Bleeding Kansas (18 page)

He hesitated before adding, “Write me, Lulu. Write me every day if you can. I need to know you guys still remember me.”

It didn't even occur to Lara to tease him about Janice, who probably didn't know how to put a sentence down on paper. Instead, when his unit reached Iraq she sent him e-mails full of the ordinary news of the farm.

T
HE DAY AFTER
the county fair ended, Lara e-mailed Chip:

Curly, who'd taken Lara that evening, had said, “Junior and his old man are the kind of guys who love themselves so much they eat their own shit and like it.” Lara added that in quotation marks, making sure Chip knew it was Curly speaking, that she wouldn't say something so dirty, even if every time she thought it she started to giggle. She knew it would make Chip laugh, although, come to think of it, Curly had probably said it to him a million times.

“Anyway, when the platform was fifteen feet high, Junior tossed the bale and it landed on his head. It knocked him out, but even Big Arnie could see it happened because Junior was hotdogging. They stopped the contest for a bit while they made sure Junior was okay, just a little concussed, but given that his head is pretty solid ear to ear they really should have checked the hay bale for damage.”

She was hitting the
SEND
button when the doorbell rang. Lara couldn't place the sound at first, because in the country no one ever went to the front door or even rang a bell. Not just at their house, but every house in the valley, people always went in through the kitchen, and kitchens opened onto the yard—it's the way farmhouses were built.

Lara didn't even realize her house had a doorbell until that moment. When she heard the shrill sound, she thought it was the old black telephone, the one Gram used to have in her bedroom, because she couldn't abide the new, lightweight plastic ones.

Lara went down the hall toward the back bedroom and then heard the sound again coming from the front door, except, of course, the front of the house was at the back, at the bottom of the big staircase, which the family also never used. She ran down the stairs, her hand automatically caressing the eagle head carved into the newel-post at the bottom. She could see the outline of two men's bodies through the white-glass panel, but she couldn't wrestle the door open, it had been locked for so many years.

“Come around to the kitchen,” she shouted through a crack along the panel.

She ran through the cold front room. It had been her parents' bedroom when Gram and Grandpa were alive, and then Gram's bedroom when she got too frail to manage the stairs, but they never used it now. She ran into the dining room and then the kitchen, where she stood waiting for the men. As soon as she saw them, in their formal chocolate jackets, covered with medals and gold buttons, she knew Chip was dead. She didn't say anything but started screaming “Dad! Dad!” and ran to the barn, to the combine shed, to the cornfield, before remembering her father had announced at breakfast he was working the oat field, two miles distant.

She was so distracted that she started to run along the train tracks that marked the south boundary of the farm, as if she could run in her flip-flops all the way to the Wakarusa River where the oat field lay, but Blitz, who'd been irrigating the corn, caught sight of her. He came after her in the small Cub tractor and scooped her up.

“It's Chip,” she panted. “I need Dad, they're from the Army, they're at the house.”

Blitz turned the Cub around, heading toward the house.

“No, no,” she shouted, pounding his side. “We have to find Dad.”

“I'm going to do that, Lulu, but I want to get the pickup.'”

When she kept pounding him and screaming, he stopped the tractor and grabbed her arms. “Listen to me, Lulu. We will get there faster in the truck than in this thing. Stop your yelling. Your dad needs you to be strong for him, you hear me?”

When they got back to the house, the two men in uniform were still standing outside the kitchen door. One of them was holding his hat, turning it around and around in his hands.

Blitz went up to them. “You here about Chip? Chip Grellier?”

And the one playing with his hat said yes, he was Captain Wesson, was Blitz Chip's father?

“Mr. Grellier is in another field, about twenty minutes from here. You sit in the kitchen and wait. This here is his daughter. We'll find him.”

It was funny, in hindsight, that Lara hadn't tried to find Mom, who was just across the tracks in the X-Farm. Maybe Blitz thought of it and decided it would be better to get Dad first. It wasn't until they found Dad and were driving back in the pickup, the three of them squeezed into the front seat, that Dad asked Blitz where Susan was, did she know about Chip?

“We don't know anything yet for sure,” Blitz said.

But of course that was what Captain Wesson and the other man had come to do, to say they were very sorry, that the Grelliers should be proud of their son who had given everything for the defense of his country, but he had been killed when a bomb was detonated on the road he was patrolling south of Baghdad.

Chip had been in Iraq for twenty-four days. He'd been a soldier for twenty-three weeks. He wouldn't even be nineteen until November 6. Now he was dead.

It took twelve days for his body to come home. First it went to Germany, then to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, then to Kansas City, where the family picked up his body. The process stunned them all: they assumed he'd be in a real coffin, and that someone would be standing at attention on the tarmac to welcome his body home. Instead, he'd been stuffed into a metal box in the hold of a cargo plane, and the family had to fill out a bunch of forms and drive around to the back of the airport to collect him, picking his coffin out of a jumble of giant containers holding tractor parts and milk cartons. Fortunately, Blitz had driven over with them. Dad could never have managed everything on his own.

The Army said he could be buried in a military cemetery, but Dad and Mom wanted him to come home, to be buried next to all the other Grelliers, starting with little Lizzie, 1852 to 1855, “The Shepherd has gathered up His Lamb and carried her to His bosom,” her gravestone read.

Lara had often read the faded inscription when they'd gone to put flowers on her grandparents' graves, the graves of her dad's parents. The graves didn't mean anything to her: Dad's mother and father died when he was nine, so of course Lara never knew them. Even the later graves, for Grandpa and Gram, didn't make Lara particularly sad. They'd been so old when she was little, they hardly seemed part of the same species that she and Chip belonged to.

But now Chip was going to be in the ground. For the rest of Lara's life he would be lying there, all alone in the dirt. He'd been her big brother, he'd frightened her and teased her, but he'd protected her from bullies, and given her a canary for Christmas the year she broke her heart over one of the farm cats getting run over by the tractor. And now she'd get older than him. He'd be eighteen, going on nineteen, for the rest of his life. But unless she joined the Army, and went to Iraq and got blown to bits, she'd be old someday, old like Gram. The whole thought made her insides come together, as if her heart had disappeared and her chest collapsed in on itself.

The Army provided an honor guard at the funeral but couldn't give them a bugler to play taps—there weren't enough to go around, Captain Wesson said, even though Fort Leavenworth was only thirty miles away. Captain Wesson said he'd provide a CD they could play at the graveside, but all the Grelliers, and Blitz and Curly, too, agreed that would be disrespectful of Chip to have a recording instead of real music, so Lara, wearing the blue seersucker suit that she'd made for last year's county fair, with panty hose over her scraped knees, stood above her brother's body and played taps on her trumpet.

The sound crashed through the gym floorboards and ran up everyone's legs. Crotches tingled, ached, the dancing grew wilder, strobes chased each other faster across the walls, so that the thrusting, sweating bodies looked like parts of a machine moving so wildly the pieces would fly off.

Robbie tucked his grin behind a blank stare, nodded at Chris Greynard on drums, prolonged the chorus another three minutes. They were hot. Becoming the Archetype and Sons of Thunder couldn't match them.

“Thank you, Jesus, thank you for the shower of your love,” he sang, slowing down the tempo. “Your Spirit's here, it's in us, send us out into the world to do your work!”

He softened the chords. Behind him, Chris moved from drums to xylophone, and the kids in the crowd started singing along with them. It was ten-thirty; Pastor Nabo would be turning up the lights in another minute. “Send us out into the world in love, help us do your work in love.” This was the traditional farewell song for the Full Salvation Bible Church Christ-Teen Group. Robbie thought it was corny, but he loved to lose himself in the chords and the crooning harmonies.

The lights came on and the crowd gathered in a large, sweaty circle, holding hands. Pastor Nabo joined the circle, taking the hands of two unpopular girls who came every Thursday in the hopes of attracting notice, even from overweight, sweaty guys like Neal Grafton. But Neal, of course, drooled after the peppy, popular girls in the group. Pastor Nabo always went out of his way to notice the two girls, who came early to mix Kool-Aid and iced tea for the rest of them and baked cookies for everyone at Christmas.

“Jesus!” the pastor intoned. “Pour down your Spirit on these young people, keep them pure in heart, mind, and deed in the week ahead. They live in a world of great temptation, Jesus, a world filled with drugs and abortion, homosexuality and false teachers, where Satan is holding sway. Satan has come among us in person, Lord. Satan is holding orgies not five miles from here. Keep these young people from giving in to him, help them remember that a moment's pleasure here on earth is repaid by an eternity of torment in the just fires of hell.”

Robbie knew that his father had made a big fuss about the women living in the old Fremantle place and that he had just about burst his deputy sheriff's uniform with pride when he got the Eudora fire department to come put out their bonfire in June. Of course it was wrong, it was wicked, to indulge in witchcraft, like Gina Haring did, but Robbie still felt angry with his father for bragging to Pastor Nabo about how he'd made fools of the witches. Why couldn't Arnie have left them alone? Lara Grellier's mother had been at the Midsummer Eve bonfire, and now there was one more reason why Lara hated him.

“At the same time, Lord, you have given us a sign,” Pastor was saying. “A sign here in the heartland, where a saving remnant remains true to your Word. Your disciples questioned if any good thing could come out of Nazareth, and so it is today with Kansas. A nation of liberals and sodomites ridicules us for holding fast to the Bible, but we shall confound them, as the Nazarene confounded His disciples, because you have sent your sign to us here in Kansas, even in a manger!”

The pastor's voice choked with emotion. Robbie shifted his feet uneasily. Pastor was talking about Soapweed's calf. She was ten months old, and she was still completely red, from her forelock to her hooves, so the Jews had given her a Hebrew name, Nasya, which they said meant “miracle.” Most of the kids around him knew about Nasya—or Nassie, as Robbie thought of her—it had been impossible to keep her existence secret. As soon as the elders saw the heifer, they told their wives, the talk became common around the tables of Full Salvation Bible Church members, and pretty soon everyone in the county knew about it. Robbie had even heard whispered comments at the county fair.

Right after the fair ended, the
Douglas County Herald
sent a reporter out to the Schapen farm to follow up on the rumors. Robbie knew his father had been tempted to show off the red heifer; once or twice a week, Arnie speculated out loud on how much money they'd get if the heifer was still flawless when she turned three. And if she wasn't flawless, all the more reason to start making money on her now, charging admission so folks could see her, even advertising the special quality of milk that came from her mother and the other cows on the farm.

However, the
Herald
sent out a woman reporter, and Arnie wouldn't run the risk of the woman polluting the heifer. Perhaps it was the time of her impurity, Robbie intoned to himself as his father talked it over inside the house with Myra while the reporter cautiously approached the cows grazing behind the milking barn.

Myra thought they should seize the opportunity for publicity, but Arnie disagreed. Arnie said the Jews would find out in a heartbeat that he'd let a woman not only look at Nasya but write about her.

“If God is speaking through us, as the Jews seem to think, we can't risk alienating Him.”

“And since when have a bunch of Jews told a good Christian woman what to do in her own home, on her own farm? Jesus came to free us from Jewish law, and, here you are, kowtowing to it as if our Savior had never shed His blood for you. I'm starting to question your salvation, Arnold, you taking those men's word over that of your own mother,” Myra snapped.

Listening to the two of them shout, Robbie realized his father was afraid of Nanny. It was a sad and humiliating thought that this big, blustering man who frightened Robbie felt small in front of Nanny.

The argument finished with Arnie, breathing hard, telling the reporter the story about the calf was just a rumor. “Some kids got hold of a wild tale and they're pulling your chain, miss.”

The reporter still hung around for another half hour, photographing cows, which made Arnie happy because it would help the farm if the
Herald
ran a story on his herd. She finally left when Junior, getting bored, went out to the pasture and came back with a bucket of manure that he spilled on her shoes, apologizing with an ugly grin for his clumsiness.

The Jews, dressed in long black coats even in the middle of the July and August heat, had come every month to inspect Soapweed's calf. Robbie had finally learned their names. The short one, who seemed to be the main spokesman, was called Reb Ephraim. One of the tall, stout ones, Reb Meir, didn't speak much, but he seemed to be the leader of the trio, while Reb Gamliel did the main inspection, getting down on a rubber mat to look at Nassie's vulva. Reb Meir always questioned Arnie about who had access to the heifer, stressing that women must not be allowed near her.

Arnie loved the injunction against women. “You know, if your mother were around, that calf would have been made impure before it was twelve hours old. The Lord has a plan for everything that happens in our lives, and now I see He sent that clothes salesman to seduce Kathy because He was paving the way for our household to be worthy to receive the calf.”

Arnie had said this a million or two times since the first visit by the men from the Bet HaMikdash Yeshiva in Kansas City. It was hard for Robbie to believe the Lord took Kathy away from her children just so they could make money from a calf.
Sorry, Lord, but I wish my mother still lived here. Or that she'd taken me with her.
He wondered, as he often did, what he'd done as a small boy to get his mother so angry that she up and left, abandoning him to Myra and Arnie.

The day after the
Herald
reporter came out, Robbie was working the sorghum field, across the road from the Grelliers' experimental farm. He saw Lara wandering through her sunflower crop. Robbie hadn't heard about Chip's death; he only thought Lara looked forlorn, in need of comfort. In his head, Robbie sauntered across the road, suave, cool; Lara looked up, her face alight with pleasure; he mentioned the reporter and the calf; she laughed and said she would never betray any of Robbie's secrets, not even for a chance to be on
American Idol.

In reality, watching her, he turned the tractor too sharply. The harrow swung wide into the drainage ditch, almost toppling the tractor. Robbie leaned forward, opening the throttle and turning the wheel hard. For a hair-raising instant, he thought he was going to have to jump clear of the tottering Case and hope for the best, but after a horrible few seconds the machine righted itself, and he was able to pull the harrow out of the ditch. Beneath his sunburn, his face had been hot with mortification; he hadn't even risked a look across the road to see how Lara had reacted to his clumsiness. As it was, he had to endure a searing lecture from Myra and his father for bending a harrow blade and damaging the end of three rows of sorghum, while Junior made fun of him for days.

Robbie wondered for the first time if his mother had run off to get away from Myra, rather than because she didn't love him, Robbie, any longer. He wished he knew where she'd gone. He'd Googled her at school, but he didn't know the last name of the man she'd run off with and his searches didn't turn up any Kathy Schapens. When his dad said that God had sent the clothing salesman to seduce Kathy as part of His plan, Robbie did venture to ask the man's name, but Arnie demanded to know whether Robbie wanted to follow his mother down the road of fornication and everlasting torment.

“He's not a Schapen, you might as well face it,” Myra said viciously, taking out on Robbie her anger over being barred from the heifer.

Afterward, Robbie had gone into the bathroom and stared at himself in the small, wavery mirror, wondering if the clothing salesman was really his father. It was true, he didn't look like Arnie or Junior, but when he pulled his precious pictures of Kathy from the underside of his dresser drawer he didn't seem to look like her, either.

His mother's hair was dark, like his, but curled, where his was straight and spiky. Arnie was mostly bald now, but the hair he had was tightly curled, as was Junior's, reddish gold hair that on Arnie had deepened to a rusty brown. In one photo, Kathy had scraped the curls back from her face, so Robbie was able see her round, soft cheeks. His own face was long and narrow compared to hers.

“Make these children worthy of the Lamb.”

With a guilty start, Robbie came back to the present, to the big meeting room at Full Salvation Bible, the sweaty bodies around him, girls clad modestly in knee-length skirts and blouses or sweaters that didn't reveal any cleavage. He thought of Lara Grellier's nipples poking through the thin fabric of her tank top when he'd sat behind her in Chip's Nissan. It was hard to believe that Chip Grellier was in hell, although he had to be because the Grelliers weren't true Christians. But Chip had been a hero, a patriot, he hadn't just ranted about loving his country, he'd gone to Iraq and died to prove he loved America.

Make an exception for him, Jesus, he shed his blood just like you did,
Robbie prayed silently while Pastor Nabo continued out loud, “Make them worthy to receive the miraculous harbinger you have given of your imminent coming. Protect them, seal them as yours, so that they may spend eternity with the blessed. We ask this, Lord, in the name of your Son, who taught us to pray—”

Robbie recited the Lord's Prayer with the kids around him, who hugged and kissed and began sorting into groups of three or four, the ones dating, the ones sharing rides home. One of the girls who'd been holding Pastor Nabo's hand had a crush on Robbie; she lingered while he and Chris went up on the stage to pack their equipment. Robbie tried to ignore her. Amber Ruesselmann was a hardworking, pious girl; Myra thought she would do him good. Amber carried her Bible with her in school and read it endlessly during study hall or break. She'd made Robbie a batch of brownies for his birthday last March.

“You don't deserve a good Christian girl like Amber, but she might save you from Satan,” Myra sometimes said.

“What about Junior?” Robbie demanded. “He's never had a girlfriend and he's eighteen. Isn't it time he showed me a good example?”

But Myra said Junior was saving himself for marriage, without explaining why Robbie couldn't be doing the same thing. He sometimes wondered if she could read his thoughts, knew he was interested in Lara. He'd written a poem to Lara, or at least for her, after he learned about Chip's death, but he'd never had the courage to send it to her.

He realized Amber had been talking to him, but he had been so lost in his daydreams that he hadn't heard her.

“I thought maybe you'd like to join a prayer session at school tomorrow,” Amber repeated.