Cold Black Earth (7 page)

Rachel smiled at her, though the thought of being a grandmother at thirty-nine depressed her. She was groping for a suitable pleasantry when the bell over the door jingled and a man walked in.

In truth Rachel might not have recognized him but for the hook; but the hook drew the eye just as it had when Rachel was a child, cowering behind her mother’s skirts. “Hello, Mr. Thomas,” she said.

He stopped in his tracks and stared, a sour-looking old man with wildly undisciplined eyebrows, a Harvester cap on his head and a brown corduroy jacket over old-fashioned engineer’s overalls. In place of his right hand he had a two-pronged stainless steel hook. He peered at Rachel as if she had asked him for money.

“I’m Rachel Lindstrom,” she said. “Jim Lindstrom’s daughter.”

It took him a moment but his seamed face finally contorted into what might have been a smile. “Why, sure. Little Rachel, I remember. You’ve been away a long time.”

“I have. How’s Ruth?”

The old man dug in a jacket pocket with his good hand. “She died in May.”

Rachel gasped. “Oh, I’m so sorry.”

“Well, she was seventy-six. I never thought she’d last that long.”

Rachel stared at him, appalled. Recovering, she said, “I was very fond of your wife. She was my Sunday School teacher when I was little. And then later she gave me painting lessons. She was a wonderful teacher.”

The old man shrugged. “I liked her, too. Ten dollars on pump three out there,” he said to Debby, sliding a bill across the counter. “So where you been, little Rachel?” His voice was deep but rough, like the sound of an empty oil drum being dragged across gravel.

Coolly now, Rachel said, “Overseas, mostly. I worked for the government for a long time, in the State Department.”

He gave her a look from head to toe that would have been impertinent coming from a younger man. “Home for the holidays, huh?”

“That’s right.”

“You still painting pictures?”

“Oh, I haven’t in years, I’m afraid. But I’ve always intended to get back to it some day.”

“Well, maybe you can come out to the farm and take some of those pictures off my hands. House’s full of ’em. I’m just gonna throw ’em out otherwise.”

“What, your wife’s paintings? Oh, don’t do that. You don’t want them?”

“There’s a couple I’ll keep. But there’s more’n I know what to do with. And all the paints and brushes, too, if you want ’em. Come out and take a look and take what you want.”

“I may do that. What would be a good time?”

“I’m most always home. You know where I live.” He pushed out the door and hobbled toward a rusted old light-blue Ford pickup.

Debby said, “So you’re friends with old Captain Hook, huh?”

Slightly dazed, Rachel said, “Not exactly. He and my father grew up together. I knew his wife mainly, from church. She was so sweet.”

“I guess she had to be, to make up for him.”

“Losing a hand might make me a little cranky, too. My father said it ruined Ed.” Rachel shuddered. “God. Farmers and corn pickers.”

Debby blew smoke, shaking her head. “Used to happen a lot. And they all knew better. But it was too much trouble to stop and shut the thing down, with all those acres of corn to get in. And ninety-nine times out of a hundred they got away with it, reaching in there to unjam it.”

Rachel watched through the window as the pickup rolled out onto the highway with an excruciating grinding of gears. “Poor man.”

“Well, that’s no excuse.” She shot Rachel a furtive look. “My mother always told me to steer clear of him, and I always told my daughters the same thing.”

Rachel frowned. “I must have missed something. You know something I don’t?”

“Well, maybe it was only rumors. I hate to bad-mouth a friend of your family. But people always said he was a little free with that good hand around women.”

Rachel shook her head. “I never got that kind of vibe from him. But like I said, he and his wife were friends of ours, so maybe I just didn’t see it.”

“Or he was careful around you. Because of your dad.” Debby shrugged. “All’s I know is, there was always that rumor. You didn’t want to let him get you alone in the back of the store or whatever. But what do I know?”

Rachel sighed, reaching for her milk. “More than I do, I’m sure. I’m just starting to realize how out of touch I’ve been.”

“Well, that’s what Christmas is for,” said Debby, stabbing out the cigarette. “Coming home and reconnecting. You have a great holiday, now.”

7    

Rachel hadn’t been to a basketball game in a quarter of a century. “The last time I saw a basketball game you were playing in it,” she said to Matt.

“The game’s moved on some since then,” he said. “They don’t use peach baskets anymore.”

They were in the truck and heading for Ontario. “Who are we playing?”

“Kalmar. Probably the best team we face this year. They got this Peterson kid who’s a hell of a player. They say a couple of Division One schools have been recruiting him. Meanwhile all our good players graduated last year. We’ll have our hands full.”

Rachel had about as much interest in basketball as Matt had in French literature, but the thought of spending an evening alone at the house, brooding on bloody hatchets, failed marriages and vicious old men had made her an instant enthusiast. “Do we get to sit with the grown-ups tonight? I remember there was this strict segregation, adults on one side of the gym and kids on the other.”

“Of course.” Matt grinned. “Remember how Dad used to sit there with Henry Olson and yell at the refs?”

“Yeah, it was embarrassing.”

“Well, when Billy was playing, he came out of the locker room after one game and wouldn’t talk to me. Because I embarrassed him, yelling at the refs. I did it, what they warn you about. I went and turned into my father.”

Rachel smiled, aware that a large part of what had driven her to Paris and Beirut and beyond was a determination not to turn into her mother. Suddenly she missed her mother with a pang so intense it made her catch her breath.

They were on the outskirts of town now. The lit-up windows of the gym, the biggest building in town, were visible across the railroad tracks. In a farm community social life was built around school events, and Rachel could see a file of cars pulling into the parking lot. She said, “I’m shy all of a sudden. It’s like my debut in public or something. I’m going to be embarrassed walking in there.”

“It’ll be fun. People will be glad to see you.”

“Especially the divorced farmers, huh?”

Matt laughed. “Don’t worry, there’s not that many.”

Just enough to make me self-conscious, Rachel thought a few minutes later, walking into the gym, feeling a couple of hundred pairs of eyes locking onto her. The place hadn’t changed much—maybe a few more conference championship banners hanging from the rafters—but the players going through their warm-up drills and the cheerleaders prancing at courtside and the students clambering on the bleachers were mere children. Rachel was amazed.

She quelled her desire to turn tail and run, instead following Matt along the foot of the bleachers. She heard her name called and she recognized Ann Gerard, twenty-five years older and twenty-five pounds heavier but still wearing her hair in a basic bob with bangs, unchanged. Rachel waved and moved on. Matt was already heading up an aisle toward a group of men sitting together, Dan Olson among them. Here we go, she thought.

“You don’t have to sit with us,” Matt said when she caught up. “All we’re gonna do is bitch about the officiating and second-guess the coach. You might want to go sit with the gals.”

“Which gals would those be?” said Rachel, wishing bitterly she’d thought to ask Susan to meet her there. “I don’t know any gals, I’m afraid.”

“To hell with that,” said Dan, grinning. “Sit here with us. This row’s just a whole lot of ugly without you. Remember Phil?” He elbowed the man sitting next to him. Rachel remembered Phil, and beyond him Chuck and Joe and Darrel; they were all recognizable under the extra weight and the grayed hair and the lined faces, the jocks of twenty-five years ago transformed into the pillars of the community, farmers and business owners and county officials. Matt stepped aside to let her into the row, to sit next to Dan. There were greetings and some banter, and just as Phil took on a serious look and leaned toward her Dan said, “We’ll try not to bore you too bad. If you get tired of us you can go sit with Janey Phillips over there. Remember her?” He pointed.

Grateful for the deflection, Rachel said, “Oh, my God. With the bleached hair? What happened to her? She was like, the mousiest little thing in high school.”

“I guess she decided mousy wasn’t working. She’s done better as a blonde. Right, Phil?” Phil grunted. Dan said, “Phil narrowly escaped being her second husband.”

“She’s on her third now,” said Phil.

Rachel smiled. “And is that Tommy Swanson I see walking in there?”

“It is. He and Linnea have five kids.”

“Linnea Hanson? You’re kidding me.”

“Nope. She weighs about three hundred pounds now.”

“God. She was so pretty, too. And is that . . . Is that Luci Seifert there, by the door?”

“Yup. You notice how all the guys kind of snap to attention when she walks in.” The woman in question was a well-lacquered brunette with expensive hair and very tight jeans, tottering a little on spike-heeled boots.

Rachel rolled her eyes. “She is . . . nicely preserved.”

“If you say so. We don’t notice things like that at our age, do we, fellas?”

This brought a rumble of half-hearted merriment from the row. “Nice heels,” said Rachel.

“And they’re still as round as ever,” said Dan, and the laughter was full-throated this time.

“Goodness, aren’t we catty tonight,” said Rachel. “Who’s the lucky beau?” The man trailing after Luci was thin and blond, with a face that showed some mileage and possibly traces of a few thousand drinks. He wore a long double-breasted coat with a fleece collar, and jeans disappearing into a pair of alligator cowboy boots that must have cost five hundred dollars.

Dan grunted and she glanced at him, sensing a drop in the temperature. “We don’t talk about him.”

“We just take potshots at him,” said Phil, making a pistol with his hand and squeezing off an imaginary shot.

“Why, because he’s sleeping with Luci and you’re not?”

“Whoaaa,” said Dan, leaning away from her. “Who’s catty now?”

Sheepish, Rachel grinned. “Sorry. I’m just wondering why this guy’s so unpopular.”

“
’Cause he’s a fucking crook,” said Phil.

“Watch your language,” said Dan. To Rachel he said, “Because he’s a miserable low-down piece of shit.”

“OK,” said Rachel. “I give up. What’d he do?”

Dan and Phil traded a look and Phil shrugged. Dan said, “That there’s Mark McDonald. He’s not real popular with the farmers around here because he swindled a lot of them out of their money a few years back.”

“How’d he do that?”

“He used to run the elevator up at Kalmar. Come to find out, about ninety-nine or so, instead of running it like it should be run, he and his boss were playing the commodities market up in Chicago. With our money. When the Department of Agriculture shut ’em down they had something like a million bushels in positions on the market. That’s way over the limit for an outfit like that. And they were losing the bets, and trying to cover up by getting in deeper. So of course they got shut down and went bust, and a lot of people around here lost a lot of fuckin’ money.”

“Me for one,” said Phil. “Could have been a lot worse, without the insurance, but it was bad enough to ruin my damn year.”

Rachel watched McDonald run a jaded eye over the crowd, apparently unconcerned about potshots real or imaginary, before settling onto the bleachers next to Luci. “Why isn’t he in jail?”

“He was. He got out a year or so ago. What happened was, he pleaded guilty to destroying records and cut a deal to testify against his boss. So he only did two or three years, though what I heard was that the whole thing was his idea. I think the boss is still inside.”

“Jeez, you’d think he’d be afraid to show his face around here.”

“Yeah, wouldn’t you? But he moved back here and got a job and he’s been pretending to be an upstanding citizen. But I don’t think anyone’s gonna buy the bastard a drink anytime soon.” Dan pointed with his chin. “Remember Bobby there?”

“Bobby Jacobs? Sure. I wouldn’t have recognized him. He doesn’t look like the years have been too kind.”

“Well, he’s had some knocks. His son got killed in a car wreck, along with his girlfriend, a couple of years ago, over near Rome.”

“God, that’s awful.”

“You know how it is. Up in Chicago the teenagers shoot each other. Out here they roll their cars going a hundred miles an hour.”

The game started, to Rachel’s relief; the local gossip was too depressing. She found herself leaning toward Dan rather than Matt. “When did they start wearing bloomers?”

“That’s the style now, big baggy shorts.”

“My God, they’re wearing girdles underneath.”

“Those are called compression shorts.”

“If you say so. I liked it better when they wore the little tight shorts.”

“The hot pants look? That’s good on women, not so good on men.”

A fleeting image went through Rachel’s mind of Danny Olson in tight basketball shorts, but she suppressed it. The score seesawed a bit, but then Kalmar started to pull away. She laughed at the men, so extravagant in their reactions. It occurred to her that in a culture that prized male stoicism, sports allowed men a rare excuse to suffer and exult. When her attention wandered from the game, she looked at people, recognizing a few more, amazed by the number she didn’t. On the other side of the gym the students were an undifferentiated mass, other people’s children.

This is what you do on a Friday night if you live here, she thought.

Halftime came. Matt and Dan and Rachel followed the crowd out into the hall, where people milled around the concession stands and spilled down the main hallway of the school. Rachel excused herself and made for the restroom, but before she got there she felt a hand on her arm and turned to find her cousin Steve smiling at her.

“Hey, Rachel. Heard you were home.” Steve Ashford was the son of Rachel’s father’s sister; he had the Lindstrom family gene for height but was otherwise all Ashford: hair at the dark end of the color range, graying nicely at the temples, and a face that had benefited from maturity, crow’s-feet suggesting a man who had mostly enjoyed the ride. His corduroy sport jacket was just a shade dressier than average for the crowd. They embraced, and Steve said, “Last I heard you were in Iraq getting shot at.”

“Not really. The ride to and from the airport’s always interesting, but I don’t think they were aiming at me.”

“Well, it sounds exciting. I haven’t been shot at since deer season. You just home for the holidays, or you come to teach Matt and Billy how to wash behind their ears?”

“They seem to be taking regular baths. I’m home till I decide what to do next, I guess.”

Steve frowned. “Did I hear you were married to an Arab guy?”

“You did. What you didn’t hear about was the divorce.” Rachel flashed a quick smile “How’s your mom?”

“She’s OK. We had to put her in a home, finally. The last time she fell she cracked a hip, and that was about it for being able to move around and keep house and stuff. She’s still sharp as ever, though. You should go and see her. She always liked you.”

“I’ll do that.” As a child Rachel had secretly admired her Aunt Helga’s acid wit and slightly subversive worldview, so different from her own mother’s steadfast uprightness. She noted the name of the nursing home and then asked the usual perfunctory questions about Steve’s kids and finally made it to the restroom.

When she came out she found Matt and Dan drinking concession-stand coffee with a stumpy, thick-trunked man in a Harley-Davidson cap, some years past sixty. He had a gray beard that crawled around the contour of his jaw and a moustache that dived down around both sides of his mouth to join it, and he had a belly that was giving the buttons of his shirt all they could handle. His face had weathered a lot of years and his eyes were shrewd. Danny was listening to him with a somber look but gave Rachel a wink. He put a hand on her arm and said, “Carl, you remember Rachel Lindstrom, Matt’s little sister?”

The man frowned at her and held out his hand. “Can’t say I do, really, but pleased to meet you. Carl Holmes.”

They shook hands. “Carl married my Aunt Peg,” said Dan. “After she was widowed a few years back. We had no idea we were welcoming a Green Bay Packers fan into the family, but it’s worked out OK ’cause we’re tolerant, broad-minded Scandinavians.”

Holmes said, “You gotta be pretty broad-minded to root for a team as shitty as the Chicago Bears.”

“Rooting for losers builds character, Carl. But then I don’t expect a Packer fan to know much about character.”

“Yeah, our morals get corrupted by all those trips to the Super Bowl.”

It was an old ritual; Rachel had been hearing it since childhood. Having discharged it, the men scanned the crowd, the smiles lingering on their faces. “Well, look at that,” said Holmes. “Junior’s got a new girlfriend.”

They turned to look and saw a fortyish man with a completely shaven head and a tidy moustache passing by in the crowd, hand in hand with a not-unattractive blonde of a certain age. The man looked pleased with himself.

Rachel said, “My God, is that Barry Henderson? What happened to his hair?”

“Yeah, that’s Junior,” said Matt. “Believe me, the chrome dome is an improvement over the comb-over.”