Children talk about the stranger and worry about dying. At the grocery store, they see dead bodies hidden behind quarts of Neapolitan ice cream. On the farm, the creak of the Quonset door sets my cousin Mindy on edge. Suddenly she wants to live in town like her friends. She hates the haunted howl of the wind, the desolate whistle of the train. She never gave much thought to the bogeyman but now believes he’s taken up residence in the barn and won’t tend her steer. She’s half my age but tougher than I am. For the last three years, she’s raised a bull to auction off at each county fair, earning a 4-H Best in Show ribbon and enough money to pay for a year of college. Four years ago, when I first moved to the farm, Uncle Jarl bought me a calf. The whole school year I babied Brutus, so much so that when the time came to sell him off for organic hamburger, I couldn’t do it. He spends his time in the pasture, an obese bull who hobbles over when he sees me.
Tonight, Mindy wants me to go feed Theodore with her. I tell her I’m too tired after my shift. I don’t tell her John Junior got in a fight with his wife at dinner. Or she got in a fight with him. Flo was out back having a smoke, so I was the one who had to break it up. I could smell the beer on his breath when he grabbed me. It was only when Flo stepped toward him that he backed away.
“Coward,” his wife said.
After he paid, Flo said, “We see a lot of things we shouldn’t have to in this job,” before letting me off fifteen minutes early. I want to be like Flo, wise and tough, and fear I’ll end up like her.
My arm is still tender. Bruises have formed. I just want to sit with my feet up. I tell Mindy not to worry, the killer isn’t going to hunt her down on the farm.
“A man died in a field just like ours,” she says.
I pull myself off the couch. When I pry open the barn door, she peeks her head in and looks both ways like she’s crossing a busy street.
The next morning, Mindy tells us she wants to see where the stranger was found. My aunt — a hospice nurse used to dealing with death — says it’s weird, and that no good can come of it, but my uncle tells me to take her, so we climb into the old Ford and crawl down the bumpy back roads. I don’t know why she wants to go. I don’t think she knows why. I suppose that for her, murder used to be something on TV, something far away. Now it’s in our county.
At Sig’s, all that are left are the indentation marks from the cars. The field is a field. It’s lonesome, but not sinister. The fireweeds are a foot high. Once I told my uncle they looked like Christmas trees and got the lecture of my life: Do you know this “Christmas tree” is toxic to cattle? Do you know a single plant can produce 50,000 seeds? Do you know it’ll break off at the base and travel for miles? Looking over the long strip of summer fallow, I see the lines that tumbleweeds have drawn, sowing Russian thistle or fireweed on their journey. It drives Uncle Jarl crazy to see land abandoned like this. I understand why he asked me to bring Mindy. I glance over at her. Her blond hair is in a ponytail, and she has that look on her face, the one she gets when folks start bidding on her steer. Sad but stoic. She starts pulling up stalks of fireweed, ripping the roots from the soil. I wish I could remove the angst she feels as easily.
“Poor man,” she says. “I feel bad for his family.”
When she’s ready to go, I tell her to take the wheel. We roll down the windows and turn up the volume. Maybe singing Dolly Parton at the top of our lungs will exorcise Mindy’s feelings of fear. I learned to drive when I was ten, too. She hits the gas and the truck flies down roads that run parallel to the big sky.
We survey your land, we survey your life. We hear what you won’t say. Nothing escapes us. Nothing escapes. If you were born here, you will die here. I think of the stranger. Even if you weren’t born here, you’ll die here. We know everything. We know that Nancy Mallard loves her horses more than her husband John Junior. We figure her brother Davey might be gay. We know the hospital administrator resigned because he got caught embezzling. (He’s not from here.) Knowledge moves through us, around us, with us, against us. So why don’t we know who killed the stranger?
Rob Skelton, the posse lawyer, starts coming into the café earlier. Choose your friends wisely, College Girl. Partiers might be fun, but you’ll end up bailing them out for the rest of your life. Do you know how many times I had to go get John Junior from the drunk tank this summer? Nancy won’t pick him up anymore. You sure do look good, College Girl. I begin to think of him as apart from the posse. Rob. In crisp suits that still smell of dry-cleaning chemicals, he makes me think of life in New York City. Talking to him lets me dream of other worlds. It doesn’t feel like he’s almost twenty years older than me.
When John Junior and Brad Halsted join Rob, I move on to the Ladies’ Auxiliary table. At my graduation party, Hazel Murphy gave me a homemade laundry bag embroidered with my initials. It’ll come in handy in the dorm. Betty Davis gave me twenty-five dollars in quarters. “For warsh,” she said loudly. But in my ear, she whispered, “Play the slots. I hope you win big.”
People are still talking about the stranger. “What drove him to come here, of all places?” Brad asks as I pour his coffee.
“A Ford!” my uncle shouts out for a laugh. The Town Dump is a boxing ring after all, full of fights, jabs coming from all corners. It’s a place we see everything, we hear everything.
Who killed Sullivan? Why here? Why now? Speculation continues all week though there’s an hour intermission for church. After Pastor Joe frees us, we lumber over to the church hall for donuts. At the pulpit of the percolator, the sheriff tells us what he knows: “The stranger was” — a pause as he sips his coffee — “here undercover.”
Like heavy heads of wheat whispering to each other right before harvest, murmurs ripple through the room.
“FBI?”
“Border patrol?”
“Workers’ Comp?”
“PETA?” They were here last year, nosing around the Bar None feedlot, just out of sight of the highway, where 1,700 horses were crammed together in two corrals completely unprotected from the elements.
“I knew it,” Uncle Jarl says. “He was investigating someone.”
This is the thing: we’re used to watching. But we had no idea we were being watched. That an outsider was interested in us.
“An investigator?” I ask my uncle. “What was he doing here?”
Was he after Jim Ballestreri? Jim said he injured his left shoulder plumbing underneath Blanche Hellinger’s sink. He’s been on disability for years. He’s also the town’s best southpaw bowler, playing in weekly winter tournaments.
Was the investigator targeting Meg Walker? She said she’d hurt her back hoisting bags of flour at her job in Albertson’s bakery. In front of God and Great Falls, the doctor (her brother-in-law) swore that she could barely lift a bar of soap. Yet who hadn’t seen her picking up fifty-pound bags of Purina for those pit bulls of hers?
Or maybe it isn’t about disability at all. Maybe it’s about fraud. Several tavern owners pay barmaids under the table. That’s how farmers, even my uncle, pay summer help.