Bleeding Kansas (8 page)

July 23, 1855

The sum of money my dear mother gave to me on our parting is fast depleted by the exorbitant price the Missouri ruffians charge for the basic needs of living. With a sack of wheat $6, we make a baking of bread do for a week. I must store it in my tin trunk to keep the greedy mice from it! We have apples a plenty, for there were trees on the land that M. Grellier staked out, and they are a great gift and mercy to us.

I used some of my precious hoard to buy a cow, and “Mrs. Blossom,” as I christened her, has some days been my dearest friend, for M. Grellier is very busy in the town with the militia that will try to protect us from the ruffians. She stands near me while I tend my vegetable garden, dug for me with great kindness by Mr. Schapen, who has a team of oxen. One acre of this prairie sod is now under cultivation! And my radishes, peas, and corn are all rising well.

“Y
EAH,
S
OAPWEED,
it all sucks.”

Robbie Schapen leaned his head against the Guernsey-Jersey's flank. The urge to curl up around her warm body and go back to sleep was so strong that he sat upright again. She hated—all the cows hated—automated milking. No matter how careful you were, the rubber tubes and vacuum pump moved milk through them too fast for comfort. If he fell asleep, she'd bellow in agony when her udders were stripped. That would be cruel to her, and would also bring his dad—or, worse yet, his grandmother—to see what new blunder he'd made.

He scooted over to Scurf-pea and attached the teat cups, moved on to Bittersweet, Daphne, and then Connie. Five cows on a side—his side—move them out, bring in the next five. A race of sorts that he won about once every three months.

Junior could outmilk both Arnie and Dale, but that was because he didn't worry about hurting the cows. The ones he milked always had the highest rate of mastitis on the farm, so Robbie thought it was fucking unfair—
Sorry, Jesus, but it really is
—for Dad to hold Junior up to him as an example. A cow with mastitis has to be on antibiotics, and you can't use her milk—you take it from her, but you have to throw it out until she's well again. So the faster Junior milked, the more money they lost. But try telling Dad that.

Today, fortunately, Dale Bracken was on the other side of the drainage pit. He was a tired, quiet man who worked for Arnie, coming out to help with the early milking and doing odd jobs, like spraying the lagoon, which collected wastewater runoff from the grazing pastures and milking shed.

Robbie turned on the pump, watched the milk flow through the Lucite tubes, checked the udders, turned off the switch, and removed the hoses. “Okay, girls, out you go.” He slapped Cornflower's flank. She was the lead cow in this lot, and once she moved out the other four would follow. As soon as Soapweed, last in this group, was in motion, Robbie trotted back to the yard and brought in his next five.

Naming the cows was his job. It was actually a punishment, something his grandmother thought up because he'd broken his leg, or maybe because he'd been crying when the broker showed up to buy the cows after his mother disappeared. Robbie couldn't remember very clearly: he'd only been nine at the time.

First, Nanny had told him Mom was dead. But Junior, who was eleven back then, said, “She's not dead. She ran off with some guy she met at the bank.” So then Nanny said Mom was a harlot who couldn't take family responsibilities, and that was the main story she repeated so often it was like a routine part of daily conversation: “Hello, Nanny, how are you?” “Your mother was a harlot.”

She usually repeated it when Robbie did something to annoy her. With his olive skin and skinny frame, Robbie looked like his mother. Blond, broad Junior, he was a true Schapen. Nanny was also very fond of saying that.

Robbie didn't remember his mother clearly. After she left, Dad, or maybe Nanny, had thrown out all her pictures. Robbie rescued three from the garbage when his grandmother was in the field and Junior and Dad were in the barn. He kept them taped under one of his bureau drawers where Nanny wouldn't find them. She was always snooping through his things, looking for clues about whether he was queer, because Robbie liked to play the guitar and hated sports.

Junior was a defensive end. He was hoping for a football scholarship from Tonganoxie Bible College for next year, which meant he couldn't flunk any more of his courses this year. He was flunking biology this fall, but the college didn't care about that, because in Lawrence you had to study evolution to pass biology and Junior told the people at Tonganoxie he'd been flunked because he was the only student to take a stand against forcing students to disregard the sacred Word of God. Really, Junior had failed because he never did any work for the class. He hardly did any work for any classes, but most teachers passed him because he was on the football team. Only Mr. Biesterman, the biology teacher, and Ms. Carmody, in English, refused to give a free ride to the football players.

Of course if Tonganoxie found out what Junior and Eddie Burton had been up to, good-bye college, good-bye football. Robbie sometimes thought about telling, especially when Nanny was raving about Junior like he was one of the elect sitting at God's right hand. The fact that he didn't wasn't out of loyalty—he and Junior had always sacrificed each other on the altar of Nanny's anger—or even that he was afraid of Junior. He was a little afraid of him, of course, his brother being so big and so prone to use his fists. You'd be an idiot not to be somewhat afraid of him. But Robbie's reasons for not telling were more complicated than just fear of Junior. For one thing, he only suspected, he didn't know for sure. More than that, Robbie was afraid if he put his suspicions into words he'd make them real.

Robbie used to have to go to all Junior's games, but last year he started playing guitar for the Salvation Through the Blood of Jesus Full Bible Church's youth programs. The teen group met on Thursday nights, when a lot of Junior's games were scheduled.

Nanny snarled about his lack of family commitment, but Robbie took her hands and said in a wistful voice, “Nanny, I have to put my commitment to Jesus first, because didn't He tell us that ‘he who loveth father and mother more than me is not worthy of me'?”

Nanny had scowled at him and snapped something about Satan and Scripture, but Robbie only smiled a kind, patient smile, one that he had practiced in front of the mirror for a long time: you cannot be punished if you are soulful and solemn. “Pastor Nabo says our metal band is an important Christian service, because we get kids to come to Jesus through music.”

Nanny thought music was a waste of time. If she'd been the last person on the tractor, you could count on the radio being tuned to Rush Limbaugh and William Bennett. If Robbie was the last one using it, he left it tuned at top volume to a heavy-metal station. The sound always jolted Nanny when she turned on the engine—a small pleasure, the price of which was a lecture on Mick Jagger and the dangers of hell waiting for people who jumped and danced on stage and were sodomites when they left it. No matter what Pastor Nabo said, Nanny wouldn't believe that rock or metal weren't the devil's playthings.

Nanny essentially worshipped Junior's football playing. Come to think of it, she was an idolater, with a golden football instead of a golden calf on her altar. She still talked about Dad's stats from when he'd been in high school thirty years ago, and for the last four years all she'd talked about had been Junior's, how he'd made more tackles than Dad in a game against Shawnee Mission or fewer in the homecoming game against Wyandotte. Robbie tried to imagine what she would do if he said, “Nanny, you and Dad have turned Junior and his football team into a statue of Baal.”

“I'm not brave enough for that, Jesus,” he whispered against the cow's side. Anyway, maybe Jesus didn't want him thinking up ways to torment Myra. “Why should I do your work for you,” Robbie said out loud. “She'll die one of these days, and you can torment her yourself.”

Dale, working across the pit from him, looked over. “You say something, Robbie?”

Robbie blushed, hoping the machines were too loud for Dale to have made out his words. “Just practicing my lyrics.”

And then he did start practicing the new song he'd written last night for him and Chris Greynard to sing at youth group next week:

He started to sing more loudly, then remembered where he was: in the milking shed. Not that the cows, or even Dale, would tell on him, but Nanny sometimes came out unexpectedly in the middle of milking to inspect him.

She never worked with the cows, not because she was eighty-seven and couldn't handle the workload, but because the herd had been her daughter-in-law's idea. The Schapens used to raise cows back in the early 1900s. They even had their own dairy, Open Prairie, back then, but during the Dust Bowl Robbie's great-grandfather had to butcher or sell the herd—they couldn't cultivate their own grazing land during that long drought, and they couldn't afford to buy fodder for the herd.

Nanny blamed the Grelliers. Back in the Depression, they raised beef cattle, which they grazed on their acres down by the Wakarusa River. Nanny thought the Grelliers should have sacrificed half their herd and shared their grazing land and fodder with Arnie's grandfather. Just imagine if the Grelliers had suggested the same thing to them! Nanny thought Susan was a Communist who was bound for hell just for running that co-op market. If she'd said kill half your cows for us, Nanny probably would have burned down the Grellier house.

According to Junior, his and Robbie's mom thought she could start Open Prairie up again when the organic craze first got going twenty years ago. She'd bought a mixed herd of Guernseys, Jerseys, and Brown Swiss, starting with fifteen cows. She looked after them herself, before and after her day job at the bank. On her own, while Dad and Nanny scoffed, Mom had dug and lined the lagoon. And she had gone around the county to all the independent grocers, finding buyers for her milk.

His mother's job at the bank in Lawrence had been essential for the family to make ends meet. Like most small-farm families, someone had to work outside the farm if they were going to keep the land—that's why Dad had become a sheriff's deputy after Mom left. When she started the herd, though, she had had high hopes for her cows. She'd thought they might let her quit the bank job and stay home with Robbie instead of leaving him in Nanny's care.

When he was little, Robbie loved going out in the early morning with his mother to do the milking or make rounds with her to the local grocery stores. He could hardly believe it now, leaning against Gilly's side, trying to keep his eyes open. He'd stayed up too late last night, working on the new song, which he had to do almost silently so as not to bring his father or grandmother in on him. He and Junior took turns doing the early shift with Dale. He didn't know what would happen when Junior left next fall—Robbie would probably have to get up every morning to do the milking.

Mom and Robbie had named the cows. That was their secret together, Robbie's and hers, because Dad and Nanny thought naming cows was a sissy thing. He hadn't been supposed to let Dad know the cows all had names, although now that he was older he realized it wasn't that big a secret: Mom used to write the names on the backs of their ear tags. Each tag showed the breed, the date of birth, the registration number, and, on the back, the name she and Robbie had given it. They tried always to give new calves names that started with the same letter as the mother.

It was how he learned his alphabet, Mom squatting to look at him, her face smiling. “Okay, Robbie, Sunflower starts with
S.
Now we need another
S
-word for her baby daughter.”

“Superman,” he shrieked, jumping up and down.

“It's an
S
-word, all right, but is it a good name for a girl?”

And then he thought of Sugarplum, because it had been near Christmas, and she'd read him about visions of sugarplums, not that he knew what a sugarplum was.

Nanny had this bitchy attitude toward the cows because when Mom took off Dad planned to sell the herd. He'd turned against the cows, probably because Mom loved them, and he caused mastitis in a lot of the herd by his rough handling of the milking machine—information Robbie got from outsiders, at 4-H or the farmers' market.

“You're the one who made us keep those cows, Robbie,” he could hear his grandmother saying. “You're the one who can name them.”

It didn't make sense, but there never had been anyone Robbie could discuss it with to try to make sense of it. Nanny made it sound dire, as if naming the cows was like mucking out the milking shed, so that the pleasure he'd had with his mother in thinking up names had disappeared.

He reckoned in six years he had named over a hundred cows. He was running out of ideas and was starting to reuse names from cows who had died, starting to hate the whole routine. Only the unspoken knowledge that his grandmother would feel triumphant if he stopped naming the animals kept him going to lists of wildflowers and colors, even turning to foreign languages, to come up with new ideas.

He slapped the last of his cows on the side and urged her out the shed door. Dale had finished already and was bringing in the water hoses to swab out the pit below the milking stands. Robbie disconnected his milk lines and took them out to the washroom with his milking jars and teat cups.