, I don’t know what they’re doing, but they’re wrong.”
“I’ll talk to Lara,” Jim said quietly, “and let her know she’s upsetting you. Now, why don’t I drive you home.”
“Not in the back of that tractor. Don’t think I’m stupid enough to do that twice.”
Jim couldn’t help laughing. “No, we’ll go in the pickup.”
He helped hoist Elaine into the truck, but when he turned left at the crossroads, toward the Fremantle house, Elaine demanded that he take her to the Schapen farm.
When he refused, she said, “You want to take off all of Gina’s clothes and get in bed with her again, don’t you? But one of her girlfriends is doing that tonight, so you’re shit out of luck, buster.”
Did every woman talk like a field hand these days? First Susan and now this monstrous woman. “I’m not taking you to the Schapens’, Elaine. If you don’t want to go back to Gina’s, I’ll take you into town.”
She started to harangue him, but he cut her off. “If you go to Schapens’, remember that Arnie is a sheriff’s deputy and he’s not afraid to use his power. They won’t invite you inside for orange juice and a chat.”
“I know what Arnie likes to do, beat up women, or get his son—the big thug, not the skinny spy—to beat us up for him. No women allowed near their heifer, but he doesn’t care what men do. And that mother of his, setting fires, she murdered my baby.”
“You had a baby in the Fremantle house, and you think Myra murdered it?” Jim said, trying hard to sort out Elaine’s disjoint accusations.
She was quiet for a moment, then said, as if surprised by the thought, “That’s right. There were two of them. I lost them both. Myra burned him, too. ‘Fire within fire.’ I used to know that whole poem by heart because it was by Dante. I met him in Mr. Patterson’s class on Victorian poetry. He was the most beautiful boy in the world.”
“Dante?” Jim’s head was spinning. “You’re out of your mind. Even I know he’s been dead for a thousand years.”
“Not that one!” Elaine was scornful. “My Dante. And then Myra burned him to death. And now that she thinks I’m collecting evidence, she’s siccing that grandson of hers to spy on me, him and your darling daughter both.”
“Get out. Get out here, Elaine. I’ve had enough.”
“I can’t get out of this great big truck alone,” she whimpered.
“Then I’ll drive you back to Gina’s.”
She gave him a bitter look but clambered down to the road, reciting curses under her breath. He turned the truck around. But when he reached his own yard, he didn’t think he could bear to see his wife, or even his daughter, again tonight. He drove into town, to the coffee bar where he usually met Peter Ropes or some other friend. His insurance broker was there tonight. Jim sat talking with him about the Kansas football team until
the place shut down at midnight.
It was only when he was driving home that he thought again of Elaine and her outburst. Her Dante. And Gina had said the ringleader of the kids in the bunkhouse had been named Dante something. Her lover, her father, she’d said tonight. Had Elaine Logan been the young woman Jim saw in the cornfield all those years ago? He couldn’t remember her face, only the waterfall of pale hair and the provocative smile.
Forty-Nine
GRAFFITI ARTIST
AS HE SCURRIED home in the dark, Robbie wondered about all the sarcastic ways he described not just Junior but even the students at Tonganoxie Bible College when he talked to Lara. Maybe she really was a bad influence on him. Thanks to her, he was questioning everything he’d been taught all these years, by Nanny and his pastors at Salvation Bible Church.
At first, he kept telling Lara that what they were doing didn’t count as sex because he wasn’t inside her, but he had to admit it was pretty hard to believe he was truly being abstinent. Besides which, she showed him websites that proved she could get pregnant even if—well, he didn’t like to put it into words—so she was using a gel, which was messy and nasty, and that meant he was encouraging her to use artificial contraception, which was against Jesus. But Lara claimed that Jesus never talked about contraception, and when Robbie searched his Bible at home he had to agree. So maybe she was right when she said it was just something his church had made up, to mess with his mind.
If Nanny had been different—well, even if she’d been the same angry person but had treated him like she treated Junior—he might have stood up more strongly for his church’s teachings to Lara. Come to think of it, Salvation Through the Blood of Jesus Full Bible Church wasn’t really the Schapens’ church: they’d always been Methodists, up until Nanny married Robbie’s grandfather. Maybe true Schapens, to use the phrase Nanny was so fond of, really were Methodists.
If he became a Methodist, or even joined Riverside Church with Lara, would he start thinking the Universe was billions of years old? Trying to imagine the big bang, dinosaurs, the earth going back billions and billions of years without any people on it, made him feel dizzy. How could you believe that and still believe in God?
Even so, as Robbie ran up the road into his family’s yard he couldn’t help laughing at what Nanny would do if he said, “Dad and Junior aren’t true Schapens, because they belong to your church, but as soon as I leave here I’m going back to the Schapens’ real religion.”
He could see Myra in the kitchen. He could only stand up to her in his head, not in the flesh, certainly not with Lara’s kisses on him: he was sure Myra would be able to smell Lara’s lemongrass shampoo on his skin.
He went around to the back of the house, where he crawled in through a window that he kept unlocked just for such occasions. The window opened into the old parlor, where the family Bible sat on a carved wooden stand.
On impulse, he opened the Bible to the genealogy page. He had never been interested in it before, except to see his own birth date and that he was named for that first Robert, Robert Cady Schapen, b. 1826. Now he wanted to find some sign that he was the true Schapen, Junior the imposter. With Junior gone, Arnie would love him best, the unspoken fantasy of every younger brother.
After his mother ran off, Myra had put a heavy black line through her name, so that it appeared as though he and Junior—Arnold Taylor Schapen, Jr.—had sprung from Arnie’s body without any womanly help. He studied the history of marriages and births. Schapens had married Wiesers, Longneckers, and Fremantles, and his great-great-grandfather had even married one of the Grellier daughters. That meant he and Lara were cousins of some kind. The thought made him laugh again.
The noise brought Myra from the kitchen into the front room. “And just what do you have to laugh about, young man, missing dinner without a by-your-leave? Since when do you get to pick and choose when you’ll be here?”
Robbie ignored her complaint. “I was looking at the family tree, Nanny. It says here we’re cousins of the Grelliers’.”
She glowered but bent over the page. “Hmm. Must be where you come from, then. Or maybe your ma fooled around with Jim Grellier, and told my son you were really his. Kathy Sheldon dated Jim in—”
“I’m tired of you talking that way, about me and about my mom. I am Arnie’s son!” Robbie shouted. “If you’re so sure I’m not related to him, get our DNA tested.”
“DNA,” she cried, as if he’d suggested her running naked down the county road. “You know Pastor says DNA stands for ‘Devil Noes All.’ Are you being infected by evolution talk now? Is that what you’re doing when you waltz off to get away from the crowds? Studying evolution?”
Robbie started to say “DNA isn’t about evolution,” but it was a waste of breath to argue with Nanny. And, anyway, he had an uneasy feeling, from what his biology teacher said, that DNA did have something to do with evolution.
“What did you do with my mom’s letters to me?” he demanded, made suddenly bold in front of Myra.
“How did you know—” She bit off the words.
“So she did write me, and you never let me know. I want to see my letters.”
“I’m trying to save your immortal soul all the time you’re trying to sink back down into the pit. Ever since your father told Pastor Nabo you bred that calf, you’ve been getting a swelled head. Well, I am here to bring it back to normal size! You think you can come and go from this house as if it was a Holiday Inn, but you’ll think twice about that from now on. This is a working farm. Your father does double duty, working for that liberal, Commie-loving so-called sheriff, besides carrying his load here. I cook three meals a day that you don’t think you have to show up for. Your brother cares enough about the farm to come all the way from Tonganoxie to guard the calf, even though he’s a college student and a football star, while you wander around the countryside as if you were the prince of Douglas County.”
“That’s so unfair,” Robbie said. “I milk a hundred twenty-two cows every day, sometimes twice a day. I clean out the barn. I’m in school, too—and, unlike Junior, I actually study.”
“Junior doesn’t need to study,” Myra said loftily. Which was true, Robbie thought, when you considered the free pass instructors at the high school and now at the Bible college gave their football star.
His grandmother added, “Your father is on the four-to-midnight shift tonight. You can relieve Junior until your father gets home. And when you get up at four-thirty tomorrow morning to do the milking, we’ll see how big your mouth is then.”
“I have homework. Anyway, Junior loves guard duty. You know he’s hoping to shoot someone, or break heads or something.”
Robbie brushed past Myra and went into the kitchen. His grandmother had thrown his supper into the garbage, so he started to make himself a peanut butter sandwich. Myra stormed in after him and snatched the bread away, so that he ended up spreading a knife full of peanut butter onto the countertop.
“You will respect me, you—you vermin. I told you to get out there and relieve Junior!”
Robbie’s hands were shaking, but he took another piece of bread from the bag and put peanut butter on it. The knowledge that his mother hadn’t forgotten him, that she had written to him—written him letters his grandmother had kept from him—brought him a small glow of comfort as well as courage. “You know, Nanny, if Arnie isn’t my father that means you’re not my grandmother, either, which means I don’t have to listen to you for one nanosecond. Which is what scientists call a billionth of a second.”
“Don’t you dare bring science into this household and pretend it means something. If you won’t respect me out of your own conscience, your brother will make you do so. Junior!” she shouted, but of course he couldn’t hear her, all the way at the back of the lot, so she stumped her way out past the old hay barn, the milk and cow barns, and the sheds for the new calves to the red heifer’s enclosure.
When Myra reached the enclosure, she expected to see Junior patrolling the
perimeter. The padlock was off, and light was seeping around the edge of the door. What if someone had jumped Junior and was making off with the calf? She’d better go in to see.
It was wrong that a boy like Robbie, who talked back to his own grandmother and even dreamed about DNA testing, could get in to see the calf while she, Myra Schapen, who had rebuilt this farm and raised Junior and Robbie when that worthless Kathy ran off, was barred from it. On top of which, since when did a good Christian like herself take direction from a bunch of Jews with greasy coats and long, dirty beards?
She pushed open the door to the heifer’s pen and heard a loud howl. She blinked, her eyes adjusting to the lights, and saw the calf, her grandson, and Eddie Burton in a great whirl of motion. The calf was bleating unhappily, its “yeh-heh, yeh-heh” drowning the noise that Eddie and Junior were making. Eddie Burton had his jeans down to his ankles. That was what she focused on. Not on her beloved older grandson, whom she hadn’t seen naked since she changed his last diaper seventeen years earlier.
“Eddie Burton! Eddie Burton, have you been peeing on this calf?” Myra said. “Get your clothes on this minute and get home! What are you doing in this sacred place?”
The calf continued its uneasy lowing, but Junior was laughing. “He didn’t hurt the calf, Nanny. Don’t get your undies in a bundle.”
Robbie appeared in the doorway behind Myra. “Junior! You and Eddie better not have been touching the heifer. The Jews are coming tomorrow and they look at everything about her—and I mean everything!”
“You think a couple of Christ killers with long hair should be telling me what to do? Think again, shrimp.”
“You shouldn’t be in here with Eddie,” Robbie said, trying to stand his ground.
“I seen you,” Eddie said to Robbie. “I seen you at Fremantles’.”
Robbie’s stomach went cold.
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