Driftless. David Rhodes
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the waist, lifted into the air, and set down again. When she opened her eyes, she was on the other side of the bearded young man, while he absorbed the combined force of the rushing boys, gathering them into his arms and ushering them off again in another direction with the reproof, “Don’t run indoors, boys.”
Though her drink had not spilled, something was decidedly overflowing. Her first sensation issued from just above her hips, where she retained the impression of two gripping hands rearranging her place in the world. The next came from the realization that the man had taken time to set his own drink down, and now he drew it back to his mouth, his eyes twinkling in amusement.
“I can’t breathe,” she said, unsure if this was either a legitimate concern or an appropriate topic of conversation.
He smiled, unable to find anything to say.
“I’m Cora,” she said.
“I’m Grahm Shotwell,” he said, and his voice expanded like summer.
“Pleased to know you,” said Cora. She offered her hand. Grahm took it, entangling them in a mutually inquisitive texture of fingers and palms. The most primitive parts of themselves immediately began speaking to each other, without permission. Their imaginations entered caves deep in unexplored forests, and joined painted bodies dancing around orange fires. The thin membrane keeping the watery world of dreams from diluting the hard substance of reality stretched to breaking. Through a quick organization of bodily fluids, Grahm’s face turned bright red, and Cora tried to pull her hand away but found she couldn’t move it.
“Oh, no,” she said.
“Let’s find a place to sit down,” said Grahm.
So began an acquaintance that in many ways proved too strong for them both. And though they fought bravely against falling foolishly, pointlessly in love, they remained hapless victims. Even their most venomous arguments, accusations, declarations, and final good-byes resulted only in bringing them closer together, clinging to each other in exhausted defeat. Episodes of soaring exhilaration were succeeded by evenings of heroic despair—depressions so dank, clammy, and dark it seemed they would live the rest of their lives underground.
The one hundred miles of expressway and sixty-eight miles of back roads separating them became so familiar that it sometimes felt as though they lived in vehicles. During one emotionally momentous month Grahm drove to Milwaukee twenty-one times.
There was always something left unsaid. Telephone bills arrived in envelopes with extra postage. Their need for each other grew at a pace impossible to appease, like disease feeding on its own symptoms. They tried to save themselves by making rules: times to call and topics never to discuss because they contained labyrinths of meaning. They bought candles and vowed to let the burning of them determine the boundaries of their lovemaking, hoping in this way to leave room for all the other things they weren’t getting done. But they always forgot to light them, or ignored them when they burned out.
Cora hoped to be able to transplant Grahm from his rural surroundings into her clean, comfortable, and convenient urban apartment. But Grahm could not be separated for very long, it seemed, from his 246 acres of rocky, hilly ground and forty black and white spotted cows. It was as though he had been born with two umbilical cords—one attached to his mother, successfully severed, and the other to his great-grandfather’s farm.
Farming provided Grahm with a mission as urgent as it was unquestioned. The duty to save the family business infused him with an unwavering sense of his own importance, and he never struggled with problems of identity or other social anxieties. He was indispensable to his own quest. It was as if his ancestors gathered on an hourly basis to communicate from the Other Side: We’re counting on you, Grahm. Even the land seemed to conspire with the dead to gain his unconditional loyalty, and as a result he simply revered the forty-acre stand of old- growth maple trees at the back of his farm and walked through it as if it were an ancient cathedral.
“It isn’t fair,” she complained. “My work, friends, family, everything that is me is here. Why should your life be more important than mine?”
“It isn’t,” he said. “But I have cows. You can’t just put out food for them as if they were cats.”
“When will I see you again?”
“I’ll call tomorrow.”
“Don’t leave now.”
“I have to.”
“Wait, I don’t want you to drive alone.”
It seemed the only way to end the madness was for Cora to move out of Milwaukee and into the farmhouse, which she did. She gave up her job with the insurance company, gave up her apartment and the friends she had made over the years but never saw since attending the performance by the Barbara Jean Band. She even gave up her family name, not wanting to be bothered with a hyphenated future, yet had every intention of going back to work after settling into her new home.
But settling took longer than she had anticipated. All of a sudden there were two children two years apart and enough responsibilities to fill two lifetimes. A natural process that began with vague, alluring images on the back wall of her mind ended in the numbing details of daily living, the currency of dreams spent on cooking meals, doing laundry, and making ends meet. Whatever remained of her youth evaporated in the worried heat rising from unending physical movements.
GATHERING EVIDENCE
CORA TOOK OVER THE FINANCIAL AFFAIRS OF THE FARM AND AT once became alarmed when she examined the records, which Grahm kept in shoeboxes in the bedroom closet.
“We’re going broke!” she exclaimed.
“Farming isn’t easy,” said Grahm, trying to coax her back to the bed and away from the ocean of papers spreading over the bare wooden floor like great sheets of sea foam.
“Grahm, stop. We aren’t being paid for our work. For crying out loud, who sets the price of our milk?”
“It’s complicated,” said Grahm.
Over the next several months Cora decided to find out how complicated it was, and she began pouring over receipts and canceled checks and consulting with the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection and the local chapter of the National Farmers Union. The answers seemed clear enough: a century of government policies directed at favoring industry at the expense of the rural economy was still achieving its goal, reducing farmers from 70 percent of the population to 2 percent. And what the government did not accomplish through laws and regulatory boards was completed by giant agribusiness.
She confronted Grahm in the barn as he went from cow to cow attaching the milking machine to the animals’ soft, leathery udders.
“It’s all wrong,” she said, balancing her daughter—an uneasy child—between her right arm and hip. “Our milk prices are set by the people buying it, with government help.”
“It’s always been like that,” he said.
“It’s unfair,” said Cora. “Every year the price of milk in the stores goes up while the farm price doesn’t change. The people selling to us and buying from us are making money. We aren’t.”
Grahm looked at his hands. He tried to keep his life manageable by limiting his attention to things he could control. Open discussions of government agricultural policies caused him great discomfort. His otherwise reasonable and beloved grandfather had been so sure that the big chemical and seed companies were single-mindedly undermining his livelihood and his health that he occasionally exploded in apoplectic fits of red-faced fist waving at the dinner table. In his declining years his grandfather imagined corporations taping his telephone conversations, filming his trips into town, and discussing his farming methods behind mahogany desks in St. Louis.
Cora returned to the house to make supper. The next day she began looking for work, and babysitters. The following week she took a part-time job as a waitress. Two weeks later she found full-time employment