A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [5]
“I’d like some now,” I said. “Would you rather I ate here with you, so we could talk about our day, or should I take the tray out to the porch, where there is peace and quiet?”
“Here,” Emma said. “Could I please have something to eat?”
“Certainly.” I smiled a tight, close-lipped smile at my reformed daughter. Welcome back, I wanted to say. We will tread so carefully, so lightly, so you will not go off again.
“Tell me,” she said, “exactly what the plan is.”
The farm is surrounded by housing tracts now. Even so, on our swatch of land, looking across the rye, I occasionally had the feeling that all of the wide sky could be seen from our porch. Because of poor drainage and the whim of two stubborn town fathers, the land we owned was locked into agricultural zoning for time immemorial, or until money or new blood could forcibly change the rules. When we bought the farm it was the cheapest four hundred acres we could find. Although there were problems with standing water and rotting outbuildings there was the allure of varied topography, of marsh and woods and gentle hills. After we’d moved, every parcel around us fell prey to what has long been heralded as progress. From our sanctuary of woods and oats we looked out to garage doors painted with iridescent geese flying off to a better land, and black satellite dishes standing like lunar ornamental shrubs. When we walked to a place Howard called “the Highest Point on the Earth” we could see in the distance the square steel-and-glass complex with its black windows where the greyhounds race. I’ve never been, but I think of it as a silent sport, the menacing dogs galloping noiselessly around and around the track, the spectators standing up to shout and nothing coming from their mouths.
We were, even under normal circumstances, outsiders, far more than the city dwellers who came to the subdivisions for the country life. First of all, it was common knowledge in Prairie Center—the kind of knowledge that one acquires by the simple act of respiration—that we had no business moving into a place that had been in the Earl family for three generations. After Maynard Earl died there was no relation who was willing to carry on the dairy tradition. Although ours was not Howard’s exact dream farm, it was four hundred acres for the price of two, had a solid house with a dry basement and three good floors, and it wasn’t too far away from an elementary school. Not least of all, the barn was in good repair, with a new roof and recent structural improvements. After the building boom he spent a fair amount of energy going out into the night, making blinders with his hands at each side of his head, and finding a place where he could look and see the dark. “I need to know there’s a patch of wild space,” he said once.
I can think of any number of reasons why people feared us. The wheels were set in motion that first week when Lloyd, an old friend of Howard’s, came rattling into town in a silver-green Thunderbird. One side of his car had been knocked out and replaced with a kitchen door. We didn’t stop to think that a person of African descent in their midst might frighten and then enrage the natives of Prairie Junction. And Lloyd wasn’t someone whom we could very well hide or disguise. His brown skin gleamed and his head was covered with long, dirty-looking dreadlocks. He loped instead of walked, as if the day would wait for him to catch up with it. He could fix anything, and did that summer, making miracles from rusty old parts that had no memory of their purpose. True Midwesterners, our new neighbors were polite about their revulsion. They didn’t burn our lawn or egg our house. Lloyd stayed with us for two months, during which time no one spoke to us, or offered a friendly word, or welcomed us with a potted plant or a casserole. It was as if we didn’t exist, not only that first summer, but for years after. I noticed the little things, how the bank tellers were falling over each other with their “Have a nice day,” and then I