Q Road (13 page)

When Parks initially asked Rachel what she thought happened to her ma, Rachel had said, “She's probably at the bottom of the damn river.” If you could even get Rachel to stand still and answer a question, her words pretty much shot your own words right out of the air. Recently, the girl had changed her story about
when
her mother had disappeared and then tried to take back what she had said; Parks believed the changed story, that her mother had been gone just over three years. Never mind that Milton and George kept saying they were pretty sure it had been less than that. Straighter kids than Rachel had killed less troublesome parents, and Parks had been worried that George might be in danger. Parks had looked into Rachel's past, but found out nothing more than her birth date, the fact that she had no middle name, and that she had attended Greenland schools and had never been in trouble with the law. Dropping out of school at fifteen was illegal, but you couldn't retroactively make a kid go back and take the month of school she'd missed. In the last week, Parks had been coming to a kind of conclusion about Rachel's ma, and he wanted to get out to Greenland to talk to George about it.

Parks was grateful to be assigned to patrol Greenland Township, but watching all the new houses going up on old farms was rough. He couldn't very well take the high ground, though. The real estate agent who bought his family's deteriorating house on a single acre took it down and sold the land as two residential lots.
Elaine Shore and her husband had bought the southern lot, and Parks supposed it was only fitting that he should have to respond to her complaints about bad smells, illegal parking at the farm stand, and George's animals getting loose. Several times Elaine had called about alien spaceships. One night last October, not long after he'd returned to Michigan, Parks had gotten patched through by an amused station operator, and Parks found himself so intrigued by Elaine's description of something in George's field that he got out of bed and drove up Queer Road. From there he saw for himself George's Hollander combine appearing to hover, lit up against the night in a whirring storm of dust and chaff as it worked its way across a field. The sight was so lovely that Parks had leaned against his car and watched for forty-five minutes. When Elaine Shore had called another time describing red and white spaceship lights in the sky, Parks assured her without even bothering to investigate that they were from a small plane making an emergency landing on the dirt strip beside the golf course.

Thinking about Elaine Shore and the rest of Greenland's new development made Parks crave something that would melt in his mouth. As George threw the forty-fourth bale to David inside the oldest barn in Greenland, Parks forced himself to look away from the vending machine's Swiss rolls and cheese puffs and up to the painting that he'd bought at a museum charity function. It was a student-made copy of a museum oil, depicting local Potawatomi men from the 1830s. Decades ago, George's grandpa had told Parks (along with George and any other kid who would listen) all about the local Indians, the Horseshoe Clan, he called them. Parks figured those men—like the ones in his painting—stayed lean and muscular from the hardworking hunting life, where you caught yourself a squirrel and skinned and gutted it and roasted it on a stick over a fire. And maybe you made a complete dinner by adding some wild onions and a few crab apples so astringent they made your saliva glands shoot spit. You weren't tempted to overeat on
squirrel and crab apples, now, were you? Without vending machines and fast food restaurants, there had been little opportunity for the Indians to overindulge. Until the settlers brought whiskey, that is. Parks believed what they said about Indians and firewater because that was how Parks himself was with food—he knew when he should stop eating, but sometimes a meal just made him hungry for another meal.

As George threw the forty-fifth bale to David inside the barn, Officer Parks walked to the machine, dropped four coins in the slot, and pushed the button for a peanut butter and chocolate candy bar.

ACROSS THE STREET FROM WHERE GEORGE AND DAVID
stacked hay, April May licked the suction cup on the back of a glow-in-the-dark blow-up ghost and stuck it to the inside of her new bay window. She noticed a flock of crows circle and land deep within the cornfield beside the barn as though they were children hiding from grown-ups. The old farmers used to complain that crows pulled their seed corn out of the ground as quickly as it sprouted, but April May knew crows preferred meat, most of all roadkill, because it didn't require a lot of chasing down. According to her
Michigan Bird Book
, crows had never been seen in the state before 1864. When loggers cut roads into the woods, however, the crows, like people from New York, realized that Michigan was fertile and accessible, and as quickly as the white pine forests were felled, both the folks and birds arrived in droves. The settlers showed up in wagons packed with seed and tools and dynamite to blast apart the big stumps, while the crows flew overhead with
hardly any effort to nest at the edges of woods, forage in meadows, and pick the bones of the unburied dead. The increase in crows coincided with the decline and extinction of the passenger pigeon, which, at the time the first settlers arrived, had a population in the billions. There were records of Greenland Township baseball games canceled due to the sheer number of passenger pigeons flying overhead, darkening the sky and plastering the ball fields and assembled crowds with nutrient-rich guano. Today there remained not a single passenger pigeon in the world.

April May had rediscovered bird-watching in a serious way only about ten years ago, after her third and youngest daughter had moved out, and when April May had begun to think she no longer loved her husband. Outside the dining room window they'd always kept a bird feeder, and April May used to enjoy that view, but while her daughters were growing up, she often forgot to fill it with seed. On the first few evenings of their new life without their daughters, Larry had seemed to her oafish, crude, and passive, as though his years in the GM plant had worn away all that was once lively and sharp in him. He slogged instead of walking; sometimes he grunted instead of speaking. The dread grew in April May for several weeks, until one morning she just stayed in bed until after he left for work. Eventually her foot ached so much she had to get up and walk on it, but she did not go to the greenhouse to transplant seedlings, and did not even bother to call in sick, but stood at the window and stared at nothing, until she began to notice the birds. Larry must have filled the feeder before he left, and he must have tossed some seed on the ground, because there was all kinds of activity out there. Each time a car drove by, the birds flew up from the lawn in a wave, as though they were parts of some larger whole. Around noon she saw a single rose-breasted grosbeak—a Jesus bird, her mother used to call it, because of the blood-red stain on its chest. Just after the mail truck passed, an indigo bunting glimmered like blue metal. As the sun was setting, tiny sparrows
with clownish stripes on their heads pecked at the grass under her lilac. When her husband came home that night, though he neither did nor said anything special, she loved him again.

As George threw the forty-sixth bale to David, April May strung pumpkin lights along the top of the window glass and looped the string around six plastic hooks she'd glued to the frame for this purpose. Usually she hung lights only at Christmas, but she hadn't been able to resist this string, with a little plastic pumpkin mounted over each clear bulb. Two black-and-white female downy woodpeckers were feeding at the suet cage, one at each side, perhaps sisters from the same nest, or a mother and daughter, far less territorial in any case than their male kin. Birds were so much less complicated than people, April May thought. They ate and drank as much as they needed, they fought a bit and settled their differences, and they raised their yearly broods and sent them out of the nest right on schedule. Birds didn't plan their lives, and they rolled with changes in weather or their housing situations. If something destroyed its nest, a bird built a new one. Birds took their regular trips without packing or poring over maps. Either they stayed here all year or they followed their instincts south in autumn, and when they died, they toppled from branches or fell out of the sky without a lot of fuss.

In the last few days, April May had noticed the woolly bears crawling across her driveway and beneath the feeders, apparently unconcerned about the birds pecking at seeds near them. April May had heard and repeated the tale that a small orange band on a woolly bear meant a harsh winter, and nobody could argue with that, seeing how every Michigan winter was harsh. She'd also read in her
Audubon
magazine that the width of the orange band more than likely reflected the maturity of the caterpillar, but the first explanation made a prettier story, one that was more fun to tell her grandchildren. She pressed her nose against the glass and let her breath fog the new window. The caterpillars' determined trekking
made her yearn to travel herself, maybe not to get anywhere in particular but just to be moving. She also wanted to see a bird eat a woolly bear—it seemed astounding that in her seventy-two years she'd never seen a bird eat one. She wondered if woolly bears tasted bitter.

She looked across at the Harland barn, where George handed David the forty-seventh bale of straw. Though April May's mother had called Harold Harland a bossy old bag of wind, April May had enjoyed listening to his sad stories, especially about the Indians. And when the tornado put that nail through her foot, Harold had made sense of it by telling her that God must have wanted her to take notice of something that day. There were some days like that, Harold said, days that tipped the world on its edge. April May's mother's comment later was, “Harold's off
his
edge, that's for sure.” When George was a kid, he had always paid attention to his grandpa Harold, and April May supposed that was why he had deserved to inherit the farm. April May, twenty years George's senior, had worried that all the talk of loss and regret would make George too serious, and George had indeed grown up to be a serious fellow, which made it even harder for folks around here to reconcile his taking up with young Rachel.

When April May next looked at the feeders, they were empty of birds. A chickadee hugged the leafy underside of the burr oak branch just outside the bay window. At the top of a telephone pole perched a red-tailed hawk, turning its head slowly side to side, as though it, too, were wondering what might happen today.

April May had experienced a number of remarkable events since the 1934 tornado swept away her grammar school teacher and also toppled the house across the street from where she would end up spending most of her life. There were the births of her three daughters and the time the Kalamazoo River had peaked six feet above its banks, flooding Greenland and washing Margo Crane's boat onto George's land. There was the day April May had fallen
in love with her husband the first time and the day she'd fallen in love again, and there was one bright night three years ago, when April May had stood outside the Harland barn's lower level and watched Rachel dig the grave in which she buried that bastard Johnny Harland. April May knew about Johnny, had learned too late from her adult daughters how Johnny had taken each of the three, as girls, into the hay barn. On that bright night, April May had stood outside the barn watching Rachel dig for so long that she wondered if her feet might have fused to the ground. Her foot had ached with the inactivity, but the planet was tilting so sharply beneath her that she feared the slightest shift of her body weight would send her tumbling downward. She heard, off and on, a great horned owl from the woods, and all the while, April May's only real feeling of regret had been that a girl so young should have to work so hard.

April May was a law-abiding person, but all that following day and then the next she could not bring herself to report the girl's crime or even tell her husband, Larry (who'd slept through the events of the night), and the longer she kept the secret, the more she felt like an accomplice. Perhaps if she had told Larry what her daughters had told her about Johnny, then she could have told him this, but April May had promised she would not tell their father, and then after Rachel buried the body it seemed too late to start telling everything.

At times she felt unsure of what she'd seen, but she never would forget the sound of Rachel's shovel scraping against stones, hour after hour. Mostly what she had felt while Rachel dug was a weird calmness, a satisfaction at seeing that son of a bitch dead. Out there in the cool of night, April May had gotten the sense that eventually things would turn out all right, that if she would be patient, justice would somehow be forged out of this land around her. She'd had no trouble keeping the secret of what she'd seen three years ago, and more recently she'd had no trouble lying to her husband's
nephew Tom Parks when he asked her if she knew anything about Margo or Johnny disappearing. “That's so far in the past, Tommy,” she'd said. “We all need to be looking toward the future.”