Bleeding Kansas (14 page)

When Susan and Gina read the Schapens' website, they were both angry. Arnie's photos were too blurry to make out anyone's faces, or even the fact that a number of the women had been naked, but Susan resented the Schapens' attacks on her Christian commitment. Gina didn't care about that, but she was furious that Arnie had trespassed and invaded her privacy.

Susan couldn't get any sympathy at home: Jim said he'd warned her, Chip said he wished for once she'd think about someone besides herself.

“I told you your weird crap was making all of us a laughingstock, but you had to do it, anyway. Do you know the kind of stuff they're saying in school, Junior Schapen and his group of football wannabes? How you're a harlot or the whore of Babylon? They even hassle Janice for being my girlfriend, all because you had to prance naked around a fire with a bunch of other loonies! She came this close to breaking up with me over it.” Chip held his thumb and forefinger together.

“Too bad she didn't,” Lara muttered, but too softly for Chip to hear her.

Lara didn't know what she thought about her mother and the bonfire. She'd been excited by the spectacle, the drumming, the dancing, the wild unexpectedness of it, but that was before she saw Eddie Burton, his face glistening, licking his lips. That had made the whole evening so shameful that she couldn't think about the fire at all.

All the talk at school further upset her. Even Kimberly Ropes and Melanie Derwint said they thought Susan had gone too far. “What those women were doing is witchcraft, Lara, and my pastor says you can go to hell for it,” Melanie told her. “If you want to save your mother, you should keep her away from those people.” After that conversation, Lara didn't have the nerve to admit she'd watched part of it. She certainly couldn't mention Junior and Eddie.

And then Junior Schapen started taunting Lara in the hallway whenever he saw her. “Seen your mom on her broomstick lately?” he'd call, or, “Check her forehead to see if any horns are growing there?”

“Any horns around will be on you, cowman,” Lara yelled back. “You spend so much time in cowshit, it's filled up your head, you and your creepy friend Eddie.”

Chip happened to pass her in the hall just then, which was fortunate, because at the mention of Eddie's name Junior lunged for Lara. Chip muscled Lara out of Junior's reach and dragged her into an empty classroom. “I am not going to fight Junior or his asshole friends for you over this, Lulu, so stop stirring him up.”

“Chip, he was there, him and Eddie. And Eddie, his face, I can't tell you—”

Chip said roughly, “We're not at Kaw Valley anymore, Lulu. Whatever Junior and Eddie do, we can't do anything about it. You have to do like Janice: turn the other cheek.”

“Do like Janice? You mean show everyone in school my big, wobbly boobs?”

Chip grabbed her shoulders and shook her. “One moron in the family is all I can stand, so you'd better take that back.”

Lara mumbled an apology that she didn't mean and ran down the hall to her geometry class. When she got home, Lara told her mother that thanks to her she and Chip were having a tough time at school. “If you find me in the emergency room after Junior breaks my neck, I hope you'll know you can only blame yourself.”

“Lara, don't stoop to their level. Don't go fighting boys like Junior Schapen. It makes you look as bad as they do.”

“Mom, I'm trying to stand up for you, but the way you carry on no one can support you. People say you're a witch for taking part in the bonfire, they say you're doomed to hell. What am I supposed to do? Tell them I agree?”

The next day, Robbie Schapen raced past Lara in the cafeteria and dropped a folded square of paper on her tray. She was afraid at first to pick it up, wondering what insult it might contain, but when Kimberly reached out a hand for it Lara took it herself and unfolded it.

Kimberly peered at her curiously. “What's it say?”

“Oh, all those Schapens are totally bogus!” Lara stuck the note into her social studies text. “Like I want to go hear some sermon on hellfire from his church.”

Later, during Spanish, she took the note out and studied it. Was he trying to insult her by asking her to his stupid, narrow-minded church or was he asking her on a kind of date? She tried to picture going out with Robbie Schapen. He had put grasshoppers down her T-shirt in sixth grade and smashed up her diorama of Kansas during the age of dinosaurs when they were in third grade, but, really, he wasn't as bad as Junior. Of course, after the grasshoppers she'd slugged him hard enough to break his front tooth, so they were sort of even.

Still, if she went to his youth group she'd either have to get Chip or Dad to drive her—or ride with Robbie and his dad, since she and Robbie were both too young to drive alone at night. The more she imagined the evening, the more horrible it seemed. She scrawled, “Sorry, my folks won't let me,” on a piece of paper and dropped it on his desk in chemistry, which they had together at the end of the day.

Susan meanwhile took refuge from her critical family with Gina Haring. Gina mocked the whole idea of religion, saying that it was no more superstitious to light a bonfire to the goddess than it was to worship bread and wine by pretending they were your god's body and blood. When Gina saw that her comments upset Susan, she put an arm around her and said, “I love you because you're so sincere,” which comforted Susan since no one at the farm these days was telling Susan they loved her.

She spent most of her free time with Gina, either at the Fremantle house or with other women from the bonfire at Between Two Worlds. And it was at the store that Susan learned about K-PAW—Kansas Patriots Against the War. At supper, Susan showed Jim and Lara one of K-PAW's brochures.

“Did you have any idea what's been going on over there? Did you know we've been torturing people? Our government? Or that nearly four thousand of our soldiers have died? Why are we there?”

Jim said, “Suze, it's all I can do to get a stalk of wheat to come up out of the ground. I figure we elect people to Congress to think about whether we need to go to war or not. Anyway, I thought you and I agreed before the war started that the president and Congress were making the right decision. We shouldn't start second-guessing them now. Just because the war is going badly is all the more reason not to turn on our leaders. Saddam was a tyrant, he was threatening us—”

“But he wasn't, Jim.” Susan's amber eyes widened in her intensity. “Read this and you'll see he never had any weapons like we said he did. The whole war, everything we were told about it, it was all lies.”

Jim took the pamphlet from her and laid it next to his plate. “A pamphlet by a bunch of Kansas women doesn't carry weight with me. What do they know about war or foreign policy?”

“How can you belittle us without even reading the evidence? Just because we're women doesn't mean God didn't give us brains to think with. It's all documented in here, you could look at it instead of being so superior about being a man.”

Jim scrunched his eyes shut for a second before answering. “Susan, if you think I feel superior to you, or any other woman, you haven't been paying attention to me for the last twenty-five years. You know darn well that's not how I look at the world or your place in it. I'm just saying, this is a group of women, well meaning, maybe even smart, but they're not involved in government, they don't have access to the information our leaders had when they made these decisions. I don't want you going out on a limb with them and getting hurt or hurting our reputation.”

“Mom, you know we have to plant the lettuce and beans this week,” Lara interrupted. “And I have basketball tomorrow night. It's a big game, against Shawnee Mission North, so I really really want you and Dad to be there, okay? So can we talk about that, and who's going to drive me in since Chip won't take me?”

Jim seized gratefully on the diversion. The rest of the meal was spent working out the week's schedule, who would drive Lara to the game, who would get the germination trays set up in the greenhouses for the nonorganic crops, what paperwork had to be filed with the organic-growers certification board before they could put in the sunflower crop in April, whether Jim could fix the damage to the greenhouses from last month's ice storm on his own or if he needed to hire Curly's cousin.

After dinner, when Jim dragged a reluctant Susan into the family room to watch a
Columbo
rerun, Lara took the K-PAW brochure from the kitchen table. She read it through, wondering which of her parents was right: the flyer was filled with footnotes from the
New York Times, USA Today,
and other papers, but could you trust those papers to tell the truth? All Lara knew was that she didn't want another fight to build up at home, especially over an issue where her mother would stir up more public notice.

Lara tucked the flyer into her school binder; the next day, she threw it out when she got to school, hoping that if it wasn't in the house her mother would forget about it. In the excitement of the basketball game, which they lost by one point, of working on a play for Presidents' Day with Melanie, and the rest of her life, which included band practice, choir, and putting in the seedlings, Lara forgot about K-PAW.

Susan didn't: she picked up another flyer from Gina and started going to the group's meetings. Until then, she'd paid no more attention to the war than to gasp with dismay every time a suicide bomb targeted U.S. troops, but in short order she had mastered all the history, all the outrages K-PAW claimed Americans had committed, the numbers of dead Iraqi children, the numbers of American boys and girls with terrible injuries.

“Why does Gina Haring care so much about this war?” Chip demanded on one of his rare nights at home—he was spending more and more evenings fooling around with Janice in the back of his Nissan or meeting his buddies in town for burgers or pizza.

“We all do, Etienne, not just Gina. Our country was
founded
on principles of decency and justice. But we've murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis with our bombs and all for what? So that the president's oil friends can get rich?”

“Says you and the
New York Times.
If you watched Fox News, you'd know those are just slanders New York Jews use to try and make the president look bad. And why is it your business, anyway?”

“Since when does anyone in this house use a negative word or tone of voice to describe people of a different religion or race? It is the tradition of this family, of
your heritage,
to take a stand against injustice.” His mother's eyes flashed. She ran up to the bedroom and came back downstairs with her commonplace book.

“Here's what your father's great-great-grandmother wrote about the Civil War: ‘June 17, 1862. We have always shared the Peace Testimony advocated by our brothers and sisters the Quakers, we could not sit passively by while others shed their blood on behalf of our brothers and sisters in bondage.'” Susan looked sternly at her son. “Pacifism, the peace testimony, is your heritage, Etienne, as is commitment to work on behalf of the oppressed.”

“Yeah, well, even old Gramps Etienne finally saw the light and joined the Union Army,” Chip reminded her.

“But only to save the oppressed,” his mother insisted.

“And that's what we're doing in Iraq!”

“Killing a hundred thousand women and children to save them? Explain the logic of that to me, mister!”

Chip ignored her. “I think Gina's putting you on and you're too ignorant to tell. She'll get you all stirred up, then leave you high and dry. Just you wait.”

That was one of the milder exchanges Chip had with his mother. As the winter wore on, the two had blistering arguments whenever Chip ate at home. Lara couldn't stand the tension. If Chip and Susan started in at dinner, she'd leave the table, go up to her room, plug her music into her ears, and doggedly read
The Hobbit.
One day, she made up flyers in art class, announcing the creation of PPGF—Patriots for Peace in the Grellier Farm. She brought them to the dinner table. Jim ruffled her hair, grateful to his daughter for trying to diffuse the tension, but Chip told her not to be lame, and Susan wouldn't even look at them.