Bleeding Kansas (24 page)

“He said it wasn't surprising for a mom to be upset when her son was killed,” Jim said flatly. “He gave her some drugs, like I told you.”

“You know she's writing a lot?”

“The doctor said keeping a journal can help her work through her loss.”

Rachel folded her napkin into the shape of a bird. “Have you read any of it? She's got hundreds of pages with only a few words on them.”

“I'm not invading Susan's privacy. It's her way of showing grief, and I respect that.”

“Lara feels you're expecting her to be Susan's minder, see that she eats or—or whatever. She resents that.”

“Well, damn it, Rachel, I can't get Susan to eat. I'd think her daughter would want her mother to be healthy.”

“She does, Jim. She wants her to be a mother, not an invalid. She doesn't want to have the roles reversed right now. That's why I thought it might be good for Lara to be where someone could mother her.”

“If I didn't think you meant well, Rachel, I swear you and I would have a falling-out. Listen to me: my daughter is not going to live with strangers. That's final.”

Rachel pushed her stool away from her uneaten food and stumbled to the door, bumping into the counter and the stove because she couldn't see through the tears she was blinking back. Absolutely the last time she would try to do good for anyone, whether student, family, or homeless drunk falling through the cracks.

Blitz, who hadn't spoken during Jim's and Rachel's conversation, got to his feet and followed her to her car. “His world's fallen apart. Don't blame him too much.”

“I was probably out of line.” She just managed to get the words out.

“The fact that he's too scared to listen doesn't mean you were wrong to speak. I'm going to ride into town behind you; I don't want you falling into a ditch on your way home. Or at least if you do, I'll be there to pull you out.”

She smiled gratefully. The truck headlights in her rearview mirror kept her company all the way back to her tidy ranch house. Blitz stayed outside until she'd unlocked her door and flashed the porch light for him.

I
N THE NIGHT,
the unbearable late-year heat broke. A thunderstorm moved through the valley, waking Jim as he slept on the sunporch. He sat up on the folding bed and watched lightning fork to the ground along the river two miles away, and then rain poured on the house, pounding the uninsulated porch roof with the urgency of stampeding cattle.

The corn was close to harvest. Too much rain now and it would rot in the ground. He couldn't summon fear or worry about it. Like everything else on the farm, whether the corn rotted or came in perfectly seemed uninteresting. Losing the crop would increase his financial worries, but even that couldn't spark any emotion in him.

He looked across the fields to the east, but the angle of the house blocked any view of the Fremantle place. Was Gina asleep? Was she all right? On a restless impulse, he pulled on his jeans and a slicker and drove the pickup along the pitted road to the Fremantles'. The house was dark, its gables emerging in the sudden flashes of lightning and then disappearing again, a black blot against the fields. The rain streamed across his windshield in a thick gel.

Lightning suddenly lit the entire landscape, as if a movie crew had set up shop on the Fremantle veranda. In the blue-gray flash, he thought he saw a person outside the big front doors. He climbed down from his truck cab. The rain covered him like a shroud, pouring inside the collar of his slicker, so that in a moment he was wet inside his coat.

He put his hands over his head and stumbled to the veranda as fast as he could. The wind was whipping water across the porch floor, but the wide wooden canopy provided some protection from the wet. He scuttled to the great double doors, wondering what he'd do if Eddie Burton or even Junior Schapen were there.

It was Elaine Logan. Encased in a black trash bag, she slouched against the double doors, another black bag full of her belongings next to her, a pint bottle nestled in a crease in her lap.

She smiled up at him. “Hello, Farmer Jones. Wet enough for you and your corn?”

Even without the muzzy smile and the pint bottle, he could tell she was drunk. “You can't stay out here, Elaine. You're trespassing. Gina doesn't want you here. I'll drive you into town, find you a place to spend the night.”

“It's my home more'n it's hers. I'm just a little girl. You can't beat up on me.” The words came out in a high-pitched baby voice.

Jim felt the skin on his arms crawl underneath his clammy shirt. “No, Elaine, you're not a little girl. You want to be someplace dry, don't you? Up on your feet; now, there's a good woman. Let me drive you into town.”

“Who are you, you big bully? You mind your own business and leave me alone, damn you. I got a right to be here, more'n you have. They told me I could stay.” She began howling, so loudly her wails could be heard over the thunder.

He looked down at her angrily. Another damned woman in his landscape who didn't give a rat's ass about what he thought or wanted or needed. He wanted to howl himself.

At that moment, the front doors swung open behind Elaine. She toppled backward in a heap of trash bags and vodka. Gina stood above her, wearing a pair of jeans and loafers underneath her combed-cotton nightshirt.

She jumped to one side as Elaine fell over. “I heard the noise. What is she doing here?”

“I don't know,” Jim said. “Storm woke me and I couldn't get back to sleep, so I thought I'd check up on you, and there she was.”

“When I looked out and saw your truck, I thought it was Eddie Burton. My heart started pounding like—like whatever they pound like when you're frightened.” Her voice was cool, but Jim saw she was carrying a carving knife and that her hand was shaking.

“Don't try taking on Eddie with a knife, not unless you know how to use it,” Jim said. “He could wrestle it from you and use it against you. And don't open the door when you're alone here in the middle of the night. If I had been Eddie—” He clipped off the end of the sentence without finishing it.

In one of the blue-steel flashes of lightning, her crooked teeth showed as she smiled. “I'd be lying in a pool of arterial blood. Yes, I need to be more sensible, but Elaine's howling—Where is she, anyway?”

She moved back into the hall and found a light switch. The bronze-edged chandelier came on but with such a feeble glow that Jim that couldn't see the homeless woman, for all her great size.

“Elaine!” he called. “Elaine?”

He and Gina both turned at a sound from the stairs above them. Elaine was inching her way up the stairs on her rump, going backward like a dog crawling out of a room, hoping no one will notice he's got the family roast in his mouth. When she saw that they'd noticed her, Elaine put her fingers over her face, giggled, and squeaked, “Peekaboo!”

Jim shut his eyes. “How did you get out here, anyway, Elaine? Were you in the house this afternoon?”

“Ask me no questions, I'll tell you no lies,” she said in a singsong, her fingers still covering her eyes.

“Elaine, Ms. Haring doesn't want you here. You come with me, like I already offered, and I'll drive you into town.”

She pouted. “I won't go. I belong here, way more than you do, Farmer Jones. This is my home, I was born here.”

“What are you talking about? I've lived here my whole life. I know all the Fremantles. You were never born out here.”

“Gina isn't a Fremantle, but she gets to live here, so why can't I? I even knew Mrs. Fremantle, she let me stay, and Gina never laid eyes on her that I heard of, Farmer ‘Know-It-All' Jones.”

“I don't know what she's talking about,” Jim said to Gina. “She showed up out here two or three times in the last ten years, but I don't think your uncle's mother ever let her spend the night in the house.”

“That's a lie, Farmer Jones, and you Christians go to hell for lying. Mrs. Fremantle did too let me stay here, I have a paper to prove it.”

Jim looked helplessly at Gina. “She's too big for me to budge on my own. Do you want me to call the sheriff? I'm afraid that means Arnie, but he'd be able to bring a crew. They could at least get her out of your hair.”

“Call the sheriff, call the sheriff, he can start a fire like he did at midsummer, we'll all be dry and warm,” Elaine crooned above him. “You wanna see my paper about my mommy and me living here before Sheriff Arnie burns me up in smoke?”

“See? You get everything backward!” Jim fumed. “He didn't start the midsummer fire, he put it out! And your mother never lived here. I hope you aren't trying to pretend you're one of Liz Fremantle's children.”

Elaine started to scrabble in her bag, pulling out a brassiere whose cups looked like skillets. She dropped it negligently on the stairs, followed it with some men's boxer shorts. “I got my paper here somewhere.”

Jim looked away, looked at Gina, whom he expected to mirror his own revulsion. Instead, she was looking thoughtfully at Elaine.

“I don't want Arnie Schapen to help me manage my life. Elaine can spend the night. I can put a clean blanket on one of the beds. You're soaked, Jim, and it's turned chilly. You'd better go home and get dry before you come down with something. Thank you for checking on me.”

The words were thoughtful, but she hurried him out the door so fast that he felt his skin prickle with shame, as if Gina could see into his heart, could know that he had driven over out of his own loneliness and need, not because of any altruism over her. He walked back into the wet, not staying to hear whether she had pushed home the bolts he and Blitz had installed on her front door this afternoon.

He turned the truck around in the yard, but at the entrance to the road he stopped, not wanting to go home despite his wet clothes. He turned the heater up to
HIGH
and stared north, at his own corn, the stalks bending under the pummeling from wind and water. His crop, his wife, his daughter—all these worries he couldn't think about. He sat like that for almost an hour, not dozing, just staring frozenly at the corn. The 4:32 westbound freight finally roused him, and he pulled into the road. The surface had turned to wet clay; he had to fight to keep his truck from skidding into the drainage ditch.

At the intersection with the county road, he waited for the last freight cars to roll past. The rain had finally eased; puddles glinted black under the crossing lights. The caboose rumbled by. Jim had the truck in gear, ready to go, when he saw a slender figure jump free from the caboose ladder and land in the weeds to his left. The figure rolled a few feet and lay still.

Jim was opening his truck door to see if the man was injured when he realized it was Eddie Burton. He wasn't about to risk another rebuff tonight, especially not from one of the Burtons. Anyway, Eddie's posture made Jim think he was lying doggo until he had the road to himself.

Jim drove across the tracks and turned in to his own yard, where he killed the truck lights. He waited a minute, then drove back out to the road. He squinted up the slight rise at the tracks and saw Eddie's slim figure shambling south toward the Burtons'.

If Eddie had been the person in the Fremantle house this afternoon, he could easily have run into the Grellier corn and hunkered down, waiting for the 6:43 eastbound freight. What did he do, roaming around the county all day? And what business was it of Jim's, come to think of it.

It was almost five now, no point in returning to bed—this close to his usual rising time, he wouldn't go back to sleep. Standing in the yard, he noticed the light was on in the master bedroom. Did Susan know he'd gone out? Was she taking advantage of the cover of night to do her endless writing?

He hadn't been in his own bedroom for several days, not since he'd taken Susan to the doctor. Despite his assurances to Rachel, Susan's writing frightened him. He'd tried tidying some of the papers. Susan had watched as if he, Jim Grellier, were an intruder on his own land, in his own house, as if his wife were holding herself still until the intruder left, just as Eddie had lain in the weeds a few minutes ago, as if Jim, whose family had farmed this valley for a hundred fifty years, were the prowler, not Eddie, whose shiftless parents let him ride all over the state looking for houses to break into.

He felt a rage rise in him, against his wife for treating him like this, against Gina, against Eddie, against the world. If he went inside now, he might murder Susan, or at least violate every code of decency he lived by.

He went to the back of the barn, where Chip had cleared out space for a weight-training room. His Christmas present to his son two years ago had been a complete weight set; he'd found a used machine in Overland Park that Blitz cleaned and refitted.

Chip had been so sure building his upper body would give him the edge he needed to make it to the pros. The Royals had the worst record in baseball this season. Would they be any worse off if they'd given his boy a chance in A-ball? In his head, Jim kept writing them a letter: you could have given him a chance—would that have killed you?—could've, would've, should've, don't walk down that road. Pastor Albright had counseled Jim and Susan on that in the one session they'd attended. Good advice, if you could bring yourself to follow it.

Jim turned on the bare bulb that hung over the corkboard Chip had put on the floor. Dust and cobwebs covered everything. He got a bucket and a bottle of bleach and scrubbed the floor, the equipment, even the light fixture. He stripped off his wet clothes and turned on a space heater. By the time the area was clean, he was already sweating, but he unfastened the barbell and started lifting weights. He worked for forty-five minutes, pushing himself beyond his limits, as if daring the fates to cripple or destroy him, but all that happened was his undershorts and T-shirt got soaked through. Finally, he returned the equipment to its racks, lining everything up so that Chip would find it all in order.

He lay down on the cork floor to rest his back and fell asleep. In his dreams, he was playing catch with Chip at Royals Stadium in Kansas City. Chip was five, with his front teeth missing, but he had the coordination of an adult, and George Brett was saying, “You belong in the outfield, son,” so Chip ran out on his little-boy legs, face full of joy. George Brett started hitting fungoes to him, and Chip held out his hand in its outsize glove. “Don't touch it,” Jim tried to yell, but he couldn't make a sound. As he watched, frozen to the ground, the ball exploded in Chip's hands, splintering his small body into red smears that filled the stadium, so that Jim himself was suddenly chest-deep in blood.

He woke, his heart pounding, his mouth dry, his throat raw. When he sat up on the cork floor, the muscles in his shoulders and lower back ached so badly that he could hardly pull himself upright. The pain he'd been seeking in the night had filled his joints while he slept, and, now that he had it, he didn't want it. He only wanted to feel better. “Don't wish for anything too hard,” his grandmother used to say, “because you won't relish it when you get it.” Right as usual, Gram. He tipped an imaginary hat to her, and staggered to the sink in the far corner of the barn to sluice his head under the hose. The water was cold, and it only made him hurt worse.

His jeans had dried in front of the space heater while he slept. He pulled them on but carried his shirt and slicker. Outside, it was still raining—the soft misery rain that goes on and on, like the whimpers of a teething baby. The temperature had fallen thirty degrees in the night. By the time he'd hobbled through the rain into the house, his teeth were clacking from the cold.