This New and Poisonous Air (16 page)

“Then why?”

He wiped bile from his mouth with the back of his hand. “For the same reason you are not touched by the plague, I suppose—because the world has found some sympathy.”

“That seems a dangerous thing to believe, Herr Adle,” she said. He did not respond, and Illinca didn’t force him. Instead she considered the circle of wooden beasts again—wondering if they’d somehow provided her protection, if the gravers had understood them not as toys but as talismans. She decided she would leave them on the road, just as they were and wondered what some other traveler would make of their configuration. What mystery would he imagine had been enacted here?

“If you’re strong enough,” she said, “we should walk. We need to find a house or barn where we can spend the night.” Herr Adle’s soft cheek lay against a stone, and he did not move. His eyes no longer searched for her, but instead seemed to silently ask what could be the point of traveling now that there were clearly no Irontooths to be found, no visiting to be done? Illinca drew tall in her new velvet dress. The point, she understood, was to do what was necessary—to move as a poison in a poisonous world. If they traveled far enough, maybe they’d find a part of the country where the air was kinder and Herr Adle could begin to recuperate. She would not let him die. Too many had died already. And if the pestilence had spread to all corners of their country? Illinca would find a bridge or perhaps a boat to ferry them. She understood there were solutions to problems like this and a real traveler would find a solution, so she took Herr Adle’s cold hands and started to pull with all her strength, slowly at first, dragging him down the road behind.

NO HORSE WOULD APPROACH the McCormick threshing machine once its steam engine had clattered to life and shot an antique column of coal smoke into the pale autumn sky. Bill had to put the skittish animals in the stable and pull the grain wagon into place himself, hoisting one shoulder against the leather harness and dragging the wagon to a spot beneath the thresher’s tin arm. His new wife, Minarette, looking dollish in her city clothes, watched him work from behind the rippled glass of the farmhouse window, sipping coffee from a Chinese cup. The McCormick shook the ground as its flywheel quickened, and Bill fed sheaves of newly harvested wheat into the mouth, listening as the internal rakes and shakers cut grain heads from straw and then banged the seed from the chaff. When a river of golden wheat had begun to spill from the arm into the wagon, he mounted the engine that was attached to the thresher by train tongue and canvas belt and climbed through heavy smoke to reach
the platform where the throttle provided some control over the leviathan.

Bill hurried the work, more concerned with the road than the harvest and keeping an eye on the strip of dirt that led to town, hoping to glimpse a rising trail of wagon dust. He anticipated a visitor, his boyhood friend Calvin Hascomb, come to say goodbye before heading off to divinity school in Toledo, but it was already late in the afternoon—the light had gone golden—and Bill was no longer sure that Cal would come. In that event, he told himself he would continue to work the thresher—this day and then the next, until harvest was done. Then he would help his father ready the farm for winter. This had been their pattern since he was ten years old. But when he pictured Cal departing without paying final respects, the sun beating down on his icy blond hair and clear eyes fixed on an invisible point in the horizon, Bill found he could barely lift another sheaf.

The McCormick bucked hard against its rotating belt, and Bill adjusted the throttle, reducing the flow of steam enough to temper the drive wheel. He wanted to kick the thing for requiring such attention. The newer, more urbane thresher, made by the J. I. Case Company, had broken down days ago, and Bill’s father had cursed its modernity in Old World Dutch as he stalked off to the barn to pull the tarp off the old McCormick. Bill stood by the horse trough with his hands stuffed in the pockets of his trousers, one boot heel digging nervously at the dirt, and watched as the McCormick emerged from the dark hold of the barn, wagon wheels slowed by mud, spokes strung with woolly cobwebs. “That’ll probably reap one of us before harvest is through,” Bill called to his father. The old man ignored the comment, clenching his jaw and pushing the machine further into the light.

The thresher was the size of a grand piano turned on its side and painted crimson red, and over its hundred-odd years of service, it had developed a frightful personality and a talent for toying with any steam engine that powered it. The McCormick could grip the canvas rotating belt hard at times, causing the engine’s flywheel to stick and squeal, building up an excess of high-pressured steam, then just as suddenly, it would release the belt so the engine would nearly burst. In this way, it had taken four of Bill’s uncle’s fingers during the harvest of 1902 when it had overheated the iron cylinder and finally blown the boiler, sending jets of hot steam and shrapnel in every direction and melting the very flesh of Uncle Dean’s hand into something that looked like an overgrown cherry pit.

The incident occurred only three years after the flood had driven the Von Stolt family up from Illinois to the dryer plains of Ohio, during which time, Bill had witnessed all manner of calamity from floating houses to starving herds and had come to believe that traveling between the States of the Union involved passage through levels of watery Purgatory. It was also on that cross-country trip that he found a crate of books, miraculously dry and balanced on a steep rock—these were French novels translated into English, and even before he could read, they became his most important possession, talismans rescued from the rushing waters. Perhaps it was because those books came from the end of the world, he thought, that they eventually provided him with a temporary exit.

He sounded out words from the flood books for Uncle Dean as the poor man convalesced in the upstairs bedroom, left arm no longer ending in a cherry pit, but a wad of cotton gauze that sprouted blood roses on the hour like an ornate German clock. When Dean got frustrated with the boy’s stops and starts, he would grab the
book from Bill and read aloud. “Mr. Phileas Fogg lived, in 1872, at No. 7, Saville Row, Burlington Gardens, the house in which Sheridan died in 1814.” Dean grimaced at this sentence, barely awake. “You see there, boy,” he said. “There isn’t anything worth reading in these. Just a bunch of details about rich people who don’t even live in America.”

Bill took the book from his uncle’s good hand and ran a finger over the embossed cover. “This one’s about a hot-air balloon that travels around the world,” he said, “and this other’s about a submarine.”

Dean coughed. “Bring me one about good farm life and then we’ll see.”

His wounds went septic after a week, and he ended up throwing himself down the steep farmhouse stairs and dragging his body into the snow, which he attested felt like a bed in Heaven’s finest mansion. Dean went mad from the poison in his blood, and Bill suspected that his father, in his secret heart, had appreciated the service the McCormick provided. The machine left him, after all, with half a brother but in full control of the family farm.

Bill, nearly nineteen and more savvy at farming than Dean had ever been, tried to reason with his father, saying they could repair the Case threshing machine, but the old man merely scowled over the tops of his wire-rim spectacles—blue eyes like the centers of twin gas flames. He slid one hand along the McCormick’s belt, jockeying the flywheel, and said that when he was a boy they’d pounded wheat on a threshing floor using oxen. Compared to that,
any
machine, even a dangerous one, was a convenience. “By the time we fix that Case, the wheat will have rotted in its sheaves,” he said. “The McCormick hurt Dean. That’s the truth. But Dean wasn’t watchful. My brother would have let water burn in a pot.”

So the red McCormick was put into active service once again, positioned in the barnyard far enough from the chicken coop and the apple orchard where the sheep grazed to avoid frightening the animals. Bill’s wife said it looked like a true instrument of terror—some medieval attempt at representing the ineffable for the purpose of a Passion play. Bill considered this observation as he worked the throttle on the engine’s high platform. If God was anything like the McCormick—strung together by bailing wire and tenpenny nails—they were all in quite a corner.

His mother and father had gone to town, leaving Minarette and him to play farmer and his wife—parts that made them both uneasy. A hill of grain rose slowly in the wagon while a pile of chaff took shape in the grass, casting a low hump of shadow to one side. Bill was covered in coal soot from the steam engine’s chimney pipe, and from time to time, he turned to Minarette and grinned, assuming he looked like some variety of sulfurous demon risen from the depths of Hell and knowing how she’d pretend to hate such waggishness. His teasing and her chilly responses were one of their mutually agreed-upon contrivances. They practiced their relationship even when there was no audience to watch. In reality, Bill felt heart-heavy and longed to see the black church buggy float into view, Cal in the buck seat guiding the horses with effortless twitches of his wrist. The two men would register each other in the way they used to as boys, as if some mark had been made on an invisible scoring card.

Upon catching first glimpse of Calvin Hascomb in the evening light of the county fair, Bill had felt that he was looking into some poor mirror at an image of himself, faded to such an extent that it lacked all color and weight, and perhaps because of these defects, was able to enchant. Cal had blond-white hair and pale lips. His eyes were blue
in the same impossible sense that water appears blue until cupped in the hand. They were both thirteen, and Cal’s family had come from Missouri after a flood similar to the one that had driven Bill’s people up from Illinois. The two of them took to each other and played games of chance all evening, pitching baseballs at bowling pins and cheering each other’s laughable skills. Bill finally won a tiger with shoe-polish stripes and eyes of melancholy green and gave it to Cal who carried it proudly the rest of the night.

When Bill described these scenes to Minarette, she warned him that she thought he’d been deceived. “The apprentice preacher has allowed religion to bend him in ways that no man should be bent,” she said. “You don’t see it, Bill, because you’ve know him too long. But from what you’ve described in your stories, I can tell you though that Calvin Hascomb, the boy, and Calvin Hascomb, the man, are two distinct substances.”

She herself hailed from Chicago, and though she’d brought only a small dowry, she’d managed to drag all her expensive taste and eloquence out of the city—high-collared dresses, cloisonné broaches, and a comportment most farm girls would never dream of adopting. She seemed a piece of urbanity, transported, and her body too looked like it was derived from the delicate architecture and light that Bill had seen in postcards. To some degree, he’d married her out of spite for the fact that as soon as he’d turned eighteen, his parents had been on him, pushing him to find a girl. Not the right girl, but
any
girl as long as she knew how to work a farm. They’d nearly thrown him on poor Clara Hutchinson one Sunday at church, even though she’d had a cough since infancy and a cloudy eye. Settling down was important, his father told him. It would get him right in the Lord’s eyes, and, on a more practical level, would provide progeny. “Without blood,” his mother said, “a farm withers.
Family is the life of a place like this.” So when he caught sight of Minarette Anderson at a barn dance, Bill saw his chance. She’d arrived that week from Chicago to visit her cousin, piquing the interest of everyone in town, and he liked the way she glared disdainfully at the farm boys in their haphazardly polished boots and checkered shirts. Bill was brave enough to ask her to dance, and after that, he hadn’t let go for the rest of the night. She smelled not of lemon verbena as the other girls, but of French perfume which mixed with the smell of her vitriol and excited him. He recognized her as something new—a sophisticate that his parents would fear. Surprisingly, she’d warmed to him as well, clasping her hands behind his neck and moving to the sound of the slow German fiddle. She whispered, “I do hate all of this, Bill—these fools playing at culture.”

“They don’t know any better,” he said, touching the stiff crinoline of her skirt. “Most of ’em haven’t ventured beyond Union township.”

“And you?” she asked, looking to the white carnation pinned on his vest. “You seem a man of difference.”

His grin made him feel handsome in the lantern light. “The only places I’ve gone, ma’am, are of my own making.”

“Like my father,” she said, dryly, “the renowned playwright of the Chicago stage.”

“I’ve done nothing as fine as all that,” Bill replied, “unless you consider a grain silo fit for tragedy.”

Minarette contemplated this. “I might prefer it to my father’s stilted atrocities. How long do you think it would take to make a corn-fed Salomé of me?”

Bill did not know
Salomé
but thought Minarette looked like an oil painting fit for a museum in the farmhouse window, a
tableau vivant
with one white hand against the curtain and a beam of sunlight hooked across her powdered
face. He turned from the thresher to wave again, but she did not raise her hand in response. She only stared at the strangeness of his work and sipped his mother’s coffee, which she complained was as weak as tea. There was a look of perturbation on her face, and she, too, from time to time, glanced toward the road.

Minarette was no real worry to Bill. He continued to enjoy her presence and had even begun to think of her as something of a compatriot—another piece that did not fit. On top of that, she was able to occupy his parents in ways that he hadn’t imagined possible; it seemed that they’d taken on their daughter-in-law as a new project, determined to translate this gadabout into a rustic girl of the farm. His mother tried to teach her how to churn butter and collect eggs from the chickens, but inevitably Minarette could not get the cream to set and broke foul smelling yolks across her stylish dresses. She would cry and sometimes even throw herself down in the tall grass of the yard. Bill’s mother and father would lean over her, cooing kindnesses, worried that they’d damaged something dear. Bill wondered sometimes if she had not come to the farm for him but for his parents, born from their wish for a daughter. During their drawn-out scenes of instruction, he crossed his arms and rested against the porch post, smiling at his wife’s ability to control their small universe. Once Minarette had even convinced his mother into having her face painted “city style,” and the poor woman had gone around for a whole day with rouge on her doughy Dutch cheeks until she couldn’t take it anymore and scrubbed herself with lye. Minarette had also used a length of ribbon to tie bells around the necks of all the sheep in the orchard—a contribution to what she called the farm’s “pastoral scene.” When the herd moved together, they were a choir.