The fall of alice k, p.1
The Fall of Alice K., page 1
Table of Contents
Also by Jim Heynen
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
PART I - September, 1999
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
PART II - October, 1999
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
PART III - November, 1999
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
PART IV - December, 1999
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Acknowledgments
More Fiction from Milkweed Editions
Copyright Page
Also by Jim Heynen
Fiction
Old Swayback, illustrated by Gaylord Schanilec
The Boys’ House: New and Selected Stories
Why Would a Woman Pour Boiling Water on Her Head?, chapbook
Cosmos Coyote and William the Nice
Being Youngest
The One-Room Schoolhouse
You Know What Is Right
The Man Who Kept Cigars in His Cap
Poetry
Standing Naked: New and Selected Poems
A Suitable Church
How the Sow Became a Goddess
The Funeral Parlor, chapbook
Notes From Custer, chapbook
Maedra Poems, chapbook
Nonfiction
Minnesota Schoolhouses, prose poems to accompany photographs
Sunday Afternoon on the Porch, text to accompany photographs by Everett Kuntz
Harker’s Barns, prose poems to accompany photographs
One Hundred Over 100
Writing About Home: A Handbook for Writing a Community Encyclopedia
Translations
Sioux Songs, chapbook
In memory of Anne Paine Williams (1933–2010)
patron of the arts
lover of literature
defender of the natural world
For the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less apart of the body.
1 Corinthians 12:14-17
I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible.
Mahatma Gandhi
PART I
September, 1999
1
Alice Marie Krayenbraak was standing on the screened porch when she heard shots coming from a neighbor’s farm—one loud blast after another, the sounds of a twelve gauge. Each time she thought the shooting had stopped, it would start again. Some shots were followed by moments of silence, but others were followed by guttural squeals, like pathetic last-second objections. Sometimes a new blast came before the last squeal stopped. The time between shots got shorter, as if someone was hurrying to get this done.
The kitchen door opened and Alice’s father stepped onto the porch with her.
“You don’t have to hear this,” he said.
The four-foot sections of screens were gray from the summer’s dust, giving a hazy view of the feedlots and beyond them the corn and soybean fields that extended in the direction of Ben Van Doods’s farm. The buffer of trees and dusty screens might have absorbed the sounds, but instead it caught the blasts and flung them back into the air for a second life, like an echo—or an aftershock. Alice could see the cupolas of Ben’s tallest barn and the green domes of trees in his grove, but she could not see the scene on the ground.
“Aldah sure shouldn’t hear this,” said Alice’s father. “Go inside and have her watch some television. Play piano for her or something.”
“What’s going on?”
“Today’s market report.”
“What’s going on?”
Alice stepped closer to the screen, which prompted her father to move in front of the screen door to keep her from stepping outside and closer to the gunshots.
“Ben must figure it’s cheaper to shoot them than truck them to market.”
Her father’s shoulders twitched with each blast. If Ben was doing this by himself, he was getting faster and faster at it. Now there was squealing before the gun blasts, frantic squeals as if animals were trapped in a corner. The ones that were left must have known what was coming.
“Go take care of Aldah.”
Alice didn’t move. “She probably can’t hear it,” she said. “Mother is probably covering Aldah’s ears.”
“Your mother is covering her own ears,” said her father. “Get inside.”
Alice obeyed and walked into the kitchen, a space that to Alice felt cluttered in spite of its generous size. The round oak table in the middle was the room’s center of gravity, but surrounding it were contradictory images—the brick-patterned linoleum on the floor did not harmonize with the white metal cupboards or the plastic food canisters and cookbooks on the counters. In one corner sat her father’s wooden swivel chair, which looked like a respectable piece of antique furniture, but anything respectable was diminished by a scattering of dime-store paintings and plaques with quotations that were supposed to be either edifying or clever on the off-white walls. Some might say the room’s decor was eclectic. In Alice’s mind, it was a pathetic hodgepodge.
Her mother stood across the round oak table with her back toward Alice. She was leaning over the sink and staring out one of the room’s two windows. It was not open, but Alice could almost see the sounds of the gun blasts rapping on the windowpane. As if responding to the sounds of gunfire, all the scattered pieces of the room came together into a harmony that made it feel like a comforting refuge.
“This is just the beginning,” said her mother and kept her back to Alice while staring across the lawn toward the gravel road. “Things aren’t much better here.”
The matter-of-fact coldness in her voice was all too familiar to Alice. The chilly flatness of it.
This was her mother’s way of making reference to the millennium. The world was starting to end, one little chunk at a time, one dead hog at a time, one sour thought after another.
Her mother’s shoulders looked narrow from behind and sloped steeply from the edge of her graying hair, which she had let hang loose. She was clearly in one of her dark moods. Alice could not see her hands. Might she have them folded over the sink as she looked out? Alice wondered. Was she praying for Ben? For the hogs? For the Krayenbraak farm?
“Where’s Aldah?”
“Watching TV.”
“At two o’clock in the afternoon?”
“It doesn’t make any difference to her.”
Her mother still didn’t move. The white cupboards that rose up from both sides of the sink framed her shoulders and made her slim body stand out in sharp relief. The spine of Joy of Cooking met Alice’s eye where it sat wedged between other cookbooks on the kitchen counter. Alice could almost smile at the irony because her mother’s cooking was too much like the perfect storm: it looked bad, it tasted bad, and it was bad for you. The way a lazy doctor might prescribe penicillin for every ailment, her mother prescribed a can of mushroom soup for any dish that needed help. She didn’t have those cookbooks because she liked to cook; she had them because she liked to read.
Alice walked to the window that faced the hoglots. “It obviously doesn’t make any difference to you,” she said and turned to go back onto the porch with her father. He still stood in front of the screen door, all six foot four of him. Alice stepped next to him, all six foot one of her. In her peripheral vision she caught the grim tightness of his lips and thought that her lips looked the same. She had an urge to take his hand but didn’t.
“Think we should see if Ben’s all right?” she asked.
“He’ll be all right.”
They stood beside each other, looking out, breathing in unison. “What if he does something terrible to himself?”
“He’s too mad for that.” Her father took one of his deep breaths that made his shoulders rise. “Maybe we could just drive by,” he said and stepped back from the screen door.
Alice drove the Ford 150 pickup with her father beside her, easing off the Krayenbraak farmyard in a reverent manner and driving slowly down the gravel road toward Ben Van Doods’s farm. She kept her speed at a steady thirty so she wouldn’t draw attention by slowing down when they passed his farm.
What Ben Van Doods had done was all too clear: eighty market-ready 250-pound Chester Whites lay strewn across his cement feedlot like scattered white tombstones. A few were clustered, a whole mound of them, in one corner. These must have been the last ones, the ones that knew what was coming.
Over the next few days, Ben was seen driving to town and getting groceries as if nothing was wrong, but he didn’t move the carcasses.
“He’s trying to tell the world something,” said Alice’s father. “He’s trying to show what’s happening to us.”
Alice had the reputation among her friends at Midwest Christian as a straight talker, somebody who faced the facts and looked reality in the eye. She lived up to her reputation a few days later when Ben’s Malibu disappeared in the distance and she drove over to his farm to have a closer look at the carnage. She expected to see flies swarming over the white carcasses, but there weren’t many. There were more hornets, some hovering like little copters around the snouts and some crawling into the caverns of the ears the way a honeybee goes into a flower. And sparrows, fluttering flocks of them, landing on the bloating bodies and pecking bits of dirt from the forest of bristles.
Numbness swept over Alice at the sight of the bulging pink bellies and all those limbs jutting stiffly out like table legs. She returned a day later, thinking that if she looked again, the horror would diminish. The scene had changed but only for the worse because starlings and crows had moved in and were pecking into the rotting flesh.
She stood with her hands folded and looked at the awful sight. She didn’t feel disgusted or angry. She didn’t even feel sad. She felt scared. As she stood staring, her clasped hands tightened and her shoulders gave little shudders. The fear that had come over her, as best as she could understand it, was that this was just the beginning. Her mother’s doomsday fantasies might be coming true.
The sound of a car slowing down near Ben’s driveway interrupted her quiet and private horror. Alice turned and prepared to be embarrassed by someone who would think she was some kind of pervert who liked to stare at animal carnage. The vehicle, a dark Toyota station wagon, did more than slow down: it stopped, and the heads of three small people stared in her direction. Alice faced them, and for several seconds it was a stare off. Then the vehicle inched forward down the driveway in Alice’s direction. As it got closer, she saw that the occupants were foreign—probably Mexican immigrants who worked on one of the big dairies, but the Minnesota license plates didn’t make sense. When Mexicans drove in from other states, they usually came from California or Arizona. The driver was a young woman, and she swung the station wagon directly in front of Alice. She was not white, but she didn’t look Mexican either.
“Hi,” said the young woman, “what on earth happened here?”
She sounded totally American, but she looked Asian. Alice came to a quick realization: these were the Hmong family that had just moved to Dutch Center.
“Are you the Vangs?”
“Whoa-ho!” said the young woman. “Word travels fast around here. Yes, I’m Mai, and this is my brother, Nickson, and that’s my mom, Lia. We were just taking a ride and checking things out.”
Nickson lifted his hand and nodded. “Hi,” he said. The mother, in the backseat, only nodded and smiled.
“I don’t live here,” said Alice.
“You sound American,” said Mai.
“No, I don’t live on this farm.”
“Looks like you’re too late,” Mai commented.
“I don’t think anybody could have stopped him. They were Ben Van Doods’s hogs.”
“I meant it looks like it’s too late to eat them. They smell rotten! Why didn’t he butcher them when he had the chance?”
“I don’t know,” said Alice.
“Quite a waste there,” said Nickson.
They all had such intense eyes and such black hair. Even the mother had those intense eyes, but she was all eyes and no speech.
Alice didn’t like the judgment that had been leveled at Ben Van Doods. It felt directed at every farmer around Dutch Center. She didn’t like these brazen newcomers, but at the same time, she did. What would it feel like to be that confident and outspoken in an unfamiliar setting?
2
Alice sometimes wondered if she would go to church if she had a choice. In Dutch Center, church was something people did out of habit, sometimes sleeping through the sermon, sometimes gossiping after church in cruel ways. Alice didn’t like the way that the people with the most expensive cars parked right outside the front door. Showing off. Wouldn’t people do better by staying home and relaxing in a quiet room, reading their Bibles and asking God to help them make the right decisions? Alice didn’t have a choice. In Dutch Center, not going to church would have been like having a bumper sticker that said, “God Is Dead.”
Compared to some of the real wackos, even her mother, with her doomsday fears of the millennium, seemed relatively sane. One church member thought space travel into the heavens was a Hollywood camera trick created by atheists. There was the millionaire retired farmer who thought global warming was the result of the earth still drying out after Noah’s flood, and the even wackier jeweler, Gerrit Vanden Leuvering, whose gray head swaying in the second pew harbored the belief that dinosaur bones were leftovers from an earlier creation because this earth and its creatures were created 6,456 years ago. Around these people Alice knew that it was best to keep her mouth shut. Don’t pretend to know more than the next person. If she had spoken up, more people than her mother would be saying she was arrogant, somebody too big for her britches. Alice didn’t go to church to argue science. She went to hear the music and to find peace. “Getting centered,” some people called it.
She could sing hymns and listen to organ music all day, and often Rev. Prunesma preached sermons that made her think about something other than the judgmental eyes of her mother or the shuffle of hungry steers. Man does not live by bread alone: at its best, that’s what church was all about. Going to church also gave her the chance to wear clothes that made her look like somebody who didn’t live on a farm. It wasn’t as arrogant and pretentious as parking an expensive car in front of church, and it did give her a taste of the future when she planned to be out of here.
The Krayenbraaks walked down the aisle in their usual long-long-short-long order—Father, Mother, Aldah, Alice—and sat in their usual pew: left side, sixth from the front. People said Alice resembled her father more than her mother, and she thought about that as she watched his dignified and stately walk that he reserved for church. Compared to her mother, he looked well groomed when he went out into public. Alice had never known him when he wasn’t bald, but he still fussed with the little hair he had left. You could have held a carpenter’s level to the edge of his sideburns.
In church, her father did not look like a farmer, and she hoped she did not look like a farmer’s daughter. She knew they both looked different when they were on the farm. On the farm, he had an undignified but still controlled, pumping-forward efficiency in his manner. When she was working outside with him, she thought she looked like somebody who was following the mandate of the hymn that said, “Work, for the night is coming.”
The church sanctuary was a no-nonsense place of worship. Simple and huge is how Alice thought of it—like a large auditorium. The ceiling slanted in straight lines of wooden rafters above them to a peak that was fifty feet over their heads. The smooth oak benches had no cushions, and though narrow arched windows lined the walls, the stained glass patterns were simple designs that did not hint of “graven images.” A large wooden cross stood against the wall behind the lectern, which was centered on the raised pulpit—centered to remind everyone that in this church the preaching of The Word was central to the worship service.
The church didn’t have a choir, and it didn’t have any fresh flowers or stenciled banners. Bright colors of any kind would be a distraction. The congregation didn’t want their house of worship cluttered with any New Age garbage. Of all the churches in Dutch Center, this was the one that had the largest number of farmers and the smallest number of the local Redemption College students.
