Q Road (14 page)

As George threw bale number forty-eight to David, April May plugged in the extension cord, then stood back and admired the orange lights and puffy vinyl ghosts. April May knew she wanted some of those new grapefruit-sized pumpkin gourds she'd seen at Rachel's farm stand. As for jack-o'-lanterns, she'd get one pumpkin for her husband and one each for the grandkids. She'd grown most of her own pumpkins in years past, but when Rachel opened up that farm stand last year, April May figured her arthritis was bad enough that gardening was no longer a pleasure, and the decision to give it up had felt like a burden lifted.

Not that she had any intention of giving up on
carving
pumpkins. She always helped the grandchildren carve slowly and carefully, but nowadays she cut her own pumpkins with reckless speed. She'd learned by practice about spacing the features to cover more of the pumpkin, of not skimping on the size of the eye and mouth holes. Nowadays she chose to slash without thinking, and this method, she found, resulted in a scarier face. Her husband seemed shocked at the violence with which she carved and with the wounds she sometimes inflicted upon herself. If the grandkids didn't want the pumpkins—as often they didn't—she gutted and carved more herself. She burned twenty dollars' worth of candles last year just to keep all her pumpkin heads glowing on the porch. Though she hadn't dressed up or gone to a costume party in years, Halloween had become her favorite holiday. Much simpler than Christmas with its endless buying and baking and nice-making.

Before heading out for her Saturday-morning errands, just as David adjusted the forty-ninth bale, April May took a last look at the barn-shaped feeder, set against a backdrop of the barn itself. The doors were properly placed and covered by carpenter's cloth through which the birds plucked seeds. It had been such a success
that Larry was in the process of building another feeder, a model of Milton Taylor's Barn Grill, the second oldest barn in the township. On the ground beneath the barn feeder were the first white-bellied snow birds who'd traveled south for the winter from Canada and Michigan's Upper Peninsula. April May hoped they'd be able to hold their own with the English sparrows. When she was young, the Audubon Society had encouraged people to kill English sparrows, an Old World species of finch that stole nesting sites from tree swallows and bluebirds, even pecking the native chicks to death to get those nests. Before the English sparrows came, bluebirds had been the most common species of bird in the eastern United States. Naturalists now called English sparrows “house sparrows” and had since given up on trying to get rid of the conquering species, or maybe the invaders had just settled in so thoroughly that they were no longer even foreign.

AS DAVID ACCEPTED BALE NUMBER FIFTY-TWO, HE WAS
less than halfway done, but he was already tired; his arms and legs were aching and his chest was beginning to burn. As he dragged that bale and the next and the next up and over and pushed each into place, he felt his muscles swell and thicken. Sometimes a man's muscle didn't show in his arms and legs, David thought, but only in how tall he was, which was how George's muscle showed. Being tall was the best kind of muscle because everybody saw it, even from a distance, even in long sleeves. For the first couple dozen bales, George had stood atop the hay wagon pretty much level with David. From there he tossed bales almost into place so David had only to angle each into position and push it tight against the others with his knees. As the wagon emptied and the stacked bales rose, George eventually was unable to toss a bale all the way up to David, and instead held it above himself and waited for David to reach down and grab the strings. One level of bales ran east-west,
and the next north-south, only you didn't just stack one level at a time, you built out, adding a few to each level as you went, so one level tied down the one beneath it. That was the phrase George used,
tied down.
George offered bales in quick succession, and David pushed one after another into place as best he could, grateful for any noise that distracted George from his raspy breathing. Straw rustled, crows squawked, the wagon squeaked. For the next couple dozen bales David slipped into a rhythm and even forgot his exhaustion for a while.

“Did you see Rachel on your way down here?” George said.

“She was yelling at woolly bears.”

“Was she?”

“Everybody says she doesn't talk, but she talks to me a lot.”

“Maybe it's because you're a good listener.”

“She thinks you shouldn't kill woolly bears. I don't know why she cares so much about them when she kills everything else.”

“I guess you shouldn't kill anything without a reason.”

“Officer Parks doesn't like Rachel, does he?” David exhausted himself with that burst of speaking, and now he hoped George would talk so he could just listen.

“I wouldn't worry about Rachel and Officer Parks,” George said. “They'll learn to get along. How many bales you count so far?”

David hadn't been counting. After fifty-two, he'd forgotten to count. He'd put each bale tightly against the others, but he'd been daydreaming about driving tractors and about living with George. David looked around, unable to distinguish the new bales from the old, and for a moment he couldn't breathe at all. He had known something terrible would happen today—everything up until now had been too good to be true.

“I think I counted eighty-three so far,” George said.

David sighed and thanked God. George had been counting. And of course George was right. “Sounds right,” David said, swearing
to himself to keep count from now on. George's nephew might not bother to count bales, but relatives had special privilege and could expect forgiveness even after terrible mistakes. Eighty-four, eighty-four, he repeated to himself as he dragged bale number eighty-four toward the back. His foot slipped into a hole between bales, and his leg went clear down and he was stopped only by his crotch slamming onto the corner of a bale. He saw colors and couldn't exhale until after he'd pulled himself up, but George didn't seem to notice, just continued holding up bale number eighty-five. Eighty-five, David said as he accepted it. David knew how important it was to keep count in order to know how many bales were in this barn at any given time, so that George could sell some and keep as much as he needed for the winter—not that George couldn't probably just look in the barn and give a pretty good estimate. George produced bale number eighty-six.

George, to the contrary, felt unsure about his own count, because counting bales wasn't complex enough or important enough to keep in the front of his head, where he continually performed bigger calculations. Corn was selling for $1.46 a bushel, and soybeans for $4.27. George was expecting a yield of about 110 bushels of corn an acre, so that was going to be about $161 per acre, times 475 acres (including the field he rented next to O Road) so that was $76,475, barring insect infestation or excessive loss to animals. Of soybeans he had 490 acres, and at 36 bushels an acre, he'd end up with $75,323. He owed about $118,000 for seed and fertilizer, which left about $34,000, minus taxes, equipment, and mortgage payments for the Parkses' land, which would eat up more than the rest of it. He'd end up living day to day by selling alfalfa, oats, and oat straw to other local farmers.

George sighed. “David, how is your ma?”

“She's fine.” He wished there were something good he could tell George. “She might be getting a job.”

“That would be good news,” George said. “Where?”

“I don't know.”

“Well, your ma's got her troubles,” George said. “You're a good worker, anyhow.”

Having lied to George about his mom made him feel crummy, made him think of the woolly bears he'd run over and killed on the way here, and he wanted to change the subject. He said, “You know, Rachel says there's somebody buried around here.”

“What?” George put down the bale he'd started to lift.

“From more than a hundred fifty years ago,” David said. George's reaction made David worry he'd said something wrong, but he continued. “She's Rachel's relative, and she used to talk to the plants, and she killed herself by jumping out of a tree because she didn't want to move away.” David usually didn't give his full attention when Rachel told stories about the Corn Girl, but now that he thought about it, he knew just how Corn Girl felt about not wanting to leave.

David saw George was still listening intently. “Or she might have fell,” David said. Actually, that Indian girl falling rather than jumping was his own theory, one he hadn't shared with Rachel. He didn't believe people would jump to their deaths on purpose.

George again lifted the bale. Thank God, George thought. Rachel hadn't killed and buried her mother. Of course she hadn't. How could he even think that? George imagined Margo's face as though underwater, pale as in death.

“Rachel calls her Corn Girl,” David said.

“That's quite a story.” George held the next bale above his head but leaned it against other bales so it felt almost weightless to him. He worked more slowly than he would have with his nephew Todd, but he didn't mind so long as the work was getting done. As George waited for David to grab the bale, he searched the corners of the barn. The swallows had already left their mud nests and flown south, to wherever they lived in winter: Key West or the Bahamas, places his first wife had wanted to go. Rachel, so far,
wanted to stay right here, winter and summer. At even such a cursory thought of Rachel, George again felt himself come a little undone. When David took the bale, George said, “Corn Girl, you say? And she's related to Rachel?”

“On her Indian side.”

“And she liked to talk to plants, you say?” George repeated the name to himself.
Corn Girl
. Rachel was a mysterious person, all right. George didn't know what had propelled him into each day before she came. Maybe he had always known in his muscles that she'd show up and make life worth living. Reminding himself of his weakness for Rachel made him forgive Sally for not paying rent, made him forgive the Taylors for letting their land become a golf course, and made him even forgive the Higgins kids for wanting to give up their family's dairy operations. He'd been hearing more rumors about an impending sale over the last few months, and George couldn't blame the young Higginses for rejecting a life in which work began at 4
A.M
., rain or shine, snowstorm or hangover. He only wished he could afford to buy all their land for Rachel. Of course, Rachel herself would eventually decide that the sun didn't rise and set only on northern Greenland Township. She was bound to figure out that the world was vast and, for a resourceful girl, infinitely rich with experience.

David reached down and grabbed bale number 112 from George, trying not to let on how exhausted he was, that he wanted to collapse and breathe without using a muscle until, as the doctor had explained, the oxygen saturated his blood again. As a rule, David conserved his medicine, only puffing when he really needed to, because his mom didn't get him his new breathers quickly enough. He'd recently started telling her they were gone before they really were, working toward having a full one in reserve. By the time George was standing on the plywood platform of the wagon handing up the last bales, David had to lie on his belly, reach down, and pull up while George pushed. When they'd
started, the upper part of the barn had seemed open, but now the bales were filling up the back and the east side, so the walls were closing in, and the ceiling hung more closely overhead. At last, George pushed the final bale toward David, and David accepted it with hands that were raw from the twine. George had offered him gloves from his truck before they started, but George himself didn't wear gloves, and David would just as soon hurry and get his hands as tough and callused as George's.

“One hundred eighteen,” David announced.

“That's it,” George said, from below. “Good job.”

The words echoed in David's head. He collapsed to his knees onto the silky yellow bales. His head felt light, and he had the sense of floating upward.

“You did a real good job, David.” George waited beside the hay wagon for David's legs to appear. “I'm hoping I can bale tomorrow,” George called up to him. “If you feel up to it, you can drive the tractor while I stack. You'll just be careful on those turns.” George figured that driving a tractor couldn't tax David's breathing much.

David's legs appeared, not in descent, but dangling over the side of the stack, as though he did not intend to climb down anytime soon. George moved around the hay wagon so he could see David's face. “How are you feeling? Do you want to help me tomorrow?”

David nodded yes.

“Meet me at the house at two o'clock?”

David nodded again. The invitation made him feel like cheering but he hadn't even the energy to speak.