Inside the cab they were still arguing. “What exactly are you going to say?” Abby asked for the third time since leaving Collins.
“I’ll figure it out,” said James. “I figured out Jeremy Heldt.”
“I don’t know what you figured out,” Abby said. “He told you to leave him alone.”
“He knew where she was,” James said, and though his timing was in their usual fraternal block-and-parry mode, his tone was soft, nurturing. He was guarding something, Abby wasn’t sure what. “That’s the giveaway.”
“He told you not to come here,” she said.
“And then he copied and pasted the address from someplace on his hard drive right into the e-mail.”
“It’s right up there,” Ed said from behind the wheel, pointing. They all looked at the house: it was in a nice neighborhood, full of houses that had been built long ago, more ornately decorated than the farmsteads outside Collins or the red-brick duplexes that lined the new streets of Nevada. This one was yellow with brown trim.
“I wouldn’t trade the farmhouse for this,” Abby said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with people.” She looked through the passenger’s-side window of her father’s RV with her brow knitted, scrutinizing the little yellow house like something excavated from an archaeological dig. I wished I could have made it last forever: the great hulking machine drawing up to the curb, parking so slowly, not wanting to scrape up the hubcaps, aligning itself and then correcting the angle and finally coming to a stop; the young woman looking out the window, fixing her gaze; and then the whole family, spilling out into the daylight like moles from a hill blasted open, blinking in the bright sun, looking expectantly toward my front porch and then upward to where I stood, happy to have company, smiling and waving like a little girl.
From the window, I couldn’t hear what they were saying, of course, but I could see their lips moving. As a child I developed a habit of watching people’s mouths when they spoke. In restaurants, for example, with too much ambient noise to make out the words without some visual cue, my father busy with the menu, keeping his idle inventory of which towns called them hotcakes and which ones held firm at pancakes; but my eye would be on the old woman with her grown-up son two tables away, her eyebrows rising a little as she tried not to telegraph her worry. You should get a vacation, she was saying, I was sure of it. You can’t miss a word like vacation.
Our lives, of course, were in some ways like a vacation that never ended; Dad would find work at the local bank and diligently put in his forty hours, but as soon as he picked me up from school we’d be off on our expeditions: to the shelters, to the hospitals, to the college campuses and the storefront churches. When the options were all exhausted we’d just move on; there are banks everywhere, and if the bank didn’t need another accountant, the grain elevator might, or the hog lot, or the fish hatchery.
Wisconsin was where we stopped heading east: we’d spent time in Missouri, and in Kansas, and in Colorado and South Dakota. From there we’d tried Minnesota; Dad had word that the group was active around St. Paul. But Mom wasn’t in St. Paul, and she wasn’t in Rochester, and while Madison had looked promising—so many Jesus people on the college campuses back then, their feet bare in spring, long hair down to the middle of their backs—the trail had grown cold.
We stayed several years. I was young, but I’d already lived in so many places. Even as a very young girl, I’d known enough to say I was from Tama; it set me apart. Most of my friends had been born across the river at the big hospital in Omaha. They never treated me like an outsider, but I felt like one, a little.
Pulled along by Dad in his doomed pursuit of the stability he’d lost, I took this outside feeling with me; it accompanied me everywhere I went. I came to resent it. Wherever we were, it seemed, everybody else was local. Not me, not Lisa. There was a newness to every place that never wholly went away. It got worse every time we pulled up roots.
So when our first year in Madison ended and a second began, I allowed myself to begin feeling the pull of some small attachments I’d formed, and to stop forgetting things as soon as they happened. To let my heart begin the assembly of a new scrapbook. I still remember my friends from that time: Carol, whose mother was a professor at the university, and who was a transplant like me; Elsie, who knew how to swear in Norwegian; Damon, who I asked to the heavily chaperoned sixth-grade Sadie Hawkins dance, and who said yes. It felt like we’d finally come to a stop at last, but then somebody from the network of parents Dad had unearthed in Sioux Falls found our Wisconsin address somehow and sent a letter by registered mail saying there’d been a confirmed sighting of Michael Christopher at a former shoe store in Decorah. The records on the property were public and showed him taking out a year’s lease. They’d been doing surveillance for two months to be sure. They were planning an intervention.
Dad took me with him; I waited in the car in the dark while the other families stormed the Wednesday evening Bible study, the deprogrammer from Chicago coordinating the abduction, his assistants emerging from the building two at a time, dragging parishioners by their arms, roughly slipping pillowcases over their heads and throwing them into the van. They got three out before the Christopher clan managed to barricade the door.
It was the climax of our seven-year search. I was twelve years old. The deprogrammer’s van sped off, the remaining worshippers visible through the shoe store’s glass door, crying and holding one another, unbathed, dressed in thrift store castoffs. Dad came back to the car and got in and started the engine, but he didn’t say anything; I was a big girl, I could see for myself. Mom wasn’t there.
After he died, years later, back in Crescent, I saved the surveillance tapes he’d gotten from the private investigator. They weren’t hiding in a high cupboard or in a lockbox; he’d kept them in the entertainment center in the living room, like something you might watch on any idle evening. His clothes I drove across the river to the Goodwill on North Seventy-eighth; they might have gone to a vintage store in the Old Market by then, and fetched a decent price. They were so well preserved, relics of a simpler time. Surely they were worth something, but I felt a need to empty the house, quickly and methodically. It wasn’t the house I’d lived in as a child. But Crescent is small. The house my mother’d left behind forever one Christmas was only a few blocks away. I stood in my father’s room sorting his things into piles and tried to remember what our family had been like. But clear memories wouldn’t come; everything blurred. I couldn’t even make out their faces. It was like someone had scribbled over them in black marker, or wrapped them in shrouds.
The rest of his effects went to people from the church: old ladies who’d known my father when he was young. I thanked them for making it easier, and they helped me find boys from the high school to help with the furniture. I stood by while they worked, watching the house grow empty, the last remaining traces of my family vanishing into the gleam of things swept clean. It felt strange to be helping this work along, but the drive within me was instinctual, as natural to me as the brownness of my hair and eyes. When we had finished I headed back through Iowa alone.
At my apartment in Nevada, and then, later, at the Collins farmhouse I bought by pooling Dad’s life insurance money with the proceeds from the Crescent house, I watched the surveillance tapes, night after night. They were hypnotic. They calmed me somehow, kept me centered. The anonymity of the people at the bus stops and around the bonfires at the trash dumps or behind the bowling alleys … there was a sort of hope in it, a gathering of possibilities that could never be dispelled entirely, because the names of the faces in the frame were lost forever. They could have been anybody. There was no way to say who they were or were not. They were free.
In their untrackable freedom I located a place to store something I had carried with me since Christmas of 1972, something whose need for space grew greater every year. I found a second VCR at a yard sale and began collecting moments from the endless time-stamped hours of my father’s fruitless se
arch. If you learn to look hard enough, you can find stories in seemingly impenetrable tableaus. Street scenes. Parking lots. People waiting for a bus.
I made a few friends: people who were drawn to me, to my steady strength, to my knack for making any place I stood feel like a permanent shelter. I preserved their stories, and when they had no stories, I gave them stories they could call their own, stories I trust they have carried with them in their travels beyond my reach, and I made of these stories a permanent record on tape. I filled in the parts I couldn’t know or needed to change with bits and pieces of other people’s stories: from the movies, I mean. But they all seemed to lead me to the same place. No attempt to change the outcome found purchase, however adept I became at splicing and cutting and smoothing transitions.
I left all this to ferment in the place where the people on Dad’s tapes had gone: the great nowhere, the land whose air assumes the familiarity of whatever surroundings it finds. But it was never far from me, I learned. It was contained, but still curious. Left to guess at the dark around it, it became subject to simple metabolic laws of action and reaction. When it all burst free from its tank at the house in Collins, I sold the place quickly through a broker, said a hard goodbye to yet another friend I’d never see again, and finally came home.
* * *
In the basement, just outside the darkroom, Emily hung her freshly developed prints on a clothesline: she’d finished a roll in Tama after their plans fizzled. She was glad there’d been no confrontation; there’d been that woman waving at them from the upstairs window, and they’d waved back uncertainly, but then continued right on down the street, as if they had business elsewhere and had only pulled up because they’d seen an open spot. Nobody wants to be a pest, or bring up unpleasant memories. It was nice just to spend the day taking pictures of old buildings.
They wouldn’t be there forever, the old buildings. Iowa seemed less bloodthirsty about its past than California, but she’d seen all the construction along the highway on the way in from Collins: mini-malls and motels, spaces for chain restaurants and cell phone stores. It’s in the nature of the landscape to change, and it’s in the nature of people to help the process along; there’s no getting around it. It’s the same everywhere in the end.
Still, when she considered her best shot from that morning—the old Tama Bank & Trust building, gray and imposing above the downtown square—she wondered what she’d already missed, what had gone missing from Iowa before she ever got there. There is no way of knowing. That’s what pictures are for, after all: to stand in place of the things that weren’t left behind, to bear witness to people and places and things that might otherwise go unnoticed.
It was so nice to have this hobby in retirement. There was so much to think about if you just gave yourself the time, even in places most people couldn’t find on a map.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This is a book largely about mothers, and it would be a grave oversight not to thank my own mother, Mary Noonan, who always encouraged me in my writing, and gave to me, for my seventh birthday, a Royal typewriter, vintage 1936 or so, which set me on my way. Without that old Royal: who knows?
Thanks to everyone working and studying in Building 4 here at Golden Belt: it’s a pleasure and an inspiration to share this space with you.
Sean McDonald is my editor, and offers the gentlest, best suggestions, opening onto places I could never have found by myself: thank you!
Chris Parris-Lamb believed I could write books before I did. Neither this book nor the one before it could have been written without you. I am in your debt.
John Hodgman offered invaluable observations about this book during its writing, and great encouragement; how far astray it might have gone without your words of insight and support. Thank you!
Donna Tartt, you’ve been my steady companion in keeping the focus where it belonged as I wrote this book: a true confidant and a constant source of comfort and inspiration. Thank you, a dozen times over.
Thanks, too, to Steve Pietsch, Michael Ganzeveld, Lynsi Heldt, Lisa Chavanothai, Sarah Jane Gelner, Laura Lavender, and the many Iowans whose first or last names I borrowed for this book: only one of you, Steve, knew I was working on anything at all in this vein, but you were all with me in memory as I wrote.
And finally, to Lalitree Darnielle, née Chavanothai, mother of my sons and first hearer of these pages, through whom I first came to know Iowa, recurring thanks, here and in all that may follow.
ALSO BY JOHN DARNIELLE
Wolf in White Van
A Note About the Author
John Darnielle was born in Bloomington, Indiana, and is the author of Wolf in White Van. He lives in Durham, North Carolina, with his wife, Lalitree, and their sons, Roman and Moses. You can sign up for email updates here.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Part I
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
Part II
1
2
3
4
5
6
Part III
1
2
3
4
Part IV
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Acknowledgments
Also by John Darnielle
A Note About the Author
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2017 by John Darnielle
All rights reserved
First edition, 2017
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Darnielle, John, author.
Title: Universal harvester / John Darnielle.
Description: First edition.|New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016025809|ISBN 9780374282103 (hardback)|ISBN 9780374714024 (e-book)
Subjects:|BISAC: FICTION / Literary.|FICTION / Horror.|GSAFD: Horror fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3604.A748 U55 2017|DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016025809
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Universal Harvester Page 18