Driftless (10 page)

“Won’t hurt to have the car clean,” said Rusty.

“No it won’t, Russell. Anyway, Margie called and it looks like Mother might be able to come with her. She talked with the doctor and called the airlines. She can take her walker on the plane.”

Rusty wrung out the chamois and wiped off the trunk.

“We’ll have to put Mother in the girls’ room,” she said, turned, and spoke again. “It’s been almost ten years since they were both here—clear back before the girls were out of high school.”

Rusty finished with the trunk and continued until all the water
streaks had been removed. Then he rewound the hose and drove the Oldsmobile back into the barn. He stood beside the workbench and lit a cigarette. He didn’t know what to do. He had to find someone to work on the house. Maxine was beginning to panic. At this point she could contain herself, but she wouldn’t last long. He should have found someone to do the repairs early in the summer, but he’d put it off. The bitter fact that he couldn’t do the work himself had made everything else easier to ignore.

He checked the oil in his lawn-mowing tractor, took a deep breath, and climbed stiffly onto the seat. With a turn of the key, he was out of the barn and moving along the fruit trees like an insect perched on a noisy green leaf, the giant old dog ambling alongside as well as she could.

While he had been farming, their yard could be mowed in fifteen minutes with a push mower. After he retired, the mowing area gradually expanded until it now took three hours. The mower deck beneath him chewed into the thick damp grass and sprayed cuttings onto the blacktop road halfway to the centerline. The roaring and churning sound was punctuated at odd intervals by an occasional
ping
from a piece of gravel coming into contact with the whirling blades.

He made two passes along the orchard, and a white pickup stopped on the shoulder of the road, maybe twenty yards away. A man climbed out. From this distance, without his glasses, Rusty couldn’t be sure he knew him, but with both of them moving toward each other he soon recognized July Montgomery, a Jersey farmer near Words. Jerseys, Rusty smiled, were for people who were afraid to milk Holsteins and too ashamed to milk goats. He shut off the engine and lit a cigarette as a way of saying hello.

“Rusty,” said July, smiling with a sincerity that Rusty interpreted as feigned. “I’ve been meaning for a long time to stop. How are you?”

“I’m okay.”

“How are those knees holding up?”

“I’ll let you know. What do you want?”

“Dog won’t bite, will it? Looks mean.”

“Take your chances like everyone else,” said Rusty.

“Remember that grain drill I bought from you?”

“No refunds.”

“How did you set the boxes for barley?”

“Set the outside box on about the sixth notch, the inside ones on the tenth.”

“Sixth notch outside, tenth notch inside.”

“Worked for me.”

“A little wet to be mowing, isn’t it?”

“Not really. Want a job doing carpenter work?”

“No. What kind of carpenter work?”

“The house needs a new roof, among other things.”

“I found a good carpenter last summer. Eli Yoder and his boys Isaac and Abraham. They built my new shed.”

“Don’t want Amish,” said Rusty.

“I thought the same thing,” said July, taking his cap off. “But I hired them anyway, and it was the drop-dead best thing I ever did. They work like mules but you only have to pay them like horses.” He laughed. “No, seriously, they did a good job. Eli lives—”

“I know where he lives.”

“Say, have you seen any signs of that cougar?”

“Nope.”

“Me neither. But they say it’s around. Many people have heard it and some people have seen it. I saw it myself.”

“First time I see it will be the last,” said Rusty.

“Big cats used to be all through this part of Wisconsin,” said July.

“Maybe so, but people back then had the sense to kill the buggers off.”

A ROOM WITHOUT FURNITURE

W
HEN CORA HAD GATHERED ALL THE EVIDENCE SHE NEEDED to prove that the American Milk Cooperative was shipping adulterated milk, shortchanging its patrons, and manipulating government reports, she told her supervisor she didn’t feel well and took the afternoon off. On the drive home she kept her hands from shaking by gripping the steering wheel until her knuckles turned white.

The farmhouse seemed cold, and she turned up the thermostat. As her husband moved back and forth through the north windows pulling a chopper and wagon into a field of July hay, Cora poured a cup of hot coffee and drank it, thinking it might calm her down. Then she telephoned the number written on the back of a pink memo card. With the box of photocopied documents sitting on the floor in front of her, she listened to three distant rings before the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection answered.

“May I please speak with the compliance officer in charge of dairy,” said Cora.

“Who’s calling?” asked the secretary.

“A concerned citizen,” said Cora, bracing herself for the questions that would follow.

“I see,” said the voice on the other end. “I’m afraid Mr. Wolfinger is not available.”

“I have something important to speak with him about,” said Cora. “Very important.”

“I’m sorry, but Mr. Wolfinger is not in his office at the present time. Perhaps you can call back later.”

“I must talk to him.”

“I’m sorry, but Mr. Wolfinger is not in his office at the present time. If you wish, you may leave your name, telephone number, and
the nature of the business you wish to discuss, and Mr. Wolfinger or a member of his staff will contact you as soon as his schedule allows.”

Reluctantly, Cora gave her name and, in a very general way, said something about the information she had to report. Neither elicited a response.

Outside, the thick sound of the chopper’s whirring vegetative violence ceased. Her husband drove out of the hay field, out of view. A short time later the auger could be heard running beside the bunker feeder.

Three cups of coffee later, Cora called back.

This time, a different voice answered.

“Hello, this is Cora Shotwell. Mr. Wolfinger is expecting my call.”

“One moment, please.”

“This is Mr. Wolfinger,” said a pleasant alto voice.

“I have something you will be extremely interested in,” said Cora.

“Excuse me?”

“I have something you will be interested in,” repeated Cora.

“To whom am I speaking?”

“This is Cora,” she said. “I have really important information to turn over to you.” She steadied her breathing and spoke again. “You will want to send someone immediately. It’s all here.”

“Could you tell me what this is about?”

“It concerns highly illegal actions taken by a very large milk-processing cooperative over a period of roughly six and one- half months. I have proof—all of it. I have it right here. For instance, on this May billing sheet the testing line for the ratio of butterfat and the dates are . . . ”

“Excuse me, where are you calling from?”

“The farm.”

“What farm?”

“We live in Thistlewaite County.”

“How did you come to have this information?”

“My husband and I ship to American Milk. I also work for them as an assistant bookkeeper—at their plant in Grange—and became
aware of extremely illegal actions at the main office. I have records that prove everything. When will you be sending someone out?”

“Can you spell your name—last name first.”

“S-h-o-t-w-e-l-l, C-o-r-a.”

“One r?”

“Yes.”

“Your telephone number?”

She gave it.

“And address?”

After giving her address she anticipated that directions would be needed and began explaining how to reach the farm from Madison. Before even getting off the interstate, she was interrupted.

“Pardon me, but I have enough information for right now. Next week you will be notified about a time to come into the department. Thank you for contacting us.”

Cora put down the phone and tossed the papers she was holding into the box on the floor.

She felt undone, unfinished, like a room with a fresh coat of paint but no furniture. How could someone register so little interest in what she assumed would be the lifeblood of his agency?

Not wanting to remain in her tomb of arrested expectations, she drove into town to pick up her children and save them a long bus ride.

FAITH KEEPS NO TREASURE

W
INIFRED SMITH OFTEN FELT SHE LIVED TOO MUCH INSIDE her own head. She thought about things longer than she should and this presented quite a problem, especially in the ministry. It made her appear out of place.

Sharing reality with others had always proved difficult for Winnie, a problem made much worse after the death of her mother. Child Services had placed her with a foster family whom she suspected would without a second thought jam her into the coal-burning furnace in their basement if her roasting would result in an additional payment from the state. She later understood this probably wasn’t true, but at the age of twelve her imagination fashioned whole garments out of the soiled cloth of her despair. Her inconsolableness over the loss of her mother gave her the demeanor of belligerence, loneliness made her seem aloof, and the perpetual fear she lived in caused others to think she might be mentally challenged.

Lying awake at night in her first foster home, she knew she had nothing. She was nobody. No future waited for her and she had no answer for the tiny yearning voice inside her that asked over and over:
Am I going to be all right?

After months of listening to this, one night Winnie noticed another, deeper voice. At first she couldn’t make it out—only that it was not asking the same fearful question. This new voice was making a statement and the feeling attached to it gave her comfort, and the more comfort she felt the more clearly she could hear the voice. It was telling her something about herself. She could be somebody after all: a Christian.

But what did this mean? Other children called themselves Christian and they seemed to get this blessed identity from their parents, like
being Norwegian. But Winnie’s mother and father had belonged to nothing. They had no religion.

What did it mean to
have
a religion, she wondered, and thought about this incessantly. Inordinately shy, she had no skills in talking to strangers, and everyone now was a stranger. There was no one to ask, and she had to figure everything out for herself.

One by one, things were revealed, and her young mind built from them a safe fortress to grow up in. Christian membership, she decided, was unlike other ways of belonging. It was a community of faith, and so long as you had faith, you belonged—a home of shared convictions. In the family of Christians, togetherness was maintained not by similar physical characteristics or spatial proximity, or even knowing each other, but through the fellowship of sharing beliefs. In the privacy of your own mind, when you thought about these special beliefs you could find safety in knowing that others shared them. Your thoughts were theirs. They conversed agreeably in exchanges of encouragement and goodwill. Sharing in these beliefs was like talking with a friend under a warm blanket, or knowing something in your heart, something good, that someone else also knew. And not just any beliefs would do—only the right ones. The wrong beliefs left you outside, alone, with no firm identity.

As she was transferred from one foster home to another, she continued to work out these beliefs that qualified her to be a true Christian. She read the Bible from beginning to end, and then started over. Slowly she began to understand what was required, and as her understanding grew her confidence in herself as an authentic person strengthened.

At fourteen, she was placed with a Christian family and experienced a cautious elation at finally arriving in her mind’s outward community; but the elation quickly faded when she attended church for the first time and was placed in a class for religious instruction. She had lived too long, it seemed, in her own fortress, and the walls had become thick.

She tried to talk to the other Sunday school students about the beliefs they shared with her, only to discover that they didn’t share
them. Not only did they not share them, they had never heard of them and had no interest in learning about them. Even her teacher seemed unfamiliar with many, and those he seemed familiar with he had obviously spent too little time thinking about.

After six months Winnie asked to be excused from the confirmation ceremony following the completion of her religious instruction class. Her teacher was “cut to the quick,” he said, because she was, he said, his best student. But she did not think any legitimate sanctification could be granted solely on the basis of affirming belief, because, she said, a person could be filled with the Holy Spirit and still not believe, in the same way that someone could be electrocuted but not believe in electricity. Professed belief was an insufficient agency between God and woman.

She of course wanted to accept the things her teacher insisted she must, but as long as there remained the slightest
wanting
on her part, surely it couldn’t be faith. True faith kept no treasure in wanting. True faith wanted nothing to make it whole; it simply was, and grace could only be called “sufficient” when the Grace of grace was present, and no one, she told her teacher, could say that grace was always present because that would make living outside of Grace impossible. And if one never lived outside Grace, one could never know the experience of living under its benevolent rule. After all, Grace was not just a word for which a meaning could always be assigned and a definition found. Grace was something real that made all the difference, something that could be experienced, and because of this it had to be admitted that it could also
not
be experienced, and if it was
not experienced
it could not be sufficient.