Eloise took them to see the Golden Gate Bridge, which they drove over one way, and then they turned around and drove back over it the other way. They went to Chinatown in San Francisco. Granny Elizabeth wanted to buy a doll, and she had the money, but Eloise insisted on bargaining for it, and then, when the price got down to two dollars, Granny Elizabeth walked right up to the woman and paid her four dollars anyway. The night before they went home, they had dinner in a restaurant where, in her show-offy way, Rosa ate only vegetables. They had ice cream for dessert. Henry told a story about his adviser, who had divorced his wife because she kept mispronouncing the word “album.” She could not stop herself from saying “alblum.” Henry said, “He corrected her, but she was really stubborn.”
“Why don’t you go digging in Mexico or somewhere?” said Rosa. “New Mexico. There’s plenty of interesting archeological stuff there.”
“There is.” Henry’s voice was sharp. “But I didn’t start with that culture. I started with Indo-European, and it’s too late to change now.” His lips snapped shut, and Aunt Eloise looked from him to Rosa. Rosa shrugged. It was a careful shrug — she knew Henry was looking at her, and she wanted him to understand that, whatever he did, she, Rosa didn’t care.
“How many languages do you speak, Henry?” said Granny Elizabeth, oblivious.
“English. German. I can read French and Italian. If you can read Italian, you can work out Spanish. I can read Latin, Middle English, Old English. There aren’t many texts, but I can make it through the Gothic version of the Bible. I’m taking Greek this semester.” Henry’s voice rose.
Rosa turned her head slowly, toward him, and then away from him, across the room. Aunt Eloise took another sip of her wine. Claire saw then that she and Rosa did have something in common, and that it was keeping secrets. Claire’s secrets might be about the family life of pigs, but Rosa’s were more interesting, and maybe sadder than that.
Granny Elizabeth wiped her mouth and said, “Well, I am sorry to go home! And the penny jar is empty, upside down, drained dry, but this trip was worth it!”
“What’s next?” said Henry. “You should go to England, Gran.” He dragged his gaze away from Rosa.
“I think Hawaii!” said Granny Elizabeth.
—
WHEN JOE CAME IN from cultivating the field that ran behind the house, the first thing he did was splash water on his face at the outdoor sink. Then he kicked off his boots. It was hot and he was thirsty, and although later he remembered that the door was ajar, at the time he just closed it behind him. He was hungry. He shouted for Lois, but there was no answer, and then he glanced out the kitchen window and saw that the car was gone. Minnie, of course, was at the high school, administering something or other — even in the summer she was gone most of the day. He opened the refrigerator. The plate of leftover ribs, right next to a dish a strawberries, had a little note—“Took Jesse to his six-month checkup. Annie is with your mother. Eat them all, Lois.”
He did eat them all. They were cold and delicious. He ate them standing by the kitchen counter, and with the strawberries, he did a thing slightly frowned upon, at least by his mother — he dipped each one into the sugar bowl before sucking it off the stem. Then he scraped and rinsed the plates, washed his hands, and went back out. He had at least four more hours, he thought, but he didn’t mind cultivating. It was precise work; he liked seeing the weeds uprooted and covered by the soil, but the rows of corn plants still standing — small, neat sown seams.
Sometime later, he saw Lois waving to him. He finished his row, made his turn, tried to ignore her. He hated turning the tractor off and on unless he had to. She went inside. He continued his task, but he watched, promising himself that if she came out and waved again, he would go see what she wanted. She didn’t come out. Joe finished the field, once in a while glancing toward the house. Nothing.
On the porch, Joe heard Minnie say, “Do we call the sheriff?”
Through the screen, Joe said, “What about?”
Minnie’s face turned toward him, blanched but blank. She said, “My father is at the bottom of the basement stairs.”
Joe didn’t understand at first, then, when he registered how pale and how angry Minnie looked, it finally clicked. “Is he dead?”
Lois said, “He’s really cold. As though he’s been down there a long time. I saw him when I opened the door to go down for ajar of peaches. What was that, an hour ago.” Her voice was flat, matter-of-fact.
Joe peered down the stairwell. There wasn’t much light, but he could see the old man staring upward, his neck twisted to the right and backward. His hands were above his head, as if he had been reaching for something on his way down. He was wearing a dirty shirt with long sleeves, and overalls.
Sheriff Dee arrived just then with his deputy. After they spent maybe fifteen minutes in the cellar, they sat everyone at the kitchen table for the questions, which Sheriff Dee asked as if he were reading them from a piece of paper, though he wasn’t. Lois bounced Jesse on her knee. Minnie looked half upset, half angry, but Lois looked blank. The deputy, Carson, wrote everything down. Joe told about the back door being ajar when he came in the first time. Lois told about noticing a car by the side of the road when she went into town, but she didn’t recognize it, it was partly in the ditch, there was no one in it — she’d thought maybe someone had run out of gas. They never used the front door, but, no, neither of the doors was locked. No one locked their doors around here. And what had they all been doing today? Rosanna had been at her house with Annie, Minnie had been at school, Joe had been out cultivating the corn, Lois had been away for about four hours, taking Jesse for a checkup, then shopping, mailing some letters, visiting with Dave Crest at the store, and browsing at the Denby library. Witnesses? Joe didn’t say anything at first; then: “I guess my only witness is the cultivated field.”
The deputy nodded, but Sheriff Dee remained serious and still.
Rosanna said that, yes, Roland Frederick had appeared — when was that? — two years ago now, came and went, said he was working in Omaha, seemed like he’d been drinking steadily for eight years, hardly coherent, but, no, he hadn’t seemed threatening, exactly, and he’d gone away as quickly as he came. She had told Minnie about it. Joe’s head snapped toward Minnie; then, under the table, he took Lois’s hand.
Minnie said, “I thought I mentioned it to you, Lois.” She cleared her throat.
Once they had been “questioned,” Joe and Minnie sat there while Sheriff Dee and Deputy Carson — oh, Seth, his name was, Rodney’s kid — walked around the house, looking at this and that, going out on both of the porches, then coming in, staring at the floor, checking doorknobs. They went back down into the cellar, but this time only stayed for under five minutes. It was now after six. Sheriff Dee went to the phone and called the undertaker. Lois asked if they were free to go over to Rosanna’s for the rest of the evening, and that’s where Minnie, Lois, Jesse, Rosanna, and Annie did go, taking Poppy along. But Joe stayed, sitting quietly at the table, making sure that Nat sat next to his leg while the undertaker and his two assistants carried the shrouded corpse up the stairs, through the kitchen, and out the front door. Nat growled once or twice, but he knew better than to bark. Joe gazed at him, wondering what he knew — he would not have been in the house, but he might have seen something. Joe felt ashamed and somehow suspected, though he didn’t know why or of what. Maybe because he really was an interloper in the Frederick house? Maybe because at last the farm was his?
—
DR. KATZ SAID, “How about dreams?”
Andy was lying on his couch, though it was more like a daybed. He was behind her. This was her thirty-second appointment. She had started in the summer, after reading about how H-bombs had potential as usable conventional weapons. She realized that she could not get the word “fallout” out of her mind — it was planted in there like a black pea that sometimes sprouted and sometimes did not — but Dr. Katz didn’t seem interested or impressed by her worries. He said he wanted something “deeper.” She was up to five days a week now, as of September 1, when they both returned from their August vacations. It had been fifteen dollars a session, but since she was seeing him every morning, like a regular job, he was doing it for $12.50. Frank didn’t mind. This year he stood to earn fifty thousand dollars at Grumman, and that did not include their investments in what they called their “Uncle Jens Fund,” named after that strange great-great-uncle of hers who had left all his money to be divided up among his descendants, but only after those who were living when he was still alive had themselves died — a grouchy, Nordic legacy that Andy hadn’t yet mentioned to Dr. Katz. She said, “Not much. Well, one sticks in my mind.”