Bleeding Kansas (19 page)

“Nope,” Robbie said, then, noticing Pastor Nabo was listening in, added, “My grandmother says when a man and a woman are alone together, Satan is always present as an uninvited guest. Let's not take chances, Amber.”

Pastor Nabo nodded approvingly, but Amber flushed to the roots of her mousy hair, embarrassed by even the suggestion of sex. Behind her and the pastor, Chris Greynard made an obscene pumping gesture. Robbie bent quickly to tie his shoe so that neither Amber nor Pastor could see his inadvertent grin.

“Come on, Schapen,” Chris called to him. “Time for cowboys to get home to beddy-bye so they can get up bright and early and milk their prize Jerseys.”

Robbie wouldn't turn sixteen until next March so he couldn't drive at night, but Chris Greynard had celebrated his birthday in August and could drive both of them. Things were way better than they used to be when he had to depend on Dad or, worse, Junior, to come get him.

He sang the refrain to his song for Lara under his breath as Chris turned north onto Alabama Street, heading toward Highway 10.

“She's ready and waiting for you,” Chris said.

“She is?” Robbie faltered, his heart pounding. “How do you know?”

“Come on, man, why do you think she was inviting you to pray with her—the chance to wrestle with the devil for your immortal soul?”

“Oh. Amber, right.” For one heart-stopping moment, somewhere between fear and desire, he'd thought Lara had talked to Chris about him.

“So who do you want to comfort in the night, man? When'd you start writing love songs, anyway?”

“It's all about love, dude,” Robbie answered. “Isn't that what they've been telling us our whole lives?”

Board Meeting Minutes,

New Haven Manor September 29

OLD BUSINESS

New Haven executive director Michael Nilsson reported to the board that Elaine Logan set fire to the building on Labor Day (see September 8 “New Business” minutes). The fire was quickly extinguished, and no one was injured, but Mr. Nilsson explained that Elaine Logan was intoxicated, in contravention of New Haven rules; she has been warned twice before that the third episode would result in expulsion.

The board discussed alternative placements, but Ms. Logan refused to go into a detoxification program, which all housing options similar to New Haven require. She collects a monthly Social Security check of $220; Rachel Carmody appealed to the Riverside United Church of Christ to supplement this with enough money to rent Ms. Logan a room in a regular rooming house. Ms. Logan stayed there for only three nights. She has been seen begging on Massachusetts Street and in South Park. After a long discussion, the board agreed that until Ms. Logan agrees to a detox program and commits to sobriety, we can't house her.

Three days ago, a Ms. Gina Haring, who is renting the old Fremantle house east of town, reported that Ms. Logan has been hanging around her property. Rachel Carmody agreed to drive out to talk to both women.

OTHER OLD BUSINESS

Driving between the rows of sorghum and corn, Rachel Carmody felt insubstantial. The fields were dry and the crops close to maturity, but to her untrained eye the rust-colored sorghum heads and weathered tan cornstalks appeared dead. She drove this route several times in the summer when she came out to the Grelliers' farm market, but today it looked unfamiliar, even ominous.

The sky was the color of lead. It stretched taut above the fields, like a tent covering the prairie, keeping out air. With her car windows down—the air conditioner had failed last month, and she was trying to save money by not repairing it until next summer—the roar of the wind across the plants was so loud it drowned the radio. Although it was the middle of September, the heat still had the closeness of high summer.

Rachel had a disturbing vision of the birds that hovered over the sorghum flying skyward and dashing their brains against the leaden sky. Teenage horror stories were compounding her dread of the errands she faced.

The boys in her English classes, obsessed by war and horror games, often produced phantasmagoric scenes of zombies, werewolves, and other monsters in their school writing. No matter what the topic, whether fiction or nonfiction, she could count on a dozen dramas involving wizards and demons from the boys; the girls tended to write about world peace and harmony. The year the
Lord of the Rings
dominated the movie world, she read endless accounts of Orcs and Sauron terrorizing the world until some brave Kansas boy brought them to their knees.

She'd just finished marking the first hundred fifty essays of the new school year on the topic “If I were in charge for a day” and found three that told her, “If I ran the government for a day, I would muster an army of Orcs to destroy all the Muslims.”

Most kids facing that topic assumed they would be in charge of the United States, although a few wrote about running the school. Lara Grellier had turned in one sentence: “If I were in charge for a day I would oblitterate this whole sorry planet to save everyone the bother of destroying it one person at a time.”

Rachel had marked it D, and added: “Lara, we both know you understand the assignment and that you can do better work. I don't object to the sentiment, but to your laziness in not working it out. See me to discuss a second chance at this topic. Also, even for a one-sentence submission, use spell-check.”

Rachel pulled over to let a dump truck pass her. Its wheels spat gravel into her windshield. How did the pioneers stand it, that vast expanse of prairie, where plants grew higher than the tallest man's head, and land and sky and wind blurred into a ball of gray noise? Just driving through it, dust billowing around her, Rachel felt disoriented. But families like the Grelliers and the Schapens had built farms here when there weren't roads, the women washing clothes in tubs they filled with water obtained at great hardship.

One winter, for the church's study group, Susan Grellier had made a presentation on Jim's pioneer ancestors. She'd put up clippings from the old territorial newspapers on some of the great events of the day: how pro-slavery men poured into Kansas and threatened judges and killed settlers so that pro-slavery candidates won elections; John Brown and the Pottawatomie Massacre; Quantrill's raids. Then, to show daily life against this backdrop, Susan read from Jim's great-great-grandmother's diary, where Abigail Grellier recounted how Mrs. Fremantle checked to see if Abigail's linens were white and ironed.

Sitting at the crossroads south of the tracks, Rachel noticed a small, hand-lettered sign pointing left to the
OPEN PRAIRIE DAIRY, OPEN DAILY 10 TO 4.
She knew the Schapens lived close to the Grelliers, but she'd never known exactly where they were. She craned her neck, looking for the Schapen house, but the sorghum field and high grasses in the ditches blocked any of the buildings from her view. Every now and then a car came north down the county road and turned toward the dairy.

Junior Schapen had been a tiresome boy, the worst kind of student: ignorant, unprepared, and arrogant. He'd assumed that his status on the football team exempted him from classwork, and Rachel had endured more than one belligerent visit from the coach, demanding that she raise Junior's grade from an F to a C. When she compromised on a D, she'd felt filthy for betraying her own sense of integrity; even so, the coach had treated her to another tirade, as had Junior's father, dressed in his deputy's uniform, and nearly threatening her with arrest for messing with Junior's chance to go to college: even Tonganoxie Bible College, where Junior ended up, had some minimal admission standards.

When she saw another Schapen on her class roster this fall, Rachel had been dismayed, but at least at first blush Robbie seemed like a different kind of boy, skinny, shy, interested in poetry.

“If I were in charge for a day, I would make everyone stop what they were doing to sing a song, any song, not in harmony or unison, just sing. By the time they finished singing, they would be so filled with happiness, they would stop trying to hurt each other.” He had appended a second page, called “A song I wrote”:

“Please tell me, is this any good? Is it okay to rhyme mist with dust?” he had added.

It was derivative, a country-and-western song, but it had some grace as well. She'd wondered idly who he was writing for, who he was too shy to show his song to. Rachel's experience of adolescents was that they wrote about the particular, people or things they knew, not abstractions.

Chip was the only Lawrence student who had died in the war. From the poem, Rachel wondered if Robbie had a secret crush on Janice Everleigh, Chip's old girlfriend. Janice was studying business systems, whatever that meant, at a community college in Kansas City. She still came to the high school's football games, driving Chip Grellier's old Nissan and draped in his baseball-letter jacket.

Rachel had always thought Janice was too superficial for someone like Chip Grellier, and surely even more so for a boy like Robbie, with his hankering for poetry. Now, sitting at the crossroads with the Grelliers in front of her and the Schapens to the left, Rachel wondered if Robbie had been writing to Lara Grellier. They must have grown up together out here, gone to that boarded-up little school she'd passed at the turnoff from Highway 10.

Rachel was frankly worried about Lara. Until this fall, Lara had always been part of a crowd of kids, both in Sunday school and at high school. She'd been a leader in the church youth group, a good student in school, the kind of bright, fresh-faced girl who made adults smile. Since her brother's death, she'd dropped out of choir, didn't come to Sunday school, and was doing abysmal course work.

Lara had been working the Grellier booth at the farmers' market in town last Saturday. Rachel went up to the table just as another woman asked Lara how her mother was.

“
My
mother? Don't you mean
Chip's
mother? Susan Grellier has taken to her bed. I haven't seen her for days.” Lara's face blazed with a scorching anger, the kind of anger kids use to suppress tears. “She's stopped eating. Maybe she'll starve to death.”

Since the start of school, Susan had been in church only once. She'd appeared emaciated, her face white under its bridge of freckles, her red-brown mop of curls limp and unwashed. It looked to Rachel as though Jim had practically carried her into the pew.

Even the experimental farm, which Lara had shown off when Rachel came out in June to buy early tomatoes, was suffering. The sunflowers, heads all facing east, bowed under the weight of their seeds. The field was full of blackbirds, rising and swirling as they attacked the seeds, and the plants looked bedraggled, as if they weren't getting enough water.

“Your car break down? Oh, it's you, Ms. Carmody.”

Rachel squawked. She'd been so lost in thought she hadn't noticed the man approaching the car. After a moment's panic, when she tried to figure out if she could drive away with him leaning into the car, she realized it was Blitz Fosse. She hardly knew him, except as the man who cleared the teachers' parking lot during heavy snowstorms. She knew he sometimes worked for the Grelliers, but she hadn't recognized him out of the context of school.

She smiled weakly, her heart still pounding. “I'm avoiding some hard errands, that's all.”

“They must be hard: I watched you sit there for ten minutes, looking like a kid called to the principal's office.”

“Yes, I'm a terrible coward.” She knew he was teasing, but she spoke seriously. “I don't have the right skills to be a teacher. I love poetry and literature, but that's not enough—you have to be able to stand up to abuse and backbiting. I don't like having to fight people.”

“Being able to hit people between the eyes is an overrated skill.”

“If I were as strong as you, maybe I'd believe that.”

“If you were as strong as me, you'd have a different set of problems. Every John Wayne wannabe tries to push you into a fistfight.”

She finally smiled. “Okay, I can believe that. Are you spending a lot of time with the Grelliers? I'm worried about Lara.”

“I work for Jim every year until we bring in the corn. Repairing equipment for the school board is something I do between harvest and planting, not the other way around. Didn't you know that?”

She shook her head, ashamed at her own ignorance. “I've lived in Lawrence for twelve years, but I've never figured out how to tap into the communal gossip spring.”

He jumped back to her previous comment. “Worried about Lara how?”

“I'm her Sunday school teacher as well as her English teacher. She's not coming to church, which is between her and her parents, but she's doing close to failing work in most of her classes, and she hasn't kept her appointments with me.”

“I wondered, way she's been carrying on. Of course, the whole family's in trouble—you know that if you know them from your church.”

“Yes.” She looked at him squarely. “Last week at the farmers' market, Lara said her mother stopped eating. How is Susan functioning out here?”

He hesitated. “It's not my business to pry into their business,” he finally said. “If you want to talk to Lulu—Lara—I'm not sure she's home. I could be wrong, but I thought I saw her take off across the fields awhile back. If you want to talk to her folks about her—well, Jim's carrying a heavy load right now. If Lulu is screwing up, it'll just be one more thing he probably can't do much about.”

“I like him, too,” Rachel said. “I have to see Gina Haring, anyway. She's upset because a homeless woman she sort of befriended is hanging around her house.”

His thick brows shot up in surprise. “Why should you drive all the way out here because of that? Let Haring sort it out—she's capable of just about anything, from where I look.”

“Oh, she's sort of a problem child. Not Gina, the woman. Elaine Logan. I'm on the board of a home where Elaine was living; we had to throw her out because she was setting the place on fire. Not on purpose—passing out while smoking. We feel some responsibility for her.” She mustered a smile. “Congregationalists don't support a cult of the Virgin Mary, but I'm beginning to think I was dedicated at birth to Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility. I'm tired of it, but I agreed to talk to Gina. I'm hoping that between us, we can come up with some inspiration about Elaine. Afterward, I'll stop back by the Grelliers'. If Lara's back, I'll have a word with her about her classes.”