The Solace of Leaving Early by Haven Kimmel Read Free Book Online Page A

Kountry Kids and Kousins, where one could acquire a wide variety of stuffed rabbits in gingham dresses and wooden little black children for one’s front yard; a convenience store/gas station combination, which also sold a species of Pizza King pizza out of what had formerly been a hydraulic bay; a beauty shop; the Farmers and Mechanics Bank; a rickety building, once the hardware store, where Haddington’s weekly newspaper,
The Crier,
was produced; Lu’s Diner; and a small grocery store wherein all the floors tilted to the west. (Woe to the child who dropped a gumball there.) This comprised the downtown. There were a few more establishments at the east end of Main (a veterinarian, a post office, a junk shop), but they were no different in quality, and if anything, were even less interesting to Langston than Kountry Kids and Kousins, which she had picketed one summer during her undergraduate years for its exceedingly poor taste. Farther east, all the way out of town, was the pesticide plant where her father, Walt Braverman, worked. The plant was called Jo-Gro, after the owner’s wife. The owner took over a series of airplane hangars built on a whim by a survivor of the Second World War, Jed Kelso, who believed he would be able to buy vintage aircraft from the government and open his own tourist attraction. When he died he owned exactly one plane, the crop duster he used on his fields, which Jo-Gro left sitting in front of the plant as an advertisement for its services.
    They crossed Main Street and headed north, toward the park. Germane didn’t walk on a leash, so he and Langston were acutely aware of traffic noise, of which there was little. Just after they had safely covered the distance from one side of the street to the other, Langston heard the rumble of a large truck in the distance, and reached down and looped her hand through Germane’s collar. He didn’t chase cars—he didn’t, as far as Langston could tell, misbehave in any way—but she wouldn’t take chances. The truck lumbered up the street, switching laboriously from one gear to another, and she could smell who it was before she even turned and looked. It was Lars Yoder, with a load of pigs headed for auction. As he passed he waved at Langston. She waved back. They had gone to school together, Lars and Langston, and never exchanged a single word. Langston was so confident of this fact that when she met her maker in heaven and was asked: Did you ever exchange a single word with Lars Yoder? she would say, even if her salvation depended upon it, “No, I did not.” And yet he waved every time he saw her. She could only assume that he waved at everyone. The pigs were pushing their noses through the slats in the truck bed, which made Langston so unaccountably sad she thought she would have to sit down on the sidewalk. How is it possible, she thought, that a person can drive a thinking, feeling animal to slaughter and not become less than an animal himself? And what were the pigs searching for, after all, but air and freedom? She considered purchasing a copy of
Charlotte’s Web
for Lars and sending it anonymously through the mail, and at the same time she knew such a gesture would be fruitless. All around her people participated in occupations they neither advocated nor condemned. They simply acted. Her father, for instance, had never expressed any excitement over pesticides, and her mother’s own garden was organic, and yet he drove to work every day and loaded his Jo-Gro truck with toxic chemicals and sprayed them on the fields at various farms, and her mother lived off his paycheck and no one said a word about it. (And this particular irony—her father, her mother, chemicals, money, given the nightmare they had lived through and continued to endure—this one caused Langston’s heart to stutter in its traces, when she was able to think about it at all.) Every time Langston came home she felt this way, both appalled by and curious about the methods her