"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.
Chapter Five
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?