Cole glanced into the rear-view mirror. No one was following. “I’ve got things that’ll help you sleep, ma’am. It’s no big deal.”
The President put a hand on Cole’s shoulder. “It is a big deal, Cole. I need my pills.”
“But I thought you were in a hurry to hide.”
“Just do it, Cole. Please. Trust me. Turn the car around and drive back and find my pills. They should be in a green shoulder bag in the back seat.”
Cole opened his mouth to protest yet again. But a glance at the President stopped him. Linda’s face was hard and tense, her cheeks streaked with tears. Her hand, resting now on the gun she cradled in her lap, trembled slightly. The President was terrified.
Cole pulled into the next driveway and turned around.
Chapter Two
2.1
“Report,” said the General.
Mary flinched. The boss was never this abrupt. She drew a deep breath and took a seat before his expansive cherry desk. “Little news, General,” she said. “The word is out. We’ll find her.” Carefully she smoothed her jacket.
“The media?”
“They’ve got the story. Surprise attack last night at dusk. Helicopters, explosives, a small-scale war, the whole nine yards. As far as the public knows, a bunch of terrorists from God-knows-where invaded the President’s family home, overpowered and murdered a dozen or so agents and security people, kidnapped the President, and slipped away into the night. Throw in some stock footage of helicopters, a couple of interviews with some of the People posing as agents who saw the whole thing, before you know it, the story has a life of its own.”
“The people who were there—?”
“— have all been taken care of, General. We were lucky to have had our People present in the numbers that we did. We could clamp down tight before some meat-for-brains had a chance to call the dogs.”
“The search?”
“Just as you predicted, Boss. Every yahoo with a badge from here to Seattle has been mobilized. Of course they all think they’re looking for heavily armed lunatics in helicopters, but with a posse this large, any clues Ma Kettle leaves behind ought to turn up quite quickly. We’ll let the badges do the grunt work for us and move in when the search starts to narrow.”
The General nodded, his eyes closed. “And Bob?”
“Bob spent the night in flight. Took a couple of trips this morning, too. Nothing conclusive. Bob could see a car. Something big and old, she said. Long stretches of secondary road. Travis was listening to the news. She must have driven all night, but her defenses never faltered. Oh, and Bob saw knotweed this morning. That was all.”
“Knotweed?”
“Japanese knotweed, General. Polygonum cuspidatum. It’s an invasive.”
“Polygoni—. Don’t tell me. The plants told you.”
Mary smiled. “Bob’s good with plants, sir.”
2.2
Cole slowed the car, switched on his blinker, and turned onto the narrow gravel road that led through the community and back to his house. A large wooden sign, carved and painted with brightly colored flowers, greeted them as they passed.
“Harmony: A Cooperative Farming and Residential Community,” the President read aloud. Her tense, tired face melted momentarily into a smile. “You a farmer?”
Cole smiled and nodded. “Well, sort of. Among other things.”
“Good for you. So what’s the story with this place?” She indicated the land around her with a wave of her hands. To the right of the road was a hayfield, recently cut, dropping off and rolling away to a thin row of maples that lined a creek. Past the creek, the mountains to the East rose abruptly. The September sun, just now cresting those mountains, gave it all a golden, burnished look, like a painting by Bruegel.
Cole hesitated, unsure of how much to say, as if it were still possible to not get involved. “Bunch of friends,” he said finally. “They bought this old farm about ten years ago. Built this road, carved out some home-sites, built houses and moved out here and started working the fields together. Mostly small-scale stuff. A few animals, lots of gardens, an orchard. That sort of thing. Ruth and I were living in town but knew one of the couples that lived out here. And then a house opened up. We’ve—” Cole sighed and looked out the window. “I’ve been here almost five years now.”
Linda pointed back over her shoulder with her thumb. “That sign makes you sound like some sort of a commune or something.”
Cole scrunched his face in distaste. “Yeah, well, we get that response quite often. We’re not a commune. At least not by any definition of the word I know. We don’t all live in the same house and share food and all that. We were just all looking for some place where we could live amongst folks we knew and loved and wanted to be with. We’ve all got our own houses, and plenty of privacy, but we do work together on projects, and we eat a good many meals together. We take care of each other.”
Cole looked over at the President. Linda had her head against the window, scanning the sky as if she were afraid of being followed by an airplane. Her head bumped lightly against the glass.
“So… not married anymore?” she asked, still looking to the sky.
“I, uh, no. It’s just me and the kids now.” Cole noted how the sunlight made the President’s hair look like freshly varnished pine. He cleared his throat. “What are you looking for?”
The President ignored the question.
Cole drove slowly down the slender country road. They passed an old farmhouse, now partially restored, with shiny new tin on the roof and new lap siding still unpainted. A newly built barn stood behind the house, with a pair of miniature donkeys in the overgrown pasture. Cole gestured toward the orchard, just starting to produce this year and fenced with tall posts and electrified wire, and pointed out the solar cell that brought the thin strands to jittery life. Across the fields, somebody drove a tractor with a bush-hog. Cole started to wave, then thought better of it. Linda crouched low in her seat.
They followed the road, turning hard to the left and heading down a steep hill that plunged back into more woods. At the bottom they crossed a long timber bridge, the creek bed underneath nearly dry from the summer drought. The road rose up again into the light of another open field, this a pasture with a horse, a number of black-faced sheep, and a pair of tall, brown, Nubian goats, all standing nose-to-nose near a weathered gray barn, as if plotting the overthrow of the government. Behind the field, against the wall of trees, sat a long, one-story building lined with windows. Farther on, past the field, stood more woods, glowing with the fall. Cole pulled up the driveway that hugged those woods and parked the car in a short spur set into the trees. He turned off the engine. Its rumble faded quickly, leaving only the sounds of the breeze and the shallow breathing of the President sitting next to him.
He was home. And he was pretty sure he’d brought trouble home with him.
2.3
Cole Thomas was born and raised in rural Minnesota by hardworking parents, surrounded by an extended family of grandparents, great aunts and uncles, and cousins. They lived side-by-side in neat, clapboard farmhouses on Thomas Road, rooted to their little corner of the world by generations of habit, held together by shared work, shared stories, chromosomes, and potlucks. Cole’s had been a relatively happy and normal childhood, whatever that meant. Gangly and lean, highly sensitized to the world around him, nervous of tapping foot and facial ticks, he’d never quite learned how to inhabit his body, as if he’d grabbed it off the rack on his way in without checking the label. There was about him a peculiarity of both movement and focus that followed him through life, a presence that caught the shameless stares of children and the confused smiles of passersby, as if they’d just seen a jester, a king, a dancing bear, or a tourist from some distant star. But the web of love, safety and continuity that held him as he grew left him surprisingly hale of heart and whole of mind, as odd as he might sometimes appear. His quick wit and talented intellect had been nurtured and encouraged, not only
by his elders and teachers, but by the last full fading flush of American exuberance. Post-modern ennui and existential despair took their own sweet time settling onto the rural playfields of his youth. He grew up believing the script he’d been handed; he could do and be anything he wanted.
But what did he want? That was the question that plagued him. Cole’s father, Ben, had broken free from the family model and had gone, not into farming, but banking, a move that echoed the social patterns of his time. So, although he grew up surrounded by a farming family, Cole could dimly sense that he was not a part of it, as though his father’s break from the agricultural life had bastardized his children, making of them pretenders and outcasts. The roots had been severed. The old answers no longer served. All four of Ben’s boys were raised with the expectation that they would do well for themselves in the outside world, finding there a destiny far grander than their parents had even dreamt possible. Doing well looked like having a career, making money, and using your brains and talents to accomplish something big. Doing well meant moving away from the land and never looking back, taking one’s place in the new scheme of things.
Cole shrugged along, taking the script he was handed and running with it. He went where his teachers pointed him, passed easily through high school and into college, and acquired the skills and knowledge he would need to be successful. He tried astrophysics at the University of Minnesota, switched over to anthropology, ended up in religious studies, tolerating the courses the college said he needed and thriving in the courses that interested him. He always did well. But he never really had a vision of what he would do with his education. He could never see where he was headed. He just trusted that his parents and teachers knew what they were talking about. One day, his place in the new scheme would become clear.
He met Ruth Weston during his freshman year and courted her with intention, even though she couldn’t stand him, even though he’d never had a clue how to talk to a woman, even though he had little idea what he’d do with her if he got her. Ruth did seem to know where she was headed, and that was powerful magic to Cole. His persistence paid off: they were married the summer before his senior year.
Cole graduated summa cum laude, worked a year selling shoes, then went on to a Master’s program at a small seminary on the campus of Northwestern University, following in the footsteps of a former roommate. He did well there and looked forward, for a while, to a university teaching career. But at some point he realized he didn’t really care about his course of studies. So he left. And for the first time in his life, he faced a blank page in the script. It hadn’t occurred to him that such a thing was possible.
With nothing better at hand, he worked short stints in a series of low-paying jobs in retail and food service and security. A part of him felt feeble, diminished, and lost, a disappointment to his potential and a failure as a husband. But a part of him was relieved to stop pretending that he knew where he was going. Iain was born. Then Emily. Day-care was depressing, and none of the individual baby-sitters they tried worked out. So Cole quit working altogether and stayed home with the kids. They could afford for him to stop. Ruth’s career in pharmaceutical research was on the rise.
The culture shock was excruciating. In the course of two years he had gone from grad-student with a promising career, to stay-at-home dad with not much on the horizon. Where was the success he was destined for? Was this it, folding towels and changing diapers? He tried to go back to school part-time, but the needs of his children were too great. It seemed, indeed, as though this was it. Sometimes a brittle resentment would settle into his bones like a cold draft, driving him to brief outbursts of anger or vague protests of pain that even he could not understand. This was not how it was supposed to go.
It was not that the work had no value. When he was able to think clearly about the subject, he was forced to admit that the raising of his children was the most important and valuable thing he could be doing. But he was embedded in a society that did not seem to agree. Homemaking was what people did when they couldn’t make it in the real world. It was boring, menial, unfulfilling, stultifying. And it was a woman’s work. Those were the stories that colored the culture in which he’d been raised, and he was certain he was being judged according to them. And what could he expect? He was a product of that same culture. He judged himself.
Yet their arrangement made perfect sense. Ruth had a wonderful job, a successful career with a salary that allowed them to live comfortably, even luxuriously. What better solution than to have Cole run things at home? In addition to raising the kids, and avoiding the bleaker aspects of day-care, it would give him time to write, something he had always thought he might want to do.
Eventually Cole began to wake from his upper-middle-class dream. He came to see how profoundly his thinking had been shaped by the world in which he had been raised. By the time Grace was born, he had distanced himself from the expectations of his parents and forged his own definition of success. He crafted an identity apart from careers and money, one more connected to how he lived and loved and laughed. He began to write. And paint. He took care of the house and the kids. Somewhere in there they moved to Vermont, when Ruth made a career leap to Laird. Life moved on. Ruth was driving. Cole could just watch the scenery.
The opportunity arose to join the intentional community at Harmony and they grabbed it. Ruth, a “city girl” if ever there was one, and the product of a bent home, if not a broken one, had longed for the sort of close, land-based interdependence Harmony promised. She was ecstatic. What surprised Cole was that he was happy as well. He suddenly found himself more at peace than he’d been for some time: working the land, raising the kids, writing when the baby slept. There was something almost mystical about his return to the farm, living and working within the loving arms of a real community, raising his children in the same sort of extended family he had known as a kid. It was as if he was doing what he had been born to do, carrying on the work his grandparents and aunts and uncles had done before him, picking up the ancient tune that still sounded in his soul, singing the song his father had tried to refuse. It was as though he had been anointed, appointed, fated, remembered. His was a simple life, a peaceful life, a meaningful life. The question of what he would be when he grew up had been answered; he would recapture his place in the Thomas family of his youth. He was back on script.
But new demons came to call, taunting him in the dark of night when sleep refused him. There was an urgency in these voices, as they whispered over the background murmur of global populations rising and forests dying and climates changing and resources dwindling. “Just look at you,” they would sneer, “thirty-something years old and what do you have to show for it? No resume! No money! No success! Don’t you have some great work to do in the world? Should not you be putting your brains and talent to some real use?” The voices buzzed around the steel frame of his skull like daredevils on motorcycles, chuckling and sighing and hissing soft misgivings, stirring up the pain and resentment he thought he’d assuaged. And one truly terrifying voice joined the fray, asking Cole if he really knew what love meant, and challenging him to consider whether even his marriage needed to be questioned.
Had Cole truly found his calling, or was he hiding from his own grand destiny? Had his father stumbled upon a truth he could ignore only at his peril? Was this right where he’d been meant to be all along? Or was he just a lazy Wendell Berry wannabe living off the good graces of a complacent wife he didn’t really love? He did not know. He wondered why, and for how long, Ruth would put up with his unknowing, his inexplicit, distant anger, and his failed commitment.
As it turned out, Ruth hadn’t had to put up with it for much longer.
2.4
Cole helped the President out of the car and along the short, graveled walk that led through the woods toward his house, bending to give Linda a shoulder on which to lean while she hopped along on her good leg. The house rose before them, two stories of simple contemporary design with large, tall p
orches on the north and south sides. Unstained, rough-cut pine siding gave the place a rustic look that fit in well with the surrounding woods. The double-shed tin roof glinted in the sun above. Here and there were the signs of children: a bicycle, a sandbox littered with toys, and, buried in the fallen leaves, a cracked and sun-bleached squirt gun. Cole and the President paused at the bottom of the stone steps that led into the house. Linda reached out to steady herself on the handrail and let go of Cole’s shoulder.
“How many kids?” she asked, motioning with her head at the sandbox.
Cole climbed the steps and pushed open the door. “Three,” he said after a pause. He felt exposed, his life opened up to forces too great for him to fathom. An alien world of politics and intrigue had stuck its heavy boot in the entryway to his private life. Instinctively he pushed back. If the door opened further his whole world might spill out onto the ground.
Because he could think of no alternative, Cole stepped back down to help the President inside.
“Did you see them?” asked Linda from her spot on the brown leather sofa. She picked at the bloody stain on her slacks, pulling it away from where it stuck to her skin. Already the blood was beginning to stiffen and dry.
Cole stood next to the sofa, unwilling to sit down yet, as though sitting would confirm the long-term nature of the situation. “Who?”
“The police. Local boys, from what I could tell. Two of ‘em. Between where I ran off the road and here.”
Cole sighed and nodded. “Yeah, I saw them.” He remembered the tickly shudder that had passed through his body when the patrol cars had passed. Police cars made him nervous even on normal days.
The President shifted in her seat. “A bit unusual, don’t you think? For way up here, I mean.”
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