Driftless (7 page)

Cora returned to the house to make supper. The next day she began looking for work, and babysitters. The following week she took a part-time job as a waitress. Two weeks later she found full-time employment at the American Milk Cooperative, a nationwide farmer-owned organization that marketed milk from more than 40,000 dairy farms, including theirs. Within the first year, she was awarded two pay increases at the branch office in Grange and the following year became an assistant bookkeeper.

Their situation improved. Though much of the money Cora earned went toward the farm operation, they now had a fairly reliable automobile, a roof that did not leak, and a refrigerator with a self-defrosting freezer compartment.

At the same time, their lives became more hectic, a frantic race from one workstation to another. The children were alone, they feared, too much. Cora often found reason to believe that Seth and Grace had grown bigger—grown up—during the space of a single day away from her.

In an effort to lower debt, Grahm added five more cows to his herd. He began leaving the house at 4:30 a.m. and did not return until after 8:00 p.m. They no longer kept a garden and had little time on the weekends for anything other than chores they neglected during the week. And for Grahm, weekends merged seamlessly with weekdays, as indistinguishable as links in a chain. Like most of their neighbors, they came to accept a state of perpetuating fatigue.

In April, Cora returned from work and found Grahm in the
machine shed kneeling beside a grain drill. He set down the grease gun, with grease scrolling out of the nozzle’s end like a red transparent worm, and went to her.

“What’s the matter?”

“Grahm, they have a second set of books. There was a discrepancy in the shipping sheets. When I reported it to my supervisor, I was told I could find the correction in the main building in Madison. I drove there this afternoon. There’s a second set of records in back of the main office. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to see them. I don’t know—I’m just an assistant bookkeeper—but there’s a whole wall of file cabinets.”

Grahm stared mutely forward.

“I told my supervisor, but he told me not to worry about it. He said it only concerned upper management and they had a different accounting system.”

“What does this mean?” Grahm asked, feeling much like he had when he’d learned Cora was pregnant, both times. There seemed to be nothing for him to do. Something was happening that greatly concerned him but he had no way to assure that everything would turn out all right, and this somehow seemed like a personal failing.

“Maybe there’s another explanation. Maybe it’s just a mistake.”

“It’s no mistake, Grahm. With one hand they steal from us farmers and with the other they lie to the government. They’re breaking the law and it’s not right.”

Cora decided to gather enough information to prove her suspicions. The next evening she brought home two Xeroxed spreadsheets, folded and tucked into her purse. And she continued collecting evidence.

She also began having difficulty sleeping, migraines, and finally a doctor prescribed pills. But even then she often could not sleep.

Grahm and Cora’s intimacy dried up like attic furniture.

Grahm felt increasingly frustrated. Voices in his mind told him to
do something,
but he had no ideas. Like most of his neighbors he had devoted his life to farming. He liked farming. All he wanted to do was farm. Farmers had a long, proud history of avoiding social,
economic, and political issues. They enjoyed nature, work, and solitude, and they eschewed everything that might be considered grist for the nightly news.

But after a lifetime of successfully defending his private life from the baneful affairs of the world, his wife had rolled a pestilential army of scandalous problems through the front gate. And now they were in his house, in a cardboard box beneath their bed.

One afternoon he drove his pickup to July Montgomery’s small farm, several miles away. Grahm didn’t remember exactly when Montgomery had moved into the area. He’d arrived unnoticed and blended in so well with his surroundings that it seemed he’d always lived in the old brick house, taking over a farm that had been for sale for a long time. Tim Pikes, the drunkard and former owner, had lost the battle against bank payments when Grahm was a small child. Most of the land had been sold off, and the remainder with the buildings—only a hundred acres—didn’t seem like enough for a viable farm, but apparently it was for July.

His place was easy to identify, with MONTGOMERY JERSEY FARM painted in large white letters across the upper front of the red barn. Each word sat on its own board, and the third board had recently come loose on the “m” end and now hung perpendicular to the ground.

Grahm pulled into the driveway just as the middle-aged man in a checkered shirt came around the side of the barn with a double-hung aluminum ladder. He planted the metal feet and pulled on the rope, hoisting the upper half of the ladder into its uppermost position. When the ladder was fully extended, the highest rung came within a couple feet of the hanging board, twenty feet in the air.

Grahm got out of his pickup and walked to the barn. “Hello, July,” he said. “Can I help?”

“Do you have a hammer?”

“Sorry, no.”

“Then I guess you can’t help,” said July and headed up the ladder.

“I can hold the ladder.”

“Good, you do that,” he said.

Watching him climb, Grahm wondered about July. He seemed
odd somehow, and because he didn’t look especially out of the ordinary or deformed in any way, Grahm imagined the reason for this impression must come from something July had experienced beyond the normal range of what most people experience. His history, in other words, contained a deformity. And for some unknown reason this made him easier to talk to. He never seemed to be passing judgment.

Standing on the next-to-highest rung, July reached the errant board and worked it underneath the ladder. When it reached the horizontal level of MONTGOMERY and JERSEY, he took a nail from his shirt pocket and drove it into the wood. Then he dropped the hammer into the denim belt loop and climbed to the ground.

“Thanks,” he said.

They collapsed the ladder.

“You got a minute?” asked Grahm.

“Sure. You want some coffee?”

“No thanks, coffee makes me too nervous.” They carried the ladder over to July’s machine shed and hung it on an inside wall. July leaned against the back tire of his Minneapolis-Moline while Grahm paced back and forth over the dirt floor.

“I didn’t know who to talk to. I think we’re getting into trouble, my wife and I. I mean I think we really are.”

“We’re all in trouble,” said July. “We’re farmers.”

“Cora and I ship to American Milk, and Cora works in the office.”

“I ship to them too. Not many independent plants left. American Milk bought up most of them.”

“Cora says they keep two sets of books, and there are other things. One big farm is shipping watered milk; several others routinely test positive for antibiotics and listeria but are accepted anyway. Cora’s making copies of shipping and accounting sheets—stacks of them. She says they will prove everything, and she won’t stop.”

July took off his hat, rubbed a hand through his short brown hair, put his hat back on, and said, “Look, Grahm, this is serious. AM is a Fortune 500 company. The people who run it are wealthy and powerful, and it’s better to just leave them alone.”

“They’re not above the law.”

“Maybe not, but they’re not as far beneath it as we are.” In some ways he looked more worried than Grahm.

“My grandfather and some others started American Milk during the Depression. He was a charter member and it wasn’t a crooked outfit back then.”

“No, maybe not,” said July.

Grahm continued pacing.

July once again took off his hat and rubbed his hand through his hair.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” he said. “Make more copies of the copies your wife brings home. Put them somewhere safe. Everything depends on them. If those papers get out of your hands, you’re done. Show them to people you trust. Do you have a lawyer?”

“We don’t need a lawyer.”

“I think you need a lawyer.”

“We can’t afford one.”

“Then maybe you can’t afford to be involved with this.”

“We shouldn’t need a lawyer. We haven’t done anything wrong. This is the United States of America.”

“No country is immune to human nature.”

Grahm reached the end of his desire to talk. He regretted coming. Talking to people was difficult enough, even in the best circumstances. Now he felt angry, and he drove away.

THINK LESS, DO MORE

J
ACOB HELM CLIMBED INTO THE JEEP, BACKED OUT OF THE GARAGE attached to the side of his log home, and drove the eight miles into Words. He had bought the Words Repair Shop building soon after moving into the area, converting it from what had once been a creamery. At the time he’d known little about running a business, but he needed a new beginning. After Angela’s death, he’d quit his job of eleven years (he’d been an engineer for an electrical component company), sold their suburban property, and left Sheboygan. He ended up here, determined to immerse himself in anything that bore no resemblance to his past.

The old creamery was bigger than he’d needed for a repair shop—even a shop where he worked on everything from tractors to watches. He added a craft room, managed by Clarice Quick, who opened and closed the building when he wasn’t there. She knew the local people, ran the cash register, and did the billing.

The smells from the two parts of the building competed for dominance. Oil, grease, gasoline, hot metal, fermenting leather, burned-out electrical components, tobacco, mildew, mud, and workbench solvents did battle with the thinner but better defined odors of scented candles, dried flowers, paraffin oil, fabrics treated with fabric softeners, lemon furniture polish, air fresheners, Clarice’s lavender body wash and her hair spray. The combined fragrance one encountered in the doorway adjoining the two rooms, if truth be told, resembled nothing else on earth.

“Good morning, Mister Helm,” Clarice said when Jacob came in. He suspected she would refrain from using the formal title if she ever thought about it, but when her mind was consumed with other things—in its normal state—she relied on the expression her upbringing had prescribed to her for addressing teachers,
shopkeepers, and employers. “We have an order for eight quilts, Mister Helm.”

“Someone must be reselling them.”

“They said they would make good Christmas presents.”

“I forget who makes them.”

“Olivia Brasso—the cute one in the wheelchair. Her sister Violet, the bigger one, usually brings in her things. They work as a team, you might say. Always have for almost as long as I can remember, though if you ask me it would be no picnic taking care of Olivia. Despite her small size and her infirmity, there’s something quite frightening about her. I don’t know if others have noticed it, but, oh, yes, and Mr. Shrinkle left a wheel from his farm wagon. I guess it needs a tube or spokes or something.”

Jacob stopped listening and resumed welding a hay rake that he had begun working on the day before.

Mid-afternoon, five men dressed in olive fatigues came inside. Jacob had seen them before but did not know them by name. For several minutes they walked from place to place, not speaking. The largest man closed the door into the craft shop. Another turned off the radio beside the air compressor.

“You the owner?” asked the oldest of the five, a muscular man with small eyes set inside a wide, square face.

Jacob nodded.

“Know anything about guns?”

“Not much.”

“Know anything about machine guns? Ever work on them before?”

“Some. I was a mechanic in the Guards.”

“We have several we want you to check over.”

“If they’re Chinese nine millimeter, forget it. They’re junk.”

“These are American and Israeli, thirty and fifty caliber.”

A tractor stopped in the road and backed an empty manure spreader toward the open double doors into the shop.

“We’ll bring them over to your house,” said the man. “We know where you live.” And they left.

July Montgomery climbed off the tractor and came inside.

“What did those men want?” he asked, watching them climb into an SUV with tinted windows.

“Nothing,” said Jacob. Three years ago July had pulled Jacob’s jeep out of a ditch after he’d had too much to drink, and after that awkward meeting they got along well. July even occasionally showed up at Jacob’s house with beer and cigars. They played chess and cribbage next to the woodstove. Though July was ten or fifteen years older, he was the only person Jacob ever talked to, in the sense of really talking to someone.

“That was Moe Ridge, and those men are in his militia,” said July.

“I know who they are.”

July turned toward his spreader. “Chain broke,” he said. “Bearings are making noise and she needs new grease cups.”

“Might take a while, I’m busy.”

“You look tired, Jacob. You should get more sleep. Where’s the soda machine that used to be here?”

“Company took it back. Said they’d replace it, but I haven’t seen them for two weeks.”

“Too bad. I was going to buy you a soda. Say, there’s a lawn mower on the edge of town that won’t start.”

“Bring it over sometime next week.”

“The woman who owns it doesn’t have a way to get it here,” said July. “It’s a big one and she doesn’t know anything about motors.”

“You can show her,” said Jacob, opening the door to the craft shop and returning with a can of soda from the refrigerator on the other side of the cinder block wall. He handed it to July and turned on the radio.

“Thanks,” said July, “but I want
you
to show her.”