Q Road (16 page)

From the second floor landing, George had followed Old Harold up the wall ladder into a six-by-six-foot room and sat beside him on the built-in wooden bench. The first thing his grandfather did was remove a small yellowed photograph from under the edge of the window frame. Harold looked at it a long time before handing it to his grandson. The photo of the young widow at first frightened George, because in her faded form she seemed as much ghost as human. George was squinting to study the photo when Old Harold wrenched loose that first piece of plywood. The light hit the photo so suddenly that the woman seemed to burst into flame. Through the empty window frame, its edges rimmed with glass shards, Harold pointed out the river, and the path alongside,
on which, he said, a line of thousands of Potawatomi had walked toward Kalamazoo in 1840. He pointed out the big barn with no house, silo, or shed beside it, and said that right after Mary O'Kearsy was sent away by the school board, the sky had turned green and a twister had spun up across the Taylors' grazing land to Harold's own land, knocking down trees and even rerouting his creek. The tornado tossed dirt into the air with a force that would embed pea-sized stones deep in a fellow's flesh as it did to Enkstra, the man with whom the schoolteacher had the affair. That tornado pushed one way and then another, Harold said, digging trenches across newly planted fields, moving rocks the size of rabbits effortlessly, killing with such a rock a curly-tailed yellow dog with a lame hind leg who'd stood on the ridge barking at the wind as though it were an animal intruder.

As the tornado roared toward the barn, vertical siding boards he had nailed down just the previous day sprang loose. Harold himself lay nearby, facedown in the narrow ditch beside Queer Road with his hands covering his head and his face in poison ivy. Hail peppered his body, growing from the size of corn kernels or blood-engorged ticks to reach the size of husked walnuts. When he looked up from the ditch, he saw a railroad tie pierce the silo, saw the wind blast the tower to bits, flinging glazed blocks out into the field as though they were as light as straw. The tornado seemed about to pass through the barn siding the way the tines of a pitchfork passed through sand, seemed poised to transform the barn to swirling rubble, but then it turned away from the barn and moved toward the unoccupied house and instantly and thoroughly demolished it. The front door ripped itself free and the oval of glass never broke while the door was in the air. The door rose for several long seconds, then spun, parallel to the ground, its window pointing at the sky, like a mirror showing the sky to itself, the oval reflection as calm as a green pond, before spinning toward the earth and, upon impact, splintering.

Harold had sat for a long while in the barn doorway, he told
young George, anticipating the onset of poison ivy and contemplating the destruction God had wrought for his betrayal of Mrs. O'Kearsy. God had tolerated all of Harold's other mistakes, but apparently He had taken offense at that one. On that day in 1934, Harold Harland had sat alone until dark, finally concluding that the people in his church were wrong, that God was not the picket-fence spirit they worshiped. Harold's God was the wrathful God of the Old Testament, an awesome God and a vengeful God. Harold knew then, he said, sitting in that barn, that life is both too short to have enough joy and too brutally long for a man who regrets what he has done. Ever since then, Old Harold said, he had tried to refigure the world from scratch. Up in the window room, Harold told George that the tornado changed everything. George didn't understand all of what the old man was talking about, but he knew he'd believe it once he figured it out.

“It's too late for your thickheaded papa, but it's not too late for you,” Harold told George. “You may as well know the truth about this place. Only don't tell your grandmother. She's not interested in the truth. She just wants everything to stay the same.”

“I won't tell,” George whispered.

Harold took the photograph from George's hands and studied it some more.

“Mary O'Kearsy didn't hurt anybody,” Harold said. “She stood on her porch and watched for that big dumb fellow Enkstra to come walking along the path. I had no right telling other folks about who she loved.”

“You told on her?”

“And don't think that was the only mistake I made. I've made plenty. And the one thing I've learned for certain in this life is that there's no sense in judging people.”

“Did the lady become a teacher someplace else?”

“She wanted to stay here,” Harold said, “and we should have let her stay.”

“Were her students sad about her leaving?”

“Everybody was sad after she left town. And those people knew afterwards that they shouldn't judge a woman so harshly.”

In truth, apart from Enkstra, Harold was the only grown-up person who seemed to care about Mary O'Kearsy after she left, but Harold wanted his grandson to think that people could change, that they could learn to be kind. Harold had sighed and looked away from the faded little photo, toward the barn to the south. He said, “That woman was as beautiful as the day is long.”

On the morning of October 9, two stories below the window room, George started a pot of coffee, unwrapped pale green butcher paper from a pound of bacon and dropped thick slices into the biggest cast-iron frying pan he'd inherited, along with this house and the rest of the farm, from his grandparents. George was realizing already that he should have insisted David come eat breakfast. That regret would grow larger throughout the day, but for now he satisfied himself by deciding that tomorrow, after they baled straw, he would insist David come to supper with him and Rachel. He couldn't pay the kid much money for helping him, but maybe later today he could give David and Sally some steaks and hamburger he had in the freezer. As the streaks of fat became translucent and then golden, George removed each slice of bacon with tongs and placed it on a paper bag flattened on a Blue Willow plate. With his right hand, George cracked and emptied the shells of two, three, four eggs, letting each slide over his thumb and into the bacon grease. He almost couldn't stand the pleasure the smells of bacon and coffee gave him these days, enough to sustain him eight or ten hours, even in the heat or cold. Breakfast was Rachel's favorite meal too, George was pretty sure.

Sometime in the future, Rachel would undoubtedly tell him whatever she'd told David about the Potawatomi Corn Girl. Probably
some day Rachel would talk about her mother, about what it had been like to grow up on a boat with an eccentric woman, and someday Rachel might tell him why she'd called him Johnny in the barn and solve a dozen other mysteries, but George didn't want to rush into conversation. He and Rachel had lived together a year and a half, and they'd been married six weeks, but George still felt shy around her. He figured there was plenty of work to keep him occupied for the next few months, and anyway the dead of winter would be a better time for talking.

George went out the back door and through the porch, which he had screened in at the request of his first wife, and he followed the trail out to Rachel's garden. George used to keep this side yard mowed, but last year Rachel had suggested they stop wasting time and gas, and George hadn't been able to argue with her logic. He'd let the brambles, weeds, and wildflowers grow last year, and then this July the smell of the blackcap raspberries had been like a liquor. It had given him a weird satisfaction, though, the several times he'd seen Rachel out there yanking burdock, ragweed, and garlic mustard.

“Rachel, come eat!” As he waited, he considered that on any sort of day, even today, she might just disappear from his life. Having so much meant a fellow had all that to lose.

Rachel stood up from her garden and looked in his direction. She wore two braids this morning, making her face seemed even rounder than usual.

When he and Rachel got inside the kitchen, she looked down at the table and the two chipped Blue Willow plates and said, “Where the hell's David?”

A HALF MILE WEST AS THE CROW FLIES, DAVID'S MOTHER
, Sally, was still sitting behind her house in a lawn chair, her feet up on the picnic table. She had remained nearly motionless long enough that birds flying over probably assumed she was something inanimate or dead. Above her, five turkey vultures circled effortlessly, barely shifting their wings to execute turns. They spiraled downward and landed, one at a time, a hundred yards away, where a newly dead possum lay in alfalfa stubble. The birds milled about, their pink heads bald of plumage, their clumsy turkey-sized bodies shifting across the rows scraped clean by the mower, rake, and baler. Sally assumed the birds were just out and about, traveling aimlessly, picking up carrion where they could and digging into it with their hooked beaks. She might have respected the vultures more had she known they were readying to fly south. With the help of winds a thousand feet up, they would be migrating to Central America, fully intending to keep warm this winter. Sally took the
last swig of her bourbon-laced coffee. She considered lighting another cigarette from the one in her hand, but instead snubbed it out on the picnic table. A few seconds later, though, when she saw a vulture yank a length of grayish gut from the possum, she fumbled in her robe pocket for the pink lighter. There were four more cigarettes in the pack.

A walnut fell out of a tree onto the barn roof with a clunk that sounded familiar to Sally. Though she had dutifully collected the nuts every autumn of her youth, she would no sooner have shelled one of those walnuts today than she would have peeled her own toe. Without anything else to drink and with only a few smokes left, Sally felt the weight of the gloomy sky. Harsher weather was on its way, as it usually was in Michigan, so unlike California, which would have blue skies, season after season. She mentally rummaged the farmhouse, imagining she might have more liquor. She knew she didn't, and yet she envisioned herself opening closets and unlatching secret wall compartments, pulling out drawers to find false bottoms beneath which farm wives could have long ago hidden flat bottles of alcohol-rich cure-all. Really, those drawers and cupboards contained only mismatched silverware, dishes in all variety of cheap designs, a cereal box with a bit of oat dust in it. In the refrigerator was an old brown heart of a cabbage that Rachel had given David months ago, and some ketchup and mustard. There was no milk and no booze. Fortunately, she wasn't broke—she had twenty-six dollars from the child support, and Mike had just sent her an insurance card for David, so she could get him a puffer, though she'd have to pick up the five-dollar copayment. She'd get another box of cereal and a bottle of milk for David. And bread and peanut butter if she had enough left.

Sally saw the turkey vultures take clumsy flight from the hay field, but from her position behind the house she didn't notice the window salesman's quiet Thunderbird pull into her driveway, and then she didn't see the salesman press the doorbell at the front of the house.

Steve could see the house was badly in need of thermal windows and insulated doors, that it needed minor miracles of hammers, nails, caulk, and paint. He couldn't help it that when he saw a rundown old house like this, he right away imagined the house restored to its full potential, with new windows, doors, and smooth-looking siding. The vision of restoration wasn't a ghostly thing—it was a full-blown, full-color picture overlaying the real house, and he sometimes had difficulty calling back the actual state of things. He pressed the buzzer and waited, but heard no response, no footsteps, no voice shouting
I'll get it.
Perhaps the occupants were sleeping late. When he pressed the buzzer again, he also pressed his ear against the door and realized the buzzer was broken. He knocked and peeked inside at Sally's stairway, on which there was a pair of worn-out boy's sneakers and a few crumpled towels. Steve stepped back on the porch and looked up. Sometimes a woman would be getting out of the shower, and she'd hear his knock and pull aside a curtain and look out a steamy window. He imagined a face showing through mist, but that vision quickly faded. The lower sash of a window to his left was cracked and held together with a length of duct tape. A car was parked on the overgrown lawn at the side of the house, but the front passenger-side wheel was missing and the axle rested on blocks.

Steve retreated from the creaking wooden porch and glanced out over the field of stubble beside the house, imagined it greening and springing forth with a fresh crop, in a scene overlaying the brownish expanse. Such fields just thrust their fertility up at a man, begging him,
Plow me, sow me, reap me.
Steve had gone to school with a few farm kids and had always thought he'd make a good farmer, but his father had been a foreman at a paper mill, and his grandfather had worked for the railroad, as some of his uncles still did. The last farmer in his family, as far as he knew, was his great-grandfather Enkstra, who'd worked on another man's farm until he got his railroad job, but he had died long before Steve was born.
Steve headed toward his car, but then he sensed another presence. He detoured to look behind the house, and halfway between himself and the busted silo, he saw a woman with a coffee cup and a cigarette, her naked, slender legs propped up on the picnic table so that her robe barely concealed her torso. As he approached, he anticipated the smell of her. Steve thought cigarette smoke fit certain women the way fresh-baked cookies fit other women, the way nail polish and potpourri or vanilla-scented candles fit still others. His wife wore perfume that smelled of flowers and babies. Cigarettes and coffee and the sweetness of alcohol were merely the opposite end of the spectrum of womanly smells.