Bleeding Kansas (25 page)

He found Lara heating a frozen waffle in the microwave. It was eight o'clock. She should have been out of the house by now.

“Dad! I thought you were working the north quarter with Blitz!”

“Is that why you're pampering yourself like the Queen of the May in here instead of having your fanny in your chair over at school?” He gasped in pain and grabbed the back of a chair to support himself.

“What have you been doing? You look like a train wreck. Did the tractor fall over on you?”

“My ego fell over on me. The storm woke me, and I decided to work out with Chip's weights in the barn. I way overdid it.”

He didn't tell her about driving to Fremantles', much less about seeking out pain. It wasn't the kind of thing you burdened your kid with. Besides, in the cold of the morning it seemed idiotic. He asked instead if she had any ibuprofen. Lara rummaged in her backpack; her face alight with mischief, she handed him a bottle labeled
FOR RELIEF OF MENSTRUAL CRAMPS.
He shook his head but poured out a handful of tablets, chewing four and laying the rest on the kitchen counter before handing the bottle back to her.

“Gross, Dad, don't you even want some water with those?”

“I'd have to walk to the sink. I'll just stand here until they kick in.”

She suddenly started fussing around him, bringing him juice, putting water on to boil for coffee, running down to the laundry room in the basement for a clean, dry shirt, tossing the wet one in the machine, then coming back up to help him fasten the buttons.

He brushed her fingers aside. “Okay, okay, knock it off. You've earned your written pass for being late.”

“Thanks, Dad.” She grinned at him, the old Lulu briefly showing through the new, sullen Lara.

He put his hand under her chin and tilted her head so that she had to look at him. “Sweetheart, the one thing I really need you to do for me isn't making me coffee, although this tastes better than what I boil up, but to buckle down with your classes. You hear? I don't want any more teachers making a home visit because you're not doing your work.”

“Okay, Dad, okay,” she muttered.

He walked to the desk in the corner of the kitchen where he and Susan kept the farm accounts and found a pad of paper in the jumble of unopened mail. The sight overwhelmed him. He was behind in everything—quarterly tax returns, bills—he hadn't even balanced the checkbook this month, although Susan usually did that. If he didn't pay the grain elevator today, he wouldn't be able to store his corn when he started harvesting.

He massaged the small of his back with his left hand while he wrote out a short note for Lulu. She kissed the top of his head and skipped out to the old pickup. After Chip enlisted last spring, Blitz had fixed the truck so that Lara could drive herself to school. It was over twenty years old, its battered body so rusty and weathered you couldn't tell it had once been blue. Blitz had taken the engine completely apart, fixed all the cylinder heads, and found four good used tires for it at Hardy's Tire Shack. Lara had scorned it at first—it looked so ratty next to Chip's Nissan or the SUVs some of her classmates drove—but, that summer, she'd fallen in love with it. Her art project for the county fair, in fact, had been to paint the sides with a history of the Grellier farm, from the days of the dinosaurs to the present. She hadn't won a ribbon, but Jim loved the pictures. Susan did, too—or had, when she was still paying attention to Lara.

After a time, when the ibuprofen started to work and he wasn't quite so sore, Jim went upstairs to change out of his dirty jeans and socks. He took a hot shower in the kids' bathroom. Then, wearing just the clean shirt Lulu had dug up for him, he stood outside his bedroom door for a long minute, praying for courage to go in for clean socks and underwear.

When he went in, Susan was sitting at the vanity table he had bought her their first Christmas together, writing on one of the pads Lara made out of old government reports by cutting them into 8
1
/2-by-11 sheets and stapling them so the blank sides faced up.

“'Morning, Suze,” he said warily, trying not to notice the smells in the room: old clothes, old sweat, old blood.

She glanced up at him but kept writing.

“Suze, we need to talk. This isn't good, for any of us, you sitting up here, writing your head off, not eating, not bathing.”

When she didn't respond, he walked over to her and gently took the pen and notepad away from her. She didn't protest but started scrabbling through the heap of pages on the vanity for another pen. He took her hands and knelt in front of her, his joints giving him such a jolt he couldn't keep back a grunt of pain, but she didn't seem to notice.

“Suze, we're all going crazy here over Chip, all three of us in our unique ways. Yours is the most public and obvious, but Lulu isn't doing her schoolwork—she's deliberately courting failure, Rachel Carmody said last night. I'm not attending to the crops or the bills. I can't do it alone. I can't keep the farm going without you, don't you understand?”

“The farm has weathered troubled times before,” she said, her eyes flicking anxiously to the paper he'd placed behind him on the bed.

“No, darling. The family has weathered troubled times. The farm just exists, regardless of who owns the land. But if we lose the land, how will we exist? Please, baby, please get up and help me.”

“I will, Jim, I really will, as soon as I finish writing this. I can't do anything until I get it all off my chest.”

“Susan, I'm begging you—if not for me, for the farm. You've always loved this place, the history has mattered so much to you. Help me preserve it so we can pass it on to Lulu.”

“That's what I'm trying to write here, Jim, how history affects us, how our lives are controlled by it. When I'm done with that, I promise I'll come down and go through the bills and help you get it all sorted out.”

She twitched her hands free from his loose clasp and scurried to retrieve her pen and notepad. He sat on the floor, arms over his head, and rocked in misery.

J
IM SPENT
what was left of the morning in his north quarter section, working with Blitz to dig up the soybean field. The crop had been infested with stem borers, which Jim should have seen sooner. By noon, the rain had started falling so heavily that they had to stop.

Blitz went home then, while Jim cleaned himself up for the second time that day. His back and legs still ached, but the morning's work and Lara's menstrual tablets had eased the worst of the pain. He heated the spaghetti left over from last night, tried to sort out the mess of papers on the desk in the corner, but his brain was cut in too many fragments for him to make sense of anything. He could hear Susan pacing the floor of the bedroom like a ghost, present in the house but not connected to it. The sound drove him so wild that he went into town with a check for the elevator. He lingered in the office, a bare room with a grimy cement floor that smelled of corn, to talk with Herb Longnecker and Peter Ropes, who were also using the rainy day to run errands.

No one would talk about the only things on his mind, Chip and Susan, but the weight of their pity lay heavy in the air. What they did discuss, besides the University of Kansas football team's sputtering performance and whether the school would do any better in basketball, was the story going around about Arnie Schapen's special calf.

“Did that lady reporter stop and talk to you, Jim?” Peter Ropes asked. “She came by my place, but I told her I had too much to do on my own farm to know what Arnie was doing on his.”

“Lulu came home from church with some garbled story, that the Schapens had a calf they were turning into an idol, like the Israelites did, to tempt the rest of the valley, see if we'd fall down and worship it. I can't break my kids—can't stop Lulu—from gossiping about everyone around us, no matter how bizarre the story is.”

“Dale, Arnie's dairy hand, he says it's some special calf the Jews need for their prayers,” Herb Longnecker said. “He says these three Jews come over from Kansas City every month to check on it because if it has any flaws in it, they can't use it. There must be money in it somewhere, if the Jews are involved, so I don't see why Arnie isn't bragging about it more. Myra Schapen's mad as sin because the Jews say it'll hurt the calf's magic, or whatever it has, if a lady goes near it.”

“That must be why we're not reading about it on the website,” Peter chortled. “Usually, if Junior makes a tackle or Arnie blows his nose, she trumpets it all over the Internet.”

“Funny how Myra never writes about the other boy,” Herb said. “Our Ruth's daughter, Caroline, is in school with him—well, Lara must be, too, isn't she, Jim? Caroline says the boy is a good musician, plays lead guitar in his church's heavy-metal band. You'd think Myra would write something about him sometime. Instead, we're getting every detail of Junior's games at Tonganoxie Bible College.”

“Heavy metal? What's that? Two combines falling on a guitar?” Peter Ropes laughed, and the meeting broke up.

Jim stopped at the store for some frozen pizzas. Lulu liked yogurt, but he always got the wrong kind, so he bought three different flavors just to be on the safe side. Ice cream—the two of them were keeping Wiesers Dairy in business these days, the amount of ice cream they were going through—chocolate for Lulu, strawberry for him. Vaguely thinking there should be something healthy on the menu, he added a head of lettuce and a bag of carrots, and tried not to read the total bill before running his credit card through the slot.

By the time he got home and unpacked the groceries, the rain had let up. His grandfather would have gone back out to the north quarter section. His grandmother would have somehow made Susan get out of bed and get back on an even keel.

If Gram had done like Susan and taken to her bed when Jim's father died, what would Grandpa have done? Jim couldn't imagine his grandmother behaving so extravagantly. He remembered the county fair when Susan first entered her apple pie out of Abigail's sketchy recipes in the old diaries. The judges had been dismayed and disdainful, and Susan came home weeping. Jim had tried to comfort her, but she took to her bed and lay there for two days. Gram got fed up.

“No one can be best at everything,” Gram told her. “You learned a lot this year, Susan, and we're proud of you. Now you have to learn from your failures and move on. You certainly can't lie around feeling sorry for yourself, not with the hay to get in and the market to attend to. And the tomatoes need spraying—last night, Jimmy found hornworm in the west rows.”

Susan had dragged herself out of bed—she never could stand up to Gram, who wouldn't cajole or tease her into feeling better, the way Jim or even Grandpa would.

Jim pictured himself going upstairs to her now. “No one can be number one at everything,” he imagined saying, “not even at grieving. So learn from your loss and move on.” But the thought of trying to talk to his wife again was so painful that he finally got back in the truck and drove south on the county road to Burtons'.

On the way, he couldn't help glancing at the Fremantle house. Gina's behavior last night still rankled. After he'd gone out of his way—helped her make the house secure, offered her a place to stay, driven over to check up on her in the middle of the storm—for her suddenly to act as if he wasn't there or didn't count, that made him angry. And then to let that homeless woman, that Elaine Logan, spend the night—and that was after Gina made Rachel Carmody come out because Gina claimed Elaine was more or less stalking her. Gina hadn't behaved well, by him or by Rachel: he was right to be angry. But he still looked down the road, as if he might see some kind of sign in the southeast bedroom where she'd set up her office.

“You expecting to see a banner reading
COME MAKE LOVE TO ME, JIM GRELLIER
?” he said aloud. He gunned the engine and hurtled down the county road toward Burtons' at seventy, jolting his sore spine in the potholes, spraying gravel into the ditches.

The beater Ardis used for getting to her job was parked along the edge of the road, maybe ready for a fast getaway, if she got so she couldn't cope with Clem and Turk and her children. Someone had flung a drop cloth over the Lincoln, but the rest of the cars on blocks were littered with branches and dead leaves from the weeping trees in the yard. Jim picked his way through the rusty parts to the back door.

Ardis answered his knock, blinking in surprise at the sight of a visitor. She had been a pretty young woman when she and Clem married, with dark hair and a firm, plump body, but the plumpness had oozed into fat during five pregnancies and life below the poverty belt. She wrinkled up her moon-shaped face in a sort of smile.

“Jim Grellier.” Her voice came out in a slow, soft wheeze, as if the bellows for producing air were buried so far in her soft, fat breast that they could barely push sound to the surface. “I was sorry to hear about Chip, but you must feel real proud of him. Everybody says he was a hero.”

“Thanks, Ardis. I'd rather be happy than proud, but I guess you don't get to choose, do you?”

She smiled uncertainly, not sure what he meant, but asked him to step inside. The pile of dishes in the sink he'd seen last December hadn't changed. Looking at the empty frozen-food boxes scattered on the counters and floor, he wondered if the dishes were a monument to the last time anyone had cooked a meal in the kitchen, then thought of the pizzas he'd picked up an hour ago for himself and Lara. Judge not, judge not, he reminded himself. Not so hard to see how everything could cave in around you.

“Where's Clem's father?” he asked. He'd expected to see the old man still at the kitchen table.

“Oh, last week he wandered out of the house and tripped and fell. He just doesn't know enough to watch where he's going anymore and he broke his hip, so he's in the nursing home for a bit. Until his Medicare runs out, I guess. Would you like some pop?” Her soft voice wheezed all the words together in one long breath.

“I'm fine, Ardis. I was hoping to talk to Eddie.”

“He's in the living room, watching TV, with Turk and them.”

Jim followed her across the cracked linoleum to the living room. Turk, Clem, and Eddie were jumbled together on the couch, watching
Star Trek
. Eddie's sister Cindy was sprawled on the floor, eating chips; a tabby with a missing ear shared the dip container with her. The three youngest children were still in school, Ardis said. The bus would bring them home in an hour or two.

Turk was drinking out of a quart can of malt liquor, which he waved in a kind of salute when he saw Jim come into the room. “Hey, Grellier, how's it going?”

“Fine, Turk, fine,” Jim said automatically. “Everything okay here?”

“Why wouldn't it be?” Clem tried to sit up, but the couch's sagging springs pulled him downward.

“No reason. I just wanted to make sure Eddie got home okay.”

“Well, here he is, you can see him for yourself.”

“Yep,” Jim agreed. “Riding the rails, that's a hard way to get around, isn't it?”

Eddie smiled slyly and looked at his hands. With his head bent over, hiding his vacant expression, he was a nice-looking boy, almost girlishly pretty, except for his hands, which were broad and square. He resembled Ardis, the way she used to look before she cloaked herself in layers of fat—he had her dark curls and long lashes. He felt Jim's gaze and looked up; a thread of drool ran from the corner of his mouth to his sweatshirt. Eddie's shoulders were hunched over so Jim couldn't see the whole front of the shirt, but the letters
ANOXIE B
were visible.

“Tonganoxie,” Jim said idly, filling in the missing letters.

Eddie's face changed from smirk to terror, as if Jim had accused him of blowing up the town. “I'm not in Tonganoxie, not there, no one seen me, I swear no one seen me.”

“What's got into you, Eddie?” Ardis said from behind Jim. “Mr. Grellier here ain't saying he seen you, are you, Jim?”

“I saw him jumping off the westbound freight at four-thirty this morning. Way he was walking, I wondered if he'd twisted an ankle or something.”

“Now, ain't that neighborly of you, Grellier.” Clem spoke with heavy sarcasm. “You don't need to worry about my boy, when you couldn't take care of your own boy.”

“Easy there, Clem,” Turk protested. “Chip Grellier's a war hero. Jim couldn't'a saved him from a terrorist mine, no father could.”

Jim's head began to swim from the strangeness of the conversation, but at least the fear died away from Eddie's face, replaced by his sly slack-jawed grin. He picked up a half-gallon bottle of cola from the floor in front of him and tilted his head back to drink. With his shoulders back, Jim could read the shirt:
TONGANOXIE BIBLE COLLEGE.

“So you went to visit Junior Schapen?” Jim asked. “All the way from here by riding the rails? I didn't know the freights ran through Tonganoxie. I thought all the lines passed through Kansas City.”

Eddie dropped the bottle, spilling cola over himself, the couch, and Clem, who jumped out of the sunken cushions with a curse and a smack along the side of his son's head. “Ardis! Ardis? Come and clean up after your retard son who just spilled shit all over the couch.”

“I never seen Junior. Anyone who says they saw him and me, they's lying.” Eddie was choking from the cola running the wrong way down his windpipe.

Ardis went over with a dirty bath towel and began dabbing at her son, and the couch, although most of the cola had run into the exposed foam rubber of the cushions.

Clem looked at his son in disgust. “What's got into you, boy? So what if you up and visited Junior Schapen? Why shouldn't you?”

“Junior don't like folks to know him and Eddie are friends.” Cindy Burton spoke from the floor, startling Jim, who'd forgotten about her.

“Why not, Cindy?” Jim asked, like it was any of his business.

Turk laughed. “You went to college, Grellier. You show up on campus with a boy like Eddie, would anyone else talk to you?”

“That ain't fair, Turk,” Ardis sighed, still dabbing at the foam rubber. “Eddie's a good boy, nothing to be ashamed of. If Junior Schapen thinks he's too good for Eddie, well, I say to hell with him. And to hell with Arnie, too.”

“Arnie, don't say nothing to Arnie,” Eddie said. “Arnie will kill me, kill Junior, we'll go to hell, not even the cow will save us.”

“The cow?” Jim asked. “You can't mean Schapen really is worshipping a cow!”

“The cow is special, you can't talk about it!” Eddie cried, his eyes knuckling in his agitation.

“But—Arnie Schapen can't possibly believe a cow will save him. He goes to Full Salvation, or whatever that church is, out near Clinton Lake. It's Bible all the way through—they believe there's no salvation except through Jesus. And where do the Jews come in?”

“The Jews, they want that cow, and Arnie, he's keeping it for them, ain't that right, Eddie?” Cindy said helpfully from the floor. “When the Jews come right out and take it, then Arnie and them will be famous and richer than—than Donald Trump.”