Bleeding Kansas (2 page)

H
EAT DEVILS SHIMMERED
over the cornfield. It was late July, the midday sun so hot that it raised blisters on Lara's arms. It turned the leaves into green mirrors that reflected back a blinding light. Lara shut her eyes against the glare and held out her hands, trying to reach the edge of the cornfield by feel, but she tripped on the rough ground and fell, grazing her knees on the hard soil. She'd had plenty worse falls, but this one so humiliated her that she started to cry.

“Don't be such a baby,” she whispered fiercely.

She sat up to inspect the damage. Her dress had a long streak of dirt up the front, and her knees were bleeding. She'd made the dress as part of a summer 4-H project for the county fair. It was pink lawn, with a placket up the left side edged in rose scalloping, and she'd won first prize for it. She got up, her knees stinging when she straightened them, and hobbled the last few yards into the cornfield.

The corn was so tall that walking into the field was like walking into a forest. After a few dozen steps, she couldn't see the house or any of the outbuildings. The rows looked the same in all directions, neat hills about two feet apart. If she turned around in circles a few times, she wouldn't know what direction she'd come from. She'd be fifty yards from home but would be so lost she could die in here. Probably she'd die of thirst within a day, it was so hot. Blitz and Curly would find her bones in October, picked clean by prairie hawks, when they came to harvest the corn.

She lay down between the rows and stared at the sky through the weaving of leaves and tassels. The corn was as tall as young trees, but it didn't provide much shade: the leaves were too thin to make a bower overhead the way bur oak would. She scooted close to the stalks so that leaves covered her face and blocked out the worst of the punishing sun. It was a close, windless day, but when she lay completely motionless she could hear a rustling in the leaves, a sort of whooshing, as if they created their own little wind within the field.

Grasshoppers whirred around her. A few birds sang through the rows, pecking at the corn. The ears were just taking shape, the kernels at blister stage. The smell was sweet, not like the icky, fake-flavored corn syrup you got with your pancakes at the diner, but a clean, light sweetness, before anyone took the corn and started manufacturing things from it.

She lay so still that a meadowlark perched on the stalk right above her. It cocked a bright eye at her, as if wanting her opinion on the world.

“They'll make the corn dirty,” Lara told it. “Here in the field, it's clean. But then they'll take it to their stupid factories and turn it into gasoline or plastic or some other nasty thing.”

The bird chirped in agreement and turned to peck at one of the ears of corn, trying to get through the thick husk. When Lara reached up an arm to strip the husk back, to help out, the bird took off in fright.

In the distance, she heard her father calling her name. She squinched her eyes shut again, as if that would shut out sound and sight both, but in a few minutes she heard the louder crackling of his arms brushing back leaves.

“Lulu! Lulu!” and then louder, closer, more exasperated, “Lara! Lara Grellier! I know you're in here. Blitz saw you go into the field. Come on, we have to get going.”

With her eyes shut, she felt his shadow overhead, heard his sudden intake of surprised breath. “Lulu, what are you doing down there? Did you faint? Are you okay?” And he was bending over her, smelling of shaving cream—so strange, Dad shaving in the middle of the day.

It didn't occur to her to lie, to say yes, the sun got to her, she fainted, she was too ill and weak to go. She sat up and stared at him, imagining how she must look covered with dirt and blood.

“I just fell, Dad. I'm okay, but I wrecked my dress. I can't go like this, I wrecked my dress.” She burst into tears again, as if the loss of a stupid dress mattered. What was wrong with her, to cry over her dress at a time like this? But she sobbed louder and clung to her father.

He stroked her hair. “Yeah, baby, you look like you decided today was mud-pie day. It's okay, the dress'll clean up fine, you'll see. You run in the house and wash up and put on something else.”

He pulled her to her feet. “No wonder you fell, wearing those crazy flip-flops in the field. I keep telling you to put on shoes. You could step on a nail, get tetanus or ringworm. Aphids could lay eggs under your skin.”

It was a familiar litany, and it eased the worst of her sobs. When they got to the house, he hesitated a moment before letting go of her arm. “See if your mom needs any help getting dressed, okay, Lulu? And don't forget your trumpet.”

 

L
ATER, WHEN SHE'D
been away from Kansas for years and finally came home again to run the farm, with children of her own who couldn't tell the difference between a stalk of corn and a sheaf of wheat, the colors were what Lara remembered from that day. Most of the other details she'd forgotten, or they'd merged in her mind with all the other shocks and horrors that made up one long year of grief.

What her aunt Mimi and uncle Doug said when she shoved past them in the kitchen or Curly's sour remark to Blitz, just loud enough for her to hear, “Are we supposed to drop everything and clap, now that Lulu's turned into a drama queen?” let alone Blitz's rumbling warning to Curly to get off Lara's back, “She's been through too much for a kid her age,” none of that stayed with her.

All she remembered was the heat, green leaves against blue sky, the red-brown blood on her pink dress. Oh, yes, and her mother, sitting on the edge of her bed in a bra and panty hose, staring blankly at the pictures of Chip and Lara on the wall in front of her.

The sight terrified Lara. Her mother was the active presence on the farm. Jim was cautious, uneasy with change, but Susan was a gambler, an experimenter. After he took physics, Chip labeled her a perpetual motion machine, “p-double-m” in teenspeak, because she never sat still, not even in church or at the dinner table—there was always someone who needed a helping hand up the aisle or “Just one more shake of salt will make this dish perfect.”

That hot July day, Lara shook Susan until her mother finally blinked at her. “You're hurting me, Lara. I'm not a pump. You can't draw water out of me by yanking my arm up and down.”

But she got up, and let Lara choose an outfit for her, a gold linen dress that Lara loved for the way her mother's auburn hair looked against the fabric. Susan sat while Lara pulled up the zipper and tied a dark scarf around her throat, Susan smoothing Lara's own brown curls away from her daughter's face with a wind-roughened hand. She seemed so very nearly like herself, even on this day of all days, that some of the tightness went out of Lara's chest. Nothing would ever be right again, but it wouldn't be so horribly wrong if her mother started moving.

 

I
F THE DETAILS
of the year blurred into a long memory of grief for Lara, her father thought of them as a string of tornadoes roaring down on him. Jim saw himself as small, bewildered, holding out his hands in a futile effort to push back the funnels of wind.

For a long time, he played that most useless of all games: if only. If only I had paid more attention to Chip, seen how unhappy he was. If only I hadn't argued so much with Susan about the bonfires or the war. If only I'd told John Fremantle no one could live in his parents' old home because it was too rundown.

For some reason, that last one gnawed at him most, maybe because it was the one thing he thought he could have controlled: letting Gina Haring come to live in the valley. Not that it had been his decision, but he and Susan had been keeping an eye on the Fremantle house ever since Liz Fremantle died. Her three children had come back for her funeral, had looked at the old house and agreed with Susan that it would take a lot of work to restore it to the splendor of its early days, and had fled again, to New York and London and Singapore.

And then right before Thanksgiving last fall, John Fremantle called out of the blue to say he was renting the house to Gina Haring. Gina was his wife's niece. She'd been through a difficult divorce and needed a cheap place to live while she figured out how to pull her life back together. And all Jim thought was, one less burden. Not, what will a stranger do to the subtle balance of relationships in the valley? Well, no one does think about that, do they?

T
HE NEWS THAT
the Fremantle children were renting out their parents' house had whipped around the Kaw Valley that previous fall. Before Jim and Susan decided whether Blitz, who worked for Jim and was a first-class mechanic, should try to fiddle with the Fremantles' old octopus furnace, let alone the best way to get keys to Gina Haring, all their neighbors knew she was coming. In fact, two days after he heard from John Fremantle, Jim ran into Myra Schapen at Fresh Prairie Cheeses. Jim had stopped in to buy a slab of cheddar; Myra was delivering the raw organic milk Annie Wieser used in making her artisanal cheeses.

“What's this I hear about the Fremantles?” Myra demanded when she saw Jim.

She was eighty-something, and her false teeth fit badly so she clacked like a loose combine shoe when she talked.

“I don't know, Myra, what do you hear?” Jim said.

“John Fremantle's letting some hippie take over the house. Or, worse, a sodomite.”

“Then you've heard way more than me,” Jim said. “I only know that his wife's niece is moving in next week. She's had some hard times, and he's renting the place to her.”

“Hard times? Her husband divorced her because he found her in bed—”

“Myra!” Jim interrupted. “You weren't there anymore than I was, so neither of us knows what went on in the lady's life. My only business is to make sure the house is fit for her to move into and try to make her feel welcome in a strange place. She's been living in New York City—the country's going to seem like a foreign land to her, most likely.”

“Make her feel welcome!” Myra's jaws worked around her teeth. “In
your
place, I would have thought about my neighbors and spoke up. We don't need our children exposed to people like her. I'm not surprised you don't worry about your own pair, the way you let them roam around doing whatever they like, but I care about my grandchildren's immortal souls.”

“I expect Junior can look after himself,” Annie Wieser said briskly. Junior, who played football at Lawrence High, had been an enthusiastic bully since he started first grade.

“‘Every sound tree bears good fruit.'” Myra half smiled, taking Annie's comment as a compliment. “But Robbie, that's another story altogether. Takes after Kathy, and I can't whip it out of him.”

When she stumped out of the barn, Annie made a face at Jim. “Poor Kathy. I'm not surprised she ran off, although I've never understood how she could leave those two boys with Arnie and Myra. Of course, she tried to take them that day she left, but when Arnie stopped her she just seemed to let them go. Or maybe the gentleman in the case didn't want a great lout like Junior on his hands. But why not take Robbie?”

Jim only grunted. It made him uncomfortable to be drawn into conversations about his neighbors, the endless speculations on who did what and why. Arnie had shot at Kathy when she drove out to tell him she was leaving and that she wanted her sons; she'd stopped at the Grelliers' farm afterward, trembling and crying, until she was calm enough to drive off. That was the last anyone around Lawrence had ever seen of her—as far as Jim knew, anyway.

“How does Myra get her news?” He fumed at supper that night. “I haven't told a soul about John Fremantle renting out the house.”

“No more have I,” Susan said. She was peeling an orange, trying to cut off the rind in a single piece without touching the fruit with her fingers. She'd been practicing all fall. Tonight, she held up a perfect spiral in triumph.

“Way to go, Mom.” Chip grinned, and gave Susan a high five.

“Myra's installed a mike in every house in the valley,” Lara said. “Then she listens in on our conversations and posts the juiciest parts on the Schapen website.”

“She knows when you've been sleeping,” Chip sang off-key. “She knows when you're awake, and who you wake up with.”

Susan laughed, but Jim shook his head gloomily. “I hope she doesn't want to make trouble for the young lady. When I asked Myra why she said Gina Haring was a sodomite, she clacked her teeth and said it was common knowledge.”

“I didn't think women could be sodomites,” Chip objected.

“Why not?” Lara asked.

“Because—”

Jim cut off his son. “More than I want to hear on the subject, especially at mealtime.”

“Myra has that cousin in St. Jo who grew up with John Fremantle's wife,” Susan said. “That's probably who told her about Gina Haring. And then Myra might have embellished Ms. Haring's story so she could get angry about it. Myra has to be angry about something all the time, you know. If she was ever happy, she'd probably fall apart.”

Myra's rages had been part of Jim's life since he and his brother, Doug, came to live on the farm. They'd always spent a few weeks with Gram and Grandpa in the summer, but they'd never been part of county farm life until their parents died and Gram and Grandpa took them in. The brothers—Jim, nine; Doug, eleven—had been startled by how much the other children knew about them when they started at Kaw Valley Eagle School in the fall. Two town boys suddenly transplanted from schools with more students in each classroom than made up all eight grades at Kaw Valley, they were furious at the way the other kids discussed their parents.

It seemed to Jim that their classmates knew more about his dad's childhood than he did himself, repeating stories they heard from their own parents, who'd grown up with his father. Arnie Schapen, who was Doug's age, liked to needle the Grellier boys by insisting that their dad had been drunk at the wheel when a Santa Fe freight train crashed into his car. Arnie also taunted the brothers for being sissies.

“You don't know a baseball from an ear of corn,” Arnie yelled when Jim overthrew first base and the ball landed in the cornfield behind the school. Jim had never liked fighting, but Doug jumped into the ring—really, into the cornfield—with zest, punching away his grief and anger over their parents on Arnie Schapen's nose and shoulders.

That was the first of dozens of encounters between the two. Once, when Doug broke Arnie's front tooth, Myra marched over to the Grellier farm, waving a dental bill under Gram's nose. “You better pay that bill, Helen Grellier. Seventy-eight dollars your hoodlum grandson cost me.”

Gram made a shooing gesture. “You want to pay my doctor bill for Doug's broken nose, Myra? That was a whole lot more than seventy-eight dollars, but I'd be ashamed to ask someone else to take responsibility for my boy's behavior. You go on home and hoe some peas. That'll take your mind off this nonsense.”

Jim's grandparents were just a little older than Myra, who had married late. Arnie, Myra's only child, was born when she was past forty. Gram said that before Arnie was born, Myra had five or six miscarriages. Gram thought that's what had soured Myra on life, all those losses combined with the hard-line religion she practiced. Schapens and Grelliers used to be Methodists together, but when Myra married Bob Schapen, she took her husband, and later her son, to Full Salvation Bible Church.

Jim, under his own wife's influence, had also left the Methodists, in his case for the Riverside United Church of Christ. Susan had insisted they join because it was the church Jim's many times great-grandmother helped found. Gram shook her head, exasperated by Susan and what Gram thought of as her fads; she and Grandpa stayed with the Methodists.

The three families, Schapens, Fremantles, and Grelliers, had first met in 1855, when they came to Lawrence as anti-slavery pioneers. They had staked neighboring claims near Lawrence for safety.

More than once, the first Robert Schapen had come to Jim's ever-so-great-grandmother's rescue: her husband was an idealist, a French disciple of Emerson and Alcott, who often forgot his farm and family when he was in the grip of a transcendent idea.

The Fremantles brought money and status west with them. Horace was a judge, Una one of the Salem Peabodys, and they built what looked like a mansion to the rest of the valley. After their first house was burned by Quantrill's raiders in 1863, Horace built an even grander place when the Civil War ended. Marble fireplaces with Venetian tiles set into the sides, a grand staircase leading down to a formal parlor, a veranda that enclosed three sides of the house, these had all been extraordinary in pioneer Kansas.

When Jim was a boy, it was still a wonderful place, but after Mr. Fremantle died old Mrs. Fremantle stopped trying to keep on top of repairs or modernizing things that badly needed it, like digging a deeper well to get below the rusty water that was rotting out her pipes. Jim tried to pitch in when he could, but he didn't have the skill or the money to repair the roof or the flashing around the chimney. By the time Liz Fremantle died, the mold along the chimney walls and cat urine in the floorboards had turned the place squalid.

Every time Jim or Susan went over to check on the roof after a microburst or tornado swept through the valley, they e-mailed John Fremantle with a catalog of decay. Jim got Blitz and Curly to help him seal up the basement so that cats couldn't get into the house, and Susan, one hair-raising afternoon, climbed up to replace the flashing around the three chimneys. They couldn't afford to take on other repairs themselves.

Despite its decay, Susan loved the house. She'd fallen in love with the history of the three families and their fight against slavery before she'd fallen in love with Jim. Abigail Grellier, who Jim only thought of as the grim-faced woman in the photograph on the front-room wall, was a living person to Susan.

The first time Susan visited the Grellier farm with Jim, back when they'd been students together at Kansas State, she'd asked a thousand questions about its history that Jim couldn't answer. He and Doug never thought about things like Quantrill's raiders, or the way the anti-slavery women circumvented the slavers' posts along the Kaw River. Grandpa was entertained by Susan's enthusiasm. He showed her however many great-grandmother Abigail's diaries and letters in the tin trunk in the attic.

Susan had stayed up half the night poring over the faded ink, reading bits out loud to Jim. “You mean you've never even read these? But, Jim, this is the trunk she brought with her from Boston. She had to keep her food in it the first year on the farm because it was the only thing the mice couldn't eat through. I can't believe it, can't believe I'm sitting on the same trunk! And that piano down in your gram's parlor, that's the piano Abigail carried out here.”

Jim tried to explain to her that his family's history meant something different to him, something he found hard to put into words. It was a sense of having a place in the world, a place ordained for him. Susan, whose father, unable to hold on to a job, had moved every two or three years, responded with a kind of wistful eagerness that Jim found touching.

She'd finally let him pull her down next to him, finally let him turn out the light, make love, but she'd been too excited to sleep much. Jim had grinned idiotically all through breakfast the next day while Susan catechized his grandparents about Abigail. How many of her children had survived? How had she decided who inherited the farm? Could Jim's grandmother run the farm herself the way Abigail did when her husband was away?

Grandpa couldn't resist Susan's flushed face and bright eyes, but Gram found her questions naive or pointless. This was a farm, not a museum. Even after Jim and Susan were married and Susan proved she could carry her weight at harvesttime, Gram often treated her as if she were a child who had to be indulged or restrained.

When Lara was little, Susan used to take her over to visit the Fremantles. Mrs. Fremantle would give Lara sour lemonade and chocolate chip cookies while Susan wandered through the house, tracking the descriptions in Abigail's journals against the floor plans.

Now and then, Liz Fremantle let Susan lead a tour through the house for the Douglas County Historical Society or a Riverside Church study group. Susan showed visitors the outsize flour bins where Una Fremantle had hidden Robert Schapen and Etienne Grellier during one of the slaver raids and the basement room where Judge Fremantle stored guns for the anti-slavery militia in Lawrence.

Susan mourned the fact that the Grelliers' old two-room shanty (rebuilt after Quantrill's raid in 1863) had been replaced by a proper house in the 1860s. That house had been demolished in turn in the 1920s, replaced by the comfortable two-story, brick-and-frame place where the family still lived. Susan wanted to feel herself in Abigail Grellier's two-room lean-to, with the slats so wide apart the mice and snakes came in and out at will.

Susan wished she could explore the Schapen place, to see what remained of their original buildings, but if she'd suggested that to Myra or Arnie they would have assumed she only wanted to snoop and sneer. It seemed to be a point of honor for Myra to live in almost-punitive austerity. She still bent over the low zinc sink installed in the 1920s when her father-in-law brought plumbing into the house. The steep stairs to the second floor weren't carpeted, and only the cheapest rugs—rag in her father-in-law's day, discount bath mats for Myra—lay at the front and back doors.

Susan told her daughter that Myra lived like that to increase her grievance with the Universe. “Everything in the world works against the Schapens. Myra to this day blames your grandpa for the death of their dairy herd in the thirties. She'd only just come there as Bob Schapen's bride when the drought took hold. She thought the Grelliers should have sacrificed half their beef herd and shared out their hay with the Schapens.”