Q Road (27 page)

A few days after Henrietta Harland and the other members of the school board told Mary O'Kearsy she was no longer in the town's employ, Harold Harland was working on the barn beside the house she would be vacating. Even though he was glad to be back in his wife's good graces, Harold was feeling uneasy about having reported to Henrietta what he had seen Mrs. O'Kearsy doing with that fellow Enkstra. The woman would be leaving the following morning, though, and Harold told himself that his feelings about her would be easier to bear when he could not see her every day. Surely he would stop thinking of her after she was gone, and then finally he could be at peace with his desires and with God, not to mention with his wife. Harold was grateful that his wife did not ask how he happened to be watching when O'Kearsy met Enkstra in the barn, or how he saw her waiting for the man at the back door. He could never explain that he had felt a surge of confused
anger each time he saw Mrs. O'Kearsy with Enkstra and that he had wanted to punish her.

As Harold Harland worked on his oldest remaining barn that morning, he was hoping to get a final glimpse of Mrs. O'Kearsy, so he was not disappointed when she came out and stood on the porch. She continued to watch Harold for a long time, as though he were a great curiosity, such as a puppet show or a parade of interesting automobiles driving along Q Road. She watched him unashamedly, did not peek through a window, the way he had watched her, but stood right out in the open with her hands clasped behind her back. When Harold let himself look up from his work, Mrs. O'Kearsy waved, and so Harold put down his hammer and approached the house, growing more nervous with every step. At her invitation, he sat in one of two chairs on the porch and she took the other. When she sat her skirt rose above her knees.

“I am sorry you have to leave, Mrs. O'Kearsy. I am sorry things did not work out.” Harold stared at the porch floorboards.

“Yes, sir, Mr. Harland, everything here was fine.” She was squinting because of the sun, but he could see her eyes were red-rimmed and bloodshot as though she had been crying, and it gave her a naked look. She was not wearing a hat or handkerchief, but then, Harold reminded himself, covering one's head was not a hard-and-fast rule anymore. Up close he could see that her hair, which was pulled back and up onto her head, did not lie still, but struggled against its pins and wriggled to loosen itself. Her curls glistened the color of river silt. “I have enjoyed living here very much,” she said. “Michigan has been an adventure for me.”

“Glad to hear that, ma'am.” Harold did not know what she meant by
adventure.

“They say you are the one who reported seeing me and Mr. Enkstra together.”

“Yes, I am.” Harold found the discord between O'Kearsy's tear-filled eyes and her cheerful voice unnerving, and it made him speak
more honestly than he had intended. “Why Enkstra, ma'am?” His own words surprised him. “Of all the men in Greenland, why that big dumb fellow?”

Mary O'Kearsy laughed. “That is what everybody is wondering, I suppose. What could he and I have to talk about?” When she looked at Harold again, tears were streaming from her eyes, and she made no attempt to conceal them or wipe them away. “Well, I'll just say that any two people can find plenty to talk about if they are able to think for themselves. I like Mr. Enkstra very much.”

Harold cleared his throat and made a last attempt to reclaim his indignation. “So you don't deny you were in a sinful way with Mr. Enkstra?”

“Despite all you self-righteous people, I do not want to leave,” O'Kearsy said. “It is breaking my heart to leave this place, and I cannot fathom why.”

“You could go to Kalamazoo,” Harold said. “Maybe you could get a job teaching there, close by.” Harold was starting to wonder if not seeing her was going to make his longing for her even greater.

“I do not want to be close by. I am going back home to Boston. Or Salem maybe, to visit my aunt. You know, of course, that Salem is where the witches lived.” She smiled.

“I would not want to live in Kalamazoo, either,” Harold said. He did not know what she meant about witches. He knew most folks had not considered Mrs. O'Kearsy pretty, because she had a kind of face where the two sides did not quite line up, but Harold had always liked the look of her. Maybe it was just the look of her and nothing more that had made him watch her through the cracks in the barn siding and made him hate that big man Enkstra for entering the house (Harold's house!) without knocking, and maybe the look of her was why his heart ached at the thought of her loving a man other than him. Knowing she was leaving the following morning, Harold could not look enough at her—if it would not have been impolite, he would have stared until he had drunk her in completely.

“Maybe before I go on packing,” she said, “I should spend a few minutes with my accuser.” Every sentence from her mouth sparkled like a clear stream, faster and brighter than the creek from which the cattle drank behind the barn.

“There were the children to think of.” Even as Harold said it, he did not believe it. In truth, he thought the children lucky to have such a teacher, if only for a couple of years. All his own teachers had been unpleasant to look at.

“The children,” repeated Mary O'Kearsy, unconvinced.

“Of course, the children all like you,” Harold said. “Little April May says you go to Europe every summer.”

“Would you like to come in and see a few things I have picked up abroad?”

As a curl of her hair sprang loose, Harold squeezed his chair arms. But it would be silly, he thought, not to accept her offer to go into a house he and his wife owned. As he followed her through the kitchen he snuck a glimpse at her slender, belted figure walking and felt guilty about doing so, but he told himself this would be his last glimpse ever, and so he looked again. She led him to the dining room, where three leather trunks stood full nearly to their brims, lids open. She lifted out some framed postcards: the leaning tower of Pisa and the Parthenon. She showed him a walnut-sized chunk of stone, which she said she had taken from Hadrian's Wall. She handed him a small brass model of the Eiffel Tower, which he turned over in his hands and studied. When Harold asked the identity of the man in the small photograph opposite her in the hinged double frame on the windowsill, she said it was her late husband.

“Do you have a picture of, uh, him?”

“Mr. Enkstra, you mean. Where would I get such a thing?”

She placed the gold-framed photos in her trunk beside the European souvenirs. When she turned to go back into the kitchen, Harold picked up the frames, slid the small photo of her out from
behind the glass and put it in his overalls pocket, then folded closed the frame and replaced it in the trunk.

Of the other objects in the house that morning, Harold would most clearly remember something from the kitchen: the white-glazed ceramic marmalade jars imported from England, lined up on the counter with spices, dried flowers, and odds and ends.

“I have a weakness for marmalade,” she said. “It costs too much and I should not buy it.”

Harold could tell by the rims that the ceramic jars had been sealed with paraffin and paper for the transatlantic voyage. He wondered how she could have gone about making the decision to buy such a fancy item so many times. He counted fourteen jars.

“You've been a lot of places,” Harold said, when they returned to the porch. He sat again, afraid that otherwise she would expect him to leave. The sun had moved behind the barn, so Mary O'Kearsy no longer had to squint. She was a girlish woman, and yet leaning against the wall, she seemed mannish to him, as well, as though he might actually have something to fear from her if, say, they wrestled.

“Since I first came here,” she said, “I sensed something peculiar about this place, about this piece of land beneath us, something queer. Secretly, you know, I have always called Q Road ‘Queer Road.'”

“Queer Road?” Harold said.

“I had been thinking that maybe I would not go away this June. I thought maybe I would stay and help the families of my students with their summer work.”

“Surely you would rather be in Italy or France.”

Mary O'Kearsy laughed as she sat in the chair beside him, but when Harold next looked at her face she was crying. At first Harold had wished she would make up her mind to laugh or cry, one or the other, but now he found the confusion making sense.

“Why did you report me to the school board?” she asked.

“How could you love Enkstra that way?” Harold said. “So easily?”

“Easily?” She laughed. “Tell me, how can you love this farm so easily?”

“I don't know how you mean that.”

“Having this farm probably feels like the most natural thing to you.”

“It was my wife's family's farm.” By now Harold was feeling altogether sick in his chest and stomach, and he did not know who he was anymore, or rather he did not know who he had been when he told his wife what he had seen. Harold had made a terrible mistake, and there was nothing he could do to right it. This was worse than burning down the little hay barn; that had merely been innocent stupidity, but this was calculated meanness. Maybe when he burned down the barn, it was the last time he had been himself. Mary O'Kearsy was weeping in earnest now, and Harold felt bad about having sent Enkstra across P Road to plow a field, as far away as possible from this house. Harold wondered how he had let himself become such a mean son of a bitch.

Harold knew he should get up and leave but he could not bring himself to do so. Sitting there with Mary O'Kearsy, his thoughts were clearer than they had been in a long time. He considered the ways he loved his wife, Henrietta. Though he had never felt an inclination to speak the word, he loved her first and foremost for her family's land, which she shared with him. He loved her for her seriousness, and for her knowing so much about fruits and vegetables and about the seasons. While Harold and the hired men worked in fields, she planted and tended the garden, and she cooked, pickled, and canned in the kitchen, with sweat pouring down her temples and into her freckled cleavage. Harold ate jelly or jam with his breakfast every day of his married life, and it never came from the store, except the time that somebody at Christmas gave him some special strawberry preserves, which did not taste as
good as his wife's—and he had had the good sense to tell his wife as much.

Sitting there with Mary O'Kearsy, however, he was aware of some of the ways in which he did not love his wife. Henrietta had changed after Harold burned down that barn. She used to be kinder, he was sure, and she had possessed a forgiving nature, and she even used to treat vagabonds with Christian kindness. Henrietta used to admire Harold as a man, had occasionally paused in her labors to watch him work. Since the barn went down, however, she was always looking in other directions, and she had begun sending away vagrants from their door without so much as a Bible verse. Harold had been grateful for his situation, satisfied with the fine hand life had dealt him, but on that sunny afternoon with O'Kearsy, the idea of sitting down to a breakfast with imported marmalade of Seville oranges possessed him. He started thinking of a life beyond this life, where the day would not be only for work, where cleverness and loveliness would be as important as goodness and godliness, and where women were not as hard as his wife, who would later say with certainty in her heart that the tornado had swept away the house because the O'Kearsy woman had been a sinner and a scourge upon their community.

In her hurried late-morning departure the following day, Mrs. O'Kearsy undoubtedly left some things behind, but before anyone had a chance even to go inside and take stock, the tornado ripped the house from its foundation. Harold later tried to clean up the site and bury the rubble of the house and silo, but the comet tail of debris stretched out a quarter mile onto the cultivated earth. Throughout the years making up the rest of his life, Harold noticed those old pieces of painted wood and window glass, and even what could have been bits of the white marmalade jars from England spread out over the same land on which his wife's father had once found flint arrowheads; but instead of collecting the pieces the way his predecessor had collected arrowheads, Harold worked the
dumb shards into the earth. Another Christian might have worried about the desire he felt for Mary O'Kearsy, but despite what the church said, Harold told himself the thought was not the deed, and when he reflected on knowing this, he decided that the only time a man really knew God was when he knew God was different than folks said He was. That was when a man really knew something, when he figured it out for himself, and all the better if it disagreed with what was commonly held, for otherwise belief was merely a matter of adopting the community position.

After Mrs. O'Kearsy left for good, that fellow Enkstra just kept working for Harold as though nothing had changed, and nobody said a word against him. The only suggestion of sadness was a slowing in the man's movements, a slightly more exaggerated bend as he tugged on turnips, a lean as he tamped the dirt around fence posts. Enkstra had never been a clever or quick man, any more than the ground beneath them was clever or quick, but Harold found himself at times watching the man as intently as he had once watched O'Kearsy. Harold started calling Q Road “Queer Road.” Others soon took up the habit as well, but only Enkstra could have known Harold was renaming the road in honor of Mary O'Kearsy. After a few years, unbeknownst to anyone in Greenland, she married a Boston man whose brother was a railroad executive. Greenland residents knew only that the big fellow Enkstra was suddenly offered a good-paying railroad job working between Detroit and Chicago, and so left the Harlands' employ.