Page 22 of The River We Remember

“Jimmy Quinn’s place?” Surprise was in his words and on his face; she’d have seen it if she’d lifted her eyes to look. “You know that Mr. Quinn’s dead?”

She nodded.

“It was my understanding your husband had been fired.”

“They asked him to come back to work. They said they needed him.”

Graff felt his shirt sticking to the damp of his back. He could tell that the day would be unusually hot and humid for so early in the summer. He saw sweat trickling down the side of the woman’s smooth face, following the lines of a few long black hairs that had escaped her hat and lay clinging to her temples.

“A lot of work,” he said, noting the great number of planted rows where the ground still needed breaking with her hoe, if that was her intent. It was the kind of job most farmers in Black Earth County would have used a tractor and cultivator to accomplish.

“It’s good work. I don’t mind it,” she said.

Graff knelt on one knee and touched one of the shoots in the line that had risen from the black dirt to a height of nearly six inches. The leaves felt soft but resilient in his callused hand.

“What is this?” he asked.

“This field is amaranth.”

“Amaranth. Never heard of it. Sure it’ll grow here?”

“My husband believes that it will. It is one of the most ancient and versatile of grains.” There was a little iron in her voice now, a thread of defiance, as if she was fully prepared to defend her husband’s crop choice.

Graff stood and brushed the soil from the knee of his pants.

“At Quinn’s, you say? You worked for the Quinns, too, didn’t you?”

“Three days each week. I cooked, cleaned, washed.”

“Why aren’t you there with your husband now? Not one of your days?”

“It’s summer. The children are out of school and can help. Marta told me she didn’t need me now.”

A moment passed with nothing between them except the silence of that empty land.

“Amaranth,” Graff finally said. “Well, Mrs. Bluestone, I wish you a fine harvest.”

“Thank you.”

Graff tipped his Stetson. “I appreciate your time.”

“Good day,” she said. Then she added, “Deputy Graff.”

He turned and left her alone with her old Saint Bernard. But in the way a magnet is always drawn toward the north, the old deputy could feel the pull of her presence at his back.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

BRODY STOOD AT the screen door of the funeral home, waiting for the Quinns to arrive. Brown’s was a lovely building, an old Victorian that nearly forty years earlier had been turned to its current use by Fred’s father, Carl. The Browns had not always been Browns. Until World War I, they’d been Brauns. The anti-German sentiment abroad in America during and after the war had compelled Karl Braun to Anglicize his name. In the same way, Schmidt’s German Bakery on Main Street had become simply Smith’s Bakery.

It had been Carl Brown who’d prepared Brody’s father for burial. Brody rarely thought about Robert Dern, but when he did it was with a mixture of sadness, anger, and regret. His father had died young, at the age of forty-five, from the explosion of an aneurysm in his brain that had sent him tumbling from his tractor while harrowing the fields for spring planting. The back wheels of the John Deere had rolled over him. The discs of the harrow that followed had sliced his legs into pieces. Brody, who was eighteen at the time, had witnessed all this from near the barn, where he was mucking out the cattle yard, a chore he hated but one his father forced on him. Brody had raced across the field, stumbling on the broken earth. He’d caught up to the tractor, killed the engine, and turned to see to his father. There was no point. The man was stone dead. Brody’s older brother, Tom, had been away at college in Ames, studying modern agriculture, but he returned to Black Earth County to take over the running of the farm, which, in his will, Robert Dern had left entirely to his older son. Brody had known this would be the way of things, that Tom would inherit everything. It wasn’t only because this was the tradition, to pass the land intact to the eldest. It was also because Tom had been the favorite, the good son. Brody had been the wild one. Irresponsible and reckless as hell, his father had often ranted. In retrospect, Brody knew this had been true. But at the time it struck him as simply one more example of the low esteem in which Robert Dern had always held him. And what son, even the most reprobate, wants to be seen as worthless in his father’s eyes?

“J.P. told me they’d be here by ten,” he said. “They’re running a little late.”

Fred Brown, who’d been sitting at a desk in what had once been the living room, rose, walked to the door, and stood beside Brody. The mortician wore a dark suit and round wire-rim glasses, and was bald as an egg.

“This is hard enough on a family when it’s only about the funeral preparations,” Brown said. “Add to it the situation and the need to make an official identification and I imagine it becomes even more difficult. Understandable that they might be dragging their feet.” He removed his glasses, took a folded handkerchief from the breast pocket of his suit coat, and cleaned the lenses. “Ruth Coffee’s family was in earlier today. A much simpler affair.”

“Oh?”