Dad had told me once, a million years ago, that everything worth knowing could be learned on a farm. He had valued the land above all else—the hard work it demanded, the simple routines and quiet satisfactions. It had been his father’s land, and his grandfather’s before that, and so on, back to the Homestead Act that had divided much of the Midwest into neat, square grids.
And so he had left it to Johnny.
He’d made the arrangements years before, mailing Johnny the paperwork in a thick legal envelope. Johnny had signed everything and mailed it back—not that he understood any of it at the time, he said. He’d been in his early twenties then, picking up odd jobs here and there, trying to keep his head down and stay out of trouble. All those years in between, when Johnny had moved from Illinois to Ohio to Tennessee to Texas, the farm had actually been in his name, with Dad listed as the official renter. Now the land was Johnny’s free and clear, with none of the inheritance taxes that had crippled Jerry Warczak so long ago. His first act as a landowner was to draw up plans for expansion. The dairy would always be there, but Johnny knew the future lay in genetics and breeding. “This is what I dreamed of, all those nights when I was on the road,” he told me once.
“You dreamed of inseminating cows?” I asked.
He smacked me, but lightly, playfully. “Coming home,” he clarified.
I grinned at him. “The prodigal son makes good.” And one by one, the rest of us began to come home, too.
Emilie took a few more gigs in Vegas before she and Darby packed up their tiny apartment and moved back to Watankee, permanently. Surprisingly, Emilie had “a little money saved up”—enough to begin some renovations on Grandpa and Grandma’s old house. She’d been dabbling here and there in photography, and a new generation of teenagers used our farm as a backdrop for their senior pictures. Darby enrolled at Lincoln High School; I experienced a particularly hard jolt of déjà vu the first time I saw her in a gray Ships sweatshirt.
Mom was next, taking a head nurse position at the E.R. in Milwaukee. She wasn’t ready to call Watankee home again but liked being able to drive up on a long weekend to help with a remodeling project or watch one of Darby’s volleyball games. She even got over her phobia of shopping in the grocery store. To see her walk through the Piggly Wiggly now, you would think she owned the place, and it was everyone else who didn’t belong.
I returned to Berkeley to finish my studies in cultural geography, finally understanding what it meant to have a sense of place. Every chance I could, I caught a flight back. Sometimes I stayed in Aunt Julia’s guest room or on Emilie’s sleeper sofa, but every now and then, I stayed in Johnny’s house, curled up in my old childhood bed under the eaves. I could never do this without crying, but they weren’t always tears of sadness. Sometimes I cried simply with relief for things being right with the world.
Being back home, it turned out, wasn’t a distraction at all. I toted my laptop most mornings to the Watankee Public Library and found myself suddenly zipping along on my dissertation. Somehow, the words came more easily here.
From time to time, I thought about visiting Jerry Warczak in prison. He was at the Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, which had famously housed Jeffrey Dahmer before him. I imagined sitting behind a Plexiglas barrier, lifting the receiver and demanding an explanation. I pictured him on the other side in his orange jumpsuit, just one of a thousand other men in an orange jumpsuit. I rehearsed the string of invectives I would let loose on him, knowing that nothing I said would matter, and nothing he said would change anything. Jerry Warczak had killed Stacy Lemke, and my family had suffered for it. In the end, I never made the trip. Jerry Warczak had stolen my childhood, but I wasn’t going to let him have anything else.
The summer after Jerry was convicted, the Lemkes held a memorial service for Stacy at the Watankee Memorial Cemetery. Thousands of people attended, some from as far away as Minnesota and Iowa. Her gravestone read simply, Stacy Lynne Lemke, 1978-1995. Never forgotten.
Bill and Sharon Lemke were there, of course, and Joanie and Heather, too. We’d only nodded to each other politely during the trial, giving each other space, but we stood together at her gravesite and ate together afterward at a small luncheon at the Lemkes’ house. Bill Lemke didn’t exactly apologize to Johnny, but he offered to help him out, should Johnny ever need anything. Johnny accepted graciously, but I knew he would never take him up on that offer.
Heather and I talked for a while on the Lemkes’ front porch, while Joanie’s redheaded kids chased each other in circles on the lawn. Neither of us mentioned the tetherball match; it was ancient history now. We shared the basic details of our lives: my dissertation, her plans to work for a district attorney’s office after law school. I thought this was a perfect fit—if she took no prisoners on the playground, she would be fierce as a pit bull in criminal court.
“You’ll stay in California when you finish?” she asked, catching me off guard.
“Well, actually—” I hadn’t admitted this to anyone else, and hardly even to myself. “I’ve applied for a few teaching positions in Wisconsin. There’s an opening at Marquette, and another one in Madison.”
“Good,” she said, touching me on the arm. “It’ll be good for you to be home.”
When I returned to California a week later, the homesickness was especially strong. Darby would be starting her senior year soon, and Mom was going to help Johnny rip out the upstairs bathroom, which needed a complete overhaul. We talked every few days, but sometimes that wasn’t enough for me.
Once, late at night, I logged on to Google Earth and visited Watankee through my laptop. I approached first from far away, following the ridges and crevices of the Rockies, whizzing past the flat expanse of prairie, lingering over the neat sections of green-and-brown farmland bisected by gray lines of highway, dawdling over the forests that appeared suddenly, like green heads of broccoli.
I zoomed in on the businesses on Main Street, the striped awnings and flat silver parking lots. I followed the country roads, dotted here and there with pickup trucks and the metallic blurs of oil tankers.
There was a curious absence of human life, as if the farmers in their work boots had been lifted from the fields, the women and children sucked from kitchens and backyards.
Something inside me tightened when I approached 2242 Rural Route 4. My heart ached for the old truck still rusting away behind the barn and the white homes set close together on the lush, green lawn. It didn’t take much to fill the land with people I knew—Johnny and his dog, heading out to the barn; Darby with a backpack slung over one shoulder, waiting for the bus. I could even make one of those blurs into Stacy Lemke, still a sixteen-year-old girl, her red hair trailing over her shoulder, her smile wide and welcoming.
When I zoomed back out, following the neat grids of farmland and pavement, I could almost hear the mosquitoes buzzing in the stagnant water of ditches, the cows flicking flies off their hides. I licked an imaginary finger and held it to the wind, feeling the storm roll in. Then I put an imaginary ear to the ground, listening for the roots of the corn to spread downward, deep down, beyond the face of the earth.
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