Q Road Read Free Page B

built just for them.
    In truth she hadn’t paid much attention to the barn she drove past every day, and so the barn in her imagination was freshly painted, not rotted around the foundation, and did not lean as a result of 135 years of winds from the north and west.
    A half mile to the south, meanwhile, inside the barn under discussion, April May Rathburn was crouching, filling a bushel basket with loose straw. When she felt her lower back muscles stretch too far, she tipped forward onto her knees and remained perfectly still. Shortly she heard a vehicle with a loud exhaust rattle up from the field road and stop. Probably as a result of her awkward position, her right foot began to throb.
    â€œI wouldn’t have taken you for a thief,” a man’s voice said.
    April May watched George Harland approach the barn’s entrance. “Help me up, will you?” she said.
    When George reached out, she used his arm to bring herself up nearly as tall as him—he was just over six feet. He picked up the basket of straw for her. “Are you making Halloween displays already?”
    â€œChrist, I must be getting old,” she said. “I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t try to put in a garden this year.”
    â€œYou want me to carry this over for you?”
    â€œI’m fine once I stand up.” April May accepted the wire handles. “Did Rachel bring out pumpkins yet?”
    â€œShe put some out last night,” George said. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
    â€œI’m fine, really.”
    â€œHow’s your husband?”
    â€œLarry’s off for the day visiting his brother.”
    â€œTell him hello when he gets home.”
    April May said so long, and limped outside and across Queer Road to her house. She sat and rested on her porch steps to watch the cardinals, chickadees, and nuthatches at the feeder Larry had built for her, a detailed miniature version of the barn from which she’d just gotten the straw. She and Larry had never farmed, but in the half century she’d lived in Larry’s old family house, she’d seen local farmers go broke and lose their land, and she’d seen others unable to resist the temptation to sell at a good price while they were flush, and she hoped George could hold out, because she couldn’t imagine him as anything other than a farmer. His piece-of-shit brother, Johnny, had been a different story altogether.
    April May took off her shoe and sock to check whether maybe a bee had stung her, but she saw only her old tornado scars. Perhaps it was the sharp pain in her foot or the dullness of the sky that made the bird feeder and the barn seem so bright this morning. In fact, every object in her field of vision seemed bright and a little blurry around its edges. She massaged her foot and wondered if something was going to happen today. Something good or bad, she didn’t care—she’d welcome any excitement.
    There have been those days in Greenland Township, as anywhere, that have changed the course of local history, days that have so clearly determined the future that afterward it was hard to believe the future had ever been uncertain, that arrows had ever pointed in other directions. None of the Queer Road neighbors, nor George Harland himself—owner of more than a square mile of the earth’s surface, bridegroom of a girl one-third his age—could know whether today would be one of those days. A length of board was missing at the back of the barn, and through that space, George watched three of the cattle in the barnyard stamp their feet and bellow impatiently. The fourth, a white-faced Hereford steer, drankcalmly from the creek, against the backdrop of woods separating George’s property from the golf course. When it finished drinking, the steer turned and looked up at George in a way that suggested it knew something he didn’t.
    George fed the cattle by pushing a broken bale of hay