Driftless (48 page)

Cora looked quickly through the copies of shipping receipts and tax forms. “It’s them,” she said with satisfaction, smiling in a conspiratorial manner at Grahm. “Now we can nail those bastards to a wall.” Grahm returned the smile, then grew self-conscious and closed his face.

Leona laughed. “That’s the spirit,” she said.

“If we have the papers,” said Grahm, “we don’t need you. The papers prove everything.”

Tim Pikes took off his coat and laid it across the back of a chair. “Mr. Shotwell, proof applies well to mathematics but everything else is a matter of precedent and persuasion. By notifying the agriculture department of the existence of these papers and the illegal practices they serve to record, you’ve entered a world of litigious grief.”

Leona sat at the table. “We’ve received transcripts of all department activity as well as the files at the district court, and have drafted a petition to overturn an improper administrative ruling and reopen all proceedings. We’ve challenged the fine and have prepared a petition on your behalf asking for an injunction to cease and desist
against the cooperative as well as a civil suit addressing the prejudicial termination of your employment. A petition has been drafted for the removal of the administrative judge assigned to the investigation because of his prior association with the cooperative and other conflicts of interest, and we have outlined a preliminary petition to present to the attorney general and district court.”

As Leona named the documents, Tim pulled them from the briefcase and set them on the tabletop, with the blank lines above “plaintiff” circled in red ink.

“We don’t need help,” said Grahm. “We need justice, and I’m beginning to believe that justice is something that means nothing to the government or the people who work for it.”

“Everyone needs help, Mr. Shotwell,” said Tim. “And as Aristotle was fond of pontificating over two thousand years ago, justice exists only between those who are equally involved in making and enforcing laws. You’ve offended some very wealthy and powerful people, and they will do anything and everything to defend their positions of privilege.”

“This is the United States of America,” said Grahm, “or at least it used to be. ‘Positions of privilege’ means nothing to me and should mean nothing to judges and lawyers like you.”

“Mr. and Mrs. Shotwell, contrary to what you may think, the legal system was neither founded upon nor designed to reflect the common decency found in normal human relationships. It primarily works like the rules for a lunatic asylum. It tries to govern people driven insane by the inflated idea of their own worth. You’ve unfortunately become caught up in it, and the outcome is anything but certain.”

“What are you saying?” asked Cora.

“I’m saying that if you value your reputation in the community and want to avoid receiving anonymous death threats in the middle of the night, including threats against your children, and going to jail and losing your farm, you should pay attention to us.”

“But we’ve done nothing wrong,” said Cora.

“Telling the truth is always wrong if it threatens those for whom being wrong can never be true.”

“Who hired you?”

“Look,” said Tim, directly addressing Grahm. “You have a good life here—far better than most. You can work for yourselves, visit with your neighbors, and grow old watching your children become fully conscious adults. It’s unlikely you will ever go hungry and you can go to sleep nearly every night in each other’s arms. People have no right to wish for any more than that, and if they do they’re idiots. A good life is worth fighting for and Leona and I are presently your only way of fighting.”

“I don’t believe that,” said Grahm.

“We understand these problems,” said Leona, addressing Cora. “But first, it would be nice to get to know each other better. Our four children and our grandchildren are coming to visit in a week and we’d like for you and Grahm and Seth and Grace to come over for the afternoon. We live not far from here. We’re planning on lamb, if that’s all right. Tim wants to roast one on an open fire, but that seems extravagant to me. We’ve never done it before. I’m not sure what we should have to go with it. I’m unfamiliar with lamb. What do you think? We can talk about it later. I’ll call.”

“There are no guarantees, Grahm,” said Tim. “Something can always go wrong, but with our help you have a good chance of winning against American Milk. After several years of exhausting administrative remedies we will finally get into the district court and there will probably be a verdict in your favor, and a fine against the cooperative. Both will be appealed to a higher court and after five or six more years the fine will be reduced to an insignificant amount. But you’ll keep your farm and your reputation, and you’ll be able to take pride in knowing the good guys won a battle against institutionalized greed.”

“We don’t have bottled water,” said Cora, filling him a glass from the faucet. “Our water was tested, though.”

“Who is going to pay you?” demanded Grahm. “We don’t take charity.”

“We don’t give charity,” said Tim. “We’re mostly retired and can do what we want with our lives. This is something we want to do.”

Tim took a long drink of water and Cora said to Leona, “You have four children?”

“Yes,” said Leona. “Four children and ten grandchildren. You can meet every one of them next week.”

Tim put on his jacket and left a pile of papers on the table, indicating the places where Grahm and Cora needed to sign their names. Then, carrying his briefcase and coat, he returned to the passenger side of the green German car, with Leona holding his arm.

“I don’t think we should accept their help,” said Grahm, watching them drive away.

“We have to,” said Cora. “Under the circumstances, it wouldn’t be right to refuse.”

Seth and Grace ran downstairs, across the kitchen floor, and outside in urgent pursuit of something known only to them.

Cora went to the stove and continued cooking dinner. She listened to the sound of water coming to a boil, and for the first time in a long while the warm feeling of being safe glowed inside her, a lantern on the edge of a still lake. And now that the subject had been brought into the open where she could examine it—first in the shape of envy and then in the color of desire—she knew her mind quite well: she wanted more children.

RESEMBLANCE

R
USTY KNOCKED ON THE FRONT OF THE PARSONAGE IN WORDS and waited, then knocked again. While he was knocking the third time, Winnie walked around from the back yard where she had been working in her flower garden and asked, “May I help you?” Her hands and forearms were covered with dirt and she held a small trowel.

Rusty took off his seed cap and put it back on, the bill curving low over his eyes.

“Most people call me Rusty,” he said, a cigarette bobbing out of the corner of his thin mouth. “Rusty Smith.”

“I think I’ve seen you before,” said Winnie, staring at him uneasily. “Doesn’t your wife, Maxine, volunteer at the library in Grange?”

“Yup.”

“I’m Pastor Winifred. How may I help you?”

Winnie felt an instant and unexplained loathing for the shape and manner of the man standing in the yard. Something in the way he moved, his facial muscles and the attitude with which he stood in his silver-toed cowboy boots, set loose a primordial cascade of neural firing in her lower brain. She instinctually avoided eye contact, hoping to sever the connection between him and her emotions.

“Your last name Smith?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“I’m your uncle.”

Winnie dropped the trowel and backed away.

Rusty couldn’t help staring, recognizing in Winnie—despite her gender and tall, birdlike stature—several unmistakable features belonging to his brother, and these came as some surprise because before seeing them in her, he did not know that he remembered them
in Carl. He stepped forward, as though to draw closer to his own memories.

“I’m your uncle—Carl’s older brother. We should talk.”

“Why?” said Winnie, and again stepped backward, her long legs creating more space between them, separating herself from her memories.

“Didn’t know you had an uncle, did you?” asked Rusty. He flicked an ash from his cigarette.

“For years I hated my father,” said Winnie. All the twisted and fearful associations that her childhood had locked away in little wooden drawers migrated into the person standing before her. He truly seemed like the kind of man who set traps for others by luring them into despising him, and even as she recognized the bait as bait, she felt herself taking it.

“I’m afraid your father is dead.”

Winnie said nothing.

“You’re my niece,” said Rusty.

“Please go away.”

“I should show you something. Will you come?”

“No.”

“Yes you will. I can’t do this without you, Pastor Winifred. And even if you don’t want to cooperate I still need to do my part, don’t I? All these years, I haven’t been able.”

Rusty drove for more than an hour without speaking. Winnie sat on the far other side of the truck seat, staring out the window and concentrating on her breathing. On the north end of the dusty village of Domel, he pulled into an abandoned quarry, steering around pools of stagnant water, rock ledges, and rusting machinery, and parked next to a gate made of steel posts and barbed wire.

“Come on,” he said, dragging the gate aside.

Winnie stepped through and they walked uphill.

“There used to be a road here,” he explained. “It ran all the way west along the ridge. It’s grown over now. Somebody logged off the bigger trees. But the view of the horizon is the same as it was sixty years ago.” He stared into it for several minutes.

They continued up the hill, stopping twice for Rusty to sit on a
flat rock, rest his knees, and smoke. Scrub oak, sumac, and ash poked out of the sandy wasteland. Near the top, Rusty headed through a thicket of brambles. Winnie followed, and at a place that looked no different from any other place, he stopped and said, “This is it.”

“What?” asked Winnie.

“The place we grew up, your father and I. Those foundation stones—that’s where the house stood.”

“What happened to it?” asked Winnie, noticing five or six irregular stones jutting out of the ground in a ragged line, apparently the only signs of a once-existing homestead.

“Our dad set it on fire one night when he came home from town. He did it on purpose. We were all sleeping inside. One of our sisters woke up and Mother got us out. We stood right here and watched it burn to the ground with everything we owned inside. Carl tried to save his raccoon and was badly burned.”

“Did he save it?”

“It burned up in the attic. It was the middle of the winter and we were so cold we stayed here near the fire until some people from town came with blankets and clothes.”

“Many people have bad things happen to them,” said Winnie. “Some of those things hurt for a long time, but most people don’t use them as excuses to hurt others.”

“They aren’t excuses,” said Rusty. “This is the place where Carl and I grew up. It made us. The things that happened here can’t be helped and won’t be changed, and even if some of them were bad, they weren’t
all bad.
So I brought you here to say that however your father may have failed you, he did the best he could.”

“I’m in God’s family now,” said Winnie. “My father can’t hurt me any longer.”

Rusty leaned against a tree to take weight off his knees. “He did the best he could, and you can’t just go off and forget your people. It’s not right.”

“Your brother’s cruelty knew no limits. He left my mother when she was sick. He never had a thought for her, or me, and as much as I live, I live in opposition to him. The most important day of my life was at the foster home when I decided I could make my own life for
myself, and I walked away from those memories forever. Talking to you now makes me remember how I used to feel, and I hope to never feel that way again.”

“Maybe so,” said Rusty.

“You have no idea what it’s been like for me,” said Winnie. “You can’t possibly know what it’s like to see a better world—where all living things come together without fear. You can’t know what it’s like to see that the only thing preventing the Kingdom from coming is a corruption in your own heart, a lie in your own soul, and to know that your only chance to be part of something truly good is to separate yourself from what’s inside you. You can’t know what it’s like to be afraid you can never get far enough away, no matter how long you live, because that unredeemable ugliness is something you’ve inherited. And you can certainly never know what it’s like to go back to the birthplace of that festering terror and get reacquainted. I’m not strong enough to completely forgive him yet, and I don’t have to be.”

Rusty walked over to the tallest foundation stone he could find and sat on it. “You’re mistaken if you think I don’t know. What do you think coming here means? I’ve never been back. I couldn’t come before. But you need to know that people do things because they don’t know any better. They do the best they can.”

“I don’t believe that,” said Winnie.

“We’re related and that’s what counts,” said Rusty. “If you don’t get over whatever it is you think Carl did to you, you won’t feel right about all the things you will have to do in your own life.”

For the first time since leaving the parsonage, Winnie looked directly at him and said, “Your brother knew what he was doing and he did it anyway.”

“It was my fault, much of it.”

“What are you talking about?

“I’m talking about Carl. After we moved into town dad drank himself to death. Our mother took in laundry and did what she could, but it wasn’t enough. As the oldest, I hired out on a crew that cleaned boxcars for the railroad—they would hire children in those days. I sent money home every week. Later, I worked on a hog
farm on the other side of the county, and I still sent money home. But after a few years I stopped going home. I never went back. And by the time I was eighteen I’d stopped sending money. My mother didn’t know where I was and that’s the way I wanted it. I didn’t go back. Carl needed me, but I didn’t go back. I didn’t.”