Cold Black Earth Page 2

  She walked the perimeter of the acre of grass and trees surrounding the house. This had been all the world she had needed when she was small, exploring this vast realm, obeying strict instructions not to go near the road. Some trees had grown and some had gone; the patch of ground she had been given for a vegetable garden when she was ten was just a change in the texture of the grass now. Standing by the road at the head of the drive, Rachel looked at the handsome frame house Swan Lindstrom had built and his descendants had expanded, now the seat of an established western Illinois corn and beans operation, a family farm hanging on in the age of agribusiness. Rachel was home, and her heart was desolate. She had come halfway around the world again, this time to find comfort in the familiar, and there was no comfort here.

  She walked back up the drive and made for the far corner of the lot. Shielded from the house by the barn, Rachel stepped to the fence and managed to get herself up and over without serious damage to her jeans. Pleased she could still handle a barbed wire fence, she set out across a field full of corn stubble toward the trees lining the creek.

  The creek had carved a meandering hollow across the land. It was the northern limit of Lindstrom land and prized outlaw country for farm kids. Matt and his friends had tried to dam the stream and built a fort of fallen limbs on its bank. In the tangle of brush beneath the trees were a few places clear and level enough for an adolescent girl to sit and read a book or just poke a stick in the water and brood.

  It was rough going over the field and Rachel almost turned back, but her native stubbornness kicked in. By the time she reached the trees she was sweating. In summer the creek bed was a thicket, but now it lay exposed, fallen branches and dead leaves clogging a meager trickle of water, bare trees clinging precariously to the slopes.

  She made her way along the edge of the gully, looking for the old paths down and not finding them. Finally she managed to descend, slipping on the hard earth, grabbing onto branches. At the bottom she stood on the bank with her hands in her coat pockets, kicking at shards of ice that had formed along the edges in the night. What am I doing here? she thought. Nothing, she decided, and that was good enough for now. She began walking east along the creek, stepping carefully.

  After a hundred feet or so she stopped, looking in vain for something familiar. Wherever her brooding place had been, it was gone now. Trees grew and fell and rotted in twenty years; the land changed. Once as a girl she had decided to see how far she could walk upstream. She had walked for what seemed miles, then climbed up out of the gully and been dismayed to see the back of the Larsons’ house, their closest neighbors.

  I will walk until I get to the bridge where 400 East crosses the creek, Rachel told herself, and then I’ll climb up and walk home by the roads. It would be a circuit of about three miles and a good morning’s workout. She had on her running shoes, and even if she got her feet wet in the creek it wasn’t going to kill her.

  She made a couple of hundred yards without too much trouble. She remembered this part, where the gully widened a little and the trees grew bigger. On a level patch of ground traces of a fire showed that thirty years after she had grilled hot dogs on sticks with Matt and the Larson girls, the spot was still in use.

  The creek bed bent and narrowed and the walking got harder. Rachel was having second thoughts again—a foolish middle-aged woman stumbling along a brush-clogged streambed, searching delusionally for her lost youth. She had to cross and recross the stream, slipping on rocks.

  She stopped at the sound of something scrabbling in the brush, just around the bend ahead. She remembered the coyotes and felt positively foolhardy, with an edge of alarm now. The scrabbling stopped.

  You can at least peek around the bend, she thought. She searched until she found a sturdy stick. Rachel Lindstrom wasn’t going to let a puny coyote or two spoil her morning’s walk.

  When she rounded the bend, it took a moment for what she was seeing to resolve itself into something she could identify. The coyotes were still milling around it, though they had retreated to the far side of the stream; there were half a dozen of them, and only a meal this big could have brought them out in daylight.

  Rachel had seen her share of dead animals and even, to her great regret, a few dead people. There was no particular reason why the sight of a dead animal in the bed of a stream should trigger this slow suffusion of dread.

  Except that this animal had been flayed, brutal reds and violets veining the pale, headless trunk, the stumps where the limbs had been hacked off. Something had stripped the hide from the raw flesh and left the carcass to the scavengers at the bottom of the gully.

  She stood stupefied, trying to make sense of the sight. What animal was this? The answer lay ten feet away on a pile of dead leaves, where the deer’s head, propped back on its antlers, presided obscenely, the eye gazing vacantly upward, truncated veins and the severed backbone visible in the cross section of the neck.

  Rachel’s grip on the stick tightened. Could coyotes do this? Tear the head off a deer?

  A hunter might do it if he intended to take the meat—but who would kill a deer and skin it, only to leave the meat for the coyotes? She scanned the rim of the gully on either side, looking for something that would explain this pointless butchery. She saw nothing but a tangle of brush and trees, cover for coyotes and perhaps larger things. Suddenly she was aware that she was well out of sight and hearing of any friendly being and a long, stumbling run from any kind of help.

  The coyotes were creeping back. Rachel retreated, hastening to put the bend in the gully between her and the slaughtering place. She stumbled, losing her stick, then rose and thrashed through brush. At the first opportunity she charged up the slope, pulling herself up through clinging branches, toward the sunlight.

  At the top she broke out of the trees and stood panting, looking across fields at the Larson place, tranquil in the winter sunlight. A few hundred yards back was the cluster of buildings that were her home, unfamiliar from this angle but marked by the towering oak.

  Rachel cast a look over her shoulder, shuddered and began walking along the grassy border of the field. Hunters, she thought, who’d skinned the deer on the spot and went to fetch a truck or a tractor to haul the carcass home.

  Leaving the meat unprotected from coyotes? It made no sense. Or perhaps they intended the meat for the coyotes? To keep them fed and distracted from domestic animals? That didn’t seem very likely. If you didn’t want coyotes to eat your animals, you shot a few pour encourager les autres and kept the .223 handy.

  Rachel made tracks, resisting the thought that came trailing after that one: Some people hunted just because they liked to kill things.

  When Rachel came into the kitchen, it took her a moment to recognize the man sitting at the table as her nephew Billy. He was a different person from the eleven-year-old she’d last seen: Testosterone had lengthened and roughened his features and furred his upper lip and chin. He had his mother’s dark good looks, but hadn’t taken especial care of them. Long stringy hair hooked over an ear with a ring through it, and a wary look came up at her from under dark brows as he slouched at his place in an oversized white T-shirt.

  This one fancies himself a bad boy, Rachel thought. “Hello, Billy,” she said.

  “Hey, Aunt Rachel.” He smiled, but he didn’t knock over any chairs leaping up to embrace her. His body language said he might respond positively if she cared to cross the kitchen, but that was about it. Rachel contented herself with pulling out a chair opposite him. The smile had helped; if this was a bad boy there would be no shortage of girls anxious to reform him.

  “Out late last night?”

  Around a mouthful of Cheerios he said, “Mmm. Takin’ the back roads home from Peoria. Dodgin’ state troopers.”

  She decided it was best not to ask for details. “Visiting your sister?”

  That was funny, apparently; Billy nearly choked on the Cheerios and shook his head. “Nah, Emma doesn’t approve of me anymore. Just listening
to a band. In a bar down there.”

  As far as Rachel knew, they hadn’t lowered the drinking age to nineteen in Illinois, but she had a feeling that wouldn’t deter Billy. She failed to find a follow-up and felt the conversation screeching to a halt.

  Billy looked up and said, “You haven’t changed.”

  “That’s nice of you.”

  He shrugged. “Just callin’ it like I see it. You quit the State Department, huh?”

  Rachel nodded. “It hasn’t been much fun the past few years.”

  “Saw a lot of shit over there in Iraq, huh?”

  “A lot of shit,” she said, surprising herself. “Mostly I just got worn out.”

  Billy shoved the bowl away. “Weren’t you married?”

  “I was. The divorce just went through last week. I said good-bye to my ex-husband in Beirut, flew to Washington via Paris, had a very unpleasant couple of days there talking to my former bosses, then flew to Chicago yesterday.”

  The bad boy was giving her a surprisingly thoughtful look. “Well, after all those places I got a feeling you’re gonna find it a little quiet around here.”

  Rachel had to smile. “That’s what I’m hoping,” she said.

  Matt brought home groceries and news. “They had one get loose out at the prison yesterday. There’s sheriffs’ cars all over the roads.”

  Rachel pulled frozen dinners out of the bags, looking for food. “Anybody dangerous?”

  “They’re not saying who on the radio. I know they got some tough characters locked up over there.”

  “I thought it was just a medium-security facility.” The prison had been built in the eighties, the town catching a break as the plants closed, getting in on a growth industry.

  “What, you think that means everybody in there’s harmless? Plus, they got the psychiatric unit over there, with all the crazies.”

  Her eyes met Matt’s. “You don’t think that’s who we saw on the road last night, do you?”

  “Well, I did call the sheriff’s office to report it. But I’d be surprised. We’re eighteen miles from the prison, and I don’t think he covered that on foot. And if he caught a ride, stole a car or whatever, then he’s in Chicago or St. Louis by now. He’s not going to hang around here. I think that was just somebody fooling around. One of the Collinses stumbling home from the tavern ’cause he lost his car keys. It’s been known to happen.”

  “All right,” Rachel said. “I won’t worry about it.”

  “They’ll grab him in a day or two. They never get too far. A few years ago two of them made a break for it and got as far as the rail yards. They found them in a box car, hungry and ready to give up. Billy around?”

  “Some friend came by and they went off together.”

  Matt shot her a look, a handful of TV dinners poised to go into the freezer. “Dammit, he was gonna help me fix that auger. I bet he ran off just to get out of it.”

  “Maybe he forgot.”

  “He didn’t forget. It’s a constant fight, trying to get him to pull his weight around here.” He jammed the dinners deep into the freezer and slammed the door.

  “Seems to me I remember you and Dad tussling over work a few times.”

  “Not like with this kid. I keep telling him, you’re tired of farm life, that’s fine. Get your ass back down to Macomb and finish college, go join the Marines, whatever you want to do. But as long as you’re living off me, you’ll do your share of the work around here. And I have to fight him about it, every day.”

  “Maybe he’ll be back in time.” Here I am playing peacemaker, Rachel thought, just like my mother.

  “Don’t hold your breath. I’m going to have to hire somebody again next year. I was hoping Billy would commit to the farm, at least for a couple of years till he figures out what to do with his life, but it’s not happening.” Matt drank a glass of water at the sink, looking out the window. “He took it real bad, Margie killing herself like that. That’s the worst thing about it. That’s what I can’t forgive her for. Killing yourself is about the cruelest thing you can do to your loved ones, especially your kids. I don’t know if that’s what she intended or if she was just too sick to think. But it hurt those kids, that’s for damn sure. Billy especially.”

  The silence went on for a while. Rachel came back from thoughts of cruelties done to her and said, “Can I have the car to go into town? I’ve got some visits to make.”

  “Far as I’m concerned.”

  “I thought I’d start with Susan. And I’ll cook tonight. I’ll get what I need on the way back.”

  Matt turned from the window and smiled. “That’d be good. I got a whole side of beef down in the freezer, already cut up. I can bring up some steaks.”

  “I think I’ll save them for tomorrow. Tonight I’m going to cook you something exotic.”

  “Exotic? Like what?”

  “Something other than meat and potatoes.”

  “What’s wrong with meat and potatoes? You forgotten you’re Swedish?”

  “Nothing wrong with meat and potatoes. Or TV dinners, once in a while. But even the Swedes throw caution to the winds sometimes and have vegetables.”

  Matt shrugged. “Suit yourself. I got a freezer full of meat, and I don’t know who’s gonna eat it all.”

  3

  The country high school Rachel had gone to served four little farm towns in the northern part of the county, each with the type of unlikely name that betrayed where the pioneers had come from or what they admired: Ontario, Bremen, Regina and Rome. Each town had maintained its own high school until the fifties, when the districts were merged, producing a consolidated high school with a population close to three hundred, just big enough to field a football team.

  Susan Stevenson, née Holmgren, had been Rachel’s best friend at North County High. Distance and diverging paths had never quite extinguished the friendship, though it had been reduced to a flicker at times. The advent of e-mail had resuscitated it, and through the teeth-grinding times in Iraq, Susan’s messages from a blessedly humdrum world had helped keep Rachel’s sanity more or less intact.

  Susan had married a CPA and moved to Warrensburg, where she had raised three children, run the PTA and the First Lutheran Missions Committee, and in general done what generations of prairie women had done before her—namely, make civilization possible.

  “Honey, you haven’t changed a bit.” Susan stepped back from their embrace and held Rachel at arm’s length.

  “Don’t lie to me.”

  “All right, you haven’t gained an ounce. How’s that?” Susan had gained quite a few; she wore them reasonably well, but the willowy young blonde whose looks Rachel had secretly envied was history.

  “That’s stress, not virtue,” Rachel said. “Eighteen-hour days and the occasional explosion don’t do much for the digestion.”

  “Was it awful?”

  Susan led her into the kitchen, where a pot of tea was steeping on the table. Through a window Rachel could see trees, a patio with wrought-iron furniture, a garage. Susan lived in the nice end of town, in a house she had described to Rachel as “Addams Family meets Home Improvement.” To Rachel it looked like heaven, a big creaky comfortable Victorian with the pleasantly untidy look of a place where the raising of children had worn down standards of organization.

  “Some of it was awful. Some of it was just tedious. All of it was pointless after a while.”

  “And you just up and quit?”

  “Not exactly. My last job over there was to go around throwing unbelievable amounts of money away on projects that made no sense. People were desperate for power and water and we were setting up beekeeping projects. I sent a very skeptical report back to the embassy and got called in for a dressing-down. I lost my temper and either resigned or was fired, depending on who you talk to.”

  They settled at the table and Susan poured the tea. “I thought of you every time we read about bombs going off.”

  “There were some bad times. But we were protected. We h
ad an army unit with us everywhere we went. The ones who suffered were the poor Iraqis.” Rachel shuddered. “Don’t get me started. I’m still trying to process it all.”

  “There’s a book in there somewhere.”

  “Maybe. Everybody I knew over there talked about writing a book. Now all I want to do is rest. And figure out what to do with the rest of my life.”

  Susan sipped tea, watching her over the rim of the cup. “And the husband?”

  “Now the ex. The naysayers were right. Though I probably could have saved the marriage if I’d ditched the career.”

  “And what would you be doing if you had ditched the career?”

  “Living in Beirut, the idle wife of a rich Christian businessman. I’d have two or three spoiled children, probably bilingual in Arabic and French. I’d vacation in Paris. I’d have made it back here for my parents’ funerals.”

  In the silence Susan reached across the table to put her hand on Rachel’s. “Nobody blamed you.”

  “I blamed me. But I’m over that.” She heaved a sigh. “I guess I can’t really complain. It’s been interesting.”

  “I guess so. Paris, Beirut? I think you get the prize for longest distance traveled from the farm.”

  “And it’s all because of Mrs. Avery’s French class. Who’d have thought?”

  “Oh, God. You were such a star. I never got much past keska say ka sah.”

  “She forced me to learn it. Said I had a talent. God knows I didn’t want to learn French. I was going to be a nurse, remember?”