Cold Black Earth (2 page)

Time went by and Matt said, “So what are you going to do now?”

Rachel just blinked at him. “I don’t know. Rest, for a start. Just rest. Get to know my family again, look up some old friends. Then look for a job. Where, I don’t know. I’ve got money saved, so it won’t be urgent for a while.”

Matt drained the beer and stood up and went and put the bottle under the sink. “Well, you can stay here as long as you want. Maybe you can teach us to cook.” He headed for the back door.

When Rachel finished her tea and went to find him, he was standing outside in the chill ten feet from the door, listening. Through the crisp, still air they could hear a dog barking, angrily and insistently, somewhere to the east.

“Wonder what’s got him riled up,” Matt said. He turned toward the door. “Billy’s got a key. Make sure you lock up when you come inside.”

2    

In the morning there were no ghosts, only a quiet house beginning to seem familiar again. Matt had left a note on the kitchen table:
Gone to town. Back for lunch.
There was coffee in the pot and bread in the fridge, and Rachel was able to cobble together as much of a breakfast as she ever had. For a moment she was at a loss without a newspaper to read. She looked in vain for the radio on the counter, the one on which her father had listened to the noon market reports on WGN for as long as she could remember. She decided she’d had enough of world news for a while.

When she had eaten she put on her coat and went outside. It was a clear cold day, with just a breath of wind stirring. She stood with her hands in the pockets of her coat, taking in the immensity of the sky and the long views: the scattered distant farms, their closest neighbors a half mile away, the line of trees along the sunken creek bed a quarter mile to the north, the endless empty fields. The sighing sound of traffic on Interstate 74 three miles away, shooting north to the Quad Cities, came clearly across the hard black earth. High above her a jet had left a contrail on its way west.

Rachel made a quick tour of the old farmstead: The barn was mostly empty now that there were no cattle or hogs, the chicken house long since converted to a storage shed. The old corn crib had been replaced by a pair of cylindrical steel grain bins with a grain leg and a dump pit. She still missed the old crib; instead of watching the place evolve, she saw abrupt changes on her infrequent visits, and it was always traumatic. She peeked into the equipment shed to take stock of a million dollars’ worth of toys: tractors, combine, planter, semi and trailer for hauling grain. A farm was a considerable business, as Rachel had explained many times to urban sophisticates impressed with her having risen so far above her background.

She walked the perimeter of the acre of grass and trees surrounding the house. This had been all the world she had needed when she was small, exploring this vast realm, obeying strict instructions not to go near the road. Some trees had grown and some had gone; the patch of ground she had been given for a vegetable garden when she was ten was just a change in the texture of the grass now. Standing by the road at the head of the drive, Rachel looked at the handsome frame house Swan Lindstrom had built and his descendants had expanded, now the seat of an established western Illinois corn and beans operation, a family farm hanging on in the age of agribusiness. Rachel was home, and her heart was desolate. She had come halfway around the world again, this time to find comfort in the familiar, and there was no comfort here.

She walked back up the drive and made for the far corner of the lot. Shielded from the house by the barn, Rachel stepped to the fence and managed to get herself up and over without serious damage to her jeans. Pleased she could still handle a barbed wire fence, she set out across a field full of corn stubble toward the trees lining the creek.

The creek had carved a meandering hollow across the land. It was the northern limit of Lindstrom land and prized outlaw country for farm kids. Matt and his friends had tried to dam the stream and built a fort of fallen limbs on its bank. In the tangle of brush beneath the trees were a few places clear and level enough for an adolescent girl to sit and read a book or just poke a stick in the water and brood.

It was rough going over the field and Rachel almost turned back, but her native stubbornness kicked in. By the time she reached the trees she was sweating. In summer the creek bed was a thicket, but now it lay exposed, fallen branches and dead leaves clogging a meager trickle of water, bare trees clinging precariously to the slopes.

She made her way along the edge of the gully, looking for the old paths down and not finding them. Finally she managed to descend, slipping on the hard earth, grabbing onto branches. At the bottom she stood on the bank with her hands in her coat pockets, kicking at shards of ice that had formed along the edges in the night. What am I doing here? she thought. Nothing, she decided, and that was good enough for now. She began walking east along the creek, stepping carefully.

After a hundred feet or so she stopped, looking in vain for something familiar. Wherever her brooding place had been, it was gone now. Trees grew and fell and rotted in twenty years; the land changed. Once as a girl she had decided to see how far she could walk upstream. She had walked for what seemed miles, then climbed up out of the gully and been dismayed to see the back of the Larsons’ house, their closest neighbors.

I will walk until I get to the bridge where 400 East crosses the creek, Rachel told herself, and then I’ll climb up and walk home by the roads. It would be a circuit of about three miles and a good morning’s workout. She had on her running shoes, and even if she got her feet wet in the creek it wasn’t going to kill her.

She made a couple of hundred yards without too much trouble. She remembered this part, where the gully widened a little and the trees grew bigger. On a level patch of ground traces of a fire showed that thirty years after she had grilled hot dogs on sticks with Matt and the Larson girls, the spot was still in use.

The creek bed bent and narrowed and the walking got harder. Rachel was having second thoughts again—a foolish middle-aged woman stumbling along a brush-clogged streambed, searching delusionally for her lost youth. She had to cross and recross the stream, slipping on rocks.

She stopped at the sound of something scrabbling in the brush, just around the bend ahead. She remembered the coyotes and felt positively foolhardy, with an edge of alarm now. The scrabbling stopped.

You can at least peek around the bend, she thought. She searched until she found a sturdy stick. Rachel Lindstrom wasn’t going to let a puny coyote or two spoil her morning’s walk.

When she rounded the bend, it took a moment for what she was seeing to resolve itself into something she could identify. The coyotes were still milling around it, though they had retreated to the far side of the stream; there were half a dozen of them, and only a meal this big could have brought them out in daylight.

Rachel had seen her share of dead animals and even, to her great regret, a few dead people. There was no particular reason why the sight of a dead animal in the bed of a stream should trigger this slow suffusion of dread.

Except that this animal had been flayed, brutal reds and violets veining the pale, headless trunk, the stumps where the limbs had been hacked off. Something had stripped the hide from the raw flesh and left the carcass to the scavengers at the bottom of the gully.

She stood stupefied, trying to make sense of the sight. What animal was this? The answer lay ten feet away on a pile of dead leaves, where the deer’s head, propped back on its antlers, presided obscenely, the eye gazing vacantly upward, truncated veins and the severed backbone visible in the cross section of the neck.

Rachel’s grip on the stick tightened. Could coyotes do this? Tear the head off a deer?

A hunter might do it if he intended to take the meat—but who would kill a deer and skin it, only to leave the meat for the coyotes? She scanned the rim of the gully on either side, looking for something that would explain this pointless butchery. She saw nothing but a tangle of brush and trees, cover for coyotes and perhaps larger things. Suddenly she was aware that she was well out of sight and hearing of any friendly being and a long, stumbling run from any kind of help.

The coyotes were creeping back. Rachel retreated, hastening to put the bend in the gully between her and the slaughtering place. She stumbled, losing her stick, then rose and thrashed through brush. At the first opportunity she charged up the slope, pulling herself up through clinging branches, toward the sunlight.

At the top she broke out of the trees and stood panting, looking across fields at the Larson place, tranquil in the winter sunlight. A few hundred yards back was the cluster of buildings that were her home, unfamiliar from this angle but marked by the towering oak.

Rachel cast a look over her shoulder, shuddered and began walking along the grassy border of the field. Hunters, she thought, who’d skinned the deer on the spot and went to fetch a truck or a tractor to haul the carcass home.

Leaving the meat unprotected from coyotes? It made no sense. Or perhaps they intended the meat for the coyotes? To keep them fed and distracted from domestic animals? That didn’t seem very likely. If you didn’t want coyotes to eat your animals, you shot a few pour encourager les autres and kept the .223 handy.

Rachel made tracks, resisting the thought that came trailing after that one: Some people hunted just because they liked to kill things.

When Rachel came into the kitchen, it took her a moment to recognize the man sitting at the table as her nephew Billy. He was a different person from the eleven-year-old she’d last seen: Testosterone had lengthened and roughened his features and furred his upper lip and chin. He had his mother’s dark good looks, but hadn’t taken especial care of them. Long stringy hair hooked over an ear with a ring through it, and a wary look came up at her from under dark brows as he slouched at his place in an oversized white T-shirt.

This one fancies himself a bad boy, Rachel thought. “Hello, Billy,” she said.

“Hey, Aunt Rachel.” He smiled, but he didn’t knock over any chairs leaping up to embrace her. His body language said he might respond positively if she cared to cross the kitchen, but that was about it. Rachel contented herself with pulling out a chair opposite him. The smile had helped; if this was a bad boy there would be no shortage of girls anxious to reform him.

“Out late last night?”

Around a mouthful of Cheerios he said, “Mmm. Takin’ the back roads home from Peoria. Dodgin’ state troopers.”

She decided it was best not to ask for details. “Visiting your sister?”

That was funny, apparently; Billy nearly choked on the Cheerios and shook his head. “Nah, Emma doesn’t approve of me anymore. Just listening to a band. In a bar down there.”

As far as Rachel knew, they hadn’t lowered the drinking age to nineteen in Illinois, but she had a feeling that wouldn’t deter Billy. She failed to find a follow-up and felt the conversation screeching to a halt.

Billy looked up and said, “You haven’t changed.”

“That’s nice of you.”

He shrugged. “Just callin’ it like I see it. You quit the State Department, huh?”

Rachel nodded. “It hasn’t been much fun the past few years.”

“Saw a lot of shit over there in Iraq, huh?”

“A lot of shit,” she said, surprising herself. “Mostly I just got worn out.”

Billy shoved the bowl away. “Weren’t you married?”

“I was. The divorce just went through last week. I said good-bye to my ex-husband in Beirut, flew to Washington via Paris, had a very
unpleasant couple of days there talking to my former bosses, then flew to Chicago yesterday.”

The bad boy was giving her a surprisingly thoughtful look. “Well, after all those places I got a feeling you’re gonna find it a little quiet around here.”

Rachel had to smile. “That’s what I’m hoping,” she said.