Q Road by Bonnie Jo. Campbell

her standing outside the house, cursing him. During the winter that followed, he walked gingerly through snow, imagining her lying in hibernation beneath each drift. By spring he found that the soil under his feet was imbued with her, and the process of cultivating seemed criminal, as though by disturbing the dirt with his plows, he were tearing her body apart. George used to see himself as producing nourishment, but now he feared he was only scarring and depleting the earth.
    Though he went over and over it in his mind, Rachel’s calling him Johnny made no logical sense. George resembled his brother physically, but there was nothing his missing brother could be to Rachel. Her calling him Johnny did make sense in a more profound way, however, for George felt he had become Johnny. All his life he’d thought himself better than his careless, shiftless brother, and now it was clear he was no better, for surely even Johnny had never done anything as reprehensible as molesting an innocent girl. What made him hate himself most was that he couldn’t honestly regret what he’d done, that he’d felt Rachel’s rough, warm skin against his, her steady breath on his neck and chest, her muscular limbs twisting around his, her river-smelling hair brushing his face, and the way she’d locked her hands behind his back and held him when he tried to pull away.
    He considered going to Rachel and begging forgiveness. He’d offer her anything he had. He’d deed her an Indian grave site if she could find it. He’d help her find it. But night after night he resisted seeking her out, knowing he couldn’t trust himself. He became accustomed to not sleeping, to just lying awake each night, trying to imagine her face, wondering if time passed differently for someone so young. He wondered what the girl did all day, whether she hunted alongside her mother, or whether she dug up ground all over Greenland in search of bones. Or would she be in school? (Again he resisted the urge to calculate her age.) What would she and her mother talk about when they sat together on the boat with no comforts, no electricity? Day after day, George worked with or without Mike Retakker and held just enough hope in his heart that he did not once drive his tractor or his truck into the river.
    Then, as if in reward for George’s steady work and his decision at the end of each day to live to see another one, as though beckoned there by the longevity of his thoughts, Rachel showed up outside George’s house one evening in late May, eight months after the incident in the barn. Instead of knocking, she stood by thekitchen door with her arms crossed, her rifle slung over her shoulder. George had no idea how long she’d been there before he saw her after supper. He considered that perhaps she had come to shoot him.
    â€œCome in,” he said.
    â€œI want to see your damn garden.”
    â€œWhat garden?”
    â€œYou said there was a goddamn Indian garden here.”
    â€œOh, the Indian garden. Let me get my boots on.” The shameful memory of his wet boots in the barn all those months ago washed over him. “Please, come in.”
    She entered reluctantly and stood facing his kitchen cupboards as though she were angry with the dishes there, both the dirty dishes on the left side of the sink and the clean dishes draining on the right; she seemed angry at the store-bought cans of vegetables stacked against the back of the counter beneath the sooty pine cupboard doors.
    George had intended to plant sixty more acres before dark that night, and then he would recalculate the planter settings for the sloped field across P Road. Instead of all that, he guided Rachel out the back porch door, into the woods northwest of the house.
    â€œI don’t see any goddamn thing,” Rachel said. She’d been in or near these woods hundreds of times. She and David had trekked across the edge only a week before to get to