Driftless by David Rhodes Page B

grease scrolling out of the nozzle’s end like a red transparent worm, and went to her.
    “What’s the matter?”
    “Grahm, they have a second set of books. There was a discrepancy in the shipping sheets. When I reported it to my supervisor, I was told I could find the correction in the main building in Madison. I drove there this afternoon. There’s a second set of records in back of the main office. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to see them. I don’t know—I’m just an assistant bookkeeper—but there’s a whole wall of file cabinets.”
    Grahm stared mutely forward.
    “I told my supervisor, but he told me not to worry about it. He said it only concerned upper management and they had a different accounting system.”
    “What does this mean?” Grahm asked, feeling much like he had when he’d learned Cora was pregnant, both times. There seemed to be nothing for him to do. Something was happening that greatly concerned him but he had no way to assure that everything would turn out all right, and this somehow seemed like a personal failing.
    “Maybe there’s another explanation. Maybe it’s just a mistake.”
    “It’s no mistake, Grahm. With one hand they steal from us farmers and with the other they lie to the government. They’re breaking the law and it’s not right.”
    Cora decided to gather enough information to prove her suspicions. The next evening she brought home two Xeroxed spreadsheets, folded and tucked into her purse. And she continued collecting evidence.
    She also began having difficulty sleeping, migraines, and finally a doctor prescribed pills. But even then she often could not sleep.
    Grahm and Cora’s intimacy dried up like attic furniture.
    Grahm felt increasingly frustrated. Voices in his mind told him to do something, but he had no ideas. Like most of his neighbors he had devoted his life to farming. He liked farming. All he wanted to do was farm. Farmers had a long, proud history of avoiding social,
     economic, and political issues. They enjoyed nature, work, and solitude, and they eschewed everything that might be considered grist for the nightly news.
    But after a lifetime of successfully defending his private life from the baneful affairs of the world, his wife had rolled a pestilential army of scandalous problems through the front gate. And now they were in his house, in a cardboard box beneath their bed.
    One afternoon he drove his pickup to July Montgomery’s small farm, several miles away. Grahm didn’t remember exactly when Montgomery had moved into the area. He’d arrived unnoticed and blended in so well with his surroundings that it seemed he’d always lived in the old brick house, taking over a farm that had been for sale for a long time. Tim Pikes, the drunkard and former owner, had lost the battle against bank payments when Grahm was a small child. Most of the land had been sold off, and the remainder with the buildings—only a hundred acres—didn’t seem like enough for a viable farm, but apparently it was for July.
    His place was easy to identify, with MONTGOMERY JERSEY FARM painted in large white letters across the upper front of the red barn. Each word sat on its own board, and the third board had recently come loose on the “m” end and now hung perpendicular to the ground.
    Grahm pulled into the driveway just as the middle-aged man in a checkered shirt came around the side of the barn with a double-hung aluminum ladder. He planted the metal feet and pulled on the rope, hoisting the upper half of the ladder into its uppermost position. When the ladder was fully extended, the highest rung came within a couple feet of the hanging board, twenty feet in the air.
    Grahm got out of his pickup and walked to the barn. “Hello, July,” he said. “Can I help?”
    “Do you have a hammer?”
    “Sorry, no.”
    “Then I guess you can’t help,” said July and headed up the ladder.
    “I can hold the ladder.”
    “Good, you do that,” he said.
    Watching him climb,