Bleeding Kansas (41 page)

Lara giggled again and bit Robbie in the neck. “Tell her you're with a vampire. Tell her you have too much respect for Amber to infect her with vampire blood.”

She bit him again. He yelped, and they scuffled happily for several minutes.

“Lucky for me it's football season or she'd have Junior chained to me like a prison guard,” Robbie said a little later. “He tried to follow me this afternoon, but I was too fast for him, and he had to get back to the school—he missed football practice yesterday, and his grades aren't good enough that they'll let him keep his scholarship if he keeps missing practice. But I think he told Eddie to spy for him. So, Lulu, we really have to be careful.”

Lara agreed, more readily than Robbie thought she would. She was more courageous than him, or at least more willing to take risks, but Junior and Eddie in the heifer's shed had frightened her badly enough that she didn't want to court the disaster of them coming on her and Robbie.

“We can cool it for a day or two,” Robbie said. “I'll go to my youth group tomorrow. Maybe we could get together Saturday: I think Nanny's going to leave Mrs. Ruesselmann in charge so Dad and her can drive over to Tonganoxie Bible to watch Junior play.”

“Three days,” Lara said.

They clung to each other, trying to ward off the impending separation. And then it turned out Robbie couldn't even get away on Saturday because Arnie kept him hopping all afternoon. They didn't meet again until Monday evening. After four days' separation, they melted together. They clung to each other in Chip's sleeping bag, whispering, stroking, not caring how late they were.

When she got home at eight, after ignoring Jim's calls to her cell phone, Jim told Lara she was grounded for two weeks and that he was going to enforce it.

As for Robbie, even though he always left the Schapen farm on foot when he slipped off to see Lara, Myra was so furious at his late arrival home that she took away his truck keys. She gave them to him in the morning so he could drive to school and then took them away when he was doing the afternoon milking. Since Myra monitored all the phone bills so closely, he and Lara were reduced to using e-mail. At night, when they were supposedly doing homework, or at study hall during the day, they sent each other longing messages, Robbie's filled with the songs he was writing to her, Lara's with pictures she had drawn of him or the two of them together. Robbie saved her messages on a flash drive that he kept in his jeans pocket, making sure he erased them from the family machine each night.

T
HE ONLY GOOD THING
about her and Robbie's two-week separation, at least in Lara's mind, was that if Jim had to keep an eye on her, to make sure she was out after school only to go to basketball or band practice, she could keep an eye on him, too. No trips over to Gina's, at least not after school.

Jim embarrassed her by driving her to and from school; the winter wheat was in, and he wasn't nearly so busy during the day as he had been all fall. She told her friends that her truck was in the shop and sat sullenly at her father's side all the way into town. Secretly, she enjoyed the time alone with him, especially after school when they might stop for a coffee at Z's or at the store, where he let her choose the dinner menu. She'd done a cooking course at 4-H and amused her father with her lectures on nutrition and balanced meals.

One afternoon at Z's, she asked him, point-blank, if he had been visiting Gina. When he froze before answering, she looked at him from under her lashes as if inviting him to confide in her. “I mean, did she have any terrible aftereffects from the bunkhouse falling on her?”

“Not that I know of, Lulu. You could have asked her yourself when she came over to see your mother.”

Jim tried to speak naturally, but Gina's visit, which he had longed for, had not been a success, for him or for either of the women. Gina had treated him with the coolness of a stranger when he answered the door, while Susan insisted on receiving Gina in the front room, dressing as if she were a Victorian widow in deep mourning with the Gold Star pin the Army had sent her at her throat.

After letting Gina in through the kitchen, Jim busied himself with farm accounts in the family room. He knew Lara was eavesdropping: he'd seen her crack open the door that connected the parlor to the unused front staircase. Instead of admonishing his daughter, Jim wished he had the nerve to join her.

When Gina said she was sorry for everything Susan had been through, Lara, peering through the crack in the door, watched her mother bow her head like a queen, saying nothing.

“I'm sorry I haven't been to see you sooner,” Gina said. “I guess I've felt helpless.”

“Then you know exactly how I feel,” Susan said.

“We'll be celebrating Samhain at the end of the month,” Gina said after a pause. “That's the original Celtic ceremony the Christians took over and turned into Halloween. We'll make a fire and show Arnie Schapen that he can't frighten us out of the valley.”

Susan didn't answer, just sat with her hands folded in her lap.

Gina ploughed on, desperate. “We hope you can join us, Susan. You brought so much good energy to our earlier ceremonies. Even though it marks the end of summer, Samhain is a festival of new beginnings. If you came, perhaps it could be a time for you to make a new beginning as well.”

“Did Jim tell you to deliver this message?” Susan asked.

“No!” Gina was startled. Even from behind the door, Lara could sense her wariness. “But you're hovering between life and death, and Samhain is the time when the world itself is balanced between life and death. If you come to the festival, you might find yourself ready to choose life again.”

“I see.” Susan's voice held the dryness of old leaves or old paper. “You've done your duty. You've visited the sick, and apologized for whatever you imagine your own sins are. You can go now.”

Lara scrambled to her feet and was waiting in the kitchen when Gina left. She watched her father suspiciously for any signs of passion, but he merely came into the kitchen to thank Gina for being neighborly.

The sight of her had brought desire to the surface, like a sore tooth. Only the awareness of Lara's sharp gaze made him behave as remotely as Gina did herself. But he drove over to Fremantles' the next day, after delivering Lara to school, while Susan worked on the endless afghan that her occupational therapist thought would do her good.

Gina met him at the door, gave him her crooked gap-toothed smile, but told him it wasn't a good idea for him to visit her. “I don't want to do any more harm to Susan than I already have. And the one thing I've learned in my short stay in the home where the buffalo roam is that everyone for miles around is watching the deer and the antelope play. If you keep visiting me, people will notice. Inevitably, one of them will say something to Susan.”

She looked down at her hands, at the long white fingers that roused Jim more than the idea of her body. “I ran into Clem Burton at the drugstore this morning, and he said he'd be glad to come out the next time I was trapped inside a falling building. Elaine probably blabbed it all out at Raider's Bar—Clem's uncle Turk drinks there, which means everyone out here knows at least that you pulled me out of the bunkhouse. Let's not have them start telling each other that you're neglecting your wife and your farm by visiting the local witch.”

His face burned. He couldn't say anything because he knew Gina was right, but he pulled her to him, anyway. She let him kiss her but drew away almost at once. As he turned to leave, he saw Elaine Logan in the kitchen, her face alive with malevolence.

After that, Jim was just as glad he'd grounded Lara: driving her back and forth to school gave some shape to his time. That, of course, and taking Susan to her therapy appointments. Settling the bills for September, Jim tried to believe Susan's therapy was helping her.

He studied his wife for any encouraging sign. She was bathing regularly. She ate enough to keep her weight steady. Those were the good signs. But, on the minus side, Susan wouldn't go to church or the farmers' market. Nor would she talk to people, not even Rachel Carmody, who faithfully phoned every few days. Besides the afghan, now about ten feet long, Jim didn't know how his wife filled the hours when he was in town or working on the repairs that farm buildings and machinery always needed.

When Pastor Natalie came over on her promised visit, Susan received her, as she had Gina, in the formal parlor in her black dress with the Gold Star pinned at her throat.

“Susan, I'm so very sorry for the loss you have suffered,” Natalie said.

“Our family is used to the senseless shedding of blood in the name of some higher good,” Susan said. “Some
alleged
higher good. Abigail's brother Michael died at Peach Tree Creek.”

Natalie blinked uncertainly, and Jim mumbled, “That was a battle in the Civil War.”

“July twentieth, 1864, just outside Atlanta,” Susan said. “Mr. Grellier had been murdered the previous August, in the great slaughter committed by Quantrill here in Lawrence. Mr. Grellier was teaching in a school for freedmen, and this, of course, was gall and wormwood to a slaveholder like Quantrill. Abigail said of Mr. Grellier's death, ‘It is what we came into the Kansas Territory to do. Not to be murdered, but we were called by God to take up His yoke, and we were to count no cost.' I don't remember her words more exactly, but Jim, or perhaps my daughter, has hidden her diaries away from me, so I can't check them for you. They used to be in our attic, but who knows where they are now. The invalid must be protected at all costs from her personal desires.”

So she had been looking for the diaries. Jim had thought, or hoped, that Susan had forgotten them. If they weren't in the attic any longer, then Lulu must have moved them. He felt so tense he thought his skin would turn inside out on him, while Lara, dragooned into sitting in on the visit with him, froze: if she told her father what she'd done with the trunk, he'd ground her forever!

Jim didn't think he could endure more of the conversation. “I'm going to make some tea, Natalie. Do you want any, or a soft drink?”

Natalie gratefully accepted the offer of tea, but Susan, sitting pointedly under the portrait of Abigail—dressed, like herself, in black, with a cameo at her throat rather than a Gold Star—shook her head.

“Is that Abigail?” Natalie asked, looking from Susan to the portrait. “What did she do after she lost her husband and her brother?”

Susan fingered her pin. “She went on. She had to. She kept this farm going and raised her surviving children.”

“What kept her going, do you know? Or what's your guess?”

“Do you want me to say it was her faith in Jesus?” Susan said with a bark of laughter.

Natalie shook her head. “I want you to say what you think kept her going.”

“She'd had a vision,” Susan said listlessly. “She came out here because she'd had a vision. And her faith in her vision helped. Also, she was very close to one of the neighbors, Mr. Schapen, and his mother, and their love sustained her.”

Lara pinched her lips together. Her mother was behaving in a shocking way—she was playacting at being in mourning. She pretended she didn't want visitors, but, really, whether it was Gina or Pastor Natalie, or even poor Ms. Carmody on the phone, Susan was enjoying the chance to show off how depressed she was.

For instance, when Pastor Natalie said, “We miss you. We need you at Riverside Church,” Susan said, “To do what? Show you what happens when the blind lead the blind?”

“Bogus,” Lara said under her breath. Bogus. She got to her feet and went to the kitchen to help Jim make tea and to tell him what she thought of Susan.

“I bet if we left Mom totally alone, she'd come around, because she wants an audience.”

“You think? You an expert now on human psychology as well as nutrition?” He handed her the tea to take into Pastor Natalie so that he wouldn't have to go himself. “Lulu, where are those diaries? And don't tell me you don't know.”

“Do I have to tell?” she whispered. “I'm taking good care of them, I promise.”

Jim felt the hair crawling on his scalp. “Don't tell me you put them in the miracle calf's manger!”

“No, Dad, honest—I haven't been near the calf again. The trunk is safe, okay? I just couldn't stand it if Mom started going through those old papers again, scribbling notes like she was some clone of Abigail's.”

“Oh, Lulu—” He threw up his hands, not knowing what to say, finally finishing weakly, “They should go to the university library. The archivist there has been asking for them, and the library would take better care of them than we can. Bring them home, okay? We'll take them in together to the archivist.”

Lara nodded and scurried to the front room with Pastor Natalie's tea. The pastor didn't stay much longer. When she'd left, Lara leveled her scorn on Susan.

“You want us to think you're teetering on the brink of death because you're so overwhelmed by losing Chip, but then you dress up as if you were in a play and sit underneath Abigail's portrait so everyone will see what a martyr you are. You never even wore that Gold Star to Chip's funeral, or anything, so I
know
you're just showing off!”

Susan looked at her. “Perhaps you're right, Lara. My feelings are so far away from me that I don't know what they are anymore, and drama seems a way of at least pretending to have feelings. Do you know where Abigail's diaries are? You are so alert about what everyone in the family is doing, I'm sure you know where your father put them.”

It was Lara's turn to be discomposed, but she said hotly, “Even if I did know, I wouldn't tell you. I couldn't bear it if you locked yourself in your room again, studying those old books and writing crap all over the walls. Do you know how long it took Ms. Carmody and the other ladies to clean up after you? Do you even care?”

After a long pause, Susan said, “I don't like you shouting at me, Lara. You're my daughter, not my mother or my drill sergeant.”

Lara bit her lip and fell silent. Susan undid the Gold Star from her throat and pinned it to Lara's sweatshirt.

“I'll share my loss with you,” Susan said. “We're a Gold Star family. They tell me in therapy to remember that I'm not the only mourner in the house.”