Universal Harvester(31)
It had a lilt of its own; not, to Peter, a pleasant one. He didn’t know where it came from, and he didn’t want to follow it out to where it went. He drifted back into his nap, the way you sometimes fall asleep when there’s something on your mind you’d rather not think about. When he woke again, there was pot roast in the oven. You could hear the juices sizzling in the pan. The rich smell filled the house.
*
Lisa was chalking hopscotch squares on the driveway while her father pushed the lawn mower over the grass. He wore a white undershirt and his summer shorts, black checks over alternating gold and white squares. It was very hot outside, and though he’d kept the blades sharp and the mower oiled, the June grass was thick. Sweat ran into his eyes. He stopped near the driveway to wipe his brow with his hand.
Lisa looked up, hearing his heavy breathing. “Sharon’s daddy has a lawn mower that’s a car,” she said.
“I know he does,” said Peter. “It’s an antique. Her daddy let me take it for a spin once, back when he first bought it.” It was a John Deere Model 110. Everyone in Crescent had stopped by the Lumley place to see it when it was new.
“It sounds like an airplane,” said Lisa.
“Sure,” said Peter. “They call that ‘horsepower.’”
“Can we get one?” Lisa said. “It’s super fun. Sharon gets to ride it.”
“Can’t go wrong with a True Value,” said Peter, rattling the push mower by its handles.
“Two people can ride on Sharon’s lawn mower!” countered Lisa.
“Maybe Santa will bring us one,” said Peter; it was a good line, but he didn’t get the rhythm right, because he resented having to hear from his daughter about Chuck Lumley’s Model 110, which Chuck had been able to afford because his parents owned preferred stock in the Union Pacific. Lisa looked hurt.
“OK,” she said, throwing her piece of chalk at the garage door.
“Oh, honey,” he said. He sat down on the driveway next to her. Sweat dripped from his forehead onto the cement. “Sure, we can try and get one sometime. They’re just kind of—”
“Expensive,” Lisa said, finishing the sentence for him. She had heard this word about a lot of things, starting with Baby Alive and continuing on more recently through Malibu Barbie and color TV.
“Yes, expensive,” said her father. “They are expensive.” He returned to the lawn. He didn’t want to make any promises he wouldn’t be able to keep if operations kept shrinking at the stockyard. From the corner of his eye he saw Lisa pout a little more, then retrieve her chalk, finishing the squares she’d been drawing and putting big round numbers inside them. It was hard to believe she could write numbers already. In October she’d be six.
“When’s Mommy coming home?” she asked when he was pushing the lawn mower back into the garage.
“She should be home in time to fix dinner,” he said. It was half past noon. He gave her a conspiratorial look. “What should we do about lunch?”
“Grilled cheese!” said Lisa.
“Coming right up!” said her father, tipping an imaginary cap to her as he headed in mock hurry toward the house.
*
Let me ask you a question: What do you see in your head when I tell you that one Sunday, toward the end of June, Irene Sample went to a church in Council Bluffs? Are you seeing a Catholic church with a stoup full of cool water just inside the front door, leading through a pair of huge doors into a great high-ceilinged room full of wooden pews with prie-dieus for kneeling? Something more modest and Midwestern, maybe—a Methodist room with an angled ceiling, wooden beams, plenty of light? Are there candles? Stations of the Cross? Carpeting? Is the organ pipe, or electric? Maybe there’s an upright piano instead of an organ, maybe a stylized cross behind the altar: the kind of thing you’ve been looking at for several minutes before you say, Aha, that’s the cross, I get it now. You wonder whether you’ve happened across a particularly modern congregation, but it’s not that: it’s just that you’d brought a set of assumptions with you when you came inside, some of which concerned the constancy of the cross. But here, suspended above and to the rear of the chancel, is this massive gnarled thing, made, evidently, of straw or strips of green wood. You can see how puny a human body would look if you tethered one to it with rope or fishing line. You can imagine it creaking and rustling while its captive strains against his bonds: no use.
If you shrink that modern greenwood cross down to the size of a poster, and, instead of suspending it with rigging from the rafters of a large room, nail it to some painted-over drywall behind a lectern in an otherwise undecorated storefront next door to an army surplus store, then you have prepared the room in which Irene Sample attended church services in June 1972, two months after she’d accepted a second copy of a tract she’d initially been given by a man named Michael, who had been scavenging for food in an open garbage can in Omaha.
It was Michael who stood at the lectern now. He was not dressed for church: he looked much as he had that day last November. His tan pants were dirty, his beard untrimmed. His hands looked like they’d been scrubbed with pumice—his palms, when he gestured, showed pink—but there was still plenty of dirt under his nails, which were long. Every member of the small congregation in the folding chairs before him looked better than he did: better dressed, better rested, better fed. There were only seven people in the chairs, plus Irene. The room was bright with sunlight. Lisa was playing in their driveway while her father mowed the lawn; Irene, as far as anyone knew, was out shopping.