Driftless (6 page)

He often walked at night and was familiar with the woods, streams, and valleys for miles around, including the heavily forested area inside the reserve. He knew which families owned dogs, where coon hunters hunted, the narrow ravine with a corn mash still boiling in late summer, and where the local militia—forty or fifty armed men—held meetings at night.

At the end of the field he followed a narrow path along the chain-link fence surrounding the Heartland Federal Reserve, stopped at
the rope bridge he had strung across the river, listened to the moving water, and eventually reached the gravel road.

Morning light grew in the sky.

On either side of the road were the DO NOT SPRAY signs he had put up two years ago. He had won that particular battle, but after he convinced the township to stop spraying herbicides they bought a radial arm shredder. The chewing device ripped through plants with ear-splitting efficiency, leaving saplings and bushes severed between two and four feet above ground, their decimated tops splayed out like beaten stakes. It was a war of factions. The road crew wanted safe, wide roads and managed ditches; Jacob was making more signs.

Some distance later he came to his driveway—two parallel tire-wide tracks trailing off through the grass and weeds and into the trees. He looked in his empty mailbox and straightened the bent flag. Geese flew overhead.

He followed the driveway half a mile to his ramshackle log home. It was the last remaining building in a former logging camp, and he had added onto it one room, porch, door, garage, loft, and solarium at a time. It now stood as a tribute to afterthought. Solar panels were mounted on the south- facing roof, and, beneath them, were storage tanks for rainwater. A composting outhouse sat partially hidden in honeysuckle and snow pine with a satellite receiver on top, providing access to the Internet. A dozen small round windows salvaged from boats were set into the front of the cabin, giving it a hivelike appearance.

Inside, Jacob showered and shaved and dressed in coveralls for work. He moved the carburetor and newspapers to the far side of the table, ate two tomatoes, and drank a glass of orange juice for breakfast.

Before leaving the house, he glanced at the framed picture of his wife taken two years before her death. She looked lovely, though because of too much sunlight the photograph was beginning to fade.

PAINTED BODIES AND ORANGE FIRES

I
NTIMACY HAD NOT ALWAYS BEEN DIFFICULT TO ACHIEVE FOR Grahm Shotwell and his wife, Cora. Not at all—until about a year ago, when finding a way to close the door on the rest ofthe world ago, when finding a way to close the door on the rest of the world became harder. Problems that couldn’t be solved kept stealing into their mutual space, making it impossible to experience each other with the spontaneous delighting freedom that they both desired. It was maddening to them both because it always seemed as though they should have the mental strength, the courage, to close the door and keep all the unwanted concerns outside. And they should be able to have the integrity to not blame each other for what neither of them could control. But they couldn’t. Banished from each other, they endured in their lonely spaces, and the grief was all the more unbearable because of their well-remembered history of comforting sensuality.

In fact, their relationship had been forged, as it were, in the furnace of physical inspiration, when Cora, a young woman working for her father’s insurance company in Milwaukee, attended a concert by the Barbara Jean Band with a couple friends. Dressed in a flaming red dress and heels, her black hair gathered on top of her head with long, waving strands falling along the sides of her face, she stood next to a folding table covered with Styrofoam cups, cold cider, and hot coffee. She surveyed the crowd and wondered what she was doing in a place that resembled a page out of a ten- year-old JCPenney catalog.

Her roaming eyes fell on a young man on the far side of the room, beyond the musicians, wearing a suit too large for him. He seemed almost comical as he attempted to negotiate his medium-sized frame through the room, armed with only rustic formality and a broad smile that flashed like fireworks from inside his neatly trimmed
beard. Many people apparently knew him and reached out to shake his hand, whisper, joke, and touch him as he tried to move around them, causing him to blush again and again in shy retreat.

His slow progress appeared as though it had been filmed earlier and was now being replayed at reduced speed, and it took him nearly five minutes to wend his way through the mostly-seated crowd. Unaware that such mannerisms evolved naturally from the habit of walking among large, excitable animals, she could not take her eyes off him, even after it became clear that his destination was the very table she was standing in front of. His slow movements seemed overly practiced. His oversized suit, she became convinced, was neither borrowed nor stolen, but a deliberate choice to cover up more of him—extra folds of material to hide within. It seemed his ambition, frequently obstructed by people who clearly enjoyed his company, might be to remain unnoticed.

He continued moving until he almost reached her and then stood on the edge of her personal space, looking at the floor. They continued standing this way until Cora realized he had come all the way across the room for a cup of coffee or cider and was now too shy to look directly at her, say what he wanted, or come close enough to reach for it. The realization that she was effectively blockading an entire field of refreshments with her own slender presence gave her—as soon as she recognized it—a surprisingly pleasant sense of power.

“Oh,” she said, moving to her left, “excuse me.”

Grahm stepped forward and captured a Styrofoam cup of coffee with his rough-looking left hand. They stood together without speaking for several minutes, sipping from their drinks. Grahm noticed the perfume evaporating from Cora’s neck, and Cora discovered an interesting pattern of swirling thread in his jacket sleeve, next to the button.

Left alone, they could discover no conversation. But out of the crowd, fate provided two young boys chasing a third. The pursued—running pell-mell in the direction of the exit door—was more concerned with his pursuers than with what lay directly in his path and was busily engaged in knocking chairs to either side of him and scrambling around them.

It seemed inevitable that all three would rapidly collide with Cora, who put out her one free hand in a pallid imitation of stopping traffic and grimaced in anticipation of being driven onto the field of drinks in an undignified collision of overwhelmingly social significance. Instinctively, she closed her eyes and held her drink away from her dress, and in that selfsame instant felt herself grasped about the waist, lifted into the air, and set down again. When she opened her eyes, she was on the other side of the bearded young man, while he absorbed the combined force of the rushing boys, gathering them into his arms and ushering them off again in another direction with the reproof, “Don’t run indoors, boys.”

Though her drink had not spilled, something was decidedly overflowing. Her first sensation issued from just above her hips, where she retained the impression of two gripping hands rearranging her place in the world. The next came from the realization that the man had taken time to set his own drink down, and now he drew it back to his mouth, his eyes twinkling in amusement.

“I can’t breathe,” she said, unsure if this was either a legitimate concern or an appropriate topic of conversation.

He smiled, unable to find anything to say.

“I’m Cora,” she said.

“I’m Grahm Shotwell,” he said, and his voice expanded like summer.

“Pleased to know you,” said Cora. She offered her hand. Grahm took it, entangling them in a mutually inquisitive texture of fingers and palms. The most primitive parts of themselves immediately began speaking to each other, without permission. Their imaginations entered caves deep in unexplored forests, and joined painted bodies dancing around orange fires. The thin membrane keeping the watery world of dreams from diluting the hard substance of reality stretched to breaking. Through a quick organization of bodily fluids, Grahm’s face turned bright red, and Cora tried to pull her hand away but found she couldn’t move it.

“Oh, no,” she said.

“Let’s find a place to sit down,” said Grahm.

So began an acquaintance that in many ways proved too strong
for them both. And though they fought bravely against falling foolishly, pointlessly in love, they remained hapless victims. Even their most venomous arguments, accusations, declarations, and final good-byes resulted only in bringing them closer together, clinging to each other in exhausted defeat. Episodes of soaring exhilaration were succeeded by evenings of heroic despair—depressions so dank, clammy, and dark it seemed they would live the rest of their lives underground.

The one hundred miles of expressway and sixty-eight miles of back roads separating them became so familiar that it sometimes felt as though they lived in vehicles. During one emotionally momentous month Grahm drove to Milwaukee twenty-one times.

There was always something left unsaid. Telephone bills arrived in envelopes with extra postage. Their need for each other grew at a pace impossible to appease, like disease feeding on its own symptoms. They tried to save themselves by making rules: times to call and topics never to discuss because they contained labyrinths of meaning. They bought candles and vowed to let the burning of them determine the boundaries of their lovemaking, hoping in this way to leave room for all the other things they weren’t getting done. But they always forgot to light them, or ignored them when they burned out.

Cora hoped to be able to transplant Grahm from his rural surroundings into her clean, comfortable, and convenient urban apartment. But Grahm could not be separated for very long, it seemed, from his 246 acres of rocky, hilly ground and forty black and white spotted cows. It was as though he had been born with two umbilical cords—one attached to his mother, successfully severed, and the other to his great-grandfather’s farm.

Farming provided Grahm with a mission as urgent as it was unquestioned. The duty to save the family business infused him with an unwavering sense of his own importance, and he never struggled with problems of identity or other social anxieties. He was indispensable to his own quest. It was as if his ancestors gathered on an hourly basis to communicate from the Other Side:
We’re counting on you, Grahm.
Even the land seemed to conspire with the dead to
gain his unconditional loyalty, and as a result he simply revered the forty-acre stand of old- growth maple trees at the back of his farm and walked through it as if it were an ancient cathedral.

“It isn’t fair,” she complained. “My work, friends, family, everything that is me is here. Why should your life be more important than mine?”

“It isn’t,” he said. “But I have cows. You can’t just put out food for them as if they were cats.”

“When will I see you again?”

“I’ll call tomorrow.”

“Don’t leave now.”

“I have to.”

“Wait, I don’t want you to drive alone.”

It seemed the only way to end the madness was for Cora to move out of Milwaukee and into the farmhouse, which she did. She gave up her job with the insurance company, gave up her apartment and the friends she had made over the years but never saw since attending the performance by the Barbara Jean Band. She even gave up her family name, not wanting to be bothered with a hyphenated future, yet had every intention of going back to work after settling into her new home.

But settling took longer than she had anticipated. All of a sudden there were two children two years apart and enough responsibilities to fill two lifetimes. A natural process that began with vague, alluring images on the back wall of her mind ended in the numbing details of daily living, the currency of dreams spent on cooking meals, doing laundry, and making ends meet. Whatever remained of her youth evaporated in the worried heat rising from unending physical movements.

GATHERING EVIDENCE

C
ORA TOOK OVER THE FINANCIAL AFFAIRS OF THE FARM AND AT once became alarmed when she examined the records, which Grahm kept in shoeboxes in the bedroom closet.

“We’re going broke!” she exclaimed.

“Farming isn’t easy,” said Grahm, trying to coax her back to the bed and away from the ocean of papers spreading over the bare wooden floor like great sheets of sea foam.

“Grahm, stop. We aren’t being paid for our work. For crying out loud, who sets the price of our milk?”

“It’s complicated,” said Grahm.

Over the next several months Cora decided to find out how complicated it was, and she began pouring over receipts and canceled checks and consulting with the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection and the local chapter of the National Farmers Union. The answers seemed clear enough: a century of government policies directed at favoring industry at the expense of the rural economy was still achieving its goal, reducing farmers from 70 percent of the population to 2 percent. And what the government did not accomplish through laws and regulatory boards was completed by giant agribusiness.

She confronted Grahm in the barn as he went from cow to cow attaching the milking machine to the animals’ soft, leathery udders.

“It’s all wrong,” she said, balancing her daughter—an uneasy child—between her right arm and hip. “Our milk prices are set by the people buying it, with government help.”

“It’s always been like that,” he said.

“It’s unfair,” said Cora. “Every year the price of milk in the stores goes up while the farm price doesn’t change. The people selling to us and buying from us are making money. We aren’t.”

Grahm looked at his hands. He tried to keep his life manageable by limiting his attention to things he could control. Open discussions of government agricultural policies caused him great discomfort. His otherwise reasonable and beloved grandfather had been so sure that the big chemical and seed companies were single-mindedly undermining his livelihood and his health that he occasionally exploded in apoplectic fits of red-faced fist waving at the dinner table. In his declining years his grandfather imagined corporations taping his telephone conversations, filming his trips into town, and discussing his farming methods behind mahogany desks in St. Louis.