If she’d stay, his life would change completely. He’d be chancing jail. He would stop going to township meetings, and he and Rachel couldn’t very well go to lunch together in Greenland. George didn’t know how April May or Milton would receive the news but he was glad for the first time that his police officer buddy Tom Parks had moved to Texas. (George was able to forget momentarily that Parks had written, saying he would be returning within a few months.) George’s life was about to become strange and, to the outside world, sordid. George’s mouth watered for that change. He had never liked going to township meetings anyway.
“What would happen if your ma found you here with me?” George asked.
Rachel turned and glanced behind her, but otherwise did not respond. One of her breasts was uncovered, so George leaned into her and pressed his cheek there and inhaled her river smell, for which he would happily forsake all other perfumes. When he opened his eyes, he noticed a bluish welt on her shoulder, and he wondered if she’d been violated in some way, tied up maybe, and it took him awhile to realize it was a disfigurement from carrying that rifle on a sling. He resisted a desire to brush away the dirt from her body. He noticed a starburst of white and red scars near her armpit. Oh, Rachel, he thought, and closed his eyes again in order not to see other wounds. George thought his heart would pound through his ribs with this new emotion, this mixture of love and terror. He tried to breathe evenly so she would think he was asleep. He felt her reach out and touch his forehead. She whispered, “Damn you to hell.”
11
ON OCTOBER 9, 1999, SIX WEEKS AFTER GEORGE HARLAND married Rachel Crane (and a year and a half after George had originally proposed in the garden), Officer Tom Parks of the Kalamazoo County Sheriff’s Department watched seagulls land and fight over the stale butter-flavored popcorn somebody had tossed out into the cop shop’s parking lot. As George Harland threw the thirty-eighth bale of straw to David inside the big barn miles to the east, Tom Parks looked up from the gulls to study the painting he’d recently hung above the window, a depiction of three lean Indian men in buckskin and single-feather headdress. On the way to work this morning, something about the weather had made Tom Parks feel uneasy, depressed even, and a little anxious. Though the grass and farmlands were dry enough to burn, the air felt wet and heavy. This seemed to Parks the kind of day on which a fellow could make a rash decision that would screw up the rest of his life—say, deciding to move to Texas, as Parks had done some years ago. Or agreeing to sell his family’s farm or allowing the house to be torn down. On a day like today, a cop might clearly make out a gun in another guy’s hand and shoot, only to learn later it had been one of those little telephones or a cable-cutting tool.
Parks unwrapped his carry-out egg, cheese, and sausage sandwich without looking at it. He didn’t know why he bought fast food—it didn’t fill him up but only piqued his appetite for something finer, less processed. When he was first married, his wife had cooked for him in the mornings, and those breakfasts had filled him, surely. In five bites the sandwich was gone, and Tom Parks searched the wrinkles of the paper wrapper for more, before wadding it into a tight ball, stuffing it in the bag, and throwing the bag into the can under his desk. He knew he’d need something else before lunch.
Out in Greenland Tom Parks rarely saw gulls, but they always showed up in downtown Kalamazoo, in mall parking lots and here at the county cop shop. When the gulls landed on the asphalt, you could see they were big birds, as big as wild ducks. So why was there no gull à l’orange? he wondered. Why no Peking gull? If the gulls had been around when Tom Parks and George Harland were kids, they would’ve tried eating them. They’d killed and cooked all sorts of creatures from the sky and water—English sparrows, ducks, crayfish, bluegills, even river catfish, which had probably been toxic. Back then neither he nor George had cared that the Harlands owned the creek that flowed into the river, no more than they had cared that the Parkses owned the little pond on the east side of Queer Road from which the creek flowed. Now George owned it all. Parks wondered if the seagulls followed the roads thinking they were streams, if they landed in parking lots thinking they were ponds and lakes. Asphalt probably looked like water from the sky, and once the birds landed, they were too foolish to be disappointed.
Stress always made Parks overeat. He’d overeaten all through his divorce, but his habit had never been so bad as since his return to Greenland last autumn. That business with George and Rachel had been a heck of a thing to come back to. It was bad enough to return from Texas to face two new houses on his old land and the Taylor farm turned into a golf course, but to find his best friend shacked up with a kid was too much. Not only was Rachel a fraction of George’s age, but everything about the girl made Tom Parks nervous, starting with her mother’s disappearance, and that awful swearing—if any kid of his swore that way, he’d wash her mouth out with soap. Parks hated her dragging that rifle around, though strictly speaking it wasn’t illegal on private land. He’d tried to talk George out of marrying Rachel, but George had refused to listen to reason, and Parks hadn’t been able to figure out how to encourage a breakup between two people who apparently didn’t even talk to each other.
Milton Taylor had been distressed too and for a time had tried to prevent the union, but then Milton changed his mind and committed himself to seeing the two legally joined, figuring it was better than their living in sin. George was Parks’s best friend, and so Parks eventually agreed that as soon as Rachel turned seventeen he would testify before the judge that this marriage was reasonable. Because it had been important to George, Parks had even agreed to witness the courthouse ceremony. George had looked neat and clean in a suit jacket, which Parks recognized as the one he’d worn to the funeral of Parks’s father years ago, but Rachel looked the way she always did in a pair of George’s jeans rolled up over cheap canvas shoes. There was no denying she was a unique-looking girl—even the magistrate, Deborah Vissers, had been visibly shocked by her and looked repeatedly to Parks for acknowledgment of the strangeness of this marriage, when she normally would have been smiling in a congratulatory way at the bride and groom.
“Does the groom have a ring?” Vissers had asked.
George shook his head. Rachel just stared at her. Vissers pronounced them husband and wife without a ring, and despite Parks’s reservations, he found himself becoming tearful. Parks had been divorced more than six years, and he doubted any woman would ever again want to marry him or even make love with him.
There’d been some trouble getting Rachel inside the Kalamazoo county courthouse to begin with, because even when she emptied her pockets, she set off the metal detector. She begrudgingly told the guards she had a bullet in the back of her arm from a shooting accident, and she’d rolled her sleeve all the way up to her armpit to expose flesh scarred as though wild animals had clawed at her. The sight had made Tom Parks’s skin crawl, had made him feel queasy and confused. George had looked fearful standing on the other side, as if worried the guards would keep Rachel and not give her back. Once outside the building afterward, while waiting for George and Milton, Parks found himself briefly alone with the girl, and he had to ask, “Why’d you want to go and marry such an old guy as George?” Parks couldn’t help but compare her to George’s first wife, Carla, their old schoolmate, flirtatious and funny; by the end, though, Carla had been bored out of her mind by farm life. She’d headed out to California even before their divorce was final.
“Because I want his damn land,” Rachel said. Parks didn’t look into her face but down at her hand, which was clutching the marriage license as though it were cash or a blue chip stock certificate—or rather, he told himself, a deed to property. Parks had said good-bye and gone off and sat in his cruiser and stewed. All he could think of was that George had paid for Parks’s family land fair and square, while this kid had no right to it. Now, as he sat at his desk in the station, he tried to focus some anger on George for taking up with the girl, but mostly the anger bounced back to himself for
selling out, for being such a fool. Way back when Tom and his wife had been on the verge of divorce the first time, when his wife insisted they move to Texas and get a fresh start, Parks had agreed they needed a drastic measure to save their marriage; but if he’d stayed in Michigan, maybe his father wouldn’t have died of a heart attack, as he did less than a year after Tom left. If Tom had stayed, he would have found an alternative to selling the family property. And if Tom Parks and his wife had divorced in Michigan, the local courts would never have allowed her to take the kids so far away, but since they’d split up in Texas, Tom had no way to make them move back. Thinking about all this made Parks crave something creamy or chocolate from the vending machine, which stood only about twelve feet from his desk.
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.
12
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 d
owny 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.
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