Driftless (4 page)

“Nothing is more important mostly than a funeral,” Violet said as they ate a noon lunch of soup and sandwiches. “The whole point of a person’s life—or the lack of a point if it’s more or less rounded—can’t help popping out at a funeral.” She wedged the last triangular bite of wheat bread, cucumber, mayonnaise, and lettuce into her mouth and chewed deliberately.

Olivia helped herself to another puddle of tomato soup. The ladle wobbled dangerously in her small hands, and tipping the liquid into her bowl summoned a wincing blink into her face. She eased back into the wheelchair and rested before picking up her spoon and beginning her comments.

“When the end comes—for whomever it comes—it is the duty of the church to hold them up and present them to God.”

Violet picked at the bread crumbs along the edge of her plate. “Funerals remind us that nothing ever for very long has ever lasted for very long ever and always things change.”

But Olivia would have the last word. For decades, she had accepted
the burden of spiritual insight, devoted herself to assiduously reading Scripture, study, and prayer, eventually gaining the respect of and measured control over her immediate family. Deciding she had eaten enough after all, she abandoned her spoon and pushed away from the table several centimeters.

“Ecclesiastes twelve-fourteen,” she said. “‘For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil.’” Then she added, “A funeral, Vio, is our last chance to contribute to people’s lives before they step into the past.”

But as the sisters well knew, stepping into the past did not mean Gone, and the Brasso home offered as many walkways into that frozen zone as there were stars in the southern sky. Their white clap-board house provided a veritable launching pad into the past. Every book, chair, teapot, beveled windowpane, spring-wound clock, and door frame covered in darkening layers of varnish offered direct passage into a time somehow more established, meaningful, and real than the present moment.

At the end of one long, dusky hallway was a room; in the room was a small table near a window; on the table stood a framed photograph. The picture beneath the glass had yellowed until there was no visible image, only an oblong space of cloudy mustard colors. Yet Violet and Olivia would often stare fondly into it, contemplating the likeness it had once contained.

Happenings, friends, neighbors, relatives, and others who had long ceased filling their lungs with air had left indelible clues to finding their current hiding places, and anyone able to decipher them could at once begin solving the mystery of their seeming, habitual absence. The sisters were constantly surrounded by the presence of things not there.

This was equally true of the village of Words. Like the Brasso sisters themselves, Words attached more firmly to the past than to the present, and only tentatively engaged the future. Named for the surveyor who had first donated land for the village, Elias Words, the community had little to contribute to the modern world, having already forfeited all of its inhabitants who entertained a keen interest in actually
being somewhere.
Indeed, the only residual relevance of Words remained
more a subjective secret than an objective fact—a secret collectively shared with other small towns throughout the world.

As three generations of rural people had migrated to cities like woodland creatures fleeing fire, the current denizens of Words remained stubbornly rooted in an outdated idea. Like people who refuse to update their wardrobes, they simply ignored all evidence that their manner of living had expired. Their fierce loyalties were often provoked but never progressed, and they clung to the particular, the vernacular, in the face of ever-encroaching generalities. Consequently, they were losing their habitat, and empty buildings accumulated—somber, withered monuments lacking inscriptions—memorializing a once-functioning cheese factory, school, post office, dry goods store, lumberyard, mill, grocery, furniture store, dress-maker, garage, wagon factory, implement dealer, and gas station.

The town stood in its own shadow of better times, when families depended on agriculture for their livelihood, on work for exercise, on common sense for intelligence, on each other for entertainment, and on faith for health. Seasonal rhythms of nature had permeated every aspect of living and everyone, in one way or another, had danced to the same fiddler. Shared ethical standards fought crime, and inexorable obligations linked individuals together in a single, unbroken human chain.

Violet helped settle her sister onto the living room sofa, tucking a quilt around her. She cleared the dishes from the table and packed away the leftover food. Placing water, pills, remote control, and telephone on the end table, she told Olivia she would be home before dark. In case there was more talk of the mountain lion that people kept hearing at night, she brought in the police scanner. On the chance that their young neighbor might be outdoors doing something interesting—like last week when she jumped up and down on her lawn mower—she pulled back the curtains on the south-facing window.

More groceries were needed for the lunch following the burial service, as well as additional cleaning supplies. Mildred Fletcher, Rachel Wood, and four others were meeting Violet in the church
basement at two o’clock. Their pastor might also come, but this was uncertain. Her movements had been unpredictable lately. The young woman was highly sensitive and overly intelligent—not stable traits in a pastor. Her heart was too full to be completely trusted with the customs of the church, and for some unknown reason she had asked the pastor of the Methodist church in Grange to conduct the funeral. She had done this with the permission of the family, of course, but it had been her suggestion, and no one knew why.

Violet’s Buick started without hesitation and she drove slowly through town toward the highway.

The golden years of Words, she speculated, must have begun sometime after the territory joined the Union in 1848 and then extended somewhere into the post-European War period. They did not, however, reach as far as the resignation of President Richard Milhous Nixon on August 8, 1974, which coincided with the death of Margaret Brasso, the mother of Violet and Olivia and wife of James Brasso, pastor for twenty-five years of Words Friends of Jesus Church. During those blessed times the nation had defined itself in terms common to Words—farmers, shopkeepers, and reliable traditions. People had mattered then, and provincial citizens had waxed confident in the knowledge that they represented—in every movement and thought—the soul of the nation.

But times changed. First the railroads came, or rather didn’t come to Words, then electricity and telephones, cars and interstate highways, all promising more community, commerce, and culture. But one by one, those promises were broken to Words. The economy restructured, large families divided, and Words filled with abandoned homes, rusted automobiles without wheels on streets named for families no longer there.

Driving slowly over Thistlewaite Creek Bridge, Violet remembered the exodus years, when people she had known all her life, even whole family trees, simply vanished into the wider civilization. And even when some had tried to return, something prevented it. They had forgotten how to be themselves; the old ways of thinking could no longer conceive. The human chain had broken inside them.

The new, dominant culture moved on, forgot about Words and
thousands of similar rural communities as though they had never existed.

But of course they did exist, and of the people presently living in and around Words, about half could remember the village as a vital business and community center, though this group was rapidly aging. A smaller portion of the local residents were the offspring of this shrinking majority, who refused for whatever reasons to follow their brothers, sisters, cousins, and children into distant cities. A third group, smaller but growing in relative size, were people now escaping those same cities, moving into the area from Chicago, Milwaukee, Sheboygan, Minneapolis, St. Louis, and Des Moines. Generally better off, this group usually built new homes and, to Violet, seemed like tourists on permanent vacation. And finally, there were the Amish, coming in with their black buggies, blue bonnets, and strange Anabaptist customs. About them, no one knew what to think.

But in real numbers, the population of Thistlewaite County had been shrinking for decades. Sometimes the only reflection of earlier homesteads was patches of daylilies and iris growing in ditches, perennial reminders of bygone housewives sowing blue and orange along driveways.

The only businesses in Words today were the Words Repair Shop and the church. And though some would argue that a church was not a business, it was, as Olivia was fond of pointing out, “God’s business.”

In the Grange grocery store, twenty-three miles away, Violet accepted a free cup of coffee at the bakery counter and spoke with Florence Fitch about the funeral. Florence was bringing her Crock-Pot chicken and dumplings, and her cousin Margie was making her usual macaroni and four-cheese casserole, with ham. She wondered if Violet had arranged for anyone to bring a bean or rice dish.

They discussed the deceased briefly. Both already knew the pertinent details of the death and the family, and they soon exhausted all there was to share on the subject. Then they drifted into a more fertile conversation about the national decline. Things had changed for the worse.

The whole country, it seemed to Florence and Violet, suffered
from a moral ailment whose symptoms could be readily identified: high divorce and crime rates; profanity; drug and alcohol use; pornography in movies, on television, and inside popular magazines; promiscuity; homosexuality; personal and corporate greed; political corruption; and misbehaving children. The symptoms were stark and clear—but not the cause. Today, Florence thought the blame could be unequivocally assigned to taking prayer out of public schools. But for her part, Violet feared the problem might be more complicated.

Violet had thought a lot about the national erosion of morals and the difficulty of assessing it. First, she could admit that she and others often regretted getting old. Mourning the passing of their youth made them jealous of young people and resentful of all the things young people do. Consequently, she and other old people inclined to remember themselves in childhood not as children but as miniature adults and their parents as patron saints of irreproachable stature. They did not recollect ever stepping outside the margins and viewed willfulness in modern children as a sign of emerging pathology.

Even when the tendency to edit memories was taken into consideration, however there still remained firm differences between the present and past. And from a moral point of view those differences could only be seen as skydiving from grace. The family, for instance, had been nearly torn apart, and as the nation was nothing but a large number of families, the nation had itself fractured. Despite rising incomes and larger homes, old people were routinely discarded into nursing homes to die from institutional cleanliness. Professionalism had replaced real compassion, and nothing made Violet angrier than families that did not act like families. Selfishness was something she could not abide.

At sixty-six, Violet was well acquainted with duty. She had outlived two husbands, caring for both through their last gasping minutes. Later, because of the nursing skills she had acquired, it seemed appropriate for her grandmother, and then her mother, to move in with her. Still later, at the request of her father, she had moved back to Words to care for Olivia.

That was eleven years ago, and during those years she had had plenty of opportunity to witness the nation’s calamitous decline.

Since she had no children of her own, other people’s children remained the focus of Violet’s historical assessment. Children were the meter of change, and an indication of cultural decline could be found in the prodigious resources and effort now required to raise them. It was apparently impossible that families had ever lived in drafty houses filled to the rafters with unplanned offspring. Now, radio and television programs routinely featured experts guiding parents through the minefields of having children. Books, brochures, and videos apprised grandparents of their august responsibilities. Elementary and secondary schools, which in Violet’s youth were rickety wooden buildings in vacant fields, had mushroomed into hospital-sized compounds with squadrons of specialists skilled in interacting with another squadron of state and federal departments, lawyers, accountants, psychologists, medical consultants, testing agencies, welfare workers, and law enforcement officers. Clearly, mere living had become so complicated that these intervening bureaus were actually needed to prepare children for getting older. And to argue, as some did, that as a result of this deathless regimentation young people were now better prepared, well, it simply wasn’t true. The size of the current prison population was one of many facts militating against this wishful notion.

The wrong people were winning. Those who were completely without morals were now in control. Decent homes were under siege and every ounce of vigilance was required to protect them.

SCHEDULED VIOLENCE

G
RAHM SHOTWELL WAS MAKING A BOMB IN THE SHED BESIDE THE barn while his wife and two children slept in the farmhouse. His dog, Gladys—curled up yet wide awake—lay on the floor next to the kerosene heater, and Boxer the family cat sat on the sill staring out of the smudged window into a barnyard lit by the blue-green light from a gibbous moon. An old tube radio crackled and spit in the corner, occasionally emitting music from
The Gospel Hour.
A single hooded bulb cast a cone of yellow light onto the workbench.

Grahm set a foot-long section of pipe into the vise, locked it in place, and selected a three- inch die from the collection his father had bought at a neighbor’s auction a generation ago. Inserting the die into the ratchet handle, he made threads in both pipe ends, applying a fresh supply of cutting oil after each several turns. Slow work, but the metal yielded to the strength in his arms in a satisfying way. When he was finished he wiped the metal shavings and oil from the threads and with a loose-jawed wrench screwed an iron cap on one end until he could turn it no more. He drilled a small hole in the middle of a second iron cap. Seated at the table, he poured used bolts, screws, and nuts into the pipe until it was approximately one-third full. These would act as shrapnel, which he separated from the rest of the interior with a small, clean rag.