The room was still about half full when a new cry passed from mouth to screaming mouth: Elaine had stolen an SUV. Someone—Sister Ruesselmann, no, Brother Schapen, Brother Clifton, maybe Pastor himself—had left their keys in the ignition. Elaine had driven off.
At that, Arnie and Mr. Ruesselmann both ran after the mob. In another moment, Pastor Nabo followed them. Junior and the other casualties got to their feet and started limping toward the exit. The doors swung shut behind the stragglers. Robbie and Lara were left alone, staring at each other under the spotlights.
Fifty-Two
SACRIFICIAL CALF
LARA STOOD ON wobbly legs and tore the mike from her jacket. “I don’t like your church very much, Robbie. I’m going home.”
“I’m sorry, Lara.” Robbie couldn’t speak above a whisper. “That was so horrible, I didn’t know—they didn’t tell me—I never expected—Oh, Lara, I’m so sorry.”
He began to sob, the inexperienced wracking sobs of a boy who hadn’t cried for years. A minute earlier, Lara had thought she couldn’t stand to be in the same room with him, or any other Schapen, but now she found herself patting his head and telling him it was all right, she knew it wasn’t his fault, she didn’t hate him.
“But I’m still going home. I’m worn-out, and I want to see my dad. He doesn’t even know where I am. And that stupid jerk Miles Ruesselmann stole my cell phone, so I can’t even call him.” She bit her lips, which were swollen from her own earlier sobbing.
“Can I ride with you, Lulu? My dad made me drive in with him and Nanny. I should’ve known Dad had something awful planned when he said they’d be coming tonight: they’ve never wanted to listen to me play before, especially not Nanny. I didn’t even have time to get my guitar out of the back of the truck—they had Junior drag me in here as soon as we parked.”
The two walked slowly out of assembly room, looking around fearfully in case Arnie or Junior was lurking. They kept about a yard apart, neither willing to touch the other. The pastor’s description of sex had been so repulsive that they were each privately disgusted by their previous intimacy.
A few knots of people stood in the hallway, talking in excited under-voices. When Lara and Robbie passed, the groups became pointedly silent, watching the pair, who stared stonily ahead, marching on robot legs to the front door.
Cars were still backed up, trying to leave the parking lot. Robbie and Lara had to skirt their way around the cars, trucks, and SUVs to cross Lone Pine Drive. A woman lowered her window and yelled “Harlot! Thief!” at Lara.
When they were safely inside her truck, Robbie gave Lara a sidelong look. “Lara, I don’t want to go back there, to my dad and Nanny. Could I come home with you? Just for tonight?”
Lara squinched her eyes shut. “I need to be alone, Robbie. I know that sounds mean, because it must be shitty at your place, but not tonight. I just need to see my dad, and be alone.”
He took the rejection humbly—he felt too responsible for the treatment she’d endured at Pastor Nabo’s and his father’s hands. Both teens were exhausted from the evening’s emotions, but Robbie had worked all night Monday and much of Tuesday: he was worn to the bone. He made a pillow of his backpack and drifted off to sleep when Lara turned on to Highway 10. Lara switched on her CD player for company. Jennifer Hewitt was singing “I just can’t take it.”
“I can’t, either,” Lara said aloud in the dark, “and I have way more to take than you do.”
She hoped her dad would be home by the time she got there. As she drove along, all she could think about was flinging herself into his arms, crying against his chest, getting comforted. Maybe a miracle would have happened tonight at the therapy session. Maybe her mother would notice Lara’s distress, pick her up—big girl that she was now—and rock her in Gram’s old rocking chair.
Lara started to say aloud, “Come back to life, Mom,” but it sounded too much like Pastor Nabo demanding that the Holy Spirit descend on him, or that Lara come to Jesus and give up her demon. That memory made her feel sick and shaky. Turn it off, she ordered herself, keep this truck on the road. If you fall in a ditch, it’ll be big bad Arnie Schapen they’ll dispatch to pull you out.
She pictured having to spend the rest of her life dodging Arnie Schapen. She’d be driving to school, or bringing the combine down the road to the Wakarusa River, and Arnie would be there, barring her path, grinning all over his red face. “Come with me, come to Jesus!” he’d be shouting.
Lara wondered if this was how Susan felt when Lara demanded that her mother snap out of it, wake up, pay attention. Did Lara herself seem like some terrible bully like Pastor Nabo? It wasn’t right to run away from your children, whether you did it literally, as Robbie’s mother had, or withdrew into a shadow world like Susan, leaving your body behind as a pretend person. Even so, Lara squirmed on her seat, seeing herself haranguing Susan as if her mother were a demon-possessed sinner. She turned up the volume on the CD to drown out her thoughts. No more thinking tonight, no more words about demons in this head, ever.
She braked for the exit to the county road. As she turned north, she saw a glow across the bare fields. Gina Haring’s bonfire—she’d forgotten all about it in the drama of the evening. The bulk of the Fremantle mansion lay between her and the Wiccan ceremony, so that their bonfire appeared only as a corona around the house. It was all such a—such a crock. That was what Chip used to say when he was furious with someone for making up bullshit. A crock. Dancing around a bonfire to commune with pagan spirits or frothing over the demonically possessed, both were crocks. All that was really on Myra’s or Pastor Nabo’s or Gina’s minds was sex, sex, sex.
There was a huge backup in front of her on the county road, unusual at this hour, unusual at any hour, except on weekends when pilgrims poured in to worship the Schapen calf. The SUV in front of her sported bumper stickers announcing SAVED THROUGH THE POWER OF HIS BLOOD and I CAN DO ALL THINGS IN HIS NAME.
Lara’s stomach clenched. Had Pastor Nabo brought his flock out here to attack her? Her hands started to slip on the steering wheel, but as she passed the Burton house, with its collection of old cars on blocks, and got closer to the tracks, she saw the vehicles ahead were turning left toward Schapens’. Probably Arnie had invited the Saved Ones to hold a powwow and decide what to do next to rid Kaw Valley of the devil.
The SUV ahead of her braked so abruptly that she almost rammed it. The truck bounced on its shocks hard enough to wake Robbie. He didn’t open his eyes, willing himself to go back to sleep, hoping that if Lara couldn’t rouse him he could at least spend the night in her truck.
Lara pulled out to drive around the line of turning cars. She bumped over the train tracks. At the turn-in to the Schapen place, a sheriff’s car was blocking the way. One of the deputies, a man Lara didn’t recognize, was inspecting driver’s licenses before he let people through.
Lara nudged Robbie. “Something’s going on. I don’t want to have a hassle after all the other hassles I’ve gone through. Can you tell the guy you’re a Schapen and get him to let you in?”
Robbie reluctantly opened his eyes. “Oh. Deputy Hardin. He knows me.”
He stumbled out of the truck on his numb legs and walked over to the deputy. Lara rolled down her window and caught a fragment of the conversation over the crackling of radios and the noise of the people in the cars around her.
Deputy Hardin put an arm around Robbie’s shoulders. Break-in, Lara heard. Only church elders. Grandmother beside herself.
Excellent. A break-in, with Myra beside herself. The only good news tonight. Lara waited until she was sure the deputy was letting Robbie on the property. In fact, Hardin blew an imperative whistle and another deputy appeared who put Robbie into a squad car and drove him toward the house.
Lara put her truck in gear. She was turning in to her own yard—finally, shakily, home—when she was startled by the hullabaloo behind her. She looked down the county road just in time to see Arnie’s outsize pickup bounce out of the sor
ghum field and somehow leap across the drainage ditch. The cars backed up on the county road scattered, and just in time: the pickup roared across the road, cleared the second ditch, and headed in to the X-Farm. Behind it—far behind it—Arnie chugged along on his tractor, with Myra next to him and Junior standing behind.
The yard lights at the track crossing showed the back of the pickup clearly. Lara laughed out loud. Someone had stolen the perfect red heifer and was taking her for a joyride.
Fifty-Three
SAMHAIN
WHEN LARA REACHED her own home, her heart sank: her father’s truck wasn’t in the yard. Her parents weren’t back from group therapy. What were they doing, going out for dinner and a movie? Didn’t they know their daughter was home alone after the shittiest evening of her life, worse even than the day she learned Chip was dead or the night Susan tried to kill herself?
Her parents were always home by nine at the latest and here it was—She looked at her watch: eight-ten. No. She stared at the dial, watched the electronic seconds tick away. The watch was working. How could that be? She had left her house a little after six. How could a year’s worth of unbearable emotion been squeezed into so little time?
She couldn’t go into the dark house alone. She put her head in her hands, wanting to howl like a baby until mommy and daddy came home to comfort her, but she found she was too exhausted even to cry. She leaned back in the seat, turned up the volume on her CD player, and nodded off. Five minutes later, she was startled awake by an explosion, followed by pistol shots and screams.
Lara screamed herself. The noise was terrifying, terrible, but when it stopped, her tired brain tried to make sense of it. Had one of the Saved Ones thrown a stick of dynamite or hand grenade at Arnie’s pickup with the heifer in the back? Morons. Imbeciles. The sooner they all went home to Jesus, the better off ordinary people like her family would be. They didn’t even think about all the pain they brought to the people around them. And what if there were wounded people lying around the X-Farm now?
She climbed from the truck, her legs still shaking from her fright. She needed to bring first aid to the survivors, that’s what she’d learned in 4-H, in the disaster-preparedness class she’d done when Chip shipped out to the Gulf.
She forced her tired body into a run. It was like at the end of a basketball game, when you didn’t think you could move another foot, and Coach yelled, “Call up your reserves! There’s always a little extra your body’s holding back.”
She’d stowed her first-aid kit next to the fire extinguisher in the kitchen. A flashlight stood there, too. She grabbed them and pelted back to the truck, drove across the train tracks past the lineup of cars, and turned in to the X-Farm. People were running madly through the disked sunflower field. Trucks, Hummers, SUVs were stopped at crazy angles along the ditch, and everyone was screaming.
Lara jumped out of her pickup, kit in one hand, flashlight in the other, and went into the field searching for casualties but not seeing any. As she looked around, bewildered, she spotted Chris Greynard. He was sitting cross-legged on the hood of an abandoned truck.
“What happened?” she demanded.
“Lara Grellier! What are you doing here?” He slid off the truck.
“I live here, don’t you remember? I heard the explosion and the gunshots! What happened? Did they get the shooter? Is anyone hurt?”
Chris laughed. “Elaine Logan blew out the engine on Arnie’s truck. That’s what you heard—pistons and pins shooting out the sides of the engine and whacking the hood. Can you believe Robbie’s dad, Mr. Law-and-Order-of-Douglas-County Schapen, left his keys in the ignition when he parked at the church tonight?”
“So Elaine took it? Serves him right, bullying busybody!”
“Yeah, maybe,” Chris said. “Anyway, old Arnie put out an APB for his truck. I heard the deputies at the crossroads about splitting their pants laughing at Mr. Schapen for leaving his keys in the ignition. Someone spotted Elaine doing eighty on K-10, so everyone from church came roaring out here. Only Elaine had like a twenty-minute head start before we knew where she was going, so she had time to steal the calf.”
“But how did she get in the pen? How could she get Nassie on the truck?” Lara demanded.
“My dad drove Mr. Schapen to the pen. He says, as far as they can tell, Elaine rammed Nassie’s enclosure hard enough to bust down the door and part of one side, then backed up to the pen and forced the heifer onto the truck bed: the platform was just about the same height as the bed. I don’t know what she thought she’d do with Nassie, take her to the witches’ bonfire and roast her or something. Anyway, once Elaine got the calf in the truck she took off. Somehow, she managed to clear the drainage ditches, but she ran into a hole in your field here and the truck went into dirt up to the axel. She gunned the engine so hard she blew it apart.”
Chris started to laugh again. “You should’a heard Myra Schapen. I never knew anybody could swear like that without using any bad words.”
“Where’s Nassie?” Lara asked. “Is she still in the truck?”
“Nah. Elaine scared the shit out of the heifer: Nassie freaked when the engine blew. She jumped over the backboard and took off. For all I know, she jumped over the moon. Arnie and my dad tore off after her; so did Myra. She got Junior to drag poor old Robbie along, too.”
Lara looked around the X-Farm at all the vehicles. It was as if she had sown sunflowers and reaped a car wreck. “Why are you just sitting here laughing your head off? Why aren’t you joining the rest of the Saved Ones in destroying the heretics in the valley?”
Chris shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot. “I’ve had enough heretic saving for one night. I’m waiting for Robbie, see if he wants to crash with me. If you see him, tell him I’m waiting in my old man’s car over by the crossroads.”
“Yeah, okay.”
Chris turned back toward the road, but Lara hiked through her field, looking at the abandoned cars and trucks. A number sported IN CASE OF RAPTURE, THIS CAR WILL BE UNMANNED bumper stickers.
“The wise men followed a star to the manger, you followed a calf away from the manger!” she shouted at the night sky. “Hypocrites!”
In the distance, she could see the Saved Ones heading onto the Fremantle land, going toward the bonfire. Lara walked through the heavy, dry clods to her own truck, then bumped down the dirt track to the county road. At the train tracks, she stopped to stare at her house: it was still completely dark; her parents weren’t home yet. She turned east, toward the Fremantle place.
She parked in the big circular drive under the arms of a giant cottonwood, planted as a seedling by Una Fremantle in 1857. She jumped down from the cab. The Fremantle house was dark, too, so she used her flashlight to find her way around to the back of the house. She gasped in fright at a shape moving toward her. Taking a step back, she held up her flashlight.
Elaine Logan looked up. The turquoise pantsuit she’d been wearing when she was arrested was black with mud. Her face was smeared with dirt as well. At the sight of Lara, her mouth twisted into a bitter leer.
“Oh, it’s you, Goody-Two-Shoes Farmer’s Daughter. You got us all into that scene at church tonight. I hope you’re proud of yourself.”
Lara couldn’t speak.
“Your pious little boyfriend is off lassoing his calf. It can’t be that much of a miracle. It came with me, and that didn’t bring the wrath of Jehovah onto my head, did it?”
Lara edged away.
Elaine laughed derisively. “Everyone out here thinks they’re better than me. They’re not. They just do their dirty deeds in the dark, where no one can see. Ask Farmer Jones. He’ll tell you I’m right, even if you are his darling little girl.”
Lara hadn’t realized how much venom could be packed into the word darling. She stood frozen until Elaine’s laughter abruptly stopped.
“I’m tired and no one cares, no one wants to help a poor little lost girl.” Elaine reverted to her whiny-child voice, which unnerved Lara even more t
han her invective.
“I can’t help you. You’re on your own!” Lara cried, turning to run.
At the edge of the orchard, she looked back. Elaine was unlocking the kitchen door—she’d somehow found a key to the house. Probably she stole one while Gina wasn’t looking.
Lara trudged into the apple orchard and followed the shouts and cries coming from the bonfire. When she reached the clearing where the Wiccans had their fire, she pulled herself up on the low branch of one of the trees.
Gina and her friends, a number of them naked despite the chilly night, were arguing with the Salvation Bible people. Everyone was shouting so loudly that Lara couldn’t make out what anyone was saying, beyond the occasional “bigots” on one side and “harlots,” or “whores” on the other. She saw Pastor Nabo and the Ruesselmann family, including Amber, but didn’t recognize any of the other Saved Ones.
As she watched, Arnie Schapen approached, leading the perfect red heifer by a rope. Junior was with him and Robbie was following after, head sunk in his chest. Far behind them came Myra, her head upright, her jaw moving, although whatever words she was snapping out were drowned by the uproar around her.
Poor Nassie. The calf was covered with mud and was trembling, from her perfect umber crown to her ruby tail. Lara longed to take the calf away, wash her, rub her down, get her away from this assembly of maniacs.
To her horror, she saw Arnie pull out his gun. She jumped from her perch into the high grass, where she lay flat, her hands over her ears. She was afraid he was going to shoot Nassie, or even Gina, but he fired into the air. People screamed, ran, and Arnie fired again. This time, the crowd subsided into an uneasy, muttering silence.
“You witches!” Arnie bellowed. “I could shoot every last one of you and not blink an eye, for harming my calf.”
Gina stepped forward. “We have done nothing to your calf, Mr. Schapen. Don’t bring her here all muddied and lathered and pretend we hurt her.”
Bleeding Kansas Page 43