Q Road (34 page)

GEORGE HAD LEARNED OVER THE YEARS TO RELAX WHEN
he couldn't sleep, to lie still and let himself drift, to let his body recover for the next day's work. Tonight he lay quietly and tried not to think about his barn and David. Instead he thought of the day his first wife left him, thought of all those buttons on the yellow dress she wore. There were twenty-two buttons, he remembered, because instead of listening to her he'd counted the tiny black buttons, which he thought made her look like a cluster of black-eyed Susans. Back then he'd assumed that once you got married you stayed married. After Carla left the first time, she did return, but then she just kept on leaving until she was finally too exhausted from all that leaving to come back.

When Rachel got up and left the bed, George kept his eyes closed so he wouldn't see her walk out. There had been one bit of good news coming out of this day: Parks had stopped just shy of pointing out that Margo and Johnny must have run off together.
Despite himself, George had always suspected that Rachel had killed and buried her mother, and his feeling about it grew every time he saw her digging in her garden with a round-end shovel. He could well imagine a scenario in which Rachel's killing her mother would have been justified, but he was relieved that he no longer had to. It made all the sense in the world that Johnny was somehow responsible for Margo's disappearance.

If Rachel were still beside him, he'd stop faking sleep and turn to her, wrap an arm around her and smell her hair, and she would move closer and put one of her strong arms around him. Even if she didn't love him the way he loved her, she seemed at times to desire his body as simply and wholeheartedly as she desired this piece of land beneath them. When Rachel didn't return to bed right away, George figured she'd gone outside. She would have no part of lying still and faking sleep. When she couldn't sleep, she wanted to be fully awake, making love or working or just sitting in her garden waiting for an animal, as she sometimes did all through the night. He never followed her outside on those nights. He felt too much for her already, and if he watched her sitting silently in the dark, his heart might burst.

Just as he raised his arms to adjust his pillow, he heard a rifle crack so close outside that he thought he'd been shot. He lay still until he heard Rachel's voice below the window, then he switched on the bedside lamp and got up slowly so as not to lose his balance, as sometimes happened when he stood quickly. George went around the bed to the window, opened it, and rested on the sill, letting cold air into the room. He continued to hear Rachel's voice but saw only the glimmer of her rifle lying in the wet grass. George pushed up the window screen and stuck his head out in time to see Rachel push David down beside the concrete steps. As the boy lifted himself onto his elbows, she kicked him. At the realization that David was alive, George felt a kind of congestion leave his chest, the way a mouthful of horseradish cleared the sinuses.
George thought David was too good a boy to be treated the way Rachel was treating him. George had never in his life attacked another person, and he would never hit David. But it made sense for somebody to be angry. David had destroyed something irreplaceable. David, at his tender age, had already done something he would always regret.

George thought that a boy who knew regret might listen to the kind of stories Old Harold used to tell, and might even make sense of them in a way George never had been able to. George might try telling David that the people around here had been wrong to send away the Indians a century and a half ago, and that the school board had been fools to send away that widowed teacher, because she might have taught those people something new, might have inspired them to see things differently, the way Rachel had inspired George. George would tell David that if this place was going to survive, the farmers needed a new way of seeing, a new way of farming, maybe a new crop, because clearly with fellows in Iowa getting double his yields, corn and bean farming wasn't long for this region. George wondered if maybe there was a way to combine farming and gardening; he knew some farmers were trying green beans. And there were the oddball crops he'd read about in the farming magazines—organic carrots, hybrid apples, ginseng that grew in the woods. Hadn't he heard something about a special kind of popcorn? Beneath the window, Rachel kicked the boy again.

George had always figured that when corn and beans failed, it would signal the arrival of that monster he'd been watching for at the horizon all these years. He'd always imagined the monster reaching out for him in winter, in the form of bills he couldn't pay, and he'd never considered that he'd do anything other than admit defeat. But maybe he could put up a fight. If he could slay this beast, or if he tried his damnedest, anyhow, then he might survive into the future. Maybe the future would arrive silently and mysteriously, the way Rachel had arrived outside his door on that spring
day, full of anger and possibility. Perhaps the future wouldn't knock, but would just stand out there waiting to be noticed, maybe was standing there now. If the future were here, then it could be time to start harvesting those walnut trees his grandmother had planted. How much would they be worth now? A few hundred dollars a piece? A few thousand for the taller, straighter ones? George wasn't surprised when Rachel stopped kicking David, helped him up, and hugged him.

After Rachel and David went inside through the mudroom door, George put on his jeans. He intended to join the two downstairs, but when he reached the landing, he looked up and noticed that the access panel to the window room had been moved. Instead of following the sound of voices, he climbed the wall rungs as he hadn't done in years, shoved the panel aside, and pulled himself up into the dark room. He looked south, to the end of the line of roadside walnut trees, where a pool of orange coals glowed. From here the barn's disappearance was as shocking as the river slithering away downstream, never to return. He looked south and west and assured himself he could make out the length of the dark serpent, but he knew this house was not the same without that barn. Beyond the burning coals glowed the lights of Greenland, which seemed to stretch farther in all directions than he remembered. A string of lights headed west along M-96, toward Kalamazoo. George ran his hand along the bottom of the window frame and found that the picture of the teacher was still stuck where his grandfather had left it decades ago. George didn't bother to look at it in the dark; he remembered the woman well enough.

George considered that he might rebuild that barn after all, just for the hell of it. What was involved in building a barn besides more money and more work? His great-great-grandfather had been a mere mortal. So what if it would take George ten years? So what if they never painted the house or got insulated windows or an electric clothes dryer? So what if the new barn could go up in flames
just as quickly as the old one? Tom Parks would undoubtedly get a kick out of George's building a new old-fashioned barn. Milton would help too, so long as he was allowed to see the new barn as a sort of museum. George would tell Milton that Greenland was becoming the town of born-again barns, and surely Milton would appreciate the holy implications of that! If George's grandfather were still alive, he would help. After all, Old Harold was the man who replaced and glazed these windows forty years ago. And for what practical purpose? A 270-degree view of what was gone and what remained? A man like Harold could forgive George for loving Rachel. His grandmother would not forgive him. For his grandmother, George would plant new walnut trees, two or three for each one he harvested to pay for building the new barn.

Of course, an identical new barn wouldn't really be the same as an old one. While the original had been built as a practical affair, George's rebuilding the same would be a defiant act. Frivolous, even, the way that keeping cattle had seemed frivolous to the deer-hunting Potawatomi, the way that building a window room had seemed frivolous to neighbors in 1834. George had always considered himself a practical person, but the practical thing now would be to sell the place for subdivisions. If the future was going to be Rachel and keeping the land, then it was also bedspring fences, crazy Indian gardens, overgrown lawns, experimental crops, and all kinds of disapproval, from neighbors new and old. Now, George thought, if he could find enough of them, he'd build a new cow pasture out of nothing but bedsprings.

SHORTLY AFTER SHE WENT TO BED IN THE SPARE ROOM AS
usual, Elaine Shore heard a sharp noise like a gunshot. She got up, put on her bathrobe, turned on the hall light, and went and sat again in the breakfast nook. Across the street, in the dim light at the Harland's side door, she made out the black-haired girl. She wore a man's shirt that hung almost to her knees, and she was hugging a boy, hugging him as though he were a lost son who'd been abducted by aliens shortly after birth and who had finally been allowed to return home. As tightly as she clutched the boy, Elaine figured that the girl didn't realize she had to be careful with abductees, for they'd been through a kind of physical trauma the rest of us could not imagine. It was miraculous that he'd even survived the crash, let alone made his way down the road to the Harland House. In the upstairs window, Mr. Harland was backlit by a small lamp, looking down on the two below. Elaine felt a spark in her chest, which expanded into a lightness she had not experienced
in years. Maybe Elaine could help the boy somehow, advise the Harlands how to care for his delicate condition. She watched until the two went into the house and Mr. Harland pulled his head inside and closed the window. Afterward, Elaine could not hold on to her feeling of lightness, and before long she wasn't even sure what she'd felt. She got up and stood before the wooden spice rack over the stove, and her chest swelled with anger toward those glass-stoppered bottles. She never used mace in anything. Not fennel either. Even chili powder seemed suddenly useless. She wanted to throw those bottles down with enough force to break the glass, but instead she carefully placed them all in the garbage receptacle, tied up the quarter-full bag, and walked outside to place the bag in her trash container. As the kitchen light came on at the Harlands', Elaine stepped back into her own house, wiped her terry-cloth slippers on the mat, locked the door behind her, and sat down again. She crossed her arms over her chest to hug herself as she planned her escape from this place. She did not want to be a pioneer; she wanted to be comfortable. She clutched a breast in each hand and gently squeezed.

OFFICER PARKS HAD DRIVEN BY THE HARLAND HOUSE
, intending to tell George the good news, that he'd seen David, but the lights were out and he didn't want to wake George if he was managing to sleep after all this. When Parks later came across Sally walking up Queer Road from the direction of the Barn Grill, he turned the cruiser around, stopped beside her, and reached across to open the door. She got in automatically, as though she had been expecting him to come by. As she slid onto the seat, her silvery hair flashed in the dome light and she seemed to Parks like some element of nature, like the woolly bears migrating, like birds traveling mindlessly south. When you picked up a spider, it showed no sign of surprise, but just kept walking on your hand and then up your arm if you let it. Sally was an animal that had ended up in Greenland Township the way a woolly bear might get stuck in some kid's science project shoe box. Parks was glad nobody else was on the road, because giving someone a ride was against the rules and,
strictly speaking, nobody but another cop should sit in the front seat of the cruiser without prior approval.

Parks said, “Milton told me he took you home.”

“I walked back, but Milton wouldn't serve me.”

“I saw your son,” Parks said.

Sally nodded.

Though Parks didn't generally allow smoking in his car, he didn't object as Sally shook out and lit a menthol cigarette. Sally didn't speak again and neither did Parks, even as he pulled into her driveway, got out of the car, and went around the outside to open her door. He walked into the house with her as though it were the most natural thing.