“If they delved into the whys and wherefores of that, I never heard about it. Why would it have to do with farming and not with, say, a hopeless love affair?”
“I don’t know. I just vaguely remember the gossip.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“Well, there was the Miss Kitty fantasy, where I imagined myself living in Dodge City and running a saloon. I think I was five. Then there was the Christine McVie fantasy. We would be living in London. I guess I was eleven or twelve then. Daddy bought me a ukulele after I pestered him enough. I did spend that summer in Washington, D.C., interning for Congressman Leach. Before I left, I imagined never coming home. That lasted a month. What about you?”
“Well, my uncle Frank kept inviting me to New York City. He would send me postcards of various sights we could see. He was all set to paint the town red. Uncle Henry had me to Chicago a couple of times. I don’t really mind going to see Annie in Milwaukee and fishing in the lake. But back then, I was sort of afraid of New York, or of Uncle Frank. It seemed disloyal to write to him, to talk to him, to go shooting with him, so visiting him in New York would be a big betrayal.”
“Disloyal to whom? Your uncle Frank was like the family god.”
“Oh, to my dad. He never said anything, but I knew by the look on his face when he handed me a letter. They papered it over, but they weren’t close.”
“You know, did I ever tell you about the time I was sitting out on the porch with your dad? It was hot. Your mom was talking all the time about being ‘left behind.’ So your dad turned to me and said, ‘Doesn’t she realize that we’ve already been left behind? Look around—the landscape is empty.’ He laughed, but he looked blue.”
Now Jesse said, “That’s the tragedy of life, I guess—you can only be in one place at a time.”
Jen said, “This is the place I chose. I don’t mind.”
After a moment, Jesse said, “I don’t either, baby.” And they both knew that, these days, she was the reason he didn’t mind.
—
GUTHRIE LIKED Iowa City. He had a room in a house with two other guys and a girl on East Washington Street. He kept completely to himself. His job was at the mall in Coralville, “Ice Arena Representative.” His boss at the mall told him he was to “represent and present” the ice arena to mall customers, so that this “absolutely unique Iowa attraction” would not go to waste. Guthrie, who was a good skater, didn’t mind whooshing here and there. Other than “Do you rent skates?,” the most common question he got was “What in the world is this?” He would smile and say, “This is a unique recreational opportunity, right here in Coralville. Would you like me to help you?” He would skate gracefully backward, shifting his hips from side to side, smiling his welcome, feeling like a character straight out of Lake Wobegone.
It was an easy job that paid a little something, and, a bonus, he didn’t have to feel his dad’s worried eyes boring into the back of his head, assessing his “state of mind.” Iowa City, everyone said, was suddenly ringed with pot farms—in some bars, they said, you could get high just sitting in your booth, sniffing the air. At the VA hospital, he chatted with several sympathetic counselors about his anxieties. He thought that he got the most out of the Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing sessions. The counselor was a woman about his mom’s age, Dr. Kingston, who had grown up on a farm in Illinois. She always wore sensible shoes, but almost at once she noticed that while he was talking he would stare at her shoes, so she made him look at her hand. Which memory kept coming back to him?
Guthrie closed his eyes.
Dr. Kingston said, “No, open your eyes.”
Guthrie opened his eyes.
She said, “Tell me the story.”
“We were guarding a checkpoint. I guess there were about six of us. The road was clear. So this kid comes down the road with a Coke can in his hand. I’m guessing he was maybe seven, but the kids there acted older, even though they were very small. He was a cute kid; he had sandals on—I noticed that. Maybe a blue shirt. Anyway, he threw the can into the air, and someone shot it; it was like a game for just a second. I guess we thought it might be a bomb; it wasn’t beyond them over there to use a kid to deliver a bomb in a Coke can.”
Dr. Kingston nodded.
Guthrie cleared his throat. He said, “Anyway, the Coke can broke up and flew into the air, and then someone shot the kid, right in the neck, I saw the blood spurt out on his shirt, into the air; the air was clear. He got this look on his face. We just let the body lie there. We were afraid of it. The longer it lay there, the more afraid of it we got. I kept expecting it to blow up any second. Maybe an hour later, some Iraqis picked it up. It didn’t blow up.” He shrugged.
“What is the most disturbing image you have? Tell me, but stare at my hand, let your gaze follow my hand.”
She put her hand about a foot in front of his face and moved it back and forth. Guthrie stared at her hand, and he could feel his eyeballs swiveling, back and forth, back and forth. After a moment, he said, “I think I shot him.”
The hand kept moving.
She said, “Did you shoot him?”
Guthrie thought for a very long moment, then said, “I don’t know.”
She was well trained. She didn’t react or stop moving her hand. She said, “Do you remember lifting your weapon or looking at the boy through the sight?”
Guthrie said, “I don’t know.”
“Tell me again.”
She kept moving her hand.
“I was afraid of the boy. I meant to hit the Coke can, but when the Coke can was shot, I didn’t have time to change my aim, the boy jerked forward so fast.”
“Keep talking.” His eyeballs went back and forth.
“I was afraid of the boy. I had my hand on my weapon, but I didn’t lift it. Someone else shot him. I looked around. I didn’t see anything except Private Heller. He was the one who hit the can.”
“Maybe the same bullet that hit the can killed the boy.”
“Maybe we all shot him. It was ten years ago. I have thought about it and dreamed about it so many times that a thousand boys have been killed, and I can’t remember what really happened.” He did not add his real thought, which was, What’s the difference? Or, Maybe I saved that boy from joining ISIS. Or being beheaded by ISIS.
Dr. Kingston prescribed him some Zoloft.
They got into a reassuring routine—twelve sessions. He met interesting women at the ice rink (he didn’t dare go into bars, except sometimes for the music and the weedy fragrance), but in fact, he forgot about sex completely. Zoloft was good for that.
Iowa City was a place where people could and did stall out forever. Seated along the bar in the Mill Restaurant was a line of customers that hadn’t changed in thirty years, being served by bartenders ten years older than Guthrie was. If you were from Oelwein or Spencer or Denby, you could wash ashore in Iowa City and be so sated with ease and pleasure that you would never move on, which was not the case in Ames. Ames took them in and popped them out. Iowa City took them in and kept them—that was the difference between pain and pleasure, Guthrie supposed. He had been living here two and a half years, and he did feel better than he had at the Usherton Motel 6, but he also felt that he was reaching a point of no return: another year and he would buy a house on American Legion Road and grow a beard to his waist. He was thirty-two now, a disappointment to everyone but himself and Dr. Kingston, who thought she had done a good job with him. He gave himself six months to come up with a plan. If, when he saw Felicity at Thanksgiving, he still hadn’t thought of anything, he would put himself in her hands.
—
THE CORN WAS knee-high on the Fourth of July. This was not a good thing. Jesse had never, even in 2012, seen corn that was only knee-high on the Fourth of July—hybrid seed didn’t waste time like that. The June weather had been dry, but not in-the-bottom-five-years-of-the-century dry. After the downpours of mid-May, some farmers had replanted seed with a shorter growing s
eason and a lower yield. Jesse had thought of it, but hadn’t dared go back to the bank for more money to buy the “inputs,” and so he had ended up doing what his father had always done—hoping for the best. The problem was not the lack of moisture; it was the weeds. In spite of all the herbicide he had used, more than he had ever used before, the weeds were thriving, and not only the velvetleaf, but the foxtail, the thistles, everything. It was evident that they were sucking whatever moisture there was right out of the soil. Weeds always grew fast and produced seed almost instantly. Corn and beans and, for that matter, peas, tomatoes, zucchini, and peppers, were the slowpokes, rather like educated couples who produced a single precious child when they were in their thirties. If the weeds flourished, you had to get them out before their seed distributed itself (his dad, for example, had never allowed the kids to pick dandelions and blow the seedheads into the air; he had gone around the yard when they first came up and pulled them one by one).
Jesse had cultivated the corn once in June, but the soil was so dry that it had lifted off in waves. In the first few days after he did it, he’d thought he might have gotten control of the weeds, but they came up again, flourishing. There was a part of him that expected this to be his worst crop ever. Everyone at the café was complaining about the glyphosate, which had, apparently, given up the ghost at last, overwhelmed by Darwinian selection. And the Monsanto reps were nowhere to be seen, had nothing to suggest. Jen said that they would be too busy offshoring their money to address customer concerns. Jesse got into his truck every morning and drove around Denby and Usherton, even down toward Grinnell and past Ames to Boone, just looking at fields. Some were better, some were worse. He did not feel singled out, but he did feel his scientific certainties dissipating. He almost never opened the computer, not even to read e-mails from Felicity about record droughts in France, tornadoes in Ontario, the collapse of the oil business in North Dakota, locusts in Minneapolis paving the airport runways so that planes were grounded. As always, Felicity communicated these events with a kind of upbeat fascination (lots of exclamation points!!!!!!) that did not seem to indicate fear. She communicated about Ezra Newmark in the same way—no passion, no pain, only detached enjoyment. His mother had hair to the back of her knees! She owned a yarn shop in Delhi, New York, that was mostly mail-order!!!! She had knitted a lace bedspread on size 1 needles! Queensize!!!! Ezra was surprisingly well endowed for a man of his stature!!!! Jesse and Jen got a good laugh out of this one—it was the oversharing they had always expected from Felicity, the girl whose great-aunt gave her a picture book about the nature of reproduction when she was five.
Felicity was fine, Guthrie was fine (or, at least, Jesse and Jen agreed to always say this), Perky was home from Syria, working at Fort Bragg. He was a major now. No one knew what he did, but he was successful at whatever it was. Jesse knew, even though he and Jen never talked about it, that this was all that mattered. Once you were in your sixties, your own fate was unimportant.
He stepped onto the back porch, slipped off his boots, and checked the thermometer. Ninety-eight degrees, nothing to remark upon anymore. It was almost lunchtime, and there would be pork loin from the night before in the refrigerator, but he wasn’t hungry yet. He went into his office, opened a drawer, and checked the available balance on his Citicard—$5,987.23. Then he opened the computer, went to the Weather Underground, and checked the national temperature map. All red, just a little orangey-yellow in Maine, the Upper Peninsula, and around Bellingham, Washington. Then he looked at Vancouver—beautiful there, yellow shading to green. The towns in British Columbia had amusing names: Chilliwack, Coquitlam, Squamish. He clicked on Orbitz. There were, in fact, flights from Des Moines to Dallas to Vancouver, daily flights, as if people made that trip all the time. He booked flights for two and a nice hotel for a week, reserved a car, put it on the credit card with fifteen hundred to spare. He had to get away from the weeds and the dust. It felt just then like a matter of life and death. He rummaged around in the desk for their passports, which Felicity had made them apply for in 2009. They had never used them.
The weather was ideal in Vancouver, no fires this year, seventy-five during the day, and congenially sunny, about sixty at night, but they only enjoyed it for one day. Maybe if Jesse had told Felicity where they were going for their little vacation, she would have warned them, but maybe not. There was nothing in the paper the morning of the riots but a notice that there would be a peaceful protest against the Chintar Pipeline beginning that afternoon at one in Jonathan Rogers Park, proceeding from there to City Hall, and then to a “Rock the People” concert put on by local bands in Douglas Park. There was no sign of trouble in the morning. Jesse went out onto the balcony of their room with his cup of coffee. They would go to Granville Island for lunch—there was some kind of famous crafts market there—then come back and watch the rally, then go to the concert. Nothing bad ever happened in Canada; well, maybe in Quebec, but not in Vancouver. Well, maybe about ice hockey. Something bad had happened about ice hockey in 2011. After only one day, it was the best vacation they had ever taken. It made Jesse want to go into the heirloom-tomato business.
When all the people first started running toward them as they were walking down Cambie Street toward the concert venue, Jesse’s first thought was “bomb”—that was probably everyone’s first thought after the Boston Marathon bombing. There had been no explosion, not even a popping sound. But people were terrified—Jesse could see it in their faces and the handbags and cell phones they dropped as they ran. Rubes that they were, he and Jen kept standing, staring, holding hands. Then they saw the bodies on the ground, at least five of them, and the line of police in helmets, their weapons raised, marching toward them, stepping over the bodies and the signs the protesters had been carrying vowing resistance against the Harper government. Felicity would have told them that Harper had vowed to get the Chintar Pipeline built no matter what was going on in the oil market, that he had pushed through laws that outlawed protest and imposed draconian punishments on any sort of “insurgent and unauthorized references to so-called climate change.” Planes, especially private planes, could not even fly over or near the tar sands, and all analyses of effluents or river or lake pollution were designated as Top Secret; leaking any findings was punishable by years in prison. Felicity did tell them these things when they finally got home. But first, before that could happen, they were taken into custody, handcuffed with painfully tight yellow textile handcuffs, and pushed into the back of a van, where there were at least twelve other people, some of them bleeding. By nightfall, but not before, they were in separate jail cells in separate wings of the Vancouver police station. Late that night, Jesse was ordered over and over to reveal who was behind the protest and who was funding “his” campaign to undermine Canadian national security. Whenever Jesse said that he was just a tourist, he had a farm in Iowa, his hotel was in that neighborhood, his inquisitors laughed. They demanded to see his passport, but they had taken his wallet, and his passport was back in the safe in his hotel. They said, “Why should we believe you, mister?” He held out his hands—knobby, rough, years of grime under his fingernails. They kept Jen for the night, him for two nights, but they lost interest in him—he thought they only kept him for the second night because they had forgotten all about him.
When they got out, they still had three days left. They walked around the city, recognizing its beauty, but in a state of shock. It was as hard to get up and out in the morning as it was to stay in bed, snuggled under the covers. Jesse had never been so simultaneously reluctant to move and restless. They flew home. When they got into their car at the airport in Des Moines, the thermometer registered 105 degrees.
When the call came, three days after they got back (still sweaty hot at midnight, only nine p.m. West Coast time, though), what Annie said seemed like garble to him. Even as he turned over and repeated it to Jen, he didn’t understand what he was saying.
“She’s dead.”
“Who?”
“My mom.”
Jen sat up, threw off the sheet. “Oh my God!”
“Annie was locking the car, and lost sight of her, and when she went out onto the beach, Mom had disappeared.”
“What does that mean?”
“Something called a ‘rogue wave.’ They found the body just before sunset.”
Even once they were fully awake, this did not seem possible. His mom was eighty-six years old, but when she visited the farm, she seemed unchanged and unchangeable, permanently determined to do what she had decided to do. Once Jesse’s dad had told him how they came to marry—all his mom’s idea, she was twenty, and it had worked out (here his dad had given him a bear-hug—odd thing for a farmer). It might be that some kids (Felicity, for example) analyzed their parents’ marriages looking for signs and symptoms, but Jesse had never done that. The only evidence of Lois’s age was her obsession with trying this delicacy or that, and not just at Lunds or Whole Foods, but wherever they were “sourced,” as she called it. She had gotten obsessed with smoked oysters, gone to Scotland—there had been a little accident on that trip, driving on the wrong side of the road, that scared the pants off her and the driver of the car she didn’t quite hit (a little scrape, knocked off the sideview mirror). She had gotten obsessed with lobster, gone to Maine; gotten obsessed with barbecue, gone to Kansas City. They had joked at Christmas—was she going to get obsessed with tomatoes and go to Hoboken?
And then she had to try abalone before she died—all the items on her bucket list were food. Annie had agreed to take her to Monterey, Jesse had agreed to contribute some money and forgotten all about it.
The next day, there was more information, but none that made his mom’s fate less spooky. The beach was called Monastery Beach, south of Carmel. It was notorious for these events—its dangers were frequently underestimated by tourists because nearby beaches were safer. Annie was out of her mind, not exactly at the surprise of it, but at how it fit their mother’s personality, just to be swept away like that, doing something she was determined to do.