Bleeding Kansas

by Sara Paretsky

  “Etienne! We just finished saying we don’t want you to use that word. Beyond that, I can’t believe a son of mine would be so small-minded as to care about public opinion, least of all what the Schapens think. Anyway, how can people say I’m a Communist when everyone knows how active I am at church?”

  “Because of the stuff you do. The co-op market, wasn’t that a Communist thing?”

  “Etienne, you’re making me crazy. The market wasn’t some state-run outfit taking people’s profits from them, it was a local initiative where everybody benefited without needing a middleman. Besides, look at all the farmers who took part in it: the Ropeses, the Longneckers, the Wiesers, even Liz Fremantle. It’s only narrow-minded people like Arnie Schapen and Dennis Greynard who tried to sabotage it.”

  “If you hadn’t named Lara for that stupid Russian movie, maybe the talk about you being a Commie wouldn’t have started in the first place.”

  Privately, Lara agreed. But she didn’t want to get involved in a fight between Chip and her mother. Anyway, Lara wasn’t a weird name, at least not compared to Etienne—if Susan hadn’t explained to everyone that it was Lara, not Laura, because she was named for Julie Christie’s character in Doctor Zhivago, no one would ever have thought twice about it. Susan watched the movie about a hundred times when she was pregnant with Lara, and of course people like Arnie Schapen took it for granted that if you liked something Russian you were automatically a Communist. People were so ignorant, Lara agreed with her mother about that, but at the same time Lara wished she was a little more clued in to how they reacted to the things she did.

  “Did you know,” Jim asked, trying to calm down the passion at the table, “that the early Christians held all their possessions in common? That really is Communism. Imagine how Arnie Schapen would react if I suggested that to him.”

  “He’d be thrilled,” Lara said, trying to help. “He’d take Dad’s John Deere and make us drive his old Case tractor.”

  Jim winked at his daughter, and added, “He’d also have you up doing the five o’clock milking. One reason we don’t have animals—the thought of getting you and Chip out of bed before dawn every day.”

  Chip and Susan were still flushed with battle, but Lara laughed loudly. Chip got up from the table and stomped upstairs. They heard the water running in the bathroom. In a few minutes, he came back down, heavily drenched in aftershave.

  “Don’t you have homework?” Jim called to him.

  Chip’s only answer was to slam the kitchen door hard enough to shake the windows. They heard his car start, the engine roaring as he gunned it, and then the wheels spinning in the icy gravel.

  “What’s going on with him?” Jim said.

  “Etienne has always had his moods. He doesn’t like to be thwarted.” Susan, still angry with her son, didn’t want to see his point of view.

  Jim turned to Lara. “Lulu, do you know what’s eating him? It’s not something with Janice or at school, is it? Is she—do you know—”

  “Is she pregnant?” Lara cut in as he dithered for a euphemism. “She wouldn’t talk to me about it, but I don’t think so. Anyway, you know Curly is the person Chip talks to, not me. Make Curly tell you, or get Blitz to make him—he’s scared of Blitz but not of you.”

  “Scared of Blitz? What’s scary about Blitz?” Jim was incredulous. Blitz was more than a farmhand, more than a crackerjack machinist—he was the closest friend Jim had.

  “The way he looks at you, like he sees right through you, and doesn’t think much of what he’s looking at, you know, Dad.”

  “You make him sound like he’d be at home with Gina’s witches.” He stared narrowly at his daughter. “And you also make me think you know what Chip has said to Curly. I know you, Lulu, you slip in and out of places, and people don’t know you’re there. Come on, spill it. What is going on? It’s not tattling if it helps me get things sorted out.”

  Lara turned scarlet but burst out: “Oh, Dad! No one wants to hurt your feelings, but Chip doesn’t want to farm.”

  Jim blinked and sat back down. His first thought was to say automatically, if he doesn’t want to farm he doesn’t have to, but he realized it wasn’t that simple. His own father hadn’t wanted to farm; he’d gone into town and become an insurance agent. Then a Santa Fe freight, speeding around a hill to the unprotected Fifteenth Street crossing, had killed both him and his wife, leaving Jim and Doug to live with Gram and Grandpa on the farm.

  From the moment he first got to drive the small tractor that summer, Jim had known that farming was his life. He couldn’t imagine a different one. Knowing, too, that he was working land his family had worked for seven generations—he didn’t have Susan’s romantic fantasies about Abigail and the Abolitionists, but standing on land that he belonged to brought him a comfort beyond wife or children, or even, really, God.

  Sitting at the table now, studying his hands while he tried to think about the future of the farm if Chip didn’t want it, Jim remembered the guy who blew up the federal building in Topeka some years back because the feds were confiscating his farm. The man had been an idiot, growing marijuana on his land, selling it. Still, if the feds had merely sent him to prison he would have gone knowing he had his land to come home to, but they were taking a farm like Jim’s, one his family had lived on for seven generations. When he got out of prison, his life would be gone. Jim couldn’t imagine blowing up a building and killing people, but he still thought he understood how the guy must have felt.

  He didn’t say any of this, just looked at his daughter’s scared, anxious face and put a hand to her cheek. “It’s not your fault, Lulu. And it’s not your problem. The worst thing I could do for Chip is to try to make him stay here when he doesn’t want to be here. It’d be the worst thing for the farm, too—it’s a recipe for failure. But why is it eating him now?”

  “Baseball,” Lara said. “Now is when people like him get to try out. He was sure he’d get to try out as a walk-on, but not even the Royals are interested. Haven’t you noticed how he runs for the phone whenever it rings? And he checks his e-mail, like, every ten seconds.”

  “Baseball? You mean, when he went to that camp last summer and played in front of those scouts? And they won’t take him? Oh, poor Etienne, no wonder he’s upset, his dreams shattered like that!” All Susan’s anger with her son evaporated in her distress. She looked as mournful as if it were her own dreams that had been demolished.

  “Y-e-es,” Jim said doubtfully, “but he was never that good.”

  “He was MVP in the northeast Kansas league last year,” Susan flashed.

  “Sweetheart, a thousand boys are MVPs every year, but not too many are good enough for the majors. I guess Chip thought baseball was big enough that if he got drafted, he wouldn’t have to talk to me about the farm. He can go to college this fall, though—he should get accepted at K-State or Baldwin, don’t you think, if he started on his applications right away? He’d have four years to figure out some kind of direction—maybe coaching, or sports management.” Jim tried to sound hearty, as if he thought these were wonderful choices. “I’ll talk to him tomorrow.”

  “Chip hates school,” Lara said. “You know he does. He’ll go to college only if you make him.”

  “Lara is the student in the family. We’ve always said so,” Susan added.

  Jim looked at his daughter, trying to smile. “Lulu, you’d better be careful. You’re carrying a lot of parental ambitions on your curly brown head. You’re the student, you’re the one who likes to work the farm, you’re the one who plays the trumpet and your ever-so-great-grandmother’s piano.”

  Lara grinned. “I’ll instruct a team of agriculture students out on the X-Farm while heading up a marching band and pushing a piano through the furrows. You’ll see, Dad, it’ll all work out.”

  “I know you’re trying to be funny, but you could do it!” Susan’s eyes glowed. “Look how Abigail ran this farm on her own, even before the first Etienne died, and she did it—”


  “In twelve-pound wool skirts. I know, Mom. But could she play the trumpet at the same time?” Lara went upstairs to start her homework.

  Fifteen

  FIRE DANCE

  “YOU WOULDN’T MIND if the farm went to Lara, would you, Jim?” Susan asked later.

  “Mind? What, because she’s a girl? Of course not. What a ridiculous idea—I’d be ecstatic. But it’s true that she’s our brainy kid. I don’t want her to give up doing something, oh, big in the world because she thinks we want her to stay here. Let her stretch her wings when the time comes.”

  He paused and took Susan’s hands. “You know I don’t interfere with the things you do with your friends, Suze, but this bonfire, couldn’t you put that off? If Chip is this upset about his life, let’s not add to his woes when we don’t have to.”

  Susan pulled her hands away. “If I could make Etienne a baseball star by giving up my friends, I would, but it really troubles me that my own son worries so much about what small-minded people like Arnie and Myra Schapen think. He pays no attention to anything I say to him, about his course work, or his plans for his future, or the amount of time he’s spending with Janice, whose only attraction I can see is between her bra straps, which, by the way, her mother should talk to her about getting fitted properly. But, anyway, Janice doesn’t do anything to improve his mind or enhance his life—I know you agree with me about that! Why am I supposed to placate him by staying home this coming Thursday?”

  Jim rubbed his forehead. “It makes me uncomfortable, Suze, I guess that’s the point. I’m not superstitious, but—women dancing around a fire, pretending to be witches—”

  “But they’re not, Jim, they’re not pretending to be witches. It’s female bonding, it’s going back to the old women’s religions, when women felt powerful and comfortable in their bodies. Gina says women used to be in charge of the harvest, the planting, all the old fertility rituals. If Etienne is upset by me wanting to celebrate women’s lives, I haven’t done a very good job as a mother raising a son who isn’t comfortable with female power.”

  He could tell from the glib, disjoint phrases that she was repeating what she’d heard from Gina, or Autumn Minsky at the bookstore, but it irritated him all the same. They argued about it until bedtime, and off and on again during the week, but on Thursday she left the house after supper with a bag of sunflower seeds, her “gift to the fire.”

  Predictably, Chip refused to eat supper with the family on Thursday. He came home from school long enough to see that his mother was intent on attending Gina’s Imbolc ritual and announced he was meeting Curly in town for a burger. When Jim asked if he was keeping up in his courses, he yelled “What’s the point?” and once again slammed out of the house.

  Jim had tried talking to his son about how to think about a future without a professional ball career, but Chip wouldn’t respond. Instead, Jim later overheard him driving Lara to tears by shouting at her that she was a tattle-telling brat who hadn’t changed since she was four and told Dad it was Chip who had broken Mom’s crystal vase.

  Lara was excited by the thought of the bonfire and begged Susan to take her, but Jim put his foot down. The image of Gina’s body entwined with her friend Autumn’s hovered at the edge of his consciousness. He imagined some kind of depravity that would unnerve Lara and degrade Susan. When he tried to suggest this to his wife, she became furious, and they had the kind of shouting fight that left him hollow with helplessness.

  On Thursday, Jim took a bowl of chili into the family room and doggedly watched a movie while Lara and Susan ate in the kitchen. Over the television, he heard Susan’s squeaky voice and Lara’s laugh. He felt hurt that they could be happy when he was upset.

  A little later, the kitchen door banged shut again, the pickup engine turned over, and his jaw tightened. Had Susan taken Lara with her? If she had—but, after a minute, he heard Lara washing the dishes. He turned back to the television, trying to care about what Morgan Freeman and Clint Eastwood were doing in front of him.

  He went to the kitchen. Lara had gone upstairs. He stared out the back window, but the bulk of the barn and equipment sheds blocked any view of the Fremantle house. He put his work boots on and walked out behind the outbuildings.

  He was turning back to the house when he saw a shadow move in the grasses on the far side of the track. Something about the way the grasses bent told him it wasn’t a coyote or fox but his daughter. Damn Lulu, anyway. He didn’t want her watching the drinking or whatever else the women might do. He started through the dead grass after his daughter.

  The ground was gluey from a recent freeze-thaw cycle. He never mowed near the tracks, and the head-high wild grasses and weeds had become a dumping ground for rotting fenceposts and rusty plowshares, as well as the bottles and bags that landed everywhere, even along tracks through a cornfield. Like fox droppings, he thought, with their telltale pointed ends, garbage was the recognizable excretion of the human species. He banged and stumbled his way to the tracks, barely saving himself from falling several times, roundly cursing his wife, his daughter, the whole female half of the species.

  When he finally made it to the train tracks, he slopped through the muck along the ties: at least the ground was level here. In the distance, he could hear the traffic on K-10 like a faint roar of wind, but as he got closer to the Fremantle place that noise was covered by the sound of drums and singing and laughter.

  He followed the sounds and the glow of the fire through the remains of the old apple orchard. Gina and Autumn had constructed their bonfire not far from the ruins of the bunkhouse. Beyond it loomed the Fremantles’ main barn; they’d built it there so their hands would have easy access to it.

  The fire wasn’t big, but to Jim’s surprise it had been carefully laid: he somehow hadn’t expected that kind of skill from city women. It was burning steadily. The dozen or so women gathered around it were laughing, a few were beating drums, and someone outside his field of vision was playing a flute. The women were passing bottles around to share. Every now and then, someone would throw something into the flames. He’d see a burst of color, green or gold, now and then a flash of red, and everyone would cheer.

  He made out Susan’s back, her unmistakable halo of curls and the bulk of her down vest, and, near her, Gina’s taller, leaner silhouette. Someone passed Gina a wine bottle; she drank from it, then handed it to Susan, who at first shook her head, but then, after Gina seemed to urge her, took a swallow and quickly passed it on. Underneath his annoyance, Jim felt a twinge of pity for his wife, who didn’t much like alcohol but who wanted to be part of the group.

  Staying well back from the fire, he skirted around, looking for Lara. Years of practice had made her a skilled eavesdropper—or tracker, to be charitable. He almost missed her, but she must have moved at his approach because he looked up and saw her perched on a low branch of a bur oak.

  “Enjoying the show, Lulu?”

  In a flash from the fire, he saw her flatten her upper lip against her teeth; she was nervous, not knowing if he was angry. He held a hand up to her, and she let him swing her down.

  “Oh, Dad, don’t be mad. This is so—so amazing! No one does stuff like this. It’s totally awesome! I wanted to see the ceremony, and I knew you’d hate it if I went with Mom.”

  “Did she ask you?”

  “She wouldn’t let me. She said you’d expressly forbidden it. And, anyway, it was for her and her friends.”

  Jim felt some of his tightness ease at realizing his wife had respected his wishes, at least as far as not involving Lara in her new hobby. “So you decided to be Pocahontas Grellier and trail along?”

  Lara grinned at him; the question meant he wasn’t angry anymore. She snuggled up to him as she used to when she was seven or eight, although she was tall now, at eye level with him. They watched the fire ceremony together in silence for a while.

  “You know, Mom wants to have a vision,” she startled him by saying sometime later.

  “A vision?” h
e echoed uncertainly.

  “Like however many great-granny Abigail’s. That’s why she wants to be at this bonfire. She hopes she’ll look into the fire and see a vision.”

  “Your mother didn’t tell you that!” he exclaimed.

  “No, but read between the lines. She talks about Abigail’s vision all the time to Gina, or anyone who will listen, but she says she doesn’t do anything exalted enough with her life to merit a vision. But she’d probably have to smoke dope, or something, and I don’t think she’d do that. Or maybe fast for forty days. But—”

  “Lulu, your imagination is working way overtime. Your mother is an enthusiastic woman, she gets passions for causes, but she’s not the kind of person to lose track of the real world around her.”

  Lara mumbled something that Jim decided he didn’t need to have repeated, and they watched a few more minutes in silence. The flute playing and the drumming became more intense, and the women started dancing around the fire. Again Jim felt a twinge of pity for his wife, trying to join in but moving awkwardly. They weren’t dancers, he and Susan, not even in their college days. Susan was quick in all her motions, racing around the farm, the house, but quick wasn’t necessarily rhythmic. As the women circled and the drumbeat got louder, one of the women took off her coat and her shirt, and then another one did the same.

  Jim sucked in a breath, embarrassed, titillated, angry—he couldn’t tell which feeling was on top. “This is where we go home, Lulu. I hope your mom leaves her clothes on. February isn’t the month to prance naked around a fire.”

  She didn’t resist, but as they walked away from the fire she kept turning her head to look. “Dad, I’ve been looking at naked girls for years. We don’t get underneath towels to change for gym, you know. And if this is the first time you’ve seen—Oh!”

  Before he could react, she broke off and poked him in the shoulder. He turned automatically. She wasn’t pointing at Susan, as he’d feared, but beyond to the far south side of the property, where the trees stopped and the Ropeses’ field started. Just visible behind the trees was Arnie Schapen, a set of binoculars pressed to his eyes.