Q Road (6 page)

“Do you want me to kick the sorry bitch out?” Rachel had said.

“No.” George's heart jumped at realizing Rachel might just go over there and tell Sally to leave. “Not yet.” He wanted her gone, but if something bad happened to David as a result of sending them away, George might end up bound to Sally by regret, and he wasn't ready to take that chance. Anyway, George had listened to his grandfather's stories long enough that he couldn't feel right about passing judgment on Sally. Morality, Old Harold said, was a more complicated business than it might seem on the surface, and sending people away was about the worst thing you could do.

Inside the barn, David scrambled to the top of the wagonload of straw by grabbing hold of the ends of bales. He stood unsteadily atop the wagon, and when he was sure George was watching, he jumped over the five-foot gulf between the loaded wagon and rest of the stacked bales, where he landed on his knees and hands. David crawled to the edge and looked down, terrified and grinning, his chest heaving. David, you scare me, George thought. George climbed the hay wagon slowly and expertly, but he remembered how it was to be a boy, to feel the need to take chances.

“Are you ready?” George said.

“Ready.”

George threw the first bale from the wagon past David, right into place so David had only to push it an inch or so with his knees. Immediately upon asking David to help him yesterday,
George had remembered David's breathing trouble, but the boy had seemed so happy to be asked that George couldn't take the invitation back. George would do as much of the work as possible himself.

“Ready again?” George threw the next bale.

David pushed it into place and stepped aside to await another, and another.

“Okay, that was four,” George said. “Will you help me out by counting the bales as you stack?”

David nodded.

“That would be a big help. Here's five.”

“Five,” David said.

“The beans will be ready to harvest on Friday,” George said. “That means I've got a lot of work to do before then.”

“I can help.”

“I think I've got that knotter fixed, but the power take-off clutch on the Case needs some work before I can bale the rest of the straw.”

“I can drive the tractor anytime you want me to.”

“This afternoon I'll fill the oat bin, put the rest of the oats into the silo outside the stock barn.” George was thinking aloud. There was too much to do, but that was always how it was, and George figured that a person could only work all day long, and he couldn't work any more than that. Starting next Friday, and continuing through the next two months, every day from six in the morning until midnight, George would be in the field taking in soybeans and then corn. He'd drive the combine, but he needed somebody to haul the wagons south to the elevator in Climax Township as fast as he filled them. Nobody'd answered the ad he'd posted at the grocery, and he didn't know how he'd pay a person anyway—maybe with a couple of his cows. Rachel hadn't offered to help, and even if she wanted to help, she didn't have a driver's license.

As he took bale number nine from George, David said, “Would you ever want to go to Southern California?”

“Oh, I don't know,” George said. “It's hard to take time off to travel.”

“I mean to live.” David's mother had said that David absolutely couldn't tell George or Rachel she was intending to move them to California, where David's half brother, Jim, and his wife lived. David barely knew Jim, who was eighteen years older and had a different dad.

“Must be a nice place.” George threw bale number ten. “An awful lot of people leave here for there.”

“Are there farms in California?”

“Oh, I think they grow a lot of grapes. Lots of fruits and vegetables. Avocados.”

“I mean regular farms like yours.” David adjusted the tenth bale.

“There's not enough fresh water. Maybe in parts of Northern California.”

“Well, I don't ever want to live out there,” David said. He didn't know if there were woolly bears or eighty-foot-tall walnut trees or anything else nice in California. He didn't know how much another place on the planet could differ from this place, and he wished he wasn't going to have to find out. David knew his mother would make them leave without warning. One day, maybe even today, she'd say the word, and they would pack a few bags and head west.

George wasn't considering anything as exotic as travel plans. As he picked up the eleventh bale by the strings and tossed it into place, he worried mostly about getting the grain to Climax. For more than a decade, George had felt he was working under the shadow of a monster perched on the western horizon, a monster that was not a creature but a point in time, a day somewhere in the future, when he would have to sell off pieces of his land to pay
taxes or else lose it in one fell swoop, and he knew that all his hard work served only to push that day a little further off. As Milton Taylor always said, the farmers would soon be gone from this river valley the way the Indians were already gone. When George's ancestors arrived in this spot, there had apparently lived what the settlers called the Horseshoe Clan of the Potawatomi, a group who erected their wigwams around a central fire in a three-quarters circle precisely on the site of this barn. Old Harold said the barn's construction had buried any evidence of a three-quarters circle, or a fire pit, or a civilization, but George figured that plenty of relics were buried around here, if only a person had the time and inclination to dig.

Old Harold had become a kind of neighborhood authority on the Potawatomi, and he used to speak with regret about sending those Indians away, as though he himself had witnessed the 1840 exodus. Though the event occurred a half century before the old man was even born, he seemed to feel he had something to do with forcing those folks out of this paradise into a hostile land across the Mississippi. Harold said that so many Indians died along the way that the westbound trail itself became a graveyard nine hundred miles long. As Harold got older and maybe even a little senile, he told two stories over and over again: the Potawatomi being sent away by the U.S. government, and the widowed schoolteacher Mary O'Kearsy being sent away—fired and evicted—for loving one of Harold's hired men, name of Enkstra. The story of the tornado that destroyed the house and rerouted the creek became part of the schoolteacher story. Harold said he was responsible for the eviction of Mary O'Kearsy, and the tornado's veering up north onto his property had been a kind of punishment for his self-righteousness, he said, a kick in the rear.

George figured that in the old days, when farming made sense, a farm could survive the kind of devastation wrought by tornadoes and floods and complicated heartaches, but now farming was a
precarious business, and even a small disaster could take George's whole enterprise, his whole life, down with it.

“Ready?” George said, grasping the strings on bale number twelve.

David said, “Ready.”

ACROSS THE STREET FROM RACHEL'S FARM STAND, STEVE
Hoekstra sat at his kitchen table, paging through a windows industry magazine and listening to his wife, Nicole, shower. Nine o'clock was about the earliest a man dared knock on a stranger's door, and Steve liked to start his day, even a Saturday, by reminding himself of prices, mechanical information, and heat loss statistics, and about new products in which he might be able to interest folks. He sometimes offered gutter systems, hot water heaters, even lawn furniture, but those items generally turned out to be ways of making conversation. No matter what came on the market at what price, he mostly sold vinyl siding, vinyl replacement windows, storm doors, and the occasional hollow-core insulated metal door. He loved being able to make houses look better and be more energy efficient, and he was glad to be doing so in his own neighborhood. People loved their houses at least as much as they loved their spouses, which seemed natural to Steve—after all, you didn't get to remodel the person you married.

As George and David stacked the first dozen bales to the south, Steve listened to warm water rain upon his wife and thought of her trim, pretty body enveloped in steam. He could just walk into that bathroom and touch her, but he liked the thought of her alone, touching herself, washing herself unmolested. This house was really more hers than his, and it didn't surprise Steve, for women usually occupied houses more substantially than men; that was why women were more inclined to want vinyl replacement windows and storm doors. When he heard the shower water shut off, Steve collected his materials and slipped out. Before getting into his car he looked around for Rachel, but she'd disappeared. As George threw the fifteenth bale to David in the barn to the south, Steve backed out of his driveway. He paused in the road to search for Rachel once more, and when he didn't see her, he headed north.

Steve's company had a high turnover rate for salesmen, because most people didn't like the business of traveling door-to-door. Steve himself liked nothing better than stepping out of a cool October morning into a woman's house, inside of which warmth emanated from furniture and kitchen cabinets. He loved his own perfectly proportioned wife—who must be toweling herself off about now—but he didn't think he could live without also going into other women's houses. Not that he had sex with those women, for that happened rarely, only once in the year and a half since he'd been married. His lone infidelity had occurred a month ago, and he'd felt bad about it. Really he liked just being near different women, smelling their perfume and lotion mixed with the scent of potpourri or plug-in deodorizers and Crock-Pot cooking, even the adhesive smell of new construction or a crafts project. Most of the longtime women residents of Greenland Township worked odd hours, on their farms or gardens, or at the greenhouses in season, or part-time as school lunch ladies, so you didn't know when you'd catch them at home, but Saturday morning was a good bet. The population of Greenland was growing, especially in the new housing
developments, but those new people didn't need windows or siding.

If a woman were home alone and invited Steve in, he'd always sit in the chair which he figured to be the husband's chair. By sitting there he assumed the authority of the man of the house, and the woman took him more seriously, listened intently while he talked about insulation and resale value. As he spoke, he imagined the women giving the same pitch to their husbands later in the evening, retelling Steve's tales of fuel savings, even exaggerating the importance of safety lock windows with easy removal for cleaning. Single women were no different; though there was no tangible man, there was an ideal man they dreamed of, who would come home someday and sit in the chair Steve chose. (Or in some cases there might be an ideal
woman
, and Steve was not afraid to stand in for
her
, either.) A single woman sometimes made her decision then and there, after he'd walked through the house, followed her into halls, bedrooms, a warm cluttered bathroom, which might still be humid from a morning shower, with shampoos and conditioners askew on the shower shelves, still coated with water droplets. If he gave a woman an estimate and she made the decision on the spot, he'd have a crew chief on the phone in ten minutes, and by the end of the day that crew chief would have stopped out, met the woman, and confirmed the price, date, and time of installation.

Steve didn't abandon a woman after she'd signed the papers or even after the crew had installed the windows. He'd stop by a few weeks later, ring the doorbell, and get himself invited in. He'd tell a woman her windows looked great. “Everything go all right?” he'd ask, and the woman would assure him that the men who installed the windows were nice fellows who didn't leave a mess. He'd ask that right off: “They didn't leave a mess, did they?” In fact, plenty of women would follow the men around and clean up after them before they even had a chance to clean up after themselves.

For the most part, Steve preferred dealing with women over
forty or fifty, women who wore little or no makeup, women whose houses were not too clean. Such women usually had an easier way about them, weren't anxious or excessive the way young women could be, the way his Nicole sometimes was. Steve's first sale in the neighborhood had been that big window for April May Rathburn. He hadn't given her a hard sell, but had seen her out feeding the birds and merely stopped by to say he was a new neighbor, and when she asked what line he was in, he couldn't deny he sold windows. April May brought out a few chocolate chip cookies, saying she'd expected her grandchildren but they'd gotten sick, and Steve said that, sick or not, those kids were fools for missing such delicious cookies. April May had insisted he take another and invited him inside.

When Steve had been inspecting the plate glass picture window she wanted to replace, he noticed that April May was a strong woman. Though she must have been seventy, her long arms were muscular and veined. Together they decided that a bay window would work well exactly where she wanted it. Steve made her the best deal he could—he worked for a straight 40 percent above installation and materials cost, and the pleasure he got from giving his neighbor a good deal outweighed the pleasure he would have gotten from a bit more money. Steve felt there was something cocoonlike about April May, as though she were going to burst open and emerge as a much younger woman, or else she might wither suddenly from a cancer that nobody knew was growing inside her.