The Strangers of Kindness (3 page)

“Yes, Your Honor. I own 40 acres, a perfect square, and 1867 feet is the diagonal length of it. I can be in the barn and have him working in the far corner field with no problem . . .”

“That would be enough for him to roam around on neighboring property.”

“I thought that was what the ‘Admonishments’ button was for,” she said. “He wouldn’t do it twice, and now that you’ve already given him a taste of it I don’t expect him to do it once.”

“Very well. Mr. Slitter, are the papers in order?”

Jennifer signed her portion of the papers and the judge stamped them, said “Good day to you,” nodding to Slitter and Jennifer and swept away to his chambers.

Slitter and his attorney sauntered out. Fred sent Theo one last contemptuous sneer. Jennifer watched him, then turned to her new property.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said, and she led him out of the courtroom and out of the building. Once on the sidewalk she let him catch up and walk alongside. Passers-by stared, until they saw the bandage on his neck and the paper booties, then they hurried past. In the shadows of the buildings the breeze was cold. Barely clothed, Theo’s skin was all gooseflesh.

“We have to get you some clothes,” she told him.

She left the truck running with the heater on while she went into the Wheeler’s store to buy his clothes. Theo just sat, numb. She came out with an oversized bag, stuffed and lumpy.
 

She gave it to him. You can get dressed in here,” she said, pulling out of the parking lot. “We’re up high enough, nobody can see.” She guided the truck through heavy traffic, making for the Interstate west.
 

Theo pulled underwear and socks out of the sack. He kicked off the jail booties and put on the socks, then peeled off the scrubs. Jennifer shot a glance over, saw he was naked, yanked her gaze back to the road. He looked so defeated, resigned, that pity crushed any nervous embarrassment she might have felt.

He got the blue jeans and flannel shirt and sneakers on and sat back as though he needed a rest.

“What’s the matter? You look worse now than when I first saw you.”

He didn’t answer. She looked again and it struck her that he’d lost some weight in the past couple of days, too. “Have they fed you?”

He shook his head.

“For Christ’s sake! What kind of bastards are they—”

“Taxpayers don’t like coddling criminals,” he said, matter-of-factly.

She swung into a MacDonald’s just outside of Omaha and ordered at the drive-through. She parked off in a corner and handed him two sandwiches, large fries and malt. The familiar smells filled the cab of the truck. He unwrapped a hamburger.

She bit hungrily into hers but stopped chewing mid-bite when she realized he was crying, silently, tears running down his face.

“Hey, what’s the matter? Oh, sorry, I guess that’s the year’s dumbest question. Look, don’t worry, okay? You’re gonna be all right with me. I need you for my farm, I’m not going to abuse you. You’ll like it, my farm. I’ve got a room all fixed up for you. It’s real nice out there. Please—try not to feel so bad, okay?”

He’d turned to face the window when she’d started talking. Now he faced her. “You got something you want me to call you? Like Miss Skoada, or Mistress or something?” Without a trace of humor, and that made her acutely uncomfortable.

“No! No—nothing like that. Just call me Jennifer, of course. Geez, ‘Mistress,’ why would I want that?”

He looked at her carefully and realized that she was very young, and plenty naive. “Excuse me for asking, but are you sure you know what you’ve gotten into, buying me?”

“Why?” Suddenly apprehensive. “What are you going to try?”

“Nothing. It’s just that—you do realize, I have to ask you stuff like what to call you? What job to do next, and how to do it, and how soon? When to go to bed, when to get up? What to eat, when to eat, how much to eat? How I should act with your friends and customers? I’m not just an employee, you know. You’ve got my life in that gizmo on your wrist. Do you know what that little yellow button does? Did they show you films of what it does? No? Too bad. And the red one with the little cap over it—that one will blow off my head. I don’t want to piss you off, Jennifer, not ever.”

The half-swallowed bite of burger felt like a wad of newspaper in her throat. She hadn’t thought of any of those things. She wriggled uncomfortably in her seat.

“Look,” she began, and made herself meet his eyes. “I didn’t do this because I want to be mean to somebody. I’m twenty-four years old. I turn twenty-five in December. Both my folks are dead. You know what that means. At 25, if I don’t have a million dollars in assets, I either have to get married to anyone who’ll have me, or they take everything I own and send me to one of their religious service orders.
 

“My farm’s worth about four hundred Kay. The only guy who wants to marry me, I don’t even want to think about. You’ll meet him, you’ll see. When I saw you downtown, and what Slitter was asking for you, it gave me another possibility. With the Clerk of Court’s projected valuation on your services, I got a good $65,000 over the million dollar mark. I was desperate. All I could think of was that by buying you, I could be free.”

Those last words hung heavily in the truck’s cab. She wished she hadn’t said them, but Theo didn’t react in any way.
 

“I’m sorry,” she said, mauling her sandwich in embarrassment. “That was really insensitive.”

He shook his head. “You don’t owe me any apologies. You don’t owe me anything. It’s the other way around, isn’t it. You saved me from a lifetime of busting rocks by day and servicing horny cons by night.”

She blanched. “Oh, God.”

Suddenly, ridiculously, he felt sorry for her. “Well, what is it I’ll be doing? What kind of farm you got?”

She smiled. “Right now it’s pumpkins.” She glanced at him shyly and was delighted to see him smile for the first time.

“Really? Pumpkins?”

“Yeah. I do strawberries in the spring, then herbs and carrots and things during the summer, then sweet corn, and now pumpkins. I really need help right now. The next three or four weeks are big ones for me. I use the Halloween profits to make the quarterly taxes on the place. We’ve got a Come’N’Pick weekend coming and I have to get the displays built and clean up the field so it looks neat, and find a store or something that’ll take what we don’t sell then. I’ve also got a hog to slaughter and package for my own freezer. And my kitchen garden’s winding down, there’s a ton of work to do there—it’s a lot of outdoor work, long days. I can’t do it on my own.”

He munched and watched her talking. She was pretty, and fine-boned, though her slim hands were rough and callused. Her eyes took on happy lights as she talked about her farm. She struck him as a peculiar mixture of tough and vulnerable.

“Sounds like we ought to get a move-on, then,” he said, and dug into his second burger. “Thanks for lunch,” he added.

She flushed. “Don’t thank me for feeding you.”

“Why not? It’s been a long, long time between meals. I’m grateful.”

She said fiercely, “Godammit, you’re still a human being.” But she saw his eyes graze the control unit on her wrist and she felt a yawning gulf between them that couldn’t be crossed.

* * *

“Come in, I’ll show you your room.” The house was old, two-story white clapboard. The porch boards sagged comfortably and the screen door into the kitchen screeched just the way a screen door should. Theo started feeling better.

“It was my mom’s sewing room,” she said. “That’s why all the flowers.”

Theo dropped the sack of clothes on the candlewick bedspread and looked around. The window was dressed with bright yellow-and-green flowered café curtains and the crocheted rug was a sunflower. There was an oak dresser, an oak rocker and a walnut night stand with a bookshelf on the bottom. The closet was tiny.

“The bathroom’s next door . . .”

Theo smiled at her. “This is really nice. I figured, when they said ‘farm,’ I’d be sleeping in the barn.”

Jennifer gritted her teeth and pointedly ignored that.
 

“There are boots in the sack. We might as well get to work.”

* * *

She gave him a machete and wheel barrow, set him to cutting down the drying corn stalks standing in rows among the pumpkins, and wheeling them to a big compost pit dug behind the barn. He was surrounded by orange globes of all sizes, ripening in the afternoon sun. The infinite blue sky was cloudless and the cool breeze sweet. The physical work felt good, even in his sore shoulders.

She did carpentry up on the big driveway in front of the house. He looked up there once in awhile to see how she was doing. She was putting together a market stand, obviously a break-down that she stored in sections between sales events.

By nightfall the stand was completed and she’d hung a wide muslin banner across the front that said “Skoada’s Halloween Come’N’Pick.” She called to Theo to come in and eat.

He trudged up to the house, sweaty, worn-out, and coated with dust and little seeds. He’d taken off the flannel shirt and tied the arms around his waist, and the new white T-shirt was soaked with sweat, streaked with dirt. She grinned at him.
 

“I’ll forage for food; you get cleaned up. How far’d you get?”

“Only about a third done.”

“That’s good, for an afternoon. You’re a lot faster than the hired guy I had. And he was stealing me blind.”

When he emerged clean and clothed in more new clothes, he found the kitchen table set with cold roast, hunks of cheese, fruit and homemade bread sliced for sandwiches.

“Wow.”

“Sit. Eat. You can have two and seven-sixteenths sandwiches.” Her eyes gleamed, daring and nervously hoping he saw the intended joke.

He smiled in spite of himself. “Yes, ma’am. I’m hungry, that’s for sure. It’s been a few years since I worked on Dad’s place. You don’t earn much of an appetite pushing books.”

Jenny finished her sandwich and reached for a pear. “You’re behind on your quota for food, still, too. I can’t believe they starved you.”

Theo didn’t answer until he’d finished eating. He sat back and sighed, and said, “You know, I never paid attention to what was going on with all these Acts and laws and things. It didn’t affect me, or anybody I knew.” His expression darkened. “Except Lyle. He had the mens clothing shop next to my bookstore. Flaming fag, really nice guy. But—they got his lover on morals charges. Not too long after that Lyle sold his store and checked into Hope for Change up in Minneapolis.”

“Is that the place where they turn gays straight?”

“Supposedly. That name always made me laugh, makes me think of quarters and dimes. I don’t know . . . kinda thought he went to learn how to act and talk ‘straight’, trying to keep out of trouble. I mean, until they threw his friend in jail Lyle was perfectly happy with his life.” He frowned again. “But I didn’t know they could do this to people. I guess I was the first one here they tried that pillory out on. It’s new around here. Otherwise I would have seen it, would have had some clue.” He rubbed his wrists. “But, I still wouldn’t have tried to do anything about it. I never would have dreamed it could happen to me.”

Jennifer nodded. “That’s why they could get by with it. Nobody thinks it can happen to people like them. Everybody was tired of criminals walking, taxes going up, people not paying their bills. Tired of generation after generation living on welfare. It looked like a good idea to solve the problems.”

“Well, crime’s sure down, what with ‘Three strikes and you’re dead’. Teenage pregnancy, same thing, once they started taking unmarried mothers’ babies away from them and sterilizing the girls. Opened all those orphanages. The three days I spent

“ his teeth flashed, “hangin’ on the street corner, I didn’t see a single derelict. Not one. I saw some runaway children down there, in the middle of the night. Otherwise, nothing but suits and ties. Hardly any women, either, except when they came downtown to have lunch with Hubby.”

“Yeah,” Jenny agreed bitterly. “All the happy little women home tending the fires. I wonder how many of them hate their husbands as much as I would hate Glen?”

“That the guy who wants to marry you?”

She nodded, scowling. “I don’t want to think about it.”
 

Her face brightened. “And now I don’t have to. It isn’t fair, me being this happy when it took your—your destruction for it to happen, but there it is.”

“Somebody might as well be happy. I’d rather it was you than a long list of other people I can think of.” He stood up. “Want me to clean up the dishes?”

“Yeah. I’ve got some book work to do. Then we’d better turn in. Early morning tomorrow.”

He got into bed later feeling intensely grateful for the real bed, the privacy, the sense of safety. Even the sheets felt reassuring. Sleep came quickly.

* * *

He hacked steadily at the corn stalks all morning while she got the rest of the preparations for the big weekend done. At lunch, she told him, “I have to go into town. I need to get cash for change, and I’ve got a P.O. box that’ll probably be stuffed with mail. You can go on finishing the stalks. It’ll take me less than half an hour.”