She Walks in Shadows (4 page)

She heard Nate throw off the covers, muttering, “What the fuck?” And then, sharper, “Abby!”

The two of them rushed downstairs, a shadow of the team they had once been when they were first trying to forge a life together out of the money they’d saved in college, him at the chem lab, her at the campus store. “I bet it’s our buddy Pierce,” Nate muttered, barreling through the kitchen, running into a chair in the dark. If it hurt, he didn’t show it. “He probably cooked up some radio-controlled boondoggle to mess with the crop. Probably aiming for the sprinklers. Or just trying to nuclear-waste the whole damn thing.”

Abigail did not think that sounded much like him. Ambrose might have enjoyed eating up the little farms around him, counting up his tripling acres with a glass of whiskey, but he hated parlor tricks, didn’t think he needed to lower himself to sabotage. She said nothing to Nate. It was better to let him cling to that bone if it kept him occupied.

Nate had his gun. Abigail had a fireplace poker. Her farm cats were skulking by the flower pots, making low, scratchy howls at something in the corn. Abigail followed him to the front as quietly as possible, her bare feet curling around dry stalks and kernels and poisoned insect corpses, but she had the feeling they would not find what Nate was looking for. They would not find any ruddy farmhand with a twistable neck, nor a small, broken, remote-controlled drone. Nate would periodically shush her and veer in a new direction, but Abigail knew there was no life out there. The field was so quiet, she could hear the cats’ growling. Though the air sure smelled strange — pungent and tart with a hint of curdled sweetness. It prickled her skin.

Between the rows, Nate turned and whispered, “There’s no one here.”

She could have told him so, but Nate had to know for himself before he’d turn around. Had to go all the way to the state border before he admitted that maybe he had missed the turn for Salt Creek Road. That was just his way. He liked being careful; she liked that about him.

“Maybe it was something on the road,” she said, so he would let them get back to the house. The thought of the road and the real world beyond the gravel driveway had reminded her that the children were alone. She had dreams about them growing up that way — little feral masters of the house, sunken and sullen and riding the dogs like wolves. “Maybe somebody blew his tire.”

Nate seemed to be chewing the whole interior of his mouth. “That wasn’t a tire, Abby.”

“You can look again in the daytime,” she tried.

“I’m gonna call up that son-of-a-bitch Pierce in the daytime, is what I’m gonna do,” said Nate. “Teach him if he thinks he can intimidate me.”

When they slunk back to the house, the boys were standing on the porch, the dogs at their heels. Zeke was trying to project his authority with his Little League baseball bat; Merrill was wiping his eyes. Teddy asked if a comet had crashed. Nate gave him a little push to the head and said, “Don’t get too excited.” Underneath the porch, the cats’ diamond eyes were shining.

Their harvest was surprisingly healthy that summer — bigger and greener than any others since they’d moved out of their south Lincoln bungalow three years ago and decided to make a more wholesome life in the country. Nate didn’t have the nutrient content analysis back yet, but when he took bites off the blond-haired cob, he said he knew. Abigail thought it tasted off — sour, like the air in the field since the crash that wasn’t a crash — but Nate said it needed processing and when was the last time she’d won any farming awards? Well, he was right about that.

And it was good to see Nate happy. She had never allowed herself to doubt him — before she married him she had asked herself,
Do I trust this man to lead this family?
and she had decided the answer was yes, come hell or tarnation — but it was still good to get good news.

“What kind of Frankenstein corn are you growing now, Gardner?” said Ambrose Pierce when they ran into him outside Horwell’s General Store, sipping a Dr. Pepper. “I thought you were all about that hippie organic tofu living and here you are, pumping your crop with steroids.”

“You’re the only one growing Frankenstein GMO corn,” Nate said, puffing out his chest. “Some of us haven’t forgotten what it means to be a real farmer, growing real food for a real family.” Ambrose wasn’t married. Nate had suggested he was gay, but he was not. “Guess you Big Ag types wouldn’t recognize real corn if it rose up and kicked you in the ass.”

Ambrose made a guffawing sound. “Aren’t you from Omaha?”

Nate shifted the bags in his hand and went to the truck and didn’t answer. But Ambrose caught Abigail by the wrist before she could follow and said to her, “Abby, something’s off about that corn. I don’t like it. I don’t know what
he’s
been doing, but you gotta get that shit cleared by the FDA.” A good wife would have stiffly told him he was just jealous, just sorry that he couldn’t quite yet eat up Nate’s land, but she must not have been a good wife. Nate unlocked the doors and shouted, “Abby! Let’s go!” The
“go”
had a punchy desperation to it, probably because that was the moment he saw Ambrose touching her hand.

So, Nate was already in a bad mood when they started the drive home. Zeke and Teddy had been late meeting them at the truck, and Merrill had knocked down a chocolate display at Horwell’s. Abigail understood. They were restless children. Sure, they had all the bicycling down country lanes that they could want, all the smashing of rotten pumpkins, but they needed people. They needed to look at things that weren’t stalks or clouds. Teddy, especially. She could see the look in his eyes getting pounded in deeper all the time: the look of a cornered animal.

“Did you get that nutrient analysis back?” Abigail asked and she really shouldn’t have.

Nate, chewing on a thumbnail, widened his eyes. “What?”

“For the corn.”

“Why would you ask me that?”

A welt of worry in Abigail’s stomach became a full-on ulcer as she searched the horizon — just corn and trees and ditch and road — for something that would answer Nate’s question to his satisfaction. “I just was wondering.” No, that wasn’t good enough. The ache didn’t stop.

“Did Pierce tell you to say that? Back at Horwell’s? Huh?”

Her mouth was opening and closing, but only breath was coming out. She heard something constrict in Nate’s ribs and he suddenly ripped the steering wheel to the right, pulling the truck to the shoulder of the road. She knew the boys were holding their breath, so she felt the need, then, to make some noise of protest on their behalf.

“Are you sleeping with him?”

“What?” Her voice broke. “Nate, the boys are right ….”

His shout punched down like a hammer of God. “Answer me, Abby! Was this some whore’s bargain? Said you’d jump into bed if he’d just cut your poor idiot husband a break?”

The radio was playing a mellowed-out beach-pop song by a local band that had made it out. They used to get her dreaming about coarse California sand from the anarchic desolation of Sokol Auditorium. This song always made her think of breaking surf, of drinks with plastic umbrellas. Maybe they should go on vacation. Maybe they should never come back.

“No,” she hissed. “You know I would never do that. You know I would never want to.” She nodded toward the backseat. “Can we
please
talk about this later?”

For five minutes, they all breathed together. Then Nate changed the station with a sudden strike of his hand, muttered, “Hate that song,” and drove back onto the road. So, the rest of the way they listened to Dr. Touchdown on KMKO out of Lincoln. “Wear them down,” said Dr. Touchdown. “The key is to wear down the defense, go for the throat, and don’t let up. Lights out. Bam!” From the backseat, Merrill echoed, very softly, “Bam!”

She was ready — no, not ready, never ready, but resigned — for a fight, but when they got home, Nate went into the field and started running the combine even though there was nothing to strip, anymore. He watched in a state of near-motionlessness. And Abigail watched him from behind the muslin curtain, and the boys watched her over the stained pages of their homework, and the dogs watched the boys with sad, bovine eyes. Boys and dogs alike asked for things — food, drink — and eventually, after the sun began to set, Teddy put down his American History book and asked for an explanation of Croatoan. When the Roanoke Colony disappeared, he said, they left that word behind. Yes, a sign post. Salvation, five miles south of Cripple Creek.

“Nobody knows,” said Zeke. “They probably got eaten by an Indian tribe.”

“Maybe they ran away,” Abigail said. “Maybe they wanted to.”

The cats were gone. She waited for them by their little bowls of dirt-colored pellets for a week, but they weren’t coming back. She had looked everywhere. She even peeked down into the well. She didn’t know why, exactly. Cats didn’t just jump into wells. Did a tiny piece of her think that perhaps someone —
who?
— had killed the cats and thrown them in? There was something down there, ding dong bell, but the flashlight revealed a collar, a yellow tag, a long nose. It was the dogs. She had last seen them the day before, pacing near the corn and whimpering. Nate had gone to tie them up and, she assumed, to untie them.

She was watching the kitchen clock tick toward, 3:30 and wondering how to tell the boys, when a silver Dodge Ram pulled up to the house. Like a crocodile, or a tyrannosaur, sidling up to its prey. Ambrose Pierce stepped out of the cab and she immediately calculated how long it would take Nate to get back from his meeting with Ticonderoga Mills.

“I haven’t seen you and the boys in town much.” Ambrose looked aside at the barely-tilting wind chimes. “Haven’t heard from you lately, neither.”

Abigail ground her teeth, head shaking slightly to the internal retinu
e of all the things she’d really like to say to Ambrose, to Nate. Finally, she conceded that “Nate’s been acting a little different, lately. Since that light came down ….”

“What light? ‘Different’ how?”

“Different” like standing in the sea of corn, humming at the sky? “Different” like telling Zeke he couldn’t go out for Junior League baseball this year, because he was “needed” at home? “Different” like picking up the phone and telling her sister that she wasn’t home when she was just around the corner, fixing dinner? No, that was more trouble than it was worth.

“Just different. He’s stressed. It’s hard, you know, worrying about feeding a family when your neighbor’s lying in wait, drooling over your property.” She gave him a look. He wasn’t fazed. He’d long-ago reconciled himself to the vulture’s life. “Maybe the water’s gone bad. All the fracking they’re doing out by the aquifer.”

Ambrose clicked his tongue, muttering something about “hippie bullshit,” then leaned in, putting his right hand on the door frame as if he owned the place, as if she wouldn’t have slammed the door on his fingers. His voice lowered. “Do you need help, Abby?”

“No, I don’t need your
help
. What kind of
help
could you give me?” She grabbed the door. “Nate’s coming home soon. I don’t want to be a witness in a murder trial.”

Actually, Nate didn’t come home for another hour. She heard his truck pull up, but he didn’t come in. When she ventured outside, he was standing and staring at the freshly scalped corn field with his keys dangling from his right hand, as if hypnotized by an inaudible sermon. She asked if he was all right, but her fingers wouldn’t quite rise to touch his arm. His exhale seeped out like a deflating balloon.

“What did the guy at the mill say?”

“Max Beecham is a motherfucker.”

“What?”

“Max Beecham doesn’t believe in us.”

Abigail hurried back inside. She called her sister’s cell, but it was off; called her house phone and only got her five-year-old niece. “Will you tell Mommy to call Aunt Abby? Aunt Abby in Cripple Creek.” She dropped the phone when she heard the porch squeak, but it was just the boys, who ditched their dusty backpacks, and started clapping and calling, “Here, boy! Here, boy!” Of course, no dogs answered.

All day, she’d been hoping that some vagabond, some wanderer, had snatched up the dogs in the middle of the night and dumped them in the well. Or that perhaps they’d been run over on the highway, or slain by a disease, or just spontaneously died — and that Nate had thrown the bodies in the well in an attempt to protect the boys from the reality of death. But when the boys were still mewling out in the field well after she’d called them in for dinner, Nate said, “Boys, I told you: They ran away. Told you we didn’t train them well enough. Probably halfway to Colorado by now.”