Bleeding Kansas (39 page)

Jim thought of all the fights in the family last winter. No one could have stopped Susan once she had her mind made up, that was true. No one could stop Chip, either, come to that. He had always been more like his mother, more passionate, more intense, than Lulu.

“Still,” Jim said, “I'd like to know what's real and what's fake. The bonfires—were you doing that to see what kind of rise you'd get out of us, checking how narrow-minded we actually are?”

She sighed. “I've been a Wiccan for, oh, since I was in college, but I've never lived where I could try some of the rituals on a bigger scale. I met Wiccans in Lawrence, the way everyone meets people who share their beliefs. The bonfires grew out of that. We all were longing to have real bonfires, do the full ceremonials. One of the women had taken part in them in Massachusetts and showed us how to set up the fires.

“They are meaningful to me, these rituals, as much as church and communion are to a Christian. We will have our Samhain festival at the end of October, when the world celebrates Halloween.” She stared at him as if daring him to condemn her religion.

“Fine. Burn down the whole property, as long as it doesn't cross the tracks and get into my cornfield. Are you really trying to write a book about the kids in the bunkhouse?”

“I don't know.” She played with one of the gold studs in her ears. “I've started reading what I can find about them—there isn't much. They called themselves the ‘Free State Commune.' They grew dope, of course. Susan told me how Myra Schapen killed the crop.”

“We don't know who did that,” Jim corrected her. “My brother and my wife assume it was Myra, but no one saw her do it.”

Gina picked up a stack of paper by her laptop. “The Free State ringleader wrote for an old underground newspaper in Lawrence. His name was Dante Sirota—he's the kid who was killed in the bunkhouse. He was pretty inflammatory about the Vietnam war, and on the collusion of townspeople in violence against Indians and African-Americans in the area. I can imagine how Myra Schapen would have reacted to him. I can't help wondering if she set the fire in the bunkhouse.”

“The sheriff concluded at the time that the fire was started accidentally. The kids burned a lot of candles, and the wiring in the bunkhouse was pretty ancient, so—”

“Naturally the sheriff said that!” Gina cried. “The law-and-order man wouldn't challenge the local power structure, especially not when the communards were urging the abolition of private property.”

Jim thought with longing of his fields and the winter wheat. How safe and reliable the land was, not filling your head with romances about dead revolutionaries and great-great-grandmothers and visions—just land that might or might not give you the crop you wanted but wouldn't pretend to be something it wasn't.

“Maybe. Maybe. But I don't think Myra Schapen set that bunkhouse on fire.” He got to his feet again.

“But Elaine saw her the night the bunkhouse burned,” Gina argued. “She went over to look at that miracle calf, or whatever the Schapens are so puffed up about, and she recognized Myra Schapen. She told me when she got back here.”

“It's true Myra was at the bunkhouse the night of the fire. I saw her myself when my brother, Doug, and I were helping with a bucket brigade. Mr. Schapen—Myra's husband, who died a few years later—was there, too. But just because Myra wasn't helping put out the fire doesn't prove she set it. Why don't you talk to Hank Drysdale, Gina? He's the sheriff now, and he's a decent man. He can look in the files at the county building and tell you what the investigation showed.”

“Oh, Jim! I bet you were the last guy in your school to give up on Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, weren't you?”

“What's that supposed to mean?” He was nettled. “That I'm too naive or too bone ignorant to make reliable judgments about people?”

“I'm sorry—I wasn't trying to insult you. You're such a decent person, Jim, basically, you can't believe there's bad in anyone, can you, not even Myra Schapen, let alone a sheriff who's supposed to uphold law and order?” She put a hand on his sleeve, white hand, long fingers.

Even annoyed with her, disliking her dogmatic opinions, he couldn't stop flashes of fantasy. “And what if I can't? Is that such a bad thing? Myra is a pain in the butt, I'll give you that any day of the week, even Sunday, but I will not believe she put a torch to a bunkhouse when she knew people were inside of it.”

He removed her hand from his arm. “I have to go, Gina. I need to get Lulu up, make sure she gets to school, and I have to fertilize twelve hundred acres today.”

She moved around him to face him in the doorway. “Promise me you won't say a word to anyone about my looking for those—those bones in the bunkhouse. Please! I can't stand for people to make fun of me.”

He smiled faintly. “I don't believe in minding other people's business for them. You'll come see Susan sometime soon?”

“A trade, you mean. I'll visit Susan and you'll keep quiet?”

She gave him a saucy smile of her own; once again, he saw the young woman in the cornfield and felt a breath of hot July air on his neck. He took Gina's face between his hands and kissed her, expecting her to back away, slap him, or say something cold and cutting, that she might do it with Susan but not Jim. Instead, she slipped her hands under the top to Mr. Fremantle's pajamas and ran her fingers up his back. They were as soft as he'd imagined, whispers on his wind-roughened skin. He knew he should draw away, return home to face his responsibilities: daughter, wife, wheat. Instead, he pulled Gina closer, wishing he hadn't given all of Chip's Hot Rods to Lara.

T
HE SKY WAS
still dark when Jim left the house an hour later. This was usually the hardest hour of the day for him, the long wait for sunrise after the autumn equinox, but today he was grateful for the protection from his neighbors. The Schapens would have finished milking by now; Myra or Dale were often leaving with milk deliveries about this time, and Arnie might well be returning home from his sheriff's deputy shift.

Gina had made Jim a cappuccino before he left, and between the richness of the coffee, the pleasure of her body, the guilt of lying with her, he felt light—light-headed and light on his feet. He jumped onto the tractor, so light that not even his dirty boots dragged him down.

He had put his own dirty clothes back on. In case either Lara or Susan was up when he got home, he didn't want to compound his guilt by making up a story about Mr. Fremantle's pajamas. He had the engine going and was bouncing down the drive, singing
“Froggy went a-courtin' and he did ride,”
when he thought he heard someone cry out. He braked hard, sure it was Gina, and turned around.

It was still too dark to see, but he heard the cry again over the tractor engine and swung down from the high platform. It wasn't Gina at all but Elaine Logan.

“What do you think you're doing, Farmer Jones?” she snarled. “Trying to break every bone in my body? Why don't you ask people if they want to get yanked all over the country before you drive off with them?”

She was struggling to push herself upright, but a piece of chain had come loose and was lying across her stomach, as Jim realized when he got close enough to see her in his taillights. He burst out laughing, which made her even angrier.

“I could sue you, you and every rotten motherfucker out here. That Schapen and his calf that he won't let anybody see, his murderer of a mother, all of you, getting together to destroy my life.”

“When you put it that way, I can see we're a bad bunch,” Jim said, still laughing but lifting the piece of chain from her and trying to help her out of the cart. She had wrapped herself in the plaid comforter and lain down in the middle of the foam rubber he'd brought along; her weight had wedged the foam so tightly into the cart that he couldn't get underneath her or the foam. He was beginning to think he'd need to drive her back to his barn and use his crane to hoist her out when she grabbed his arms and managed to free her own shoulders. He quickly knelt, got his hands under her, and shoved. She fell onto her left side but was finally able to push herself upright.

“You're going to hear from my lawyer, Farmer Jones, leaving me outside all night, laughing your head off while you molest me. I'll go to the sheriff, I'll talk to that Sunday school teacher, the one who's in love with you, you'll see what trouble I can cause when I put my mind to it.”

“I'm sure you can,” Jim said. “Can you also find your way back to the house?”

“Without help from you.” She turned and waddled up the drive, very much on her dignity.

The Sunday school teacher who was in love with him, he thought as he climbed back on the tractor. She must mean Rachel Carmody. He started to laugh again, thinking how embarrassed Rachel would be by such an accusation. He was a molester, Myra Schapen a murderer, and Rachel a would-be adulterer—unlike Jim himself, who was the real thing.

He was still laughing when he pulled into his own yard. Lara was up, leaning against the counter, eating blueberry yogurt out of a carton. Susan never allowed that kind of sloppy habit, but Jim didn't feel like correcting her, especially not this morning when he'd been so incorrect himself.

“What's so funny?” his daughter demanded.

“Oh, Elaine Logan. I told you last night how I went over to dig Gina out of the bunkhouse. Turns out Elaine crawled into my cart and slept there. When I started up the tractor just now, she woke up and began hurling insults at me. I was afraid I was going to have to get the crane to pry her off the tractor. She thinks Myra Schapen murdered her baby, and a bunch of other stuff. And she kept calling me Farmer Jones.”

“It doesn't sound very funny to me,” Lara said coldly. “And it's wrong to make fun of Elaine just because she's fat. You told me that yourself.”

“I know, I know. I can't help it, sweetie. I don't know what's got into me.” And he gave way to another loud burst of laughter, collapsing onto one of the kitchen chairs.

Lara stared down at him, her lips pinched in disapproval, looking as forbidding as the sepia photograph of ever-so-great-grandmother Abigail in the front room. “Are you drunk, at seven in the morning?”

He forced the laughter down his throat. “No, Lulu, just light-headed from too little sleep. Is your homework done? Are you taking off? What do you have on today?”

“I have basketball practice until four-thirty. Then me and Kimberly are going to work on our science project.”

“Which is what?” Jim asked, not wanting a meeting with Kimberly to be a cover-up for a date with Robbie Schapen.

“We're taking swabs from doorknobs in the girls' and boys' bathrooms and culturing them. Then we'll compare them to see if one has more germs than the other.”

“You don't need a science project to do that. You can write up the results here in the kitchen. Boys are filthy creatures who should keep their hands in their pockets at all times. You certainly don't want one of them touching you.”

“You are acting really strange this morning!” she cried. “What happened over at Fremantles'? Did Gina put a spell on you?”

“She was too tired and beat-up to do much witchcraft—she was trapped in the bunkhouse for about two hours before Elaine wandered by and heard her yelling for help. Elaine walked all the way here to find me, so you're right, it's very bad to laugh. Elaine's the real hero in this story. Gina was darned lucky that Elaine came out to the bunkhouse and that I was home. That center beam missed killing her by about an inch.”

“What was Gina doing there, anyway?” Lara demanded.

“She's decided to write a book about the kids who used to live in the bunkhouse. She was hoping they left something unusual behind. Ludicrous, really—there's nothing there but rotting furniture. The old enamel kitchen table was still there but all rusted out. I cut my shin pretty good on it when I was crawling in after her. Those hippies had a name, which I never knew. They called themselves the Free State Commune.”

Jim didn't think Lara needed to know Gina was really searching for human remains. He went over to the counter and started the coffeemaker just for something to do, something that wouldn't betray him when he talked about Gina. “Your mom up?”

“You know she never is, this time of day. Are you going to stay home tonight? Should I count on eating here? Because if you leave me with the zombie again, I'll spend the night at Kimberly's.”

Her crudeness told him she was worried that he'd slept with Gina. He wasn't going to lie to her, swear he hadn't done what he had, so he settled for a partial truth.

“Lulu, by the time I got Gina out of that wreck I was so beat I couldn't move. I have to confess that she gave me a drink, and after that brandy hit my empty stomach I was too woozy to drive the tractor home, so she let me sleep on the couch.”

“Oh. That one in her study?”

He forgot his own embarrassment. “And how do you know about that couch, missy? When were you in Gina Haring's study?”

She fiddled with her yogurt carton. “Uh, when Mom and I—”

“Lulu, were you the person who taped a roach to that poster on the wall?”

“She was so mean to Mom, getting her all stirred up against the war, then not even coming over to say she was sorry Chip died! I figured she could suffer a little.”

Jim suddenly felt the ache in every muscle he'd strained last night. “You were breaking into the house when I expressly told you to stay away, and you promised you would.”

“I never promised!”

He took her shoulders. “Lara. No more of this. If Junior had found you when you hid in the Schapens' manger, he'd have beaten you so hard you might not ever see again or walk again! What will it take for you to stop sneaking into people's private spaces?”

She scowled, fighting back tears, then broke away from him. “I'll be late for school, and we can't have any more of that, either, can we? Tardiness and making up excuses and not doing homework. Are you like Mom? Do you wish it was me who died in Iraq and Chip who was here?”

He grabbed her again. “You're out of line here, Lara Abigail. I wish Chip was alive but he's not. And I'm glad you're here, you're the bright spot in my heart, which is why I don't want you making mistakes so big that you can't correct or undo them. You hear?”

She muttered an apology and started for the door, but Jim blocked her path. “One last thing, Lulu: where did that roach come from that you put on Gina's poster?”

“I'm not smoking dope. That was one that Chip left behind. I found it in the piano—Gina hasn't touched anything in the parlor, you know—it's all thick with dust.”

Jim sighed, his light mood evaporated, but he let her pass. He didn't know if he could believe her or not, and he hated that more even than the idea of her smoking. If he'd so alienated his daughter that she wouldn't tell him the truth, what was he going to do? He watched her climb into her old pickup, the dinosaurs on the side too covered with mud for him to make them out.

When she'd taken off in a great spray of gravel, he poured a cup of thin, watery coffee and took it upstairs to Susan, who was lying awake in the dark.

“Come on, Suze,” he coaxed. “Get up, have breakfast with me. I'm laying down nitrogen for the winter wheat today. I'd love it if you'd go over the field charts with me, make sure I'm choosing the right varieties and the right acreage.”

She turned over. “Not today, Jim. I'll look at them later. I'm not ready to get up.”

He sat down next to her in his dirty clothes. “I went over last night to rescue Gina Haring from the bunkhouse. Silly woman had been poking around in there looking for bones from the hippie who died in the fire there.”

“That was noble of you,” she said, not moving. “Was she hurt?”

He recounted the rescue, trying to make a drama of it, trying to make a comedy of Elaine's behavior, but he'd never been much of a storyteller, and his wife's passive back made his voice peter out. He sat looking at her unkempt hair, again feeling Gina's soft white hands on his back, her silken skin next to him in the Fremantles' creaking bed. No stretch marks from childbirth, no roughness from too many days in the sun.

“Will I see you again?”
he'd asked at the door. She'd only smiled, brushed a hand across his cheek, and said,
“Thank you for helping me last night, Jim. You saved my life, and I'm truly grateful.”
Which he took to mean that this morning was a thank-you gift, that he shouldn't expect to go back for seconds. The thought produced an ache beneath his ribs sharper than the soreness in his muscles.

Finally, he went downstairs, not bothering to change. His clothes were unbearably filthy, but he was going to spend the day in the fields, so why put on something clean now? He fixed himself peanut butter sandwiches to eat later, filled a thermos with the watery coffee, and scrambled four eggs, which he ate out of the pan.

Lulu and I, we're reverting to a state of nature, not bothering with plates and sitting down at the table. Pretty soon, if he wasn't careful, the house was going to look like the Burton place. Tonight he would make a proper dinner. Even if Susan lolled apathetically in the family room, he would shower, would sit down at the dining-room table with his daughter and eat like a human being.

He took his lunch box and drove the tractor to the equipment shed, so he could unpack the cart and attach the spreader to the tractor. Grandpa had taught him that you halved your workload if you put everything away as soon as you finished using it. That way your equipment was ready when you needed it. If it needed repairing, as it inevitably would if you hadn't put it away, you could fix it now.

He dragged the chains to the far wall and slung them over giant hooks. He folded the plaid comforter and left it by the door so he'd remember to take it back to the house. As he hung it over a sawhorse, a square of paper dropped from the blanket. It was a photocopy of an old newspaper clipping so folded and faded that it was practically illegible.

Jim held it directly under the light, trying to make it out. It had been cut from the
Douglas County Herald,
but the date wasn't clear. The headline was melodramatic: