twenty-five
D
ad came to the barn eventually, his voice traveling through the rafters. “You up there, Kirsten?”
I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. “Yep,” I called back. Through gaps in the floorboards I watched Dad split open bags of feed and fill the troughs, then fork new hay into the stalls. The cows didn’t shy away from his touch as they had from mine; they pressed up against the bars of their pens eagerly, as if they were coming toward an altar to worship their god.
“You going to come down?” he called after a while.
“Sure,” I said, wondering what he would do if I didn’t reply; would he charge up the creaky staircase to the hayloft two steps at a time, hurrying to check on me? Was he, like every other parent in Watankee, now charged with keeping an extra close eye on his girls?
We trudged back to the house under a dark blue sky deepening to black. The driveway was crisscrossed with muddy tire treads in snow that had melted and refrozen. Kennel met us at the edge of the lawn, his tail thumping against our legs. We paused on the back porch, while I stepped out of my tennis shoes. “I’m sorry about all of this, Kirsten,” Dad said, his hand on my shoulder for balance while he wriggled out of his boots. I wanted to say something back—that I understood, or that I was sorry, too—but the words got clogged in my throat. Maybe Dad wanted to say something to me, too, because he kept his hand on my shoulder, kneading my wool sweater with the tips of his fingers.
What could he say? Make some empty promise about things being okay, and life going back to normal? I looked him straight in the eye, waiting to hear it.
“You’re my good girl,” he croaked finally, his voice thick.
The table was already set, and Emilie was dropping rectangular chunks of ice into each water glass when we came in. Mom ladled potato soup with chopped bits of ham into our bowls, and we sat silently. When I looked at Johnny, my chest ached as if someone had taken my heart out and put it back in upside down and backward. He was my brother, and I’d always love him, but I’d as good as pronounced him guilty. He kept his head down, eyes focused on his plate. The rest of us went through the motions, passing the salt and pepper shakers, buttering thin slices of French bread. We were trying too hard to be normal, to be the family we had always been.
I swished my spoon through the soup, loading and unloading it without bothering to bring the spoon to my mouth. “What happens next?” I asked, determined to break the silence.
Mom glanced at Dad quickly, then away. “What do you mean?”
“I mean with Johnny. With the case.”
“Well, I guess we don’t exactly know.”
“Damn it!” Johnny snapped, looking up. He bumped the edge of his bowl with his elbow, scattering a few milky white drops of soup across the tablecloth. “What are you trying to do, protect my feelings or something? Go ahead and tell her.”
Mom flushed, glaring at Johnny. “We’re waiting on the D.A. at this point. If he decides to press charges, then Johnny will be taken into custody. He’ll have a bail hearing, and he’ll need a lawyer. There will be a trial, and then, well, we’d have to go from there.”
Johnny made a funny sound in his throat, half laugh, half groan. “Might as well say
when,
not
if.
”
I let it sink in. Johnny would be arrested. He would spend the night—many nights, maybe—in jail, go before a judge. He would have a chance to say what he knew in court before God and everybody.
Mom, ignoring him, said, “It seems unlikely that will happen, though. Very unlikely.”
“Why are we pretending?” Johnny demanded. “The police have been here. They’ve taken my truck, searched my room, questioned me...”
Mom picked up her untouched bowl and headed for the sink. She turned the water on full force, spraying the front of her shirt.
“Isn’t it obvious that I’m the number-one suspect?” Johnny continued, raising his voice over the noise at the sink. “I mean, I’ll tell you one thing, it would be a relief to be arrested. It really would. A relief!”
Mom whirled around, the water still going. “Are you kidding me? Are you determined to throw your life away?”
Dad held up a hand suddenly, shushing her.
“No, I’m going to say this!”
“Quiet,” Dad ordered suddenly, his expression alert. “I thought I heard something outside.”
Stacy,
I thought suddenly.
She’s back.
“I don’t hear anything,” Mom said, but she turned off the faucet and wiped her hands on her pants.
Dad straightened to attention, his hand still raised for quiet. Slowly, he shifted his eyes to the back window. The shades were still open, but now it was fully dark, the world dissolving into inky blackness after a few feet. Someone outside, however, could have seen us sitting at the table, turned in our chairs and staring out into the night. Right then Kennel started barking.
“Something’s definitely out there,” Dad said, standing. Johnny stood, too.
Outside, someone yelled—not close, but not far away, either. It wasn’t a friendly yell, or the cry of someone who was hurt. I instinctively knew that this was a yell that signaled trouble.
“Wait here,” Dad ordered. “Johnny, come with me.” They stood, walking deliberately to the door. Dad snapped the light switch, and the back porch came into view.
A voice called again, angry and indistinct. It came closer, splitting into two voices, then several, then more. A man yelled, clearly now, “Show your face, Hammarstrom!”
I must have let out some kind of cry, because Mom pulled me so tight against her chest that for a moment I couldn’t breathe. Leaning over, she grabbed for the phone receiver, which had been off the hook all afternoon. She clicked it into the cradle and lifted it again, listening for a dial tone. Dad whirled around from the door.
“No police,” he said. “We’re going to settle this on our own.”
Mom pleaded, “John!”
“Don’t do it!” he seethed, and swung the back door open. Mom dropped the receiver onto the table with a clatter. The night had turned bitterly cold; the chill filtered in through the screen door. A hinge creaked as Dad stepped halfway out, one foot in the kitchen and the other on our back porch. Johnny stood behind him, and their bodies blocked the doorway.
“Come out here and fight like a man!” someone called, and there were whoops of agreement, like war cries.
Whimpering, I slid from Mom’s grasp and landed beneath the kitchen table. Emilie joined me, and we grabbed at each other silently, clutching wrists and shirtsleeves. Emilie muttered, “Holy shit,” under her breath a half dozen times, like it was a prayer. I clapped a hand over my own mouth, terrified that I would let out a scream.
“Who’s out there?” Mom demanded. “Who is it?”
With Dad and Johnny blocking the door, we couldn’t make out anyone from the crowd. The men were approaching the porch steps, their voices clear now. One voice, louder than the rest, hollered, “Hammarstrom, you coward!” and I recognized it as belonging to Bill Lemke. The other voices were both familiar and unfamiliar at once. They sounded like men I might know, except their voices were wild and angry, not at all like the men who had said a polite hello to me every time we met.
“Come out and face us, Hammarstrom,” Bill Lemke taunted, his voice commanding. I remembered how he had taken charge at Stacy’s birthday party, leading the guests in a wild, off-key chorus.
“You’ve got some real explaining to do,” another man echoed. “We’re not letting you get away with this.”
It wasn’t clear to me if they were talking to Dad or Johnny.
Mom gasped. “That’s Sandy Maertz,” she whispered, her fingernails digging half moons into my arm with the ferocity of her grasp. I was shocked, too—Sandy went to our church. He had been here that night—one of the First Responders who sat around our kitchen table, warming himself with a mug of coffee. He’d been on our softball team, I remembered—center field.
“Now listen—” Dad began loudly, but his words were immediately drowned out.
“Let’s settle this once and for all!” Bill Lemke yelled.
Someone else called, “Just admit what he did! Tell us where the girl is!”
“Don’t her parents deserve to know, Johnny?” That last voice was plaintive, more pleading than angry. I recognized it as belonging to Chris Hansen, the father of Johnny’s longtime friend and wrestling buddy, Erik.
Emilie recognized it, too. “Oh, my God,” she said, looking at me.
“We’ve got to call the police,” Mom mumbled, although she made no move toward the phone. “We’ve got to call...”
His body still half behind the screen door, Dad was trying to calm the men with a voice that quavered when he spoke. “We don’t need to start more trouble than we’ve got already. This isn’t going to help us find Stacy.” He seemed determined to ignore the rest of them and addressed Bill alone. “I don’t want to have to get the police out here. Think about your wife and girls. Think what this would do—”
“Don’t you talk about my girls!” Mr. Lemke howled, his voice unsteady.
“He’s smashed,” Emilie said in my ear. She was so close to me that I could feel her heart beating through her sweater—or else it was my own. I realized she was right—they were all drunk, unreasonable and dangerous.
There was laughter, and someone called, “Go ahead and call the police. See whose side they’re on!”
Sandy Maertz shouted, “You’ve got some nerve, Hammarstrom, talking about his girls—”
Johnny, who had been frozen in place, now pushed against Dad’s back. “That’s enough. Let me out there.”
“Johnny, you stay put!” Mom shrieked. Dad held him back with one hand against his chest.
“Your boy’s more of a man than you are,” someone jeered. “Send him out here to fight if you won’t.”
Johnny tried to slip around Dad. He had a tight hold on the door frame, but Mom, coming around the table, gripped him around the waist.
“So you’re a coward, too, Johnny? You going to hide behind your dad?” Sandy Maertz called. “Come out here and face what you’ve done!”
“Yeah! Get him out here!”
“I’m going out there,” Johnny insisted, struggling against Mom and Dad. Mom lost her grip on Johnny’s waist, but Dad had pinned one of his arms. “I’ve got to do something!” Johnny wailed, desperate. “I’ve got to say something!”
“What are you going to say, Johnny? Are you going to tell the truth about what you did to my little girl?” Mr. Lemke’s voice was closer now, and I realized he had stepped onto the porch, almost face-to-face with Dad. In the yellow pool from the overhead light, he wasn’t the genial, proud Bill Lemke from Stacy’s birthday party last September. Now he was reckless, balancing himself against one of the porch beams, his mouth hanging loose and sloppy. “How did you do it? How did you fucking do it?”
“I didn’t—I didn’t—” Johnny’s voice was half scream, half sob. He stopped struggling, his legs going limp in Mom’s grasp. Dad pushed Johnny back into the house, then opened the screen door the rest of the way and stepped completely onto the porch. He was only a foot from Mr. Lemke, and the contrast between them amazed me—one man sober, his jaw set in a firm line, and one man drunk, his face contorted with pain.
“That’s it, John,” Mom pleaded. “We’re calling the police right now.”
“Wait,” Dad ordered. He raised both hands above his head, as if he was surrendering, and to Bill Lemke he said, “Here I am. I’m not hiding behind anything. You got something to say, here I am. You want to take a shot, you take a shot.”
Emilie moaned, and I turned into her shoulder, too scared to look.
There was a low rumble, like a growl from the crowd.
Please, God, please, God,
I prayed.
“You want me to take him, Bill?” someone called. “I’d be happy to do it.”
And then Mr. Lemke seemed to collapse. He tilted to one side, grabbing the porch rail to steady himself. “My girl!” he wailed, his voice quivering. “What happened to my girl?”
Dad’s voice was shaky, too. “I feel sorry for her and for you, Bill, and for what’s happening to your family. God knows I do. But I can’t take responsibility for something that my son didn’t do. And deep down I know you know it. Johnny didn’t do anything to hurt your daughter.”
There was a collective cry of outrage, and the men rushed onto the porch. One of them—it was impossible to tell who from my vantage point—tackled Dad, and he went down hard, his body thumping against the concrete. “Get him, Bill!” someone yelled, and Bill Lemke took a drunken swing that connected with Dad’s cheekbone. Later, Mom said that Dad didn’t struggle, didn’t even bother to cover his head with his hands—he just took it, square on. Johnny, wild-eyed, tried to push open the screen door, but it was blocked by Dad’s body. Bill Lemke raised his arm back above his head and brought it down again, and we heard another crunch as it connected with Dad’s face.
Mom screamed, “Stop! Stop!”
Bill Lemke’s face had broken open with grief. He reminded me—although I couldn’t think this until later, until after the fact—of an animal in pain, like the time one of our steers had gotten its head stuck between two bars, and the more it writhed and tried to break free, the more desperately it was trapped. He had brought his arm up a third time, his fist tight, when the noise of a shotgun split the night.
I didn’t even realize I’d been screaming until Emilie clapped both hands over my mouth.
“Next time you lay a hand on my son, I’m not going to miss,” Grandpa called, his voice coming from around the corner of our house. I’d been wrong; I thought my grandfather could sleep through just about any noise in the world.
“Jesus,” Mom moaned.
“I mean it now,” Grandpa said, coming into view. His voice was as level as the shotgun balanced on his shoulder. “You think this is the way to settle this? A bunch of drunks attacking a man on his own property in the middle of the night?”
“Hey, now,” Sandy Maertz said, backing up with his hands raised. “Calm down, old man.”
“We just wanted some answers,” someone else said.
“It’s about justice!” Mr. Lemke was standing again, and a few men were trying to hustle him off the porch. “It’s about justice for Stacy!” On the lawn again, he looked smaller, defeated. He was so drunk he could barely walk on his own; he leaned between two men as if he were using a pair of crutches.