Rough Justice Page 4

  ‘Just like a country preacher,’ she said. ‘Show up at supper time.’

  ‘I already ate,’ he told her.

  ‘I don’t see you in ten years and you start out by lying to me? Park up by the house.’

  He did as he was told. When he got out the dog came at him barking again.

  ‘He’s all talk,’ Frances said, and sure enough the dog settled down as it reached Carl. He put his hand out and it came to him at once, its whole rear quarters wagging promiscuously. As Carl patted the animal, it seemed to him that Frances was regarding him as she always had, with the slightest disdain. He couldn’t be certain; she was a hard one to read and nothing at all like her sister. Frances had always played her cards close to her chest while Suzy had been all primary process; a blind man could see what was on her mind.

  ‘Well,’ Frances said, ‘you look OK … for an old man. Don’t tell me you’re looking after yourself after all these years.’

  ‘You already warned me against lying.’

  She smiled at that, removing the hat and shaking her hair loose. She was still beautiful, there was no question about that. Carl would have been surprised to discover otherwise. Her dark brown hair was thick and unruly, her skin tanned and smooth. She would be forty-four or forty-five now, a few years younger than Suzy. She indicated the flowers, which were tiny and purple.

  ‘I have to put these in water,’ she said. ‘Then I could use a beer. How about it?’

  ‘I just left Archer’s.’

  ‘I didn’t ask you where you just left. I asked you if you wanted a beer. Come around back.’

  Following her, Carl spotted a man hoeing a row of cabbages in a field off the end of the barn. He was tall and thin, wearing a wide-brimmed hat. He looked up from his hoeing and watched Carl for a moment from the distance.

  ‘That’s Perry,’ Frances said as she walked. ‘He works for me. I call him the hired man when I’m feeling John Steinbecky. You’ll meet him at dinner.’

  ‘I’m not staying for dinner.’

  ‘Chrissakes. You drive out here just to leave?’

  She led him to a flagstone patio which ran along the rear wall of the original house. There were mismatched chairs and a round wooden table of scarred pine. A barbeque constructed from a steel drum was on the grass just off the flagstones.

  ‘Sit,’ Frances said, and she went into the house.

  Carl sat in one of the chairs and looked out over the farm. It appeared the entire acreage had been planted in garden vegetables. Corn, tomatoes, cauliflower. Grapes along the fence row to the north, raspberries and strawberries on the south side of the grape vines. There were forty or fifty chickens scratching around in a large pen behind the old barn, and a red rooster standing one-legged on a manure pile, overseeing the brood.

  The barn looked the same as it had more than thirty years earlier, when Carl used to wait there for Suzy, who was doing her own waiting in the house, marking time for her father to stumble up to bed after drinking a half bottle or so of rye. It would be eleven o’clock, sometimes midnight, when Suzy would enter the dark barn carrying the red wool Hudson’s Bay blanket. They would make love in the hay, or sometimes escape down the gravel road to where Carl’s Harley was parked, far enough away that John Rourke – drunk or sober – couldn’t hear the bark of the mufflers. Summer nights they would ride to Fiddlers Bay, spread the blanket on the cool sand, fuck like horny teenagers, which is exactly what they were. How could that have been over thirty years ago?

  Frances came back, carrying the flowers in water and two bottles of beer, a brand Carl had never seen. She gave one to him and had a long drink from the other, then set it on the table while she went over and lit the charcoal in the steel drum. She fanned the flames until she was satisfied with the effort, then returned and sat down.

  ‘I’ve got some chicken marinating,’ she said. ‘I’ll treat you to a River Valley Farm meal.’

  ‘Rufus Canfield told me about you and this place,’ Carl said.

  ‘I’m sure he was mocking me,’ she said. ‘Man lives on rye and coke and deep fried chicken wings. I suppose he told you he’s a newspaperman these days.’

  Carl nodded and had a drink. The beer was peaty and sharp. ‘He doesn’t seem real happy about it.’

  ‘I would think not, with newspapers going the way of the dodo.’

  Carl gestured toward their surroundings. ‘I thought that was true about small farms too. But here you are. I thought you loved Chicago. Shit, you even became a Cubs fan, didn’t you?’

  ‘I did like Chicago. I still do.’ She took a drink. ‘But life is a crooked road, Carl. Dad died in 2005, and then mom got sick about a year later. Ovarian cancer. It took her a long time to die. I came home to take care of her. While she was dying – and I guess this is typical – while she was dying, she decided she wanted all she could get out of living. That first spring she bought a bunch of organic seeds and planted them in her little garden by the shed. And things just took off from there.’

  ‘When did she die?’

  ‘May fifteenth, 2008,’ Frances said. ‘Planting season. By that time, we were into it whole hog. I never thought for a minute I would ever be a farmer. Then again, this isn’t my father’s farm anymore, Carl. This is a different animal.’ She smiled at him. ‘You remember my father, don’t you?’

  ‘The guy that wanted to shoot me?’ Carl asked.

  ‘You knocked up his eighteen-year-old daughter. Were you expecting a warm embrace?’

  ‘You having fun, Frances?’

  ‘Little bit,’ she admitted. ‘My father was big on chemical fertilizers and engineered seeds and all of it. But then my mother – well, it was strange – my mother never really started thinking about the earth until she knew she was about to depart it. And I got caught up in it. Watching your mother die while she is furiously making everything around her live does something to you.’ She tipped the beer back and after drinking she smiled. ‘So here I am, schlepping around in rubber boots and a dirty t-shirt, drinking beer with an ex-convict on the back patio. And I thought being a Cubs fan was hard on my self-esteem.’ She kept smiling until he smiled back.

  ‘Rufus told me you were a cover girl for some fancy magazine,’ he said.

  She scoffed. ‘Me and my John Deere. The tractor looked better than I did. Those people were here all day and ended up using six pictures. Your average twelve-year-old with a cell phone could have done it in five minutes.’

  Carl glanced around, taking in the plush fields teaming with produce, the chickens scratching in the yard. ‘Looks as if you’re doing OK, though.’

  ‘You’d be surprised. We have a website, and we ship stuff all over North America. This is one of these things … not only does it make good sense health-wise, but it’s extremely fashionable these days to boot. There’s a pop singer – Nikki something, flavor of the month – well, she mentioned in an interview last year that she buys berries from us for the organic smoothies she drinks on tour. We got thousands of hits because of that one interview. We put her quote on the website and our online sales went crazy. Teenagers, right?’ She laughed. ‘Of course, six months later Nikki went into rehab. We didn’t post that.’

  ‘So you’re making money and you’re saving the planet,’ Carl said. ‘I remember you wearing mink coats and dating millionaires.’

  ‘I never owned a mink coat in my life.’ Frances stood and walked over to check the coals in the drum. Carl looked at her legs as she bent at the waist to blow on the embers. When she turned, she caught him. ‘I don’t want to burst your bubble, but I don’t believe for a nanosecond that I’m saving anything. The people who are destroying the planet are too damn big and their actions just too fucking rampant for me and my free range chickens to take them on. All I can do is keep my own little corner clean. I’m no idealist, Carl.’

  She sat down again. ‘You know the ironic part about this business? It turns out that the way things were done a hundred years ago is the right way. When it comes to
farming, progress is the problem, not the solution. Animals are supposed to eat grass, not corn. Manure sustains the soil, not chemicals. And ugly tomatoes taste better than the pretty ones from the hothouse, and they’re better for you.’

  Perry, the hired hand, was approaching now, trudging slowly across the expanse of lawn between the house and barn. Carl watched the mopey approach. He was around forty and he wore overalls and heavy black work boots. He’d removed the straw hat and was carrying it in his hand.

  ‘So he’s the field hand,’ Carl said. ‘What else?’

  ‘You’re a nosy bastard for somebody who hasn’t been around for ten years,’ Frances said. ‘That’s all he is. He’s a sweet soul but a good sneeze would blow him off his moorings. I wouldn’t inflict myself on a guy that sweet.’

  ‘What about the guy in the Land Rover?’ Carl asked.

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘He damn near ran me off the road. Looked as if he was just leaving here. What did you do to rattle him, Frances?’

  She smiled. ‘Maybe he was asking personal questions that were none of his business.’

  Carl laughed. ‘Hey, I can take a hint. Besides, I thought you were married.’

  ‘I was. For about eight seconds. A real estate agent in Chicago who couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to spend my life having lunch with the girls.’

  ‘You had to get married to figure that out?’

  ‘I’m not too bright, I guess.’

  ‘That’s not the Frances I remember,’ Carl said.

  ‘What about you?’ she asked. ‘You ever get married again? You were so good at it the first time.’

  Carl smiled and shook his head. He indicated Perry. ‘The two of you run the whole show?’

  ‘No. I’ve got a full-time and a part-time doing the online orders. Grace and Joanne. That’s the new building over there. Perry and I and Mike run the farm. But Mikey’s on his way out. He missed the market run this morning for the second time in a month. He doesn’t know it yet but he’s gone. I’d call him on the phone but I’m looking forward to telling the little prick to his face when he shows for work Monday morning.’

  ‘Now that’s the Frances I remember.’

  They ate on the patio. Frances pressed Carl into service to grill the chicken while she went into the house and put together a salad of greens and onions and tomatoes. She opened a bottle of red wine.

  As they ate, they talked mostly about the farm and the marketing of everything. Perry was openly resentful of Carl’s presence, and he took his meal in near complete silence, speaking only when asked a direct question. After reluctantly shaking hands, he never looked at Carl. He was bony and angular but he had a voracious appetite and used every means available to stuff food into his mouth, like a man in a pie-eating contest.

  It was growing dark when they finished eating. Perry declined dessert and said he would be going. He told Frances he’d see her in the morning, then walked off into the night.

  ‘He live in the forest?’ Carl asked.

  ‘He rents a little house, down the road about a mile. He enjoys the walk.’

  ‘I don’t think he enjoyed the company,’ Carl said.

  ‘He gets like that when I have visitors. Male visitors.’

  ‘Like the bad driver in the Land Rover?’

  ‘I thought we’d established that that was none of your fucking business.’ She smiled.

  They had dessert and then Frances brought a bottle of brandy out on the patio. They sat where they’d sat earlier. The night air had cooled and at some point Frances had changed into jeans and a v-neck sweater.

  Carl had left Dundurn before dawn. With the beer and the meal, and now the brandy, he was growing tired. It felt good to be sitting on the patio, though, with this woman he’d always liked, but who had always been wary of him. There was something different about her now. She’d had a restlessness about her that Carl remembered, and that restlessness seemed to be gone. She was more comfortable now, not so much with herself – she’d always been that – but with everything around her. Maybe she realized that the place she’d avoided all those years was actually where she wanted to be. It had probably surprised the hell out of her. It would surprise the hell out of Carl.

  ‘Tell me about Kate,’ he said.

  ‘I wondered when we’d get to that.’ She raised the brandy snifter to her nose, inhaled as she considered what she would say. ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Shit, I don’t know. What does she do?’

  ‘She has a day job, working for an insurance company. Office work. Weekends, she tends bar at a place called Shoeless Joe’s. Sports bar, it’s got outdoor volleyball, that kind of stuff. She’s a jock. Lord knows where that came from. Not from my side of the family, and you weren’t an athlete, you were a juvenile delinquent.’

  ‘So you keep telling me.’

  Frances shrugged. ‘She beat the odds, I think. I mean, it took her a long time to get it together but she’s doing all right. She really knows who she is, and I know that sounds like New Age bullshit, but it’s not. Look where she came from. She had Suzy for a mother. She had you for a father. There’s two strikes right there.’

  ‘Don’t pull any punches, Frances,’ Carl said.

  She half smiled and took a drink of the brandy, holding it in her mouth for a time before swallowing. ‘You two were a disaster together. Suzy was an addict in waiting from the day she was born. She used to eat sugar by the spoonful when she was four years old. And you were a serial hound dog. How long were you faithful to my sister after you two got married?’

  ‘We need to talk about that?’

  ‘You’re right,’ Frances said. ‘I don’t want to know.’

  ‘I did want Kate to come live with me,’ he said then. ‘After Suzy died, I tried to get her to come live with me.’

  ‘Christ, she didn’t even know you! She’s eight years old, her mother overdoses and she’s supposed to go live with a stranger?’

  ‘I was still her father. That didn’t count for anything?’

  ‘She was better off here, with my parents. And you damn well know it.’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Yup,’ Frances repeated. ‘Don’t give me that cowpoke attitude. Tell me what you want from her now.’

  ‘Nothing,’ Carl said.

  ‘But you intend to see her?’

  ‘I’d like to.’

  ‘You figure after all this time she’s going to be any good at the father–daughter thing?’

  ‘You think I am?’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ she said. ‘But for what it’s worth, I’m glad you’re here. You’ve scored some brownie points with me, showing up. Better late than never. And, just so you know, I don’t believe you’re harboring any ulterior motives. You were never like that, even when you were fucking up in spectacular fashion.’

  ‘I appreciate that. Part of it, anyway.’

  ‘You should.’ Frances stood up. ‘You can sleep in the spare room tonight. You’ve had too much to drink to be driving.’

  Carl knew that she was right. There was a time when he would’ve argued the point. No, there was a time when he would just have left.

  ‘You going to the courthouse?’ Frances asked.

  ‘I should talk to her first,’ Carl said. ‘I want to.’

  ‘Wanting to is reason enough to go,’ Frances said.

  ‘All right.’

  He fell asleep with the brandy still in his hand. Frances took it from him and then she cleaned up, carrying the dishes inside and loading the dishwasher. When she went back out to the patio the air had grown suddenly cooler. She pulled her chair close to the still warm barbeque and looked at the wild flowers on the table. She’d put them in an antique milk bottle, with Talbotville Dairy etched in the glass, that she’d found a couple years earlier on a dusty beam in the old barn. Martin had picked the flowers for her, down by the river flats, shortly before he’d climbed into his Land Rover and left for the airport.

  She�
�d been seeing him for several months, after he’d shown up the previous fall with the magazine people to take pictures of both Frances and the farm for the profile. He worked free-lance and, after returning the following week to offer Frances some prints that the magazine wasn’t going to use, he had asked her to a Sting concert. Frances, aware that she hadn’t been on anything resembling a date in months, had accepted, even though she wasn’t a fan of the singer. That opinion didn’t change over the course of the evening but she and Martin started seeing quite a lot of each other afterwards.

  He was a few years younger than Frances and very good-looking – almost too good-looking, she’d told herself early on, before she got to the point that she no longer noticed it. It was a strange thing about humans, she thought: first attractions were almost always based on physical appearances, which in time became the least important element of a relationship. Martin favored a slightly bohemian look: he wore his hair past his collar and had a full beard, giving him a rugged mien befitting his reputation as a man who’d photographed African plains and Swiss peaks and Australian deserts. In real life he was not the rugged type, not at all. He was soft-spoken and introspective and prone to quoting century-old poets Frances had never heard of.

  They got along quite well, and even traveled together, once to Barcelona for a photography exhibit and once to New Mexico, for fun. Martin was educated in a good many disciplines, which drew Frances to him while at the same time reminding her that she no longer had a wide range of interests, unless one was to consider the many different ways to grow a tomato to be a renaissance art form. Frances did not.

  The sex was good. As she might have expected of a man with an artistic bent, Martin was gentle and inventive, not to mention flexible and able, and he did not, as some men did these days, concern himself much with the subject of who finished first.

  In spite of all that, his leaving today had been a little tense. He was off to South America on an assignment, actually two different assignments, and he’d been quite certain that Frances would be anxious to tag along, or at the very least to join him in Peru or Chile for a week or two. She’d been explaining to him for a month or more now that she couldn’t do that but it hadn’t been until today that he seemed to get the message, after assuring her over and over that ‘Perry could handle things at the farm’. It was an absurd suggestion and one that Frances found somewhat patronizing. Why was his work more important than hers? Sensing her aggravation, he had climbed down the river bank and picked the flowers as an apology of sorts, she guessed. She had kissed him before he left, but it hadn’t been much of a kiss. She was certain that he was unhappy with her, but he was, in general, passive in the face of any conflict. Maybe too passive, she thought. Once, in a restaurant in Spain, a waiter had brought him a different entrée from the one he’d ordered. Rather than correct the man, Martin had eaten the meal. Frances, on the other hand, was prone to speaking her mind, a trait that didn’t always serve her well.