Bleeding Kansas (5 page)

I
T WAS STARTING
to snow as they drove home, big, wet flakes that melted on the windshield. By the time Chip drove into the yard with his sister and cousin, the snowfall was heavy enough to coat the fields, but not bad enough to make Doug and Mimi think they wouldn't be able to get to the airport in the morning.

Mimi started a load of clothes while Lara helped Susan set out leftovers in the kitchen. Doug put a bottle of wine on the table. He and Mimi almost always drank with supper. Since Jim and Susan didn't care much for alcohol, drinking rarely and only on festive occasions, Doug always brought four or five bottles with him. Tonight, after asking the blessing, Susan gave a self-conscious laugh and let Doug fill a glass for her. The wine flushed her and softened her. She even flirted a little with Doug.

Jim, watching her eager smile, the light glinting on her pale freckles, thought how much more vital she was than her small, elegant sister-in-law. Mimi worked out every day, but Susan worked, and it made her more vivid, at least to Jim. I scored so much better than you did, he thought in silent competition with his brother. You went for looks, but I won on personality.

Nate was full of everything he'd seen and done with his big cousins today—the lights, the zoo—all the things he saw regularly in Chicago seemed magical because he'd done them with Chip and Lara. Chip had even bought him an early Christmas present, his very first big-league baseball glove. “Me and Chip, we're going to be in the outfield. For the Cubs.”

“Royals, doofus.” Chip grinned, and cuffed Nate lightly on the ear.

“How'd the cleanup go?” Lara asked.

Mimi detailed the day's woes, but Doug interrupted to ask about the marijuana. “Who'd be in there doing dope?”

Mimi looked worriedly at Nate. He was arm wrestling Chip, who faked a strenuous effort and then let Nate knock his arm over half the time.

“Maybe Junior Schapen,” Lara suggested. “He and Eddie, they go all over on Junior's bike. They could ride across the fields to the house and no one would see them.”

“Peter Ropes would if they came in from behind,” Susan pointed out.

Mimi wanted to know who Eddie was.

“Eddie Burton,” Chip said over Nate's head. “He's kind of a retard.”

“Etienne! You know better than to use that language.”

“We know, Mom, we know,” Lara put in hastily. “He's a sad case. Maybe he got lead poisoning as a baby, from sucking on all those rusted-out cars in their yard, or maybe something else that stopped him being able to learn even the whole alphabet, but you have to admit he's gotten pretty creepy now he's older. Even when we were still in school at Kaw Valley Eagle, he was doing stuff like starting fires in the trash cans.”

“Yeah, but Junior sicced him on that,” Chip interrupted her.

“Maybe,” Lara said, “but did Junior make him come into the girls' bathroom and crawl under the stall to look up Kimberly's skirt?”

“Eddie Burton?” Doug echoed. “What's he doing with Junior Schapen? I saw Hank Drysdale when I went into town yesterday, and he was full of some rigmarole about Clem Burton assaulting Arnie, or something. He was surprised that I didn't know, until I reminded him that my brother was the original trio of hear-no-evil monkeys rolled into one.”

“Burtons have a hard enough time of it without me spreading their problems all over the U.S.,” Jim said through thin lips. “You know good and well that you can't farm in the valley—”

“—if you're on bad terms with your neighbors,” his children and brother finished in a chorus.

“Which makes no sense,” Doug added, “because the Schapens go out of their way to be on bad terms with everyone.”

Hank Drysdale was the county sheriff. When he and Doug were in law school together, Hank used to come out to the farm for picnics or to pick sweet corn; he got to know a number of the area farmers, who'd mostly supported him when he ran for sheriff—except for the Schapens and Greynards. Arnie, already working as a deputy, was convinced Hank Drysdale was a liberal, if not an outright Communist.

“Drysdale wondered why you and Susan never drop in on him when you're in town,” Doug added.

“I figure Hank's a busy man, running that department. And he was always more your friend than mine,” Jim said.

“You should cultivate him,” Doug said. “It never hurts to have the top lawman on your side. If I hadn't run into him, I wouldn't have known what was going on around this place. He told me Myra Schapen put up some nasty comment about one of the Burton girls on her home website, and Clem went over, threatening to blow Arnie to kingdom come.”

“Yeah, that was pretty dumb,” Chip put in. “But only a Burton would be dumb enough to go over to Arnie face-to-face like that, with him being a deputy sheriff and aching to put the whole valley behind bars.”

“Of course, Myra could drive stronger men than Clem Burton round the bend.” Doug laughed. “What was it she said? Hank couldn't remember, or wouldn't tell me.”

Ignoring warning signs from their parents, Lara and Chip explained, “She keeps this ‘News and Notes' column on the Schapen website. Mostly, she brags about how many people Junior massacres at football every week. But then Cindy Burton had an abortion, and Myra wrote, ‘We believe all life is sacred, so it grieves us when an innocent child is slaughtered. If a family can't feed their children, they should learn the virtues of self-control.'”

“How did she even know?” Mimi demanded.

“That's the point, Aunt Mimi,” Chip said. “Eddie Burton, he's Cindy's brother, he probably told Junior, and Junior told Myra. He knows Myra worships him, and every now and then he throws her a bone.”

“Listen to you two.” Susan was distressed. “A, you don't know for sure that Cindy had an abortion, and, B, if she did, you can't know that Eddie told Junior.”

“Oh, Mom! It was all over the county,” Chip said, “except for you and Dad refusing to admit it was going on. And, you know, Curly says the reason the Burtons made Cindy get an abortion at all is because Eddie was the father.”

“Etienne!” Susan's face was flushed. “I won't have that kind of talk in here.”

“I suppose it might have been Junior Schapen,” Chip conceded.

“Yes,” his sister agreed. “You know, lots of times I see Junior trying to hide that old Honda of his in between the used cars in the Burtons' front yard.”

“Yeah,” Chip said. “And of course Eddie will do anything for Junior, even—”

Jim reached across the table and cuffed Chip on the shoulder.

“Oh, all right,” Chip grumbled. “But you can't blame Clem for being pissed off that Schapen made Burton's business everyone's business. And then when Clem got fined a thousand dollars just for threatening Arnie, he went and shot holes in the Schapens' milk barn in the middle of the night.”

“Enough!” Jim slapped the table. “I won't have such mean-spirited talk in here, especially not during a family holiday. You want to laugh at me for hearing and speaking no evil, be my guest. I'd rather be a naive fool than spread so much poison around.”

His children and even his brother fell silent. Mimi murmured something about laundry and packing, and got up from the table. Susan, after giving her husband a look, went to help her. While Lara started on the dishes and Doug took Nate into the family room to play Foosball, Jim steeled himself to talk to Chip about the marijuana they'd smelled in the Fremantle house that morning. It wasn't the best time—his outburst had left everyone on edge—but he wanted to get the conversation over with as fast as possible.

“Why do you keep harping on me about dope?” Chip glared at his father. “Do you think I'm some kind of addict?”

“I want to know you're not breaking into Fremantles' and smoking,” Jim said doggedly. “And if you are using marijuana, I'd like to know where you're getting it.”

“Why?” his son demanded. “Do you want some?”

Jim's own temper rose. “What kind of crack was that? If Curly is supplying you with drugs—”

“Curly is not supplying me with drugs, okay?” Chip stared at his father with hard, hot eyes. “And I won't lie to you: I sometimes smoke with the guys on the team, but I don't do it often. And I don't do it when I'm alone.”

He turned on his heel and ran up the stairs, slamming the door to his room. Chip was supposed to be helping Lara with the dishes, but Jim didn't feel like confronting his son for a second time in five minutes so he went into the kitchen to help her himself. She saw how upset he was; she gave him a lighthearted rundown of their day in Kansas City, trying to coax him into a better mood.

Jim kissed her forehead. “Baby, I'm a crab cake tonight. You go on up to your homework—I'm better off doing the dishes myself.”

When he'd finished, Jim went into the family room and challenged his brother to a Foosball match. Nate jumped up and down with excitement, cheering on his dad, who beat Jim by two points. Nate demanded a turn with Jim, who let his nephew win. The little boy's glee slowly brought Jim back to his more usual level spirits.

Lara, bored with her history book and drawn by the laughter, came back downstairs. She challenged Jim and Doug to a team game, she and Nate against the brothers. Jim was surprised all over again by how competitive his brother was: even though it was his own son he was playing, he put everything he had into the game, even snapping at Jim for letting Nate kick a ball past his defenders.

“We won, we won!” Nate squealed. “We beated them.”

He and Lulu exchanged high fives, and then Lara scooped him up under her arm. “Come on, shrimp. Even Brian Urlacher has to go to bed sometimes.”

“I am not a shrimp. I'm a giant. Put me down!”

Later, in bed, Jim told Susan about his abortive conversation with Chip. “The way he reacted makes me think he
is
smoking over there at Fremantles'. You don't think you could talk to him, do you, Suze?”

“If Etienne swore he wasn't using drugs often, I think we have to believe him,” Susan said.

“He didn't. That's the point. He won't lie to me directly. But he did a good job of dancing away from my questions.”

“After Tuesday, when this Gina Haring moves in, it won't be a problem anymore.” Susan turned out the light. “It'll be good to have the house to ourselves again—I'd forgotten how crowded this place feels with seven people in it.”

“So seeing Nate running around doesn't make you wish we had another little person here?” Jim said, only half teasing. He liked all children, especially his own, despite his recent brushup with Chip. It was going to be hard when his son went off to college next fall.

“Oh, Jim, I'm forty-five now. I can't go through another pregnancy.” To soften her response, she put her arms around him and pulled him close to her in the bed.

S
UNDAY NIGHT,
Lara and Chip slipped out of the house, muffling their laughter against their parka sleeves. They'd told their parents they were going to stay up late to watch a movie. If their father was surprised that they'd agreed so easily on what to see, he didn't say anything.

They sat in the family room, watching
March of the Penguins,
for half an hour after the lights went out on the second floor. When they were sure all was silent in their parents' room, they slipped out of the house through the garage, leaving the television on as a decoy. Chip didn't turn on the flashlight until they'd reached the gravel road on the far side of the train tracks.

Yesterday's snowfall was starting to melt. Wheat stubble poked through the snow in the Ropes field like stubble in an old man's beard. The dead stem grasses along the drainage ditches waved ghostly arms in the wind.

Chip switched off his flashlight, and said, in a deep, soft voice, “They're in there, you know, waiting to jump out at you.”

“They are not,” Lara said, louder than she intended, because, in the dark, the towering grasses looked menacing. “Don't be an idiot. I'm not stupid Janice Everleigh, who's going to cling to you and screech, ‘Oh, Chippie, protect me, you're so big and brave.'”

Chip picked up a handful of soft snow from the road and tried to stick it down Lara's back. She struggled with him and slipped in one of the deep ruts in the road. He grabbed her and pulled her to her feet.

“You okay, Lulu? Don't go spraining anything—I don't want to have to explain it to Dad.”

“Well, don't push me, turkey.”

They continued, arm in arm, skirting the holes, until they reached the Fremantle place. This was the part that Lara dreaded: going into the basement in the dark through the old coal chute. Dad had nailed all the basement windows shut, and seen to it that all the downstairs doors and windows were locked, when he was struggling to keep the cats out of the house. He'd even boarded over the coal chute and bolted it shut, but Chip had slipped the bolts free.

He and Lara had been using the Fremantle house as their private clubhouse for the past two years. Chip did go there to smoke dope with Curly or occasionally with a friend from the baseball team. Lara kept her diary tucked behind the overmantel in the master-bedroom fireplace where it had slipped away from the wall.

Lara loved the feeling of privacy, of owning the place, that she got when she went to the mansion. She could poke around in the rooms that hadn't been used since old Mrs. Fremantle's children left Kansas forty years ago. She'd found Mrs. Fremantle's wedding dress in the back of one closet and preened in front of the watery mirrors in it.

When Mrs. Fremantle died, her kids had taken most of the valuable furniture. They'd left a rolltop desk and a cherrywood table that dated to the Revolution, as well as a rickety piano that Susan thought could be valuable. All the windows had brocade drapes that now hung in shreds from the cats scratching them.

Lara would sit in a window seat in the master bedroom, writing by candlelight, pretending she was Abigail Grellier listening for Border Ruffians, while Chip and Curly horsed around in the back parlor.

Lara's favorite thing in the house was a Tiffany chandelier in the dining room. It was made of stained glass, like a church window, only its six sides showed people doing things with grapes—planting or picking them or making wine out of them. A big piece had broken off, the piece that would have shown the tub with people stomping grapes to make wine.

Before Prohibition, Mom said, every county in Kansas had at least one winery, and the chandelier commemorated the one the Fremantles used to own. You could see where they had grown their grapes, out behind the old hay barn at the back of the property. Mom said it would cost thousands of dollars to get the piece made to match the rest of the glass. Lara tried to make the broken panel in her art class at school, but she couldn't get the colors to turn out right.

Before she started the X-Farm, Mom had toyed with the idea of creating a vineyard and a winery herself: Château Grellier. Lara loved the idea of it, mostly because of the chandelier. She even designed a wine label in her art class, with a tub of grapes set in the middle of a wheat field. In the end, though, after going over the numbers, Susan had to agree with Jim that the payback horizon for wine was too far.

When she was little, Lara had loved her mother's stories about the early days in Kansas. Susan would copy pages from Abigail's diary into her own commonplace book, because the diaries were so fragile she didn't want to destroy the paper by handling them too often. Then she would read bits to Lara, and tell her the history, the battle raging over slavery in the Kansas Territory, what the women did, how the Delaware Indians, who used to live north of the Kaw River, helped the anti-slavery settlers. Susan would write notes to herself on the edges of her commonplace book, almost as if she were communicating with Abigail.

Susan also put her own family's stories into her commonplace book, the clippings about the co-op market that ran in the
Douglas County Herald,
or the time Chip's home run won the Northeast Kansas Little League tournament. “A hundred years from now, your granddaughter will want to know how we were living, how we faced up to the challenges, just like we want to know about what Abigail did,” Susan explained to Lara.

Lara couldn't imagine that anyone would find her life as interesting as a pioneer's. How could playing basketball or working on the X-Farm compare to Abigail's hacking off the head of a snake that slithered through the great gaps in the floorboards or lying on top of her baby to keep him from crying while Border Ruffians ransacked the house? But when she was ten, Lara dutifully started a diary. Sitting next to her mother at the dining-room table, she would write about her day at Kaw Valley Eagle or how she rescued the meadowlark fledglings she'd found in the cornfield.

When she turned thirteen, the previous year, she also turned secretive. The privacy of the deserted Fremantle house became like a cloak of invisibility she could wrap around herself. Lara left her diary behind the mantel, where her mother wouldn't be able to find it, and she would sit in the east-facing master bedroom, where there wasn't a danger that Dad would see her flickering candle from the wheat field when she wrote in it. For the same reason, Chip and Curly hung out in the back parlor, the one used for receiving special visitors back in pioneer times.

Tonight, she and Chip wanted to retrieve the private things they'd left here. Chip was especially worried about his stash of dope, but Lara didn't want to lose her diary.

When they got to the coal chute, Chip undid the cover and slid down first. He waited at the bottom for Lara, who dallied: she was terrified, and didn't want him to know. For all the money they'd put into building a fancy house, the original Fremantles had left the basement unfinished. It had a dirt floor, where snakes and wolf spiders roamed. Lara didn't mind them so much in the daylight, but she didn't want to land on one in the dark.

“Come on, Lulu,” Chip yelled up at her. “We want to make it snappy.”

She shut her eyes, took a breath, and slid down the chute. He caught her at the bottom.

“Point the light on the ground. I don't want to step on a spider. And don't fool around with me, I don't like it,” she added as he crawled his fingers up her scalp.

They ran up the steep stairs to the kitchen. The house smelled like bleach, from yesterday's cleanup, but the acrid stench of cat spray underlay the bleach, making Lara sick to her stomach. Chip pushed through the swinging door into the dining room while Lara headed for the staircase to the second floor.

Her foot was on the first step when the kitchen door opened. She couldn't hold back a scream.

“Hello, Lulu.”

“Dad! What are you doing—”

“What am I doing here? More to the point, what are you two doing here?”

“It was a dare,” Lara said quickly. “Chip dared me that I was too chicken—”

“Lara, don't lie to me. If you don't want to tell me the truth, just keep quiet.”

Lara flushed and dug her nails into her palms so she wouldn't cry. Chip said he was sorry, they had left a few things here.

“So you have been breaking in here!” Jim said. “I tried talking to you about this Friday, and you were too cowardly to tell me the truth. How do you think that makes me feel? I was asked to keep an eye on this place, and not only did you take advantage of my responsibility here, you lied to me.”

When neither of his children spoke, Jim said, “And what ‘things' did you leave here? Dope? Don't tell me you've been letting Lulu smoke.”

“No, of course not. Me and Curly, we come over here sometimes.”

“After what you said Friday night? When I—”

“I told you Curly wasn't buying drugs for me. That's the truth.”

Jim breathed hard through his nose, then he turned to look at Lara. “And what were you coming here to get?”

Chip said, “She just tagged along for the adventure. She was going to watch from the upstairs window to see if you were coming, but you beat us to it.”

Jim's hard eyes stayed on his daughter for a second. Lara didn't know why Chip had lied for her, but she was too upset to say anything. Jim made Chip get his stash, which he'd stored inside a beat-up piano in the house's front parlor. When Chip and Curly got high, they'd play the piano. They thought it was excruciatingly funny to play songs where you could only get half the notes to come out.

“This is real,” Jim announced, smelling it. “I thought maybe you were harvesting the local weed. Where did you buy this?”

“From a guy in town, okay, Dad? Now you have it, does it matter?”

“Of course it matters, because even if I throw this out you'll just get more. Is that the life you think I want for you, breaking into other people's houses, getting stoned there?”

“What are you going to do? Tell Arnie Schapen to search me every time I drive past his place?” Chip spoke with a kind of fake jocularity that always got his father's goat.

Jim and Chip both knew Arnie would think he was in hog heaven if he caught one of the Grelliers breaking any law, but Jim was too angry to think clearly, so he said, “If that's what it takes to keep you from doing dope or breaking into empty houses, maybe it's not such a bad idea.”

At that, Chip lost his own temper. He flung open the back door and took off down the Fremantle drive toward the road.

Jim knew he'd overreacted, but he was still angry with both children. He glared at his daughter. “Were you in on this? Were you joining those drug parties?”

She shook her head. “I smoked some once, but I didn't like it. Anyway, Chip didn't want me to, he only let me because I begged him. I wanted to see what it was like. And we never hurt this house, so don't act like we're robbers or something.”

“Not robbers, housebreakers, and too ignorant to cover your tracks. Come on. It's past midnight, and you have school in the morning, so let's get home.”

Once they were outside, Jim closed the coal chute. He found a screwdriver in the pickup and rebolted the two-by-four to the cellar cover. When they were heading back home, Jim emptied the bag of marijuana out the window. Tijuana gold mixing with wild Kansas hemp—maybe they'd breed a wonderful hybrid that would bring a new generation of hippies to the area.

The truck passed Chip, trudging down the road. Jim was seldom angry, and never for long. The sight of his son walking through the snow in his sneakers made him feel ashamed. He swung down from the cab and apologized to Chip for losing his temper, but he couldn't apologize for throwing out the dope or caring about his kids breaking into the house. Chip climbed into the truck, but he stayed angry with Jim for a number of days.

Later, Jim wondered if his anger that night had been a catalyst for disaster. If I had kept my temper, if I had seen it from Chip's point of view, he would think over and uselessly over.