Q Road (9 page)

Sally shivered and wrapped herself more tightly in her bathrobe; the air was cooler than she had originally thought. Sally hadn't liked the farmhouse where she grew up, and she'd never wanted to live in this one. Farmhouses were too drafty, too much to care for, and they stank of the past in their creaking, splintery pine floorboards and their shabby wallpaper. In farmhouses like this one, men had bossed their wives and children, had demanded hard work and compliance. In such houses, women had prepared meals to fill rough-hewn tables, and they'd sweated over stoves, boiling jars and lids to preserve food in seasons of bounty, canning hundreds of quarts of tomatoes, the acids of which scrubbed their hands raw. In lean years when crops were destroyed by animals or weather, the farm women processed fish and cabbage, even dandelion greens in a pinch, anything to fill all those empty men. Sally had watched her own mother toil and from a young age promised herself she would not have such a slavish relationship to husbands and sons, nor to land and weather.

California would put an end to her connection with farm life, once and for all. As soon as Sally's oldest son wrote and invited her to visit, as he surely would any day, Sally would pack a few bags and be California bound. She'd say good-bye to Milton at the Barn Grill (he'd give her one for the road, and maybe one of the other fellows playing darts would send a beer her way for old time's sake). Then she'd hitch a ride to Kalamazoo, and hop a bus to Los Angeles, where she'd sit by the ocean every day, let the sun burn away the Michigan dust and mold from her skin.

Along with David, of course.

WHEN GEORGE FIRST CAME FACE-TO-FACE WITH RACHEL
near the river two and a half years ago, he didn't know she'd been living alone on the
Glutton
for more than seven months. From a distance he saw her standing on clods of dirt in a field he happened to be disking. Even as he got close, he didn't recognize her right away as Margo's daughter, because Margo was a fairly tall, slender woman, with reddish-brown hair flowing in a way that gave a man the sense he was seeing her through clear water. When George had last noticed Rachel working in Milton's garden, she had seemed a smallish girl with her hair pushed under a bandanna. The person standing before him in his field was thickly built, sturdy on her bare feet, with heavy, straight hair hanging alongside a round face. George stopped the Case tractor beside her and let it idle. He took off his ear protectors and opened the door, and Rachel yelled up to him, asking if he'd ever come across any “goddamn human bones” down here.

The question startled George, even frightened him for a moment, and he flashed on a vision of his brother, Johnny—missing more than seven months—as a skeleton with all his flesh withered away. But the girl before him seemed familiar, as though he'd spent time with her and was accustomed to her. Maybe he had some unconscious knowledge that she had spied on him as he chopped wood, that she had borrowed tools from his sheds and had been at least as much a part of this place as the donkey, llama, or pony. When the clump upon which Rachel balanced herself crumbled into loose dirt, she climbed onto two smaller clumps. It was too cold to be barefoot, George thought. He switched the tractor key off, and when the machine went silent, the barn swallows who'd been following him to dive at bugs flew off toward their nests in the old barn. The girl stood as solidly as something growing from the soil, as though, in the minute she'd been standing in her new spot, she'd already sent down roots.

She said something about
goddamn bones
again.

“What's that?” George was glad for an excuse to get down out of the tractor and look more closely at her. Had he really not seen this girl in years? Seeing that face was like waking up from a long sleep, like the day starting over. He expected something else surprising to happen, say, for Johnny to come walking along the river, grinning about his clever departure last fall or maybe over some new debauchery.

Rachel took a breath before speaking, giving the impression that speaking took a great deal of energy. “Do old bones work their way up through the damn soil or what?” Her new clumps of dirt collapsed, and she stepped onto another clod, as though she intended to break up soil all day.

George couldn't tell from her face whether she was serious or, for that matter, why the bones and soil were
damned.
He said, “I don't know.”

“My mother told me there's a damn Indian grave somewhere
around here.” Her voice gave the impression of being rusty from disuse, requiring the force of curses to get the sentences out at all.

“Go ahead and look,” George said, though she hadn't asked his permission. “How's your ma? I haven't seen her in a while.”

“She's fine.” Rachel crossed her arms.

George didn't know what to do with his hands, so he lifted one foot and rested his boot on the tractor wheel tread, put both hands around that knee, and thought of something he hadn't considered in ages. “I don't know about graves,” George said, “but there's Indian gardens beside my house.”

The girl stared at his knee, and he felt self-conscious about the way his right hand looked mangled, for its scars and butchered index finger.

“What the hell's Indian gardens?” she asked.

He unclasped his hands from his knee. Her gaze was making him feel uneasy, so he focused beyond her, around her, at land he owned. Until now George figured his worst crimes had been inaction and maybe excessive pride about this farm. Even in dealing with Johnny, George had not been cruel. Despite George's refusal to deed Johnny property outright, George had offered him a place to live when he got out of jail, and George would not have denied his brother anything, if only Johnny had hung around and worked a little instead of taking off again. George now felt tugged by a rare urge to stand close to this girl—as close as possible, to touch her even. Politeness and patience, however, kept him where he was, a few yards away. He knew he could easily calculate her age, but he didn't. Perhaps if she'd been a complete stranger, the attraction he felt toward her would have made sense, but he must have seen her from a distance at least once a week for her entire life.

George said, “The Indians had a strange kind of garden. You'll have to come see sometime. I'm George.”

“I know who you are. Owner of all this damn land.”

Another man might have been bothered by her tone, but George was so accustomed to the unpredictable and sometimes violent forces he encountered in nature that he didn't take the anger personally. He was thinking he could stand there all day puzzling over her face, but she looked back at him with a burning gaze that made him start to feel like an intruder on his own farm, made the hair stand up on his neck. George said so long and climbed up into the Case tractor. He went back to work in such a way that he didn't stir up dirt around her. He liked the idea of her digging into the ground where he could watch her, but by the time he turned around at the end of the row, she was walking away in the direction of the
Glutton.
The rifle swung so easily over her shoulder that George imagined the metal of the barrel might be soft like human flesh. As the girl moved farther away, he felt himself unraveling, as though she had caught the end of the ribbon of his gut on her bare foot and was uncoiling him as she walked. She disappeared behind the walnut trees near the creek.

After that day, every time he turned his tractor around at the end of a row, he hoped to see the girl searching for her graves, and at night he tried to remember the contours of her face. He'd been fine living alone for years, but now he began to feel all broken up. Of course he'd missed his ex-wife, Carla, who'd shared his home and life for eighteen years, and he'd long missed his father and mother, who'd moved to Florida more than two decades ago, and Johnny, who made things lively, if problematic, whenever he was around. His best friend, Tom Parks, had moved to Texas years ago, but until George saw that girl, his loneliness had been tempered and calm, constant and bearable. For years George had been like one of those clay-heavy fields lying frozen in winter; this girl showing up in front of him was like a big spring rain whose waters were too heavy to soak in. When Milton opened the Barn Grill that summer, George went often in hopes of seeing Rachel working in the garden out back.

“Poor girl,” Milton said, when he saw George watching her through the new insulated vinyl windows he'd installed.

“Why poor girl?” George was thinking about ordering a third draft beer.

“Oh, having that crazy mother and all.” Milton walked away from George and straightened the dartboard, at the center of which he'd affixed a tiny cartoon Satan. “Margo hasn't ever threatened to shoot you, has she?”

“Actually she did, once,” George said. “Lately, though, I'd have to say, she hasn't been much of a threat to anybody, including the woodchucks that are eating my soybeans. I wanted to tell her there was a nest over on P Road, but I haven't seen her.”

Milton said, “And that poor girl doesn't believe in Jesus Christ, Our Savior. I'm not giving up on her, though. I don't want a girl like her burning in hell.”

George nodded. Way out in the garden, the girl turned toward the Barn Grill and crossed her arms. George stepped back from the window and looked beside him at the plastic-framed icon in which Jesus sat at the Last Supper; as George tilted his head, a 3-D prismatic effect made Jesus ascend toward heaven. Milton seemed to have gained all the Christianity George had lost over his lifetime—maybe there was only a certain amount of religion to be spread around in a community. George thought Milton's newest acquisition, a wooden crucifix above the cash register, gave a surprisingly muscular interpretation of Jesus.

After serving drafts to a couple of guys in John Deere caps, Milton returned to stand beside George and gestured to the two-foot-high crucifix.

“Nice piece, eh?”

George nodded.

“Got it from a Polish fellow up north, a wood-carver,” Milton said. “Say, George, I know it ain't none of my business, but I always wondered. I hope you don't mind my asking, but why'd you
give that girl's ma a perfectly good acre of your land?” Milton gestured toward Rachel. “You made Johnny mad enough to leave town.”

“Wasn't a full acre, more like three quarters.”

Outside, Rachel squatted and resumed weeding.

“Well, why anyways?”

“I guess when you think about a woman like Margo, it reminds you that you're going to die someday,” George said. Way back when George surprised Margo and encountered the business end of her rifle, Carla was threatening to leave him, and Johnny was in jail and asking for money George didn't have, and his father in Florida was saying that before George went any deeper into debt he should sell the land and split the money among everyone in the family. Having a woman like Margo pointing a rifle into his face somehow put it all in perspective—his head cleared instantly. When Margo realized who he was, she'd apologized and acted civilized.

“You mean you thought she might kill you?” Milton said

“I guess I thought she deserved something for keeping the wildlife from eating my crops.”

Milton said, “Why do you think a woman like her would turn her daughter against Jesus? A woman has a right to forsake her own soul, but why her daughter's soul, too?”

George said, “I couldn't farm that piece of land, anyways. I'd have to build a bridge to get my equipment over the creek. That's why I'd always left it as woods.” There was another reason he'd given Margo the land, one he didn't want to admit to Milton. George had figured the breakup of his farm was imminent and fast approaching, and he'd wanted to get the first cut behind him. Then somehow his sacrifice of less than an acre had paid off—it was as though he'd butchered a calf for one of those old gods. Things had picked up somewhat since then; six years ago, George had even bought the Parkses' land across Queer Road, though maybe he'd paid too much per acre.

Whenever George dragged his irrigation machinery with the tractor that summer after seeing Rachel, or trekked out to problem spots in his fields or drove the half mile between his house and his oldest barn, he watched for the girl. Whenever he searched the horizon, it was in hopes that she would step from behind bushes or rise out of the ground. Even a glimpse of her would suffice, he told himself. George thought this desire didn't belong in his life, but was of some other world where men savored desire as pleasurable in itself, apart from its object. For George, such desire seemed foreign, a remnant of a past civilization or of a decadent future dreamed up by idle men who spent their days not in fields of grain but in tiled bathhouses, oiling their bodies and taking massages. The unseemliness of his thoughts gave him the idea that he owed the girl an apology.

Rather than disappearing or becoming routine, his desire continued to grow, shift and absorb him, sometimes striking with such intensity that it blurred his vision, such as when a deer lifted its head in the distance or when he noticed something bright floating in the river. After months of grappling with this hunger, he felt that there was no patience left in him, no kindness, no sleep or sense, and after a weeklong stretch without any rest whatsoever, he took to roaming at night, as he hadn't done since he was a kid.