Driftless (16 page)

“If only you knew how little those things matter.”

“You’re probably right,” he said, and sat down on the bank beside a honeysuckle. “Come out of the water—just for now.”

But Winnie didn’t move. She didn’t know what to say. This was the most important time of her whole life, but its importance was unspeakable. Words hadn’t yet been invented to talk about it. What now filled her was understood through a long chain of lucidity that would break if she spoke about any single link. Nothing, yet everything, had changed.

The stranger sitting on the bank was no exception—he also glowed from the inside. She could feel both his kindness and his sorrow radiating from his face—feel it as her own. But she couldn’t explain.

“We’re all together all of us all,” she said. “You’re in here too.”

“In where?”

“In here, in God.”

“I don’t believe in God. What’s your name? Do you live around here?”

“You don’t believe?”

“I’m afraid I don’t see any sense in that kind of thing.”

“What kind of thing?”

“God, churches, praying, and heaven—that kind of thing. My wife went to church for a while, but for myself it never made sense. Did you say you lived around here?”

“Where I live is not important. The only thing that’s important is this.”

“What?”

“This.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“Not ‘that,’ this.”

“Is there a phone in your car? I could get it and you could call your husband perhaps, or a friend or relative.”

“Why are you concerned with such small things?”

“I’m just a small person, I guess.”

And just when she felt her heart breaking from not being able to communicate what she was experiencing, he seemed to understand. He looked at her and he somehow understood. Something in his experience connected with hers and he felt it.

She walked out of the water, took off her brown loafers, and sat next to July on the grass, her corduroy pants soaked nearly to the waistline. Her ankles and feet were bright red splotched with white. He wrapped his coat around her shoulders.

“That isn’t necessary,” she said.

“Probably not, but it makes me feel better.”

“I don’t understand how anyone can not believe in God,” said Winnie. “What else can satisfy our desire to at once understand and love?”

“Never made any sense to me—a man in the sky writing laws, judging actions, and deciding fate.”

“Oh no—not that god. Did you think I was talking about that god?”

“I guess I did.”

“Not even the old me could believe in that god. I mean I tried, but I couldn’t. That god died a long, long time ago, if it ever existed, which I seriously doubt.”

“Which one were you talking about?”

“You know—the only real one. Oh, how impossible this all is.”

Tears continued to run down Winnie’s cheeks. July handed her a fairly clean handkerchief, but she handed it back without using it. “Words are meaningless,” she said. “The truth dies before it fits into them. Language lacks the capacity to hold anything real. It serves an utterly different master. What’s really real is a home words can’t get into or out of.”

“Not everyone is capable of seeing the things you see,” said July. “Some of us have been too deeply hurt.”

Another vehicle, a station wagon, came from the north. It slowed to walking speed and came to a complete stop in the middle of the bridge. A window rolled down and a woman’s shrill voice called, “Winifred, is that you? Pastor Winifred?”

Winnie stood up.

“That’s Muriel and Don Woolever from my church. I’d better go see them. It’s my job. Don is probably back from visiting the doctor and I need to check on him. Muriel sounds anxious.”

“I could tell them you’re busy, if you want more time.”

“No, that’s all right. It’s been nice talking with you.”

“Keep my coat.”

“You’re very kind, but no thank you,” she said, handing it back. “I must be going. Where did you say you lived?”

“On a little farm outside Words, on Highway Q.”

Winnie put her wet shoes back on and climbed up the bank. After speaking for several moments with the old couple, she climbed into her car, turned around in the road, and followed them north.

July put on his coat and went back to his truck.

THEFT

I
N THE GRANGE PARKING LOT IN FRONT OF THE BRICK OFFICE BUILDING of the American Milk Cooperative, Cora climbed into a car with Alice Hobs, the neighbor who drove on Mondays, Thursdays, with Alice Hobs, the neighbor who drove on Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays. They heard a tire squeal and looked toward it.

Grahm turned off the road, raced across the lot, and pulled in front of them before they could leave, coming to a pitched stop. A small scream came from Alice, and both women stared wide-eyed through the windshield. By the time Cora recognized him, Grahm was out of the car and halfway to them, three chrome-colored balloons in one fist and a handful of cornflowers in the other.

“It’s all right!” she shouted at Alice, who was searching frantically for the lock to her door. “It’s my husband.”

“Happy birthday,” said Grahm, opening the door and thrusting the flowers toward his wife.

Cora climbed out, accepted the gifts, and stood looking between her husband—his hair wet and uncombed, his shirt half out of his pants—and her children sitting without seat belts in the front seat. “Happy birthday!” said Grahm again, and Cora burst into tears.

“For Christ’s sake, Grahm,” she yelled. “What’s wrong with you?”

At this signal, Alice slowly backed away from them and drove out of the lot.

“I thought we could go out for dinner,” said Grahm. “It’s your birthday.”

“Why does everything have to be
like this
? It’s pathetic, Grahm. Why can’t anything ever be nice?”

They drove to the Red Rooster Restaurant and ordered meals that included a trip through the salad bar.

Seth and Grace were happy to be eating out, and even happier to be inside a public building where the censure of strangers prevented
their mother from continuing to yell at their father. As she watched them running in and out of their booth, playing with the silverware and salt and pepper shakers, and marking up the paper placemats with the Crayons the restaurant provided, Cora felt herself relaxing.

“Who’s milking?” asked Cora.

“Wade,” said Grahm.

“We can’t afford to hire people to do our work,” she said. “And Wade’s on probation.”

“I’ve known him since he was a boy.”

At home in the driveway, the children bolted from the car and fled into the house. Grahm and Cora remained in the front seat, looking into a rapidly darkening sky.

“I just wanted to—” began Grahm.

“I know,” said Cora. “It’s not your fault. I’m just so tired. They’re trying to make me quit. They hired a girl just out of high school and they’re giving her a lot of my work. Today, Phil pretended to be unable to find the new application forms, which left me with nothing to do for over two hours while that new girl made out the reports. They’re trying to make me quit.”

“It’s not worth it. You should resign.”

“We need the money and the health insurance.”

The screen door banged shut on the front of the house. Seth and Grace stood on the porch, looking at the car. Their expressions caused Cora to go to them immediately. Grahm went to the barn to pay the neighbor and send him home. Minutes later, Cora found Grahm in the milk house.

“Someone was in our house,” she said in a breathless whisper. “The papers are gone—all of them. They found the box in the upstairs closet. I don’t think anything else was taken.”

They ran inside and silently set about putting everything back in order. Hoping to keep Grace and Seth from knowing that their home had been violated, they pretended nothing out of the ordinary had happened—as though natural forces were somehow capable of spewing out the contents of cabinets, drawers, and closets. As they worked they knew that the thoughts Seth and Grace might
entertain to explain the disorder—such as their father going through the house in a fit of rage—might be even more detrimental than the pretending, but they couldn’t help it. The truth hung heavily in their chests and they couldn’t imagine speaking it to their children. Their privacy had been spoiled, their sacred place defiled.

After they finished putting the house in order, Cora remained upstairs with Grace and Seth while they did their homework. Grahm called Wade to see if he had seen anyone.

“Hell no, Mr. Shotwell, I didn’t see anyone all the time I was over there. And you’ve got to believe me—I had nothing to do with whatever happened.”

“I know that,” said Grahm. “I never thought you did.”

Grahm called the police and at about ten-thirty met two men from the sheriff’s department in front of the milk house and together they walked across the driveway, under the tamaracks, and onto the porch. Cora joined them. The officers inquired after the robbery. One of them wrote with a ballpoint pen into a fat, leather-bound pad of paper. Strapped to their waists hung a number of other lumpy, leather-covered objects, and their brightly enameled badges reflected the porch’s orange bug light. Despite their laconic professional manner, Cora could tell they did not regard the theft of papers as a very serious crime.

“Were the doors locked?”

“We don’t have keys anymore,” said Grahm. “After they were lost we never bothered getting new ones.”

“You should always lock your home,” said the officer with the pen. “Doesn’t your insurance require locked doors?”

“We’re between policies,” said Cora.

The policemen said they would return the following day and interview neighbors. Information sometimes turned up in this way, leading to a “solution.” But they did not sound optimistic. When the car left, Grahm and Cora assumed they would not see it again.

Grahm returned to the barn, threw down hay for the cattle, and freed a stuck drinking cup where the lever releasing the water into the small basin had become corroded. When he returned to the house,
all the lights were turned off. At first he thought Cora had gone to bed, but after kicking off his boots and stepping inside the living room he saw her darkened figure on the edge of the sofa.

“I’m frightened,” she said.

“I have a rifle somewhere in the attic,” said Grahm.

“What are we going to do?”

The following morning, unable to sleep, Grahm got out of bed even earlier than usual, filled the manger with hay and ground feed, and went out to bring in the cows, his boots crunching on the frozen grass. A clear sky lit his way, and he found the animals huddled together in the northeast corner of the field. The dog ran around them in circles, nipping at their back legs, nudging them out of cud-chewing sleep, herding them toward the barn. Eager for grain, they did not resist.

Grahm breathed deeply, his breath white in the cool air. He listened to the wind moving through the trees, then the sound of a door closing. Over the sharp rise, an engine started, followed by the sound of tires on gravel, moving north. He watched as a gray van climbed over the hill.

Two hours later the milk truck arrived, and standing next to Grahm the driver drew a sample of milk from the bulk tank. He inserted litmus paper into the bottle, and it immediately turned color, indicating the presence of an antibiotic.

“Sorry, Grahm,” he said. “We have to discontinue anyone contaminated twice in the same year, and this has been twice in less than three months for you.”

He took another sample. Once again, the test showed traces of antibiotics.

“Sorry, Grahm,” the hauler said. “I’ll take one in for the lab to analyze, but I’m afraid I can’t accept your milk. And unless the lab test shows something different—and it won’t—you’ll have to find another plant.”

“Someone’s putting antibiotics in my tank,” said Grahm.

“That may be, but I can’t take your milk.”

After the truck pulled out of the yard, Grahm stood looking down into twenty-five hundred pounds of ruined milk—milk that
couldn’t even be fed to his calves for fear of killing the bacteria lining their stomachs.

He went to the house and met Cora, who was hurrying to her car. “See that Seth eats something before the bus comes,” she said. “And give them money to pay up their lunch account. And don’t let Seth leave his coat behind.”

“Have a good day,” said Grahm.

Later that morning, Cora was fired.

VISITOR

L
ATE AT NIGHT, RUSTY CAME UPSTAIRS, UNDRESSED, AND HUNG his clothes over the back of a chair. He crawled into bed beside Maxine as unobtrusively as possible, slowly relaxing the muscles in his legs in a manner that sometimes seemed to reduce the pain in his knees.

The darkness of the room surrounded him like an ocean. Maxine’s breathing came steady and strong, comfortable and wide, a smooth, rolling, migrating sleep.

Rusty lay blankly awake, aspirating in choppy, nervous breaths, hovering outside the borders of contemplation, an onlooker to his own thoughts.

Memories of the day danced in and out of plans for tomorrow and scenes of knee replacement surgery. But the wandering thoughts continued to return to the young Amish boy standing in the shadows behind the woman with big feet, regarding him with suspicion. As the memory repeated again and again, it filled Rusty with revulsion and contempt, lacking all proportion to the place the boy had played in the events of the day.

He tried to avoid returning to the memory of the boy, but could not. To give himself peace, he attempted to exercise some compassion, forgiving him for not having shoes, for his shabby, ill-fitted clothes, a cloistered life that rendered the outside world fearful, and the coarseness of the big woman with the broom. But he could not. The image of the boy returned to him, and as it did, he felt increasing hatred for him. His legs began to hurt and he sat up in bed, waking Maxine.