Driftless Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  ALSO BY DAVID RHODES

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  PROLOGUE

  NO REASON

  A NATION OF FAMILIES

  SCHEDULED VIOLENCE

  MOTTLED SUNLIGHT

  GRIEF

  PAINTED BODIES AND ORANGE FIRES

  GATHERING EVIDENCE

  THINK LESS, DO MORE

  PROTECTING PAPERS

  KEEPING A RESPECTFUL DISTANCE

  HUMPED FLOORS

  A ROOM WITHOUT FURNITURE

  FAITH KEEPS NO TREASURE

  BROKEN THINGS

  HOT MILK

  HIRING HELP

  PERPETUAL PERISHING

  EPIPHANY

  THEFT

  VISITOR

  STRAIGHT FLUSH

  TESTIMONY

  A PRIVATE HEAVEN

  WORK BEGINS

  LETTER TO THE EDITOR

  FIRE IN THE FIELD

  A NEW SONG

  FINISHING UP

  SNOW

  REMEMBERED LOVE

  DESPERATION

  COMPLETING THE CIRCLE

  FAMILY

  ENVY

  SEEKING HELP

  THEODYSSEY

  FEAR

  REUNION

  DON’T GO THAT WAY

  MEASURING UP

  THE MEANING OF TRUTH

  A FRAGILE BALANCE

  INSURGENCY

  SLAUGHTER

  FIGHTING DOGS

  THE THIEF

  THE UNIVERSAL ACORN

  HUNTING

  SPRING

  NEW LOVE

  KEEPING IN ONE’S PLACE

  MUSHROOMS ARE UP

  MAKING BAIL

  THE HEARTLAND FEDERAL RESERVE

  INSIDE THE NEIGHBOR’S HOUSE

  TRAPPED BY THE PAST

  VALUE

  LETTING GO

  LAWYERS

  RESEMBLANCE

  THE COUNTY FAIR

  MAKING OTHER ARRANGEMENTS

  MEETING AT SNOW CORNERS

  THE LOOK OF DEATH

  FINDING JULY

  SELLING LAND

  INSIDE THE CHURCH

  THE FUNERAL

  DRIFTLESS

  READING GUIDE QUESTIONS

  Q & A WITH DAVID RHODES

  THE MILKWEED EDITIONS EDITOR’S CIRCLE

  Copyright Page

  PRAISE FOR DRIFTLESS

  “After what had to have been years of effort beyond the usual struggle of trying to make a good novel, we get [Rhodes’s] fourth, and, I have to shout it out, finest book yet. Driftless is the best work of fiction to come out of the Midwest in many years.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “A profound and enduring paean to rural America. Radiant in its prose and deep in its quiet understanding of human needs.”

  —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

  “Driftless is a fast-moving story about small town life with characters that seem to have walked off the pages of Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology.”

  —Wall Street Journal

  “Comprised of a large number of short chapters, the novel opens with a prologue reminiscent of Steinbeck’s beautiful tribute to the Salinas Valley in the opening of East of Eden, with a little touch of Michener’s prologue to his novel, Hawaii. The book moves at a stately pace as it offers deep philosophy and meditative asides about life in Words, Wisconsin, in the Driftless zone—which is to say, about life on earth.”

  —NPR, “All Things Considered”

  “Few books have the power to transport the way Driftless does, and it’s Rhodes’s eye for detail that we have to thank for it.”

  —Time Out Chicago

  “A wry, generous book. Driftless shares a rhythm with the farming community it documents, and its reflective pace is well-suited to characters who are far more comfortable with hard work than words.”

  —Christian Science Monitor, Best Novels of 2008

  “A symphonic paean to the stillness that can be found in certain areas of the Midwest. The writing in Driftless is beautiful and surprising throughout, [and] it’s this poetic pointillism that originally made Rhodes famous.”

  —Minneapolis Star Tribune

  “Driftless presents a series of portraits that resemble Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology in their vividness and in the cumulative picture they create of village life. Each of these stories glimmers.”

  —New Yorker

  “Rhodes consciously avoids drama to deliver a portrait of a real rural America as singular, beautiful and foreign as anywhere else.”

  —Philadelphia City Paper

  “Rhodes shows he still knows how to keep readers riveted. As affecting as it is pleasantly overstuffed.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Rhodes illuminates the wisdom acquired through hard work, the ancient covenant of farming, and the balm of kindness. Encompassing and incisive, comedic and profound, Driftless is a radiant novel of community and courage.”

  —Booklist, 2008 Editor’s Choice, starred review

  “Though Driftless is a deeply contemporary tale—what it has to say about the way corporations treat small farmers is, for example, quite pressing—it also has the architectural complexity of the great 19th-century novels, but without the gimcrackery too often required to hold their stories together. It partakes as much of the moral universe of Magnolia as of Middlemarch. And it earns comparison to both.”

  —Books & Culture

  “Unique, funny, absorbing, at times frightening. A novel crafted by a real writer.” —California Literary Review, Best Books of 2008

  “Rhodes’s first novel in more than 30 years provides a welcome antidote to overheated urban fiction.”

  —Kirkus

  “A terrific novel that coalesces around the unexpected connections among people in the fictional community of Words, Wisconsin. The characters’ perceptions about the landscape, their lives and each other are continually arresting yet almost casually right on.”

  —Isthmus

  “Winner of the Milkweed National Fiction Prize, Rhodes’s first novel in over 30 years is set in a rural area of Wisconsin so remote and forgotten that it’s left off the map. Most of the residents have chosen to be isolated from the world around them and one another. Nevertheless, their concerns—the meaning of spirituality, family, love, and desire—are global and universal. The characters and their struggles come vibrantly alive.”

  —Library Journal

  “Driftless has been a long time coming, but definitely worth the wait. This is David Rhodes’ most accomplished work yet—vividly imagined, shrewd, and compassionate. He is a master at uncovering the extraordinary lives of seemingly ordinary people. The characters of his small rural town become as mysterious, interconnected, and richly idiosyncratic as the landscape they struggle against and embrace. A wonderful novel.”

  —Joseph Kanon, author of Los Alamos and The Good German

  “I have seldom read a book that so proves that each one of us stars in our own lives. Read this book some place where no one is depending on you for any other calls on your time or attention. Supper can wait.”

  —Joanne Greenberg, author of I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

  ALSO BY DAVID RHODES

  The Last Fair Deal Going Down

  Easter House

  Rock Island Line

  To Edna

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THE DRIFTLESS STORY TOOK OVER TEN YEARS TO COMPLETE AND IT’S not like I wasn’t trying. One reason may be the characters who wanted to be written about. They were for the most part not the kind of characters who usually find their way into print—very private, never satisfied with their assigned ro
les, always wanting their voices to be more accurately rendered and their feelings better dramatized. Some were more comfortable with my wife, Edna, than with me, and for over a decade she tirelessly advocated on their behalf. Her assistance was instrumental throughout the entire process.

  The work would never have been finished without the additional help of many generous people. The life and times of my friend Mike Cannell provided vital inspiration. Others helped with sage advice, editing, critical insights, living facts, and invaluable intuitions. These include: Mike Austin, Pam Austin, Steve Barza, Barry Clark, Jenny Clark, William Davis, Peter Egan, Jim Goodman, Francis Goodman, Rebecca Goodman, Darrel Hanold, Linda Kiemele, John Kinsman, Charlie Knower, Patti Knower, Lewis Koch, Jim Kolkmeier, Leslie Kolkmeier, Jerry McConoughey, Judy McConoughey, Kathleen Nett, Jim Noland, Bronwyn Schaefer Pope, Luther Rhodes, Stephen Rhodes, Paul Schaefer, Ed Schultz, Alexandra Stanton, Blaine Taylor, Judy Taylor, and Peter Whiteman. I’m grateful to my agent Lois Wallace, and I especially want to acknowledge Milkweed editor Ben Barnhart for his creative discernment and priceless suggestions on structure and tone. Thanks to all.

  PROLOGUE

  IN SOUTHWESTERN WISCONSIN THERE IS AN AREA ROUGHLY ONE hundred and sixty miles long and seventy miles wide with unique features. Its rugged terrain differs from the rest of the state. The last of the Pleistocene glaciers did not trample through this area, and the glacial deposits of rock, clay, sand, and silt—called drift—are missing. Hence its name, the Driftless Region. Singularly unrefined, it endured in its hilly, primitive form, untouched by the shaping hands of those cold giants.

  As the glacial herd inched around the Driftless Region, it became an island surrounded by a sea of receding ice. There, plant spores and pollen, frozen for tens of thousands of years, regained their ability to grow. Moss fastened to the back of rocks. Birds and other creatures carried in seeds, which sprouted, rooted, and prospered. Hardwoods and evergreens rose into the sky, with warmth-loving tree tribes settling on southern hillsides and cold- loving tribes on northern slopes.

  Rivers and streams—draining fields for the glaciers and migratory paths for animals—poured into the Mississippi River valley. The waters rushed thick with salmon, red trout, and pike, which in turn attracted osprey, heron, otter, mink, and others who lived by fishing. In time, larger animals moved in, including bear, woolly mammoth, giant sloth, saber-toothed tiger, mountain lion, and a two-hundred-pound species of beaver. (The name Wisconsin is believed by some to be a derivation of the word Wishkonsing, place of the beaver.)

  With the wildlife came humans, and for thousands of years people about whom there can now be only speculation conducted civilization from those ancient woods. The summer camp of the Singing People was once located in the Driftless.

  The first Europeans to arrive were trappers, hunters, and berry pickers—men who lived much as the people who were already there, often mating and living with them. In time, trading posts sprung up along the larger rivers, attracting more trappers and hunters. Rafts piled high with furs floated downstream, until the supply of cash animals was nearly exhausted.

  Then a larger wave of immigrants came, displacing the frequently moving trappers, hunters, and foragers. Trading posts gave way to forts, farms, and villages.

  The new arrivals, almost without exception, came in search of homesteads. Families as numerous as church mice rode in wagons on wheels with wooden spokes pulled by oxen and mules, dreaming of Property. When they arrived, they climbed out of their wagons, sharpened their axes, and moved into the Driftless to harvest a ripe and waiting crop: timber. Logging roads and lumber mills invaded the hills, and within a single generation the Driftless forests—like the rest of Wisconsin’s virgin oak, pine, and maple—were cut, floated downstream, and made into railroad ties and charcoal.

  After the settlers cut down the trees and dug up all the lead and gold they could find, many abandoned the Driftless in search of flatter, richer farming. Those who remained were generally the more stubborn agriculturists, eking a living from small farms perched on the sides of eroded hills. Like the Badger State totem that burrows in the ground for both residence and defense, they refused to leave. For better or worse, their roots ran deep.

  Small villages blossomed with schools, post offices, and implement dealers; dairy and grain cooperatives; hardware, fabric, and grocery stores; filling stations, banks, libraries, and taverns. And the Driftless farmers moved into these villages after their bodies wore out. Old men and women sat on porches in work clothes faded by the sun and softened by innumerable washings to resemble pajamas. They talked in whispers, shelling hazelnuts into wooden bowls, telling stories, endless stories, about long ago.

  The young people listened but were skeptical. It didn’t seem possible for men and women to do the things described in those stories: people didn’t act like that.

  “They don’t now,” the old people complained.

  It was impossible to explain how in those days, in earlier times, in the past, there really were giants—people who did things, good things, odd things, that others would never do. Those giants were at the heart of everything. Nothing could have been the way it was without them, but how could anyone explain them after they were gone?

  Over the years, most of the Driftless villages grew into towns and cities. Other villages, however, grew up like most other living things, reached a certain size and just stayed there. Still others, like Words, Wisconsin—a cluster of buildings and homes in a heavily wooded valley—noticeably shrank in size, and entered the twenty-first century smaller than years before.

  To get to Words you must first find where Highway 47 and County Trunk Q intersect, at a high, lonely place surrounded by alfalfa, corn, and soybean fields. The four-way stop suggests a hub of some importance, yet there are no other indications of where you are. This lack of posted information can be partly explained by the constraining budget of the Thistlewaite County Highway Commission and partly by the assumption of its rural members: people already know where they are. No provisions are made for those living without a plan.

  Still, there is some mystery why a four-way stop should be placed here, impeding the flow of mostly nonexistent traffic. Grange, for instance, with a population of five thousand by far the largest town in the area, has a justifiable need for four- way stops and even several stoplights; but Grange is fifteen miles to the east on 47.

  Red Plain, to the west, has grocery, feed, and dime stores, a gas station, a grain elevator, four taverns, and one stop sign on a highway that connects after sixty miles to the interstate.

  Heading south on Q does not take you directly anywhere, but for those knowing the roads this is eventually the shortest route to Luster.

  Eight miles north of the intersection, the unincorporated village of Words has no traffic signs at all. County Trunk Q is the only way into the tiny town, which sits at the dead end of a steep valley. Few people go there. State maps no longer include Words, and though Q is often pictured, the curving black line simply ends like a snipped- off black thread in a spot of empty white space. Even in Grange, most people don’t know where Words is.

  NO REASON

  THE MORNING RIPENED SLOWLY. TEN O’CLOCK FELT LIKE NOON. July Montgomery cut open a sack of ground feed and poured it into the cement trough. He looked out of the barn window into his hay field, where a low-lying fog stole silently out of the ground, filling space with milky distance. Beyond the fence, the tops of maple, oak, and hickory formed a lumpy, embroidered edge against infinity.

  July had lived here for more than twenty years, but because of the dreamy quality of the morning, the landscape now appeared almost unfamiliar. The row of round bales of hay—which he’d placed near the road only weeks before—seemed foreign and completely removed from any history that included him. The road itself looked different, and when a hawk stepped off a utility pole, opened its wings, and sailed up the blacktop road toward the nearby village of Words, it disappeared into the looming fog as though entering
another world. July marveled at how easily the characters of even the massive, stationary things of reality could be changed by a little moisture in the atmosphere.

  On the other side of the barn he could hear his small dairy herd hurrying back from the pasture. He had let them out just an hour before, and it seemed odd that they would be coming back. Normally, they preferred to graze all day, knee-deep in grass, even in the most inclement weather.

  Several cows anxiously butted their heads against the wooden sides of the building and he opened the doors, allowing them back into the barn. Agitated, they bellowed and crowded against each other, milling nervously from one area to the next, swarming in slow motion.

  Something had frightened them, and July stood in the opening and searched for an explanation—a pack of dogs, perhaps. But he could see nothing, and indeed it wasn’t always possible to identify the reason for a herd’s agitation. Like the fear that often seizes human society, it sometimes had no tangible cause. Given the social nature of animals, an errant yet terrifying idea could flare up in a single limbic system and spread into the surrounding neighborhood, communicated with the speed of a startled flock of birds. Before long, a climate of fear was established, perpetuated through the psyche’s network of instinctual rumor.

  A movement caught his eye. Several hundred yards away, at the very edge of where the fog swallowed objects wholesale, a large black animal jumped the fence into his hay field, turned around in an almost ritual manner, and looked directly at him.

  Now there’s something, July thought, staring back. It appeared to be a very big cat, a panther, also known as a cougar, puma, or mountain lion. He’d seen them out west and up north, but never here. Though they had once been native to the area, there had been no reports of them, as far as he knew, for generations. It wasn’t even necessary to actually see one, of course; a stray scent of the beast—inhaled by a single cow—and the whole herd would vibrate with primordial anxiety.