Q Road

Everyone wants a piece of George Harland. Or more accurately, everyone wants a piece of George Harland’s farm.

His foul-mouthed, trigger-happy, child bride, Rachel, loves those acres like her own blood and marries a man three times her age to get her hands in the dirt. David Retakker, a scrawny, asthmatic boy abandoned by George’s last hired hand, “just wanted to drive tractors and combines and pull hay balers and cultivators across George’s hundreds of acres.” But George’s best friend from childhood, Officer Parks, is filled with jealous bile that George has managed to hang on to his great-great grandfather’s farm after Parks’s parents sold to developers. And George’s bitter, alien-obsessed neighbor, Elaine Shores, is just waiting for George to sell out himself, so cookie-cutter housing projects can impose order and sterility on fertile abundance. Even the woolly bear caterpillars are rushing toward the succor of his “rich river valley land.” Meanwhile, nobody can make a living farming in Michigan anymore.

Welcome to Kalamazoo County, Michigan, October 9, 1999, as two hundred years of American history come to head at the unlikely rendezvous of the oldest barn in Greenland Township.

In Q Road, award winning author Bonnie Jo Campbell has crafted a world of rural oddities and the so-called civilization encroaching on it. As the last farmers butt heads with the new suburbanites, the land still bleeds with the memories of the Potawatomi Indians--Rachel's ancestors--driven off by the original farmers--George’s ancestors. In fact, George’s ancestors have made a few bad calls, and he doesn’t want to make the same mistakes, but his live-and-let-live ideal is shattered when he falls for Rachel.

“…there were no words for the fierce line of her jaw or the wing of her cheekbone. He didn’t want to think of what they’d just had together as sex. The phrase making love seemed like nothing.
“‘Will you please marry me?’ he said.
“‘Why the hell would I marry you?’
“‘I’ll give you everything I have.’
“‘Your land?’
“George was scared, but went on. ‘If you marry me, it’s half yours.’
“‘Milton says you’re going to sell your land.’
“‘I’m not planning on selling.’
“‘How much land have you got?’
“‘Almost nine hundred acres, including the land I bought from the Parkses.’ His heart was pounding down in his stomach and his groin, everywhere his guts used to be. ‘Eight hundred eighty acres.’
“‘So I’ll have four hundred forty acres.’
“‘We both own all of it until I die, then it’s all yours.’
“‘Fine. When can we get married?’”

The May-December marriage of George and Rachel begs the question: are their two ways of life in their death throes, or can the best parts be salvaged and recombined? History, the author argues, is not bound in artifacts, but in the mind, controlled by those who remember the past and tell stories about it. Conversely, progress is controlled by those who write their own future. Change will happen, on October 9, 1999, and always, but change need not equal extinction. As Rachel thinks, “Yes, his ancestors built the barn, and yes, his dead brother was buried there, but Johnny and his great-great-grandfather were dead, and just look a the miracle of David being alive.” Or, as George’s grandfather once told him, “It’s too late for your thickheaded papa, but it’s not to late for you.”

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