Bleeding Kansas (30 page)

W
HEN
J
IM GOT HOME,
the kitchen light was on, but his daughter's truck wasn't in the yard. He could hear the washer working through a spin cycle, so she must not have been gone long. He called her name, and then dialed her cell phone for what seemed like the twentieth time in the last hour only to get her voice message, the perky voice she reserved for her friends. Her own father didn't get that happy, lively Lara these days.

Susan was coming home. When he went in to visit her this evening, the doctor said they would discharge her on Saturday. That should be making him happy, his wife under his roof instead of in the hospital, but instead he felt scared.

He needed his daughter in the house to keep him from feeling so alone, so overwhelmed. Even though the hospital bills frightened him because their insurance plan didn't cover psychiatric care, he was more terrified still of how his wife might act when she returned. The drugs and whatever they'd been doing with her in therapy had made her more coherent, but she talked to him, her husband of twenty-three years, in dull monosyllables, and her eyes were dead in her gaunt face.

He went up the stairs and looked into the master bedroom. He hadn't gone into it since he took Susan to the hospital two weeks ago. The mass of papers was still strewn across the room, and everywhere he looked he saw where she'd scrawled words onto walls and furniture, words about peace and war and death that didn't fit together in any way he could make sense of.

He would have to get all that cleaned up, the walls scrubbed, fit all that into the next two days while bringing in the corn. The ball of tension between his shoulder blades grew. Lara would have to suck up her resentment against him and Susan and help out.

He went back down the stairs to the front room. He and Susan had used it as their bedroom when they got married, and then, when Gram got too old to manage the stairs, they'd moved her in here and taken over the main bedroom upstairs. Since Gram died, they used the front room only at Christmas, to set up the tree and open presents.

He found the bottle of bourbon Chip had given him last Christmas and poured two inches into one of his ever-so-great-grandmother's crystal glasses, which stood in an old-fashioned breakfront in the corner. It was cold in the room, because he kept the doors closed and the heat shut off to save on fuel, but he sat down at Abigail's walnut folding table. He lifted the glass and offered a toast to his son, then drank the bourbon quickly as if it were medicine. He gasped from the burn in his gut—he almost never drank, and never that much that fast.

He nodded at the bottle as if it had confirmed something he'd said to it and poured out another inch. He tried to remember Chip's face as he'd been on his last home leave, but all Jim could see was his son's eager grin in the picture with George Brett. He tried to remember his own parents, who'd been dead for almost forty years now, but he couldn't even say what color his mother's hair had been. It was as if his parents and grandparents, and now his son, lived in the country of the dead, while the country of the living moved further and further away from them. And yet someday he'd move to that country, too, so it couldn't be all that distant.

He'd been brought up to believe the dead were with Jesus, who wiped away all their tears, but it was hard to imagine. Hard to think that Jesus was any more real than the hobbits and gremlins Lara liked to read about.
If you really exist, Lord Jesus,
Jim prayed to himself,
and if the dead are in your arms, take me to them now. I need my grandfather. I need someone who cares about me and the farm. I want my boy with me. Don't leave me here with this sick wife and troubled daughter and our farm falling deeper and deeper into debt. Please, please.

The cold began seeping through his clothes. He took the bottle with him into the family room and stretched out on the couch, not bothering to take off his shoes even though his feet hurt. He lay there, holding the bottle, but not drinking any more, just staring bleakly at the ceiling.

After a time, he became aware of his daughter standing over him. He didn't notice how pale she was or the tearstains on her face but sat upright, anger flooding him.

“Where in Jesus' name have you been, Lara Grellier? I have called and called your phone and you have been acting like you're the queen of England, too high and mighty to talk to me. If you can't answer your phone when I'm calling you, then I am stopping the service on it tonight.”

“I lost it,” she whispered.

“Goddamn it, Lulu, I will not have you lying to me!” He slammed the bottle against the coffee table.

“I'm not lying. I—I dropped it after you called me. I mean, after the time I answered, and—and it was dark, so—so I couldn't find it.”

He got to his feet and looked her in the eye. “Where were you? At the Fremantle house?”

“No.”

He drew his hand back to slap her and put it down in the nick of time. No matter how angry you were, you did not hit people, especially not your wife or daughter. Nothing could ever justify that. But Lara had seen his hand and seen the murderous fury in his face.

She backed away from him and hugged her arms around herself. “You're drunk, aren't you?”

He looked down at the bottle of Old Grand-Dad and made an effort to swallow his rage, his fear, all the emotions that were pummeling him to the point that he didn't know who he was anymore. “No, I'm not drunk. Can you please tell me where you were this afternoon? You weren't with Kimberly or Melanie. I know—I called their mothers.”

She tried to speak but couldn't choke out any words.

“Do you have a boyfriend I don't know about?”

The thought of Robbie made her blush despite herself, but she shook her head. Jim saw the blush and said wearily, “Lulu, please just tell me the truth. If you're sleeping with some boy, I won't be happy, but I can deal with it better than I can you lying to me, okay?”

“I—Dad, I went over to see the Schapens' special calf.”

This was so unexpected that he burst out laughing. “And did it perform a miracle while you were watching?”

“Dad, it isn't funny. These Jews came from Kansas City. They come every month to inspect the cow—Robbie says she'll lose her special power or whatever if she isn't red all over or if there's some kind of nick or anything wrong in her skin—and all these men from Arnie's church were there. Dad, they got down on their knees to pray to the calf. They said they were praying to Jesus, but Robbie's pastor, he went on and on, all about blood and stuff. I was hiding in the manger, and that's when—”

“You mean you sneaked into Arnie's farm uninvited?”

“Yes, yes. They don't let any women come near the calf, Robbie told me, not even Myra—I mean, Ms. Schapen. And Myra and Arnie, they've put so many lies on their website, about Mom and Chip—you know, they say Chip is in hell! So I thought it would serve them right if I went right up and kissed their stupid calf and put a picture of it out on YouTube. Only, they came in, Arnie and the pastor and all these men.”

When she finished her tale, Jim didn't know whether he was proud of Lara for her nerve or angry with her for her spying. In the end, all he did was take her hands and bring her over to sit next to him on the couch.

“Sweetheart, I think we'll leave your phone in Arnie's manger and chalk it up as part of the worst year of our lives. They'll find it sometime when they're cleaning, but they'll just think one of the men out there dropped it.”

“But, Dad, I took pictures with it, a picture of me with the calf. They'll know it's mine. And Arnie, he's a deputy, he can probably trace our phone number on it through some police database.”

“We'll have to go over, then, and tell Arnie the truth.”

“Dad, no! You know how mean he is! He'll sue you for trespass or me for ruining his calf, or something. He thinks the calf is going to make him rich. Can't you and Blitz go over and talk to him and Myra about something else, keep them in the house? Then I could crawl back into the pen and get my phone back.”

“Baby, you know I don't like you sneaking into places. And now you see one reason why. You need to learn to face up to the consequences of your actions and one of those consequences is telling Arnie the truth. Maybe that will cure you of trying to spy on people.”

“No, Dad, no!” Her voice rose, trembling near the breaking point.

He was tired, too tired to try to reason with her or think of any other solution to the problem. “Okay, Lulu, okay. We'll talk about it more tomorrow; I'm too tired to think right now. And that's because I've been bringing in the corn all day, not because I had two shots of bourbon. Now I have some good news for you: the doctor says your mom can come home on Saturday.”

“Oh,” she said blankly. “I mean, good, I guess. Is she eating?”

“Yes, she's put on six pounds, they said. And she's taking her medicine, so she's starting to feel better.”

Father and daughter stared bleakly at each other, each imagining how much harder their lives would be with Susan back in the house.

“Which reminds me,” Jim said, as if they'd both spoken the shared thought, “I could really use your help cleaning out the bedroom, Lulu.”

She opened her mouth to protest, then remembered how much trouble she was in and how much she needed his help. She mumbled something that passed for agreement.

Jim clasped her to him. “Lulu, we'll get through all this. I don't know how, but we will.”

She clung to him briefly, despite the smell of bourbon, which she found disgusting. For a moment, she forgot all the hurtful words he'd said to her since Chip's death. For a moment, she felt like little Lara, whose daddy could cure anything that was wrong in her world, from her despair at her mother's abandoning the co-op market to her hurt feelings when Chip beheaded all her dolls.

Then she remembered her cell phone and how Jim wouldn't help her find it. And how Robbie hadn't waited for her at the crossroads. Even though it was her own fault for being late, he might have cut her some slack. After all, yesterday he seemed to want to be with her. She turned from her father and went to put Chip's clothes in the dryer.

There wasn't any way for Lara to know that Myra Schapen had forced Robbie to wait in the kitchen with her until the men were through in the heifer's pen, since Robbie refused to go back out to pray with them. The calf's fear and loneliness made him miserable. Even though it felt like sacrilege, to go against Pastor Nabo and the Jews, Robbie couldn't believe the heifer was speaking ancient Hebrew. She sounded too much like a frightened, lonely calf to him.

At six-thirty, hoping to see Lara, he started for the kitchen door. When Nanny demanded to know where he thought he was going, he said to town, to set up his music for Teen Youth Night.

“You'll ride in with Pastor Nabo, young man. And if you're not going to go pray like a Christian man and take your responsibilities seriously, then you can work in here with me like a woman and help me get all these coffee cups cleaned up. I'm not having you disappear on the pastor like you did last night. I'll be ashamed to hold my head up at the women's Bible class tomorrow, when Gail Ruesselmann asks me how you could leave poor little Amber in the lurch. Flat tire, indeed. Tonight it'll be trouble with the carburetor, no doubt!”

Robbie could only be grateful that Myra hadn't guessed he'd spent the whole evening right across the road with Lara Grellier—that would really have fried her eggs! She thought he was out doing drugs or getting drunk.

“But, Nanny, Pastor can't drive me home after Teen Youth Night!”

He'd been afraid she'd snarl that he could walk home, but he was startled when she said Junior would pick him up.

“Junior?” he cried in dismay. “He's over in Tonganoxie.”

“He's coming home. I called to tell him how this calf was speaking Hebrew and about to make us all famous, and he decided he'd best come home and see for himself. His first class isn't until ten tomorrow. He'll be able to drive back in the morning. It'll do you good to spend time with your brother, instead of drinking and carrying on like a sodomite in some Lawrence back alley!”

“Nanny, I'm a better student than Junior ever was, I work hard at Teen Youth. Why can't you trust me to get myself to church and back?”

“I trusted you last night and look where you ended up. And don't you go comparing yourself with Junior. If you had his abilities, you wouldn't need to boast about your grades. Pride goeth before destruction, young man, and don't you forget it! And if you think I'm calling that cup clean just because you ran water over it, think again.”

While the men were still praying over the calf, Robbie finally found a chance to slip out and walk the quarter mile to the crossroads. There was no sign of Lara. His depression deepened. Why had he ever believed someone as beautiful, as unusual, as Lara Grellier would seriously think of going out with him, especially to a lame event like a church-youth meeting? If he was honest, he'd have to admit he'd just wanted a chance to show off to her how good a musician he was. He'd imagined her eyes shining at him on the way home, telling him how special his music was, so he'd have a chance to sing one of the songs he'd written to her.