The Virgin of Small Plains

  “Was it Alzheimer’s, for sure?”

  “Don’t know. I wouldn’t let them do an autopsy on her.”

  Mitch didn’t know much about the disease, but he did know that it took a brain dissection to find the telltale plaques that screamed “Alzheimer’s!”

  “Why not?”

  “What would be the point?”

  “I guess.” Mitch stirred his coffee. Seated across from him at the kitchen table, his dad wiped an invisible spill with a napkin. “Was it hard? Her illness?”

  “What do you think? It wasn’t easy.”

  “How bad did she get in the end?”

  “Some days she knew me, some days she didn’t.”

  “What was it like for her?”

  His father frowned slightly, as if Mitch had thrown him a curve, a question whose answer he had not previously considered. “How would I know?”

  Mitch supposed it was a fair answer. But he thought there were other ways his father might have answered it. He could have said she didn’t suffer. He could have said she suffered all the time. He could have found a million different ways to describe the daily life of a sharp-witted woman who was losing her mind. But Mitch noted, like a doctor picking up clues to a diagnosis, that his father’s first answer to the question, “How bad did she get in the end?” had been purely solipsistic. It was all about him, not about her. As would his mother’s answer have been, Mitch thought, if their roles had been reversed. Two more self-absorbed people he did not think he had ever met. He suspected they had been perfect for each other, existing in one intimate world on parallel tracks.

  “She lived in hallucinations and the past,” his father said, in the same neutral tone, “but at least she always knew who Jeff was.”

  For a second, Mitch didn’t know who he was talking about. Then he remembered, with a start of rueful realization that left him feeling stupid and foolish and even jealous: his brother, the adopted son who had come to take his place in the strange scheme of things in his so-called family. They had brought four-year-old Jeff to Mitch’s graduation. His own son had an uncle, Mitch thought, whom he might never meet. For a moment, it rushed over him that an entire family life that he didn’t know anything about had unfolded in this kitchen in his absence.

  “I’d like to see him,” he said, though he wasn’t sure that was true.

  For the first time, his father looked unsure, too. “He’s not here right now.”

  “Okay. Some other time. Can he drive?”

  “He’s seventeen.”

  “That’s a yes?” Mitch regretted his sarcasm the minute it appeared. He wanted information, and getting the old man’s back up too far wasn’t going to accomplish that aim. “The reason I asked is, I thought he might drive out to see me if he wants to. I’m staying at the ranch, Dad.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I let myself into the ranch house and I’m staying there.”

  His father’s eyes narrowed as he took this in. “You might have asked permission first.”

  “I might have, yes, but I didn’t, and now I’m there.”

  “For how long?”

  Mitch bit back the bitter retort on the tip of his tongue. “As long as it takes to straighten some things out, Dad.”

  His father reared back in his seat, instantly getting the point. “You leave it alone.”

  “Leave what alone?” Mitch asked with a softness that only barely hid the venom beneath it, and with every subsequent sentence he spoke, his voice rose and the poison leaked out. “Leave her name off her grave? Leave people thinking nobody around here has any idea what happened to her or who she was? Leave people wondering why the hell I left like that and never came back until now? Is that what you think I should leave alone, Dad?”

  His fury didn’t move his father, who was accustomed to passion—both real and phony—in the courtroom. “You’ve intelligently left it alone for all these years.”

  “So why mess with success?” Mitch’s laugh was bitter.

  “That’s one way to put it, yes.”

  “Jesus, you’re a cold bastard!”

  “And you’re an ungrateful son,” his father shot back at him.

  “Ungrateful?” Mitch stared at him.

  “I protected you!” his father roared, suddenly as furious and animated as his son.

  “You never believed me!”

  “Don’t you get it, son? All these years and you still don’t understand it?”

  “What? What don’t I understand?”

  “Of course I believed you! Your mother and I both believed you. She did to the day she stopped remembering anything, and I still do. My God, of course I do. But that doesn’t make any difference, because nobody else will believe you. It was a teenager’s word against two of the most respected men in this state and it still is. It still is, Mitch.”

  “You’ve never heard of lie detector tests?”

  “Inadmissible in court,” his father said, with a dismissive wave of one hand. “Good God, Mitch, you’re a lawyer, you know that. And just what other evidence do you think you would have anyway? If Quentin and Nathan did what you said they did, there is no way in hell you will ever prove it. Nathan was the sheriff! Do you think he hung on to evidence? Quentin was the doctor, do you think he did? And even if you had evidence that they covered up her identity, what would you have then? No evidence about how she died or who killed her. You don’t have anything except your own wounded ego, Mitchell, and it is seventeen years past the time for you to force yourself to get over that, because there is absolutely nothing that you, or even I, can do to change things.”

  Mitch stared at him and for a long time his father stared back at him.

  Finally, Mitch said, “You chose them over me.”

  “We had to live here,” his father said in the cold blunt way he had always used when stating what he believed to be unalterable facts. “You didn’t. And besides, I trust them.”

  “What?”

  “They are my best friends, just like Abby and Rex were your best friends. I have always believed that even if they did what you saw them do, then they must have had a good and decent reason for it, and I trust them enough to leave it alone.”

  “Good and decent?”

  “I believe you,” his father said, “and I believe in them.”

  “My God.” Mitch turned away, and stared unseeing out a kitchen window. He was appalled by most of what his father had said, the parts that involved the hiding of a young girl’s identity so that she had to be buried in an unmarked grave, the parts that seemed to suggest nobody cared who killed her, the parts that let two grown men get away with threatening him if he told the truth about them. But even though he hated himself for it, he was helplessly gratified to finally hear seven words he felt he had been waiting a lifetime to hear and which he had never, not once, dreamed his father would actually ever say to him: Your mother and I both believed you.

  But still, he couldn’t quite believe it.

  “If you believed me, why have you never told me so until now?”

  For the first time in Mitch’s life, he thought he saw his father’s eyes get moist. “We wanted you to stay away. It was safer for you that way. And if that meant encouraging you to hate us, well then, that’s what we had to do.”

  Mitch felt stunned, momentarily unable to process the information.

  Finally, slowly, he said, “How can you possibly believe in men who made it unsafe for me to return?”

  And again, Mitch saw something in his father’s eyes that he had never seen before, only this time it wasn’t tears, it was confusion. “You just don’t understand,” his father said. “You never will. But there’s one thing you have to understand and that is that you’ve got to leave it alone. Leave it alone.”

  Mitch sat back in his chair and said nothing.

  It was several minutes before either of them spoke again.

  “You want more coffee?”

  “No.” God no, Mitch thought. It
was awful stuff.

  His father suddenly blinked, and sat up even straighter. “There he is again.”

  “Who? Jeff?” Mitch turned to look where his father’s gaze was directed, but all he saw was an oak tree in the backyard, and a flash of red in it.

  “No.” His father stood up, walked to the window to look out. “A damn bird.”

  “You into birding?”

  “Of course not. Come here. Look at him. See what you think it is.”

  Mitch followed his father to the window, and stood searching the landscape for whatever it was his father wanted him to see. The flash of red caught his eye again. He stared, and then stared harder.

  “No way,” Mitch breathed, and he turned to stare at his dad. “He’s still alive? You still have J.D.?”

  “Who? What are you talking about?”

  Instead of answering, Mitch hurried to the kitchen door and stepped outside onto their back porch. The flash of red darted out of the tree. It flew through the early morning air, and swooped down onto Mitch’s outstretched right arm. Then the big bird walked up the arm until it was close enough to stare Mitch in the eye.

  “J.D.? Is it really you?”

  The bird let out a squawk that could have raised the dead.

  Then the parrot screamed and screamed, as if everything that he had not said for years, everything pent up inside his red breast, had come pouring out in one unstoppable deafening burst of parrot squawk.

  They dug up an old cage out of the basement. There had been one cage for J.D. in Mitch’s bedroom, where they both slept. That was the one they found tucked away in a corner of the basement that, even two years after his mother’s slow demise, still had the exquisitely organized and tidy appearance she had left it in before she forgot it existed. There had been a second cage they kept for the bird on the porch, but that larger one was the one that had disappeared when, Mitch’s father told him, the bird was stolen.

  “Stolen!” Mitch said, as he encouraged the parrot into the smaller cage. “I’ll bet Mom just forgot and left the door open and he flew away.”

  “Your mother wouldn’t do anything like that.”

  That was probably true, Mitch had to admit. Even though she hadn’t been fond of the noisy parrot, Nadine Newquist wasn’t a woman to leave doors open behind her, nor was his dad likely to do it. Neither one of them would have wanted to own up to other people that they had been careless enough to let an expensive pet escape. But none of this made sense, Mitch thought. A bird didn’t get stolen seventeen years before, and then mysteriously turn up on a tree branch as if it had never been gone. And yet, unless this wasn’t really J.D., unless this was some amazing kind of parrot-coincidence, that was exactly what had happened.

  “Who would steal him?” he asked his father.

  “I have no idea. I can’t believe this is the same bird, Mitch.”

  “It is, Dad. Wouldn’t you know that ear-splitting squawk anywhere?”

  “All parrots are noisy.”

  “Yeah, well, they don’t all have a notch on their beaks where they got bit by another bird when they were babies. Don’t you remember that notch? I got him cheaper because they said he was flawed.”

  “You’re going to have to find its owner.”

  Mitch stared at him. “Like hell I will. I am his owner, Dad. This is J.D. My bird. My bird. If you think I’m going to go looking for the asshole who stole him, you’re out of your mind.”

  “What are you going to do with a bird?” his father said, as dismissively as if Mitch had found a squirrel in the woods and brought it home.

  “I’m going to feed him some fruit from your refrigerator, if you’ve got some. And then I’m going to town to buy him some seed. He’s probably starving. And then I’ll drive him back out to the farm with me.”

  His father was silent as Mitch searched the refrigerator for fruit, found some strawberries and blueberries, and then began to chop them up on a cutting board. “You have any nuts of any kind that I could give him?”

  Still without saying anything, the judge walked over to a cabinet, reached in, and brought out a large tin of mixed nuts, which he handed to Mitch. Mitch mixed it all up in a small bowl and started to go back onto the porch to give it to the bird, when his father said, “You’re not going to cause any trouble while you’re here, are you?”

  “Trouble?”

  “Yes. Now that we’ve talked about it. Now that you understand better.”

  “Trouble,” Mitch repeated, as if tasting the word. “You mean, like, asking Quentin Reynolds why he beat her to a bloody pulp, or asking Nathan Shellenberger why he let him do it? You mean, like asking them why they threatened to blame her death on me if I ever told anyone what I saw them do?”

  His father stared at him with an unblinking gaze.

  “No,” Mitch assured him. “I’m not going to cause trouble like that.”

  It was an honest answer. The operative phrase, Mitch thought, was like that.

  He put the food inside the cage, along with a small bowl of water. For a few moments, he stood and watched the big parrot attack the fruits and nuts as if he really was starved.

  “Then what are you going to do next?” his father asked him.

  Mitch returned the level gaze with one of his own.

  “Pick up my boy, J.D.,” he said, as he smoothly lifted the cage with the parrot in it, “and take him home with me.”

  Chapter Thirty-one

  It had been a long day for Abby. Insurance agents. The hard physical work of pickup and cleanup. Dump trucks and hauling. The pain of seeing at close range exactly what she’d lost and the worry of thinking what it was going to take to replace it. All that in one day, plus trying to keep her landscape services going as her customers needed her to, and it was all a long way from over. Her property still looked as if a tornado had hit it and it was going to be awhile before it looked any different.

  By the time she sent everybody home, she was too tired to cook for herself.

  Patrick had called, saying he had to drive to Emporia to see his accountant.

  It occurred to Abby as she stood exhausted under a hot shower with her stomach growling, that with Patrick away, there might be a way for her to kill two birds with one stone that evening. When she realized what metaphor she had unthinkingly used, her eyes welled up again.

  Half an hour later, she rolled down her window and let the cool air whip her face and blow over her hands on the steering wheel. She loved driving on country roads at night when the only lights were the stars and the moon and the spotlights of single bulbs above barn doors, and animal eyes flashing in her headlights, and the glow of lights inside the farm and ranch houses she passed along the way.

  As she approached the cemetery on Highway 177, she whispered, “Hi, Mom.”

  At that moment she would have given anything to be able to talk to her mother. Since she couldn’t, she was going to do the next best thing.

  Abby turned in to the gravel driveway of the Shellenbergers’ ranch house just after somebody in a pickup truck pulled out of it. She waved a hello, but no answering arm stuck out the truck window. The truck peeled off down the highway with a squeal of tires as if somebody wanted to get away fast.

  “Abby!” Verna Shellenberger, standing in the cheerful light of her kitchen, beamed a welcome through the screen in the door. “I’m so glad to see you! Get on in here right this minute. Patrick told me what that storm did to you and I was just so sorry to hear it. Have you eaten? I’ve got leftover meatloaf and mashed potatoes and gravy. I’ll bet you haven’t had a thing to eat today, have you? You single girls never feed yourselves right. And guess what…I’ve got your favorite pie.”

  “Sometimes I really do have impeccable timing,” Abby bragged as she stepped inside. Her exhaustion slipped away in the bright, fragrant, familiar welcome of Verna’s kitchen. “Who was that in the truck?”

  “Jeff Newquist,” Verna said. “Since his mom died…”

  “You have him over for su
pper? That’s nice.”

  “I’m not so sure he thinks so.” Verna held open the door for Abby and smiled at her. “I think his father makes him come, just so Tom doesn’t have to deal with him. He’s a handful, that boy.”

  “Guess what, Verna? Your son asked me to marry him.”

  Verna stopped in the act of passing over a plateful of strawberry-rhubarb pie to Abby and froze for a moment, a startled, happy look in her eyes. But then her expression changed. Her hand moved its way over to Abby, who grabbed hold of the green glass dessert plate.

  “Oh, God, I’m sorry,” Abby said contritely. “I meant Pat. For a minute there, you thought I meant Rex, didn’t you?”

  Verna Shellenberger shook her head and smiled as she sat down in a chair on the other side of the kitchen table. “I should have known better.” She picked up a fork, but didn’t stab down into her own piece of pie. “Of course you don’t mean Rex.”

  “What if I did it, Verna? What if I married Patrick?”

  Patrick’s mother lowered her gaze to her pie. “You know I love my son.”

  “Everybody knows that.”

  Verna finally looked up at her. “If Patrick married you, it would be a good thing for him, probably the best thing ever. He would be lucky to have you, Abby. The rest of us would be lucky to have you in our family, too.”

  “Aw, shucks,” Abby teased. “What about me, Verna? Would I be lucky?”

  Abby had listened to Verna complain about Patrick’s behavior often enough to feel it was safe to kid about him. So she was shocked to see Verna’s kind brown eyes suddenly fill with tears.

  “Oh, Verna, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. I was just teasing…”

  “Oh, honey, it’s not that, it’s just that ‘lucky’ is not a word I would ever use with you.” While Abby was still getting over the shock of hearing her say that, Verna really set her back by asking, “Does this have anything to do with Mitch Newquist coming home, Abby?”

  “Of course not! You heard he’s back?”