Bleeding Kansas

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Bleeding Kansas Page 46

by Sara Paretsky


  “He did? Really?” Gina laughed, exposing the crooked lower tooth that still seemed endearing to Jim. “What will happen to Clem?”

  “I don’t know. My older brother is handling his defense. Junior wasn’t badly hurt, so they may work out some kind of lawyer’s agreement.” He didn’t add that the injury had been a boon to Junior’s career: Curly had brought home the news that the Cowboys and the Eagles were both recruiting him, now that they’d seen him on national television.

  Gina stopped laughing and said, with an abrupt change of mood, “People think New York or other big cities are violent places, but New York doesn’t have anything like the concentrated venom I’ve seen up close here in Kansas.”

  “Do you think so?” Jim said. “Maybe it’s because I know all these people that I see it differently. You say you want to connect this time to the seventies, but you’re ignoring thirty-five years in between where we all got along well enough.”

  “Arnie and Myra are obsessed with how liberals took over Douglas County in 1970,” Gina argued. “They kept saying I represented the same threat to law and order as the hippies.”

  “You do like to stir people up.” Jim tried to make it sound like a joke, but his voice had an edge.

  Gina shut her eyes as if trying not to see something painful. “I guess I’ve done a lot of damage, too. If I hadn’t come down here, Elaine would still be cruising the bars, and Etienne would still be alive.”

  Jim leaned against the milling machine. “Don’t imagine yourself bigger or more important in the world than you are, Gina. Maybe Chip would be alive, but you know my wife, you know she needs a big cause to wrap her heart around—she might have found the anti-war people without you. If she had, Chip might have reacted the same way.

  “Elaine—I don’t know. Maybe you did injure her. Indirectly, so to speak, by stirring her up with all your Wiccan nonsense and getting her out here, remembering Dante and the Schapens and the bunkhouse fire. But you weren’t responsible for the Schapens and their grandiose ideas about their calf and the Temple in Jerusalem and Jesus. Arnie and Myra won’t learn anything from this except to blame their neighbors more than ever for their troubles, but maybe you can take something away with you. Something along the lines that even a woman like Elaine Logan is human, not a machine you switch on and off when you feel like it.”

  She bit her lip. “Or you? Is that what you’re trying to imply?”

  “Maybe. But I made my own choices, too.” Jim spoke with difficulty. “I let loneliness and grief and fear take over my head. Also, I liked your coffee.”

  She laughed but said seriously, “You’re a good person, Jim Grellier. I’m not used to meeting good people. Not that I hang around with bad ones, but there’s a difference between being ordinary and being actively good.”

  He was embarrassed by her speech and turned away, saying quickly, “What’s in the box?”

  “Those are your great-great-grandmother’s diaries. Lara had hidden them in the house, you know. The tin trunk they were in was in one of the few rooms to survive the fire. I brought some of the Venetian fireplace tiles, too. I thought Susan would want them, but then I thought I should check with you first.”

  “Take them up to the house. Susan’s in the kitchen. She and Lara, they’re cleaning out the cupboards.”

  He felt her lips brush his cheeks—soft, full lips, like a butterfly—and then she was gone. He found the push broom and began shoving metal shavings across the floor as if it were essential for saving the farm.

  Fifty-Seven

  TIDYING UP

  From: [email protected]

  Date: November 17

  To: [email protected]

  Jimbo—

  When I fled Kansas for Chicago, I didn’t expect the valley to catch up with me here! I’ve talked to Mimi about letting young Schapen stay with us. I agree, he sounds very different from Arnie and Myra, but I don’t know how well a Full Bible fundamentalist will cope with our secular world. I haven’t been in a church for thirty years, except for Gram’s and Chip’s funerals, and even though Mimi is Jewish she’s not like those red heifer loonies. Also, Nate’s only eight, and Mimi doesn’t want him getting weird ideas from Robbie. Still, she’s willing for him to come for a trial visit to see how it goes. I can understand why it would be a disaster to have him live with you. Aside from Lara, it would be hard for Robbie to have his father and Myra across the road.

  Did you know Clem Burton called me? You know he shot Junior Schapen at the football game last week, right? You do hear some local news, don’t you, O see no evil? He says it was because the DA was going to put Eddie in a group home in exchange for Eddie pleading guilty to setting the fire at Fremantles’. Clem was furious that Junior got off the hook by framing Eddie when Eddie was just infatuated and willing to do whatever his hero wanted. I’ll be coming down next week for the initial arraignment, so I’ll take a look at Robbie then and maybe bring him home for a few weeks.

  Cheers,

  Doug

  From: [email protected]

  Date: December 11

  To: [email protected]

  Jimbo,

  Yes, Clem has retained me to defend him on assault and attempted murder charges, so I guess I’ll be spending a fair amount of time back in Kansas. Any chance you could put up my associate when she comes down to take depositions next month?

  Having Robbie Schapen here is working out pretty well so far. We’ve persuaded University High to let him take their entrance exams to see where he places. I think it helped him coming to someone who knows the land and the people, even though Chicago is quite a big jump for a country boy. He’s taking guitar lessons at the Old Town School of Folk Music. His music seems to keep him grounded. He misses his cows, but he doesn’t miss the four-thirty rise and shine, that’s for sure.

  Mimi being Jewish is another hurdle for him, although after everything he went through last fall he’s kind of shying away from religion these days. Mimi was afraid he might want to convert her or Nate, but that never comes up.

  I’ve hired a detective to try to track down his mother. If we find her, and her life is in the right place, that might be the best solution for him in the long run. But, for the time being, he’s welcome with us.

  Right now he’s playing “Noah Built Himself an Ark” on his guitar for Nate—seems nonsectarian enough. He also writes reams of C & W love songs to Lulu. I’m starting to get gripes from Mimi about why don’t I ever write love songs for her!

  Doug

  http://www.schapenfarm.com/newsandnotes.html

  Pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall. The inerrant Word of God teaches us that, but some of our neighbors have a long way to go before they learn it. They thought they could bring us low. They thought they could break our spirit when they stole our miracle calf. They thought they could destroy us when they shot the apple of our eye, our beloved Junior.

  Well, we just got word that our milk is considered blessed by the Lord for its extra rich creaminess, and that we are the supplier of choice for Christian Cream and Ice Cream. The miracle heifer may not have fulfilled her destiny in bringing us the Lord of Hosts in glory, but she guided the Schapen family to a better place.

  And Junior’s injury brought him the national attention his play has always deserved. The Dallas Cowboys and the Philadelphia Eagles are both scouting him. His coach says his recovery is astounding. He should be back to his full strength by summer.

  Pride, pride the sin by which the angels fell. When will our neighbors finally find themselves cured of this heinous sin? They are trying to lead our younger boy, Robbie, out of the path of righteousness, but the Lord loveth whom He chasteneth.

  From: [email protected]

  Date: January 23

  To: [email protected]

  Dear Jimbo,

  Yep, I got Clem released on an I bond. I don’t know if that’s good or bad as far as Ardis is
concerned, having him home again. Although Clem is mighty peeved at the news about Junior, it will help our defense in the long run.

  Robbie did get into U High, although they’re making him go back to ninth grade to catch up on his math and science. Still no word on his mother.

  I guess it’s true that only the good die young. I saw the story in the Douglas County Herald, about Nabo holding an Advent Revival at Salvation Bible and bringing in five thousand people over the seven days of the meeting! And then Arnie gets to capitalize on his heifer and Clem shooting Junior by becoming the martyr of the Christian farm movement. His milk is commanding a premium, I read in the Wall Street Journal. Oy veh, as we say up here in the big bad city.

  Love to Susan and Lara. I know Robbie wants to see Lara, but I think you’re right to let that particular fire cool down. I’m glad Susan’s better. Lulu wrote Robbie that’s she’s taken up tile making, trying to replicate the Venetian tiles from the old Fremantle house. Sounds promising.

  Peace,

  Doug

  Fifty-Eight

  SPRING

  THE WINTER WHEAT had broken dormancy and was starting to grow. All week, a pale green had shimmered under the brown tufts, barely visible, like a shy girl at a school dance: don’t look at me, I’m here. This morning, though, the whole field was suddenly alive.

  The sky was still dark, barely paler than the land beneath it, but Jim could smell the greenness of the plants, a fresh tang like lime rising from the land. When he bent to feel the stalks, they were supple and soft as bird down between his fingers.

  He heard footsteps whickering through the grass, and then Susan knelt beside him. Like him, she bent to feel soil and roots.

  “Mmm. It smells like spring.”

  They squatted for a time without speaking. All the poetry about spring that Lara was studying for her English class—April is the cruelest month…Blossom by blossom the spring begins…Now that April with his showers sweet—and Lara’s own earnest, clumsy lines that celebrated the coming blue skies, pink roses, nestlings, why did no one write a poem about the winter wheat coming to life?

  Susan seemed to read his thoughts. “At group therapy, they say to be grateful for small things, but I’m grateful for this big thing—spring again, the wheat again. Perhaps this is the only vision I’m allowed, seeing the wheat come to life. I have to keep reminding myself that it isn’t small just because it isn’t the Mother of God in chains.”

  He squeezed her hand.

  She took a deep breath. “Jim, I’m sorry about the farm. Thank you for protecting the X-Farm for Lara, but you had to sell the river section, and you had to sell it to Arnie. I’m sorry for—for letting you down, for being the reason you had to do it.”

  He put his finger over her lips. “Listen.”

  The bobolinks were calling to each other, their long line of song drowning out the meadowlarks. The bobolinks had come back from South America a week ago, as they had each spring for twenty thousand years, and were working in earnest on their nests. They sailed around Jim and Susan in the dark, paying no more attention to the humans than to the silos across the field. In the east, a faint stain of pink heralded the rising sun.

 

 

 


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