Bleeding Kansas (49 page)

“That's such a crock,” Lara cried, reading the paper at breakfast Saturday morning. “Gina's fire was a million miles from the house, which the stupid paper would know if they could get outside of Lawrence and actually look at the land. Anyway, Junior set that fire, him and Eddie!”

“
He
and Eddie,” Susan corrected.

“Hank Drysdale told me the district attorney is trying to work out how to charge Junior,” Jim put in. “Junior's persuaded Eddie to take the blame, and of course that isn't right.”

“But what about Gina and her friends? They saw Junior setting the fire, and so did Robbie and me.”

“Let's not go overboard until we see what the DA decides, okay, Lulu? I'm not crazy about the idea of you getting up in court to testify against Junior unless there's no other choice. Arnie feels enough ill will toward us without you adding to his grievances. Besides, Junior is an aggressive guy, with the muscle to back it up. You and he are going to be neighbors for a long time, unless one or the other of you gives up on the land.”

Jim had a black eye and a cracked rib from fighting Junior Wednesday night. By the time he and Peter Ropes, with help from Turk and Clem Burton, had battled Junior away from the door, it was burning so fiercely that Jim couldn't get in the kitchen. He still felt a kind of shame for not helping Susan rescue Lara. By the time Lara found him, after Susan lowered her to the grass Wednesday night, he was working feverishly with the fire brigade, who were trying to get enough of the blaze under control to get into the house. When he saw his daughter, he abandoned the fire brigade and got to the far side of the house just in time to catch his wife as she slipped down her makeshift rope.

He and Susan spent the remainder of Wednesday at the hospital, the two of them brooding over Lara, not sleeping, not quite believing the doctors, who said she'd made it through the inferno without major injury. When they brought her home, on Thursday, she spent the day in his and Susan's bed. Her mother wouldn't leave her side, and Jim had to fight back a panicky fear that this was the prelude to another, larger collapse for his wife, worse this time because she'd take their daughter with her.

On Friday, though, Lara was ready to get up again. She was still sub-dued, picking at her food. She still clung to her mother, as if afraid, like Jim, that with the crisis past, Susan would start to retreat from her again.

Late in the afternoon, Lara finally decided to tell her parents the whole story of her Halloween. “It was so horrible, Dad, all of it. But the worst was, all that stuff at the church. It was, oh, it was disgusting. You never heard anything like it. Pastor Nabo went on and on in this totally gross way about sex and women being agents of the devil! He was touching me, he was saying
I
had the devil in me, that
I
had ruined Robbie's life. I should never have gone, I should have told you about it, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.”

Both parents rushed to comfort her. Jim secretly thought it was very nearly worth all the traumas of Halloween night if rescuing Lara had brought Susan back to this world. He stepped back and let his wife have the major share of reassuring their child.

He remembered Lara's comment a month or so ago about the prince coming to kiss Susan and wake her up. Maybe he'd made a mistake, all these weeks since Chip's death, in trying to console his wife. Instead of trying to comfort her, should he have tried to make her feel needed or even heroic?

Lara returned to the paper and started reading it aloud to her parents:

“That's true.” Lara looked up from the paper. “At the—the thing they were doing to me, Arnie and Pastor Nabo and them—Elaine said she saw Myra set the fire. She says Myra lit a fuse right up against the bunkhouse and waited for it to go up in flames.”

“Lit a fuse? That could mean anything, you know that, Lara. Anyway, if Elaine watched her set the fire, why didn't she say something at the time?”

“Maybe she did and no one listened to her then any more than they do today,” Lara suggested.

“Maybe she was high,” Susan said. “They used a lot of drugs out there. She could have thought she was saying something but couldn't get the words out.”

“Maybe she was high and imagined the whole thing,” Jim said. “No, Lulu, don't get wound up about this. If Myra set the bunkhouse on fire, we'll never prove it. It's Elaine Logan's word against hers, assuming Elaine even survives.”

“It doesn't say how Elaine is,” Lara said. “Is she—will she—”

“We don't know, baby,” Jim answered. “She was in pretty bad shape by the time the fire brigade could get to her. Rachel Carmody has organized a fund to take care of her hospital bills if Medicaid doesn't cover them all.”

“And what's Gina going to do?” Lara asked. “Is she going back to New York?”

“I think Gina is living with Autumn Minsky right now,” Jim said, his color heightened. “That's what Curly says, and he usually knows, doesn't he? What about Robbie, Lulu? Is he still at Greynards'?”

Lara nodded, her own face flushed. She and Robbie—what would she say to him when they met at school on Monday? They could never go back to the barn. Their private idyll had been made so public, so ugly, she didn't think she could ever let a boy get close enough to her again to touch her.

“It will pass, Lulu, darling, it will pass,” Susan said. “You're too lovable not to find love again.”

 

“I
'M LEAVING FOR
New York now,” Gina told Jim a few weeks later. “I suppose you'll be glad to see the last of me.”

She had sat in her battered Escort, watching the Grellier house from the side of the barren cornfield until she saw Jim go into the barn. She crossed the field, in her impractical red suede boots, lugging a heavy box, and confronted him as he started to sharpen a coulter blade.

He put the blade down. “What will you do?”

“My old job. I worked for a PR company that supports nonprofits. It's where I met my husband, my ex. He heads a foundation that we did work for. Someone quit, so they can use another hand on the telephone. I came out here hoping to make big changes in my life, but I feel as though I'm going back to where I started.”

“Maybe you are,” Jim said, “but that doesn't mean you can't go in a different direction. It's like the harvest, you know, life is, I mean. You start in the same place every year—seeds, fertilizer, soil—but every year is different.” He paused, sheepish at his pompous words. “What about your book, the story you wanted to write about Elaine and her dead lover?”

“I may still do that.
Hatred in the Heartland,
I'll call it, or something like that. How the hatreds of the seventies still obsess people and make them do unbelievable acts of violence. There's poor old Elaine, back at New Haven Manor, where she's going to be on oxygen for the rest of her life because of Junior Schapen. And what happens to him? Nothing at all. He's still at Tonganoxie, playing football, while Arnie and Myra try to blame Eddie Burton for burning down Uncle John's house.”

“I wouldn't say nothing at all happened to Junior,” Jim said. “Clem Burton took a potshot at him and got him in the ass at last Saturday's game.”

“He did? Really?” Gina laughed, exposing the crooked lower tooth that still seemed endearing to Jim. “What will happen to Clem?”

“I don't know. My older brother is handling his defense. Junior wasn't badly hurt, so they may work out some kind of lawyer's agreement.” He didn't add that the injury had been a boon to Junior's career: Curly had brought home the news that the Cowboys and the Eagles were both recruiting him, now that they'd seen him on national television.

Gina stopped laughing and said, with an abrupt change of mood, “People think New York or other big cities are violent places, but New York doesn't have anything like the concentrated venom I've seen up close here in Kansas.”

“Do you think so?” Jim said. “Maybe it's because I know all these people that I see it differently. You say you want to connect this time to the seventies, but you're ignoring thirty-five years in between where we all got along well enough.”

“Arnie and Myra are obsessed with how liberals took over Douglas County in 1970,” Gina argued. “They kept saying I represented the same threat to law and order as the hippies.”

“You do like to stir people up.” Jim tried to make it sound like a joke, but his voice had an edge.

Gina shut her eyes as if trying not to see something painful. “I guess I've done a lot of damage, too. If I hadn't come down here, Elaine would still be cruising the bars, and Etienne would still be alive.”

Jim leaned against the milling machine. “Don't imagine yourself bigger or more important in the world than you are, Gina. Maybe Chip would be alive, but you know my wife, you know she needs a big cause to wrap her heart around—she might have found the anti-war people without you. If she had, Chip might have reacted the same way.

“Elaine—I don't know. Maybe you did injure her. Indirectly, so to speak, by stirring her up with all your Wiccan nonsense and getting her out here, remembering Dante and the Schapens and the bunkhouse fire. But you weren't responsible for the Schapens and their grandiose ideas about their calf and the Temple in Jerusalem and Jesus. Arnie and Myra won't learn anything from this except to blame their neighbors more than ever for their troubles, but maybe you can take something away with you. Something along the lines that even a woman like Elaine Logan is human, not a machine you switch on and off when you feel like it.”

She bit her lip. “Or you? Is that what you're trying to imply?”

“Maybe. But I made my own choices, too.” Jim spoke with difficulty. “I let loneliness and grief and fear take over my head. Also, I liked your coffee.”

She laughed but said seriously, “You're a good person, Jim Grellier. I'm not used to meeting good people. Not that I hang around with bad ones, but there's a difference between being ordinary and being actively good.”

He was embarrassed by her speech and turned away, saying quickly, “What's in the box?”

“Those are your great-great-grandmother's diaries. Lara had hidden them in the house, you know. The tin trunk they were in was in one of the few rooms to survive the fire. I brought some of the Venetian fireplace tiles, too. I thought Susan would want them, but then I thought I should check with you first.”