Bleeding Kansas Page 4

  Jim had argued about it with her for over a year, wary now of Susan’s enthusiasms. His wife could accomplish anything, and he loved her for it, but she didn’t have staying power and that was a problem when you had such a cost-sensitive business as a farm. Besides, the climate in eastern Kansas wasn’t great for organic farming. The plains, unsheltered by mountains, were swept by winds as cold as northern Canada’s in the winter and burned by heat as warm as northern Mexico’s in the summer. Crops were too vulnerable to drought and pests in such weather extremes. You had to be able to fall back on some chemical interventions.

  In the end, Jim agreed to let Susan experiment with fifteen acres across the tracks south of the house. The Fremantle children had sold off their parents’ farmland after Liz Fremantle died, keeping just ten acres around the house. The X-Farm was part of the land that Jim had bought. It was a triangular plot, with a point sticking into Peter Ropes’s field at the south; the hypotenuse of the triangle ran along the western boundary of the land the Fremantle children had kept with the house.

  Susan had stayed with the X-Farm for three years, a record in a way, although Lara, who’d been cautious at first—Susan’s withdrawal from the co-op market still festering—had done a great deal of the day-to-day work. They’d get their organic certification this coming summer if everything went well.

  Jim wasn’t going to tell his brother any of that history. To be fair, Doug had never criticized Susan again, once she and Jim were married, but he always tightened in his sister-in-law’s company. Even her small projects, like learning how to peel an orange in a single beautiful spiral, rubbed him the wrong way. Jim wasn’t going to say he worried whether Susan could stick with the X-Farm long enough to show a profit on her crop.

  Four

  FIRE BOMB

  THE SATURDAY AFTER THANKSGIVING, while Chip drove Janice, Lara, and little Nate into Kansas City to watch the tree lights turn on in the Plaza, the four adults went over to scrub down the Fremantle house.

  When Jim unlocked the door to the kitchen, Mimi wrinkled her nose at the odor. Despite Jim’s embargo, the cats’ urine and spraying lingered, so that the house smelled faintly like the lion enclosure at the zoo.

  Doug said, “Someone’s been doing dope in here, little bro. Who uses this place?”

  Jim sniffed deeply. Sure enough, mixed in with mold and cat was the sweet smell of marijuana. Faint but unmistakable.

  “Maybe Junior Schapen’s been breaking in,” Susan suggested.

  “Arnie’s kid?” Doug asked.

  “Arnie’s three-hundred-pound gorilla, is more like it,” Jim grunted. “He’s way more aggressive than Arnie was at that age. Myra seems to like it, seems to egg him on, all in the name of Jesus, of course.”

  The brothers scouted the ground floor, but couldn’t see any signs of broken windows or forced locks.

  “Chip?” Doug suggested.

  “Certainly not!” Susan flushed. “That would mean Etienne had stolen the keys behind our backs, which he’d never do. Besides, Etienne wouldn’t be so—so idiotic. He’s an athlete, baseball is his life. He wouldn’t do something that jeopardized his playing. Anyway, where would he get it?”

  Mimi laughed. “Susan! Athletes use drugs all the time—it’s all over the news every day.”

  “Why do you call him ‘Etienne’?” Doug demanded, distracted from the main argument.

  “It’s his name.”

  “He hates it. You should know that by now.”

  “He’ll grow into it,” Susan said serenely. “It’s a name with a noble heritage in your family, Doug.”

  “No Grellier has been named that for a hundred fifty years. Chip—”

  “Etienne,” Susan corrected him.

  “Chip complained to me about it when he visited Chicago last summer.”

  While his wife and brother bickered, Jim walked through the house to see if he could find a stash of weed. Junior Schapen wasn’t smart enough to break into a house without leaving a trail of broken glass. But Chip was, and several times in the past year Jim had wondered about his son’s behavior. Chip had started having mood swings and outbursts of anger at odds with his usual disposition. When he’d asked Chip, point-blank, if he was doing drugs, his son had laughed at him, then left to go to the Storm Door with his baseball buddies.

  Chip and Curly were pretty tight; Curly might buy dope for Chip. Or maybe at school—when Jim had gone to high school, you could get a nickel bag openly on the premises. He thought the school had tightened up its drug monitoring, but maybe not. He’d have to talk again to Chip, which he didn’t relish.

  He went back to the kitchen, where Doug and Susan were still arguing, and dragged them off to start scrubbing. “Doug and I’ll do the walls and ceiling if you gals will take on the floors.”

  There were five big rooms on the ground floor, and then the front hallway, which itself was bigger than the Grelliers’ family room. By the time the women had worked their way into the hall, they were black with soot. Susan had a tangle of spiderwebs in her auburn curls.

  “This smell is never going away.” Mimi sat back on her heels in exhaustion.

  The front hall had taken the worst of the cat invasion: the two women had scrubbed urine stains, scooped feces. It was up to Susan to dispose of mouse and snake remains; Mimi had blanched at the sight of the mummified carcasses. She looked at the grand staircase, with its carved newel-posts and balustrade. It all needed to be cleaned, as did the carved double front doors; the etched-glass panels were black with dirt and webs.

  “They’ll have to strip all these floorboards and refinish them, unless they decide it’s too much trouble and tear the house down completely,” Mimi said, tossing her scrub brush aside and getting to her feet.

  “Don’t say that to Susan,” Doug called from the front parlor. “She’ll never forgive you for even suggesting it.”

  “It’s true, I do love this house,” Susan said. “I guess it seems silly to someone who doesn’t know or care about the history, but I like to think about a time when people were so committed to doing the right thing that they’d even risk their lives for it.”

  She climbed a ladder and began wiping off the red globes bracketing the tops of each of the four doorways that opened into the hall. Mimi, perched on the bottom landing of the staircase, asked if they were some kind of emergency light.

  “They’re fire extinguishers. Una Fremantle was terrified of fire after Quantrill burned down their first house. That little bead sticking out of the bottom holds sulfuric acid. The globe on top has baking soda in it. If a fire got hot enough, the glass would break. Baking soda would fall on the acid, so the room would fill with carbon dioxide and choke off the fire. At least, that was the theory. I don’t know that these globes would create enough CO2 to do any good.”

  “We could burn some of these floorboards.” Doug came into the hallway. “That would get rid of the stench and test the bulb doohickeys at the same time.”

  Mimi, seeing her sister-in-law redden, got to her feet. “I vote for lunch. Nothing like hard work to make leftover turkey sound good.”

  After lunch, they went up to the second floor, using the back stairs off the kitchen, with its narrow risers enclosed inside narrow walls. A big patch of plaster had fallen from one wall, exposing the laths.

  Doug shook his head, and said he couldn’t believe any of the Fremantles cared enough to put money into saving the place. Susan disagreed, saying it should be on the National Register of Historic Places. So Doug began baiting her, with the sarcasm that made him effective in court.

  Privately, Jim agreed with his brother, but he didn’t want to raise Susan’s agitation level any higher by weighing in on the discussion. “Come on, you two,” he called from the top of the stairs. “Enough quarreling over something neither of you has the power to control. Let’s see if we can make this bathroom and bedroom bearable for the lady.”

  The other three joined him, but their morning stint had drained their energy—esp
ecially Doug and Mimi’s, who weren’t used to such hard physical work. However, even Susan felt daunted by the second story. Liz Fremantle had stopped housecleaning some years before her death, and the six bedrooms were filled with old newspapers, a train layout, laundered clothes that had never been put away, as well as boxes her children had sent home for safekeeping while they moved around the world.

  Susan clucked her tongue anxiously over the patch of blue-black mold around the master-bedroom fireplace. She pulled out a tape measure, and announced that the mold had spread three more inches since she’d last looked in August.

  The four of them did their best to clean the main bedroom, with its fireplace, marble washbasin, and heavy cherry furniture, but gave up on the rest of the second floor.

  “If this Gina Haring cares about clean, she’ll take care of it. If she doesn’t, she won’t notice,” Doug pronounced.

  “No one could help noticing all this,” Mimi said. “I hope the Fremantles aren’t charging her much. Really, they should pay anyone who’s willing to stay here.”

  They packed up their cleaning gear and stowed it in the truck. Before they started home, Jim walked the perimeter, making sure the basement was sealed. He saw that the two-by-four was still bolted across the outside entrance to the old coal cellar but didn’t bother to check the bolts. Mimi and Doug came over to him.

  “Susan just remembered that all the dishes are dirty. She’s washing enough to set out and look hospitable, or something,” Doug said.

  “What’s that house out there that’s fallen over?” Mimi asked.

  Beyond the barn, visible in fall through the bare trees, stood the remnants of a small single-story house.

  “It used to be a bunkhouse,” Jim said. “Back when the Fremantles farmed ten thousand acres, they had four, maybe six, hands who lived there.”

  “And they just let it fall over?” Mimi said. “It’s so—so dreary, like the House of Usher, or Miss Haversham.”

  “It burned down,” Jim said, “the first year Doug and I were living with Gram and Grandpa.”

  “Mrs. Fremantle took it into her head to rent it to some hippies,” Doug explained. “You know, back in the wide-open sixties Lawrence was quite the counterculture heaven, and there were a lot of communes dotted around the county, kids trying to harvest the local weed.”

  “Local weed?” Mimi wrinkled her forehead.

  “During the Second World War, when the Philippines were blockaded, the government tried to get farmers all over the Midwest to grow marijuana for hemp, because we got all our rope hemp from the islands,” Doug said. “It made poor-grade rope, and poor-grade dope, but if you were a lazy hippie you could get enough of a crop to make enough cash to buy the real thing. So Liz Fremantle, who liked to thumb her nose at local convention, she rented out the bunkhouse to some hippies. It really riled Myra Schapen. And then one night the bunkhouse burned down.”

  Jim had only hazy memories of that fall. He was nine, and his parents were newly dead. Arnie Schapen used to talk about the hippies all the time at school. He was Doug’s age, two years older than Jim, and he was always bringing tales into school about what the hippies were doing. He said they had orgies, which Jim thought, in the confused way of children, meant the same thing as ogres, and he started watching for one-eyed giants coming out of the bunkhouse.

  One of the girls in the commune mooned Arnie’s mom when she went over to complain to the Fremantles about the hippies. Jim had been in the kitchen with Gram when Myra Schapen stopped off on her way home, shaking from head to foot in her fury.

  “We survived Quantrill,” Gram said to Mrs. Schapen. “Don’t you think we can survive a bunch of confused college kids?”

  That only got Mrs. Schapen mad at Gram. “Be your age. These people are Communists. Maybe they’re too naive, or too duped or indoctrinated over at the university, to recognize what these so-called hippies are up to, but they’re taking over our town. Now they’re trying to take over our farms, and Liz Fremantle thinks she’s hip or cool, or whatever their lingo is, because she’s helping them do it. There’s been a fire-bombing every day over in town for the last nine months, in case you hadn’t noticed, but you don’t care if a bunch of Commies blow us all up in our beds.”

  Gram said she had better things to worry about than a few college dropouts. “And how do you even know what they’re up to, Myra? I live closer to them than you do, and I’ve never seen one-tenth the stuff you’re reporting.”

  That had sent Mrs. Schapen away in a huff. Gram laughed about it with Grandpa over dinner. The fire had taken care of the problem for all of them. The Schapens said the bombs the kids were making blew up on them, but the sheriff figured they burned candles and incense when they were stoned and the place went up. He said there wasn’t any evidence to show they’d ever made bombs, or even owned a gun, although that didn’t stop Arnie’s folks from spreading the story.

  Jim remembered the fire. It was October, and he thought the Fremantles were making a bonfire for Halloween. He’d grabbed Doug, and they’d raced across the tracks and along the road to see if there would be marshmallows and cider. The two of them stopped when they saw the bunkhouse. It looked like some kind of fancy Fourth of July display, a house shape pulsing with fire.

  Then Grandpa came running, along with the Ropeses and the Wiesers, who lived east of the Fremantles, even the Burtons from their ramshackle place over near Highway 10, to keep the blaze from spreading. Jim and Doug had formed part of a bucket brigade.

  The kids from the bunkhouse, sobered up by disaster, pitched in, too, the girls working as hard as the boys. Only the Schapens hadn’t helped. Doug said later he saw Arnie standing with his folks in the background, watching all of them work but not lifting a finger. When it was all over and Liz Fremantle really did hand out hot chocolate, the Schapens took off.

  It was then that one of the girls started screaming that someone was missing. When the Fremantles and Grandpa got it all sorted out, they discovered that one of the boys had died in the fire.

  “Did you ever know the name of the kid who died that night?” Jim asked Doug.

  “Nope. Just that the girl blamed the Schapens for setting the fire, and Myra said they’d done it themselves. The girl was sure the Schapens were Minutemen or something,” Doug said. “No one ever proved it one way or another, but I think Mrs. Fremantle let the kids stay in the big house for a month or so while they sorted themselves out. Gram said Mrs. Fremantle always felt it was her fault the boy had died. She said she should have made sure they had a fire extinguisher out there, but I don’t see how she could have known they’d blow themselves up.”

  “So there was a bomb?” Mimi asked.

  “Oh, no, I don’t know. Not a bomb, but they were doing drugs and burning candles all night long, and a fire was almost inevitable. Jim, get your wife before she decides to reupholster the furniture—I’m freezing my ass off out here.”

  Five

  FAMILY THANKSGIVING

  IT WAS STARTING to snow as they drove home, big, wet flakes that melted on the windshield. By the time Chip drove into the yard with his sister and cousin, the snowfall was heavy enough to coat the fields, but not bad enough to make Doug and Mimi think they wouldn’t be able to get to the airport in the morning.

  Mimi started a load of clothes while Lara helped Susan set out leftovers in the kitchen. Doug put a bottle of wine on the table. He and Mimi almost always drank with supper. Since Jim and Susan didn’t care much for alcohol, drinking rarely and only on festive occasions, Doug always brought four or five bottles with him. Tonight, after asking the blessing, Susan gave a self-conscious laugh and let Doug fill a glass for her. The wine flushed her and softened her. She even flirted a little with Doug.

  Jim, watching her eager smile, the light glinting on her pale freckles, thought how much more vital she was than her small, elegant sister-in-law. Mimi worked out every day, but Susan worked, and it made her more vivid, at least to Jim. I scored so much better than you
did, he thought in silent competition with his brother. You went for looks, but I won on personality.

  Nate was full of everything he’d seen and done with his big cousins today—the lights, the zoo—all the things he saw regularly in Chicago seemed magical because he’d done them with Chip and Lara. Chip had even bought him an early Christmas present, his very first big-league baseball glove. “Me and Chip, we’re going to be in the outfield. For the Cubs.”

  “Royals, doofus.” Chip grinned, and cuffed Nate lightly on the ear.

  “How’d the cleanup go?” Lara asked.

  Mimi detailed the day’s woes, but Doug interrupted to ask about the marijuana. “Who’d be in there doing dope?”

  Mimi looked worriedly at Nate. He was arm wrestling Chip, who faked a strenuous effort and then let Nate knock his arm over half the time.

  “Maybe Junior Schapen,” Lara suggested. “He and Eddie, they go all over on Junior’s bike. They could ride across the fields to the house and no one would see them.”

  “Peter Ropes would if they came in from behind,” Susan pointed out.

  Mimi wanted to know who Eddie was.

  “Eddie Burton,” Chip said over Nate’s head. “He’s kind of a retard.”

  “Etienne! You know better than to use that language.”

  “We know, Mom, we know,” Lara put in hastily. “He’s a sad case. Maybe he got lead poisoning as a baby, from sucking on all those rusted-out cars in their yard, or maybe something else that stopped him being able to learn even the whole alphabet, but you have to admit he’s gotten pretty creepy now he’s older. Even when we were still in school at Kaw Valley Eagle, he was doing stuff like starting fires in the trash cans.”

  “Yeah, but Junior sicced him on that,” Chip interrupted her.

  “Maybe,” Lara said, “but did Junior make him come into the girls’ bathroom and crawl under the stall to look up Kimberly’s skirt?”

  “Eddie Burton?” Doug echoed. “What’s he doing with Junior Schapen? I saw Hank Drysdale when I went into town yesterday, and he was full of some rigmarole about Clem Burton assaulting Arnie, or something. He was surprised that I didn’t know, until I reminded him that my brother was the original trio of hear-no-evil monkeys rolled into one.”