JIM FOLLOWED LARA into the house on lagging feet. His wife was in the family room. She had taken all the farm accounts from the filing cabinet in the kitchen and spread them on the low table in front of the couch, but she was staring sightlessly at a cooking show on television.
“Pastor Albright and Pastor Natalie both asked after you,” Jim said with the kind of fake heartiness he couldn’t turn off when he spoke to Susan. “Pastor Natalie wants to visit you Wednesday afternoon.”
Susan didn’t look at him. “I wish you’d stop arranging my life as if I were a chess piece you could move around wherever you felt like.”
Jim’s head filled with a familiar fog, the mask of anger that took over more and more of his brain. “Susan, if I could move you around wherever I felt like, I’d move you back to where you were a year ago. I wish you’d make some kind of effort instead of sitting like a zombie day and night.”
“I am a zombie, Jim. That’s why I act like one. You saved my life, so now you have to accept having an undead person in your house. You should have thought of that before you took me to the hospital.”
The bitterness in her voice made him furious. “Save this drama for your therapist. If you really want to die, there are a thousand ways on a farm to make that happen. If you don’t, then pull yourself together and start paying attention to the farm and your daughter even if you resent me too much to pay attention to me. Did you know Lara’s been sneaking off to make out with Robbie Schapen? For all I know, she’s sleeping with him!”
“Robbie Schapen?” she repeated. “How can she do that to me?”
“Do that to you?” Jim said blankly. “She’s doing it to herself, or with him, not to you.”
“How much she must hate me, to start sleeping with the boy whose brother drove her own brother to his death.” Spots of color burned in Susan’s cheeks, the first real emotion she’d shown in months.
“Maybe she’s lonely and he’s available,” Jim shouted. “Maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with you at all!”
“How can she be so disloyal to Chip’s memory?” Susan’s voice trembled.
“She’s lost her brother, she’s lost you, she’s lost the sunflower crop she worked on so hard. Is she supposed to give up on life, join a convent or something, until you’ve decided it’s time to return to the world? Instead of thinking this is about you, or Chip, try to see that it’s about her. How much does she know about sex? Safe sex, I mean. Have you had that talk with her? I don’t want her having sex, not at fifteen, and not with Robbie, but she needs to know he has to wear a rubber. Does she know that much?”
“They cover that in school.”
“It will mean more if it comes from you,” he cried. “I tried in the car coming home, but—help me here, Suze, please—you know how hard it is for me to talk to Lulu about sex.”
“She doesn’t listen to me.” Susan started picking at the skin around her fingernails.
“Because you’ve stopped talking to her! Think about what it would mean if she got pregnant.”
“What difference would it make, in the end?”
“When it was Chip with Janice Everleigh, you thought it would be the end of the world if she started a baby, and I talked pretty forthrightly with Chip. It’s your turn to step up to the plate.”
Susan’s lips quivered and tears seeped from the corners of her eyes. “That’s below the belt, Jim, it really is.”
Time was when he would have picked her up, kissed those tears away, but now they only increased his annoyance. Jim looked at the papers Susan had strewn across the table. “You know, Curly’s cousin would pay twenty-seven hundred an acre for the X-Farm. Think about that as you study these bills.”
“What difference does that make? X-Farm, K-PAW, the co-op market, why did I imagine anything I said or did would matter for one minute, let alone a whole lifetime?”
She picked up a handful of papers and tossed them, as if they were a fistful of wheat she was throwing up to winnow. It was too much. He went into the kitchen, where he found a beer buried in the refrigerator, and took it upstairs, to watch the Chiefs game on the set in the bedroom.
After an hour or so, Susan came up to lie down. She looked pointedly at the beer, at the television, but Jim didn’t move. Finally, she climbed into bed, not bothering to take off her clothes, not even her slippers. Jim turned up the volume on the television. When the game ended, he gave up on the silent struggle for control of the room and went back downstairs.
He looked at the farm accounts, strewn every which way on the table and floor, feeling a hollowness under his rib cage. Now that the corn was in, he needed to plant the winter wheat. He’d never decided how many acres to put into wheat on his own before, and he’d never waited until the day before planting to figure it out. First with his grandfather, and then with Gram and Susan, they would discuss the rotation schedule, the number of acres, and the varieties weeks before Labor Day. And now?
Four weeks ago, under Blitz’s prodding, he’d ordered seed, changing the varieties based on last year’s crop. He hadn’t run the numbers to decide on how much acreage to put into wheat or which fields to rotate, and here he was at the tag end of the planting season. With less thought than Lulu was putting into sex with Robbie Schapen, he would go out in the morning and spread nitrogen in the no-till fields he was going to use this year so that he could plant next week.
The beer in the middle of the day had left him with a sour taste in his mouth and a headache, but he grimly pulled all the accounts together. If Gram were still alive, she wouldn’t tolerate dramatics in Susan, or in him, either. The farm had to come first. He turned on the computer and opened his farm spreadsheet folder.
After a time, the familiar calculations began to soothe him. He stopped thinking about the wreck of his family and concentrated on the University of Illinois’s advice on nitrogen. Would it be better to bet on lower prices from foreign producers next year and get the rest of what he needed then or buy it all now and know he had it? That was the kind of question Susan helped answer. She was a risk taker. She would have said bet on Venezuela and Iran, even though the risk of interrupted supplies was greater. He pulled a quarter from his pocket and flipped it. Heads. He went with Susan’s imaginary advice and lowered his fertilizer order.
At five, he heard his daughter tiptoe down the front stairs, trying to slip out the front door. On impulse, he called to her to wait and ran up the stairs to forage through the box of Chip’s effects.
“Lulu, these were Chip’s. I don’t want the situation to arise, but if it does, use them, promise?” he folded her fingers over a packet of Hot Rods. Both of them were blushing, but Lara thrust them into her jeans pocket.
“And you be home by nine, you hear? Or I’ll get Blitz to hunt you down.”
“Dad!” She gasped in a high, uncertain voice and ran out the door.
She had showered and washed her hair since church, he noticed, and smelled of sweet lemongrass. His heart turned over.
Oh, be kind to her, Robbie Schapen. Be good to her or I’ll kill you.
After a time, he returned to his calculations, marking off fields on the computer crop by crop: winter wheat in the northeast section that had lain fallow this year and in the section where he’d grown oats. Soy by the river? Maybe. He didn’t need to decide that today, especially if he decided to sell those acres. Corn? He hated using the same fields twice running for corn. It was too expensive, both in chemical inputs and stress on the land. Alfalfa there, and corn in this year’s wheat fields?
He was so wrapped in his calculations that he worked the afternoon away. When he stood to turn on the lights, he suddenly remembered his daughter. Where was she? What was she doing? Was Robbie feeding her? Arnie didn’t pay his sons for time on the farm, as Jim had always paid Chip and now Lulu, so if Lulu and Robbie were sneaking off someplace to eat would Lulu be paying for the meal? For some reason, this made him angry again.
He debated trying to track her down. Come on, kids, let’s go into town for a pizza. Before Arnie, patrolling the county in his deputy sheriff’s uniform, surprised them in a lay-by and shot them both.
He was standing in the kitchen, staring into the refrigerator, while these confused thoughts chased through his head, when someone pounded on the back door hard enough to shake it in its frame. So vivid had his imaginings about his daughter been that he sprinted to the door, expecting to find Arnie on the other side. When he saw Elaine Logan, he stared at her in the blankest bewilderment.
“I thought you were Farmer Jones, but she says your name is Jim.” She blew beery breath on him, and he stepped back. “She told me to come find you.”
“She?” His mind was still on Lulu, arrested or shot or both.
“Gina. She’s trapped in that old bunkhouse and can’t get out.”
He shook his head, trying to change gears, and looked past Elaine to the darkening sky. “What’s she doing out there this time of night?”
“She isn’t. I mean, she is, but she was there for a while until I got back from town. Good thing for her I came home early. And good thing I heard her screaming for help.”
“Does she need an ambulance?”
“I’m not a doctor, and I’m not an archaeopteryx. I can’t dig her out, and I can’t tell if she’s hurt. That’s why you’d better come along.”
Archaeopteryx, an old dinosaur. She meant archaeologist, but he couldn’t stop picturing the wingspan it would take to give Elaine lift. The other part of his head was ticking off what he would need. Work lights, chains, the big tractor, attach the small supply cart in case Gina had broken a leg or arm or something and needed to lie flat.
He took the plaid wool comforter from the living-room couch and ran to the barn. Behind him, Elaine called in a horrible, high-pitched voice, “You can’t leave me here, I’m afraid of the dark.”
He ignored her, hefting chains and a work lamp into the supply cart, adding a roll of foam rubber and splint-sized pieces of wood. A wood saw, two shovels. A gallon of water. He drove the load back to the house, where Elaine was sitting on the stoop, snuffling through her fingers.
“Come on, climb up!” he shouted at her over the tractor engine.
“I can’t. Can’t climb so high. You lift me, Farmer Jim.”
“If you can’t climb up on the tractor, get in the cart,” he yelled.
She pushed herself to her feet and lumbered over to the cart. “It’s cold; it’s dirty. Elaine will get sick.”
“It’s the cart, the tractor, or walk back,” he said, exasperated.
“No need to be rude. Didn’t your mommy teach you any manners?”
She grabbed the cart and managed to swing a leg over the side. Her foot caught in the chains, and, with a loud howl, she pitched over backward onto the foam rubber. Jim hoped she hadn’t broken anything. That would be the last straw, going off to rescue Gina and having to run Elaine into the hospital with a busted hip.
He drove at the tractor’s top speed, almost thirty miles an hour. Over the loud kerchunk of the engine, he could hear Elaine’s howls, screaming that he was trying to murder her. He stopped outside the Fremantle house long enough to ask her if she wanted to get out there and then saw he’d have to take out the coil of chains, which had bounced up onto her leg. He drove on to the back of the lot, slowing down to avoid the apple trees: the tractor was too big to navigate this area easily.
By the time he reached the bunkhouse, night had enveloped the land. Little pricks of light showed around him, his own house, the Ropeses’, the modest lights of Eudora two miles distant.
He placed the tractor so that its headlights shone onto the bunkhouse and jumped down. “Gina! It’s Jim Grellier. Are you okay in there?”
“I think so. I’m buried under part of the roof, and I can’t move it.”
Her voice had lost its usual coolness, but he could tell she was trying not to panic. Under the tractor lights, he studied the wreck of the building. The main support beam of the roof, which had stayed in place all these years, had come down, bringing the rest of the roof with it. If he started pulling the roof away with his chains, he ran the risk of the rest of the structure falling in and crushing her.
He explained the problem to her. “What I think I can do is pull away the front of the building: it isn’t connected to the roof anymore. Then maybe I can burrow underneath what’s left of the floor and reach you.”
He set up the work lamp so he could see more clearly where he needed to fasten his chains. “When did this happen?”
“Around four. I tried to call for help, but I couldn’t get a signal on my phone in here.”
“What were you doing, anyway?”
“She thinks she’s an ickyologist.” Elaine had managed to dislodge herself from the cart and waddle over to the bunkhouse. “Will she die in there? People do die here, you know. The Schapens burn them up.”
“Hi, Elaine,” Gina said. “I am an ickyologist; I dabble in icky stuff. Thanks for finding Jim for me.”
“He was mean to me. He bounced me in the cart and hurt my poor little tushie.”
Jim thought he could see which boards he could pull clear without bringing more of the house down onto the place where Gina was lying. He unhooked the cart from the tractor, backed up close to the house, and attached his chains to several pieces of board. He drove forward just far enough to put a small amount of tension on the chains, and then jumped down to check that he was moving the right pieces. The wood had softened and rotted with time; the piece of siding he’d attached his chains to broke up as he was moving away instead of pulling the front with it.
“It’s going to take longer than I thought,” he called to Gina. “This wood’s too rotten for easy handling. Anything fall in on you?”
“Just more rotting things. I don’t want to imagine what they are; it’s hard enough to lie here without screaming from claustrophobia. I’m going to look like a chimney sweep by the time you find me.”
“That’s okay. I look like a prairie dog, from grubbing in the ground.”
He unwound the chains from the rotted boards and tried to find a sturdier place to attach them. Again only a small amount of wood held as he pulled away from the bunkhouse. He had to repeat the process half a dozen times before he cleared enough of the front to take a shot at the back room where Gina was pinned. At that point, he took his shovel and started digging away thirty years’ worth of dirt, animal droppings, and rotted wood.
While he worked, he kept up a cheery conversation with Gina. Elaine kept interrupting, insisting that the Schapens burned children in the old bunkhouse.
“Gina will find the bones, and then they’ll go to prison, bad, nasty people, with their calf. Do you know, Farmer Jim, you have to have a penis to see that calf? You could go look at it, but I can’t. And then I tried to show them how we used to do protests back in the sixties, and they dragged me away, and Gina wouldn’t even give me a drink. I’m thirsty now, and she won’t let me have her wine. That’s selfish and mean.”
When Jim offered her his water jug, she said, in her horrid, little-girl voice, “He’s teasing Baby Elaine. He wants her to drink nastiness.”
He’d drunk most of the gallon of water himself by the time he’d cleared away enough of the dirt that he could wriggle into the back area, where Gina was pinned. He’d had to use a trowel for the last few feet. He played his flashlight around and saw Gina lying about four feet from him, the main beam of the roof perched on more of the decomposing siding about three inches from her head.
“Hi, Jim,” she called when she saw him emerge through his tunnel.
“Hey, Gina, hang in there.” He whistled through his teeth, trying to figure out how to approach her. “I can’t get a hold on anything to pull that wood away. It’s all so soft that if I try to move the sides, the beam will fall on you. I’m going to shovel this dirt away, make you a little tunnel so you can crawl out from underneath.”
In another forty minutes, he’d dug a deep enough trench that Gina was able to crawl to him. He pushed her ahead of him through the first tunnel. When they reached the outside, she tried to stand, but shock and exposure made her tremble too violently to get up. He carried her to the cart and looked doubtfully at Elaine.
“I’m going to get you inside, get you warm, and then I’ll figure out what to do with her.”
Gina’s teeth were chattering but she managed to grin. “Thanks, Superman. I know you’ll think of something.”