George said, “The Indians had a strange kind of garden. You’ll have to come see sometime. I’m George.”
“I know who you are. Owner of all this damn land.”
Another man might have been bothered by her tone, but George was so accustomed to the unpredictable and sometimes violent forces he encountered in nature that he didn’t take the anger personally. He was thinking he could stand there all day puzzling over her face, but she looked back at him with a burning gaze that made him start to feel like an intruder on his own farm, made the hair stand up on his neck. George said so long and climbed up into the Case tractor. He went back to work in such a way that he didn’t stir up dirt around her. He liked the idea of her digging into the ground where he could watch her, but by the time he turned around at the end of the row, she was walking away in the direction of the Glutton. The rifle swung so easily over her shoulder that George imagined the metal of the barrel might be soft like human flesh. As the girl moved farther away, he felt himself unraveling, as though she had caught the end of the ribbon of his gut on her bare foot and was uncoiling him as she walked. She disappeared behind the walnut trees near the creek.
After that day, every time he turned his tractor around at the end of a row, he hoped to see the girl searching for her graves, and at night he tried to remember the contours of her face. He’d been fine living alone for years, but now he began to feel all broken up. Of course he’d missed his ex-wife, Carla, who’d shared his home and life for eighteen years, and he’d long missed his father and mother, who’d moved to Florida more than two decades ago, and Johnny, who made things lively, if problematic, whenever he was around. His best friend, Tom Parks, had moved to Texas years ago, but until George saw that girl, his loneliness had been tempered and calm, constant and bearable. For years George had been like one of those clay-heavy fields lying frozen in winter; this girl showing up in front of him was like a big spring rain whose waters were too heavy to soak in. When Milton opened the Barn Grill that summer, George went often in hopes of seeing Rachel working in the garden out back.
“Poor girl,” Milton said, when he saw George watching her through the new insulated vinyl windows he’d installed.
“Why poor girl?” George was thinking about ordering a third draft beer.
“Oh, having that crazy mother and all.” Milton walked away from George and straightened the dartboard, at the center of which he’d affixed a tiny cartoon Satan. “Margo hasn’t ever threatened to shoot you, has she?”
“Actually she did, once,” George said. “Lately, though, I’d have to say, she hasn’t been much of a threat to anybody, including the woodchucks that are eating my soybeans. I wanted to tell her there was a nest over on P Road, but I haven’t seen her.”
Milton said, “And that poor girl doesn’t believe in Jesus Christ, Our Savior. I’m not giving up on her, though. I don’t want a girl like her burning in hell.”
George nodded. Way out in the garden, the girl turned toward the Barn Grill and crossed her arms. George stepped back from the window and looked beside him at the plastic-framed icon in which Jesus sat at the Last Supper; as George tilted his head, a 3-D prismatic effect made Jesus ascend toward heaven. Milton seemed to have gained all the Christianity George had lost over his lifetime—maybe there was only a certain amount of religion to be spread around in a community. George thought Milton’s newest acquisition, a wooden crucifix above the cash register, gave a surprisingly muscular interpretation of Jesus.
After serving drafts to a couple of guys in John Deere caps, Milton returned to stand beside George and gestured to the two-foot-high crucifix.
“Nice piece, eh?”
George nodded.
“Got it from a Polish fellow up north, a wood-carver,” Milton said. “Say, George, I know it ain’t none of my business, but I always wondered. I hope you don’t mind my asking, but why’d you give that girl’s ma a perfectly good acre of your land?” Milton gestured toward Rachel. “You made Johnny mad enough to leave town.”
“Wasn’t a full acre, more like three quarters.”
Outside, Rachel squatted and resumed weeding.
“Well, why anyways?”
“I guess when you think about a woman like Margo, it reminds you that you’re going to die someday,” George said. Way back when George surprised Margo and encountered the business end of her rifle, Carla was threatening to leave him, and Johnny was in jail and asking for money George didn’t have, and his father in Florida was saying that before George went any deeper into debt he should sell the land and split the money among everyone in the family. Having a woman like Margo pointing a rifle into his face somehow put it all in perspective—his head cleared instantly. When Margo realized who he was, she’d apologized and acted civilized.
“You mean you thought she might kill you?” Milton said
“I guess I thought she deserved something for keeping the wildlife from eating my crops.”
Milton said, “Why do you think a woman like her would turn her daughter against Jesus? A woman has a right to forsake her own soul, but why her daughter’s soul, too?”
George said, “I couldn’t farm that piece of land, anyways. I’d have to build a bridge to get my equipment over the creek. That’s why I’d always left it as woods.” There was another reason he’d given Margo the land, one he didn’t want to admit to Milton. George had figured the breakup of his farm was imminent and fast approaching, and he’d wanted to get the first cut behind him. Then somehow his sacrifice of less than an acre had paid off—it was as though he’d butchered a calf for one of those old gods. Things had picked up somewhat since then; six years ago, George had even bought the Parkses’ land across Queer Road, though maybe he’d paid too much per acre.
Whenever George dragged his irrigation machinery with the tractor that summer after seeing Rachel, or trekked out to problem spots in his fields or drove the half mile between his house and his oldest barn, he watched for the girl. Whenever he searched the horizon, it was in hopes that she would step from behind bushes or rise out of the ground. Even a glimpse of her would suffice, he told himself. George thought this desire didn’t belong in his life, but was of some other world where men savored desire as pleasurable in itself, apart from its object. For George, such desire seemed foreign, a remnant of a past civilization or of a decadent future dreamed up by idle men who spent their days not in fields of grain but in tiled bathhouses, oiling their bodies and taking massages. The unseemliness of his thoughts gave him the idea that he owed the girl an apology.
Rather than disappearing or becoming routine, his desire continued to grow, shift and absorb him, sometimes striking with such intensity that it blurred his vision, such as when a deer lifted its head in the distance or when he noticed something bright floating in the river. After months of grappling with this hunger, he felt that there was no patience left in him, no kindness, no sleep or sense, and after a weeklong stretch without any rest whatsoever, he took to roaming at night, as he hadn’t done since he was a kid.
One night in September, George walked across the plank bridge over the creek, to within a few yards of the dark Glutton. He listened to the slurping sounds of night, the splash of water creatures hunting and returning to nests to feed and protect their young. He followed the creek upstream. As he neared his big barn, he tried to cross the creek by balancing on rocks the way he used to, but he lost his footing and sloshed in water the rest of the way, pausing in the deepest part to let the cold current run over the tops of his work boots. He knew there should be a moon three quarters full—it must have been at an angle behind trees or hills. Soon he would begin harvesting, working late into the night, but that would be in the combine with lights and noise. Now he heard only creeping, swishing, and rustling in the grasses and trees. Standing at the edge of the field beside the creek, George thought he felt the ache of the soybeans to be harvested, the sound of the earth hushing and soothing the plants, as though this land were some native creature he did
n’t really own. He worried that, as a farmer, he was becoming useless and dull: he hadn’t noticed a rust fungus affecting over an acre of beans until Mike Retakker had pointed it out to him last month. With Mike’s help he could go through the routine of harvest, but if anything went wrong, if he had to make an important decision or a fast, tricky repair to the combine, he didn’t think he could be trusted. When the moon finally appeared, the stones of the foundation of the old house shone like grave markers. He turned away from them and approached his old barn. The sliding door he’d rebuilt rolled open with a sound like a sigh. Alfalfa, sweet and dusty, masked the manure smell from the lower level, where George kept the beef cattle a farmer had traded him for some hay. Over the course of the summer, he and Mike had more than halfway filled this upper level with hay and straw, and he hoped they’d get the rest in soon. George sat on a bale of alfalfa and looked into what should have been empty darkness, but instead he saw a glimmer of light reflected in the eyes of Rachel Crane. He identified her shape crouching on the hay-strewn floor by the silhouette of her rifle, which she slowly let drop.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and fell forward onto his knees. He wasn’t sure which apology this was—the one for disturbing her or for desiring her. “I’m sorry,” he repeated, and moved closer. When she laid her gun in the straw, he reached toward her face, but with no more hope of touching it than of touching the moon’s far side.
“Christ,” he said, at the shock of his fingers meeting her warm cheek.
“Johnny?” Rachel’s voice sounded shaky.
George moved closer and cupped her face but didn’t dare look into those eyes. Her breathing was quiet, as though she were controlling it to track an animal. She reached up and touched his mangled hand, studied the stump of his index finger with her own fingers.
“What the hell do you want?” she said, but she didn’t pull away.
George ran his hand over her hair, which was cool and coarse. He meant to say something about her being beautiful, but it would seem like nothing here in the dark, so he just squeezed her hair in one hand and moved the other down her flannel shirtsleeve and over her jeans, following her thigh to her calf to her foot, which he found to be callused and warm. He wondered how far into autumn she would go without shoes. When he slid his hands beneath her shirt her breath became audible, like his own, and her muscles tightened and she choked a little. Though everything about the girl had made George move hesitantly over the last few months, he now grabbed her and held her body the way a wild animal might grab its reluctant mate. She twisted away but only enough to tug off her jeans. George couldn’t imagine untying his rawhide boot laces, wet from the creek, and so he just dragged his pants down to his knees and rolled on top of her. He felt too naked and too old, but despite that and despite his months of awkward longing, his desire became, for that moment, a simple sexual thing. He wrapped his arms all the way around beneath her and pressed her onto the loose hay, and he couldn’t stop himself from coming apart after only a minute. When George relaxed his grip, the girl began to wail, a sound so mournful that his blood slowed in his veins. He tried to pull away from the animal noise, but her arms were locked around his back.
“Damn you,” she whispered. “Goddamn you.”
He pulled against her grip until she finally let loose of him. “Oh, Rachel,” he said. “I am so sorry.”
“Shut up,” she said, and crawled far enough away that he could no longer make out her face.
“Forgive me.”
“Just shut the hell up!” She stood with her clothes in one hand and her rifle in the other, and strode naked out through the open door, leaving George kneeling alone. The duration of their being together had been only a couple of minutes, but George felt like an entirely different person, a bad man, terrible with age, heavy with guilt. He started to pull his pants up, but dropped them and sat on the nearest hay bale and wept into his hands, grateful for the pain of alfalfa stalks poking him.
George began harvesting not long thereafter, and though he said nothing to Mike, who worked with him and hauled wagons to the elevator in Climax Township, he felt sure his soybeans were rotten, and when he looked at each load of beans or corn and saw it was not rotten, he knew it was poisoned. He became afraid of seeing Rachel at the end of each row, her round face bruised or diseased or sad. George had ruined something. He’d broken branches in the fruit trees of Eden, and now he awaited retribution: plagues of insects or weather so fierce and destructive that it would not only signal the end but bring it violently to bear. Every evening afterward, as the sun set, all during the harvest, he thought about driving his tractor or his combine or his truck right down into the river to drown.
9
ON OCTOBER 9, 1999, AS GEORGE THREW THE NINETEENTH bale of hay to David in the old barn to the south, Nicole Hoekstra returned to the kitchen to find her husband had gone off to work. She got the feeling Steve was sneaking away, even though it was normal for him to put in half a day on Saturday. Nicole was never inclined to volunteer for weekend work at the hospital office, but Steve was a born salesman, selling wholeheartedly, unabashedly—even to his own neighbors—with an energy and enthusiasm that Nicole had begun to find irritating. During this second year of their marriage, she had found herself angry with her husband as often as not, and then, a month ago, he’d come home smelling of sex and another woman. She’d felt too confused to confront him that night, and once he showered away the smell, she’d had no evidence. Though she knew the truth, she worried that if she brought up the subject, Steve might trick her into thinking she had been mistaken. Or, worse, it was possible that talking with him about himself and another woman would make it seem natural, even acceptable. Steve had a way of conversing that made you feel, momentarily at least, that everything was okay.
As the twentieth bale of straw got settled into position, Nicole turned on the gas jet beneath the stainless steel kettle in order to make a cup of tea. Steve drank coffee, but Nicole thought coffee tasted dirty and burned. At first the idea of killing Steve had shocked her so much that she’d wept, but she’d gotten used to such thoughts in the last few weeks and even let herself enjoy them. Nicole’s desire to kill Steve was never vague or abstract, but always rich in detail. As she waited for the tea water to boil, she thought she might walk behind the recliner she’d bought for his birthday, holding a knife against her right leg. She’d pretend she was just bringing him a bowl of dry roasted nuts. She’d reach around from behind with her left hand, grab his chin and tip it back, then slice his throat. Afterward she’d be in a jail cell with nothing but a toothbrush, a cup, and the memory of Steve’s bleeding and gurgling body sprawled across the chair. In her prison-issue blues she’d weep about how much she loved him, and that sort of emotional clarity might be a welcome relief from thinking about him with another woman. The day she killed Steve would be remarkable in a way different from her wedding day, but the two days would be like a pair of bookends around her marriage.
She’d wanted to marry the big, handsome man the moment she met him negotiating window installation at her mother’s house. Nicole had marveled at the way he kept saying the right thing—to her, to her mother, to strangers. Nowadays she felt that his saying the right thing was just a salesman’s trick to make conversation go smoothly, to cover up the likelihood that things were not fine, that maybe a person was being sold something she didn’t really want. Nicole turned up the flame under her kettle to hurry the water and she slid out the chef’s knife to study it. The blade was wide enough that she could see in it a crude reflection of herself. She gritted her teeth and the reflection smiled. Nicole gripped the knife in both hands and stabbed downward into empty air with a force that surprised her. Stab, stab, stab. She squeaked out a scream, then looked around, though of course nobody could have heard her.
Nicole wished there were some way to talk about all this with her mother, but she wasn’t ready for her mother to think she was crazy, and anyway it was just a fantasy. In reality Nicole was no
t violent at all; she was a gentle person who liked baby animals and pretty things, who liked to decorate her home tastefully. When they’d moved into this five-year-old house, Nicole had wanted everything to be new for them. For the walls and ceiling, a coat of paint was sufficient, but she’d also wanted new carpeting to make their lives fresh and hopeful. Her marriage plans hadn’t included somebody else’s carpeting. Maybe having another woman’s fibers touching Steve’s feet was what made him crave other women.
“The carpet is fine,” Steve had said. “They bought this carpet less than a year ago. We have the receipts. Why waste money on new carpeting?”
This morning it had become clear to Nicole that to make things right in their marriage, they needed a new house built exactly to their specifications. In order to make Steve desire only her, they needed two stories, a wraparound porch, and a beautiful view. Only then would Nicole be happy again, as she surely must have been before Steve came home smelling of that other woman. After taking the kettle from the stove, she let the gas flame flicker for a while, gold and blue, before turning it off.
While waiting for her tea to cool, she thumbed further through the new Beautiful Home magazine and saw the most charming kitchen curtains in a butterscotch and white gingham. Her own kitchen curtains, which her mother had made for her as a house-warming gift, were looking drab after only six months.
As George Harland handed the twenty-ninth bale to David Retakker, Nicole went into the bathroom to apply her makeup. By the time she returned to her tea, it was too cool to enjoy. She put her lukewarm cup in the microwave, but already she didn’t really want the old reheated tea. Already there was something inferior about it. She needed to go to the mall, but she wanted Steve to go with her, and he wouldn’t be back until after noon. Such a dull, dreary morning, certainly not the kind of day on which a woman would murder the man she loved.
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