Bleeding Kansas (27 page)

Every Wednesday, teens at Salvation Bible Church were supposed to blanket downtown Lawrence to bring people to Jesus. Teen Witness, it was called, and Pastor Nabo said it was among their most important work.

“When they see bright, happy young people like you who've given your lives to Jesus, you will be an example to other young people. University students who come down to the bars on Massachusetts Street don't realize they are thirsting not for beer but for the Word that will make them whole. You can bring them that life-giving Word.”

The teens, wearing modest clothes—calf-length skirts for the girls, jackets and ties for the boys—handed out flyers with Bible verses on one side and a schedule of services at Salvation Bible on the other. The most ardent, like Amber Ruesselmann, tried to seize strangers' hands and force them to pray with her for the Holy Spirit.

Robbie hated Teen Witness. People laughed at him enough because of his weird clothes, his cow milking, his angry father, and Nanny, who posted all her neighbors' problems on the Web. She had made Robbie teach her to use the Internet, then was always coming to him for help in putting photos and stuff on the Schapen Web page. If he tried to argue with her, she and Arnie both got on his ass about the Fifth Commandment.

Most weeks, Robbie avoided Teen Witness because of the farm's milking schedule, but, for some reason, this fall Nanny had decided that Robbie wasn't showing his faith strongly enough. It was something complicated, something to do with her anger at the Jews' not letting her near Soapweed's special calf, or her anger with Robbie for not being a muscular blond clone of Junior, whom she missed, even though she drove over to Tonganoxie Bible every Saturday to watch him play football. Or maybe she was just getting senile. Ever since school started, she had forced Robbie to race home on Wednesdays to do his share of the evening milking, then drive back to town for Teen Witness.

“Junior never had to do this,” Robbie said to her.

“Junior had football practice.” Myra's false teeth clacked like a snapping turtle, as if she wanted to stick out her neck and snap off Robbie's head.

“I have band practice.”

“You spend enough time making that racket. You're doing Teen Witness for Jesus and you're doing it so the valley can see we're a Christian family, not like some out here. Jesus is showing the Grelliers the error of their ways, all right.”

“Isn't it enough that you wrote it up and put it out on the Web?” Robbie shouted. “How do you think Lara feels having you point a finger? Didn't Jesus say, ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged'?”

Myra hit him so hard across the mouth that his lip split.

“Don't you try quoting Scripture to me. You're this close to the pit, Robbie Schapen. If Jesus returned this minute, with your disrespect fresh in your mouth, you'd be left behind with those Grellier heathen you're so fond of.”

Robbie recoiled, not so much from the blow but from the fear that she'd divined his longing for Lara. He was so careful with the songs he wrote for her, to keep them taped inside his biology notes, between two pages of formulas for carbon derivatives. When he went upstairs to change, he double-checked the notebook. The pages seemed secure. Anyway, Myra wasn't subtle: if she'd found his love poems, she would have been screeching about them.

He took a quick shower, and put on a jacket and tie, but stood in his room for a time, staring out at the fields. Too many trees and barns lay between his house and the Grelliers' for him to know what Lara was doing.

The day after they took Mrs. Grellier to the hospital, Lara had stayed out of school. She'd been coming the two weeks since then, although in the classes they had together, biology and Spanish, she hardly seemed to be doing any homework. Robbie worried that she might start failing her classes. He imagined offering to have study sessions with her. The one time he'd tried to approach her, she'd looked at him with so much contempt that his blood froze and he backed away without speaking.

Of course, that was because of Arnie and Myra. Naturally, Arnie had learned about Mrs. Grellier taking a drug overdose when he went on duty at the sheriff's office that night. He'd been ecstatic at more bad luck befalling Jim Grellier, gloating that now Jim would know what it felt like to try running a farm without a wife to help him out.

“And that daughter of his he's always been so proud of, mark my word, she'll be next, drugs or pregnant, or maybe both. Grellier has always looked down on me, but when he sees Nasya—sees this miracle calf the Lord sent me—and when he sees how my boy is making a success over there at Tonganoxie Bible while his own son is burning in hell, he'll be eating my shit and wishing it was his. Like the Bible tells us, ‘Pride goeth before destruction.'”

No wonder Lara looked at Robbie like he was a plague of kafir ants. He turned gloomily from the window and went back down the stairs.

Myra came out of the kitchen to look him over, to make sure he wasn't wearing his
BECOMING THE ARCHETYPE
T-shirt. “I called over to Amber Ruesselmann's mother and told her you'd be by for Amber in twenty minutes. So, mind you, step lively now. And remember, Amber's a good Christian girl, so don't try any nastiness with her.”

Since you think I'm a faggot,
Robbie thought,
why do you imagine I'd try any nastiness with a girl, especially one as butt-ugly as Amber. And how dare you set up a date for me without talking to me first?
But he kept that, and the rest of his rage, to himself, too scared of his grandmother to risk another confrontation this afternoon. Instead, he slammed the door as hard as he could, ignoring her clacking and hissing behind him about the sin of using objects to do his swearing for him—that will send you to hell just as sure as taking the Lord's name in vain. He knew the litany by heart.

Robbie drove slowly down the long side road that connected the farm with the county road. Arnie had stopped maintaining their end when old Mrs. Fremantle died, and it was as rutted and hole-filled as the Fremantles' side. When Robbie asked why they couldn't get a load of gravel, at least for their side, his father answered incomprehensibly, “I won't give Jim Grellier the satisfaction.”

Robbie turned south toward the highway but stopped to look at Mrs. Grellier's experimental farm. He had joined Junior and Chris Greynard in making fun of her and teasing Lara when Mrs. Grellier had started the farm four years ago. Now he felt ashamed, especially since no one was looking after it. The dying organic-sunflower crop was one more thing Arnie was gloating over.

Blackbirds and meadowlarks were helping themselves to the seeds. As he watched, he spied Lara. She had draped herself in a sheet and was running down the rows, flapping her arms. The birds rose and squawked as she approached but settled back down on the flower heads as soon as she moved to the next row. They bent the sunflowers almost to the ground as they helped themselves to the seeds.

Robbie pulled his truck as close to the ditch as he could and climbed down from the cab. By the time he had picked his way through the ditch, on the east side of the road, and reached the field, Lara had disappeared. He felt a sharp contraction under his ribs. She had seen him coming and taken off for home. Just as he turned to leave the field, though, he caught sight of her: she was sitting in the middle of the field, her white-draped arms over her head like a tent.

He walked up to her slowly. “Lara? Lulu?” His voice came out in an embarrassing squawk, as if it were still breaking in the dreadful way it had done all last year.

“Go away!” Her own voice was muffled by the sheet.

He squatted next to her, his right hand out, palm up, as if she were a meadowlark herself that he was trying to coax. “Lara, it's me, Robbie. I was driving by, and I—uh, I saw you here. Do you need some help? With the birds, I mean?”

“What, so you can laugh at me, and put it on your family's website? ‘Some of our neighbors have grandiose ideas, but God hates them and is punishing them by letting the blackbirds eat their crop while their mother tries to kill herself'?”

He turned crimson. “I wouldn't ever do that, Lara, honest. It's my nanny, her and my dad. I tried to make them stop, but they don't listen to anything I say.”

She finally pulled the sheet free of her head and looked at him suspiciously. She'd been crying so hard that the dirt on her cheeks had turned to mud. Somehow that made her look all the more vulnerable, all the more appealing. He leaned over and put his arms around her. She smelled of dirt and sweat, not fresh grass as she had when he was crouched behind her in Chip's Nissan last winter. He didn't care. He couldn't believe it, she was in his arms, she wasn't fighting him off or calling him “cowpoke,” or “milkboy.” She was leaning against him.

“You're all dressed up,” she said. “Now your good clothes are dirty. Will your gram be pissed off?”

“Probably. I'm supposed to be—” He broke off, reddening again, ashamed to tell her about Teen Witness.

“Supposed to be what? Going to church?”

“Sort of,” he muttered. “We're supposed to do this witness thing, you know—”

“Oh! You're part of
that
group!” She pulled away from him.

“Not really. I mean, really, yes, I am. I go to Salvation Bible, and it's part of the youth ministry. But, well, I hate Teen Witness. Only my grandmother, she's on me like my underwear. Sorry, I mean she's always nagging at me, like I'll go to hell if I don't do what she says. Of course, she thinks I'm hell-bound, anyway, because of my music and me not playing football. I don't know why she thinks Teen Witness will save me.”

Lara giggled. “So you'll be there with me and my mom and—and Chip, because she says us Grelliers are hell-bound, too.”

“But—but I don't think Chip is in hell,” Robbie stammered.

“Of course he isn't!” Lara's face turned round and red with anger. “Only an ignorant—dickhead—would believe something so mean and stupid.”

“Don't be mad at me, Lara,” Robbie begged. “I can't stand you to be mad at me.”

And then, without knowing exactly how it happened, they were lying on the ground, wrapped up in Lara's dirty sheet, and she was crying and telling him how angry Jim was with her, how he told her she wasn't carrying her weight on the farm.

“He acts like I'm this total loser because I don't look after my mom. But how can I look after someone who doesn't talk to me or eat or—or even take a bath?” She laughed nervously, thinking the idea of Susan not bathing was so gross he'd run away in disgust.

But Robbie was kissing her teary eyes, and she was letting him kiss her mouth, letting him put his hands underneath her sweatshirt and feel her skin, which was softer than anything he had ever imagined. She didn't wear a bra. He couldn't imagine any of the girls in Teen Witness going out of the house without a bra on: it was part of being a modest Christian girl. The thought made him even more excited. He cautiously touched one of her nipples. She moved her breast away from him but let him keep his hands on her back. He found himself telling her how his grandmother thought
he
was a total loser because he didn't like sports and wasn't big and blond like Junior and Arnie.

“But you look interesting, like—like one of the old Delaware Indians, who used to live north of the river.” In the midst of all Abigail Grellier's papers were some old photographs of leaders of the Delaware Indians who came to the aid of the anti-slavery pioneers.

“Yeah, my mom's mom was part Indian—Munsee, I think it was—but I don't really even look like my mom. At least, I just have three pictures of her. Nanny and Dad burned all the others when she ran off—I don't remember her face after all this time. I know your mom is kind of, well, not doing too good right now, but—but at least she's still here.”

“Maybe. But it's like Chip was her only child,” Lara burst out with all the hurt and anger she'd been feeling since Susan retreated to her room. “And even before Chip died, she was already abandoning the X-Farm. I had to do all the work with the organic-certification board. And now, now Dad won't help me with the crop because he's bringing in the corn and the sorghum, so I can't use the combine. And, anyway, how are we going to pay Mom's hospital bills? He might even sell the X-Farm.”

Robbie held her tighter. He wanted to say he'd help her bring in her crop, but he couldn't quite imagine telling his father he was using the Schapens' combine to help out the Grelliers.

The October twilight was closing in around them; the birds had stopped eating the sunflowers and gone off to their nests. Lara's cell phone rang. She looked at the screen: it was her father.