Love & Other Crimes

by Sara Paretsky

  “She needs to go back to Boston,” Rufus said to Sophia after four days of this behavior. “I’m going into town to buy her a ticket.”

  “Rufus, this is my house and she’s my cousin. She’s welcome here this summer. Neither of us is used to having a young person around, but if it’s that hard on you, why don’t you go across the field and stay with your parents until Georgie goes back home in September?”

  He looked at her in shock for a long minute, trying to absorb what his mother-in-law had just said. “You know I can’t do that,” he finally muttered before going out to the barn.

  Rufus’s parents farmed five hundred acres on land just to the north of Sophia’s farm. His two unmarried sisters lived in the farmhouse with them, along with his younger brother, whose wife and three children were also crowded in. If Rufus moved to his parents’ home, he’d sleep on the living room sofa and not have any privacy.

  Sophia had let him stay on with her after Anna and the baby died, first out of pity for his grief, and later out of pity for the misery of the Schapen house. She saw now she’d made a colossal mistake in doing so: it would have been better to hire a farm manager to do the work that Rufus did than to have him thinking the house belonged to him.

  She turned wearily to Georgie, who’d been in the parlor during her exchange with Rufus. “I thought your coming out here would be a welcome break for me, but you want it to be a failure, don’t you? You’re trying to punish Fanny or your parents, but you’re only turning me against you and not gaining anything for yourself.”

  Georgie was silent for a moment before saying, “Did Grandmother or any of the others tell you what my rest cure was supposed to heal me of?”

  Sophia sat. “Nothing specific, no. Fanny—your grandmother—said they thought you were running wild. Were you?”

  “Maybe. Probably. Dancing, speakeasies. Bad company.” She spoke flippantly, but the tendons in her neck stood out.

  “You fell in love with someone unsuitable?” Sophia suggested after another long silence.

  “Not quite.” Georgie smiled brightly. “Let’s say some of the boys thought they knew what love was all about. My father thought a trip to the farm for the summer would be best for him if not for me. Or for you.”

  “It will be what you make it to be, Georgie. But it’s a farm, not a country resort.” Sophia hesitated, trying to find the right words. “Rufus—is not an easy man. Baiting him is easy, but you don’t gain from it. Pitch in with the chores. It will make the time pass more pleasantly.”

  “Slops and chickens.” Georgie’s bright smile became even tighter. “Of course, Cousin Sophia.”

  After that, she did pitch in to a certain degree. She’d been emptying her slop bucket from the start, because there was no one to do it for her. She’d refused point-blank to learn to milk cows, but she did halfheartedly hunt for eggs; she dutifully spelled Sophia at the mangle on laundry days and even tried, very inexpertly, to iron.

  She still taunted Rufus, but in subtler ways that he found hard to pin down—no more sunbathing, no more appearing at breakfast in her chemise. If Rufus commented on the weather or the state of the crops, Georgie would clasp her hands and look at him soulfully and say, “So wise.” At the end of the day, if he complained of fatigue, she would coo, “Big strong man, he needs his dinner and his sleep.”

  Rufus would react angrily, but there was nothing in her words to object to—it was the mockery in her eyes, which she revealed only to him. If he snapped at her, she would gaze at him even more soulfully and say a man needed a vent for his strong feelings.

  One Sunday afternoon after church, Georgie walked two miles along the gravel roads to an Indian college southeast of town. She’d seen a notice in the Douglas County Herald that the students were holding a kind of powwow and wanted to see it.

  She’d been hoping for naked dancing around a bonfire, war cries, body paint, and was disappointed by the tameness of the display. It’s true the students wore buckskins, but men and women were all completely clothed. The men’s hair was cut short in the same style that European men used, the women’s long hair was pinned up in braids.

  The students sang standard hymns of the kind Georgie had been hearing all her life in her family’s Boston church. The dancing was sedate, nothing like the war dances she’d seen in motion pictures, let alone the Charleston, which Georgie had been dancing recently at home. After the dancing, the students served lemonade and cake that the young women had prepared in the school kitchen as part of their domestic skills training.

  The white audience was small: the Europeans in the county had little interest in Indian life and culture. They had a vague sense that the Indian school was doing a good thing, civilizing the savages, and except for making sure that Indians, like the local colored population, didn’t eat in their restaurants or sit next to them at the motion picture theaters, the Europeans didn’t pay them much attention.

  The Douglas County Herald had sent a reporter to cover the powwow, a bored young man who spied Georgie sitting on the grass, her legs drawn up under her so that her skirt covered her knees. With her bobbed hair and painted lips, Georgie would have stood out at any gathering, but here she was especially visible. Two of the young Indian men were talking to her, and she was laughing.

  “I’m Arthur Jarvis from the Herald,” the reporter said. “Looks like you’re having a good time at the show.”

  “The boys and I were just talking,” she said. “Will Garrison here from the Dakota people lent me the blanket his mother wove for his pony, but I’d better give it back. The pony races will start soon and you need it, don’t you?”

  She looked up at one of the Indians, smiling in a way that implied intimacy. He put down a hand and helped her to her feet, flashing a return smile.

  “Come with us, miss: we’ll see you get the best view.”

  Jarvis trailed after the trio. He waited until the two Indians disappeared toward the school stables, leaving Georgie in the shade of a giant cottonwood, near the open field where the races were due to be run.

  “I haven’t seen you around here before,” he said. “Where you from?”

  “You want to do an interview with me?” she said.

  “Sure, why not? Tell me your name and what brought you to the powwow today.”

  “Georgie Entwistle, and I came here on my own two feet.” She looked down at them and added mournfully, “Don’t think I’ll ever get the dust and the scratches from the gravel off them, and they cost me eight dollars.”

  “You walked here in all this heat? You must really love the Indians, Miss Georgie. But you want to be careful not to love them too much.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” she demanded. “They were just a couple of nice boys.”

  “They look like nice boys, but you know, they’re this close to still being savages.” Jarvis held his thumb and index finger up so that they almost touched.

  “I’ve seen white boys who were even closer than that to being savages,” Georgie said. “Don’t you worry about it.”

  “Just the same, Miss Georgie, your reputation—”

  “Is this an interview for a paper or for the Modesty Police?” she interrupted. “My reputation is none of your business, Mr. Reporter.”

  Other visitors began strolling up to the fence next to the field. The school superintendent, with his wife, daughters, and a few select dignitaries, were escorted to benches that had been set up for them farther along the railing.

  At the west end of the field, near the stables, Georgie saw the ponies line up. She couldn’t make out her new acquaintances at this distance, but when the starting gun went off, she clapped and screamed as the ponies streaked past the crowd. One of the white women, who had met her at church with Sophia, tapped her reprovingly on the shoulder. Georgie moved away. Arthur Jarvis followed.

  Ponies and riders grew small in the distance, then rounded a curve in the makeshift track and galloped back. The youths on horseback didn’t make a soun
d, which disappointed Georgie: she had expected at least in the races she would experience an authentic Indian war cry.

  The riders pulled up in front of the superintendent. Georgie went over to watch the superintendent’s wife give a blue ribbon to the winner; the red second-place ribbon went to her new friend, Will Garrison. When he saw her applauding, Garrison trotted over and handed her the ribbon. Sweat ran down his face into the bandanna he’d tied around his neck, but he grinned down at her happily.

  “They’ll all be drinking joy juice at the School House tonight,” Jarvis said sourly as Garrison rode back to his classmates. “You know Indians love their joy juice.”

  “What is joy juice, Mr. Jarvis?” Georgie asked in the soulful voice she used on Rufus.

  “I thought a girl like you knew all about things like that.” Jarvis was still sour.

  “Like what? Is that a special Indian beverage that they make here at the school? I’m from out east where we don’t have any Indians, so I don’t know anything about their customs.”

  “Indians don’t have any head for liquor, but they love to drink it.”

  “Oh.” Georgie made her lips round with shock. “But with Prohibition—”

  “Don’t tell me that out east there aren’t people who know how to bypass Prohibition.” Jarvis looked at her suspiciously.

  “Maybe they do.” Georgie shrugged, as if she had never shared a flask with a group of Harvard men and their girls. “My family are descended from the Mayflower Puritans. We have an obligation to uphold moral standards.” If she had heard her father and grandmother say that once, she’d heard it fifty thousand times, especially during the last year.

  “I take it the School Yard is a place where Indians can get specially created liquor?” she added.

  “School House,” Jarvis corrected. “The sheriff raids it every now and then, but people keep coming back.”

  “The School House?” The superintendent’s wife came over. “That place is an abomination in this county. I keep telling Mr. Macalaster that he needs to get it shut down. Our boys are too well mannered to frequent it, but their parents and cousins, who lack their good fortune in education, become sadly inebriated.

  “And you, young lady.” She turned to Georgie. “Don’t get too friendly with Will Garrison or his friends. It’s not appropriate for our Indian boys to be seen with white girls.”

  4

  The School House was seven miles from Sophia’s farm. By the time she’d left the powwow she’d managed to learn the exact location. Georgie waited until Rufus and Sophia were asleep and then tiptoed out of the house to the barn.

  The horses that Sophia used to drive into town or for minor hauling around the farm weren’t trained for riding, but they were placid animals. Georgie brought a blanket with her, filched earlier from Sophia’s linen closet. She put a bridle on the horse, which he didn’t like, but dried apples from Sophia’s storeroom calmed him down while she adjusted the straps and climbed onto his back. He snorted uneasily but finally walked out of the barn and down to the road.

  She didn’t try to make him do anything fancy, just guided him toward the road she wanted, let him set the pace, let him nibble at the dusty weeds in the ditches. She saw the School House easily from a distance, a grim cube of a building with lights flickering at the windows, and tied Sophia’s horse a prudent four hundred yards away. As she walked up to the door she saw the yard was full of cars, Model Ts, some of the new Model As, and even a Stutz Bearcat.

  Georgie didn’t have money for drinks, but she knew that was never a barrier. She also knew that some men would see a single woman in a speakeasy as someone who wanted physical attention, but she was used to that as well.

  In back of the building was a metal cube with cables running from it to the School House. It smelled of oil and hot metal, like the electric streetcars at home. Georgie stepped away from the smell, but saw that the cables must be providing light to the speakeasy. Why couldn’t Sophia install one of those? Then she could power the fans in her rooms all the time, instead of just when the stupid windmill put out enough energy.

  Georgie walked around to the entrance, which was locked. She was used to that, as well: there would be a special knock, a code word, but again, a young woman on her own would be let in without much bother.

  While she waited for someone to answer her pounding on the door, she saw the words carved into the lintel: kaw valley district four school house. A bar built into a school; that thought made Georgie laugh out loud. The door had a spyhole on the inside; whoever was looking through it saw Georgie laughing, head tilted back, and let her in, with a grin of his own.

  “Share the joke, sister, and first drink’s on the house.” He pinched her bottom as she sidled past him. She knew the rules of the game, knew she was supposed to pout, pretend outrage, give him a playful slap. For some reason, she couldn’t bring herself to do it tonight, but pushed past him into the packed room.

  Not much had been done to the schoolhouse when it was turned into a bar, but the cables from the generator out back powered the flickering electric lights. There was also a ceiling fan. One of the blades was bent, brushing against the ceiling slats as it turned.

  From Arthur Jarvis’s snide comment at the races this afternoon, Georgie had thought the Indians she’d met would be there, drinking joy juice. She’d pinned Will Garrison’s red ribbon to the brim of her hat and began poking and prodding her way through the mob, looking for them. The only person she recognized was Jarvis himself. He’d drunk a fair amount already. When he saw her he got unsteadily to his feet.

  “It’s Little Miss Mayflower, come to play Carrie Nation with the drunks. You going to give me your lecture on Pilgrim purity?”

  Several drinkers stopped midswallow to guffaw.

  “Buy me a drink, Mr. Reporter, and I’ll lecture you personally.”

  Jarvis nodded at the bartender, a thickset man in an open-necked shirt. The bar itself was just a couple of slabs of wood laid over sawhorses. The bartender poured something into a heavy mug. Georgie took a swallow and made a face—it was a quick-brewed beer, thin and bitter.

  She slapped the mug on the sawhorses. “We Pilgrims only drink gin.”

  “That’ll cost you a kiss, Mayflower.”

  Jarvis put an arm around her and tried to kiss her, but she reached behind him for the mug she’d put down and poured it over his hair. The crowd loved it.

  “Why’d you go and do that?” Jarvis pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his face.

  “Why’d you go and do that, yourself?” Georgie said.

  “If it had been your Indian friend, bet you’d have been cuddling right into his red arms,” he said resentfully.

  “Probably so,” Georgie said. “We Mayflowers and the Indians go back three hundred years together.”

  “Then I guess you don’t know those Indian boys have a curfew and everything and Superintendent Macalaster makes sure they spend their nights locked up in their school dormitory. But there are some redskins around here if you have Jesus power to raise the dead.”

  Jarvis pointed at a corner of the room where two men were slumped on the floor, the wall behind them keeping them from falling over completely. Their clothes were dirty, and someone had taken the bandanna one of them wore at his throat and tied it around his head, sticking in a piece of rubber tubing in lieu of a feather.

  One of the men at the bar took over a mug of beer and shook them awake. “Hey, chief, wake up. Got a lady who says she knows your great-grandmother. Have a beer and talk to her.” He poured the beer over the two men, to an uproar from the crowd.

  Georgie pretended to laugh, but turned her back. She had seen drunks before, more than once, but these two men looked so naked she found it unbearable.

  She put her drink down and tried to push her way through the door. Over the noise of the drinkers and the clacking of the fan as its bent blade brushed the ceiling, Georgie heard a siren. She froze, looking for a back door, but there wasn’t one. A mo
ment later, a sheriff’s deputy came in, accompanied by two revenue officers.

  5

  Georgie had had other bad days, but none had ever included a night in police custody. The county didn’t have a women’s prison, so the deputy locked Georgie in the sheriff’s office overnight, with a matron to look after her. She told the matron that her cousin Sophia’s horse was tied to a tree near the School House.

  “He needs to be taken back to his stable. Can someone look after him? Please? It’s too hot for an animal to be out this long. I don’t even know if there’s water within his reach.”

  “You should have thought of that before you took him bar crawling with you,” the matron said.

  However, the sheriff, when he came in at seven in the morning, sent a deputy out to the Grellier farm. The sheriff knew Sophia, he knew two of her dead husband’s nephews. He didn’t want her to lose a horse just because she had a drunk cousin visiting for the summer. He moved Georgie into the courtroom with the other arrestees and told her to wait until her cousin arrived to pay her fine.

  “What if she doesn’t come?” Georgie asked.

  “Then you’ll be assigned to a county crew to work off the fine,” the sheriff said.

  About twenty detainees waited in the courtroom with Georgie. Not everyone who’d been in the School House had been brought in. Arthur Jarvis, the Douglas County Herald reporter, was missing, Georgie noticed. The judge gave everyone a choice of a fine, thirty days in the county jail, or a week on a county work detail. At the end of the morning, only Georgie and the two Indian men remained.

  At lunchtime, Will Garrison, the Dakota who had come in second in the pony races, arrived. He was covered with dust: he’d walked the two miles from the school to the police station to pay the fine for the two Indians.

  When Georgie saw Garrison, she turned crimson with shame and huddled deep in her chair. She didn’t look up, so she didn’t know if he looked at her or not.