Bleeding Kansas Read Online Free Page A

Susan wanted to feel herself in Abigail Grellier’s two-room lean-to, with the slats so wide apart the mice and snakes came in and out at will.
    Susan wished she could explore the Schapen place, to see what remained of their original buildings, but if she’d suggested that to Myra or Arnie they would have assumed she only wanted to snoop and sneer. It seemed to be a point of honor for Myra to live in almost-punitive austerity. She still bent over the low zinc sink installed in the 1920s when her father-in-law brought plumbing into the house. The steep stairs to the second floor weren’t carpeted, and only the cheapest rugs—rag in her father-in-law’s day, discount bath mats for Myra—lay at the front and back doors.
    Susan told her daughter that Myra lived like that to increase her grievance with the Universe. “Everything in the world works against the Schapens. Myra to this day blames your grandpa for the death of their dairy herd in the thirties. She’d only just come there as Bob Schapen’s bride when the drought took hold. She thought the Grelliers should have sacrificed half their beef herd and shared out their hay with the Schapens.”
    No matter what happened, whether it was a hailstorm or a county tax levy, the Schapens felt that they’d been cheated—sometimes by the thieving Fremantles, sometimes the lying Grelliers, sometimes the government, or the Indians or the Jews. But someone was always trying to drive them out of the valley, take what they’d fought for.
    Over the decades, the Schapens turned more and more inward, away from the rest of the farms around them. By the time Chip and Lara came along, everyone was so used to thinking of the Schapens as surly that the Grellier children didn’t even try to be friendly to Junior, who was Chip’s age, or Robbie, who was in Lara’s grade at school.
    It was different for Susan, at least when she first married Jim. She actually tried to visit the Schapens, inspired by a friendship between the original homesteading Schapens and Grelliers that she’d read about in Abigail’s diaries. Jim’s grandmother warned Susan that Myra and her son, Myra’s husband having died some years before, struck by lightning as he rode a load of hay in from the fields, “liked to keep to themselves,” but Susan laughed, and said the Grelliers owed them some kind of hospitality gift to make up for all that Arnie Schapen’s ancestor had done for Abigail.
    â€œI’m a new face here—maybe they’ll take to me,” she said to Jim’s grandmother. Young wife, triumphant in her youth and sexuality, sure they made her invincible.
    She baked an apple pie, using Baldwins from the Grellier trees—the offspring of wild trees Abigail had found on the land—and Abigail’s recipe for crust, which meant buying lard, since, to Susan’s disappointment, the Grelliers didn’t butcher their own livestock. One raw November morning, she drove down the narrow gravel lane that connected the Schapens to the rest of the world.
    Myra Schapen came to the door. “Oh. You’re Grellier’s wife. What do you want?”
    Susan was taken aback. She managed to hold out the pie pan and stammer that she wanted to meet Arnie and Arnie’s wife, Kathy, that this was a neighborly visit.
    â€œWe don’t need charity in this house,” Myra snapped. “Especially not Grellier charity. You tell Jim Grellier and that grandmother of his that I wasn’t born yesterday, I know what they’re up to sending you over here.”
    â€œWhat are you talking about?” Susan said, her voice high and squeaky, as it always became with stress or excitement. “They didn’t want me to come at all.”
    â€œMaybe you’re lying, maybe you’re telling the truth. Either way, we don’t need any Grellier pies.” And Myra shut the door on Susan.
    Susan flushed a painful