She petted the dog beside her. This was her dog — the other three were Cliff's. The dog jumped on her lap and snuggled against her as Annie scratched behind its ears. She said, "He's not dead, Denise. I know he's not dead."
Annie Baxter put her head down on the arm of the swing seat and rocked gently. Heat lightning flashed in the western sky and thunder rolled across the open cornfields, into the town, just ahead of the hard rain. She found herself crying again and kept thinking, We promised to meet again.
Chapter Three
Keith Landry walked through the quiet farmhouse. Distant relatives had looked after the place, and it wasn't in bad shape considering it had been empty for five years.
Keith had called ahead to announce his arrival and had spoken to a woman on a nearby farm that he called Aunt Betty, though she wasn't actually his aunt, but was his mother's second cousin, or something like that. He'd just wanted her to know in case she saw a light in the house, or a strange car, and so forth. Keith had insisted that neither she nor any other ladies go through any bother, but of course that had been like a call to arms — or brooms and mops — and the place was spotless and smelled of pine disinfectant.
Bachelors, Keith reflected, got a lot of breaks from the local womenfolk, who took inordinate pity on men without wives. The goal of these good women in caring for bachelors, Keith suspected, was to demonstrate the advantage of having a wife and helpmate. Unfortunately, the free cleaning, cooking, apple pies, and jams often perpetuated what they sought to cure.
Keith went from room to room, finding everything pretty much as he remembered when he'd seen it last about six years before. He had a sense of the familiar, but, at the same time, the objects seemed surreal, as if he were having a dream about his childhood.
His parents had left behind most of their possessions, perhaps in anticipation of not liking Florida, or perhaps because the furniture, rugs, lamps, wall decorations, and such were as much a part of the house as the oak beams.
Some of the things in the house were nearly two centuries old, Keith knew, having been brought to America from England and Germany, where both sides of his family originated. Aside from a few legitimate antiques and some heirlooms, a good deal of the stuff was just old, and Keith reflected on the frugality, the hardscrabble existence, of a farm family over the centuries. He contrasted this with his friends and colleagues in Washington who contributed heavily to the gross national product. Their salaries, like his, were paid from the public coffers, and Keith, who had never successfully accepted the fact that you don't have to produce anything tangible to get paid, often wondered if too many people in Washington were eating too much of the farmers' corn. But he had dwelled on that many times, and if any of his colleagues thought about it at all, they'd kept it to themselves.
Keith Landry had felt good when he was a soldier, an understandable and honorable profession in Spencer County, but later, when he'd become involved in intelligence work, he began to question his occupation. He often disagreed with national policy, and recently, when he'd been elevated to a position of helping to formulate that policy, he realized that the government worked for itself and perpetuated itself. But he'd known that secret long before he was invited into the inner sanctum of the White House as a staff member of the National Security Council.
Keith stood at the window in the second-floor master bedroom and looked out into the night. A wind had come up and clouds were sailing quickly across the starlit sky. A nearly full moon had risen, casting a blue light on the ripening cornfields. Keith remembered these fields long ago when a drought had been followed by constant rain, and the wheat — they had planted mostly wheat in those days — wasn't ready for harvesting until late July. A bright summer moon had coincided with a dry spell, with a forecast for more rain, and the farmers and their families had harvested until the moon set, about three A.M. The following day was a Sunday, and half the kids were absent from Sunday school, and the ones who showed up slept at their desks. Keith still recalled this shared experience, this communal effort to pull sustenance out of the land, and he felt sorry for urban and suburban kids growing up without a clue as to the relationship between wheatfields and hamburger buns, between corn and cornflakes.
In fact, Keith thought, the further the nation traveled from its agrarian and small-town roots, the less it understood the cycles of nature, the relationships between the land and the people, the law of cause and effect, and ultimately, he reflected, the less we understood our essential selves.
Keith Landry realized the inconsistencies and incongruities of his thinking and his life. He had rejected the idea of becoming a farmer but had not rejected the ideal of farm life; he thrived on the excitement of Washington and foreign cities but was nostalgic for this rural county that had always bored him; he had become disenchanted with his job but was angry about being let go.
He thought he had better resolve these discrepancies, these big gaps between his thoughts and deeds, or he'd become emblematic of the lunatic place he'd just left.
The clouds obscured the moon and stars now, and he was struck by how totally dark and still the countryside was. He could barely see the old ghost of the kitchen garden twenty feet from the house, and beyond that the landscape was black except for the lights of the Muller farmhouse half a mile away.
He turned from the window, went downstairs, and carried his bags up to the second floor. He entered the room he had shared with his brother and threw his luggage on the bed.
The room had oak furniture, pine floors, and white plaster walls. A hooked rug, older than he was, lay on the floorboards. It was any farm boy's room from the last century until recent years when local people had started buying discount store junk.
Before he had left Washington, Keith had filled the Saab with the things he needed and wanted, which turned out to be not so many things after all. There were a few more boxes of odds and ends, mostly sporting gear, coming by UPS. He had given his furniture in his Georgetown apartment to a local church. He felt basically unencumbered by possessions.
The house had been built before closets were common, and in the room were two wardrobe cabinets, one his, one his brother's. He opened the one that had been Paul's and unpacked first his military gear, his uniforms, boots, a box of medals and citations, and finally his officer's sword. Then he unpacked some of the tools of his more recent trade: a bulletproof vest, an M-16 rifle, an attache case with all sorts of nutty spy craft gizmos built in, and finally his Glock 9mm pistol and holster.
It felt good, he thought, putting this stuff away for the last time, a literal laying down of arms and armor.
He looked into the wardrobe cabinet and contemplated what, if any, significance there was in this moment.
In college, he'd been taken with the story of Cincinnatus, the Roman soldier, statesman, and farmer in the days before Rome became an Imperial power. This man, having saved the fledgling city from a hostile Army, accepted power only long enough to restore order, then returned to his farm. In Washington, Keith had often passed a building on Massachusetts Avenue, the stately Anderson Mansion, which housed the Society of the Cincinnati, and he imagined that its members had the same sort of experience as its Roman namesake, Cincinnatus. This, he thought, was the ideal, Roman or American, this was the essence of an agrarian republic: The call to arms came, the citizen militia were formed, the enemy was met and defeated, and everyone went home.
But that was not what happened in America after 1945, and for the last half century, war had become a way of life. This was the Washington he'd recently left, a city trying to cope with, and minimize, the effects of victory.