Haymaker

Adam Schuitema

• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781609091736
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

In a political culture infused with debates about personal liberties, the role of government, and even the definition of "freedom" itself, Haymaker tells the story of an isolated Michigan town that becomes the flashpoint for some of the principal ideological debates of our day. When a libertarian organization selects the town as its flagship community, hundreds of its members migrate and settle within the town's borders. The resulting clash with local townspeople is violent and impassioned, even as the line that divides the two sides increasingly blurs.

The story follows characters on both of these sides: an eccentric millionaire known as The Man in White, who is still viewed as an outsider even after living in Haymaker for thirty years; a policewoman trained in hostage and suicide negotiations who questions raising children in this new environment; a teenage girl devoted to basketball and her desire to leave home, who has a close but complicated relationship with her uncle, a local who fistfights outsiders in an annual challenge; a libertarian PR expert, just hoping to calm the storm; and the town's mayor, who owns a local diner and is raising a baby daughter as her husband becomes tragically unhinged. A town first settled by lumberjacks, prostitutes, and roughnecks, Haymaker's present becomes as volatile as its past.

Haymaker is a story about the failure of best intentions and the personal freedom of individuals to do good or to harm. This witty and politically charged novel will certainly appeal to Michiganders and Midwesterners, but will also interest those looking for an entertaining fictional account of a situation that could plausibly play out in one of the many small, remote towns in the country.

Chapter 4

Friday, August 1

Clara Hollingshead stared at the light-blue gel coating her now glossy mound of a stomach. It looked like some moon with an unmarked surface, foreign and flawless. She adjusted the towel draped over her hips to cover a few dark pubic hairs peeking out and then glanced at her husband, Gary, who smiled back weakly and dropped his eyes. Clara finally willed herself to look at the monitor.

The ultrasound technician, a young woman named Tiana Ray, sat on a stool beside her. “Well, Mayor, let’s say hello to the little one.”

Ten months earlier, in this same room, the monitor had remained dark, and other than the soft crackle of the ultrasound, the womb had remained silent. A blighted ovum, they’d called it. There was an amniotic sac, but nothing else had begun to grow. She thought about that moment every day—Gary stricken dumb, creasing his brow and shaking his head, while she tumbled into a strange realm of mourning, missing something that she’d never known, that had never really existed. But it had.

Today, a pulse—like an echo picked up from a distant satellite—grew louder, and familiar forms quickly took shape.

“Hi there, baby,” said Tiana.

Tears welled in Clara’s eyes. “Hi,” she said. She was forty-one and had no children. Except now she did—there, on the monitor. She inhaled and ran her fingers through her sandy blonde hair before finally exhaling.

“That’s it?” asked Gary. “It’s still there? It’s okay?” His hands nervously stroked his beard.

“It’s there, and I think it’s fine,” said Tiana.

The fetus was three months along, but this was already their third ultrasound. Clara had started bleeding at eight weeks. She and Gary approached each visit to LaRock Medical—which had only just recently obtained the equipment, thanks to a grant Clara herself had sought—with more fear than excitement, more longing than expectation.

“Look, honey.” Gary rose from his chair and pointed at the screen. “You can see its head.”

The round skull curved down and out again, revealing a full profile.

“My God, that face,” said Clara, smiling and crying. “The poor thing has its mother’s nose and chin. They’re protruding.” Gary bent toward her and kissed her on that nose and that chin.

They were all smiling there in the dimly lit room. But in a moment Clara willed the smile away. “Does everything look all right, though?”

Tiana moved the wand over the glossy belly and pointed at the screen. “You can see the spine here. And the hands. And there’s the heart.”

It looked like a pair of lips, opening and closing, mouthing the sound of that celestial pulse. “Hi,” said Clara again.

“Here,” said Tiana, pointing at a dark mass on the monitor, “is the subchorionic hematoma.”

“God, it’s still there.”

“But it’s smaller.”

Clara looked to Gary again, but he wouldn’t meet her eyes. He stared at the monitor.

“Yeah,” she said, “it does look smaller.”

“She won’t have to go back on bed rest, will she?” asked Gary.

Clara rolled her eyes. “That was the longest month of my life. The café about fell apart while I was gone.”

“That’s up to Dr. Tracy,” said Tiana. “But I’d say that, considering its reduction, you’ll have just a little longer before it’s business as usual.”

“Don’t get me wrong. I will if I have to. As long as the baby’s born fine.” She looked at Gary. “You could roll me onto my side every half hour so I don’t get bedsores.” They both smiled. Hope flared up in Clara, but she tried to ignore it. This was already their third pregnancy. Anything could happen yet. In her mind, the baby was a fragile thing, and when she walked, she did so on the front of her feet, as if carrying around something made of china and glass.

“Can you tell if it’s a boy or a girl?” asked Gary.

Tiana moved the wand again. “No. Too early for that.”

“I wouldn’t want to know anyway,” he said. He turned to Clara and mouthed the words, “I love you,” and she whispered, “Me, too.” Gary was a large man, and he might have looked overweight if he weren’t six foot six. His hair had receded to the halfway point of his head, though the beard gave balance to his face. He was utterly masculine, capable of great power, yet he almost always spoke gently and softly, smiling sheepishly whenever they kissed or embraced. They’d been married ten years.

Their eyes lingered over each other’s, and something else flared up in Clara, something that always seemed to come along with hope or joy or any brightness of days. She remembered Gary’s affair—which he’d confessed almost three years ago now, and which they’d seemingly put so far behind them. There had been counseling and meetings with their priest and even a private renewal of their vows. But that time had also stoked the symptoms of Gary’s mental illness, which he’d mostly managed over his adult life through therapy and medication. His guilt over the affair had cracked a dam in his mind, and his psychosis—though brief—sent him to a Marquette hospital after he’d convinced himself that he’d be arrested for his infidelity. That the FBI had files and photographs. That any sirens in the distance meant they were coming for him, to punish him for his sins. He returned home and slipped into a prolonged depression of drinking, sobbing, and nightlong readings of Scripture. And because of all of Gary’s own chaos during that time, Clara had never had a chance to fully grieve the broken marriage. She’d never fully poured out her rage at him.

This—this pregnancy, the great summit of their long married existence—was finally within reach. Yet there were these dark memories of their past, with her always, like the large grease burn on her left forearm. A caution and reminder of pain.

“Well,” said Tiana, “in the weeks ahead, when I’m able to tell the sex, I’ll be sure to keep my lips sealed, to you or anyone.”

“Good,” said Clara. “I govern this town. I serve coffee to this town. People here act like they’re not social, but believe me, this town can’t keep secrets.”

She governed Haymaker. She served coffee to Haymaker. Clara was once the longtime waitress at a tiny diner on Schoolcraft called The Spoon, but six years ago she’d left to start her own place, The Shipwreck Café, a slightly larger restaurant up on Superior Drive, right on the beach and with a view of the lake. Many Haymakes had grumbled that the place didn’t need a second breakfast haunt, and that the Shipwreck—because of its location and nautical décor—would only attract tourists. But in time Clara had won over locals with her pasties and omelets.

Then two and a half years ago, Reginald McPhee, the town’s eighty-something mayor, died of pneumonia. He’d been ice fishing at Little Deep Lake during a March thaw. How his old hands clawed him from the water back to solid ground remains a local legend. He died two days later.

Between her tours of duty at the two popular eateries, Clara had become one of the most well-known and well-liked people in all of Haymaker. It was Greta McPhee, Reginald’s widow, who’d urged her to run for the vacant post. Clara, excited by the prospects and still wanting to punish Gary—if only through her own success—did run, against “Slim” Jim Johnstone, the high school football coach. Unfortunately for him, Johnstone’s team went 3–6 that year. Things may had been different had Reginald died one year earlier, when the Huskies had won the conference championship. But Clara came out ahead with 59 percent of the vote. A landslide.

It wasn’t long before the part-time job seeped into the other hours of the day, into the already long days at the Shipwreck. When t...