Dark Coulee

by Mary Logue

  She looked down at the manual. Written inside was the quote: “A good thrasherman wasn’t made in a day.” Nor a good thrasherwoman, she was afraid.

  Like the heroine in Rumpelstiltskin, she would try to turn these fields of sunflowers into gold. If she did, she would save the firstborn—Brad—from being taken away. And she would save Nora, too. Because she knew if Brad went to jail for good, she and Nora would be removed from the farm and sent to foster homes.

  She tied Brad’s old straw hat to her head with leather shoelaces. She climbed up into the seat and started up the tractor. She moved slowly toward the golden heads. She felt like she was sneaking up on them as they were all facing away from her. She got the tractor right up next to the first row. That would be her marker. Just keep the wheels right next to the row of sunflowers.

  She nosed the edge of the sunflowers with the side of the tractor. Then she moved forward and pulled the combine into the field.

  She was combining a field. For better or worse, the sunflowers were being mowed down behind her. She turned around once to look, but pulled the tractor too far to the side. After that she kept facing forward and just kept the tractor moving along steadily.

  When she came to the end of the field, she knew she had to stop everything and check how she was doing, but she didn’t really want to stop. After she had pulled the combine completely out of the sunflowers, she turned off everything.

  She walked back and looked at the seeds in the side bin. Some were crushed. That was no good. She could make an adjustment so they wouldn’t be handled as roughly. Walking back along her first pass, she saw that she was not scattering too much seed out with the chaff. That was good. Not bad for a first try.

  Her heart lifted for a moment, and she thought she might be able to do it. If she could keep moving, she might finish this field by lunch. She was worried about the turns. She knew that she had to do them just right to keep the combine moving smoothly behind the tractor. If she cut it too tight, the combine might jackknife on her. If she took the turns too wide, she wouldn’t get back in position to harvest the next row.

  Jenny wiped her face, then climbed back on the tractor. It was a perfect day—quite warm, not much of a breeze, the insects thrumming in the weeds alongside the fields. The sun was nearly overhead, and she needed to keep moving.

  By shortly before noon, she had half the field done. Her back was aching from keeping the tractor steady. The sun beat a blazing hole in the back of her T-shirt. Her arms and wrists were starting to burn. She hadn’t put any sunscreen on, but she didn’t feel like she could stop. She wanted to finish the field before she went into the house.

  As she was heading back toward the house, on one of her last passes, she saw Mrs. Gunderson walk out to the field, holding Nora’s hand. They waved at her. She was surprised it had taken them so long to come looking for her. But then Mrs. Gunderson probably just figured she was sleeping in and had let her be.

  She slowed the tractor down to get ready for her final turn and stood up to wave at them. The tractor hit a bump and jolted her, and she lost hold of the throttle. The tractor popped again, the engine cut out, and she fell back, one hand hanging on to the seat.

  She was going to fall, and if she did she would be eaten up by the combine. She needed to get out of its way. She made a quick decision to jump free of the tractor.

  With the tractor moving faster, rolling downhill, she flung herself off the vehicle and fell into the last remaining row of sunflowers. She landed on her side. Brad’s hat had come off her head and fallen into the combine’s path. It would be chewed up by now. The tractor kept careening ahead, the combine slowing it slightly. Mrs. Gunderson and Nora ran out of its way.

  The tractor ran into the side of the barn with a thud and then died, then the combine piled up behind it. Jenny righted herself and ran to shut down the combine. She turned it off, but saw the damage that had been done. The tractor had torn a hole into the barn and bent the front axle. The attachment between the tractor and combine was also damaged, and Jenny wondered whether the tractor would even work anymore.

  “What happened?” Nora came running up.

  “I fell off the tractor.”

  “What were you doing, Jenny?” Nora asked.

  Jenny shook her head.

  Mrs. Gunderson came walking up. “What’s going on here?”

  “I harvested most of this field.”

  “My goodness,” Mrs. Gunderson said in amazement.

  “And I think I ruined the tractor.”

  Claire got called off her investigation to come in and talk to the prosecuting attorney, Wendall Thompson, about Brad Spitzler’s arrest. She had been checking on a burglary that had been called in the night before and had told the dispatcher that she would come in as soon as she finished talking to the owner of the sporting goods store. All that had been taken were fishing rods. She thought it might be kids, she told the owner. They had climbed in through a window in the bathroom and left their footprints on the toilet seat.

  Sheriff Talbert had Thompson in his office, and both men were looking at a golf club that the sheriff had just bought. Claire stood by the door until they were done discussing the pros and cons of steel-shaft versus graphite shaft clubs.

  “What’s going to happen to Brad?” she asked Thompson as they all sat down.

  “His lawyer, Kent Byron, is advising him to plead self-defense.”

  “Really?” Claire had thought his attorney was a public defender. She wondered what had happened to change that.

  “Self-defense, since his father was always threatening to kill him. Since he feared for his life and his sisters’ lives.”

  “What do you think of that?”

  “Not a bad idea.”

  “Are you just going to plea-bargain him out?”

  Wendall Thompson pursed his lips. “I hope so. I don’t think this case should go to trial. What good will it do? But before we go any further, I’d like to get the sister in here and talk to her about the past history and the stabbing itself.”

  Claire agreed. “I’ve been thinking we need that corroboration, no matter how the case is handled. I don’t know how well you’ll do with her on the crime itself. She was drinking and on drugs that night, from what I could tell. Out of it. She’s admitted as much.”

  “Can you bring her in tomorrow morning? I’ve got to go to court this afternoon, or I’d say we should do it sooner.”

  “Will do.” Claire stood up to leave.

  “Brad Spitzler is lucky to have Kent Byron as his lawyer,” Thompson remarked.

  Claire nodded. “As far as I knew, that was not who was assigned him.”

  “How did this happen?”

  “You know more than I know.”

  Thompson looked Claire in the eyes. “I know that Pit Snyder got him the lawyer. Did anyone suggest that to him?”

  “Not that I’m aware of.”

  Ella heard a noise down in the kitchen and turned on the light by her bed. One of the girls, she thought, but she decided to go down and see. She slipped into her chenille bathrobe and put on the blue slip-on socks she had taken home from the hospital when she went in for eye surgery.

  She kept a good grip on the railing as she went down the stairs and wasn’t surprised to see Jenny, her golden head on the kitchen table, staring at a bottle of beer. The girl had slept most of the afternoon after her harvesting attempt and then had moped around and not eaten much of her dinner.

  “You having a little nightcap?” Mrs. Gunderson asked, but one look in the girl’s eyes, and she could see that Jenny had resorted to drugs again. Her eyes were wandering, and she seemed to be having trouble focusing them.

  “I can’t get to sleep. I need something to help me wind down.”

  “I bet you do. I think I could use one too.” Mrs. Gunderson went to the refrigerator and pulled one out of the bottom shelf in the back, where Jenny had stashed them. She had noticed them hidden behind a Tupperware container when she was looking fo
r some leftover stew.

  Mrs. Gunderson pried the cap off and sat down at the table opposite Jenny. She took a big swig of beer right out of the bottle.

  “You drink beer?” Jenny asked.

  “Sure. I don’t drink too much of it. But my late husband often liked a beer at the end of the day. I joined him as often as not.”

  “You had a husband?”

  Mrs. Gunderson laughed. Young people never think the old people have had any kind of life. How do they imagine that they have come to exist, if their elders didn’t drink and love and have sex? “Certainly. Why do you think people call me Mrs. Gunderson?”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He was killed in Korea, during the conflict.” How easily she could say that now. So long ago, and yet some days she could still weep if she thought about it.

  “What conflict?”

  “In the early 1950s America sent troops over to Korea. They fought there, but they didn’t call it a war, just a conflict. As if that made a difference. But men still died. Herbert went over for what he thought would be a short stint, and it was short, but he didn’t come back alive.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Not a lot older than you are now. I was twenty-two when he died. I’ll never forget the day I got the phone call. I felt like the earth had just opened up and swallowed me.”

  Jenny went to the refrigerator and got out another bottle of beer and opened it. She sat back down at the table and rolled the bottle back and forth between her hands. “I know that feeling.”

  “Everyone has bad things happen to them, Jenny. You live through them, believe it or not.”

  “Does everyone have their mom die, her arms torn off, then their dad die, stabbed in the guts, then their brother put in jail and then maybe lose their farm?”

  “No, the stories are not the same. But whole families are wiped out in Africa or India when there’s a drought or a monsoon. It’s a hard and terrible world sometimes. We all have our problems.”

  “Does that mean I don’t get to feel bad?” Jenny’s voice was rising, and Mrs. Gunderson could tell she was getting hysterical.

  “No, quite the opposite. You should feel bad. Feel as bad as you can feel. But what you are trying to do is escape your feelings by drinking and by drugging.” There. She had said it. She might as well ask another question. “Did anything ever happen between you and your father that you would like to talk about?”

  Jenny’s head jerked up. “Like what? What are you suggesting—that my dad was a pervert? Well, he wasn’t.”

  “I’m just trying to understand what you’re going through.”

  “You don’t understand. You can’t. It’s all my fault. And now Brad’s going to go to prison forever.”

  “I tend to be an optimist. Things might turn out better than you think. When you go into the sheriff’s department tomorrow, tell them everything you know. That’s what will help him the most.”

  Jenny slouched lower over the table. She wouldn’t look at Mrs. Gunderson. She covered her head with her hands.

  “Things will get better,” Mrs. Gunderson assured her.

  Jenny raised her head, and the look in her eyes was wild. She took her beer bottle and threw it in the garbage can. Then she screamed, “Stop saying that! They will never get better. There’s no way they can.”

  After forty years of teaching children how to grow up, Mrs. Gunderson knew enough not to argue. She finished her beer while Jenny put her head down on the table and wailed. What would happen would come to pass, whether Jenny believed in it or not.

  “You’re nothing but an old woman, what do you know?” Jenny said in a quiet and mean voice, lifting her tearstained face.

  Mrs. Gunderson stood and put her beer bottle in the recycling bag under the sink. She retied her bathrobe around her and turned and spoke to Jenny. “I am an old woman. But I know many things. And one thing I know is when I’m not wanted anymore. I will stay another few days until we can get you and Nora settled with a foster family or someone else can come to stay here. It’s time for me to go back home.”

  She turned and walked carefully back up the stairs, her heart heavy. She had hoped she would get through to Jenny.

  23

  CLAIRE parked her car by the courthouse, sat for a moment, trying to remember all she had to do today, and then clambered out of the vehicle. As she reached back in to pull out her purse and a couple of files she had taken home, she was tapped on the back. When she turned around, Pit Snyder was standing next to her car.

  “Hello, Mr. Snyder,” she said in a friendly tone—but her first thought was that he was going to yell at her for how he had been handled in the Spitzler case.

  Instead he asked pleasantly, “Do you want to go get a cup of coffee?”

  “Nothing I’d like better. You want to go to the Prairie Pie?” Claire had been planning on getting in touch with Pit Snyder sometime today.

  A new espresso bar with wonderful baked goods had opened up a few months ago in Durand. Claire liked to give them her business when she could. She hoped they would make a go of it, although they might have a hard time selling their espresso coffee for a dollar and a half when people around the town still expected a bottomless cup for twenty-five cents.

  “Sure. I haven’t tried that place.” As they walked along, he told her, “I’ve been waiting for you. I wanted to catch you before you went in to work. I wasn’t ready to go anywhere near the jail for a while.”

  “I don’t blame you.”

  When they got to the restaurant, Pit ordered regular coffee and Claire a café au lait. After they had been served, Snyder stared at her large, foamy cup of coffee. “That sure looks nice.”

  “Would you like a taste?”

  “Don’t mind if I do.” He took the cup in both hands and took a sip. “Creamy. Tastes like the hot chocolate my mom used to make when she brewed it in the old coffeemaker. I didn’t like it when I was a kid, but that tastes pretty good to me now.” He seemed so much more relaxed than the last time she had seen him.

  “What can I do for you, Mr. Snyder?”

  “Pit, call me Pit. Everybody does.” He took a gulp of his own coffee, then leaned forward and said in a half-whisper, “I’m sick about Brad Spitzler.”

  “Is that why you got him a lawyer?”

  “Yes, it’s the least I can do.”

  “Pit, what did you see that night?”

  “That’s the problem. I didn’t see anything. When I came walking up, the two kids were standing over their father, and the knife was on the ground. Both their hands were bloody. I told them to go wash up and I grabbed the knife.”

  “Why? Why did you cover up for them?”

  “Jed Spitzler was an evil man. He made their lives hell. I knew how mean he could be to Rainey. If I’d stepped in sooner, maybe none of this would have happened.”

  “So you didn’t see Brad stab his father?”

  “No.”

  “Do you think he did it?”

  “I really can’t say.”

  “Why do you think he would do it now?”

  “Maybe Jed did something that Brad couldn’t tolerate. I don’t know. In some ways, I’m surprised he didn’t do it sooner. That’s all I can figure. What does Brad say?”

  “Since he’s got a lawyer, he’s not saying much. But I think they’re going to try to plea-bargain with him so he’ll have to make some kind of confession.”

  “Do you have any sense of what kind of time they’ll give him for this?”

  “No court looks kindly at patricide. But with the extenuating circumstances—his mother’s death, his father’s continuing brutality—I think they’ll go easy. And, fortunately, he’s a juvenile. I have a feeling he’ll be sentenced to the juvenile center until he’s eighteen, then let go. He’ll serve less than six months.”

  Pit bent his head. “He’s such a good kid. I hope this won’t ruin him. What about Jenny and Nora?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t have an
ything to do with that. Mrs. Gunderson is still staying with them—but who knows how long she’ll last?”

  Jenny slid her feet forward and then followed them. It was easy, this thing called walking that she did to move around the world. She followed the deputy sheriff out of the patrol car and into the police station. She had worn her new red tennis shoes. They were the last thing Dad ever bought for her. That made them special. And they made the walking even easier.

  Everyone was staring at her, but she didn’t care. They couldn’t touch her. She was sliding along on her feet, walking carefully so that no one could tell how high she was.

  She had doubled her dosage, being careful not to take too much. She didn’t need another fainting episode with the deputy. But she was concerned because she was reaching the bottom of her pill bottle. After carefully counting them three times, she saw that she had only seven pills left. She wasn’t sure if her connection in school had any more, and she didn’t know if she could fake another toothache.

  “Jenny.” The woman deputy was talking to her. She needed to tune in again. The deputy’s name was Watkins, Claire Watkins. That’s right. And another deputy was sitting next to her, a cute deputy named Billy. He looked a little like Ricky Martin, who she actually thought was pretty dopey.

  “Yes.” Jenny made her lips slope upward in a smile.

  “We’re going to be taping this. Is that all right?”

  “I guess.”

  “I’ll be asking you the questions.” Claire turned on the tape. “Billy will be here, and he might ask you some questions too. Are you ready?”

  “I think so.”

  Claire said the date and time and who was present in the room. Jenny looked up at the window. It was so high you couldn’t see out of it. All it did was let some light in. The room they were sitting in reminded her of a jail cell. Maybe Brad was close by. She wanted to see him before she left. She had to remember that.

  “Jenny, some of these questions are going to be difficult, but I want you to answer them the best you can. We are trying to understand what led up to your brother Brad stabbing your father. Let’s start with your mother’s death.”