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
