Universal Harvester(11)
But a farmhouse has no neighbors, not real ones, and if you try looking for them, it shrinks. Its architecture is functional, its staircase carpeted old pine, not oak or maple; its window frames were painted white once long ago and never touched up again. Walk twenty paces from its door and you’re waist-high in corn or knee-high in bean fields, already forgetting the feel of being behind a door, safely shielded from the sky.
Whether you’re inside or out walking rows, though, you’re invisible. If we talk about seeing the house from the road, “in passing” is implied. No one inventories the shelves or the drawers or pulls up the staircase carpet, worn down from years of use. The only people likely to take much note of a farmhouse are the ones who go there on purpose: to get something, or to bring news, or because they live there.
“No,” Jeremy said when Sarah Jane finished.
“Please,” she said. “I don’t want to go back there alone.”
“I’m not going. Why do you—” Jeremy started, cutting himself off before saying you two. Why do you two want to go out there.
“I want to know,” said Sarah Jane after a little silence, knowing Jeremy, even in defiance, was too polite to ask Know what? She reached into her purse and retrieved her printout, now half-crumpled in one corner.
Jeremy appraised it. “I never saw this one,” he said.
“It’s after the credits.” Specifically, it was after someone had turned on the floodlights in the driveway; the action washes out to a pure white throughout the scene, swallowed by an incoming tide of light and then reemerging. “She tries to get away, I thought. But it’s her.”
Jeremy took in the picture as best he could; the unhooded figure was in disarray, only half-clothed now. Looking at it made him feel ashamed of something, he wasn’t sure what.
“Her?”
“The woman who lives in the house now. Lisa. She said it wasn’t but I know it is.”
“This is something we should just leave alone,” said Jeremy, surprised to hear himself sounding so assertive. But it was true: this had all gone far enough for him.
“I have to go back,” said Sarah Jane, without enthusiasm, as if describing an unpleasant duty.
“OK,” said Jeremy, unsure how to understand the way it seemed as if she were asking his permission. Her visible distress made him uncomfortable; he wanted to do or say whatever he could to calm her down, but without having to learn much more about the source of her discomfort.
“I have to go back,” she said again as she began straightening up the front counter a little: just keeping her hands busy, easing unsurely back into the normal quiet of the day.
*
Ezra was there when Jeremy came in for the afternoon shift the next day: his car, an old Chevrolet Citation with black-orange rust moons pocking its rims, stood blue and alone in the parking lot, a little worse off for having survived another winter. Their paths didn’t cross often; Ezra mainly worked the evening rush on weekends. Still, they greeted each other with nods and grunts, like men who’d seen each other every morning at the grain elevator for years.
“Sarah Jane sick?” Jeremy asked with his back turned while hanging up his coat.
“I guess sick,” Ezra said. “She called me last night and asked if I could pick up her shift. Said the key was under the mat.”
“The mat at her house?”
“No, the one out front.” Jeremy raised his eyebrows. The mat out front would be swollen with rain and melting snow until at least May, but putting the key to the store there seemed crazy.
“Huh,” said Jeremy.
The store was clean and there weren’t any returns to file; there would be nothing to do until the after-work rush. They waited out the quiet until the rush did come, then worked briskly until it died down. Jeremy was talking to Bob Pietsch about smallmouth bass in the Dale Maffitt Reservoir this year when the phone rang. “You have to be a little patient,” Bob was saying when Ezra picked it up.
“I don’t like to go out this early,” said Jeremy. “Might as well go up north and do it on the ice. Save the local spots for summer.”
“Fished all winter down here growing up, though.”
“Sure,” said Jeremy.
“She asked if I could pick up the rest of her shifts this week,” Ezra said when he’d gotten off the phone. Through the window, you could see the blast of steam and exhaust from Bob’s pickup as he pulled out onto the road.
“Mm,” said Jeremy. “Flu?”
“She didn’t say. She just said she wasn’t coming in.”
“Well, it’s her store.”
“It’s her store,” Ezra agreed. Neither man could really imagine many situations that would cause a person to call off work for a whole week. Even out-of-town funerals only took a day or two. They finished out the shift without saying any more about it, and nodded goodbyes in the parking lot.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, I guess,” Ezra said.
“Yeah, I’ll see you then,” said Jeremy, trying, as he turned the key in the ignition, to shake off the urge to drive out to Collins instead of heading home.
*
He drove past the highway on-ramp steadily. His imagination flared with the variables—smoke, fire, fumes—but he shook his head a couple of times to get his head clear, and it worked. You cultivate practical responses all your life precisely so that you’ll instinctively protect yourself if you should happen to meet a moment like this one, where, nagged by worry, you find yourself tempted to get on a dark highway at night and see who is or isn’t parked down a farmhouse driveway. You hold out for a better scenario: the next morning, say, when it’s light out, and the moon isn’t up. You hold out for the right time so as not to make things worse.