Spencerville (3 page)

The moment was not lost on Cliff Baxter, and, after an initial look of panic, he forced a stupid grin.

Annie poured him juice and coffee, then fried his eggs with potatoes and bacon, and put the toast in. She served him his breakfast, and he said, "Sit down."

She sat across from him.

He smiled as he ate and said, "Lose your appetite?"

"I ate."

He spoke as he chewed. "I'm gonna leave the guns and the ammo and everything down there. More coffee."

She stood and poured him more coffee.

He continued, "Because I don't think you got it in you to kill me."

"If I did, I could buy a gun anywhere."

"Yeah, true. But you can keep buyin' guns and stealin' guns and borrowin' guns, and it don't matter. I'm not afraid of you, darlin'."

She knew he was trying to reclaim his manhood after the pants wetting. She let him do what he had to do so he'd just get out of the house.

He continued, "I went for my gun, didn't I? I didn't have a chance in hell, but I went for it."

"Yes." True, she thought, he was more stupid than she'd imagined. An intelligent man knew he had at least a fifty-fifty chance of talking his wife out of shooting him, and less than a million-to-one chance of drawing against a pointed and cocked shotgun. But Cliff Baxter was short on brains and long on ego. One day, she hoped, that would get him killed.

He said, "You're wonderin' if I'd of killed you."

"I don't really care."

"What do you mean, you don't care? Of course you care. You got kids. You got family." He smiled. "You got me." He patted her hand across the table. "Hey, I knew you wasn't gonna kill me. You know why? 'Cause you love me."

Annie took a breath and fought down a scream. He tapped his fork on her nose and continued, "You see, you're still jealous. Now, that means you still love me. Right?"

Annie was emotionally drained, exhausted, and her shoulder throbbed. She had nothing left in her except the presence of mind to say what he wanted to hear. She said, "Yes."

He smiled. "But you hate me, too. Now, I'm gonna tell you something — there's a thin line between love and hate."

She nodded, as though this were some new revelation to her. Cliff was always mouthing idiotic cliches and aphorisms, as if he'd just made them up, and it never occurred to him that these were not original insights into the human mind.

"Remember that next time you're pissed off at me." She smiled, and he realized he'd used a bad choice of words. She said, "I'm going to the cleaners this morning. Do you have anything to go?"

He leaned toward her and said, "You watch yourself."

"Yes, sir."

"And cut the sir shit."

"Sorry."

He mopped up his yolks with his toast and said, "You call old Willie to fix up the ceiling."

"Yes."

He sat back and looked at her. "You know, I break my ass to give you things most people in this town ain't got. Now, what do you want me to do? Retire, hang around the house, pinch pennies, and help you with the chores all day?"

"No."

"I'm bustin' my hump, doin' a job for this town, and you think I'm out there floggin' my Johnson all over the county."

She nodded in the appropriate places during the familiar lecture, and shook her head when it was called for.

Cliff stood, strapped on his pistol belt, and came around the table. He hugged her around the shoulders, and she winced in pain. He kissed her on the head and said, "We're gonna forget this. You tidy up a little more here and call Willie. I'll be home about six. I feel like steak tonight. Check the beer in the fridge. Feed the dogs." He added, "Wash my uniform."

He went to the back door, and, on his way out, said, "And don't you ever call me at work again unless somebody's dyin'." He left.

Annie stared across the kitchen at nothing in particular. Maybe, she thought, if she had let him get his gun out of his holster, she would have blown his head off. But maybe not, and maybe he would have shot her, which was okay, too. Maybe they'd hang him.

The only thing she knew for certain was that Cliff forgot nothing and forgave nothing. She'd literally scared the pee out of him, and there'd be hell to pay. Not that she'd notice much difference.

She stood and was surprised to find her legs were weak and there was a queasy feeling in her stomach. She went to the sink and opened the window. The sun was coming up, and a few storm clouds sailed away toward the east. Birds sang in the yard, and the hungry dogs were trying to get her attention with short, polite barks.

Life, she thought, could be lovely. No, she said to herself, life was lovely. Life was beautiful. Cliff Baxter couldn't make the sun stop rising or the birds stop singing, and he did not, could not, control her mind or her spirit. She hated him for dragging her down to his level, for making her contemplate murder or suicide.

She thought again of Keith Landry. In her mind, Cliff Baxter was always the black knight, and Keith Landry was the white knight. This image worked as long as Keith was a disembodied ideal. Her worst nightmare would be to discover that Keith Landry in person was not the Keith Landry she'd created out of short and infrequent letters and long-ago memories.

The returned letter, as well as the dream about Cliff, had been the catalyst for what just happened, she realized. She'd snapped. But now she felt better, and she promised herself that if Keith was alive, she'd find the means and the courage to see him, to speak to him, to see how much of him was her fantasy and how much of him was real.

The drone of some sort of machinery began to register in Keith Landry's mind, and he opened his eyes. A breeze billowed the white lace curtains, and sunlight seeped into the gray dawn.

He could smell the rain-washed soil, the country air, a field of alfalfa somewhere. He lay awhile, his eyes darting around the room, his mind focusing. He'd had this recurring dream of waking up in his old room so often that actually waking up in his old room was eerie.

He sat up, stretched, and yawned. "Day four, life two, morning. Roll 'em." He jumped out of bed and made his way toward the bathroom down the hall.

Showered and dressed in khaki slacks and T-shirt, he examined the contents of the refrigerator. Whole milk, white bread, butter, bacon, and eggs. He hadn't eaten any of those things in years, but said, "Why not?" He made himself a big, artery-clogging breakfast. It tasted terrific. It tasted like home.

He walked out the back door and stood in the gravel drive. The air was cool and damp, and a ground mist lay over the fields. He walked around the farmyard. The barn was in bad repair, he saw, and, as he explored what had once been a substantial farm, he noticed the debris of a past way of life: a rusted ax buried in a chopping block, the collapsed corncrib, the tilting silo, the ruined springhouse and chicken coop, the broken fences of the paddock and pigpen, the equipment shed filled with old hand tools — these all remained, unrecycled, uncollected, unwanted, contributing to the rural blight.

The kitchen garden and grape arbor, he noticed, were overgrown with vines and weeds, and he saw now that the house itself needed painting.

The nostalgia he'd been experiencing on the way here was at odds with the reality before him. The family farms of his boyhood were not so picturesque now, and the families who once worked them were, he knew from past visits, becoming fewer.

The young people went to the cities to find work, as his brother and sister had done, and the older people increasingly went south to escape the harsh winters, as his parents had done. Much of the surrounding land had been sold or contracted to big agribusinesses, and the remaining family holdings were as hard-pressed today as they had been when he was growing up. The difference now was not in the economics; it was in the will of the farmer to hang in there despite the bad odds. On the ride here, he'd thought about trying to farm, but now that he was here, he had second thoughts.

He found himself in the front of the farmhouse, and he focused on the front porch, remembering summer nights, rocking chairs and porch swings, lemonade, radios, family, and friends. He had a sudden urge to call his parents and his brother and sister and tell them he was home and suggest a reunion on the farm. But he thought he ought to wait until he got himself mentally settled, until he understood his mood and his motivations more clearly.

Keith got into his car and drove out onto the dusty farm road.

The four hundred acres of the Landry farm had been contracted out to the Muller family down the road, and his parents received a check every spring. Most of the Landry acres were in corn, according to his father, but the Muller family had put a hundred acres into soybean production to supply a nearby processing plant built by a Japanese company. The plant employed a good number of people, Keith knew, and bought a lot of soybeans. Nevertheless, xenophobia ran high and hot in Spencer County, and Keith was certain that the Japanese were as unwelcome as the Mexican migrants who showed up every summer. It was odd, Keith thought, perhaps portentous, that this rural county, deep in the heartland, had been discovered by Japanese, Mexicans, and more recently by people from India and Pakistan, many of whom were physicians at the county hospital.

The locals weren't happy about any of this, but the locals had no one to blame but themselves, Keith thought. The county's population was falling, the best and the brightest left, and many of the kids he'd seen on his visits, the ones who had stayed, looked aimless and unmotivated, unwilling to do farm work and unfit to do skilled labor. Keith drove through the countryside. The roads were good but not great, and nearly all of them were laid out in a perfect grid from north to south, east to west, with few natural terrain features to inhibit the early surveyors, and, from the air, the northwestern counties looked like a sheet of graph paper, with the muddy Maumee River a wavy line of brownish ink meandering from the southwest into the big blue splotch of Lake Erie.

Keith drove until noon, crisscrossing the county, noting some abandoned farmhouses where people he once knew had lived, rusted railroad tracks, a few diminished villages, a defunct farm equipment dealership, boarded-up rural schools and grange houses, and the sense of emptiness.

There were a number of historical markers on the sides of the roads, and Keith recalled that Spencer County had been the site of some battles during the French and Indian Wars before the American Revolution, before his ancestors had arrived, and he had always marveled at the thought of a handful of Englishmen and Frenchmen navigating through the dark, primeval forests and swamps, surrounded by Indians, trying to kill one another so far from home. Surely, he'd thought as a schoolboy, those wars were the height of idiocy, but he hadn't been to Vietnam yet.

The territory became British, the Revolution had barely touched the inhabitants, and the growing population had incorporated as Spencer County in 1838. The Mexican War of 1846 had taken a fair number of militiamen, most of whom died of disease in Mexico, and the Civil War had nearly decimated the population of young men. The county recovered, grew and prospered, and reached its zenith around World War I. But after that war and the next world war, with their aftermaths of rapid change, a decay and decline had set in, imperceptible when he was young, but now obvious to him. He wondered again if he intended to live here, or had he come back only to finish up some old business?

At a crossroads outside the town, he pulled into a self-service gas station. It was a discount place with a brand of fuel he didn't recognize, and attached to it was a convenience store, an interesting marketing concept, he thought: high-priced, brand-name junk food, and cheap off-brand gasoline of suspicious quality. He figured the Saab, like himself, should get used to a different diet, so he got out and pumped.

The attendant, a man about ten years younger than Keith, ambled over.

The man eyed the car awhile as Keith pumped, then walked around the Saab and peered inside. He asked Keith, "What's this thing?"

"A car."

The attendant laughed and slapped his thigh. "Hell, I know that. What kinda car?"

"A Saab 900. Swedish."

"Say what?"

"Made in Sweden."

"No kiddin'?"

Keith replaced the gas cap and stuck the nozzle back in the pump.

The attendant read the license plate. "District of Columbia — The Nation's Capital. That where you from?"

"Yup."

"You a G-man? Tax collector? We just shot the last tax guy." He laughed.

Keith smiled. "Just a private citizen."

"Yeah? Passin' through?"

"Might stay awhile." He handed the man a twenty.

The attendant took his time making change and asked, "Stayin' where?"

"I've got family here."

"You from around here?"

"Long time ago. Landry."

"Oh, hell, yeah. Which one are you?"

"Keith Landry. My folks are George and Alma. Had the farm down by Overton."

"Sure. They retired now, right?"

"Florida."

The man stuck out his hand. "Bob Aries. My folks owned the old Texaco station in town."

"Right. Still twenty-two cents a gallon?"

Bob Aries laughed. "No, they's closed up now. No stations left in town. Property taxes too high, rents too high, big oil companies got you by the short hairs. I spot-buy from anybody who got to dump it cheap."

"What did I buy today?"

"Oh, you got lucky. About half Mobil in there, some Shell, a little Texaco."

"No corn squeezin's?"

Aries laughed again. "Little of that, too. Hey, it's a livin'."

"You sell beer?"

"Sure do."

Aries followed Keith into the convenience store and introduced him to a stern-looking woman behind the counter. "This here's my wife, Mary. This is Keith Landry, folks used to farm down by Overton." The woman nodded.

Keith went to the refrigerator case and saw two imported beers, Heineken and Corona, but not wanting to seem like a total alien to Mr. Aries, he chose a six-pack of Coors and a six-pack of Rolling Rock, both in cans. He paid Mary for the beer as Bob Aries made small talk, then Aries followed him out. Aries asked, "You lookin' for work?"

"Maybe."

"Real tight here. You still got the farm?"

"Yes, but the land's contracted."

"Good. Take the money and run. Farmin's the kind of job you got to save up for."

"That bad?"

"What do you got? Four hundred acres? That's breakeven. The guys with four thousand acres, mixed crops, and livestock is doin' okay. Seen one guy drivin' a Lincoln. He's tight with the Japs and the grain dealers in Maumee. Where you stay in'?"

"The farmhouse."

"Yeah? The missus from around here?"

Keith replied, "I'm here alone."

Aries, realizing his friendly chatter was on the verge of being nosy, said, "Well, I wish you luck."

"Thanks." Keith threw the beer in the passenger seat and got into the car.

Aries said, "Hey, welcome home."

"Thanks." Keith pulled back onto the two-lane road. He could see the south end of Spencerville, a row of warehouses and light industry where the old Wabash and Erie tracks came through, bordered by cornfields; the place where town utilities and taxes ended and rural life began.

Keith circled the town, not wanting to go into it yet, though he didn't know why. Maybe it was the idea of cruising up Main Street in the weird car, and maybe seeing people he knew and them seeing him, and he wasn't prepared for that.

He headed out toward St. James Church.

As he drove, Keith sort of blocked out the mobile homes, the aluminum sheds, and the abandoned vehicles. The countryside was still spectacular, with broad vistas of crops and fallow fields that ran to the horizons where ancient tree lines still divided the old surveys. Creeks and streams, sparkling clean, meandered among weeping willows and coursed beneath small trestle bridges.

The land had once lain beneath a prehistoric sea that had receded, and when Keith's ancestors arrived, most of what became northwestern Ohio had been swamp and forest. In a relatively short period of time, working with only hand tools and oxen, the swamp had been drained, the trees felled, houses built, the land contoured for farming, then planted with grains and vegetables. The results had been spectacular: An incredible bounty had sprung from the earth as if the soil had been waiting for ten million years to sprout rye and barley, wheat and oats, carrots and cabbages, and nearly anything that the first pioneers stuck in the ground.

After the Civil War, whatever money was to be made in farming was made in wheat, then came corn, easier, heartier, and now Keith saw more and more soy, the miracle bean, protein-rich for an exploding world population.

Spencer County, like it or not, was connected to the world now, and its future was in the balance. Keith could see two pictures in his mind: one, a rebirth of rural life brought about by city and suburban people looking for a safer and gentler existence; the other picture was of a county that was little more than a mega-plantation, owned and operated by absentee investors for the purpose of planting the money crop of the moment. Keith could see fields and farms where trees and hedgerows had been pulled up to make room for the gargantuan harvesters. As he reflected on all this, it struck him that perhaps the whole nation was out of balance, that if you got on the wrong train, none of the stops down the line could be the one you wanted.

Keith pulled onto the gravel shoulder of the road and got out.

The cemetery lay on a hill of about an acre, shaded by old elms and surrounded by fields of corn. About fifty yards away sat St. James, the white clapboard church that he'd attended as a boy, and to the right of the church sat the small parsonage where Pastor and Mrs. Wilkes had lived, or perhaps still lived.

Keith went into the cemetery and walked among the short tombstones, many of them worn away by weather and covered with lichen.

He found his maternal and paternal grandparents, and their parents, and their sons and daughters, and so on, buried in an interesting chronological order that you had to know about, the oldest graves on the highest part of the rise, then the next oldest graves descending in concentric circles until you reached the edges of the cornfield; the oldest Landry grave went back to 1849, and the oldest Hoffmann grave, his German ancestors, went back to 1841. There were no large groupings of dates as a result of any of the earlier wars, because the bodies weren't shipped home in those days. But Korea and Vietnam were well represented, and Keith found his uncle's grave and stood beside it a moment, then moved on to the graves of the men killed in Vietnam. There were ten of them, a large number for a single small cemetery in a small county. Keith knew all of them, some casually, some well, and he could picture a face with each name. He thought he might experience some sort of survivor's guilt, standing here among his old classmates, but he hadn't experienced that at the Wall in Washington, and he didn't experience it now. What he felt, he supposed, was an unresolved anger at the waste. On a personal level, he had this thought, which had recurred with more frequency in the last few weeks: that despite all his success and accomplishments, his life would have been better if the war hadn't happened.

He sat beneath a willow tree, among the graves between the base of the hill and the cornfield, and chewed on a piece of grass. The sun was high overhead, the ground was still damp and cool from the storm. Chicken hawks circled close by, and barn swallows flew in and out of the church steeple. A feeling of peace came over him such as he hadn't known in many years; the quiet and solitude of home had already worked its way into his bones. He lay back and stared at the pale sky through the elm leaves. "Right. If I hadn't gone to war, Annie and I would have gotten married... who knows?" This cemetery, he thought, was as good a place as any to begin the journey back.