Q Road (3 page)

“I suppose you're going to work this morning.” Nicole sat down across the table from Steve wearing a plush bathrobe and a steaming towel, which she'd wrapped around her hair and adjusted in the bathroom mirror to make sure it framed her face attractively.

“Did you take a shower already?” Steve said. “I didn't hear the water.”

“I'm preconditioning,” Nicole said. She wondered if Steve still believed she was a natural blonde. Way back when her hair was medium brown, the strands had been as soft and fine as spun silk, but bleaching had made her hair brittle, in need of special treatment.

“What's preconditioning?” Steve asked.

“It's an oil treatment you use before your regular shampoo and conditioner.”

“So after all that, I guess you use a
post
conditioner.”

Nicole used to think her husband charming, but now she wondered which of the six knives in the knife holder above the sink would most easily slice the fabric of his sport shirt and the connective tissue between two of his ribs before penetrating his heart. She said, “Isn't this bedroom cute?” and turned her
Beautiful Home
magazine around and pointed a flowery, ruffled bedroom scene at her husband.

Steve knew that no man could sleep in such a room. He said, “Look next door. Mrs. Shore is still watching us.”

“She is such a freak,” Nicole said. “She should get a life.”

“Speaking of neighbors,” Steve said, “I stopped in yesterday to check on a bay window I sold to April May Rathburn right down Queer Road.”

“I wish you wouldn't call it that.”

“She's the lady who told me people here really call it ‘Queer.' She's got to be seventy years old and she calls it ‘Queer.'”

“What's wrong with
Q Road?
Just because some kid sprays graffiti on the street signs doesn't mean you go and change the name.”

“Anyway, she said the original house next to the barn down there was destroyed by a tornado a long time ago, and nobody has ever rebuilt. Wouldn't that be the perfect place for a new house, right beside an old barn? There's even a creek that runs behind it.”

“I never noticed a creek there.” Nicole imagined a two-story white house with a wraparound porch rising out of the cornfield, a house as perfect as a wedding cake. She'd seen a plan for such a house in the
Kalamazoo Gazette
two Sundays ago.

“The creek runs under the road, then down to the river.”

“Maybe we could put a little arched bridge across it.”

“Be nice to have an office in an old barn like that,” Steve said. “Maybe if Harland has a bad year he'll be willing to sell us a plot of land there.”

The promise of a new house and an arched bridge made Nicole
think that there was hope for her and her husband. Maybe everything would be fine if they could get themselves out of this preowned prefab and into a real house built just for them.

In truth she hadn't paid much attention to the barn she drove past every day, and so the barn in her imagination was freshly painted, not rotted around the foundation, and did not lean as a result of 135 years of winds from the north and west.

A half mile to the south, meanwhile, inside the barn under discussion, April May Rathburn was crouching, filling a bushel basket with loose straw. When she felt her lower back muscles stretch too far, she tipped forward onto her knees and remained perfectly still. Shortly she heard a vehicle with a loud exhaust rattle up from the field road and stop. Probably as a result of her awkward position, her right foot began to throb.

“I wouldn't have taken you for a thief,” a man's voice said.

April May watched George Harland approach the barn's entrance. “Help me up, will you?” she said.

When George reached out, she used his arm to bring herself up nearly as tall as him—he was just over six feet. He picked up the basket of straw for her. “Are you making Halloween displays already?”

“Christ, I must be getting old,” she said. “I guess it's a good thing I didn't try to put in a garden this year.”

“You want me to carry this over for you?”

“I'm fine once I stand up.” April May accepted the wire handles. “Did Rachel bring out pumpkins yet?”

“She put some out last night,” George said. “Are you sure you're okay?”

“I'm fine, really.”

“How's your husband?”

“Larry's off for the day visiting his brother.”

“Tell him hello when he gets home.”

April May said so long, and limped outside and across Queer Road to her house. She sat and rested on her porch steps to watch the cardinals, chickadees, and nuthatches at the feeder Larry had built for her, a detailed miniature version of the barn from which she'd just gotten the straw. She and Larry had never farmed, but in the half century she'd lived in Larry's old family house, she'd seen local farmers go broke and lose their land, and she'd seen others unable to resist the temptation to sell at a good price while they were flush, and she hoped George could hold out, because she couldn't imagine him as anything other than a farmer. His piece-of-shit brother, Johnny, had been a different story altogether.

April May took off her shoe and sock to check whether maybe a bee had stung her, but she saw only her old tornado scars. Perhaps it was the sharp pain in her foot or the dullness of the sky that made the bird feeder and the barn seem so bright this morning. In fact, every object in her field of vision seemed bright and a little blurry around its edges. She massaged her foot and wondered if something was going to happen today. Something good or bad, she didn't care—she'd welcome any excitement.

There have been those days in Greenland Township, as anywhere, that have changed the course of local history, days that have so clearly determined the future that afterward it was hard to believe the future had ever been uncertain, that arrows had ever pointed in other directions. None of the Queer Road neighbors, nor George Harland himself—owner of more than a square mile of the earth's surface, bridegroom of a girl one-third his age—could know whether today would be one of those days. A length of board was missing at the back of the barn, and through that space, George watched three of the cattle in the barnyard stamp their feet and bellow impatiently. The fourth, a white-faced Hereford steer, drank
calmly from the creek, against the backdrop of woods separating George's property from the golf course. When it finished drinking, the steer turned and looked up at George in a way that suggested it knew something he didn't.

George fed the cattle by pushing a broken bale of hay through the trapdoor into the lower level of the barn, then walked back outside. Though this was the oldest barn in the township, it still had some of its original ten-inch white-pine planks intact, and the repairs his grandfather had made were holding up almost as well as his own more recent ones. Having the barn built on a low hill kept the upper level dry, less subject to rot, but at the same time made it more vulnerable to lightning strikes and tornadoes. Originally the barn had been roofed with cedar shingles, but when those deteriorated, his grandfather had installed a galvanized tin roof. A few years ago, George and Mike Retakker, David's father, had covered that leaking tin with black asphalt roll roofing and a lot of tar. George would have liked to paint the building red again, but he couldn't make it a priority. Ten years ago, when his first wife left him, George had rebuilt the barn's sliding door, and though he hadn't oiled the hardware since, the door rolled smoothly enough that a child could pull it open and shut. The paint on the door was brighter than on the rest of the barn.

George studied the horizon for a while, then the haze above, but the sky was as cryptic as the mind of that Hereford steer. If the sun burned off the cloud cover, the day would brighten and dry the oat straw nicely in the field, but if the air pressure and clouds got any heavier, rain might well destroy George's two hundred bales' worth of mown straw. He looked north, over the poison-ivy-clad stone foundation of the house built by the son of the man who'd originally bought these acres. Along with the barn's silo and several sheds, the house had been destroyed in the 1934 tornado. The only person other than George's ancestors to live in it before then was a schoolteacher, a young widow named O'Kearsy who stayed not
quite two years. George had seen only a faded picture of her, but he believed his grandfather Harold, who told him the woman was as beautiful as the day was long. Though the tornado had struck before George was born, he still occasionally came across chunks of metal, white china, or bits of varnished wood trim that must have scattered that day. George would never father children of his own, according to his doctor, and so he didn't know whether, in a hundred years, anybody would know the history of this place.

Back at the farmhouse, Rachel Crane fed the pigs a corn and soy mix along with some kitchen scraps, then dumped three pounds of oats into the wooden trough for the spotted pony, the llama George's ex-wife had left behind, and the donkey, who was gray with black markings. As she lugged a bushel of Jonathan apples from the barn, she told herself this was a hell of a day to wake up into, with deer chewing through chicken wire to eat your apples and a neighborhood brat smashing a pumpkin into your window.

“Punk son of a bitch,” she said, surprising herself by speaking aloud again—she didn't usually talk to herself. She didn't talk much to George either, and she didn't want that to change anytime soon. Once she started to talk, he and everybody else would expect her to keep on talking and answering their stupid questions. Heaviness crept into Rachel's limbs at just the thought of all that talking: a river of words, just like a regular river, could drag a girl down. When the desire to talk didn't go away, she took a deep breath. “Goddamn stupid caterpillars!” she howled, loudly enough that Elaine Shore looked over from across the street. Maybe later, Rachel thought, she'd go into her garden and tell the Brussels sprouts to stand up straight, or else demand the flowers stop blooming and settle down for the winter. Tonight she'd haul the pumpkin wagon inside the barn, the apples too.

As on other mornings, Rachel gathered what flowers she could from around the foundation of the house and from nearby ditches: mums, black-eyed Susans, and stray garden phlox, along with the
last of the wild asters. Now that even the late-blooming flowers were in short supply, Rachel added branches with berries and bright leaves. Rachel used to yank flowers from her garden like weeds, but last summer April May Rathburn had suggested she sell bouquets for two bucks each. April May was all right. She smiled a lot and didn't seem to have an agenda beyond offering gardening advice, and never once in three years had she hinted about what she might have seen in the barn the night Rachel's mother disappeared.

After Rachel bundled the flowers randomly with rubber bands, she still felt agitated about the broken window and about David. Damn him for being so ignorant and narrow-minded, the way he crushed woolly bears without even noticing, the way he wouldn't wear a jacket to stay warm or eat so he would grow.

She opened the combination lock on the metal honor box, which was bolted to the table, and found it empty, not surprisingly, since she'd emptied it twenty minutes ago. She slammed it shut and locked it. She folded up the sign that said
PUMPKIN GOURDS
$l, and put it in her pocket. She took out a blank card and wrote on it with black marker,
PUMPKIN GOURDS $1.25
.

THE WOOLLY BEAR WAS ONE OF THE FEW FURRY NATIVE
creatures that Rachel's mother, Margo Crane, had never shot or skinned in her decades on the Kalamazoo River. Margo had managed to scrape out a primitive living for herself and her daughter by trapping and hunting on farmland long after the men of Greenland Township had given up such pursuits. Margo taught her daughter to shoot with accuracy, to identify animal tracks in the mud along the river, and to differentiate among the dens carved out by woodchucks, skunks, and possums. As a child Rachel built her own hollows and mounds alongside cultivated fields; she spent hours tramping barefoot through the woods near their houseboat, the
Glutton
, and in the sandy places near O Road, where crusty sea-green lichens sent up spores that looked like frozen drops of blood.

When Rachel played, it was mostly alone and mostly in the dirt, and when she was nine, instead of making friends, she began to grow plants in a small garden plot she cleared between the woods
and the water. First she grew green beans and corn from seeds her teacher handed out in class, and later she put in tomatoes and any other plants the neighbor to the south, Milton Taylor, would give her from his cold-frame greenhouse. She didn't think to plant in rows, so the garden grew in random clumps, and back then it didn't occur to Rachel to worry about who owned the dirt beneath her plants. From a young age, Rachel's love of land dwarfed the importance of school, her clothes, her face and the looks it got. She loved her garden and all the land rising out of the Kalamazoo River, expanses broken by maple and walnut trees or dotted with barns and houses, land stretching and rolling as far as the eye could see, then curving around the planet and eventually coming up again behind her on the other side of the river. She appreciated all that grew above the surface—her tomatoes and peppers, Harland's corn shooting upward and browning for harvest—but she loved just as well the blue clay and silt from which the plants sprang, the sandy creek mud beneath the watercress, the soil itself. What she did not like was asphalt and concrete, and too many buildings clustered together. Fences too tall or difficult to climb seemed cruel. She wanted to be surrounded by farmland, swamps, meadows, and forests, and she wanted to tramp across every patch of solid earth north and east of the Kalamazoo River, on whose bank the
Glutton
was moored.