Bleeding Kansas (12 page)

“A dog?” Gina said blankly. “What would I do with it when I left?”

“Take it with you, leave it for the next tenant—I don't know.”

“Since I don't know, either, I think I'd better rely on locks and bolts. But, Susan, I wish you would consider coming to our Imbolc ceremony. I think you'd enjoy it.”

Jim, seeing his wife's face light up, found himself tensing. She would enjoy it. Witchcraft would become a new passion with her. Arnie and Myra would have a field day, writing about the hell-bound Grelliers. He realized that Gina was asking him something and jerked his attention back to the kitchen.

“That building that's collapsed out behind the barn,” she repeated, “can I use that for the bonfire?”

Jim hesitated. “A boy was killed when that place burned down. I'm not sure if they ever brought his body out. Maybe you should leave it alone.”

“Jim! They must have brought him out,” Susan protested. “Liz Fremantle wouldn't have let a boy rot in there, you know that as well as I do.” She turned to Gina and explained the history of the commune, the fire, the bucket brigade.

“Were you here?” Gina asked her.

“I was a schoolgirl,” Susan said, “living in—I can't even remember what town we lived in then. My father never could hold a job more than two or three years; we were always moving. That's why I was so thankful to marry someone who was rooted to a single place, whose family had a long history there. No, I just used to hear Jim and Doug—Jim's brother—talk about it. And Gram and Grandpa, of course, so I feel as though I had seen it, that's all. Right before the fire, someone put weed killer on the marijuana crop. The kids were out grieving over the damage—in the moonlight, I can just picture them—when the house went up in flames.”

“And you never knew who died?” Gina asked.

Jim shook his head. “I wasn't quite ten. I don't remember the details that well; I just remember forming part of the bucket brigade the night of the fire. And Myra Schapen, she always terrified me. And she came over to watch the fire, with Arnie and his dad. The Ropeses and the Wiesers, even the Burtons—everyone helped except Myra and her husband. I looked up and saw her watching the fire. The expression on Myra's face, that made a believer out of me!”

“A believer?” Gina said.

“I knew that's what would be waiting for me in hell if I died without Jesus,” he said, laughing to cover his embarrassment at mentioning God to this sophisticated woman who practiced witchcraft.

T
WICE A MONTH,
Lara's church youth group helped stock the shelves and fill bags at a Lawrence food pantry. In January, after school had started up again, Lara came home from her Saturday stint and announced that Elaine Logan had been at the pantry. The rest of the family was already sitting down to lunch. Lara grabbed a bowl of soup and took it to the table, blurting out information through a mouthful of bread.

“What? Is Elaine back in town? I thought she was living with her sister or someone in Chicago,” Jim said.

“Didn't I tell you? Curly said she showed up at New Year's drunk as a skunk,” Chip said.

Naturally, Curly knew. Even though Curly and Blitz worked in town in the winter—Blitz as a mechanic for the school system, Curly for his cousin's construction business—Chip hung out with Curly. Lara was pretty sure Curly took Chip drinking, but she knew it would really piss off her parents if she shared that suspicion so she kept it to herself.

“Poor Elaine,” Susan mourned. “What a terrible waste. She was a wonderful student, could have done anything with her life.”

“
She
says she was a wonderful student,” Chip corrected impatiently. “You know the kind of lies that old bag tells.”

“Etienne! I will not have you using language like that, especially not about someone as unfortunate as Elaine.”

“But, Mom, she really is ghastly, not unfortunate,” Lara said. “Like today, I offered to carry her groceries for her, and she said, ‘Aren't you Jesus' favorite little lamb,' in the nastiest way possible. And she makes stuff up, so you can't tell whether it really happened or not. Like, do you believe she really turned down a scholarship to medical school?”

People change with time, Jim thought, but his daughter was too young to know you could start out filled with promise and end up worse off than Clem Burton. It was hard to believe it of Elaine—fat, leering, drunk more often than she was sober—but maybe she really had been a student bright enough to get into medical school thirty-five years ago.

“You'd better warn Gina Haring,” Chip said.

“That's right!” Susan said. “It didn't occur to me, even when we were telling Gina about the bunkhouse, because Elaine's been away for over a year now. But maybe she won't try to come out. You know, after Liz Fremantle died Elaine did stop her visits.”

“All the more reason she'll do it now,” Lara said. “She'll hear the gossip about Gina and want to check her out.”

“And what gossip would that be?” asked Jim in his coldest voice.

“Just that someone's renting the house,” Lara said hastily.

“And that she's a dyke who practices witchcraft,” Chip added.

“Etienne! You're not to use that word,” Susan said. “If you mean that Gina is a lesbian, say that. But you don't know—”

“Mom, I'll promise not to use the word
dyke
if you'll promise to stop calling me Etienne. You know I hate it.”

“You'll grow into it,” Susan said. “One of these days, you won't want a child's nickname any longer and then you'll be glad you're used to hearing your real name. Anyway, we don't know that Gina Haring is a lesbian.”

“Come on, Mom, everyone knows.”

“By which, I take it, Lara talked to you and you talked to Curly, and now everyone in Douglas County knows Gina and Autumn Minsky have spent a night in the same house,” Jim said drily.

Chip scowled and turned his head away. Lara said, “Dad, it's not like it's some secret. She announced it right here in the kitchen, like she wanted us to know.”

“She didn't announce she was a lesbian, Lulu. And if that's what you're telling everyone—”

“I didn't
tell
everyone. I asked Chip and Kimberly their
opinions,
you know, after I saw Ms. Minsky in bed that day we went over. I asked if that meant her and Autumn were—”

“
She
and Autumn,” Susan corrected.

“Okay, she and Autumn. So I wondered, did that mean she was a—you know. I tried to ask you, Dad, but you got that wooden-statue look on your face you always get if I talk about anything even remotely concerned with sex, so I had to ask someone else.”

“And Chip is an expert?” Jim gave a ghost of a smile, trying not to be annoyed by the criticism.

“Ask Janice Everleigh,” Lara said pertly.

Chip made a violent gesture. “Dad is right. You should mind your own business for a change.”

“Sor-
ree
!” Lara said. “Can't you take a joke?”

Brother and sister glared at each other as if they were four and eight, not fourteen and eighteen. Jim sighed and tried to change the subject, asking Lara if she knew where Elaine Logan was living.

“Mmm-hmm,” Lara said through a mouthful of peanut butter. She swallowed. “You know, it's Ms. Carmody who takes our youth group to the pantry, and she was asking Elaine how she was settling into New Haven Manor.”

“New Haven?” Jim was surprised. “How long will that last? They have a strict no-alcohol policy.”

“Rachel Carmody is on the board,” Susan said. “She might have persuaded them to give Elaine a trial.”

“Rachel does a lot, between the youth group and being on the church's board of directors, besides teaching high school. I'm surprised she'd take on another board.”

“Yes,” Susan said, “but that's who people always want, someone who's shown she's responsible. Anyway, when I see Gina on Monday I'll explain who Elaine is and that she sometimes hitches a ride out to wander around the property. I do hope Gina won't mind—Elaine got into the habit when Liz Fremantle was alive.”

“What are you doing with Gina?” Lara asked.

“She asked me to stop into Between Two Worlds to look at a book on the Imbolc ceremony.”

“That shop is such a heap of New Age horseshit,” Chip said. Then, catching his father's expression, he quickly edited himself: “Horse
doo-doo,
I mean. The girls go there to get their fortunes told off the tarot decks. I went with Janice one night, and it is so bogus. Why do girls go in for that kind of crap?”

“Why do boys go to the Storm Door and get drunk on three-two beer?” Lara demanded. “At least we don't throw up and stink after we have our fortunes told.”

“Okay, you two, enough,” Jim said automatically, adding to his wife, “Why are you looking at this Imblog ceremony?”

“Imbolc,”
Susan corrected.

“Mom, you're not going in for Gina's witch stuff, are you?” Chip demanded.

“No, of course not, but I do want to see her fire. This is the year we're getting full organic certification for the X-Farm. We could use some good luck for our sunflower crop, so some seeds will be my gift to the fire.”

Jim's lips tightened. “Suze! You're on the board of directors at Riverside, remember?”

His wife smiled provocatively. “We're an open-covenant church, Jim. We start every service saying, ‘Wherever you are on life's journey, we welcome you.' Of course I'm not going to become a pagan. But a party with other women, a bonfire—we'll throw in leftover evergreens from Christmas for luck, I'll add some sunflower seeds, they'll dance and have drums, I'd love to be there.”

“Mom, don't do it!” Chip said. “You know it'll be in Myra's ‘News' column by Monday morning. Don't get involved with that bunch of crackpots. I can't take the fallout from another one of your weird ideas.”

“Just what do you mean by that, Etienne? What ‘weird' ideas of mine have bothered you so much?” Susan's voice trembled.

“Come on, Mom. Don't you know everyone around here thinks you're nuts, that you're a Communist? What are they going to say if you dance around a bonfire with a bunch of dykes? Arnie and Myra and Junior will be telling the whole valley that you're a dyke, too!”

“Etienne! We just finished saying we don't want you to use that word. Beyond that, I can't believe a son of mine would be so small-minded as to care about public opinion, least of all what the Schapens think. Anyway, how can people say I'm a Communist when everyone knows how active I am at church?”

“Because of the stuff you do. The co-op market, wasn't that a Communist thing?”

“Etienne, you're making me crazy. The market wasn't some state-run outfit taking people's profits from them, it was a local initiative where everybody benefited without needing a middleman. Besides, look at all the farmers who took part in it: the Ropeses, the Longneckers, the Wiesers, even Liz Fremantle. It's only narrow-minded people like Arnie Schapen and Dennis Greynard who tried to sabotage it.”

“If you hadn't named Lara for that stupid Russian movie, maybe the talk about you being a Commie wouldn't have started in the first place.”

Privately, Lara agreed. But she didn't want to get involved in a fight between Chip and her mother. Anyway, Lara wasn't a weird name, at least not compared to Etienne—if Susan hadn't explained to everyone that it was Lara, not Laura, because she was named for Julie Christie's character in
Doctor Zhivago,
no one would ever have thought twice about it. Susan watched the movie about a hundred times when she was pregnant with Lara, and of course people like Arnie Schapen took it for granted that if you liked something Russian you were automatically a Communist. People were so ignorant, Lara agreed with her mother about that, but at the same time Lara wished she was a little more clued in to how they reacted to the things she did.

“Did you know,” Jim asked, trying to calm down the passion at the table, “that the early Christians held all their possessions in common? That really is Communism. Imagine how Arnie Schapen would react if I suggested that to him.”

“He'd be thrilled,” Lara said, trying to help. “He'd take Dad's John Deere and make us drive his old Case tractor.”

Jim winked at his daughter, and added, “He'd also have you up doing the five o'clock milking. One reason we don't have animals—the thought of getting you and Chip out of bed before dawn every day.”

Chip and Susan were still flushed with battle, but Lara laughed loudly. Chip got up from the table and stomped upstairs. They heard the water running in the bathroom. In a few minutes, he came back down, heavily drenched in aftershave.

“Don't you have homework?” Jim called to him.

Chip's only answer was to slam the kitchen door hard enough to shake the windows. They heard his car start, the engine roaring as he gunned it, and then the wheels spinning in the icy gravel.

“What's going on with him?” Jim said.

“Etienne has always had his moods. He doesn't like to be thwarted.” Susan, still angry with her son, didn't want to see his point of view.

Jim turned to Lara. “Lulu, do you know what's eating him? It's not something with Janice or at school, is it? Is she—do you know—”

“Is she pregnant?” Lara cut in as he dithered for a euphemism. “She wouldn't talk to me about it, but I don't think so. Anyway, you know Curly is the person Chip talks to, not me. Make Curly tell you, or get Blitz to make him—he's scared of Blitz but not of you.”

“Scared of Blitz? What's scary about Blitz?” Jim was incredulous. Blitz was more than a farmhand, more than a crackerjack machinist—he was the closest friend Jim had.

“The way he looks at you, like he sees right through you, and doesn't think much of what he's looking at, you know, Dad.”

“You make him sound like he'd be at home with Gina's witches.” He stared narrowly at his daughter. “And you also make me think you know what Chip has said to Curly. I know you, Lulu, you slip in and out of places, and people don't know you're there. Come on, spill it. What is going on? It's not tattling if it helps me get things sorted out.”

Lara turned scarlet but burst out: “Oh, Dad! No one wants to hurt your feelings, but Chip doesn't want to farm.”

Jim blinked and sat back down. His first thought was to say automatically, if he doesn't want to farm he doesn't have to, but he realized it wasn't that simple. His own father hadn't wanted to farm; he'd gone into town and become an insurance agent. Then a Santa Fe freight, speeding around a hill to the unprotected Fifteenth Street crossing, had killed both him and his wife, leaving Jim and Doug to live with Gram and Grandpa on the farm.

From the moment he first got to drive the small tractor that summer, Jim had known that farming was his life. He couldn't imagine a different one. Knowing, too, that he was working land his family had worked for seven generations—he didn't have Susan's romantic fantasies about Abigail and the Abolitionists, but standing on land that he belonged to brought him a comfort beyond wife or children, or even, really, God.

Sitting at the table now, studying his hands while he tried to think about the future of the farm if Chip didn't want it, Jim remembered the guy who blew up the federal building in Topeka some years back because the feds were confiscating his farm. The man had been an idiot, growing marijuana on his land, selling it. Still, if the feds had merely sent him to prison he would have gone knowing he had his land to come home to, but they were taking a farm like Jim's, one his family had lived on for seven generations. When he got out of prison, his life would be gone. Jim couldn't imagine blowing up a building and killing people, but he still thought he understood how the guy must have felt.