ONE SATURDAY, Sheriff Dan Norman was kneeling on top of his trailer house, trying to patch a rusty spot that was beginning to leak, when a religious woman came by. She had yellow hair pulled into a thick braid. Her Bible was white, and she held it in both hands, like a big white sandwich.
“Does Jesus live in this home?” she said.
“Pardon?” said Dan. He stood up. In his hands were a trowel and a can of orange sealant, called Mendo, that he had got at Big Bear.
“Did you know that Jesus could live in this trailer?” said the woman. “Because he can. You accept him as your personal savior, he’s here tomorrow.”
“I’m comfortable with my beliefs,” said Dan.
“Well—what are they?” said the woman.
“Let’s just say I have some,” said Dan, “leave it there.”
“Fine with me,” said the woman. She tucked the Bible under her arm and climbed the aluminum ladder leaning against the side of the trailer. She stepped onto the roof and held out her hand. “My name is Joan Gower,” she said. “I’m from Chicago originally, but I’ve lived in this area seven years.”
The sky had the blue depth of a lake. Joan Gower took the trowel from Dan Norman’s hand. He thought for a minute that she was going to pitch in, but it was a brief thought, because she hurled the trowel to the ground.
She sighed. “Wouldn’t it be a miracle if we could throw away our sins that easy?” she said. “God, what a miracle that would be.” She stared sadly downward, and it seemed to Dan that she had in mind particular sins, occurring on such and such a day.
“Look at that,” said Dan: the trowel had stuck in the ground, like a sign. He climbed down to retrieve it, but the phone rang and he went inside, leaving Joan Gower standing up on the roof of the trailer.
The man on the telephone told Dan to go look in a shopping cart at the Hy-Vee. He did not say which Hy-Vee. He did not say what was in the cart. He said he was calling Dan at home so the call could not be traced. Dan’s approach to mystery callers was to treat them casually, get them talking, so he said, “You know, we don’t, as a rule, trace calls at the office either. Call tracing is tricky, and the phone company doesn’t like to do it. They will do it, I’m not saying they’ll never do it, but they won’t do it if they don’t have to. Sometimes you can get what is called a pen register, but that takes a warrant, and warrants are hard to get, too. I know in this county they are. It seems like the judges are all afraid of being overturned down the line, know what I mean?”
“Goodbye,” said the man.
“Now just wait a minute,” said Dan. “Which Hy-Vee?” But it was too late.
Dan hung up the phone, put on his sheriff’s jacket, and went back outside. Joan Gower had come down from the roof and was leaning on a sawhorse, smoking a reedlike cigarette. Dan brought the ladder down, returned it to the shed out back, and explained to the woman that he had to go.
“May I share a verse with you?” said Joan Gower.
“O.K., one verse,” said Dan.
She stood, rested her cigarette on the spine of the sawhorse, and opened the Bible to a place marked by a thin red ribbon.
“Set me as a seal upon thine heart,” she read, “as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned.”
Joan Gower retrieved her cigarette and took a drag. “Song of Solomon, eight: six and seven,” she said. “What does that say to you?”
“I don’t know,” said Dan. “Love is powerful.”
Joan nodded. “Good,” she said. “Solomon is grappling with the idea of love.”
On the highway Dan turned on the reds, and he got to the Hy-Vee in Chesley pretty fast, but he found nothing unusual in any of the shopping carts. He saw Lenore Wells in the dairy section—she was on antidepressants, as always, and smiled her small, lonely smile. Her father had hanged himself in the vault of the Morrisville bank, and her brother was serving fifteen years in Anamosa for stealing a mail truck. Sad, sad family. Lenore told Dan about two cranes that had flown over her house early that morning, and Dan thought she was going to weep, but instead she shook her head and reached down to get some string cheese.
There were two more Hy-Vee stores in the county, in Morrisville and in Margo. At the Hy-Vee in Morrisville the boys brought the groceries out to your car, and so there was always a line of cars at the curb, but there were no carts in the parking lot.
The store was at one end of a little shopping center, and Dan entered through a wide corridor in which about one hundred 4-H girls were involved in a confusing demonstration of soil erosion. On a long narrow table they had set up a miniature landscape covered with sand and were now attacking the sand with fans, and squirt guns, and even their hands, although their hands corresponded to none of the erosive forces they had studied, and using them was against the rules. The girls wore white jumpsuits with green sashes, and these outfits were splattered with sand and water, and all around the table was chaos, except for one end, where the older girls presided calmly over the area designated Contour Plowing. Dan was glad to get into the Hy-Vee store, but when he looked at the idle grocery carts, he saw nothing in them except broken lettuce leaves. He left the Morrisville Hy-Vee and drove to the one in Margo.
There he found a shopping cart with a cardboard box in it. The cart was in the northwest corner of the parking lot next to a yellow Goodwill bin. Dan looked at the box, which had once held a case of Hamm’s beer. The top was closed, each flap overlapping the next. Dan heard crying. Lifting the flaps, he found a baby wrapped in a blue flannel shirt. A note was taped on: “My name is ‘Quinn.’ Please look out for me.” The baby had dark eyes, much dark hair, and a loud, deep cry. Dan picked up the Hamm’s box and put it in the front seat of the cruiser. He fastened the seat belt and shoulder harness as well as he could around the box. The baby howled powerfully, but once the car was in motion he looked around, burped, and fell asleep.
Dan headed for Mercy Hospital in Stone City, but three miles out of Margo he picked up a radio call from the deputy Ed Aiken. Some kids were on top of the water tower in Pinville, and Ed Aiken could not get them to come down.
“Try the bullhorn,” said Dan.
“Did that,” said Ed.
“Say you’re calling their folks,” said Dan.
“Did that.”
“I guess you’ll have to go up after them.”
“No, sir,” said Ed, who had found it almost impossible to climb since an incident in his teens when he had come very close to falling off the roof of a barn.
“Jesus, Ed,” said Dan, “get over it.
“I’m not going up that ladder,” said Ed.
“O.K., but I have a baby with me,” said Dan. “I found a baby at the grocery store in Margo.”
“Maybe it belongs to somebody,” said Ed.
“Well, I suppose it does,” said Dan.
The water tower was by the tracks in Pinville. It was the old silver kind with a red bonnet, a ladder, and an encircling walkway that provided a good platform to stand on while writing graffiti. A small crowd had gathered in the grass around the base. Someone had come by with a box of tomatoes, and many of the people were chewing on tomatoes and staring up at the water tower. Ed Aiken came over to the passenger side of the cruiser when Dan pulled up. Ed was a thin man, and the one thing you would say about him day to day was that he rarely seemed to get a decent shave. Right now, for instance, he had a little flag of toilet paper flying under his chin as he opened the cruiser door. The baby started to cry again.
“Aw,” said Ed, “let me hold the little darling.”
He lifted the baby from its box, the blue shirt trailing like a blanket. “Do you like your Uncle Ed?” he said. “Say, sure you do.”
Dan took a turn at the bullhorn without any luck, and then he climbed the water tower. A cage made of hoops protected the ladder, but it seemed that if you slipped and fell the main function of the hoops would be to shear off your head on the way down, and Dan felt a vacuum in his lower parts as he climbed. He watched the people eating tomatoes, and when he could no longer make out the individual tomatoes, he stopped looking down. The culprits were three boys in sleeveless black T-shirts and jeans with the knees torn out. Their setup was professional, with hats, rags, a bucket of red paint, a tray, some turpentine, and a roller screwed onto a stick. In jagged, running letters they had written “Armageddon” and “Tina Rules.”
“Who’s Tina?” said Dan.
“Tina of Talking Heads,” said Errol Thomas.
“What are you thinking of, coming up here in daylight on a Saturday afternoon?” said Dan. “Did you imagine for a second that you wouldn’t get caught?”
“We want people to know,” said Albert Robeshaw.
“We want people to wake up,” said Dane Marquardt. He cupped his hands and yelled “Wake up!” at the people on the ground. “Look at them, they’re so insignificant.”
“We’re in a band,” said Errol Thomas.
“I would’ve guessed that,” said Dan.
The boys packed all their stuff into a gunnysack, and they and Dan headed down the ladder. On the ground, Ed Aiken was holding Quinn over his shoulder, patting him, pivoting slowly.
Ed raised his eyebrows and whispered, “Just dropping off.”
It rained most of the time for the next two weeks. This was the long, gray rain known to every fall, when the people of Grouse County begin to wonder whether their lives will acquire any meaning in time for winter. Water filled ditches, flooded basements, and kept farmers from their fields, but it did not stop anyone from visiting the sheriff’s office in Morrisville with supplies for the baby left at the Hy-Vee. Of course, the baby had never been to the sheriff’s office, but the sheriff had found him, and so the people turned up, craning their necks and looking into the hall behind the desk as if expecting to spy the abandoned Quinn in one of the cells or maybe lying on the floor. The visitors were farm women, for the most part, and they came shaking the water out of their scarves, and carrying bundles of diapers, cases of formula, and bales of bleached-out clothing that in at least one case had not been worn since World War II. Helene Plum even brought a beef-macaroni casserole in Corning Ware, although it was not clear who was supposed to eat it. But then, Helene Plum reacted to almost any kind of stressful news by making casseroles, and had once, in Faribault, Minnesota, attended the scene of a burned-out eighteen-wheeler with a pan of scalloped potatoes and ham. True story, told by her daughter-in-law.
At first Dan and the deputies tried a policy of accepting nothing at the station and directing all supplies over to the Children’s Farm in Stone City. That was where Quinn was. But it seemed you couldn’t tell people they had come to the wrong place—they wouldn’t hear it. This was partly out of dignity and partly because Stone City was a good half hour from Morrisville. So when Dan would say, “The baby is out of our hands,” or Earl Kellogg, Jr., would say, “They got the baby over in Stone City,” the women would leave their offerings on the bench against the wall, or on the floor, and say, “Well, hope he can use this busy box,” or “Well, see that he gets these sleepers worn by our Ted,” and then they would turn and go back out to their El Caminos in the rain. The sheriff and his deputies must have made six or eight trips to the Children’s Farm. There was stuff enough for ten babies, and sometimes the sheriff’s department looked more like a Similac warehouse than an agency of the law.
Claude Robeshaw and his son Albert came in on the ninth or tenth day of rain, but they didn’t have anything for Quinn. Claude’s concern was his son’s share—about seven hundred and fifty dollars—of what it would cost to restore the paint job on the Pinville water tower. Claude Robeshaw was tall, with plowlike features. He was seventy-one years old to Albert’s fifteen. When Dan himself was a teenager he had baled straw for Claude Robeshaw, and he remembered one August Sunday when Claude was driving the tractor and Dan, Willard Schlurholtz, and the Reverend Walt Carr were working the hayrack. The temperature was ninety-seven degrees, and Claude decided that after every round they’d better have a beer so nobody would get dehydrated, and after five rounds young Dan fell off the rack.
“I’ll climb that tower and paint it myself,” said Claude. “That kind of money, I’ll silver-plate the bastard. I’m serious. I’m dead serious. Why, Jesus Christ, some outfit comes down from out of state and they are playing this county like a piano.”
“Claude,” said Dan, “your quarrel really is with the board of supervisors. But as it was told to me, they’ve got to have somebody who is bonded. Now, what is bonded? Well, you go to the state and the state bonds you, and to find out any more about it, I guess you’d have to go to the state. But this is what it costs, apparently, to get somebody who is bonded.”
Claude turned grimly to his son, who was almost as tall, with short brown hair, jean jacket, eyeglasses. “Do you understand what the sheriff is saying?” he said.
“No,” said Albert.
“It’s bullshit, that’s why,” said Claude.
“They went out and got three bids,” said Dan. “I’ll grant you this was not the lowest. There was one bid that was lower, but that was by a company, their crew got drunk over in De Witt and ran their truck into the river, and it was a big production to get it out. Yes, it’s a lot of money. But those words went up, and they have to come down. People are mad in Pinville, Claude. They had a fine water tower, and now you drive into town, you think the place is called Armageddon.”
Albert laughed, and this angered Claude. “So help me God,” he said, “I will knock you through the wall of this station.”
“Then I’d be dead,” said Albert. “That’s like saying, ‘So help me God, I’ll cut your throat.’ Or, ‘So help me God, I’ll poison your food.’“
Claude made room on the bench by moving aside a yellow quilt that had come in that day for Quinn. He sat down, removed a cigar from its glass tube, pared the end away with a jackknife, and lit up. “I believe I had you too late in life,” said Claude. “I already had two daughters and three sons, and maybe I should have stopped right there. I know it’s been one sorry situation after another. Maybe I should tell the sheriff about when you decided to run away and live in a tree.”
“Do,” said Albert. “I want you to.”
So then he didn’t. But it was not a long story, and he had told it so many times, to prove so many different points about Albert’s character, that most anyone around Grafton knew the gist of it. When Albert was five or six years old, he got mad at Claude and Marietta and decided to move out to the woods behind the Robeshaw farm. He took a can of beans, a can opener, a fork, and The Five Chinese Brothers. Well, he sat down under an evergreen to read, and he wondered if he hadn’t brought the wrong book, because it always gave him a chill to see the picture of the first brother’s huge face as he held in the sea. But he read the whole thing and then he was hungry, and he managed to open the can and begin eating the beans. But when he came upon the little cube of pork in the beans, he didn’t know what it was, and it scared him, and he ran crying for home.
Dan waited for Earl Kellogg to come on shift, and when he did Dan left the office for the day. But it was cold, raining, and getting dark, and this made Dan think that winter was coming, so he decided to go over to the Children’s Farm with the yellow quilt, which had been brought in that day by Marian Hamilton and wouldn’t do anyone any good folded up there on the bench.
The Children’s Farm was a dark brick castle on a hill. It had narrow windows and lightning rods and stone figures that lined the roof, representing the virtues of Hygiene, Obedience, Courtesy, Restraint, and Silence. The structure was built in 1899, and rebuilt after a fire nine years later, and seemed specially designed to remind the children passing through that their circumstances were tragic. There was a farm—seventy acres and two barns, one big, one small, which were slowly falling down—and it used to be, going way back, that the hands and the children would raise their own food and even make their own shoes. Now the fields were leased to other farmers, the kids wore navy tennis shoes from Kresge’s, and the barns had not held animals for twenty-five, thirty years. Still, cows had been there once, and it was raining, so the place smelled like wet cows as Dan stepped from his cruiser, tucked the quilt under his coat, and headed across the gravel to the front door. There was a white Ford Torino in the driveway with the parking lights on and the motor running, and Dan looked in, as was his habit, and sitting behind the steering wheel was the woman, Joan Gower, who had thrown his trowel off the roof of the trailer.
She rolled down the window. A lime paisley scarf covered her hair. “Is something wrong?” she said. “Oh, Sheriff, how are you?”
“I’m fine,” said Dan. “Do work here?”
“I volunteer,” said Joan. “Well, I’m volunteering to read to Quinn. I know the community has really poured its heart out, but it occurred to me that the one thing he probably doesn’t have is someone to read him stories. That’s why I brought these books. See this? Jesus is riding a burro on Palm Sunday. Isn’t that a beautiful illustration? And here he is, making fish for the multitude. Isn’t that the greatest?”
Rain dripped from the visor of Dan’s hat. “I have to tell you something, Joan,” he said. “This is an infant. Bible stories might be a little bit over his head.”
“Well, that’s what they said, but the age doesn’t matter. I saw a story in a magazine about a child whose parents read him the multiplication tables every night before he was born, and now Princeton University is running tests on him. But these people say Quinn doesn’t have time to hear a story. Does that make any sense to you? What is it that he’s supposed to be doing? I don’t see what would occupy a baby’s time to the point where he couldn’t listen to a Bible story. This evades me completely. Plus, somebody has to provide him with a religious instinct—otherwise, when he’s christened it won’t take, and he runs the risk of going to Hell. And I told them this. Well, they have to run it by their supervisor.”
“You talked to them just now?” said Dan.
“Well, no,” said Joan. “It’s been a while, but they said they couldn’t predict when the supervisor would be in. It seemed like they were giving me a song and a dance, but then I thought, Why don’t I wait and see if he shows up. But I suppose it’s getting late now.”
Dan coughed. “Yeah, it is,” he said. “Maybe you ought to go on home and call them tomorrow. Where do you live?”
“I don’t mind waiting,” said Joan. “But I guess you have a point. Maybe I’m a little keyed up about this baby. I don’t know why. It’s been raining so hard. I think I need to see him with my own eyes. I would feel better if I could just see him. I mean, look at this place. It’s like the Munsters’ house.”
“Joan, that baby is fine,” said Dan. “He’s strong, he’s healthy, he’s got more blankets than anyone I’ve ever known.”
“Maybe you could put in a good word for me,” said Joan. “Maybe if you suggested it, they would let me read to him. Tell them my church might do a benefit for him. Which is true, we might.”
“I’ll talk to them,” said Dan, “see what I can do.” He watched Joan Gower drive up to the highway, and then he went into the lobby, which was heavy with the smell of musty furniture. He gave the quilt to Nancy McLaughlin, the night administrator. She had her arm in a cast and explained that she had been knocked down by a rainy gust while trying to get from her car to her house. She took him to see Quinn. They had him on the second floor, which was painted yellow and gray. In a low room with bright lights, Dan’s second cousin, the nurse Leslie Hartke, was giving Quinn a bottle.
“Hi, Dan,” she said. “Want to feed him?”
Dan shook his head. “Just brought another quilt over,” he said.
“This has been a bonanza for us,” said Nancy McLaughlin, rubbing her cast with her hand.
“Oh, come on,” said Leslie Hartke. “Feed the baby.” So Dan washed his hands and sat down, and Leslie gave him the baby, and the baby’s blankets, and the bottle. The baby took the bottle for a moment, looked at Dan with wide eyes, and began to cry.
“I remind him of Hy-Vee,” said Dan.
On his way out, Dan paused with Nancy McLaughlin to watch some boys playing checkers in the common room. The boys wore pajamas and sat at a card table in the corner by the stairs. The common room had high plaster walls, and the only sound was the melancholy click of the checkers.
“King me,” said one of the boys.
The other stared at the board. “Fuck,” he said.
“Checker time’s over,” said Nancy McLaughlin. “Good night now.” After the boys had disappeared up the stairs, Dan asked Nancy about Joan Gower.
“Not a happy woman,” said Nancy. “She read me a verse, what was it, something about being shut up in the hands of my enemies.”
Dan tried all the way home to decide whether Joan Gower was trouble or just overly dedicated to whatever it was she believed in. When you got down to it, Dan did not know what anyone believed in. He had told her he was comfortable with his own beliefs, but that was just to keep her moving. He didn’t have any beliefs to speak of. A world that would deposit a child in a beer carton in the middle of nowhere seemed capable of you-name-it, but Dan did not think that you-name-it qualified as a belief. The trailer was dark in the rain. Dan had left a Folgers can under the drip in the corner of the bedroom, and he emptied the can in the sink and put it back in place.
In order to see the records of the Mixerton Clinic, Dan had to talk to Beth Pickett. She was a spindly older doctor who stamped around with her chin in the air. She had begun her career in 1944, as an intern with Tom Lansford, a famous general practitioner in Chesley. Dr. Pickett had seen Grouse County medicine through its youth and would not let go. She was insufferable, and the public loved her dearly.
Dan waited in Dr. Pickett’s office, where the walls were crowded with homemade images of Dr. Pickett. She had been needlepointed, watercolored, and macraméd, although the last made her look like the trunk of a tree. She had been sketched and caricatured many, many times. Soon the doctor marched into the room and sat down behind the desk.
“We don’t think the baby was born in a hospital,” said Dan. “We thought we’d take a list of the people who came in pregnant, and a list of the people who gave birth in the hospitals, and compare the two lists. It’s a pretty simple idea.”
“Well, it’s not as simple as you think,” said Dr. Pickett, “because when a woman comes into this clinic, nobody sees the records. They’re protected by legislation I went to Des Moines and got passed in the summer of 1966. A man named Clay drove me down. He was a big drinker. All the time I was talking to the legislature, he was down at the Hotel Leroi. Drank and drank and never got drunk.”
“All I need is the names,” said Dan. “Maybe I could just look at the names.”
“No,” said Dr. Pickett. “The names are in the records, and the records cannot be seen.”
They went back and forth like this for a while, but however Dan could think to phrase it, Dr. Pickett said no, and finally Dan said he could come back with a warrant if that’s what it took.
Dr. Pickett pretended not to hear. “That’s right,” she said, “you come back anytime.”
“Help me find this woman,” said Dan. “Come on.”
Dr. Pickett brought out some brandy and poured it into jam glasses. “I don’t see what good that would do,” she said, pushing a glass across the desk, steering it around a plaster bust of herself. “When I went to medical school, I lived in Grand Forks, North Dakota, with Aunt Marilyn Beloit. This was many years ago. Every house on her street was a bungalow, and they were all small and nicely taken care of. Aunt Marilyn was a singer who went by the name of Bonnie Boone, and she must have done all right, because she had all her suits tailored in Fargo. Anyway, also living in this neighborhood was a young woman, not married, who had given birth to a child and left it on the doorstep of a family named Price. The Prices lived up the hill, and they didn’t lack for money. Well, this was the way it was done in those days. Babies were left on doorsteps all the time, and it was not unusual to open your door in the morning and find that three or four had been deposited overnight. I’m exaggerating, of course, but it worked very smoothly, as I recall, and you didn’t talk about it, but you didn’t throw up your hands in horror, either. Anyway, one evening I took the bus home, and as I was walking by this woman’s place—her name was Nora, and she rented the back of a house—she asked me to come over and visit after supper. She was older than I was, but we were not that far apart in age, so I said yes. Well, it turned out that Nora was a bohemian. She had a piano and a pregnant cat and a big bottle of red wine, and her bed was a mat in the middle of the living room floor, which I thought was an unusual arrangement. We had two or three glasses of wine, and the next thing we knew that big black and white cat had crawled onto the bed and broke her water. Nora dragged out a suitcase, opened it, and lined it with towels. She put the cat in the suitcase, and that cat began to purr so loudly it sounded like singing. I was spellbound, but with the wine I could not keep my eyes open past three kittens. When I awoke there were five, suckling in the suitcase, and Nora was playing the piano.”
Dan waited for her to conclude the story, but that seemed to be it, so he said, “Did it ever bother Nora that she gave her baby away?”
Dr. Pickett shook out a handkerchief and blew her nose. “It bothered her a great deal,” she said, “and I believe she tried to get it back. But Jack Price was a judge, so you can imagine how that went over.”
Claude Robeshaw did not give up on the water-tower issue, and the county board of supervisors eventually agreed to a deal in which he would put up four hundred dollars toward the restoration, and his son would pay off the rest by working after school for the sheriff’s office. Dan did not have to go along with this arrangement, but it seemed like the punishment would mean more to young Albert if he had to put in time; also, let’s face it, sheriff was and remains an elected position in Grouse County, and Claude Robeshaw was a faithful Democrat, who once had Hubert and Muriel Humphrey to his house for supper.
The first thing Dan had Albert do was clean up the basement of the sheriff’s substation in Stone City. This was a tiny storefront on Ninth Avenue that once had been a barbershop called Jack’s. The reason the sheriff’s department got no more than a barbershop’s worth of space in the county seat goes back to 1947, when the sheriff was a popular fellow called Darwin Whaley. He was handsome and young and just back from the South Pacific, and the board of supervisors hated him. The supervisors got their own way about everything, and wanted to keep getting their way, and decided that the thing to do with Darwin Whaley was stick him far from the rest of the government, where he would have a hard time finding out what was going on. So they built the sheriff’s building off in Morrisville—where it is to this day—and for years the sheriff had no place whatsoever in Stone City, although the courthouse was there, and appearing in court and consulting court records were common things for the sheriff to do. It was in 1972 that the county made a deal with the dying barber, Jack Henry, to buy his shop and rent it back to him for one dollar a year until his demise. But Jack Henry surprised his doctors by holding on until 1979, at which time the sheriff (this would have been Otto Nicolette) finally got his barbershop.
The basement was still full of everything a careless barber with one foot in the grave might care to throw down there: newspapers, hamburger crusts, magazines, sun-faded comb displays, pop bottles, torn seat cushions, burned-out clippers with tangled cords, radios with cracked faces, moldy calendars featuring bland farm scenes or naked women with scissors and comb. The worst was the hair tonic, which would take Albert several days to find but which he could hear dripping everywhere, like underground springs. He went to work with a shovel and an aluminum basket. On the second day he uncovered two barrels full of mannequin heads—many more heads than one barber would need, you would think, but it turned out that each one was printed with dotted lines suggesting a different cut or style. This would have seemed touching to anyone who had been around when Jack was barbering, because he was known for having exactly one haircut in his repertoire and applying it equally to all customers. Albert carried the heads up the narrow stairs in the aluminum basket. They had the feel of an important archaeological find, and Albert kept three for a use he had not yet determined, but the rest went into a dump truck parked in the alley.
The cleanup took place during a week when Dan was testifying before a grand jury in a drug case involving a restaurant called Rack-O’s on Highway 41. Once, returning to the office, he found Albert dangling his legs over the side of the desk, smoking a cigarette.
“I just used the phone,” said Albert. “I hope that’s all right. I was calling Lu Chiang. She’s the exchange student from Taiwan. They put her out on Kessler’s farm.”
“Long way from home,” said Dan.
“You wouldn’t believe how hard they make her work,” said Albert. “She has to take care of these chickens all by herself. If it wasn’t for her, the chickens would all be dead. Candy Kessler stays in town every night, but Chiang has to go home to feed the chickens. She has to get up at six in the morning to feed the chickens. One of the chickens stayed out in the rain and got sick, and none of the Kesslers would speak to her until it got better.”
“I never knew anyone with chickens where they weren’t always getting sick,” said Dan.
“There’s a foreign-exchange guy named Marty in Kansas City, but he just kisses the host family’s ass,” said Albert. “He says she knew this was a farm area when she left Taiwan, so too bad.”
“Something came up about Taiwan the other day,” said Dan. “Oh, yeah, that’s where they make our radar guns. One of them went on the blink, and we had to mail it back. Forty-three dollars postage.”
“Chiang says she’s not getting a very favorable impression of America,” said Albert. “I said, ‘Just wait.’”
The rain let up gradually, day by day, and the weather warmed into a wave of Indian summer. Farmers got back to work, and the combines were going around the clock. You could see the headlights through the stalks at night, dust plumes during the day. On the highway, every other vehicle seemed to be a tractor pulling a green wagon full of corn. The sunlight was golden. Lu Chiang’s chores became less burdensome, and she got to go up to Pizza Hut with Albert Robeshaw.
Meanwhile, Quinn had not been forgotten, and various towns and clubs and churches struggled, not in an undignified way, over the right to carry his banner. It was felt that something should be done, no question, and that one large thing would be preferable to a lot of small things. So it was decided that a Big Day would be held for Quinn on Sunday, October 14, in the town of Romyla. A Big Day was what you called it when a town held a street event for any purpose other than to celebrate a conventional holiday. You could have a Big Day for sending a sick child to the Mayo Clinic, for new axes and boots for the fire department, or just for everyone to drink and dance on Main Street. Romyla was chosen because it had never had a Big Day, although it had conducted an Irish Fair for several years in the seventies and was considered capable of holding a well-run event—unlike, say, Boris, which was regarded as something of a joke town, barely able to keep a tavern in business.
They asked Dan to bring out the sheriff’s department cruisers for the parade, and they also asked him to take his turn in the dunking booth. Dan agreed to the cruisers, and bought some hard candy for himself and the deputies to throw to the spectators. Ed Aiken was lukewarm to this idea, and Earl Kellogg said flat-out that it was sissified for anyone in a cruiser to acknowledge the crowd in any way, and that this was doubly true when it came to throwing candy, to which Dan said, “And we wonder why people hate the sheriff’s department. And I don’t mean not like, I mean hate.”
“Well,” said Earl, “if you want to do something people would get a charge out of, they already asked you to sit in that cage where they dump you in the water.”
“Lester Ward broke his collarbone that way,” said Dan. “You want to try it, you be my guest.”
“Lester Ward,” said Ed. “Isn’t he the guy with all the decoys in his yard? Why would anybody want to dunk him?”
“No,” said Dan, “but I know who you’re thinking of. That’s Lyle Ward. Lester Ward’s dead. He ran the hatchery in Pinville. You remember him—he always wore a hat.”
“Oh, Lester Ward,” said Ed.
Dan met Earl Kellogg and Ed Aiken in Romyla at ten-thirty on the Sunday morning of the benefit. They were all in their reflective sunglasses, and they stood in front of the Cotter Pin Tap watching the Methodist women unloading a van full of cakes for the cakewalk. The sun was bright, and it seemed that all the grass in town had just been mowed. Romyla had a hostile kind of pride that you didn’t find anywhere else in the county, Dan thought. Earl Kellogg sneezed eleven times in rapid succession, and Ed pounded him on the back to help him stop.
A new red pickup pulled alongside them, with Claude Robeshaw, Lu Chiang, and Albert inside. Claude said good morning and went into the Cotter Pin, and Albert introduced Lu Chiang to Dan, Ed, and Earl. Lu Chiang had brown eyes and long black hair. She was one of those foreign students whose fresh clothing and generous expressions make the local kids seem edgy and strange. She, Albert, and Dan walked down the midway, which was in this case Main Street between the old telephone office and the tracks.
“Albert tells me you have a basement with heads in it,” said Chiang.
“That’s right,” said Dan.
“It must be very comical,” said Chiang.
“They’re gone now,” said Albert. “I threw them out.”
“Now, Lu Chiang,” said Dan, “how long does it take a person to get here from Taiwan?”
“The flight from Taipei to Tokyo was three and a half hours,” said Chiang. “At Narita there was a long delay, and I fell asleep in my chair. Then I awoke and boarded a flight to Chicago, which lasted twelve hours. From Chicago there was a flight in a small, barren aircraft to Stone City, where Ron and Delia Kessler were waiting for me. I believe it was twenty-one hours from the beginning to the end.”
Dan whistled. “Was this the longest you’d ever flown?” he said.
“Yes,” said Chiang. “Seven hours from Tokyo, the flight attendants appeared with facecloths for everyone.”
“I can’t even picture Tokyo,” said Dan.
The parade was late because the Morrisville-Wylie marching band was late, but the band members finally arrived, in a yellow bus, and led the way playing “On Wisconsin,” “Quinn the Eskimo,” and “The Girl from Ipanema.” They were followed by blue-ribbon rider Jocelyn Jewell on Pogo, by a group of Korean War veterans pulling a cannon, and by floats representing the discovery of the infant in the grocery cart, the marriage of Julien Dubuque and Princess Petosa, and the complete line of Arctic Cat snowmobiles sold by Wiegart Implement in Wylie. The sheriff’s cruisers ended the procession, and no candy came from their windows.
After the parade, Albert and Lu Chiang went down the line of musty blue tents, trying to win a prize. They threw baseballs at a row of stuffed cats that seemed to be nailed down, lost eight dollars at blackjack, and had their weights guessed almost to the pound in an unsuccessful attempt to win a plaster cow. Then they examined a red tractor that had been modified to run on LP gas, but it looked to their eyes like any other red tractor, and they wandered by the table of the Little Church of the Redeemer, where Joan Gower and a thin boy named Russ were giving away coin banks in the shape of a church to anyone who could recite a Bible verse from memory. Albert responded with the one about Caesar Augustus’s decree that all the world should be taxed, and Joan said very good and handed him a church bank. Then she turned to Chiang, and when she learned that Chiang was a Buddhist, she picked up a stack of pamphlets, thumbed off five or six, and pressed them into the girl’s hands.
“I want you to have this literature,” said Joan. “I want you to take these home to your family. This part is about the death on the Cross, and this shaded area has to do with the Resurrection. This is a beautiful message for people of all nations. And I’ll bet when you get down to it you will find that Jesus and Buddha have a lot in common.”
“I think the Buddha is much heavier,” said Chiang.
“You just take these home,” said Joan.
Albert and Chiang headed for the Cotter Pin in search of old Claude. Along the way, Chiang let the pamphlets drop into a green barrel, and Albert gave her the church bank he had won.
The Big Day in Romyla raised more than two thousand dollars for Quinn, but it turned out that he did not need it. A rich couple came down from Minneapolis one weekend and made him their foster child. Because of the privacy laws, not even Nancy McLaughlin of the Children’s Farm could give out the identity of the couple, but it was Mark and Linda Miles, who, with some foresight, had made their fortune selling soy-based eye makeup in northern Europe. Quinn was renamed Nigel Bergman Miles and given a bedroom about the size of Dan’s trailer, overlooking one of Minnesota’s ten thousand lakes.
Meanwhile, Dan kept looking for Quinn’s mother. He never got to see the clinic records, and had to make do with rumors, anonymous tips, and crank phone calls. He ended up with a list of thirteen names, and during the month of October he was able to clear eleven of them. One had given birth in St. Louis and put the child up for adoption, five had miscarried without providing adequate explanation to their neighbors, two were men with female-sounding names, and three were elderly nuns at Sacred Heart Academy in Morrisville.
That left two possibilities: a woman who would not discuss the case over the phone, and a woman who had no phone.
Dan ruled out the first woman when, in the middle of their interview, she excused herself to turn up the radio to hear the theme song from Cats. This was at the laundromat where she worked, in Walleye Lake. Also, her story made sense and was verifiable. (It had to do with a troubled young man who once had a crush on her and now waged a relentless telephone campaign against her. Since the establishment of the Crimebusters Hot Line in Brier County, for instance, he had called up to link her name to well-publicized instances of arson, hit-and-run driving, and window-peeking.)
The woman with no phone was Quinn’s mother, although she never admitted it. She lived in a house on a woody hill across from the county shed on the outskirts of Wylie. It was a house that had been moved to the site years ago, but it still looked out of kilter and always would. The doors would not close; winter wind would sweep through the cracks in the foundation. The house needed paint, and for some reason there was a rusted barbecue grill on the roof of the porch. There was no sign of children, no sign of animals, no sign of anyone except this woman, who was a little older than Dan had expected, wore a cotton dress, and had her hair tied up with a frayed green ribbon. She and Dan sat on the steps of the porch.
“I went to the doctor the one time,” she said. “It wasn’t for the baby. There was no pregnancy. That’s where the confusion lies. It turned out to be a false alarm. I wrote it on my calendar.”
“Who’s your doctor?” said Dan.
“He’s on my calendar,” she said.
She got up, went inside, and came back with a wall calendar from the cooperative elevator in Wylie. It did have writing on it, lots of it, but it was unreadable, and had been scrawled across the days without regard for when one ended and the next began. Dan got up. The woman’s eyes were still—she was watching the orange county trucks across the road. “Let’s go for a ride,” said Dan, and she said, “Where to?”