“Barn’s full of hay. There won’t be any hay next year, so you’re in the clear. We’re four years into the alfalfa now, we need to kill it off. Rolf wants to rotate in some corn.”
She went on like that for a while, and Virgil heard “four years,” “Rolf,” as well as “alfalfa,” “corn,” and a couple other agricultural words, and when he realized she’d finished talking, he said, “You know what you’re doing, I can’t advise you. Except—”
“You going to advise me now,” she said.
“Yeah. I’ll advise you that next spring you’re going to have two new kids and not a hell of a lot of time to do farmwork or architectural salvage. I’ve got to keep working to bring in the cash. Maybe it’s time to ease off on the farming. And the salvage. Take a break. Or make a deal with Rolf: he does it all, he gets it all. He could use the money. That’d keep the company going.”
“I hate it when you talk sense.”
“I’m not often accused of doing that,” Virgil said. “Anyway, what are we doing today?”
“We could start by going down to Fleet Farm. I need two fence posts and some reflector buttons.”
—
They spent the late morning rolling around Mankato, running errands, stopped at a Pagliai’s Pizza for lunch, at the riverfront Hy-Vee’s, where they spent a hundred bucks on food that would hold them for maybe three days. Frankie talked about getting a couple of quarter horses so the kids would grow up with horses, in addition to Honus the Yellow Dog and the chicken.
“If we got horses, we’d have to build a stable,” Virgil said.
“I’ve got the materials from the salvage operation. Rolf says he can get Lonnie Marks to pour the foundation at cost, and then you two could build it. Easy: post and beam. I’m thinking six stalls, a tack room, storage for concentrates, a loft for the hay. I’m not thinking we do it in the next fifteen minutes. Maybe start it next spring, finish it a year later. The only thing that would be expensive are the rubber mats I’d want to put down on the concrete.”
“Who shovels the horseshit?” Virgil asked.
“Well, I mean, you know...”
“That’s what I thought,” Virgil said. But he liked the idea of horses. The image of himself galloping across the prairie. “We can talk about it.”
On the way home, they were silent, preoccupied by different thoughts. For the first time in his life, Virgil had responsibilities that he couldn’t walk away from—two kids on the way, a woman he wanted to marry and eventually, he thought, surely would.
That was not exactly what he’d seen coming. When he was inthe Army, in the Balkans, he’d taken a couple of leaves in Europe. He’d somehow imagined a writing life, on one of the coasts, with frequent visits to Paris, his favorite big city.
Not happening. He was a cop living on a Midwestern farm well outside a small city.
Still, he thought, he had the writing. He was doing a dozen articles a year for a variety of magazines, had been published inVanity FairandThe New York Times Magazine.
And was edging into something new. He hadn’t talked to Frankie about it, but he had three chapters of a novel in his writing drawer and was working on it regularly, so much so that he’d begged off a musky fishing trip to Canada with his old friend Johnson Johnson to keep it going.
—
That afternoon, Virgil did chores, including pulling out two old, rusting posts at the driveway entrance, then replacing them with two new wooden posts and mounting reflectors on them. That done, he spent three hours at his writing desk, sending out query letters to magazines about article assignments and working on the novel.
That evening, they caught a movie beamed down from the satellite, then, just before dark, went for a walk.
The night was quiet, except for the random cricket. The sky had cleared out in the afternoon, and the wind had dropped to nothing. Virgil could smell the hayfield, and, overhead, the stars were so close they could almost be touched.
“Is there anywhere better than Minnesota in the summer?” Virgil asked.
“There’s isn’t,” Frankie said. “Unless you’re dead in the library.”
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
Monday.
Virgil got an early start and was halfway to Minneapolis when Trane called. “Where are you?”
“Coming up to Shakopee. Did something happen?”
