Driftless. David Rhodes
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against his ear had the same effect on him as entering a room filled with tourists in flowered shirts. He was not gregarious in that way. To be honest, he was not gregarious at all. His entire social capital had been invested, wisely and exhaustively, in Maxine. He hadn’t talked to his own brother or sisters in over fifty-five years. He so rarely thought about them that they seemed little more than characters in a mostly forgotten book.
Finishing his cigarette, Rusty groaned to his feet and climbed the cement stairs into the yard. He let the white bull terrier crossbreed out of her pen. The enormous dog limped through the wire gate, reminding him of her untreatable arthritis. Together they completed the long walk to the barn, which sat on the edge of a woodlot.
The building’s interior looked more like a museum than a barn. After selling the farm, Rusty had turned his attention to all the things he had promised to do whenever he found time. He oiled, repaired, and arranged all his tools. Then he made a pegboard to hang them from. Though he had resisted buying certain tools during his farming life—not wanting to spend money on things he would use only infrequently—he now purchased them to complete his collection. He built a new workbench, with oak drawers to sort the nuts, bolts, screws, washers, nails, clips, pins, wire and wire fasteners, insulators, brads, tacks, rivets, and other things he had accumulated over the years, labeled and arranged according to size. He painted his vise. He painted his gasoline and oil cans and set them along the wall. He painted two metal storage barrels and put them at the end of the bench. He painted a wooden sign and hung it on the pegboard: TOOLS. He painted the doors and window frames. By the time he had finished, the inside of the barn looked like a Walt Disney production.
He backed the Oldsmobile out, drove it up to the house, parked it next to the water spigot, and began hosing off the dust and road dirt. On Wednesday nights Maxine volunteered in the library, and she often took Leslie Weedle, the librarian, home afterwards.
Keeping vehicles clean seemed important. Cars and trucks were extensions of the home and reflected their owner’s character. Like ragged clothes, a dirty car said a number of things Rusty did not wish to be associated with. Though he didn’t give a nickel what any particular individual thought about him and even held most of his neighbors in near-contempt, the mass of all of them together—the community—had considerable weight.
He began to go over the Oldsmobile with a chamois cloth to eliminate water stains. Maxine came out of the house and stood beside him. “The library’s closed tonight,” she said. “Someone is waxing the main floors.”
“Won’t hurt to have the car clean,” said Rusty.
“No it won’t, Russell. Anyway, Margie called and it looks like Mother might be able to come with her. She talked with the doctor and called the airlines. She can take her walker on the plane.”
Rusty wrung out the chamois and wiped off the trunk.
“We’ll have to put Mother in the girls’ room,” she said, turned, and spoke again. “It’s been almost ten years since they were both here—clear back before the girls were out of high school.”
Rusty finished with the trunk and continued until all the water streaks had been removed. Then he rewound the hose and drove the Oldsmobile back into the barn. He stood beside the workbench and lit a cigarette. He didn’t know what to do. He had to find someone to work on the house. Maxine was beginning to panic. At this point she could contain herself, but she wouldn’t last long. He should have found someone to do the repairs early in the summer, but he’d put it off. The bitter fact that he couldn’t do the work himself had made everything else easier to ignore.
He checked the oil in his lawn-mowing tractor, took a deep breath, and climbed stiffly onto the seat. With a turn of the key, he was out of the barn and moving along the fruit trees like an insect perched on a noisy green leaf, the giant old dog ambling alongside as well as she could.
While he had been farming, their yard could be mowed in fifteen minutes with a push mower. After he retired, the mowing area gradually expanded until it now took three hours. The mower deck beneath him chewed into the thick damp grass and sprayed cuttings onto the blacktop road halfway to the centerline. The roaring and churning sound was punctuated at odd intervals by an occasional ping from a piece of gravel coming into contact with the whirling blades.
He made two passes along the orchard, and a white pickup stopped on the shoulder of the road, maybe twenty yards away. A man climbed out. From this distance, without his glasses, Rusty couldn’t be sure he knew him, but with both of them moving toward each other he soon recognized July Montgomery, a Jersey farmer near Words. Jerseys, Rusty smiled, were for people who were afraid to milk Holsteins and too ashamed to milk goats. He shut off the engine and lit a cigarette as a way of saying hello.
“Rusty,” said July, smiling with a sincerity that Rusty interpreted as feigned. “I’ve been meaning for a long time to stop. How are you?”
“I’m okay.”
“How are those knees holding up?”
“I’ll let you know. What do you want?”
“Dog won’t bite, will it? Looks mean.”
“Take your chances like everyone else,” said Rusty.
“Remember that grain drill I bought from you?”
“No refunds.”
“How did you set the boxes for barley?”
“Set the outside box on about the sixth notch, the inside ones on the tenth.”
“Sixth notch outside, tenth notch inside.”
“Worked for me.”
“A little wet to be mowing, isn’t it?”
“Not really. Want a job doing carpenter work?”
“No. What kind of carpenter work?”
“The house needs a new roof, among other things.”
“I found a good carpenter last summer. Eli Yoder and his boys Isaac and Abraham. They built my new shed.”
“Don’t want Amish,” said Rusty.
“I thought the same thing,” said July, taking his cap off. “But I hired them anyway, and it was the drop-dead best thing I ever did. They work like mules but you only have to pay them like horses.” He laughed. “No, seriously, they did a good job. Eli lives—”
“I know where he lives.”
“Say, have you seen any signs of that cougar?”
“Nope.”
“Me neither. But they say it’s around. Many people have heard it and some people have seen it. I saw it myself.”
“First time I see it will be the last,” said Rusty.
“Big cats used to be all through this part of Wisconsin,” said July.
“Maybe so, but people back then had the sense to kill the buggers off.”
A ROOM WITHOUT FURNITURE
WHEN CORA HAD GATHERED ALL THE EVIDENCE SHE NEEDED to prove that the American Milk Cooperative was shipping adulterated milk, shortchanging its patrons, and manipulating government reports, she told her supervisor she didn’t feel well and took the afternoon off. On the drive home she kept her hands from shaking by gripping the steering wheel until her knuckles turned white.
The farmhouse seemed cold, and she turned up the thermostat. As her husband moved back and forth through the north windows pulling a chopper and wagon into a field of July hay, Cora poured a cup of hot coffee and drank it, thinking it might calm her down. Then she telephoned the number written on the back of a pink memo card. With the box of photocopied documents sitting on the floor in front of her, she listened to three distant rings before the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection answered.
“May I please