Cold Black Earth Read online

  “I could use some good news one of these days.”

  They listened to the jukebox for a while, somebody singing about somebody else dragging his heart around. Dan said, “Well, the good news is, your farm’s in pretty good shape. Matt’s a damn good farmer. He’s worked his ass off and been careful and a little lucky, and he’s got a good operation going. With what your dad and Margie left him and what he rents on top of it, I think he’s making a pretty decent living.”

  “Margie had land?”

  “Yeah, she’d inherited some acres from her grandpa or something, over there just south of Ontario. She was renting it out, but Matt started working it after it came to him when Margie died. Anyway, I think he’s got about eighteen hundred acres in all now, and he’s doing OK. He’s not one of these five-thousand-acre CEO-type farmers, like your cousin Steve, but he’s a respected guy, with being on the Farm Bureau and the school board and all that. Matt Lindstrom’s got a hell of a lot of friends around Dearborn County. Me, for sure. He’s helped me out a couple of times when I wasn’t sure how the bills were gonna get paid, hired me to drive or help him get the corn in or whatever.”

  Rachel hesitated and then decided that sounded like an invitation to inquire. “You farming your parents’ place?”

  Dan shook his head, grimacing. “I’m not even really farming anymore. I help out Matt or my cousins when they need it, but what pays the bills is driving a truck for the hog plant up at Kalmar. I’m just about the only non-Mexican employee left up there. Keeping western Illinois supplied with pork chops and sausage, that’s what I do. That and haul grain for people when they need it. A trucker’s license is a good thing to have.”

  Rachel stared at him, astonished. “What happened to your farm?”

  “We lost it. My old man never did get out from under all the debt he took on back in the seventies. He bought a lot of land when crop prices were up and interest rates were low, and then got walloped when things went to hell in the eighties. All the time we were growing up, he was always hanging on by his fingernails. He finally gave up and went into Chapter 7 and liquidated, in eighty-nine. I think you were gone by then.”

  “Oh, my God. I’m so sorry. What happened to your parents?”

  “Dad got a job at Maytag in Warrensburg and worked like a dog till he dropped dead in ninety-nine. My Mom moved out to Arizona to live with my sister. My brother Jim’s coaching high school basketball down in Kentucky. Me, I’m the only one left around here. I’m still in our old house, anyway, over by Bremen. That’s about all we managed to keep. I can look out the window at all the land we used to own.”

  Rachel shook her head, remembering a long-ago Christmas party in a big warm farmhouse, the handsome Olsons having a few neighbors in for lutfisk and glögg. “That’s so sad. Your family’s been around here forever, like us.”

  Dan shrugged. “Hey, shit happens. It all went down about the time I got married, which was kind of disappointing, but that just meant I had to scrape for land to rent like all the other young guys. It ain’t for the faint of heart, I’ll tell you. And it doesn’t always make for a lot of presents under the tree at Christmas. But I did OK. We managed to get the kids raised, Sandy and me, and then when they were raised she took off. When you get down to it, I can’t complain too much. I never went hungry and I never had to go to work in town.” He grinned at her, and the old charm was there, a little scarred and a little worn but still with enough wattage to make Rachel wonder for a second what she’d ever seen in foreign guys.

  She looked down at her drink. “I never heard my parents talk about money. When I got old enough to ask how we were doing, my dad would always tell me not to worry about it. And then I went away.”

  “Well, they weren’t all good years. I know your dad and Matt were kinda close to the edge a few times.”

  Rachel nodded. “I could never understand why he and Margie never came to visit me in Europe. He would say they couldn’t afford it, and I always thought he was just a stick-in-the-mud, making excuses.”

  “He was probably telling you the truth. But like I say, I think he’s OK now.”

  “I guess I missed more than just a couple of funerals. I’m just starting to realize, I basically checked out of family life for twenty years.”

  “Well, you’re home now. It’s not too late to get interested in farming again.”

  Rachel had to smile. “I don’t know. If it’s too late for you to see the world, it’s probably too late for me to raise corn and beans. But I’m glad I came home. For the people if not for the farm.”

  Dan clinked his glass against hers again. “Farmers are people, too. People with shit on their shoes, but you get used to that.”

  Rachel laughed. “Give me time. That might take a week or two.”

  6

  “Who the hell is that?” said Matt, looking out through the window in the back door.

  At the kitchen table Rachel looked up from her book. In the country the sound of tires crackling on gravel meant company and was generally something you looked forward to. She got up and went to the window over the sink. A white Dodge Stratus had pulled up next to the pickup. “It’s Billy,” she said as the car door opened. The wind whipped her nephew’s hair across his face as he made for the house.

  “Where’d you get that thing?” Matt said as Billy came in the door.

  “I stole it.” Billy brushed past him and grunted at Rachel by way of hello. “You guys have lunch yet?”

  “Only about an hour ago. You make a mess, you clean it up.”

  “Anything left?” Billy was already in the refrigerator.

  “There’s lentil soup in that plastic container,” said Rachel.

  “Lentil soup?”

  “Broadening our horizons, she calls it,” Matt growled. “Be grateful.”

  Rachel smiled at Billy. “I can make you a salad if you want.”

  “Nah, that’s cool.” Billy lifted the lid. “Looks interesting.”

  Matt was frowning. “So what’s with the car?”

  “Now that Aunt Rachel’s here we need a third car. She can have the Chevy. I got a deal on this one from a guy up in Atkinson.”

  Matt was glowering, suspicious. “How much?”

  Billy poured soup into a bowl. “Couple of thousand.”

  Matt stared as he put the bowl in the microwave and stabbed at the buttons. “Where the hell’d you get two thousand bucks?”

  Billy shot him a glare. “I got money saved up.”

  “From what?”

  “From working.”

  “What, you mean from when you were at the feed store?”

  “And other stuff. Odd jobs, I help guys out. Like when I helped Dan build that shed. I know you think I’m a lazy piece of shit, but I been working since I was sixteen. Not counting all the unpaid labor around here. I got savings.” Billy shucked off his denim jacket and hooded sweatshirt and hung them up by the door. He returned to the refrigerator, pulled out a beer and shot Matt a challenging look. “Believe it or not.”

  Matt stared for a moment longer and then shrugged. “OK. I’m glad. That’s real good, that you had that much saved up.”

  Billy took a swig of the beer, set it down on the counter and strode out of the kitchen. When they heard him go into the bathroom down the hall, Matt said quietly, “He didn’t save up any two thousand bucks doing odd jobs.” He was frowning again.

  Rachel thought of rumors and hearsay. “Do you keep track of everything he does?”

  “No, but if he was working that much I think I’d know about it.”

  “Be glad he’s not asking you for money.”

  “I am. I guess.” They heard the toilet flush. “I’d just like to know where he got two thousand bucks.”

  Rachel assembled her tools: portable vacuum, pail of warm water, handful of rags, trash bag, dishwashing gloves. She put on her coat and hauled her gear outside. The Chevy sat forlornly on the gravel fifty feet from the door. Matt had taken the pickup to the lumber yard
in Ontario to price materials for the barn conversion, and Billy had jumped in his new wheels and gone tearing down the drive. Rachel wasn’t sure why she’d felt the need to wait until Billy was gone to tackle cleaning out the Chevy; maybe she hadn’t wanted to give Matt another occasion to tee off on the boy. But she was damned if she was going to drive the thing around another day with garbage around her ankles.

  She pulled the car close enough to the steps that the vacuum cleaner cord would reach with the help of an extension cord. She put on the gloves and started pulling trash out of the car, beginning with the backseat. Fast food wrappers, discarded packaging from batteries and car care products, old newspapers, brown paper bags that had probably held things that shouldn’t have been consumed in a moving automobile. Rachel shook her head. When the seats and floors were clear she started probing under the seats, grimacing.

  More trash: an apple core, a broken pencil. A roll of toilet paper, crushed and soggy. And, suddenly more interesting, a pair of women’s panties, with a red heart just above the crotch, slightly soiled. Rachel wrinkled her nose and stuffed them into the trash bag.

  Billy was having a more interesting time in the car than she had suspected. She wondered who the girl was. And how on earth do you wind up leaving your panties in the car? Rachel sighed and probed farther under the seat.

  She grasped what felt like the wooden handle of a hammer. When she dragged it out it turned out to be a hatchet. Rachel stared at it unmoving for a few seconds, just kneeling there with an elbow on the back seat.

  Something had been smeared and then dried dark red on the blade.

  She stood up, bringing the hatchet into the sunlight. Oil, she thought. Someone smeared dirty oil on it. Yet she had never seen oil that shone this deep reddish brown. She raised her free hand to run a finger over it but hesitated.

  Rachel tossed the hatchet onto the ground. If it was blood, there wasn’t all that much of it. About as much, she judged, as you would get if you cut off somebody’s finger.

  Maybe a thumb, Rachel thought, and laughed at herself. She remembered Matt killing chickens with an axe, when they had kept chickens. She was fairly confident Billy could explain a bloody hatchet, even if a car was a strange place to keep it.

  She glanced at her watch and went back to work. She was expected in town in an hour, and there was a lot of work left to do. Ask him, she thought. Just ask Billy about it. There has to be a reasonable explanation.

  “You have lived the life I dreamed about.”

  Catherine Avery had taken a degree in French at the University of Illinois in the nineteen fifties, married a medical student with roots in Dearborn County and come back with him to settle there. She had proceeded to teach French at North County High School for thirty-five years, beleaguering legions of farm youths with the conjugation of -ir verbs and mostly failing to communicate her passion for Flaubert, Rimbaud and Boris Vian.

  Mrs. Avery gave a wistful smile as she filled Rachel’s cup with coffee. In retirement she was avian and brisk, a small woman with an excess of energy and iron-gray hair pinned up haphazardly in a vaguely Anna Magnani look. Her living room was full of pictures of children and grandchildren, a coffee table volume on Impressionist painters the only visible sign of suppressed Francophilia. “A package tour to Paris every four or five years doesn’t really scratch the itch.”

  Rachel returned the smile. “After about six months it’s just the place where you live. You have plumbing problems, and dealing with the syndic is a pain. The romance wears off a little.”

  “Still, it is Paris.”

  “Oh, yes. I was happy there.” Rachel raised her cup to her lips. “Mostly.”

  “I guess that’s all we can aspire to.” The smile faded, but the wistful look remained as Mrs. Avery set down the coffee pot. “I’d have to say I’ve been happy here, too, mostly. It’s not a particularly . . . stressful place to live. Unless, of course, you’ve taken on too much debt, or the factory job that’s seeing you through the lean years has suddenly gone to China.”

  “I grew up with it all, but I’ve been away too long. It all feels foreign to me now.”

  “And as the wife of a country doctor I’ve become more of an expert on the rural economy than I ever dreamed I would. I suppose that’s what happens when you marry outside your caste, so to speak. I was supposed to wind up living on the North Shore married to a Chicago financier.”

  Rachel smiled. “I might have outdone you as far as marrying outside my caste goes.”

  “I would say so. He’s Lebanese, is that right?”

  “That’s right.” Rachel sipped coffee and set the cup down gently. “Lebanese, Christian, from a wealthy family that came through the civil war better off than most. I met him when I was at the embassy in Beirut. He was good-looking, charming, serious and accomplished in business matters, and spontaneous and fun-loving in everything else. He made me laugh, he courted me in an old-fashioned gentlemanly way, finally he swept me off my feet. I ignored everything everyone told me about the difficulties of an international marriage and said yes.”

  She glanced at Mrs. Avery but found her look of sympathy intolerable and looked out the window instead. “The marriage might have had a chance if I’d given up the career. But when we went into Iraq, I was suddenly a hot commodity because of my Arabic, and that was when I had to choose, even though I didn’t realize it at the time. And I chose the career.”

  A train rumbled through town, the mournful sound of the whistle trailing off into the distance. The room was growing dim, and Rachel felt her spirits fall.

  “It doesn’t sound like the best of circumstances for a marriage,” said Mrs. Avery.

  “It probably wasn’t. I used to pride myself on my level-headed judgment, but I’m a little humbler now. Anyway, I wanted to thank you. There aren’t many teachers you can say really changed your life, but you changed mine.”

  The look on Mrs. Avery’s face was faintly alarmed. “Oh, dear. For the better, I hope.”

  “You showed me what was out there. All the rest is what I made of it.”

  Mrs. Avery brushed a wisp of hair from her eyes and tucked it behind her ear. “Honey, you had a dream and went and chased it. That’s more than a lot of people can say. You’ll always have Paris, if you’ll pardon the cliché.”

  Rachel forced a smile, teetering suddenly on the brink of a bottomless desolation. Looking at the children in the photos on the piano, she opened her mouth to say she would trade Paris and all the rest for a living room full of pictures, but she thought better of it.

  Rachel had meant to bring home a half gallon of milk but forgotten to stop in Warrensburg. Swanson’s General Store in Ontario was gone, but the gas station out on the highway now had a minimart attached.

  The woman behind the register turned out to be Debby Mays, who had been a freshman when Rachel was a senior, and while Rachel had been manning far-flung outposts of the U.S. government, Debby had been raising children. “I told Amber not to make the same mistake I did. Go and get some schooling, make something of yourself before you start having babies. But she didn’t listen.” Debby shrugged and drew on her cigarette. “And I gotta say, the babies are cute. I love bein’ a grandma.”

  Rachel smiled at her, though the thought of being a grandmother at thirty-nine depressed her. She was groping for a suitable pleasantry when the bell over the door jingled and a man walked in.

  In truth Rachel might not have recognized him but for the hook; but the hook drew the eye just as it had when Rachel was a child, cowering behind her mother’s skirts. “Hello, Mr. Thomas,” she said.

  He stopped in his tracks and stared, a sour-looking old man with wildly undisciplined eyebrows, a Harvester cap on his head and a brown corduroy jacket over old-fashioned engineer’s overalls. In place of his right hand he had a two-pronged stainless steel hook. He peered at Rachel as if she had asked him for money.

  “I’m Rachel Lindstrom,” she said. “Jim Lindstrom’s daughter.”

 
It took him a moment but his seamed face finally contorted into what might have been a smile. “Why, sure. Little Rachel, I remember. You’ve been away a long time.”

  “I have. How’s Ruth?”

  The old man dug in a jacket pocket with his good hand. “She died in May.”

  Rachel gasped. “Oh, I’m so sorry.”

  “Well, she was seventy-six. I never thought she’d last that long.”

  Rachel stared at him, appalled. Recovering, she said, “I was very fond of your wife. She was my Sunday School teacher when I was little. And then later she gave me painting lessons. She was a wonderful teacher.”

  The old man shrugged. “I liked her, too. Ten dollars on pump three out there,” he said to Debby, sliding a bill across the counter. “So where you been, little Rachel?” His voice was deep but rough, like the sound of an empty oil drum being dragged across gravel.

  Coolly now, Rachel said, “Overseas, mostly. I worked for the government for a long time, in the State Department.”

  He gave her a look from head to toe that would have been impertinent coming from a younger man. “Home for the holidays, huh?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You still painting pictures?”

  “Oh, I haven’t in years, I’m afraid. But I’ve always intended to get back to it some day.”

  “Well, maybe you can come out to the farm and take some of those pictures off my hands. House’s full of ’em. I’m just gonna throw ’em out otherwise.”

  “What, your wife’s paintings? Oh, don’t do that. You don’t want them?”

  “There’s a couple I’ll keep. But there’s more’n I know what to do with. And all the paints and brushes, too, if you want ’em. Come out and take a look and take what you want.”

  “I may do that. What would be a good time?”

  “I’m most always home. You know where I live.” He pushed out the door and hobbled toward a rusted old light-blue Ford pickup.