Golden Age
He had been raised on tales of snow and wind and drought and swamplike planting conditions. Farmers always wrested the harvest from challenging weather—that was their variety of heroism, to hear them tell it at the Denby Café. But all he had to do was read the words “rising waters” and he got jumpy. And Guthrie looked worse (Jen agreed); all they’d heard from Perky since Christmas was that his best buddy’s dog had been killed by an IED, and the soldier himself had suffered a brain injury. That was two down of the four he and his Dutch shepherd, Laredo, had been deployed with. He got e-mails from Felicity, but they weren’t good news about herself or her friends, they were about things like a group of farmers in New York State somewhere suing Monsanto pre-emptively, claiming that Roundup Ready pollination of their cornfields constituted genetic contamination of their crops. She sent updates about the Indian cotton farmers’ suicide epidemic—lower yields, higher debt. Or pictures of grotesque birth defects from Argentina, where the glyphosate was sprayed from airplanes. Yes, Jesse was using lots more glyphosate than he had back in the early nineties, and, yes, the weeds were not dying with the regularity they once did. Did she think him a sucker? A criminal? She never seemed to wonder how he would react to these repudiations of his lifework. Did she mean this personally, or was she more like a satellite dish, simply taking in the word “glyphosate” and sending it on? Jen thought it was funny. And, in the end, was he too far down the road to rethink his business model? Bill Cassidy swore that eating Roundup Ready corn had made his hogs infertile—they only gave birth to sacks of water, not piglets. And what about that epidemic at the hog facility, piglets dying in the thousands, no apparent cause, and (they said at the Denby Café) their carcasses being tossed in a pit beside the river? Russ Pinckard said he’d heard that NPPC was going to get $436,000 from the government to clean that mess up. Bill got a little red in the face and said, “Yeah, they should pay me to go organic, but they’re always whining that they haven’t got the dough.” Every time the phone rang, or his e-mail program beeped, Jesse winced, and so it was moderately better to be out in the soggy fields than in the house. Floods weren’t the only rising waters; dams and towers of sandbags weren’t the only protections that could be breached.
He slept so badly now that Jen had moved across the hall—not all night, but every night. They undressed, chatted, and got into bed as they always had. He turned out his light, and she finished the chapter she was reading or the article, then arranged her pillows and turned out her light. They kissed. He turned on his right side, because his left shoulder hurt, and she stretched out on her back, her hands crossed. He could hear her go to sleep—she was good at that. Eventually, he would go to sleep (when depended on how effectively he fended off all actual thoughts). After that, according to her, he would bundle the covers so tightly against his chest that she could not get them away from him, so she would wake up from the cold. Then he would shift about halfway onto his back, lift his chin, and start snoring. No matter what she did, he kept snoring, but he was working so hard, she didn’t want to wake him up, so she slipped out and went across the hall to Guthrie’s old room and got into bed there. They always woke up at the same time, but in separate rooms. This morning, he had been rolled so tightly in the quilt that when he woke up he had to unroll just to move his arms. Jen thought talking things through might comfort him, so she tried that once in a while, but just knowing that she shared some of his fears made him more afraid, not less.
There was nothing to the north but clouds—no rain, nothing swirling. To the west, there was a patch of blue sky; maybe it was getting bigger. Jesse dug his heel into the soil. Certain plants had reappeared on the hillside: a few pale-purple pasque flowers already, and the foliage, though not yet the blossoms, of prairie smoke and phlox. Violets—a few groups of those; what he thought was a trillium plant or two, lost in space, looking for some woods and not finding that here, but maybe protected by the slope. And, yes, wild foxtails, undead. Jesse walked away rather than reaching down and pulling them out. You could get some government money now for a conservation easement, but it was like pulling teeth compared with other subsidies.
At the house, he unlocked the door and pushed it open. The place was dark and chill, absolutely quiet and empty. His mother, of course, had done a superb job of erasing every sign that she had ever lived here or cooked here. Jesse had meant to check the hot-water heater and the faucets for leaks, look at the foundation for cracks, but he couldn’t stand it, walked out, shut the door. He looked at his watch; it was nine-thirty. He was wearing thick-soled boots, but he decided to trot the three-quarters of a mile to his own back door, for the sake of his belly.
When he got home, the breakfast dishes were stacked beside the sink, and he could hear the TV from the living room, an odd sound. He called out, then called out again, noticing that his voice shook, though, he hoped, only to his own ears. Her voice came down the stairs—“Here I am!”—and he jumped.
She looked upset, still in her robe.
Jesse said, “What is it?”
She said, “Earthquake. Tsunami.”
“Where?” He thought of Janet first, then Emily and Jonah. After that, the New Madrid fault.
Jen said, “Off the coast of Japan. There isn’t much on TV—you can turn that off. There’s plenty on the Web. I guess three nuclear-power plants are right there. Can I have a hug?” He went up the stairs. Jen was not supposed to react like this. She was supposed to accept fate in good spirits. He said, “Do we know anyone there?”
“Didn’t Aaron Cartwright’s nephew go teach English there?”
“That was years ago. He’s in Davenport now, training to be a chiropractor.”
“I guess we don’t, then.”
She still looked devastated. Jesse put his arms around her and held her for a long, long moment. But he wasn’t devastated. He had gotten so small-minded, he thought, that he was mostly grateful that this one disaster, at least, was far away.
—
AFTER HE PAID his fine, Michael must have had some money, because he bought himself a house in Georgetown that looked like a shoebox on end. It had a yard the size of a deck, square, plain rooms, and almost no kitchen. Jessica loved the sunporch, a tiny room with eight rattling mullioned windows that looked over the alley. The previous owners were in the State Department, leaving to take a position in the embassy in Peru. Michael bought their furniture, and had never, he told Richie, felt so clean and comfortable in his life. And it was true that the whole house, upstairs and downstairs, was painted brilliant white. Jessica presented him with a 36-pack of Zwipes, “to clean as you go.” Michael laughed and kissed her on the cheek. A week after he moved in, Andy drove down from Far Hills, and Michael served a meal, admittedly ordered in, but ordered with thought: a Caesar salad for their mom, and a roast chicken with sides of sweet-potato fries and sautéed spinach for the three of them. Binky and Tia came, looked around, and left a few personal items, which also made Michael laugh.
Two weeks later, he showed up in the old way, at seven in the morning, before Jessica had left for her run, before Richie was out of bed. Richie could hear them in the kitchen, talking about the massacre in Norway, how bizarre, how horrifying—how American, really. Then their voices dipped, and he knew they were talking about him. He had been going to get up, but he lay there, staring at the ceiling of the bedroom, until Jessica came in to say goodbye. She put one hand on either side of his face, kissed him, and said, “He’s got a plan.” Richie took a deep breath. That anger he had felt earlier in the year had seeped away again. Perhaps he was growing up. He said, “Good plan?”
“You decide.” She kissed him again, tenderly and with concern. He understood that she hoped he would go along with the plan, whatever it was. He heaved himself out of bed and put a shirt on over his shorts. His breakfast was on the table—a bowl of Special K, a carton of strawberry yogurt, and a cup of black coffee. Michael was reading the paper. He said, “This is what Jessica says you like.”
 
; “I like that.”
“You’re welcome.”
Richie took this to mean that it was Michael who had set out the meal. He sat down. Michael pushed the sports section of the paper across the table, and without saying anything, Richie read the article about the north/south rivalry between the Cubs and the White Sox in Chicago. He wondered if their uncle Henry had ever been to a baseball game. He ate his cereal and his yogurt and drank his coffee. Michael said, “First, the haircut.”
“Excuse me?”
“You have a ten a.m. appointment at Bang Salon with Umberto. He’s level four, very hip. If he doesn’t have any ideas, no one will. After that, we’ll have a look at Universal Gear, but I’m sure we’ll end up at J. Press.”
Richie said, “I have clothes.”
“Congressmen’s wear. No. Time for a change. We don’t know what you will actually look like after your haircut, so I’m reserving judgment about the style statement you will end up making. Are you finished?”
He actually stood up and cleared the dishes, not forgetting to fold the paper neatly and set it in the middle of the table.
A little disoriented, Richie put on plain old khakis and a green polo shirt. Better start with a blank slate, he thought. Minutes later, they were in Michael’s Acura, heading up 9th Street. That was Monday. It went on like that for the rest of the week; Michael even took him for a foot massage at the Thai Institute of Healing Arts, where they seemed to know him. The masseur was kind, but kept shaking his head when Richie flinched in pain. He was told to come back “at least once a week” and to buy himself a foot roller, nine bucks, something that looked like a miniature of what he had always imagined a medieval rack to look like. They drove around. They went to a matinee of Mr. Popper’s Penguins, after which Michael told him that he was now making a practice of seeing just about anything, as a way of being more open. Richie would not have said that they talked much during the week, but, then, neither did they avoid talking. It was peculiar and lulling.
It wasn’t until Wednesday the following week that either of them mentioned Loretta. It was a short conversation that took place as they were walking down 13th Street, eating butter chicken wrapped in chapati bread, purchased from a food truck.
Michael: “Loretta found out where Chance has been.”
Richie: “Where is that?”
Michael: “The ranch. I told her, but she didn’t believe me. She never believes me.”
Richie: “What is he doing there?”
Michael: “Minding his own business and staying out of the way. Also roping cattle. But Gail was diagnosed with bacterial endocarditis, and Chance got nervous and called Loretta. She hasn’t been invited to the patient’s bedside, though.”
They continued to walk. Richie finished his lunch and wiped his fingers on the three paper napkins he had taken from the food truck, then tossed them into a trash can. This took about four minutes. By that time, he had worked himself up to asking a question: “How long since you’ve talked to her?”
Michael looked at his cell phone, then said, “Two years, five months, and about four days.”
“How do you decide things?”
“She decides, the lawyer tells me.”
“No divorce?”
“Not permitted.”
They came to the corner of Farragut, and turned toward the park. It was too hot already to run, but Richie was rather looking forward to the walk. Michael said, “Every time I walk in Rock Creek Park, I think of murder.”
Richie said, “I can’t avoid thinking of massacres, I guess, but I never think of murder,” and to himself, he added, “anymore.”
—
HENRY WAS STARING out the window at the two linden trees in his front yard. They were both bright yellow, but the one on the left had red-orange leaves scattered through the yellow, and when the wind picked up, they fluttered in a pattern that looked like the profile of a face. He took a sip of coffee, and there was a knock that he recognized—Alexis—on his door. On Wednesdays, her school got out early. He called out for her to come in.
The Charlie in her was like the red leaves among the yellow ones—almost but not quite an illusion. Her hair was dark and straight, her eyes were brown, but she had Charlie’s nose and his personality—inquisitive and friendly rather than doctrinaire, like Riley. She said, “Today is your birthday.”
Henry was genuinely surprised. Yes, October, yes, changing leaves. But he hadn’t celebrated a birthday in so long that it had slipped his mind. He looked at his watch, but of course she was right—that she shared with Riley. He said, “Good Lord, I am seventy-nine! What in the world happened?”
Alexis came over and sat in the chair across from him. She said, “Tell me about when you were nine.” She had turned nine in May.
“I’m sure my mama made me an angel-food cake, which was a very dry, tall cake with a hole in the middle, and she would have frosted it with whipped cream, which I would have scraped off and left in a pile on my plate.”
“You were a poor eater.”
“That’s not a bad thing. Say ‘fastidious.’ ”
She said, “Fastidious. But Mom says it is a waste of good food.”
“The thing is to be choosy before you even start cooking or buying. You tell her that you will do the shopping.”
“She hates shopping,” said Alexis.
“We can do that today. For my seventy-ninth birthday, we can go buy only what you and I like, and she will have to eat it.”
Alexis giggled.
“For the rest of the day, we can do what you want to do. We didn’t do that on your birthday, so we can do it on mine.”
“I want to do my homework thing for one half hour.”
“Go get it, then. Arithmetic.”
Alexis ran out the door. Henry got out the pot and the wooden spoon.
A boy in Alexis’s fourth-grade class had been diagnosed ADD. His parents, instead of putting him on Ritalin, had decided to train him like a police horse: while he worked, one parent or the other would march around him, beating a pot with a spoon, and he would have to concentrate to do his work. He gave a report on it. Alexis had come home demanding to try it, but she had her own wrinkle. Since she was taking piano lessons, the pot beater had to use different rhythms—4/4, 2/4, 3/4, 7/8. Quite often the session devolved into chaos since Henry’s sense of rhythm wasn’t great, but she loved doing her homework now, and usually went from homework straight to piano practice.
She returned and put her arithmetic sheets on the table with two pencils, and Henry set the stove timer for thirty minutes. Then he picked up his pan and spoon. Alexis said, “Ready, set, go!” The song in Henry’s head was “Stormy Weather,” the Lena Horne version, which had a steady backbeat, one of Philip’s all-time favorites: “Can’t go on, everything I had is gone.” But he had gone on, hadn’t he?
Alexis shouted “Beep!” and he switched to “All Out of Love,” another of Philip’s favorites, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, a faster beat, a song he had listened to over and over after Philip left him, and then again, over and over, after Philip died. “What are you thinking of? What are you thinking of? What are you thinking of?” His eyes started to sparkle, so when Alexis shouted “Beep!” he went as far back as he could go—“Smoke, Smoke, Smoke That Cigarette,” a song that had made him fall over laughing when he was fourteen—every word about something his mother deplored. “Tell St. Peter at the Golden Gate / That you hate to make him wait….” After that, “The Tennessee Waltz,” and then Alexis said, “I’m done!” and waved her paper. Henry took a deep breath, set down his instruments, and flopped into his chair. The timer had not gone off. He said, “Seven minutes to spare! You’re getting good!”
“Check it!”
He did. Every answer was correct (and when she got to fifth grade, he would have to use a calculator). He said, “Hundred percent! I think you need a birthday present!”
Very seriously, Alexis said, “Can it be not educational?”
Henry leaned towar
d her and whispered in her ear, “Yes.”
—
FELICITY WAS NOT sorry that Max the math guy had faded out of her life, only to be replaced by the much more muscular Jason, who was an education major specializing in kinesiology, and, yes, his coursework included pocket billiards and racquetball, and weren’t schools all over the country cutting phys ed? But since she was in her first year of her M.S. in microbiology, she had no fears for her economic future, and he had taught her enough about billiards for her to realize that she had exceptional talents in that direction (he agreed). However, it was one thing to skip your racquetball class in order to Occupy ISU, and quite another to skip both your Insect-Virus Interactions: A Molecular Perspective class and your Foodborne Hazards class in order to join Occupy ISU in a drizzle. But Felicity considered herself even more of an observer now that observing was her vocation, and so she skipped class and went. She even carried a sign she had made out of the bottom of an Amazon shipping box, “We Are the 99.99%” It did not make an iota of difference that the family farm was worth almost six million dollars if you dared not buy a new car and add to the debt because, however much the farm was worth, it was not cash. Felicity knew that, because of corn and bean prices, the value of the farm was bubbling again, the way it had in the eighties. She thought her father should be paid not to farm. Her father didn’t want to know what the farm was worth, and her mother didn’t care, since it would never be sold. The Occupy movement was not about farming, but if anyone had any sense, Felicity thought, it would be.
They got off the bus at the Union, walked up past Carver. There were about seven people standing by the Campanile, but then Felicity saw the group, maybe a hundred or more, standing on the steps of Beardshear. The wind was blowing from the south, so maybe the protesters were chanting something, but Felicity couldn’t hear it. Jason grabbed her hand and pulled her. He seemed excited.