Q Road by Bonnie Jo Campbell

Author:Bonnie Jo Campbell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2002-08-23T04:00:00+00:00

19

BEFORE PULLING ONTO QUEER ROAD, TOM PARKS HAD SAT in the barn driveway and stared across at the Rathburn place, which looked so similar to the house in which he’d grown up: two stories, porch stretching halfway across the front, white-painted clapboards. The new bay window in the dining room seemed like a sensible addition. The Rathburns had always found ways to improve their house, while the Parkses had been so busy farming that they hadn’t even kept theirs up. His uncle Larry Rathburn, his mother’s brother, was a handy fellow, always fixing or building something. Parks got a kick out of that barn-shaped bird feeder Larry had made and the way the birds fed at the doorways like miniature feathered cattle. Parks’s family house used to have a big sugar maple in front that turned orange and red in autumn. Being out here made Tom Parks long for his family—not for his ex-wife and kids in Texas, but for his parents and siblings.

On an autumn day like today, they’d all have been picking the remaining vegetables from the garden or raking leaves, maybe helping the Harlands bring in hay. The Harlands had seemed an opinionated and energetic lot back then, compared to the quiet Parkses, but for some reason it was the Parks family men who died unnatural and unquiet deaths. As a teenager, Tom Parks’s older brother had crossed the tracks at Queer Road without looking, and a freight train had dragged his car a quarter mile toward Kalamazoo. One of Tom’s uncles had been shot on opening day of deer season. Then Tom’s father’d had the heart attack while driving the tractor and crashed into a tree over by the pond. If Tom Parks had been superstitious, he might have suspected his family carried a curse of some kind. He was careful around guns, railroad tracks, and heavy machinery, but he’d chosen a profession in which there were plenty of violent ways to die. Parks knew he had to stop thinking this way, not so much because he feared death, but because the death of a man whom no woman loved seemed wretched.

George ought to keep that barn door closed and locked, Tom told himself. There was no sense tempting kids to damage your property, and an open barn door was an invitation. Had Tom Parks looked over his shoulder one last time, he might have noticed a stream of smoke rising from the doorway, but Parks thought he’d seen enough. Though he still figured there was a kid hiding in that barn, he didn’t really want to hassle kids any more than necessary. He believed that kids needed to hide from adults sometimes, which is why they liked barns and tree houses and forts, even unattached garages and old washhouses. Tom Parks had begged his wife to return to Michigan after his father’s death, to move into the old family house, to fix it up and save it. The kids would have a better childhood in

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