Q Road Read online

  10

  AFTER THE DESPERATE NIGHT WITH RACHEL IN THE BARN in autumn 1997, George had immersed himself in the business of self-loathing and tried to leave the girl out of it altogether, but his efforts only made him think of her more. Pushing thoughts of her under the surface resulted in roots spreading in all directions: she sprouted everywhere in his consciousness. Over the course of harvesting, George kept worrying she’d appear in front of his tractor, perhaps so suddenly that he couldn’t avoid crushing her. During his sleepless nights, he sensed her standing outside the house, cursing him. During the winter that followed, he walked gingerly through snow, imagining her lying in hibernation beneath each drift. By spring he found that the soil under his feet was imbued with her, and the process of cultivating seemed criminal, as though by disturbing the dirt with his plows, he were tearing her body apart. George used to see himself as producing nourishment, but now he feared he was only scarring and depleting the earth.

  Though he went over and over it in his mind, Rachel’s calling him Johnny made no logical sense. George resembled his brother physically, but there was nothing his missing brother could be to Rachel. Her calling him Johnny did make sense in a more profound way, however, for George felt he had become Johnny. All his life he’d thought himself better than his careless, shiftless brother, and now it was clear he was no better, for surely even Johnny had never done anything as reprehensible as molesting an innocent girl. What made him hate himself most was that he couldn’t honestly regret what he’d done, that he’d felt Rachel’s rough, warm skin against his, her steady breath on his neck and chest, her muscular limbs twisting around his, her river-smelling hair brushing his face, and the way she’d locked her hands behind his back and held him when he tried to pull away.

  He considered going to Rachel and begging forgiveness. He’d offer her anything he had. He’d deed her an Indian grave site if she could find it. He’d help her find it. But night after night he resisted seeking her out, knowing he couldn’t trust himself. He became accustomed to not sleeping, to just lying awake each night, trying to imagine her face, wondering if time passed differently for someone so young. He wondered what the girl did all day, whether she hunted alongside her mother, or whether she dug up ground all over Greenland in search of bones. Or would she be in school? (Again he resisted the urge to calculate her age.) What would she and her mother talk about when they sat together on the boat with no comforts, no electricity? Day after day, George worked with or without Mike Retakker and held just enough hope in his heart that he did not once drive his tractor or his truck into the river.

  Then, as if in reward for George’s steady work and his decision at the end of each day to live to see another one, as though beckoned there by the longevity of his thoughts, Rachel showed up outside George’s house one evening in late May, eight months after the incident in the barn. Instead of knocking, she stood by the kitchen door with her arms crossed, her rifle slung over her shoulder. George had no idea how long she’d been there before he saw her after supper. He considered that perhaps she had come to shoot him.

  “Come in,” he said.

  “I want to see your damn garden.”

  “What garden?”

  “You said there was a goddamn Indian garden here.”

  “Oh, the Indian garden. Let me get my boots on.” The shameful memory of his wet boots in the barn all those months ago washed over him. “Please, come in.”

  She entered reluctantly and stood facing his kitchen cupboards as though she were angry with the dishes there, both the dirty dishes on the left side of the sink and the clean dishes draining on the right; she seemed angry at the store-bought cans of vegetables stacked against the back of the counter beneath the sooty pine cupboard doors.

  George had intended to plant sixty more acres before dark that night, and then he would recalculate the planter settings for the sloped field across P Road. Instead of all that, he guided Rachel out the back porch door, into the woods northwest of the house.

  “I don’t see any goddamn thing,” Rachel said. She’d been in or near these woods hundreds of times. She and David had trekked across the edge only a week before to get to some wild onion and wild ginger, which they’d chewed alternately until they’d had enough of both flavors. They hadn’t seen anything special.

  “Look at the ground,” George said, making the motion of waves with his damaged hand. “The way it rises and falls.”

  For Rachel it was as if the ground rose into sharp relief beneath her feet and rolled like waves. Beneath the trees, bushes, and vines, there were curves. The depressed furrows lay about five feet apart, and between each pair the land rose to about eight inches high, then dipped again toward the next furrow. Rachel reached out and touched the branches of a box elder to steady herself against the sensation of motion. She walked between two of the mounds, and when she felt overwhelmed again, she let herself sink down cross-legged into a shallow trench. Farther out, the curves were less pronounced but still visible once you knew what you were looking for. She said, “I would think this was a big old goddamn graveyard.”

  “I figure they planted in the mounds and walked in the trenches,” George said. “Or maybe they irrigated in them.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I didn’t think to ask when my grandfather told me about them,” George said. “And I haven’t got much experience with vegetable gardens.”

  Maybe George Harland wasn’t a gardener, but Rachel was, and she was thinking that this was the garden for her. She’d assumed all this time that her recurring dream of mounded earth was about dead people. Maybe for the last year and a half since her mother disappeared, she’d actually been dreaming of an Indian garden. She began to feel trickles of relief in her limbs. She remained sitting in a depression between two mounds for a long while, long enough that George sat as well and leaned his back against the same box elder she’d just touched. Rachel lay back into the furrow, and then reached her hands over the mounds beside her and slowly pulled herself up. It made her feel as though she were dragging herself out of her own grave with the strength of her own arms. She had assumed she’d plant her little riverside garden this year, and she liked Milton’s big flat garden just fine, but here she got the feeling that a garden might become an extension of a person’s body, or maybe it was the other way around, that her body might become part of the garden. If she could get rid of the damn trees, this garden would be even bigger than Milton’s. Think of all she could grow! She wondered if Milton had felt this certain when he discovered his god.

  Though George had planned to work right up until dark, he knew that if this girl disappeared again, he might never be able to plant another field. If she walked away now, he told himself, he’d just lie down and not get up again, let his body return to the soil, or let the neighborhood dogs drag his sorry dead carcass across the Indian garden. He said, “I think there are drawings of more gardens in the upstairs storeroom. There were hundreds of acres of them at one time, in all different shapes. You want to see?”

  “Hell yes.” She stood and waited for him to stand, then followed him into the house, up the stairs to the second floor, and to the north end of the hall into a room George had opened only a few times since his grandfather died. They unrolled the maps onto the raw, dusty pine floor, and George strained to remember all he’d been told as a boy. Rachel listened without speaking while he explained that his great-great-great-grandparents had documented all the original garden beds and had saved twenty-some acres, and that his great-great-grandfather, the one who had built the old barn, had continued saving the gardens until the year his pigs made a mess of them rooting for moles. This man finally plowed all but an acre of the garden mounds under and used the land to grow more rye and corn. Rachel continued studying locations and measurements in relation to the river and creek. There were several rectangular plots and one triangular one with more closely spaced beds, and even one site, not far from the Glutton, where the garden had resembled a w
agon wheel, round with spoke furrows emanating from a central mounded hub. If it were there today, Rachel figured, the creek would run through its center.

  George silently thanked his predecessors for documenting those gardens before plowing them under. Thank God he’d had something with which to lure Rachel inside. Though he had never harbored a violent thought against another human, George looked over at the tarnished brass doorknob and considered locking Rachel in this room and keeping her here. Not only did he find this thought reprehensible even as it occurred to him, but he knew a girl like Rachel could get out of a locked room. In order to keep her here with him, he’d have to figure out exactly what she wanted and give it to her.

  The sun went down as they were sitting in the attic, and the slanted light through the west window made the air look so thick with dust that George was surprised they were breathing without effort. When it was nearly dark, he asked, “So how’s your ma?”

  “She’s gone.” Rachel’s shoulders curled away from the wall as she spoke. “I haven’t seen her for more than two months.” In fact, it had been a year and a half; George was the first person she’d told.

  George felt a surge of relief at hearing this, though he knew only a brute could be happy about a girl losing her mother. He moved from the leather trunk and sat beside her on the floor. “So you’ve been living alone on that boat for two months.”

  “It’s not a big deal.”

  They sat side by side, leaning against the rough plaster wall as the sun set, as the old dust settled. Rachel sighed and her shoulders sank further, and George imagined her disappearing beneath the floorboards as beneath the surface of a body of water. When she sighed again George negotiated his body between her and the wall so she sat between his legs with her back against his chest. He wrapped his arms and legs around her in a sitting position, so she was contained, buoyed within his limbs. He bent his head so it touched hers, and for hours in the dark he breathed through her hair. Rachel seemed to fall asleep and awaken intermittently throughout the night, stiffening against his arms and legs, then relaxing into them. When either of George’s legs fell asleep, he moved as slightly as possible to revive it. He listened for owls, but didn’t hear any, and in those hours he decided that from here forward he was all on his own with this girl. There was no manual of protocol that would explain or condone this, no council of elders who could grant approval due to exceptional circumstances. All night Rachel’s hands gripped George’s arms, but at the first strains of light she stood, disentangling herself from him. She grabbed the doorknob as though making sure she wasn’t trapped. She paused and said, “I’ll bring my ma’s chain saw and we can cut down the goddamn trees.”

  “Fine. I can use the firewood.” George loved the maples, oaks, and hickories northwest of his house; he loved the woods, blossoming now with wild geranium, but Rachel could have it for her garden. She could burn down his house or level it if she wanted. George would gladly live with her in a wigwam if she’d have him. Whatever he’d once felt for his first wife was but a shimmer of what he felt for this person. His long marriage had been one stalk of desire that gradually sagged and then broke beneath the weight and decay of passing seasons. Now he felt acre after acre of this thrilling new crop sprout in a field so vast he couldn’t imagine its edges. He already needed Rachel the way he needed the weather, but he didn’t get up and follow and didn’t say anything to try to stop her from leaving, didn’t even mention he had a chain saw she could use.

  George went downstairs and made coffee and sat at his round kitchen table while the sun rose. He was unable to focus on any of the jobs that lay before him, and when he heard the buzz of a two-stroke engine outside, the sound of Rachel felling the first small trees, he knew he’d been granted another reprieve. When Mike showed up for work, George sent him to Cassopolis for tractor parts, while he himself stayed and notched trees for Rachel and yanked stumps with the Ford backhoe. When Rachel ran out of chain saw gas, George mixed her more. By sunset, both of them were sweating and exhausted, and they lay together in one of the furrows. Rachel wiggled out of her clothes beside him as though she had never meant to wear clothes at all, but George felt nervous undressing out-of-doors. Thoughts of neighbors and cars passing on the road disappeared, however, when Rachel grabbed him and handled him as though he were a chain saw to be employed, or trees to be felled, some kind of wild land to be tamed. He took his flannel shirt off over his head, though he’d never in his life taken off a button-up shirt without first unbuttoning it. The smell of her sweat woke him again from something he hadn’t known was sleep, but instead of grabbing her as he’d done in the barn, he first buried his face in every part of her. Though Rachel’s first choking screams of pleasure were so violent that crows returned calls from the trees, her curses gradually softened so that she was swearing in a tone almost tender. When George let himself go, it was with such force that he feared he’d passed his guts into the girl. He knew he’d never be able to put himself back together the same way again.

  “Marry me,” he said, looking into her dirt-streaked face. Lying on the ground with his chin perched in his hand, he felt as though he were twenty-two again, twenty-two and stupid, happy and afraid. But when he’d actually been twenty-two, nothing had been as rich as this.

  He watched her adjust her body in the dirt. She pulled away from him, tipped her head back to rest it against a mound. Her rifle lay within her grasp, and she looked at him with no expression, through close-set, bloodshot eyes. She might reach out to strangle him as easily as to caress him. Her body in twilight was almost too much to look upon; her hipbone, her strange out-poking navel, her breast, the side of her throat were of some other world, and even in that world, where beauty was but the crudest version of whatever power Rachel possessed, there were no words for the fierce line of her jaw or the wing of her cheekbone. He didn’t want to think of what they’d just had together as sex. The phrase making love seemed like nothing.

  “Will you please marry me?” he said.

  “Why the hell would I marry you?”

  “I’ll give you everything I have.”

  “Your land?”

  George was scared but went on. “If you marry me, it’s half yours.”

  “Milton says you’re going to sell your land.”

  “I’m not planning on selling.”

  “How much land have you got?”

  “Almost nine hundred acres, including land I bought from the Parkses.” His heart was pounding down in his stomach and his groin, everywhere his guts used to be. “Eight hundred eighty acres.”

  “So I’ll have four hundred forty acres.”

  “We both own all of it until I die, then it’s all yours.”

  “Fine. When can we get married?” Rachel brushed ants off her shoulder and put her jeans beneath her as a pillow, fidgeting in an effort to stay calm. She had never considered marriage. Marriage was as foreign to her as Milton’s god. For the Potawatomi Corn Girl, getting married meant going away and losing everything; for Rachel, marriage would mean staying and getting what she’d always wanted. The thought of owning the land made her dizzy and a little sleepy, as though she had spent a long day hunting and now needed to rest before cooking and eating her kill.

  “How old are you?” George asked.

  “Fifteen.”

  “Holy mother of Christ.” George looked up at the darkening sky. “Strike me dead, God, if that’s what you want. Strike me dead now!”

  Rachel studied a deep L-shaped scar on his shoulder, then looked down his long, pale body, to his tender-looking feet. She wondered how a man with such feet had survived here. All men apparently felt free to call on Milton’s god whenever it suited them, as if He were up there with nothing better to do than serve, punish, or reward them. Rachel wanted too much in this world to sit around and wait for God to give it to her, and she wasn’t about to risk His taking it away.

  She dug at the dirt beneath her, mounding more of it up under her head. In the year and a
half she’d been alone, she had yearned for this property, but she hadn’t considered what she’d do if it were really hers. She supposed she’d want bees to make honey, and Jonathan apple trees, and even more blackcap raspberries. She’d grow tall grass near the river for lightning bugs. She wondered if all those textures of soil—silty muck, sand, blue clay, and dark woods loam—would feel different when she owned them. She considered the low growth beneath wide-spreading oaks on the ridge and the beds of soft needles beneath white pines at the sandy place and the sponginess of heavily rooted soil near the water’s edge where ground birds were reluctant to leave nests of speckled eggs. And as for this garden, she would grow more peppers and cucumbers than Milton Taylor. A dozen times a day all summer, she’d bite into ripe tomatoes and let the juice run down her face. She’d produce hundreds of squashes of every color and shape, and there’d be no end of sweetness in her muskmelons and watermelons.

  She sank the fingers of her left hand into the torn-up soil of her new Indian garden, which she already loved more deeply than she imagined she would ever love a person, even David Retakker. She rubbed her hip and belly with a handful of cool black dirt. She would lie on Johnny’s grave and see how it felt to own his dead body. She wondered how long it took this soil to devour a person completely.

  George Harland lay beside her in the dirt, ecstatic and afraid, thinking about how bad a person he had become. He thought he now understood every crooked, immoral man who wanted something he shouldn’t have, wanted it badly enough that he’d sell his soul to get it. He sympathized with Johnny, who once went to jail for stabbing a man in a fight over that man’s wife. He understood the robbers of banks and liquor stores who needed money for drugs; maybe there was even sense in the cold killing of civilians in times of war if the killing moved the soldiers toward their desired ends. As George lay beside Rachel, the world seemed to him vaster and more complicated than before, and he finally understood the gravity of what his grandfather Harold had tried to tell him all those years ago, that once you had forsaken the simple rules about right and wrong and set out on your own, the universe was a humbling place. In the future as in the past, this farm should be handed along responsibly from one generation to the next, but George would give it away as a love token. His grandmother sharing her land with his grandfather seemed a sober business, but George sharing it with Rachel was like rollicking drunkenness.