Once Lizzie noticed a rare flurry of activity and, curious, went down the stairs after a few days to find that Joe, who had never done a lick of work, had taken it upon himself to put in his own plumbing—a toilet, sink, and even a small shower stall, and after that Joe Barnes never walked up from his basement again. She took to leaving his dinners on a tray at the top of the stairs—heaping platefuls swamped in sauces and gravies, generously portioned from her parties or those rare times she spent alone and cooked for herself. And each morning she picked up from the top of the stairs a tray of dishes mopped clean.
This routine went on for two years, and the most she ever saw of her husband was a dark-robed shape, a broad back lumbering down the stairs. Lizzie never said a word and refused to discuss the subject of Joe Barnes with anyone. She kept busy, her bosom swelling, laughing, the figurehead on the prow of her party’s ship, three-year-old Frank playing with wooden people carved from spools beneath the oaken table.
One day she found the tray untouched, but since it wasn’t unlike Joe to miss a meal from time to time, she thought nothing of it. Several untouched trays later, she finally ventured downstairs and discovered Joe dead on the couch, his robe a mess of stains. The county coroner pronounced him five-days dead, euphemistically of acute indigestion, and when they tried to bring him up they found they couldn’t bend his body around the stairs up through the steep cellar doorway. Joe Barnes had hardened stiff as timber. They couldn’t cut up the stairs and support beams, nor could they squeeze him through the basement window, through which all his thinner friends came and went as they pleased any time of night.
“Do whatever it takes to get him buried,” said Lizzie. “Saw off his legs if you have to, just don’t tell me about it.”
And that’s what they did, carrying him up to the light of day in pieces. The bookcases had been ransacked and the store of liquor plundered, leaving Lizzie with the bulk of Joe’s old family money and the freedom to pursue a political career, which she began as a parole officer and worked her way up, traveling over the Illinois cornfields to attend every state and county fair and political convention (where she also accumulated her enormous clutter of blue knickknacks and doodads) and feeding and entertaining America’s most prominent Democrats until she was elected to the Illinois State Senate in 1952, Illinois’ first woman state senator.
This story of the legs still made Gene laugh, as it did when his mother told it to the boys over and over, though he now wondered if it were true or evolved to ridiculous proportions in all the retellings, as Miller claimed. Miller had frequently protested that they were exaggerations, but both boys had always enjoyed listening anyway. Now the stories their mother told were pure fantasy, and Gene wondered what Miller would have made of them, if he would have rolled his eyes in disdain or laughed at the outrageous imaginative detail.
In addition to the plate-licking incident, Gene had one or two other fleeting memories of his great-grandmother Lizzie. The first was the big-bosomed woman sitting on a light blue couch and stringing green beans with one of those blue rooster mixing bowls in her lap as he, Miller, and their mother walked in the door. She was always cooking, and as they walked in they were surrounded by blue dishes, blue knickknacks, blue doodads, blue ashtrays, cracked blue tiffany lamps, and creaking old blue furniture like the couch she sat on and which, after being reupholstered several times, now rested in Gene’s living room, covered in piles of clean but unfolded laundry. This world was a wash of blue, and Gene had decided that moment, at the age of three, that his favorite color was also blue. It still was as he sped on his blue BMW motorcycle with a blue helmet and shiny black visor, all under the faded-denim sky.
Looking into his rearview mirror, Gene saw a White County Sheriff’s Department cruiser coming up fast behind him.
“Shit!” he thought. “They’ve found him already!”
His heart walloped against his ribcage and sweat trickled down his back as he slowed and started to pull over. Maybe he’d only been speeding. Maybe they hadn’t found Miller. Maybe—but the sheriff’s car didn’t slow down at all. As the brown and green car passed him, Gene saw Justin Poole, a deputy who he still thought of as a kid, raise his hand in greeting and keep right on going. Gene realized Justin didn’t even have his lights on. He felt like an idiot and knew he needed to calm down, not be so jumpy or panic so quickly, or he might give himself away. Once he got to Metropolis, he couldn’t act suspiciously or make stupid mistakes or he might end up back in his own hog shed with Miller.
Speeding up again on the highway, he looked at his shadow in the morning sun, long but faint, stretching over the shoulder, the ditch, and the sea of cornstalks stirring from nothing but his own motion. Gene returned to where he’d left with his great-grandmother, like picking up again on a morning dream after being awakened. He didn’t want to dwell on the dangers ahead, and family history was a good distraction. His only other memory of her was lying in a big trapezoid-shaped room upstairs in her huge house, his brother in a mirror image room across the hall, and falling asleep to Lizzie’s loud laughter tumbling up three stories, two flights of stairs, and through the big wooden doors. He could hear the floorboards creak as Miller, angry at having to go to bed and not be part of what was going on, crept out of his room and down the stairs only to be shooed back to bed.
Lizzie’s son Frank eloped to Edwardsville with a woman named Chantal Blanche Fischer (which she pronounced Chantle), against Lizzie’s wishes, then stayed briefly in St. Louis, where he had graduated from law school at Washington University. After Lizzie simmered down, they settled in Carmi, where Frank practiced law and Chantal gave birth to Elizabeth, a name of appeasement as well as a nod to family history. Elizabeth was two when a strep infection reached down from Frank’s throat to his heart and throttled him. This occurred in 1944, right when penicillin was first being tested, but not in Carmi, Illinois. Frank died leaving his daughter with no real memories of him, and Chantal spent the rest of her life feuding with Lizzie. Chantal had never been good enough for Frank, and then he died and Lizzie was stuck with his worst half.
Lizzie’s animosity continued when Chantal remarried, and the two never spoke again. Many Barnes family members, not just Miller and Elizabeth, had waged long silent cold wars. Chantal died the bitterest woman in Carmi. Frank had died a few years after they married. Her second husband suffered a stroke two years after they married, and she spent the rest of her life taking care of him, a man who, with the exception of one blood vessel in his brain, had the constitution of a draft horse. He lived a long life as a semi-invalid who could barely walk and who couldn’t speak. She also endured a double mastectomy, a hysterectomy, cancer of the sinus passages, a number of small strokes, and gout. Chantal died a year after her second husband, which Gene now realized was the last time he’d seen Miller. Chantal had requested she be buried with her cat, which she wanted killed and stuffed and put with her in the coffin.
“Does she think she’s an Egyptian queen?” Miller had asked.
“She loved that cat more than anything,” Elizabeth had said. “Or anyone.”
“Well, I’m not killing it,” said Gene.
“Me either.” Miller stuck his hands in his pockets. “You kill it.”
Instead they buried Chantal with a bag of Hershey’s Chocolate Kisses, though Gene hadn’t been able to resist opening the bag and popping a couple in his mouth.
“Gene!” Elizabeth scolded in a shocked whisper.
“You think she’ll notice some missing?” Miller’s eyebrows rose as he helped himself to a handful. Before the Vongottens closed the lid on Chantal’s casket, even Elizabeth had shrugged and helped herself to a chocolate kiss.
Miller’s inexplicable death, his body ripening in a hog shed with an Over/Under on his lap, was a ridiculous end to a ridiculous family history. No wonder cactus choked the family plot. Gene imagined the long dead lying in their neat little rows while prickly tentacles grew out of their hearts, cracked open caskets, bore through
the dirt, tilted tombstones, and reached into each other’s graves to throttle one another.
As he plowed through the wind, it occurred to him that, since their parents never took them to church, the religion he’d been raised on had been family. With no more worshipful offspring and none of it written down, their religion, like so many other tribal religions, would soon become extinct. And then what would happen to the little family plot, the fields around it, and the prickly pear? Miller’s big idea had been to reforest all the land around the plot and return it to its original sylvan state. When Gene first heard his plan over a holiday dinner, he had scoffed, and their mother had started to cry.
“It’s been in our family for seven generations!” she exaggerated.
“It’ll still be in the family. It just doesn’t have to be cornfields.”
“It’s been our farmland for generations!” she wept.
“You know, Miller,” Gene said, pointing a fork his brother’s direction, “that’s the stupidest idea you’ve had yet.”
Miller shrugged. “It never makes any money. Whatever Mom might say now, the farm loses money every year.”
“It most certainly does not!” Elizabeth’s eyes widened, offended her son would even suggest such a thing.
“You tell us it does.”
“How do you think I paid for your college?”
“I thought it was money Dad put away.”
“Well it wasn’t.”
Gene and Miller had looked at each other, not sure where to find the truth.
“Come on, Mom, you complain about how you lose money every year. Why not turn it into forest and have the taxes waived?”
After a few moments of stunned silence, their mother fled to her room and collapsed on the bed, her sobs so loud they carried throughout the house despite the locked-shut door. The two brothers sat and looked at each other across the table.
“Why’d you have to go upset her?” Gene narrowed one eye at his brother. “You always have to make trouble.”
Though Gene hated to admit it, Miller had been right. The farm was a burden, and it didn’t make any money these days. If it had gone to Miller, he would have reforested it and started some kind of a wildlife refuge. Gene could have no heirs, and now, after generations, it would go to strangers, most likely corporate shareholders of the neighboring farmland.
As he rode on, it dawned on him that Miller’s suggestion had been a turning point for their mother. She never forgave Miller for his attitude toward the land, and that day she had probably taken the first emotional steps toward cutting her eldest son out of her will, out of his inheritance, and out of the family. Although being disinherited probably suited Miller just fine, at the very least he deserved to be buried with the rest of them in the silt, among the cactus.
SEVEN
GENE LEANED INTO the turn and accelerated around a bend in the road. He felt more alive and full of purpose than he had since Desert Storm. His bike roared beneath him, eating up the asphalt as he drove south on Route 1, between the Little Wabash and Saline River. In a heartbeat and a blink, he sped through sad little towns, some already dead, some a few seasons away from dying. Omaha, Ridgeway, Lawler, Gibsonia. In Junction, he stopped at Patton’s Truck Stop to fill his tank. He noticed as he swiped his card that his hand shook, which he hadn’t seen happen since he drove a tank through the Iraqi desert.
At the pump he saw no one and interacted with no one and quickly returned to the road, passing a pile of rotting stuffed animals, balloons, and curled cardboard hearts stuck to a fencepost—all adding to the end-of-the-world feeling that threatened to undermine Gene’s sense of purpose. The last time he’d stopped there, no more than a year ago, the pumps were all being used and the parking lot teemed with teenagers who had nothing better to do than hang out at a truck stop, but at least the area had been full of life. Now, Route 1 strung together a series of ghost towns, dingy outposts on a once bustling byway. In a hundred years, they would all crumble back to nature, like the untouched humps of brown he’d passed in the Iraqi desert, vague gestures of abandoned civilizations no one remembered.
The Little Wabash eventually dumped into the Wabash to his east. Gene crossed the Saline River a few miles before it too dumped into the Wabash at Saline Landing, and then passed the sign marking the northern boundary of Shawnee National Forest. The further south he rode, the fewer oil wells he saw, the sparser the towns grew, and the more trees began to thicken on either side of the road. The flat bottomlands bulged here into a hill or bluff or scooped there into a valley or holler as the terrain grew rockier and hillier.
Mesmerized by the road and lost in memories and family stories, Gene rode up over a hill then came coasting down almost into a herbicide or pesticide spray system towed by a tractor. The tractor was making a slow right turn onto a field, and the sprayer took up more than a lane. There was no time to stop. Gene had just enough time to swerve to his left and swerve back into his lane to avoid an oncoming old Jeep Cherokee.
No one honked or yelled. The driver of both the Jeep and the tractor turned their heads in disbelief to watch Gene’s back take another hill and grow smaller in the distance. If he hadn’t held a bone-white grip on his machine, he would have smacked the side of his helmet for being stupid and losing focus. His heart pounded for miles, his legs shook with adrenalin as they perched on their footpegs, and sweat coated his body, dripping down his sides and back toward his flanks. A few miles later, he felt the sweat cool as invisible threads of wind wrapped around his body. He was always careful on the road, never took risks, and never daydreamed. Until now.
Regaining focus, he looked toward the turnoff on his right and saw a large green sign with white lettering: Wiley Road. He laughed, thinking of Wile E. Coyote’s endless desert road of hope and failure and anvils dropped on the head. Then he remembered Miller’s notes and the one address he could make out. He slowed and pulled over to stop the bike on a weedy shoulder that leaned precariously toward a deep ditch. Taking out the chicken-scratched yellow page from his jacket pocket, he unfolded the note and peered at it again: 1009 Wiley Rd. If he hadn’t almost wrecked, he would have flown right past the sign, likely paying no attention. Hoping this address might give him some answers, Gene wheeled his bike around and headed down the newly paved road, a smooth contrast to the heavily-patched highway he’d been on the past hour.
He passed a couple of farms, one of which looked abandoned, a few pastures dotted with dozing cows, and a boarded-up church before winding into wooded hills thick with undergrowth. Small houses with larger gardens and laundry hanging on lines sprawled to his left and right. After making a right hairpin turn to continue to the top of the hill, he came to a massive iron gate. It was connected to high yellow stone walls that circled the property. There was no mailbox, but fastened to a bear-sized slab of yellow rock were black metal numbers that read 1009 Wiley Road.
Gene imagined a house made from the same yellow stone as the wall, but he couldn’t see one. The trees and plants covered the hill and the house, though he thought he could make out a blue-gray slate roof. It was probably one of those yellow stone McMansions, brand new, judging from the walls and gate, but who would live in a house like that out here? If someone had enough money to buy property like this, why would they live in the middle of rural Southern Illinois? It made no sense. It was like a castle fortress perched high on a hill looking down on the village peasants scraping out meager lives below. The gate had no doorbell, no call box, and no way to contact the owners. He imagined there were security cameras but didn’t see anything obvious. There was nothing to do but turn around. Several times before he rejoined the highway, he looked back to see if he could see a house or anything at the top of the hills, but he saw nothing except thick green trees and blue sky. The castle, if there really was a castle, was completely hidden.
At the intersection of Wiley Road and Route 1, he stopped and considered his options. This was probably the first of many dead ends. He thought about saying
the hell with it, turning left on the highway, and going back to Carmi. He almost turned his wheel left, but the image of Miller sitting there dead in his hog shed flashed through his mind. He turned right and accelerated toward Metropolis.
As he crossed the line into Gallatin county, Gene decided he’d never cared much for the people in these southern counties, the people who lived in that gated house being no exception. Not even a doorbell or mailbox—how neighborly. Everything out here seemed like a big Fuck You.
He’d once dated a girl, Marci, from Eldorado, over in Saline County. She was a girl he’d met on the internet several years ago—shy, a little pudgy, possessing an almost childlike naiveté. In her mid-twenties, she had gone to pharmacy college for a year, dropped out, worked at Walgreen’s, and still lived with her parents. Marci happened in his life several years after Gene had come back from the war, when he was working at diesel repair shops. Despite her shyness and not overly talkative nature, he liked her well enough, especially her easy laugh and almost childish simplicity, and had taken her to dinner a couple times at the Red Geranium in New Harmony, Indiana, with his mom. It was the nicest restaurant for a hundred miles. He’d often visited with her parents when he picked her up or they invited him to their house for dinner. He laughed remembering the first time. They’d just purchased a piano at a church sale, but nobody in their family knew how to play. Marci’s father was immensely proud of it and showed him almost as soon as he walked in the door.
“We just got us a pie-anner! You play the pie-anner any, Gene?”
Gene had snorted then and he snorted again recalling it.
“No,” he’d said. “I don’t play the pie-anner. I can play the piano a little, but never tried with a pie-anner.” He’d taken lessons up through sixth grade, though he’d hated it and was never any good, and Elizabeth finally let him quit as much for the family’s sake as his.
Graveyard of the Gods Page 5
