Driftless (9 page)

“Oh, no,” said Winnie, rising to her feet and smoothing her skirt over her narrow hips until the finely woven material fell without a fold or wrinkle to within an inch of the floor. “Serving God is not limited to working inside the church. People serve wherever they are. In whatever line of work they choose, many people are doing their part. It’s simply that fewer are choosing full-time ministry. You yourself may choose to serve God while having your hair cut. You may—”

“I see,” the man interrupted. “Then perhaps everyone at every moment is serving God. Perhaps even thieves, rapists, terrorists, murderers, and other criminals are serving God as they go about their crimes.”

The haircut concluded, and the barber unclipped the neck cloth and tipped the chair into its upright position. The man took several bills from his wallet and accepted no change. He abruptly crossed the room, opened the door, and walked outside.

Winnie went after him.

“No one can serve God while hurting others and no one can serve God unconsciously,” she said, walking briskly beside him. “That’s impossible. Service is a form of worship, and worship requires more conscious attention than anything else.”

“Being conscious of a lie and insisting everyone must believe it doesn’t strike reasonable people as reasonable,” he said.

Winnie’s long legs matched his, stride for stride. She continued: “I’m afraid you’ve committed another error in your thinking, which is common among people just beginning their spiritual journey and you should not feel badly about that. Dogmatism plays the part you are attempting to cast for belief. In truth, the same vital intuition that informs reason even further informs belief. Believers are more ardently concerned with removing the Great Lie than nonbelievers.”

Followed halfway around the block, the man stopped and turned. “Leave me alone. My parents used to talk just like you. I’ve had many very bad experiences with cruel, greedy, and ignorant people who call themselves religious. They beat you until their fists are bloody and then read from the Bible. My childhood was a nightmare of perverted religion.”

“Oh,” said Winnie, touching her face with her hands. “Oh, I’m sorry. Really, I didn’t know. What you talk about is a real problem, for sure. I’m sorry. Believe me, I’m very well acquainted with nightmarish childhoods. My own was—”

“You’re a hopeless fool,” he said. “I doubt if you’ll ever amount to anything or if anyone will ever care anything about you.”

The man stepped from the curb and moved quickly through traffic to the other side of the street.

Winnie walked back.
You did it again,
she whispered to herself.
You did it again. Why can’t you pay attention! It’s not right to intrude too far into other people’s lives. Let them say whatever they want. You must
learn to respect that. You keep forgetting. How many times do you need to be whacked on the head by something you already know?

Back inside the barbershop, the older gentleman who earlier had been sitting beside her had taken the place of the man with sideburns on the elevated chair. Winnie sat down, folded her skirt carefully around her boot tops, and blushed.

The barber grinned from ear to ear. “There are some people born to preach and I believe you are one, young lady. You’ll do a bang-up job. And I know for a fact there are many churches looking for pastors. My sister, for example, attends a little church in Words, Wisconsin, which is an area so rural that God left His shoes there. They haven’t had a full-time pastor for over a year.”

“What an astonishingly odd name,” said Winnie.

In the library that evening she looked up Words, Wisconsin. Then she found an old Wisconsin map with Words on it and immediately experienced several short bursts of panic, beginning in her stomach and radiating into her extremities. The area in southwestern Wisconsin where God had left His shoes and apparently intended to send her was not far from the town that her father and mother had grown up in, as well as the place they had lived together, married, and eventually separated when she was a child. But she trusted that her guardian savior would not allow her father to hurt her again, even if he found her.

To be further satisfied that no harm would come to her, she found a telephone book for Thistlewaite County and searched for all the listings under Smith. There were of course a number of them, but none with the first name of Carl, and she assured herself that the others had no relation to her.

HUMPED FLOORS

R
USSELL (RUSTY) SMITH NEEDED SOME WORK DONE ON HIS house. The paint had peeled, especially around the upper windows, and the roof leaked in two places. But the retired farmer had long ago stopped climbing ladders. After sixty years of milking cows, carrying sacks of feed, and jumping off tractors and wagons, his knees had given out. He also had problems inside, where the hardwood floor in the guest bedroom buckled into hills and valleys. To make matters worse, his wife’s sister had called, announcing her intention to visit at the end of next month, and after hanging up the phone his wife, Maxine, had instantly reordered her collection of things to worry about, placing house repair at the very highest peak of concern.

Rusty called all the lumberyards—even in Kendall, more than fifty miles away—and was told there were no construction crews available. He called all the listed carpenters and contractors.

“This is always the worst season,” said Rodney Whisk at Whisk Lumber. “Everyone puts off construction until frozen ground is just around the corner. There’s more building now than you can shake a stick at.”

“I need someone,” said Rusty, flipping his spent cigarette to the asphalt and grinding it beneath the pointed toe of his cowboy boot. He tried to keep from reaching again into the pocket of his insulated vest, failed, found another cigarette, and lit it from a disposable lighter.

“Everybody works for the big boys now,” said Rodney. “Pete Hardin was in last week looking for someone to finish the addition on his house. He finally hired some Amish.”

“Don’t want Amish,” said Rusty. “Don’t want to encourage them to keep moving in.”

“Appears they don’t need any encouragement,” said the lumberyard
owner as a tractor-trailer load of Canadian plywood backed toward them from the street.

“The wife doesn’t like to drive at night,” said Rusty. “Afraid of hitting ’em.”

“They finally put electric lights on their buggies.”

“Didn’t do it until they forced ’em.”

“They’re hard workers,” said Rodney. “Give them that.”

“Never said they weren’t. Never said they weren’t. Just think they make poor neighbors.”

Rusty paused to remind himself why he had a right to complain about religious groups and anything else. He had grown up in an always-hungry family that never took charity. His father never held a steady job for more than three months, never owned his own home, and didn’t live past the age of forty. Rusty had dropped out of school in the eighth grade to work as a farm laborer, as did his younger brother.

From one rented room to another, Rusty had worked seven days a week, fourteen hours a day, year in and out. He had worn other men’s clothes, slept on cement floors, and hidden rice in soiled pockets of his overalls. He’d plowed with horses, shoveled manure, butchered animals, and cleared timber. He had worked for some of the most miserly farmers in the area—well known for their cruelty to family, animals, and themselves.

When he was old enough to be legally employed, he had worked nights as a grinder in the foundry. At thirty-eight he finally made a down payment on his own farm and a year later married a school-teacher. Then for the next thirty-five years he farmed with a moral ferocity that more resembled mortal combat than work, until he had paid, in full, for every blade of grass and splinter of wood on his property. Meanwhile, his wife had raised their two daughters, who eventually attended the state university, married young men from the suburbs, and provided his two grandchildren with lives of nurtured indolence.

Rusty Smith had the right to talk about other people. In a culture that valued work, he was a living testament to that virtue, a gnarled emblem of relentless toil.

He continued, “The Amish don’t pay gasoline taxes but use the roads and leave horse manure all over them. Their steel wheels cut deep into the cement. They don’t use electricity, so the rest of us have to pay higher rates. They don’t follow the same school laws. They get special privileges when it comes to having outhouses. Hell, for ten years my neighbor tried to build a hunting shack, but they wouldn’t let him unless he put in a complete sewer system. They say crapping outdoors is part of their religion.”

Rusty rarely talked about anything, but this was one of the few issues he had well rehearsed. “Amish don’t believe in owning cars, but they sure like to ride around in them. They don’t believe in owning phones, but they sure like to use them. They don’t believe in medical insurance, but they run to the hospitals in every emergency. They don’t believe in owning power tools, but they sure like to borrow them.”

“Do they borrow your tools often, Rusty?”

“Not mine.”

“You’re a hard man,” said Rodney, “and I’d like to talk to you more, but I’ve got to check over this plywood before they unload it.”

“Suit yourself.”

Rusty returned to his dual-wheeled pickup and began the drive back to his farm. Well, it really wasn’t a farm anymore, he reminded himself. Two years ago he had sold the land to Charlie Drickle & Sons. All his equipment had been auctioned. Now he just owned the house, the barn, and four acres. Drickle had wanted the barn, too, but Rusty refused, even though it stood a long ways from the house. “I’ll build you a big garage,” Drickle said.

“Not the same thing,” said Rusty.

At home, Rusty went directly into the basement. He always changed clothes down there to keep the smell of the farm out of the rest of the house. There was a shower next to the washer and dryer. After stepping out of his city clothes, he put on a pair of forest-green coveralls that zipped up the front and exchanged his leather cowboy boots for insulated rubber.

It was the only place in the house where he smoked, and he squatted onto his old milking stool and lit a cigarette. His knees hurt.
From above him came the sounds of Maxine and the vacuum cleaner. The humming and bumping gradually moved north. Running out of electric cord, she turned off the cleaner and returned south to retrieve the plug from the socket.

The telephone in the kitchen rang and her footsteps reversed, then stopped directly above him. Though he could not understand individual words, the fleeting sounds of occasional laughter led him to suspect the caller to be one of the girls, Maxine’s mother in Milwaukee or her sister in Chicago. About 90 percent, or more, of their calls could be traced to these sources. Rusty lit another cigarette as he listened to her pull a chair out from under the table and sit on it. Her voice lowered as she settled into the conversation, and the silences grew periodically longer as superficial greetings ended and more vital communication began to flow.

Rusty didn’t like talking on telephones. His circumstances had frequently made it unavoidable, yet he could not remember a time when he had ever
agreeably
dialed a number. And as he had so often demonstrated, it always proved easier to drive twenty miles to see if a store carried a desired item—or if it was open—than call. Holding a telephone against his ear had the same effect on him as entering a room filled with tourists in flowered shirts. He was not gregarious in that way. To be honest, he was not gregarious at all. His entire social capital had been invested, wisely and exhaustively, in Maxine. He hadn’t talked to his own brother or sisters in over fifty-five years. He so rarely thought about them that they seemed little more than characters in a mostly forgotten book.

Finishing his cigarette, Rusty groaned to his feet and climbed the cement stairs into the yard. He let the white bull terrier crossbreed out of her pen. The enormous dog limped through the wire gate, reminding him of her untreatable arthritis. Together they completed the long walk to the barn, which sat on the edge of a woodlot.

The building’s interior looked more like a museum than a barn. After selling the farm, Rusty had turned his attention to all the things he had promised to do whenever he found time. He oiled, repaired, and arranged all his tools. Then he made a pegboard to hang them from. Though he had resisted buying certain tools during his farming
life—not wanting to spend money on things he would use only infrequently—he now purchased them to complete his collection. He built a new workbench, with oak drawers to sort the nuts, bolts, screws, washers, nails, clips, pins, wire and wire fasteners, insulators, brads, tacks, rivets, and other things he had accumulated over the years, labeled and arranged according to size. He painted his vise. He painted his gasoline and oil cans and set them along the wall. He painted two metal storage barrels and put them at the end of the bench. He painted a wooden sign and hung it on the pegboard: TOOLS. He painted the doors and window frames. By the time he had finished, the inside of the barn looked like a Walt Disney production.

He backed the Oldsmobile out, drove it up to the house, parked it next to the water spigot, and began hosing off the dust and road dirt. On Wednesday nights Maxine volunteered in the library, and she often took Leslie Weedle, the librarian, home afterwards.

Keeping vehicles clean seemed important. Cars and trucks were extensions of the home and reflected their owner’s character. Like ragged clothes, a dirty car said a number of things Rusty did not wish to be associated with. Though he didn’t give a nickel what any particular individual thought about him and even held most of his neighbors in near-contempt, the mass of all of them together—the community—had considerable weight.

He began to go over the Oldsmobile with a chamois cloth to eliminate water stains. Maxine came out of the house and stood beside him. “The library’s closed tonight,” she said. “Someone is waxing the main floors.”