Q Road by Bonnie Jo. Campbell Page A

some wild onion and wild ginger, which they’d chewed alternately until they’d had enough of both flavors. They hadn’t seen anything special.
    â€œLook at the ground,” George said, making the motion of waves with his damaged hand. “The way it rises and falls.”
    For Rachel it was as if the ground rose into sharp relief beneath her feet and rolled like waves. Beneath the trees, bushes, and vines, there were curves. The depressed furrows lay about five feet apart, and between each pair the land rose to about eight inches high, then dipped again toward the next furrow. Rachel reached out andtouched the branches of a box elder to steady herself against the sensation of motion. She walked between two of the mounds, and when she felt overwhelmed again, she let herself sink down cross-legged into a shallow trench. Farther out, the curves were less pronounced but still visible once you knew what you were looking for. She said, “I would think this was a big old goddamn graveyard.”
    â€œI figure they planted in the mounds and walked in the trenches,” George said. “Or maybe they irrigated in them.”
    â€œYou don’t know?”
    â€œI didn’t think to ask when my grandfather told me about them,” George said. “And I haven’t got much experience with vegetable gardens.”
    Maybe George Harland wasn’t a gardener, but Rachel was, and she was thinking that this was the garden for her. She’d assumed all this time that her recurring dream of mounded earth was about dead people. Maybe for the last year and a half since her mother disappeared, she’d actually been dreaming of an Indian garden. She began to feel trickles of relief in her limbs. She remained sitting in a depression between two mounds for a long while, long enough that George sat as well and leaned his back against the same box elder she’d just touched. Rachel lay back into the furrow, and then reached her hands over the mounds beside her and slowly pulled herself up. It made her feel as though she were dragging herself out of her own grave with the strength of her own arms. She had assumed she’d plant her little riverside garden this year, and she liked Milton’s big flat garden just fine, but here she got the feeling that a garden might become an extension of a person’s body, or maybe it was the other way around, that her body might become part of the garden. If she could get rid of the damn trees, this garden would be even bigger than Milton’s. Think of all she could grow! She wondered if Milton had felt this certain when he discovered his god.
    Though George had planned to work right up until dark, he knew that if this girl disappeared again, he might never be able to plant another field. If she walked away now, he told himself, he’d just lie down and not get up again, let his body return to the soil, or let the neighborhood dogs drag his sorry dead carcass across the Indian garden. He said, “I think there are drawings of more gardens in the upstairs storeroom. There were hundreds of acres of them at one time, in all different shapes. You want to see?”
    â€œHell yes.” She stood and waited for him to stand, then followed him into the house, up the stairs to the second floor, and to the north end of the hall into a room George had opened only a few times since his grandfather died. They unrolled the maps onto the raw, dusty pine floor, and George strained to remember all he’d been told as a boy. Rachel listened without speaking while he explained that his great-great-great-grandparents had documented all the original garden beds and had saved twenty-some acres, and that his great-great-grandfather, the one who had built the old barn, had continued saving the gardens until the year his pigs made a mess of them rooting for moles. This man finally plowed all but an acre of the garden mounds under and used the land to grow more rye and