Q Road (15 page)

“Between you and Rachel, nobody talks to me much around here,” George said. “Why don't you come back to the house now for some breakfast? I'll make you eggs and bacon. Or else I got some patty sausage.”

David shook his head no vigorously. He wanted breakfast, of course, but then George would see how bad his breathing was, and
David still had the feeling that one wrong move could spoil everything. He was better off not taking a chance. Maybe if all went well with him and George today, then his ma would hold off a little longer on moving to California, and a letter would arrive from his half brother, Jim, saying for her not to come. Maybe then his ma really would get a job, and they could stay where they were.

George asked, “Are you okay?”

David nodded. He figured he'd get some food from Rachel later.

“You're breathing hard,” George said. “But at least you're smiling.”

David shrugged. Despite his burning chest, he couldn't stop grinning.

“Do you want a ride home?”

David shook his head no.

“I can put your bike in the truck.”

David shook his head again.

“You'll be okay on your bike, then?”

David nodded.

“Pull the big door closed when you go, will you?”

It was clear to George that David wanted to be left alone, and George believed in giving people their own time, kids included.

David watched George leave the barn and listened to his feet on the gravel outside. Concentrating on George, imagining George getting into his truck and turning the key and gripping the steering wheel, helped David regain control of his breathing, and within a few minutes he was able to climb down. He had done it, had kept going through the whole wagonload of straw without resting, and without anything terrible happening.

He walked across the loose straw on the barn floor and went outside to retrieve his bicycle, which he leaned against the barn doorway. He sat beside the bike and closed his mouth over his white plastic breather, inhaled, and counted slowly to ten. The doctor had said he should avoid dust, but David had a different plan.
Just as he was developing calluses on his hands, he wanted to build calluses inside his lungs. He imagined his lungs looking like his wrists and lower arms—red and torn, but getting tougher.

David saw Gray Cat pad around inside the barn, then exit through a place at the bottom edge of the wall where the wood had rotted away. A few months before, in this same barn, David had seen George's nephew Todd whip an orange kitten around on the end of a clothesline. There had been a soft pop, like the air escaping from a can of cola, as though life were a gas when it left the body. Todd hadn't seemed to care any more about the orangie than he would have at busting up a pumpkin, and afterward he'd tossed the kitten, rope and all, out into the ditch alongside the road. David hadn't been able to look at cats the same way since. Nowadays a cat just seemed like a fur-covered collection of body parts from which life could be yanked.

David inhaled his medicine again and held his breath, this time for fifteen seconds. The plain haze of a day like this felt like all the days of a person's life mashed together, but he didn't know what his whole life could add up to if he had to leave everything good behind and go to California. Beyond the door of the barn and the foundation of the old house, the cornstalks stood perfectly still, waiting. If David lived with George, he'd have gotten in the truck and gone home to breakfast as usual, and on the way they would have talked about harvesting plans. If they lived together, George would think of David's breathing as a regular part of David. If he lived with George, he'd get up early every morning and feed the animals. David would go to school if George insisted, but he would make it clear he'd rather stay home and help with farm work. David could use shovels and axes in the daytime, and he wouldn't have to worry about putting them away in the exact positions he'd found them in. He wondered whether, if George had a son, he would let him get a dog.

AS GEORGE TURNED NORTH ON QUEER ROAD, GRAY CAT
noted the fluttering of a goldfinch near the barnyard fence. The goldfinch was pulling at a thistle, and the last of the thistle seed spilled in a pile onto the ground. Wary of predators, the goldfinch knew not to stand on the ground for more than a second, so it landed and alighted, landed and alighted, grabbed several seeds at each visit, perched again on the thistle stalk or the bedsprings or the woven wire fence, then went back to the ground. Though it was wary, this goldfinch was ignorant of the approach of Gray Cat, who'd been dropped here nearly a year ago, along with the rest of an unwanted litter. The rest of the kittens—the other gray, the calico, and the two orangies—were dead. Two had been smashed under the tires of cars within a week and had their bodies pecked apart by crows. A third was killed and eaten by a raccoon, and the fourth was done in by George's nephew.

The surviving gray kitten, however, who had avoided people
from the start, had sped away from the boys who'd grabbed his orange littermate. But Gray Cat had not avoided this barn, which provided mice and shelter, nor had he avoided April May Rathburn's place across the street, where he found that he could steal chunks of dry dog food from a dish in the side yard while the shepherd slept stupidly inside the doghouse to which he was lashed every afternoon. Just once, Gray Cat had eaten cream he'd stolen from a bowl set outside, before April May chased him away. From the other side of the road, he'd watched for a chance to take more, but then one of the woman's cats showed up, licked the cream, and was taken inside. It had been a trap, Gray Cat realized, and he felt clever for having avoided it.

Gray Cat was not considering humans now, for his eyes were set upon a yellow body that flickered down to the ground, then up into the air, and back down, not as bright a creature as earlier in the season, but summer-fattened and no less tasty for being mottled with greenish brown. Gray Cat hugged the ground and approached the bird and thistle so slowly and smoothly that he might have been a serpent slithering or a liquid pouring itself in the direction of the bird. And when he was close enough, he reached out with a paw that stretched farther from his body than any bystander would have expected and pulled the bird to earth. The move was tornado quick but so smooth it could have been a light breeze. The curled claws pulled the bird down with a strength that was greater than seemed possible for a creature that had moments ago licked its paw and neatly brushed its head. When the bird tried to stand, the cat reached out and slammed the feathered body down again.

The bird did not peep or scream but flapped its wings and lifted itself, only to have the cruel paw thrust onto it a third time. Black finch eyes turned toward the sky, toward flight, in the direction the bird meant to travel—up, up—but when it began to lift itself, Gray Cat swatted it to the ground again with a force that broke one of the bird's legs. But legs were nothing compared to wings, and the
bird jumped into the air on one leg, never mind the other. Before the bird could launch itself, though, Gray Cat struck hard enough to break the bird's wing. Still, the goldfinch fluttered its one good wing upward, calling to the air where it had lived, to the hazy sky, which tomorrow might be clear. “Sky, pull me up,” the bird cried with its almost weightless body, but could only flap its unbroken wing, swishing to no effect. Gray Cat held the bird down, occasionally letting loose in order to circle, stretching out a paw again when the bird began to shift. Eventually the bird did not move, but only stared up at the sky, then into the gray eyes of Gray Cat, then again at the sky, yearning, alighting in its mind the way it had alighted ten thousand times from the ground or from a thistle or fence or from a feeder built to resemble a barn. Never before had the bird known that to desire flight was not the same as to spread wings and rise. The cat sent his claws through feathers, into nerves. The bird's yearning thinned, along with its breath, thinned to something like a whisper of smoke, and the bird was extinguished.

HAD THERE BEEN A WAY TO DRIVE WITHOUT RUNNING OVER
woolly bears on his way home from the barn on the morning of October 9, George Harland would have done it, but killing some of them was inevitable. He kept his eyes focused farther along Queer Road, so at least he didn't have to see any particular caterpillar before crushing it beneath the worn tires of his four-wheel-drive pickup. He turned in to his driveway but didn't see Rachel. He also didn't see the State of Michigan sign that was usually displayed on two posts in front of his house; George thought probably Rachel had taken it again, to help support her produce table. Somewhere beneath her turban squashes and the bushel of apples would be the green sign, engraved with the message

Michigan Centennial Farm
Owned By The Same Family Over One Hundred Years.

The state historical commission had presented the sign to George because his family had arrived here before Michigan was even a state, purchased their acreage at the land office in Kalamazoo, and built this house. Like other settlers from the civilized east, George's ancestors had quickly learned that property rights were different out here. The Indians felt free to hunt most anywhere, whether a person owned the land or not, and the settlers followed suit. In the beginning, even the relatively well off suffered from periodic scarcity, so folks adopted communal habits and shared with their neighbors: their kettles and churns, their shovels and plows, even their mules. Folks borrowed with humility and loaned with the hope that their tools would be returned in the same condition in which they were borrowed. These folks may not have considered the Potawatomi their brethren, but neither did they deny them sustenance from their modest stores.
“Bukutah”
or
“Bke de”
was a Potawatomi man's way of saying “I'm hungry,” and a fellow might make such an announcement before coming into a house. When food was scarce, that utterance filled the woman of the house with dread, but she would then remind herself that it was always an Indian who returned her milk cow when it got loose and wandered into the woods, and it had largely been the strength of Potawatomi arms that had raised the first barns in the township.

Harold Harland was not born into ownership of the farm, but came to it by marrying Henrietta, the only surviving child of an otherwise prosperous farmer. Harold learned the history of the place by listening to his father-in-law and the other old men in the neighborhood. In the next generation, Harold's own son had no interest, so by the time his grandson George was old enough to listen, Harold was nearly desperate to teach the boy all about farming and to tell him what he had learned about the 1830s, when the white settlers first arrived in Greenland. There hadn't been more than a few dozen poor farmers around when Henrietta's great-grandfather started building this house, and Harold said those
farmers had disapproved of the man's constructing a little window room up above the southern roof to provide a view south, east, and west. Those neighbors scoffed at the frivolity of the room the way the Potawatomi scoffed at all wooden structures built upon stone foundations, when surely wigwams should have sufficed.

After the Potawatomi were marched away west, and as wealth increased in the region, people gradually stopped depending upon the churns, tools, and mules of others and were expected to take care of their own needs and build their own fences strong enough to contain their cows. Within a single generation of white settlement, the Indians were gone, and the farmers stopped caring about such things as whether or not a neighbor wasted his time building a window room. Within a generation, a white man's stupidity had become his own and was no longer an attribute of the community.

George was ten or eleven when his grandpa started telling him such things, and one summer afternoon Harold proposed the two of them install new glass in the old window room, long boarded up. At the prospect of such a waste of time, George's grandmother Henrietta mumbled a complaint about what sort of fool she'd married. George himself would never have questioned his grandfather's wisdom about the window room or any other thing.