The Virgin of Small Plains (16 page)

“So which one of you guys shit in Patrick’s boot, huh?”

“Hello!” said Gracie, offering her only word.

The three of them hitched rides on her arms and shoulders for the trip back into the kitchen for breakfast. On the way, she noticed something Patrick had missed in his rush to leave her house. “Hey, he forgot his sunglasses, guys.” The shades sat on the kitchen table where he had left them. She knew he was going to be pissed as soon as he turned east into the rising sun and had to squint to see the highway.

“Serves him right,” she told the birds, “for talking mean about you.”

As she distributed fruits and nuts into their bowls—while eating almost as much as she gave them—Abby complained, “Do you know what that big jerk said to me? He said I should marry him because nobody else would want me, can you believe that?”

She carried the birds and bowls out to her screened-in porch so they could eat atop their perches. Every spring, she brought over tropical plants from her nursery, hung mirrors and toys from the rafters, and turned the porch into an aviary for them.

“Next time?” she told the birds, feeling angry at him all over again. “Aim for both boots.”

Chapter Twelve

Memorial Day.
All sorts of people went home for Memorial Day.

That’s what Mitch Newquist told himself as he stood with one hand on the gas pump and his other hand propped on the side of his Saab. As gasoline poured into the tank, he stared at a highway marker at the entrance to an interstate only a few dozen yards away, and tried to make up his mind. Go? Not go?

“Your mother passed away yesterday, Mitch,”
was how the phone call from his father had begun. That had been way back at the end of January. It was now Memorial Day, the last day of May.
“She got confused and wandered out into the blizzard last night. Rex Shellenberger and Abby Reynolds found her in the cemetery behind our house. She froze to death. I thought you’d want to know.”

Mitch hadn’t known whether to laugh or cry. His mother was dead, which ought to produce tears, he supposed. His father had “thought you’d want to know.” Which was almost as “funny” as his dad using Rex and Abby’s last names, as if Mitch wouldn’t have recognized them otherwise.

He had supposed, as he had stood in his house holding his telephone and not saying anything, that “funny” was the wrong word to use to describe his father’s approach to him, but he was damned if he could think of the right one. Ironic? Gratuitous? Finally, he landed on “cruel,” which seemed—and felt—accurate.

“What was she doing out in the snow?” he asked his father.

“One of the damned nurses left the back door unlocked.”

“I’m sorry. When is the funeral?”

“Tuesday. You think you’ll come?”

“I don’t know, Dad. I’ll think about it.”

“If you have to think about it,” his father said, sounding suddenly cold and furious, “then don’t bother coming. She was your mother, for heaven’s sake.”

Mitch stood alone in his house and shook his head over the old man’s words to him. It was unbelievable. Feeling the old bitter resentment and fury rise, he retorted with all the heat that had been missing from his father’s tone. “You don’t think there’s anything to think about, Dad? Nothing at all to consider before I come back? Doc will be at her funeral, won’t he? And Nathan. You seriously think there’s no good reason to think about anything before I just show up there?”

“Bygones,” his father shot back at him.

“Bygones?”
Mitch laughed, a loud, bitter bark of laughter. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Those two sons a bitches lied about me. They were going to accuse me of murder. They ruined my life, or would have if I had let them do it, and neither you nor my mother raised a hand to help me defend myself against them.”

“What are you talking about? We got you out of town!”

“
Ran
me out of town, you mean.”

“We put you in a good school, we saw to your every need…”

“Stop. Just stop. Do you really think I can just sail back into town and let bygones be
bygones
?”

“Do as you please, Mitch,” his father said, and hung up on him.

When he called his father back to say he wasn’t going, Mitch had not felt any need to explain his decision. He didn’t tell the old man that he had realized that if he went back after all these years he would become the center of attention instead of the woman whose funeral it was. Mitch had given his mother the only measure of respect he knew she would appreciate: He had allowed her funeral to be all about her. And he had decided he would drive down on the next Memorial Day to see the grave, when nobody was expecting him, and he would stay out of everybody’s way, and there wouldn’t be any fuss.

At least, that was the plan.

He was halfway to fulfilling it. More than halfway, actually, since he stood at the intersection of I-70 and Highway 177. To the north was Manhattan, to the west lay Denver, and toward the east was Kansas City, where he had lived for the past seven years. Small Plains was straight south from where he stood. If he remembered correctly, the cemetery was on 177 north of town. He could run in, take a look, and then get right back in his car and head home without even having to drive through Small Plains. There were only a few more miles to go to get there, and then he’d be done with it. But what was the point of this trip, he asked himself for the hundredth time? Hell, he wasn’t even taking flowers, because he didn’t want to leave any sign he’d been there. Whether or not he visited made no difference to his mother now, and maybe had never made any difference to her. And nobody else, including his father, would ever know, so why go at all?

“You’re being ridiculous,” he told himself.

He was going because something inside of himself demanded it.

Some hole in him needed to be filled by the basic act of standing at his mother’s grave, that was all.

The pump clicked, telling him the tank was full. He replaced it in the holder, took his receipt, shook his head over the price, and then got back behind the wheel, his hands smelling of gasoline. But as he drove toward the ramp with four choices of directions he still didn’t know which one he would take—until the Saab seemed to point itself straight south.

Within minutes, he was driving deep into the Flint Hills, where he was born.

It wasn’t the only time that day that events seemed to take him over.

At no point on the drive from Kansas City did Mitch ever once entertain the idea that Abby’s face might be the first he’d see upon arriving back “home.” If anything, he hoped to avoid her, altogether. But when he happened to notice a green-and-white sign with an arrow that said
ABBY’S LAWN & LANDSCAPE
, and it was only two miles from town on Highway 177, his turn signal seemed to go on by itself. Again, his car seemed to have a mind of its own, turning off the highway and then maneuvering onto a narrow, paved street, which quickly turned into a dirt and gravel road.

And suddenly, there he was, kicking up dust behind him, like a farmer.

Just because the sign had her first name on it didn’t mean it was her business.

Or any business of his, he reminded himself.

But still his car kept going down the road that was lined on either side by brown fence posts strung with barbed wire. He remembered what it felt like to dig holes for posts like those, and to drive them in all day. He remembered the feel of the thick leather gloves the men wore to handle the wire, and the cuts and blisters he used to get in spite of the gloves. He recalled the huge, greasy, delicious noontime meals the “hands” ate, all stopping work at the same time to troop into a ranch woman’s kitchen or into the café in town.

The grassy fields were full of wildflowers he couldn’t identify—purple, yellow, pink, and white ones. Red-and-white Hereford cattle dotted the fields on one side of him; black-and-white cattle, a Hereford and Angus mix, grazed on the other side. Every now and then his wheels scared birds out of the grass on the shoulder. The birds—meadowlarks? Mitch almost remembered what they were—fluttered up and away from him.

He found himself regretting his urge to come now, when the Flint Hills were at their most stunning, especially now in the fresh light of a spring morning. He’d forgotten how gorgeous this area could be at certain times of year, in certain light, in pleasant weather. Maybe he hadn’t even noticed the beauty when he was a kid. Maybe it had been something he had taken for granted, like fresh eggs, rodeos, and dogs that were allowed to run loose. But now, seeing it so many years later, and through adult eyes, it struck him that he had lived his childhood in the heart of an impressionist painting. It galled him to have to admire it. He wished he had come, instead, in the midst of harsh winter or searing summer, when only a diehard Kansan could have loved the daunting landscape.

Mitch rolled his car windows down to let the fresh air flow through.

His ears ate up the sounds of his wheels moving over gravel, of wind through grass, of birds and insects singing. He stopped the car in the middle of the road and turned off the engine, craving to hear more.

After a few moments, he started the car again.

In the few hundred yards since he had turned off the highway, he had learned that the trip was going to be painful in ways he hadn’t expected. He had forgotten how much he had loved a lot of his own childhood, how good it had felt to live in the heart of a huge country, with land spreading out in every direction. He had forgotten what it was like to climb to the top of one of the high flat hills and be able to see into four counties, what it was like to be able to walk or ride anywhere for miles around, and always run into people who knew him. He had forgotten what it was like to feel safe. He had forgotten what it was like to feel loved, if not convincingly by his own parents, then by an entire community.

It was too painful. He nearly turned the car around to go back to the city.

But then he saw a second small green-and-white sign with an arrow pointing north.

He already had on dark sunglasses. Now he reached across his car seat to grab his Kansas City Royals baseball cap and put it on. He felt slightly idiotic, like a spy in disguise. But the last thing he wanted was a sudden meeting with the girl he’d left behind. If “Abby’s Lawn & Landscape” was
that
Abby, and she happened to be driving down this road going the other way, he wanted to be able to sail past her without being recognized.

The girl he’d left behind…
in bed.

Cut that shit out, he told himself. But not before an image of a naked sixteen-year-old girl flashed through his inner vision, making him feel like a dirty old man.

Mitch tugged the brim of his cap down tighter over his forehead.

He realized he was there. Just ahead on his left, there was a fenced property on which he saw a small white house with green shutters, a screened-in porch to one side, and a front porch with a white swing on it. He also spotted a barn that had been converted into a plant nursery. He saw an entire field of young trees and shrubs, and what looked like a field of wildflowers that had been planted on purpose.