Introduction

Winner of the AWP Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction The stories in this first collection deliver the reader into a world in which men, women, and children are on the cusp of some deeper consciousness. The writing gives lie to orderly images of Midwesterners and instead evokes with unnerving clarity an interior landscape that is primitive and quietly chaotic. This is life in the balance-"whole worlds at the moment of rupture." The children and adolescent characters search for a moral compass or center, while the adults tangle with their own desires. And yet in these unprotected places people thrive in unexpected ways. Published in association with the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP)

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Excerpt

Country Girls

The picture on the cover of the dairy magazine was of a middle-aged farm woman, about forty, smiling directly, yet shyly, into the camera. She wore five blue ribbons around her neck. Her skin was clear, almost translucent, and her eyes were lovely and innocent, not the innocence of the religious devout or a child -- she was a grown woman -- but the sure-footed innocence of a herdswoman. The woman in the picture was once my friend -- that is why my father sent the magazine -- and for a moment I felt transported against my will back to my parents’ home, the air too thin, the rooms too small, me pacing the short hallway from my bedroom to the living room window, and I felt a wave of the deepest longing I had ever known, a longing too large for the body, almost cartoonish unless you are the one living it, and you are fourteen, and then it is deathly serious.

In the spring of 1974, my parents moved from Saint Cloud, Minnesota, where we had been living since I was born, to a dairy farm north of Melrose near Cedar Lake. My father had been hired as the Melrose county Dairy Cow Inspector and Milk Tester. My mother, who had grown up in the area, didn’t want to live in town so they rented a beat-up farmhouse on the land her sister and her family farmed. My parents had planned to move in the summer so my brothers and I could finish our school year, but I had been unhappy in the junior high in Saint Cloud, skipping classes and drinking, and my parents decided not to wait but to pull me out of school for the rest of the year, which was partly a relief. They left my two older brothers behind with the parents of friends.

For the first time in my life I spent a lot of time alone, walking through the unplanted black fields and semi-wooded pastures around our new house. Mornings I would hike deep into the pasture in my rubber boots and dig up cow bones that I hauled back in paper grocery sacks. I stacked the bones up against the back of the house. On warm afternoons I sat back there in my sweatshirt and bandanna, painting the skulls, jaws and femurs bright psychedelic colors, oranges and purples. In the back of my mind I thought I'd send them to my friends in Saint Cloud. I laid the bones on the grass to dry, the colors clashing with the quiet yellows and greens of the countryside.

One afternoon I hiked across the barley field, down a short hill that led to Adley Creek. I sat on the yellow grass and smoked a Kool Menthol. Adley Creek cut through the meadow and divided the land that came with our house and my Aunt Katie’s farm. Aunt Katie was my mother’s sister. She and her three kids were farming the land we lived on as well and I knew they planned to keep some of their dairy herd in our empty barn. I took a long drag on my cigarette and blew out smoke rings, something I had learned to do in the parking lot at school. The rings floated up and as I watched one float up I saw across the creek a girl with long gold hair. She was standing perfectly still with both arms at her sides examining a fence. She walked over to the wire fence and shook it, bent down and fiddled with the bottom wire. A heifer walked up to her and she grabbed a handful of its neck and pushed the cow away. Not in a mean way, but with a sense of authority.

A few days later, on a Sunday morning, I was eating breakfast with my mother and father at the kitchen table and my Aunt Katie pulled up our gravel driveway in her pick-up. From the table we could see her jump out with a basket wrapped in a dishtowel. She wore a plaid wool coat open over jeans and she moved like someone who had been up and working for hours. She knocked on our kitchen door and walked in.

“Yackety yack,” my father said and moved his hand like a lobster claw as he reached for another one of my mother’s homemade rolls. Though he didn’t dislike aunt Katie, he usually pretended he did; perhaps on mere principal that talking was a vice, something that should be contained, or perhaps because he liked her too much.

“You don’t need to be so critical of me already,” Katie said. She plopped the basket on the table. “It’s eggs and I would have been over sooner but we’ve had a horrible flu, and if one of the kids isn’t throwing up it’s another. The one out there still has the fever but she’s got a hard head and wouldn’t stay home.” She turned to me and shook her finger. “I suppose because she wants to see Miss At-The-Crick here. You stay away from her, though, or you’ll be the next one heaving your guts out.”

I was grateful that my aunt had not told my parents what I was doing at the creek and looked away from the table out the window. From where I sat I could see the girl in the passenger side of the truck. She was sitting quietly staring at our house. I had not seen Auntie Katie’s kids for two years, which felt like a long time to me; I could barely remember one from the other, except they were shy and spoke with German accents like my aunt and like my mother, only my mother’s accent had faded from living in the city. The girl got out and stood next to the truck. She was dressed a lot like Aunt Katie: blue jeans and a thin plaid coat, not wool but cotton and one of the pockets was ripped out. She was dragging the heel of her tennis shoe in the dirt.

“Can I just say hi?” I asked.

My mother nodded.

“Stand upwind to avoid germs,” my father said.

I went out the kitchen door and through the garage. It was chilly out and I was still in my pajamas. She looked up from dragging her heel and stuck one hand in her coat pocket and the other in her jeans pocket. She had thick, long, gold hair, not yellow gold but dark gold like oat stems or rope. She looked like Aunt Katie, high cheekbones in a flat oval face and wide green-blue eyes. A chill shot through me and I rubbed my arms.

“How come you have your nightclothes on?” she asked me.

“Just woke up.”

She laughed as if I’d told a joke.

“No, I’m serious. I just woke up. What time did you get up?”

She shrugged. “We milk at six.”

She was the only girl my age I’d seen for weeks and I wanted to impress her the way I had impressed kids in Saint Cloud, mainly by bull shitting or by guzzling moonshine and jumping over fires at quarry parties outside town. Cynthia was shy but eerily self possessed; she had the feeling of grass or wheat or stone. I know now that these qualities are not entirely unusual for farm girls, especially those who worked the farm as much as Cynthia did, but at that time she seemed like a rare and haunting creature.

“Want to see my skulls?” I asked. "I'm going to send them to my friends in Saint Cloud."

She nodded. I brought her around the side of the house to the back where my metal chair sat facing out toward the barley field. Her eyes got big and she took a step back, as if I’d shown her dead bodies themselves.

I had laid the painted bones out on the patches of dirt and grass that went up the field. Now I walked around them and picked out one purple skull with orange eye sockets. I held it up to her.

“Here,” I said. “You can have one.”

She kept her hands in her pockets and looked at the ground.

“Maybe you want to paint one,” I said.

She shook her head.

“Why not?”

“I like them plain, like these.” She picked out a long femur from my stack against the house and she squatted and dragged the tip of the bone through a patch of dirt.

“I have two milking cows,” she said.

I looked at her to see if she was serious. She gazed up at me with a face plain and straightforward. I threw the orange painted bone high up over the field and watched it drop. I could feel her watching me so I threw another one. The bone sailed over the yard, over the field, and landed in the dirt. I looked back at her but she looked away. My Aunt Katie walked up from the side of the house.

“Looks like you’ve been cleaning the fields,” she said. “Time to hit the road,” she nudged Cynthia, who laid the bone back where she’d found it and smiled at me.

That evening my mother told me that Cynthia had had some trouble in school early on learning to read, but that she had a knack for fixing things, fences, broken carts, machinery. She also had a knack for animal husbandry and was starting her own chickens and a dairy herd. Back at my old school, I would have thought this was ridiculous; my friends and I would have joked about it. But that night, from my bed, I kept wondering what my mother would say I had a knack for, besides getting drunk. I looked out my window at the still grass, the wheat, the sky, and instead of feeling trapped or bored I felt a quiet excitement, a new kind of racing inside me. I closed my eyes and saw Cynthia’s wide, green-blue eyes.

Monday morning I rode along with my father on his work route. This was part of my rehabilitation, but I liked it. My father sat in his big white truck and counted silos as he drove from farm to farm and gleaned samples of unpasteurized milk from the galvanized tanks in the milk rooms. He inserted a thin, sterile hose into the tank and filled small glass tubes with milk. He also sampled individual cows when they had sores, patches of missing fur, or swells. Then he labeled and stacked the tubes in a metal tray and placed them in a stainless steel refrigerator half full of dry ice in the back of the truck. At the end of the day he delivered the samples to the laboratory in Sauk Centre where they tested for quality of protein, unusual bacteria, and infectious viruses.

While my father set up his equipment, I would pull on my black rubber boots and walk up and down the stalls writing down the tag numbers for his records and noting if any cows had signs of infection or illness. Then I’d step outside the barn to see if any cows were what my father called “acting strange” in the pasture. Sometimes, if the farmer came out and they got to talking, I’d kick around the barn -- climb up into the hay loft or pet the calves, running the flat of my hand from their nose to the groove between their ears.

On the first day I had gone out with my father I saw Alquin Schultz, a tall, thin man with a sorrowful face, leaning over a cow in the barn and talking quietly into that groove, as if he were telling the cow secrets. Then that same week my mother told me his wife moved out of their house and in with a mechanic in Sauk Centre. “People get carried away with themselves,” my mother said, with little sympathy for either party, though she was not a harsh woman.

At the end of the day I asked my father to stop at Aunt Katie’s farm. We pulled up in the drive just as the sun went behind their barn, which softened the air. My dad went into the house but I stayed outside. Most of the herd lay in a clump far away under the shade of an elm tree, but in a separate corral behind the barn stood two half-grown heifers. They looked different from the rest of Aunt Katie’s herd; they had black faces and solid white bodies, except for spots of black on their legs. They reminded me of panda bears. And they were clean: no bits of dirt and manure crusted on their haunches and tails, no fur coarse with dust.

I climbed on the corral fence and watched the cows watch me. In a little while I heard the house door open and close and Cynthia walked up to the fence where I sat. As soon as she stood near me, my breath calmed, as if the water and bone and air inside me were mirroring the dirt and sky outside.

“These are Black-faced Angus, here,” she said, putting her hands on top of the fence and giving it a shake. “Eda and Classic. Most of my mom’s herd is Holsteins, which are easy milkers but so are Angus. You can go in there if you want.”

The hay in the pen was fresh. Cynthia went into the barn and came back with a bucket and two brushes. “You go like this,” she said, and gave Classic two hard strokes up her side against the fur line and then a long softer stroke down.

I started brushing Eda. Short white hairs spun up into my nose. The cows stood still as rocks, except every once in a while they’d twitch and a white ripple would cross their backs as if a snake were running under their hides. And they were warm. Cynthia showed me how to groom their legs and backside and tails, and I built up a sweat that made my skin itch under my bra and my face go hot, which felt good against the cooling evening air.

“This here,” Cynthia said, patting the cow between the ears in the deepest part of the groove. “Is its soft spot. Just like a baby’s. Once I seen a farmer get mad and hit a cow hard in that spot and the cow dropped over dead in an instant.” She stared at me. I put my hand on top of her hand. My arms were thin and freckled like my father’s and Cynthia’s arms were thick and white like the bones.

"That's where the farmers' secrets go," I said, and then I moved my hand from the cow's head to Cynthia's head where the groove would be and pressed down. Cynthia gripped my shoulders and wheeled me away from Classic's sudden step forward.

"She don't like that," she said.

Holding me in front of her, she looked at me for what seemed like a long time, though it was probably only a few seconds. She looked at me the way no one had or has ever looked at me since—with unabashed curiosity and attention.

“You are Nora Schneider," she said.

"Nora," my father called from his truck, smiling. “Daylight’s burning.”

My mother was standing by the stove talking with Katie on the phone when we got home. The table was set with fried potatoes, sausage, green beans. She hung up and gave my father a look that meant food’s cold, but also something else, a buried hurt or resentment. Though I believe my parents loved each other and that my father was faithful, I also know that on occasion he became smitten with other women. Once, about six months before we’d moved, I overheard my mother on the phone say “his mind’s drifting into something again.” During these times, my father would stay up late and pace the house; sometimes he’d sleep in a chair in the living room.

There was a towel draped over my mother’s shoulder and now she pulled it off and used it to lift a covered pot off the stove. She set the pot on the table with a bang and the table shook, which made her immediately remorseful. Her face turned pink in embarrassment. My father looked out the window, pretending not to see.

“So, Cynthia’s teaching you to be a cow girl,” my father said to me as we sat down.

“Yep,” I said.

He tried a few more questions but I didn’t see any point in answering. He complimented my mother on the potatoes and filled his plate and smacked his lips.

“Try to keep your food in your mouth, Carl,” she said.

“Oh, yeah. Good idea,” he said and smacked some more, but she didn’t laugh.

Upstairs my bedroom was still full of the heat from the day. I opened my window and pulled a cigarette out from the pack taped to the back of my dresser. On top of the dresser were pictures of my friends from Saint Cloud that I'd planned to put up; I threw the pictures in a drawer. Then I stuck the cigarette pack in my jeans pocket and headed back out the door and across the field to the creek, and then beyond the creek. At the edge of Poplar trees that bordered Auntie Katie’s yard, I cupped my hand around my eyes and peered inside the house. The lights in the kitchen were on. The rest of her house was dark, except for the top left window. Cynthia was sitting at a desk, her thick hair lying down her back. I sat at the base of a poplar tree on the grass and lit up. I imagined what she was doing, writing a letter to someone, or would she keep a diary. I smoked five cigarettes until my throat swelled up and head pounded and I felt familiar to myself again.

Just then, Cynthia leaned back in her chair and looked out the window. I stood up but I didn’t step out of the trees. She moved her chair in front of the window and seemed to look right at me; she must have seen the smoke. She stood up and came closer to the window and knelt with her hands on the sill. To this day I believe she saw me there -- that we were looking at each other -- but it‘s possible she didn’t see me. It’s possible she was just looking into the trees like she did every other night of her life. I thought about calling up to her, trying to get her to come down and smoke with me. And finally I got so uncomfortable, I started to feel a little crazy and I turned and ran across the field and creek back home.

On the days when I worked with my father, we'd stop at Aunt Katie's house. Cynthia and I brushed Eda and Classic, while my father went in the house and talked with Aunt Katie. Her husband had died two years ago. When Cynthia and I would go inside the house for a glass of water, they would be sitting at the kitchen table talking about baseball games or the weather or sometimes arguing about politics. Katie did most of the talking. My father’s red cap would sit on the table and one leg would be on a chair—comfortable the way he hadn’t looked at our house for a while. Auntie Katie would be leaning forward holding her coffee cup in both hands. They didn’t pay much attention to us, except Aunt Katie would say “Don’t get into trouble.” And once, when my dad was in the bathroom, she

looked right at me and said, “None of this” and put her two fingers up to her mouth like she had a cigarette.

My father didn’t talk a lot about his youth, but I knew that before he'd married my mother, my father had dated Auntie Katie—that’s how my mother and father met—and there was some story about the way they broke up. My brothers told me they had once found a picture in Dad’s business closet of my dad and Katie sitting on top of a Buick kissing.

One afternoon when we were testing cows I asked him. “Why did you marry Mom and not Katie?”

“I married the woman I loved,” he said. “Besides, your mother talked less.”

“No, really, were you in love with Katie?”

My father handed me the thermometer and started washing his boots. His face was serious, thoughtful. "Not love," he said. "But something else."

At the corner of our barn was my favorite chicken, favorite because it had a lopsided body and a patch of feathers missing on one side as if someone had plucked them, and because it followed me around when I was setting out my bones behind the house. Early on I had dressed the chicken in an old doll shirt and tatters of the pink collar still hung around its neck, just the sort of thing Cynthia would hate, but for some reason I didn't understand that.

"Cluck, cluck," I said, and pet the chicken. I squatted to look into the chicken's red eyes. "I love you," I said. The chicken jerked its head. "More than anything," I said. I picked it up and started walking toward the field; I had a vague notion that I would give the chicken to Cynthia, and that she would cure it. Or maybe I just wanted to show her how much the chicken loved me. At the bottom of the hill a toad scrambled under my foot and I took it to mean I was on my way to the right thing. The chicken pulsed under my arm but didn't put up a fuss -- another sign.

I stood on the porch outside Cynthia’s house. Between the screen and aluminum door a fly was trapped. I let the fly out. I could see into the kitchen; fabric laid out across the table, green with rose print. Aunt Katie came out of the back room in a big blue shirt, no pants. The shirt hung down to her knees; her legs were skinny but her knees were blubbery.

"You again," she said, picking the scissors off the table.

"Me," I said.

"How long you been here? You have a chicken for me today?"

I put the chicken on the porch and circled my fingers and thumb around my eye like a mask. “Hoo. Haa,” I said.

She laughed, but it was more a laughing at. “You are a funny kid,” she said. “Odd.”

“Is Cynthia home yet?”

“No, she’s not home. You need to get another hobby.”

I sat down on the porch with my chicken. A car that looked familiar but that I hadn't noticed when I came up was in the driveway behind the shed. After a few minutes Auntie Katie opened the door wearing pants and yelled out, “If you’re gonna sit there, Miss city pants, why don’t you work.”

“What do you want me to do?”

She pointed me toward a shovel that looked new on the porch and then toward the chicken coop.

The shed had a foot of straw and chicken poop on the floor and iron poles lying on it. I stacked the poles behind the shed and started shoveling the dirty straw into a wheelbarrow I found in the barn. The sun was coming in the door and warming my legs as I worked, and soon I could feel my sweat and then I could feel a shadow over me—someone standing in the doorway watching me. I shoveled for a while more slowly and then I went out.

She was sitting up against the coop chaining dandelions.

“I brought you a crazy chicken,” I said, but she didn’t answer. I sat in front of her. Something was different about her face, a bluish hue on her cheekbone.

"What happened to your face?" I asked.

"My mom."

“Why’d she hit you."

Cynthia kept chaining. “The reason don’t matter,” she said. “She just gets mad and swats because she can’t make things how she wants.”

“What does she want?”

Cynthia finished off the chain and looped it over the chicken's head, which I think now must have been a bit of a concession. “She wants love," she said, looking at me. "And someone to stay on the farm with her. My brothers want to sell.”

“What would you do then? Where would you go?”

“Well, it wouldn’t be for a while and I don’t know. I guess I’d be married by then.”

"Oh," I said. As it turned out, in five years her brothers would sell and Cynthia would marry a farmer in the area, not anyone I knew, but then the idea sounded entirely foreign to me; still I felt slightly threatened. My heart beat faster and I wiped a drop of cold sweat from my lip.

As Cynthia and I talked, I heard the low hum of a car driving out onto the road and I saw Alquin Schultz's thin face behind the wheel.

The sky was doing something funny now. The wind was starting to push the clouds together in a bunch and they

gathered even more darkness, like a crowd of people coming together against the blue.

We walked to the creek. Cynthia's legs were skinny like her mother's, the backs of her knees doughy and unglamorous and I liked that. I liked looking at her. We sat down and the dampness from the morning seeped through my jeans.

"You're looking at me," she said, not in a coy or irritated way, but like she was pleased.

A piece of grass or dandelion stem stuck to her chin. Her mouth seemed like a gate to something, but it wasn’t due to beauty -- her lips were often red and chapped. It wasn't the outside I wanted, or at least that’s how it seemed. I wanted to see down Cynthia’s throat, to see the inside of Cynthia. I told her stories about my old school, and I told her how lonely I'd been there and until I said it I didn't even know it was true. Cynthia watched me attentively while I spoke, her mouth slightly open. At the time, I believed Cynthia felt the way I felt -- I didn't question it. But now I can see that Cynthia had compartments inside her, a groove where she kept her secrets, a certain country girl hard headedness and heartedness that passed as practicality, as good sense.

For the rest of spring, when I didn't have to work with my dad, I'd show up at Cynthia's barn at eight am when milking was finished. I'd help her wash the milk machine, sweep out the barn, pick rocks. Sometimes we'd bicycle up and down the road or walk the fields and gather bones, cow bones but also bones from possums or raccoons: femurs, jaws, skulls. We would haul the bones over to my house and bleach them and lay them out on the hill and lay ourselves on the grass, or when the grass was wet borrow a blanket from my mother's closet in the basement. We lay with our heads in the shade and our bodies in the sun. Cynthia had a heavy breath. I have always been afraid to really let myself breathe -- I think the sound gives me away -- but Cynthia had no such self consciousness. I could hear her lungs filling up and her breath sliding against her teeth.

What do you like?" I asked her once.

She looked at me as if she were trying to see if I were really listening. "I like to hike around."

We fell asleep on the blanket and dreams swept in. Blackness behind the lid, white arms reaching toward me.

"What sound do you like best?" I asked her another time.

"The sound of the barn door opening in the morning. This isn't a sound but I like the smell of our kitchen drawers."

One afternoon while we were hiking, Cynthia found a circular piece of bone -- maybe a piece of squirrel skull -- and she slipped it onto her finger like a ring, holding her hand up to the sun and saying “I pronounce myself Mrs. Bone.” Later, when we were standing at the edge of her field under the poplars saying goodnight, I asked if I could have the ring. Leaning close and looking into my eyes, Cynthia took my wrist and held my hand out and slipped the bone on my finger.

I think these times with Cynthia were my first feelings of sexual desire and longing. When I wasn't with Cynthia, when she wasn't in my view or I couldn't hear her, I began to feel panicked, a fractured buzzing in my head, a restlessness in my legs. Sometimes Cynthia would stay for supper at my house and more often I'd eat at hers, and Aunt Katie started to tease me. "Better watch out,” she’d say, “You’re starting to look like me." A few times I slept at Cynthia’s house and we’d stay up late talking and then I’d stay up later, listening to her breathe, watching her. I didn't want to touch her -- probably later everyone thought I did and that's what riled them -- but that wasn't the point, consummation of desire wasn't at the center of my feelings. I was happy to feel her near me, to sit next to her at the kitchen table and cut fabric for her mother, or to pick rocks behind the cart and tractor her brother drove, and, occasionally, to sit next to her while she drove the tractor.

My mother stood on a chair throwing coats and belts and gloves out of a hall closet. My father sat in the living room.

"Where are you going?" she asked.

"Out, out," I said.

"Out out to Cynthia's out." she said. "You've been out all day with Cynthia; why don't you help me sort this stuff."

"I'm meeting Cynthia at the creek -- I'll sort tomorrow."

She threw out a hat, which had been mine in third grade, a dirty white fur hood with fur balls on the ties that kids and some silly adults wore in the late sixties. I picked it up and put it on -- the hat was too small; it perched on my head, the balls swinging.

"Your head used to drown in that thing," my mother said, looking down at me from her chair. All spring, since we'd moved, she'd had a worried look about her; her eyebrows furrowed, her forehead creased. She had been distracted and I had been going around as if I were invisible, which suited me. But now she was looking at me and her forehead was smooth, but sad, or maybe disappointed; I couldn’t say exactly with what.

My father walked through to the kitchen. "You're not going out," he said, and I could tell they had talked about it. "And you're coming with me tomorrow."

I took off the hat.

"Your Aunt Katie doesn't have to feed you every night," my mother said.

"She doesn't mind," I said.

"Of course she doesn't mind," my mother said. "But it's no good to push a good thing. And there are other kids around too," she added in a weak voice.

"Okay. Okay." I said, and batted the fur balls to make her smile, but inside me something choked. I felt as if my mind were thrown against my forehead. My mouth became dry. I helped my mother sort through the stuff on the floor and went to bed.

That night I lay awake and felt a wheel turning in me. Cynthia’s face was in front of me, her wide, blue-green eyes and then her white arms. I could feel this longing, but it wasn’t soft the way it had been. It pulled at me. I got up and went downstairs. My father had fallen asleep in a chair in the living room, like a guard at the foot of the stairs. His shoes lay on the floor under his foot stool. I hadn't really looked at him for a long time it seemed. I didn't even know if he liked living here, liked his new job, though he seemed happy enough. His head lay to one side and his jaw hung slightly open -- he had a lopsided face that scared me. Later, when he had a series of small strokes and the left side of his face slackened,

making him look dopey, less harsh, less the centurion, I would remember how he looked that night.

I put my hand out and touched the bagged up part of his sock. I couldn't understand that I would pass through this new internal state. The panic took me over, like a flu. I stepped through the kitchen and stood on the steps outside the house, looking toward Cynthia's house, wondering if the light was on in her bedroom. I tiptoed into the kitchen and picked up the phone quietly.

"Who is this?" Auntie Katie's groggy voice.

I hung up, but even in that moment I felt closer -- through the phone line I could feel the air and smells in Cynthia's house, hear her footsteps going up her stairs.

When I turned around my father was standing in the kitchen door, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hand. He had been watching me. I am trying to see the look on his face now. Embarrassed, confused. And I think I saw pity.

My brothers arrived a week before the town's summer festival, which included a parade and a German accordion band and polka dance. My parents decided we would, as a family, help build the platform for the dance on Main Street, along with ten people from town, and a few neighbors. Alquin Schultz worked beside me, looking thinner and more miserable than he had when I’d seen him talking to the cow. We hammered and sawed and sanded wood. When we got home I was put to work in the house helping my mother clean or cook or put up shelves. The house had filled with boxes and my brothers' noise, running in and out for food and water. They set up tents in the yard and when they weren’t working they threw footballs and basketballs and softballs to each other. They teased me about my skulls and my cigarettes -- "Nora we adora but your breath's a horra” -- and they especially teased me about my overalls that Cynthia had given me and which I wore everywhere now.

During the day I was distracted enough, but every night I sneaked down the stairs and called Cynthia's house. If Auntie Katie answered, sometimes I'd hang up. Often Cynthia would answer and we'd talk about anything, Classic and Eda, what we did that day, what we ate. Once I asked, "Do you miss me?" and she laughed.

Sometimes I'd sit in the corner of our kitchen and hold on to the phone after she’d hung up, listening to the silence. We had made plans to meet at the dance on Sunday and that week I was waiting and in the waiting I began to feel I didn't exist. I did my chores, I painted the dance platform with my brothers, who watched me out of the corners of their eyes, and I fed and groomed the six-month heifer my father bought me from Aunt Katie's that I named Eda Two. But all through it I thought of Cynthia's breath and the sound of her voice. In the middle of the night I'd get up and pace the hallways and then stand on our porch looking into the blackness toward her house.

The waiting was like an aura around me. An intensity. In the kitchen, my mother had pinned light, happy sayings on the refrigerator that irritated me: "Smile and the World Smiles Back." “His Love Will Save You.”

Two nights before the dance, I stepped into the backyard and hauled a bucket of grain from my father's shed to the trough my brothers had built for Eda Two. The air cooled and I combed the cow’s bristly hair. I clipped off the dirty long sections so the new hair could grow in clean and shiny the way Cynthia had taught me. I ran the flat of my hand down the groove in the top of her white head to the cool soggy black nose. "Smile and the world smiles back," I whispered into her groove. "Love will save me," I said.

The dance stand was like a fifty-foot gold raft floating in the middle of Main Street. Cynthia was already dancing with Auntie Katie and when she saw me she ran over and grabbed my hand, and then she pressed her sweaty forehead and nose into mine.

I had dressed in my new baby-blue hip huggers and white shirt. I had combed my hair for an hour. Cynthia was wearing blue jeans and a blouse Auntie Katie had sewn from the rose and green print fabric. The colors set off her gold hair and blue-green eyes; her cheeks were blotchy and rosy, so rosy I now think she may have been drinking.

“Follow me,” she said, and she pulled me to the middle of the dance floor. “Alls you do is this, watch. One, two, three, hop. One, two, three, hop.”

I stumbled through the first few dances, but then I felt the rhythm in my legs and feet. Only about ten other people were dancing and we whirled around the floor in big circles, stomping our feet on the wooden platform, the polka band blaring.

“I love this,” I shouted into Cynthia’s ear and she laughed.

More people must have arrived slowly, because I remember bumping into people. I remember bumping into Auntie Katie dancing with Alquin Schultz, and my mother and father. I remember whirling off, whirling and whirling with the pressure of Cynthia’s hand in the middle of my back and Cynthia’s breath against my temple. I could feel the squirrel-bone ring against my thigh in my pocket -- I had my plans. The sky, which had started out dusky blue, deepened in color, and the evening air chilled and in the growing darkness and cold I began to feel an elation. The shapes of things started to soften and now the sky and the chickens and cow skulls and creek were inside me. I slipped my hand up Cynthia's back between her shoulder blades and she looked into my eyes and I saw our future; Cynthia and I living together like man and wife. I didn’t know what that meant exactly, but I married Cynthia with every feeling in me, with every sound I had heard in my fourteen years, with every breath and eyelash, with everything I knew. I married Cynthia Hinnencamp under that darkening sky, with the Melrose band thumping, the smell of sweat and corn cobs and mowed church grass in the air. I married her I married her I married her.

I must have dropped to my knees. I must have dropped and folded my hands, like a declaration. I got the ring out of my pocket and took Cynthia's hand.

And, at first, they must have thought something was wrong, that I was ill or had hurt my ankle. The people around us stopped dancing, and then people around them stopped and on and on until a hush formed and the band stopped playing and I was on my knees looking up at Cynthia and I couldn’t get up. Someone shifted on the wood. Someone coughed. A crow cawed.

I must have said her name out loud. I must have said something like, Cynthia, will you marry me. There was blackness at the sides of my eyes and Cynthia’s wide face above me. I was on my knees looking up at her, holding her hand and trying to put the ring on it but my hands were shaking. Her mouth was open and I could see the edges of her white teeth and a sheen of sweat on her forehead and above her lip that glistened in the light. I have replayed that moment over and over across the years and still I can’t see the expression on her face. At the time I thought it was love, but it could have been something else: shock, or fear, or denial. Cynthia looked down at me steadily. The twilight behind her like a frame, a deepening blue.

My father pulled me up. For a while, when I was older and telling the story, I would say it was one of my brothers, but it was my father. And Auntie Katie was standing behind him. He pulled me up by the shoulders and took my arm and dragged me off the golden platform. He walked me down the steps, past my brothers who looked away, past Alquin Schultz who looked right at me for the first time, as if he had just discovered I existed and his curiosity pulled him out of his misery for just a moment, past a line of people waiting to buy beer. As I moved past people a quiet rushed in. They must have thought something had happened from the look on my father’s face and my face; they must have thought I was hurt and being taken home. And so they did what anyone would do. They stared at me.

My father’s truck was parked two blocks off Main street behind the Red Owl. He opened the passenger door and I got in. Then he stood outside before getting in himself. We sat in the dark for a few minutes, or maybe an hour. I imagine he was trying to make sense of it, maybe

feeling like he did when he discovered an infected cow in a herd. “You’ve got to nip it in the bud,” he’d say.

Finally my father cleared his throat and started the engine.

Continues…..

Mr. Hellerman's Vacation

Mr. Lawrence Hellerman's brain is yawning against the slick coat of drugs the psych nurses give him to sleep. His mind moves like a glacier sliding south, leaving odd deposits on the landscape: a shoe burning in the fire, the eyes of deer like a trail of turds, work boots, hunting knives, bird feeders, the entrails of ducks and geese and quail. Squirrel bones. His father, Bernard, deaf, hairless, inebriated, slides out the side of the ice in a soft chunk; as soon as he’s gone Mr. Hellerman can open his eyes. But Mrs. Hellerman and their five children are still trapped in there: the first born wearing a peach graduation dress, the three boys hunched over cigarettes behind the barn, the youngest girl, the baby boy. The unborn are there too, at the very bottom, scraping against his cranium.

Today is Mr. Hellerman's last day at Saint Mary’s Hospital; Mrs. Hellerman and the boys have been milking without him for two weeks. Tomorrow morning at eight o'clock his daughter, a student at the city university, the first Hellerman ever to attend college, will pick him up and drive two hours south to deposit him in the living room of his father's father's farmhouse. Mr. Hellerman will nap before evening milking time. He will sterilize the milk machine, check the cows' udders for swells.

But today Mr. Hellerman is not a farmer, and all he has to do is pack.

The sun is a bright yellow winter sun. Lemons from Southern California, where he's never been.

He sits on his hospital bed, packing the objects he will take home with him. They are objects he did not take from home to the hospital: a stained-glass owl you hang from a string in the window (his father would have called it useless crap). A multi-colored tea cozy he crocheted for Mrs. Hellerman, though they drink coffee, not tea. A birdhouse with "The Hellermans" engraved on the roof. A blue and white lap blanket he wove (the yarn soothed his fingers) the first week he was there. Mr. Hellerman wraps the owl in Kleenex from his bed stand; he wraps the other items in newspaper and tucks them inside the blanket at the top of his suitcase.

At lunch hour, his morning medication begins to wear off and he can feel his stomach lurch, what the doctors call his anxiety. Mr. Hellerman chooses not to eat; instead he pulls on a pair of loose-fitting gray slacks, a white T-shirt, black walking shoes. He walks down the hall to the stairwell. The stairwell is like a high-ceilinged cave. He feels larger in there, both large and small, the way he feels in the middle of Kemper's woods. And safe. He ascends in a quick jog to the fifth floor, turns, heads down the stairs toward the first floor. This descending holds its own momentum -- his body pulls him down in a steady relief of falling. He counts his breath as it fills the stairwell, imagines it floats up to the roof of the hospital, where it rings like the bell in Saint Mary's church. Sweat drips off his forehead. His toes push up against the leather of his black shoes.

On his twentieth and final run to the fifth floor, Mr. Hellerman stops and looks out the frosted window. A gray path cuts through the truncated lawn, into a wooded gully. Today is the first time Mr. Hellerman has noticed the gully; before, he saw only the overgrown lawn that needed mowing. On the other side of the gully is a blurred space. A parking lot or an unclaimed plot of dirt? No, a freeway. He often has wondered why the homeless people in cities don’t farm the unused land around parking lots and freeways. His daughter Julee has scolded him --To plant you have to own, her strange round glasses sliding down her nose as she looked up over their rims. Before she went to college his daughter used to whistle show tunes while helping Mr. Hellerman hook up the milking machine and scrape the gutters. Now she says he just doesn't know things; he lacks any critical perspective, doesn't exist in synch with theories of material evolution and human society. He inherited the farm as did his father, but if his mind is chained to the barn and the fields, does he own the farm or does the farm own him?

The gully is dark, dense with growth. Oak trees? Birch? There must be a fence, keep patients out. Or in.

Mr. Hellerman wonders if he has outdoor roaming privileges at the hospital. No one has said; until today he has not really wanted to roam, content to sit in his room and listen to talk radio (never the weather reports) or walk the hallways and run the stairs. There was a thin man in brown slacks, always brown, who disappeared every afternoon for a few hours. His bed empty, the smell of cigarettes near the door of his room. In the evening this man sat in the lounge in a whirl of smoke, as if he were a magician, cigarettes overflowing two ashtrays, sometimes one-and-a-half cigarettes in his mouth at once. Mr. Hellerman pretended to do nothing across from the man, counting the number of cigarettes the man smoked down to the nub, cleaning under his fingernails with a flat wooden toothpick, waiting for the man, or maybe himself, to disappear in a smoke cloud.

That summer, the family had attended a performance at the high school auditorium: a man in a white shirt and pants put his hand to his forehead and saw the future. Does someone own a calf with three horns? Herman Voss stood up. Don't take the vacation, the man said. Herman nodded, as if he came to town every evening and sat in that collapsible auditorium chair waiting on advice --Where were you going on that vacation, Herman? --nowheres --well don't go there. Later the man hypnotized Mr. Schaefer, his daughter's math teacher, and got him to squat on stage and buck like a chicken to the roaring of his students and his students' parents. On the drive home Mr. Hellerman pondered an alternative future.

--Wouldn't mind making my living like that guy, and put a hand to his forehead, worrying did he turn the lights out in the chicken shed before he left and would Holstein 317 deliver her calf tonight.

--You'd be good at magic, Dad. The children agreed. They'd seen him make calves appear out of the loins of cows, make swollen teats deflate.

In the blur outside the window in the stairwell a shape appears. A deer, no, a fawn. Out of the ditch onto the strip of frozen lawn around the back of the hospital, stumbling like a drunkard on the ice, making Mr. Hellerman cringe. Crazy. What was a doe doing getting knocked up at the end of spring? Wouldn't be enough foliage, fawn would starve.

Mr. Hellerman presses his forehead against the glass and, shutting one eye, focuses the animal in his scope, tracks its movement along the ditch, and then down to the wooded gully.

Bernard, his father, had tied the fawn to a bale of hay in the calf pen outside the barn. Lawrence stood in the shadow of the barn looking out at the fawn in the bright sunlight, its eyes like black marbles staring at him. It was the first time he'd seen a live deer up close. He was nine years old. When he was eight, his father had taken him hunting in the woods north of their farm; Lawrence carried a rifle and a knapsack of butter sandwiches and beef jerky his father had made. The rifle was heavy and sometimes he had to drag the butt in the snow and mud. His father shot a buck and Lawrence helped him lug it out of the woods to their truck; he clutched the hoof to his chest and heaved, but then his father told him to carry the head. Both hands under its chin and then just grasping at the rubbery jowls, blood trickling from the deer's nostrils onto his hands and jacket. The hide smelled like his grandfather's horsehair chair.

This small deer in the pen gave off a different smell, rank like spoiled cheese. Bernard spat in the hay and laughed. --Pet him, and pushed Lawrence forward with his boot. Lawrence stepped onto the hay and the fawn began backing into the fence, kicking out its front legs. Its teeth were white and tiny, like pieces of glass, and small clear bubbles clung to its black lips. Later they would guess the deer had rabies. --Show him who's boss. Lawrence frozen about a foot in front of the deer, his shoulders came up to its haunches. What was expected of him? Was he supposed to kill it? Suddenly, he lunged forward, threw himself at the deer, hugging its chest and wrestling it to the hay as the deer kicked and bucked. Lawrence wouldn't let go. Bernard banged a shovel on the deer's head at the same time that a hoof caught Lawrence in the groin and a terrible, black pain shot up through the middle of him; the pain was like a too-loud alarm ringing through his buttock, up into his abdomen, clanging in his skull. The pain did not surprise Lawrence at all; he recognized the sound as if the alarm had been there since he was born and even before that and the deer had just set it off.

Bernard smashed the deer's head until the fur and flesh scraped away from the skull and one eye popped out of its bloody cavity. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

I’ve put together a few questions that might trigger some discussion of the book—the best thing about questions—no right or wrong answers if they spark conversation!

1. Nora from “Country Girls” straddles the cusp of love and obsession—is there a difference? What do you think the difference is between love, passion and obsession? Is she foolish or heroic?

2. Are the adults in these stories, such as Nora’s parents and aunt or Theresa’s sister and parents, foolish and neglectful? Or do you see them as just overwhelmed and courageously following their desires?

3. Girls like Nora and Theresa and Ruthie Hinnencamp run a bit wild behind the scenes of the adults’ foggy fatigue, living secret lives. Why do you think these girls make the choices they make? What do they want more than anything? What do they think they want?

4. Ruthie Hinnencamp chooses to marry John—is this a tragedy or do you think she’s just choosing the life she wants, and yes, it’s not perfect, but she’ll survive and have a good enough life?

5. Do you think girls and women now make better choices for themselves than girls and women growing up in the 1960s and 70s? How is it different for a girl to grow up in rural versus urban America today?—is this changing?

6. A lot of people toss the whole Midwest into stereotype—do the characters in Heavier Than Air, some still living in small towns and some now in cities, offer something new? What surprises you about them, if anything?

7. Mr. Hellerman discovers something that seems to keep him alive—as many of the other people in Heavier Than Air thrive in unexpected ways. What’s keeping them alive despite setbacks and disappointments? What keeps you alive?

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