This New and Poisonous Air (17 page)

Though these antics provided small pleasures, Bill felt a weight in his chest, as if an all-consuming pile of chaff, spilled from the mouths of a hundred identical McCormick threshing machines, was building. Distractions sometimes diminished that pile, but he found lately that he had to pull himself through daily work, taking no real joy in dances or fairs. Like his wife, he too was living a life he hadn’t expected, but his blood was stamped all over the land, pounded into the fields, and where blood was concerned, there was little chance of escape—unless through acts of the imagination. And that variety of escape was sadly temporary.

The crate of French books he’d found during the flood were all written by a man called Jules Verne, and Bill had taken greatest enjoyment in the author’s more isolating adventures like
The Steam House
and
From Earth to the Moon
. As a boy, he’d imagined himself traveling in that steam powered mansion that was moved by a mechanical elephant across foreign deserts. A desert, after all, was the opposite of a farm, dead and dry where the other was lush. He loved the idea of being carried away from everything he knew: the daily chores, the parents, and the church folk. And from those deserts of Araby, he’d traveled to the gardens of the moon in a metal oil barrel that looked enough like a rocket to take him there. The lunar gardens provided not food but strange flowers with billowing petals, stirred by a solar wind and lit with gentle phosphorescence as all things were on the moon. Bill had luxuriated in those gardens, dragging his fingers through luminous pools, climbing the stalks of roses that towered toward the stars. And until Cal had come into his life, transported by the flood waters, he’d done all of his traveling alone.

Though Cal was Bill’s physical opposite, wan and white where Bill was thick and dark, he was his metaphysical
compatriot, a perfect partner for playing Jules Verne. And when they’d reached the moon or their mechanical elephant had grown tired and they were stranded in the sugar-colored oceans of the desert, that is when they found themselves the happiest. Sometimes they played at being men in search of an exotic wife. Other times they were just Cal and Bill, top-notch adventurers. Bill would touch Cal’s white hair, saying that if they ran out of money, they could sell such a pelt for a good price. Cal would laugh and stroke Bill’s own hair in return, saying it was like crude oil, and if their rocket ship ran low, they could shave it off and pour it into the engine.

One boy seemed to illuminate the other, and nearly everyone in town remarked on the way they burned.

“It’s like we don’t need anything,” Bill said, as they lay on the floor of the hayloft, fingertips nearly touching. Barn swallows flitted between the dark rafters, carrying bits of straw, illuminated by sunlight that leaked in through cracks in the roof.

“Need is a dangerous word,” Cal replied. “The only thing any man truly
needs
is a purpose that edifies.”

Bill mulled this over, wondering if his purpose might possibly be to remain in physical proximity to Cal for the rest of his life.

“Spiritual improvement,” Cal continued, closing his eyes. “That’s what the Reverend Fellhorne says. Every man must build a temple.”

“A barn isn’t good enough?” Bill asked.

Cal laughed. “No, Bill. A barn is not.”

At the age of sixteen, without good warning, Cal began his studies to become a minister, working privately at the church with Revered Fellhorne, a red-faced prophet of damnation, and to Bill’s dismay, the ministry seemed to cool his friend, moving Cal toward some absolute zero in
which no motion or life was possible. Cal stopped working at his family farm and then stopped coming to Bill’s for games. His skin took on a glassy sheen, as if transmogrified, becoming a delicate ornament that an old woman might be proud to sit on her shelf. He no longer drank root beer nor went swimming at Brook’s Pond. His white-blond hair turned into a field of icy thistles, and even his liquid eyes went hard.

On the day Cal announced his intention to follow the ministerial path, they were sitting on a bale of straw near the lowing cows, and Bill was kicking his boot against Cal’s, trying to knock the other boy’s foot into the air. Both had grown accustomed to these sorts of physical intrusions and though they usually ended in wrestling, neither seemed to mind. Cal was carrying the family Bible, a worn object with a soft hide cover, embossed with a faded Methodist cross. Already, he had begun to wear white clothes that matched his fine skin—a living snowstorm of shirt, suspenders and trousers, even going as far as buttoning a starched collar at his neck. “Bill, have you considered why the Bible has only two testaments?” Cal asked, hefting the book. “There’s the Old and the New—the book of the Father and book of the Son. But there are three members to the Trinity, isn’t that right?”

Bill shrugged, not accustomed to his friend playing at rhetoric. He wanted to rest his forehead against Cal’s neck which was still plain and strong because he’d only recently given up farm work, though this was an act he’d never dare attempt. “Well, I’ve been thinking about it,” Cal continued. “It’s the sort of question Reverend Fellhorne doesn’t much appreciate. He says that Abraham didn’t question God nor did Moses. But I think it’s important to work things out before you go preaching to other people,
don’t you?” Cal let the Bible fall open between them. “How many pages do you see here?”

Looking down at the book, Bill was glad he was being asked to count instead of read. He had trouble with the ornamentation of King James and didn’t want to embarrass himself. Reading Jules Verne was easier, not to mention more interesting. “Two pages,” he answered. “Left and right, facing.”

“That’s how many I used to see too,” Cal said. “Only recently, while listening to a sermon from the reverend about the Holy Ghost did I begin to perceive the third page.” Cal touched the air between the two open Bible pages, pinching his fingers together as if holding something thin and vertical. “You have to
learn
to read the Testament of the Ghost,” he went on. “It’s not immediately visible, but once you gain the ability, you realize it’s the most important part of the book.”

Bill leaned forward, squinting. He wondered if Cal was making a metaphor or if he actually saw something there. “So what does the invisible page say?” Bill asked.

Cal grinned, the same saw-toothed expression he wore when Bill asked him to look through their tin can periscope and describe the gardens of the moon. “The Testament of the Holy Ghost doesn’t say words. It’s not that simple. It makes a noise like music.” Then he sang a few discordant notes, loud enough to make the swallows take wing.

“All right, all right. I heard enough of that,” Bill said, wincing.

“You know what the song means?” Cal asked.

Bill shook his head.

“It means I’m gonna be an important man,” Cal replied. “It means I have something to say.”

Without thinking, Bill grabbed the boy’s pale hand, brought it to his mouth and quickly kissed it. Cal recoiled as if burned. “What was that?”

“I’ve heard it’s what you do to important men,” Bill said.

Cal did not speak again. He lay in the straw studying the back of his hand as if Bill’s lips might have left a mark.

TWO YEARS MORE AND BILL HAD MARRIED Minarette Anderson who attested to not believing in any sort of god, a refreshing notion in farm country where everyone seemed to wear a wooden cross. It was generally agreed that Minarette’s atheism was part and parcel of her city ways and therefore mysteriously accepted by most. Minarette confided to Bill that Calvin Hascomb’s additions to Reverend Fellhorne’s sermons gave her a bad case of the chills. “He looks like a crazy person in all those white clothes,” she said one day when she and Bill were at a church picnic, watching Cal from some distance. “And when he talks about the Holy Ghost, I can’t help but picture some loosejawed ghoul hovering behind him, waiting to do his bidding. Who’s ever heard of an invisible testament that sings? He’d be laughed off the pulpit in Chicago.”

“It’s not like that, Min,” Bill said. “He’s not trying to harm anyone. He’s trying to
nourish
them.”

“Imagination can work both ways, Bill. Nourishment or disease, and your friend is a blight, clearly indicated by those clothes. My father has a similar sickness. He transforms it not into sermons for the pulpit but hollow dialogue for the stage.”

“Tell me more about those plays, why don’t you,” Bill said, wanting to change the subject and having heard little
about Minarette’s family. Only her sister and cousin had attended the wedding.

“There’s very little to say,” she replied. “He is as cruel to his characters as he is to me.”

“What sort of cruelty?”

“A subtle kind,” she said, looking toward the lake.

“Is that why you never ask to go back to the city?”

“Partly,” she said. “For all its buildings, Chicago can be an empty place.”

He attempted to touch her hand on the gingham blanket, but she pulled away. “I’m sorry,” he said.

She attempted a smile. “Don’t be. I’m just feeling cold.”

Most of the time, Bill was fine with his wife’s temperature. In bed, she folded her hands over her stomach and lay staring up at the ceiling like a woman in a casket. Once he’d had gotten up the courage in the dark of their bedroom to ask why she’d married him—she so clearly did not think of him as a wife thought of a husband. Minarette took her time in answering this question. In a measured voice, she said, “I married you for the same reason you married me. Because I understand that much of life is theater.”

He waited for her to go on, and when she didn’t, he said, “How do you mean?”

Her small chest rose and fell beneath the neatly tied bow on her nightdress. “We all choose a stage,” she said. “If we choose poorly, no one comes to the show or worse yet, they bring rotten produce. People can be cruel if they do not appreciate your character, as I’m sure you’re aware.”

“Seems hard to believe a woman like you would come all the way out here and choose a farm as her stage.”

Even in the darkness he could see her discomfort, lips parted over teeth. “I didn’t choose a farm, Bill,” she said. “I chose a high and distant plain. I can be a woman of
finery here because people are still foolish or kind enough to believe in such things.”

He shifted his weight in the bed, unsure of her meaning, then thinking about how the cook at Gardener’s Kitchen served Minarette a special plate, extra nice with all the trimmings, to make her feel at home. They held bolts of fabric for her at the general store, believing it was of a quality she might have encountered in the city. Mrs. Emmet at the post walked into the street to meet them and personally deliver Minarette’s exotic mail. He’d never considered that Chicago might not be the place they’d all imagined.

When he fell asleep that night, Bill found himself wandering through a city that leaked pistons and gears from its shadows. He called the names of everyone he knew until his throat went dry and his voice would no longer make a sound. Finally he leaned against a wall, exhausted and hardly believing that after all those years of yearning to leave the farm, he’d come to understand that there was nowhere else to go.

THE WAGON WAS HALF FULL of wheat and a great hill of chaff had accumulated behind the McCormick. Bill adjusted the throttle, listening closely to the engine for distress. He watched the road, hopeful still for Cal’s wagon. He’d sent a letter into town with another farmer days ago and wrote only that he wanted to talk before Cal’s leaving. He hadn’t seen his friend for months except at church where the barely recognizable figure in white sat at the right hand of Reverend Fellhorne, sometimes standing to preach near the end of the service, but then disappearing behind a polished oak door before Bill could detain him. Cal no
longer seemed to walk on the ground as other people did but rather floated through an invisible ether, perhaps supported by the hand of the Holy Ghost itself. Bill worried that Cal might come permanently unteathered from this town and this cluster of insignificant farms. He’d slip off into the stratosphere, as Minarette must have done when she left Chicago. But he would not let Cal go off to Toledo like that. He would have his say.