Q Road by Bonnie Jo. Campbell Page A

insisted he take another and invited him inside.
    When Steve had been inspecting the plate glass picture window she wanted to replace, he noticed that April May was a strong woman. Though she must have been seventy, her long arms were muscular and veined. Together they decided that a bay window would work well exactly where she wanted it. Steve made her the best deal he could—he worked for a straight 40 percent above installation and materials cost, and the pleasure he got from giving his neighbor a good deal outweighed the pleasure he would have gotten from a bit more money. Steve felt there was something cocoonlike about April May, as though she were going to burst open and emerge as a much younger woman, or else she might wither suddenly from a cancer that nobody knew was growing inside her.

6

    AFTER JOHNNY HARLAND WAS SHOT AND SECRETLY BURIED , the skunk stench of Margo’s second-to-last kill hung in the air around the
Glutton
for a week. During this time Rachel kept her distance from the empty boat, except to get salve for her torn hands and for the wound near her armpit. She regretted pushing so hard about her father, and she didn’t know what to do with the information she’d extracted at such a high price. When Milton offered her a job helping with his garden in those first few days, Rachel was grateful for the distraction as much as for the money; and from Milton she learned about another neighborhood tragedy. Beef prices had been falling steadily for the last few years, Milton said, and his family had no longer been able to compete with the big western feed lots. Milton’s parents had found themselves unable to pay summer taxes in July, and rather than going further into debt, they’d decided to sell.
    Rachel didn’t tell Milton that July was also when Johnny startedcoming around; or that July was when her mother began skinning possums, even though nobody wanted a possum skin—when the skin man came up the river he wouldn’t pay her even a quarter for them. Now Rachel learned that just as Margo’s decline culminated in her shooting Johnny, the Taylor family’s problems resulted in their butchering most of their remaining cattle and selling the bulk of their property to a company that would put in a golf course.
    And just as Rachel found herself alone with a ramshackle boat (really an old camping trailer riveted to an iron hull), the Taylors’ youngest and most peculiar son, Milton, aged thirty, was left with three acres on the corner where Queer Road crossed the Kalamazoo River. The river curved to border the land on the south and west, and the property included his family’s vegetable garden and their oldest cow barn. Milton’s parents had originally planned to move just a few miles down the road so his mother could continue to garden, but they changed their minds and moved to Florida instead, to a town not far from George Harland’s parents. It was as though, once losing their grip on the land, they were spun off by centrifugal force toward the edge of the continent.
    Rachel wasn’t sure what she’d learned from her mother’s decline, but observing the transfer of the Taylors’ land taught her that a person could buy somebody else’s property and suddenly hundreds of acres of grazing land became a golf course. Rachel had lost not only her mother this autumn, but also the morel mushrooms near the Taylors’ dead elms, and the Black Angus and red Hereford cattle munching only a few hundred yards from the
Glutton.
Still, she could not help but be impressed with the power wielded by a human being who owned a parcel of the planet and could alter that parcel at will, or else will it to stay the same. A person who owned land could make sure she would always have a place, no matter what stupid, brutal thing her mother or anybody else might do. In October, the golf course people would show up with earthmoving equipment. They would kill the