Bleeding Kansas (11 page)

F
ARMERS AREN'T HOUSEKEEPERS
. Most farms have rusted-out harrows and trucks, used tractors that never found their way to a scrap-metal broker, somewhere on the property, but they're usually not right in front of the house, where you trip on them coming and going. Clem's place looked like he'd sown bolts and axles in the night, and the yard had sprouted broken-down cars and equipment.

Five cars rested on cement blocks, all missing some piece of the body. The engines lay strewn in front of them, like entrails from a deer that had been savaged by dogs. Pride of place went to a 1961 Lincoln Continental convertible. If Clem ever did restore it, he could probably name his price and move out of debt. It needed a rear passenger door, a hood, wheels, and quite a bit of engine. Every now and then, you might see Clem or his uncle Turk working on it, but most of the time it lay under a swaddling of plastic, protecting what was left of the interior.

Jim parked his pickup on the edge of the road. He moved slowly, not wanting to deal with Clem or his uncle, hoping Eddie wouldn't be around. Why did they have that old wringer washer out here? Maybe Clem had finally let Ardis get an automatic machine. He sidestepped a rusted coulter but crunched down on the head of a doll and shattered it; the eyeballs rolled around, blinking at him.

Clem didn't answer his knock, so he let himself into the kitchen. Clem's father was sitting at a table, stirring his fingers through a bowl of cereal. A cat was trying to get its head in under the old man's fingers. The table was covered with newspapers, magazines, and plates of crusted food. The sink was stacked with pots and dishes, an elaborate tower that looked as though hours of labor went into keeping it from overbalancing. Maybe the first person to drop a plate had to wash everything underneath.

The house was even colder than the Fremantle place. Jim zipped up his parka and kept his gloves on.

Mr. Burton didn't notice Jim or respond to his feeble “Good morning.” Beyond the kitchen, Jim heard voices. He followed the sound to a front room, where Clem's uncle Turk was watching television—a big set, maybe thirty-six inches, that dominated the shabby space. No lights were on, but the television was pulsing with color and noise, cars whipping around a track, NASCAR in the living room.

Turk was a big, shambling man, about fifteen years older than Jim. He'd come to live with Clem and Ardis sometime back, maybe eight or nine years ago. No one knew what he'd been doing before he arrived, and no one ever heard of him working. He tinkered around the cars with Clem, and drove over to the track at Woodlands to watch the greyhound races. When he won, which wasn't often, he was generous, splashing money around both his family and Lawrence's bars.

Although it wasn't noon yet, Jim saw Turk had finished most of a quart of Colt 45. Jim cleared his throat and called out.

“Who's that?” Turk squinted across the dark room in Jim's direction. “That you, Grellier? What you want?”

“I was looking for Clem.”

“Clem? He's right here. Clem!” Turk shouted, and then shook his nephew, who was dozing on the floor at his feet. “Clem, Jim Grellier's here looking for you.”

Clem sat up. Jim had been afraid he was drunk, passed out, but he was just dozing. He grinned foolishly, and said he'd had too late a night. “I'm too old to keep up with Turk.”

Turk grinned, and swallowed the last of the malt liquor. “You're out of practice, Clem. It's been too long since I won anything. Picked up a bundle on the dogs yesterday. Clem and me went out to celebrate.”

“That's nice,” Jim said. “Clem, I just want a quick word. Can we step in the next room.”

Clem followed him into what was once a dining room, guessing from the furniture beneath the jumble of rusted appliances and papers that covered most of the surfaces.

Jim couldn't figure out how to approach his subject, so he asked first about the Lincoln. “Making any progress on her?”

“Nah. Too hard to track down the parts. I had a lead on a cylinder block, but it turned out to be from a 'seventy-three, wouldn't fit in this engine head. You heard something?”

“Nope. Just admired the lines as I was walking up the drive,” Jim lied. “Eddie helping you out?”

“Eddie?” Clem repeated as if he didn't know anyone by that name. “Oh, Eddie. He kind of wanders around, does his own thing. Can't drive, but he gets pretty far on his feet. Got a call from someone over by Stull last week. Boy is good with numbers, memorizes hundreds of phone numbers, can add a blue streak. He ain't as dumb as some folks think, just never could learn anything out of a book. But then, we Burtons aren't readers, anyway.” Clem laughed heartily.

“You ever think about getting him some kind of training so he could work?”

“What are you, Grellier, the county social worker? Since when do you care so much about my boy?”

“Sorry, Clem. I was thinking out loud, thinking if Eddie had a job it would give him something to do with his time. Someone climbed up a tree and was looking into the bathroom at the old Fremantle house, spying on the lady who's living there. From the description, it sounds like Eddie.”

Clem took a step toward Jim. “You calling my boy a pervert, Grellier?”

Jim held up his hands. “Easy, Clem. Take it easy. Eddie doesn't have enough to do, that's all. And he hangs out with Junior Schapen, who might take advantage of him. That's all I'm saying.”

“You saying my own boy hangs out at the Schapens'? What you do, spy on him for Deputy Arnie?” Clem was shouting—the loud, blustery shout of someone who knows he's wrong.

“Clem, am I that kind of guy, spying on people? I'm just saying, Eddie doesn't always know if he's doing the right thing or not, and if Junior wanted him to spook that city lady at Fremantles' Eddie'd do it to make Junior happy.” Jim was sweating in the cold room.

Clem's mouth dropped as he thought this over. “Yeah, you're right. Arnie Schapen would be happier than a pig in mud if Eddie did something he could be arrested for. I showed Schapen up good in court, made everyone see him for the asshole he is, and he can't forgive me that. He probably sicced Junior onto Eddie, trying to get Eddie to break the law so he can arrest him.”

“Could be,” Jim agreed. Not that he believed it, but if Clem did it would make him more willing to keep tabs on his son.

Clem clapped him on the arm, breathing stale beer on Jim. “Sorry to lose my cool there, man, but every time I hear that Schapen name I see red, white, and blue. Turk give me twenty bucks yesterday, out of his winnings, and I have to put it on that damned fine. Schapen goes around spreading lies about my family—about my own daughter!—and I'm the one who has to pay a thousand-dollar fine, not him. If I could afford me a lawyer, I'd sue him for false witness. But everything costs money—I'm surprised they don't fine us for breathing.”

Jim again agreed, wondering how the Burtons afforded that big television, or even their electric bill. He turned down an offer of a drink and made his way past Turk and the television back to the kitchen. The old man at the table had fallen asleep. The cat was eating the cereal.

J
IM HAD THOUGHT OF
stopping again at Fremantles' to suggest Gina find a dog, but as he was pulling out of Clem's yard Gina passed him, heading toward Highway 10. Just as well: he'd spent over two hours on social calls—if that's how you'd classify a visit to Burtons'.

When he got home, he paused a moment in his truck, shaking the last cold drops of the cappuccino into his mouth, carefully thinking about nothing. Inside, the house still smelled like Christmas: pine needles and cinnamon. Susan had moved on to her next project: figuring out a design for her organic-sunflower packages and logo. Jim found her in the dining room, where she'd covered the table with her work.

Susan and Lara had spent weeks arguing over the best name. Lara had wanted “SuLa,” for
Su
san and
La
ra. She said it sounded Indian, and would make people think of the prairie and Native Americans, but Susan insisted on “Abigail's Organics.” Lara finally gave in, and created a dozen or so designs, some from old photographs she'd found in books at flea markets, some her own drawings.

Susan was bent over the designs, her unruly hair caught up in a clip to keep it out of her eyes, exposing the line of her neck. Her skin was brown, the skin of a woman who spent most of her time outside, not like Gina's soft white face and hands. Jim bent over and kissed the nape of his wife's neck.

“What do you think?” She leaned back and looked at him. “I like this one that Lara drew of a girl in a sunbonnet, but the picture is too crude.”

“Crude is going to reproduce better. Why don't you take a break before Lara gets back from basketball practice?” He lifted his eyes suggestively toward the second floor.

“I don't need a break—this is really—Oh, you mean—!” The tanned skin darkened under her freckles.

Since leaving college and moving into the farmhouse, they'd rarely made love in the daytime. First there was Gram and Grandpa, then Chip and Lulu and Curly and Blitz—everyone knowing what it meant if two people went upstairs in the middle of the day. Once, early in their marriage, they'd climbed into the hayloft. When they emerged, they'd found Grandpa in the yard on the tractor politely waiting for them to leave before he drove inside. With the house finally to themselves in the winter, they never thought of sex: too much to do, machinery to be fixed, germination trays to prepare, meals, errands, accounts.

Susan looked at the pictures in her hand, then laid them out on the table and got up to put her arms around him. “Hard time at Burtons'?”

“Yes. Let's not talk about it. I want to think about you right now.” Really, of course, he meant himself, his own complicated desires to be made simple in her body. He held her tighter, then, risking his back and knees, swept her off her feet and carried her up the stairs.

Later, as they were pulling on their clothes, Jim asked where Chip was. Chip had driven Lara in for her practice. Although at fourteen she could legally drive herself to school and back, Jim didn't like her on the county roads when they were icy. Chip hadn't said anything about his own plans for the day.

“School starts again day after tomorrow. I asked him yesterday if he was ready and he bit my head off,” Jim added. “What's eating him? Until this fall, he was such a happy kid, none of the moodiness boys his age often fall into.”

Susan shrugged. “Maybe it's the thought of going off to college.”

“But he's dragging his feet on his applications,” Jim said. “When I asked him about that, he said if I was so hot on a college degree I could go in his place. You don't think—could Janice be pregnant?”

“Ask him.” Susan ran her fingers through her tangled hair.

“You do it. I did safe sex and drugs, although that wasn't such a success. Maybe he's smoking more dope than he let on—that would sure make him moody.” He paused at the bedroom door, unsettled by the thought that suddenly ran through his head: he'd rather find out Chip was doing drugs than that Janice was pregnant.

Jim heard the kitchen door bang shut. Lulu had brought Kimberly Ropes home from practice. While Kimberly's folks spent the afternoon with Peter Ropes. Jim and Susan went downstairs to offer the two girls Susan's homemade mince pies and the ubiquitous overboiled country coffee.

Jim and Susan were asleep before Chip drove into the yard. In the morning, he refused to get up for church. When the family returned home following the ritual stop at the pancake house on Twenty-third Street after church, they found him in the family room with a bowl of cereal, watching the Chiefs.

Jim looked significantly at Susan, but she shook her head and went into the kitchen to check on a batch of baked beans she was preparing for supper.

“You are such a slob.” Lara didn't have her parents' inhibitions. “What are you doing, lying around in your pj's at noon? Were you out drinking with Janice last night?”

“I was minding my own business, HullabaLulu,” Chip said.

Using the old nickname meant he was prepared to be conciliatory, but Susan stuck her head in the family room. “Etienne, you know how destructive it is to get drunk. And I hope you aren't so upset by your private worries that you would drink and drive.”

“Mom, I know what I'm doing. I'm eighteen, I don't need a baby-sitter. Sheesh!”

He flung the cereal bowl onto the coffee table and stomped up the stairs. Before Jim could steel himself to follow, he heard a tentative knock on the kitchen door. Susan turned around and called for the visitor to come on in. A moment later, Jim heard Gina Haring's deeper, softer voice. He went into the kitchen.

“I'm returning your pie pan,” Gina was saying.

She'd put it on top of Jim's oat-crop file, which he'd left on the kitchen table in the morning, planning to work on it after church. Thinking back on the scene later, what Jim remembered most clearly, more even than Chip's anger, was his own annoyance that Gina hadn't cleaned the dish properly: a finger of caramelized sugar had dribbled down the side, making the pan stick to his spreadsheet.

She noticed his glance and peeled the paper away. “I'm sorry. I took the pie to Autumn's and I thought she'd washed the pan.”

“You didn't eat any yourself?” Susan was hurt.

“I did; it was delicious. I'd put it in the freezer, actually, so I could make it my contribution for Christmas dinner—don't worry, I made sure everyone knew you baked it.”

“Oh, please—” Susan made an embarrassed gesture. “I don't care about that, as I hope you know. We hadn't seen your car for a week. Did you go back to New York for the holidays?”

“New York—it's not an easy place for me to be right now.” Gina made a face. “I stayed in Lawrence with Autumn Minsky—I thought I owed myself a break in a house with real heat.”

Jim got up hastily and took the pie pan, which Gina was still holding, to put in the sink. He found her mug, which he had carefully washed and put aside, and handed it to her. Those slender white thighs, which he couldn't quite put out of his mind, embracing plump, pugnacious Autumn—he quickly returned to the table and busied himself with his oat-crop data.

“How do you spend your time?” Susan asked. “Are you doing any work on the house?”

“Me?” Gina laughed and looked at her slender fingers. “I think I know which end of a hammer you hold, but I'm not sure how to swing it. I worked in public relations before my marriage. I'm trying to reconnect with old clients, see if I can build up some kind of private business so I don't have to live in mold and ice forever. That isn't going too well, so I'm dabbling with writing a book. Like every other college English major, I always imagined I had a big novel in me.”

“It's a pity you can't use the fireplaces,” Susan said, ignoring the biting self-mockery in Gina's voice. “What's your novel about?”

“Oh, romance among the Wiccans. Nobody writes about us as if we were real people. I thought I could write a love story with Wicca as the backdrop. As if you were going to write a love story with Christianity as the backdrop.”

Susan's eyes sparkled. “No, I'd make the anti-slavery days my backdrop. I'd set a romance in the Fremantle house. After all, the Victorians fell in love, just as we do.”

“Why do you care so much about that house?” Gina asked. “I can see it used to be wonderful, but it's falling apart, and smells of cat pee.”

Lara, attracted by the talk, came in, her iPod earpieces dangling around her neck like a stethoscope. Pee, Lara thought. Gina and her friend are obsessed by pee. That was how she would casually introduce the word into conversation with Kimberly and Melanie at lunch tomorrow.

She covertly eyed Gina's clothes. She was expensively, even exotically, dressed, in a bloodred jacket with fur trim and fringed cavalier boots. The leather was soft and clean, except for a few mud spatters Gina must have gotten walking from her car to the house. Boots like that wouldn't survive five minutes if you really walked through snow in them, Lara thought scornfully, wondering at the same time how much they cost and whether they would make her look as sophisticated as they did Gina.

“It's the pee and the mold, and everything, that makes me care about the house,” Susan was saying. “Things like that don't seem repulsive to me. Just sad, the way a person who used to be, oh, maybe a great athlete, seems sad if she's falling apart.”

“But why does it matter to you?” Gina repeated.

“It's the history of the time!” Susan leaned forward, with her coffee mug between her hands. “The Fremantle house is beautiful, but it's what it meant to the valley back then, that's what I feel when I walk through it. That's why I'd like to set a book there, except I can't write. Where is your story set?”

“I put it in New York, because that's what I know, but, listening to you, I'm wondering if I should write about Uncle John's house instead. After all, we're going to have an Imbolc ceremony there, which I could never have done in the city—at least, not with a real fire.”

Susan, always eager for new experiences, peppered her with questions about her ritual.

“It's a fire festival. We cleanse ourselves to be ready for spring. You know the Swedish festival, where a girl wears a crown of burning candles?”

When Susan and Lara shook their heads, Gina smiled. “They do—take my word for it. It's a sort of Christianized version of the old goddess ritual. You should come see what we're all about.”

“When is it?” Susan asked.

“February second. If you do decide to come, you need to bring a gift for the fire, something to burn that will bring you good luck in the harvest. Come to think of it, Imbolc was originally a farmers' holiday—they'd beg the Earth Mother for a good harvest. I'd think every farmer around here might want to do that.”

“No, because then Myra Schapen would write them all up on her website,” Lara put in.

“Myra Schapen?” Gina repeated. “Isn't that the family you said lived on down the road? Is Myra in school with you?”

Lara blinked, trying to imagine a teenage Myra. “She's about a hundred years old, and she's like a witch! I always expect to see her with a corncob pipe when she's out on the tractor. It's her son, Arnie, who's the sheriff's deputy. He came—probably he's the one who came over to spy on you when you moved in. Myra—Nanny Schapen, I mean—she drove his wife off, and now she and Arnie—Mr. Schapen—they live with her grandsons. Junior is the biggest bully—”

“Lara!” Susan cut her daughter off. “You cannot be talking about the Schapens like that. Just because you can't get along with Junior and Robbie doesn't mean Gina won't find a way to talk to them. And you know your father and I don't want you using Myra's and Arnie's first names.”

“If Gina does a witches' bonfire, you know the only thing Myra—Nanny Schapen—will say is that Gina and her friends are going to hell!” Lara said stubbornly. “The Schapens have a website, and she's always writing up stuff about us or other people around here in a really mean way.”

“But if she's a witch, as you say, she and I are kindred spirits, and she belongs at our ceremony,” Gina said in the aloof, mocking voice she'd used when Lara and Susan first saw her. “Perhaps I'll call on her and issue a formal invitation.”

Lara turned away, embarrassed both by her own blunder in calling Myra a witch in front of Gina and by Gina's ironic inflection.

“There's no privacy in the country,” Jim said to cover the awkward moment. “You may think because you don't live near anyone that everyone minds their own business, but if you have a bonfire the whole valley, from the Kaw to Highway 10, will know what you're doing.”

“I know,” Gina said, laughing with real amusement. “Remember, I've already had a Peeping Tom and the witch's son calling on me.”

“That reminds me,” Jim answered. “I talked to Clem Burton. He's going to keep an eye on Eddie, in case it was Eddie up your tree. And I spoke to Hank—Hank Drysdale, the sheriff—casually. But it wouldn't hurt for you to have a dog over there.”