“You do.”
“Did I enjoy Crystal and Cooper?”
“You seemed to.” She shook her head. She thought he was joking, and maybe he was, a little. He said, “I am sixty-six. My mom is almost a hundred. Aunt Claire is eighty. Everyone in our family is sharp as a tack.”
Jessica said, “I know that, sweetie.”
He let the subject drop, but every so often, he called the investigator who had been put on the case at the beginning and asked him if there was any new information. The investigator was sympathetic—he had cousins who were twins, very close—but he never had new information. Finally, after the fifth call, he said, “Congressman, I would like to pursue this, but we are so low on funds that I would have to do it on my own time, and there are other cases that seem more important to me. Not to mention the backlog in the courts. There are a few retired investigators you might contact to see if one of them would do it—but it’s a boring case. It’s a hit-and-run. It’s more or less meaningless. Now, you were telling me about that young man you knew, who was shot out in Washington State?”
“Cousin,” said Richie.
“Yes, sir. Well, that is more interesting in its way, because those gangs of kids that they have in certain places—there in Washington State, but also in Kansas and Wisconsin and Oklahoma, and a lot of places where the economy has simply vanished these last years, they are a real symptom of the times we live in. They don’t care if they murder, they don’t care if they die. They’ve got nothing to look forward to, so, as with your cousin, they kill for a twenty-dollar bill. We thought those types were a third-world phenom; well, look where they are now. At least they got those boys, and they’re in jail. Sixteen people had to die before they got ’em, but they got ’em. That’s all I have to say.”
“Thank you for your help.”
“I wish I could help, Congressman, but you’ve got to accept the fact that whoever killed your brother got away with it.”
After that call, Richie thought about those kids in Washington. Some had been fourteen (the most ruthless age, in Richie’s estimation), though the apparent killer was eighteen—he had been living at the park for three years. His father had been a migrant from Amarillo, Texas. He farmed for ADM for a year, but couldn’t support his family doing it. The son began stealing, was kicked out of the house; the wife died mysteriously (domestic violence was no longer investigated, as a policy to save money); then the father shot himself in the mouth. The other four kids had similar backgrounds. It was the same in Oregon, the same wherever there was still water, still even the smallest hope of making a living. The boys drank from the river, shot and ate animals, ambushed passersby. The sixteen bodies (Guthrie had been number fourteen; fifteen and sixteen were a local couple, the boys’ biggest mistake) were left under bushes for the vultures and the crows to take care of them. Two of them drove Guthrie’s car to a local town, where they spent his last $38.56. Then they left the car in a parking lot and hitchhiked back to the park. Until the death of the local couple, people in the town had thought they were “harmless,” figured they couldn’t “do nothing about them—gonna ship them back to Texas?” Was he like these boys? Since he had done what he did, why did what they did fill him with horror? Sometimes he allowed himself to believe that what he had done had a certain justice to it, or, at least, a certain practicality. Other times he thought he had fulfilled his destiny—you name which one, psychological, mythological, political, masculine. But no one believed he had done it. No one believed that Congressman Langdon (D-NY) had the balls.
—
CLAIRE’S HOUSE WAS big enough for Jesse and Jen to feel almost comfortable. It was certainly well equipped—Jesse only had to think of a tool, walk into Carl’s old workshop, and find it ready to hand. They had moved in originally for Claire’s sake. Jesse’s job was to maintain the gardens and the property, sell vegetables at the city market when they were harvested, and keep the place up, though Carl had been so careful that only the most routine maintenance was needed. Jen’s job, unspoken, was to keep an eye on Claire. The very first evening, Claire had looked at them across the supper table and said, “I am eighty. I will never leave here, because I feel Carl’s presence here,” which meant, Live here, take care of me, I will bequeath you the house. It seemed like a decent bargain, not least because Claire had almost no sentimental attachment to the farm: I love it here; look at these vegetables; and to think, you can weed the garden, then take the train to the Field Museum and pick up some pomegranate balsamic on the way home. She didn’t insist that they view their eviction as a salvation, but she set the example.
After Guthrie’s car and then his body were found, though, Claire became the caretaker. It was a parent’s worst nightmare—first he disappears without a word, as if he just can’t take you anymore, and then his remains are found somewhere you’ve never been or he’s never been, until now. Guthrie, the riddle; Guthrie, the boy who smiled no matter what, and deflected all questions, all looks of concern; Guthrie, aged thirty-four, the boy who was always about to get it together. Guthrie, who died before you could look him in the eye and say, “I told you not to enlist, I told you not to be a sucker.” But he hadn’t told him, and look at Perky, “John”—it had all worked out for him.
Jesse did not think that Jen would recover from this. She had lost twenty pounds, she cried all the time, she refused antidepressants. He had never, never seen her not bounce back—even when they moved off the farm, she had truly seemed to believe that the opportunity to get rid of a lot of junk outweighed the injustice and the dislocation. She loved Claire, she loved Chicago, she loved the city market and the people she was meeting. Until. Now she could not look at Jesse; he looked too much like Guthrie. She spent her time with Claire, and Claire allowed it, comforted her over and over. Some nights she slept in Claire’s room, and Jesse could hear them through the heating vents, talking. It didn’t have to be about Guthrie—they talked about their childhoods and the news and knitting sweaters for Claire’s grandchildren.
Sometime after dawn, he woke up to find Claire in her robe, sitting on his bed. He jerked upward, and Claire took his hand. She said, “It’s all right. She’s asleep. It’s me that couldn’t sleep. I thought you might be awake already.”
“Aunt Claire, those days are gone. Even when I was farming, I never got up before eight.”
“No cows to milk,” said Claire.
“Nothing to love at all,” said Jesse. “What good was it?”
“Ah,” said Claire. “Hmm. What did I love? I think all the scents. Mama’s lilac trees, and the wild iris in the fields, and rain on the breeze on a hot day. Apple and pear blossoms. The hay just cut. The mix of odors in the barn when the sunlight was shafting through the cracks in the boards, heating everything up.”
Jesse said, “I liked a big harvest, but I didn’t love it. Not like my dad. He would put his hands into a bin of corn kernels and let them flow through his fingers, and he would pick up the cobs and sniff them.”
“Joe was a very sensuous man, and I am old enough to say that! Oh, I loved that house, the Frederick house. I remember, when I was six, so it was right around the end of the war, I used to ease out whatever door Mama wasn’t near and walk over there. It seemed like there was such a hill between our house and theirs, but it was just a little rise. I would walk in the weeds along the edge of the big field, and then I would just stand there, looking up at the row of windows, and the upstairs porch off the back; then I would walk around and look at the ripply glass panes in the front door. It was painted a minty rust-green then. I thought the color was very appealing. Whatever Mama didn’t like, I liked, that’s for sure.”
“She was a character,” said Jesse.
“And characters don’t always make the best mothers, but, with a little distance and Henry’s help, I came to appreciate her.”
Jesse did not say what he was thinking, that because, according to the police report, Guthrie probably felt no pain—the bullet went straight through h
is brainstem and cerebellum, then lodged in the headrest of his seat, and so he had lucked out—he had no worries anymore. If you were not religious, then you could imagine him at rest; and if you were religious, you could imagine him released, redeemed, reborn. Sometimes Jesse thought of this as his father had (redemption in the soil itself, in compost, in the memories of those who loved you), and sometimes he thought of this as his mother had, redemption in the arms of the Lord (and she had always told him those arms were wide open, no matter what certain pastors might say). You could grieve the strange horror of Guthrie’s demise, and what that meant about the world they lived in, or you could grieve Guthrie’s loss, or you could grieve your own loss. Or you could condemn yourself for bequeathing this new world to your children. He put his hands over his face, and his aunt Claire patted his knee. She said, “Oh, Jess. I don’t know what to say.”
—
THE BARGAIN THEY MADE was that Ezra could plan the wedding, and Felicity would plan the honeymoon, and each set of plans would be secret from the other person. Felicity thought that it would be very difficult for Ezra to plan the wedding around a rally or a march, but if she gave him the honeymoon, he would have a field day, and, as usual (in her experience), she was right. He put off and put off, and then, when they went to Britt and Leo’s place for Halloween, there was the Officiant, and there were her parents, looking spent but better than they had in the summer. Britt and Mona were wearing matching outfits, Leo and Jack were in suits, and Ezra had bought her a dress—beige, not white—and it fit perfectly of course, and looked good. Ezra was nothing if not precise. Emily and Jonah were there, too. Jonah was doing graduate work at Cornell, in Chinese, and if he wasn’t going to work for the NSA, Felicity would be dumbfounded; but at the moment, he was writing his dissertation on the violent end of the Ming Dynasty. Emily had with her a present from Tina, who had become a potter “as a retirement gesture.” It was a beautiful six-quart stoneware casserole that looked as though a peacock feather had been draped over it. Chance had been unable to come, but he had sent along his and hers cowboy shirts made of old feed sacks, which Ezra’s mom liked so much she said she would sell them in her shop. She had knitted Ezra a black vest and Felicity a white lace shawl. Felicity could tell she had been planning their marriage maybe longer than she and Ezra had, because the shawl and the vest were intricate and time-consuming. Felicity loved Ezra’s mom—in Roxbury, you did not have to hide your hippie origins or feel any embarrassment about all your friends who still lived in Woodstock. Ezra’s dad brought the Lamoreaux Landing Finger Lakes sparkling wine, a case.
She hugged her mom for about five minutes, she was so happy to see them, happy they looked okay, happy that Ezra had talked them into it, happy that her mom and Ezra kissed as if they really liked each other. But the fact was, everyone in the family liked Ezra; they thought she was lucky to get him. She did, too. Uncle Richie couldn’t come—he was in the hospital for an emergency cardiac procedure. All through the wedding, everyone tried not to be worried about him, tried to talk about Guthrie instead, what a sweet young man he had been, but at least six people, including Leo, said, “He just hasn’t been the same since Uncle Michael got killed.” When, before the ceremony, they said a prayer for Guthrie, they included Uncle Richie. As a rule, Felicity stared straight at the wall when anyone said prayers, but because it was for Guthrie, and her mom was standing next to her, holding her hand, she bowed her head this time. And so it was a big wedding, and so Ezra had pulled it off, and so the onus was now on Felicity to make something of the honeymoon.
Ezra had never been west of State College, and he had only gone there when Wolf was inaugurated as governor in ’15, to protest fracking. A honeymoon in late November was always a risk, especially since Ezra did not like sports but didn’t like any other sort of leisure, either. There had been no snow, however, so Felicity decided that a road trip, first to Chicago to visit her parents and Aunt Claire and sample the wares at the city market, and then on to…Well, that would be the surprise. Ezra might think that she was setting up an inspection of the Illinois coal mines and oil fields that he would like to blow up, or perhaps the old nuclear-waste site on the Missouri side of the river down by St. Louis, which had become such a scandal. There was really nowhere safe to go on a honeymoon anymore—not Florida, or even the Caribbean, since the hurricane season had gotten so wild. This was, perhaps, a bad omen for a marriage. Nevertheless, Felicity hadn’t been to the farm in four years. They would drink a bottle of real champagne in their room at the Days Inn in Ames, and that would remind them of who they were.
Felicity did the driving. Eleven hours through Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Ezra staring out the window and noting roses blooming here, jonquils blooming there. As they drove, Ezra checked his phone for coordinates, and kept a list of what he saw. Only two years ago, monster snowfall, and now this.
Aunt Claire’s house was an oasis of beauty and order, her dad still seemed mournfully relaxed, and her mom was beginning to resemble her old Guthrie self. She took Felicity and Ezra to the city market—tables of products from Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, even Michigan. Organic pulled-pork sandwiches, and on your ticket was the name of the hog you were eating (in Ezra’s case, “Dennis”). Tomatoes that were fresh off the vine in the last week. Baby asparagus. One of the sellers said, “Yes, the weather is crazy, but as long as we are deploring it, we have to take advantage, and produce as much as we can, for the compost, and also for the dryer. We are on our own now.” She was from Racine. Ezra took down her name. Felicity bought five skeins of lamb’s wool, undyed, cream, gray, and dark gray. That night, she was almost happy when she lay in bed, in spite of what she knew was coming.
They left at 7:00 a.m., with six of Aunt Claire’s scones in a bag and a small jar of pear jelly. They were through Cedar Rapids and on the Lincoln Highway before noon, and Ezra said, “You are taking me to the farm.”
“Just for the afternoon,” said Felicity.
The weather remained sinisterly sunny. It was strange to crack her window so late in the year because the interior of the car was so warm, strange to see…Well, she kept her eye on the road.
The farm was entirely flattened. You could loop around it, as you had always been able to do, but if you didn’t know the numbers and names of the roads, you wouldn’t know where you were. The houses were gone, the barn was gone, the butternut trees were gone, the little hill was gone, the old creek bed was gone. Some kind of machinery had been used to plane the surface of the land so that it was as flat as a table, and slightly raised, and over it the owners had spread acres and acres of black plastic sheeting, no doubt to preserve the moisture. Between the rows of sheeting, there were long, deep ditches with slanting sides, fake creeks that stored the rainwater and, Ezra thought, let it seep, by means of some sort of capillary system, into the adjacent “soil.” On the southwest corner of the farm, where the old house had once been, there was now a double-wide trailer. After Felicity and Ezra had been standing beside their car for a few minutes, its door opened, and a man stepped out onto the tiny porch. He was holding a Bushmaster. Ezra waved, and they got back into the car and drove around to the other side, where he wouldn’t be able to see them. Felicity wasn’t exactly afraid of guns, and the man hadn’t lifted his, but she was happy to drive away. She said, “One more thing.”
Ezra said, “Measuring the depth of the soil.”
“Exactly,” said Felicity. They pulled over where maybe the hill had been, the hill her dad had never wanted to plant, just west of that, where the soil had been deepest and most fertile from years of manure. She didn’t have a tool, so she used the spoon they had used for the pear jelly. She dug. She came to subsoil.
“Two inches,” said Ezra.
“It was twelve or fourteen a hundred and fifty years ago,” said Felicity.
“And it’s very fine, like sand or dust. I guess that’s the reason they cover it with plastic.”
Felicity rubbed a bit between her finger
s. It was gray, just grit.
Ezra said, “You know, it took the Mesopotamians thousands of years to destroy their soil base.”
They got back into the car and drove to Ames. That night, Felicity did not feel like drinking champagne.
—
WHEN ANDY WOKE UP, she thought it was the new year, but the clock on her phone read “11:55.” Her eyes opened wide; she was not sleepy, and she was looking out the window of her room. Maybe the moon had awakened her, so bright that it pierced her eyelids. The surprising thing was the quiet weight in bed with her—behind her, causing the mattress to dip. She knew who it was, and so she didn’t roll over. Out the window, the moon had moved upward; the light it cast was a shimmering film—over her golden yard and the glittering hill beyond, into the darkness of the trees, so that they looked bejeweled, across the sky, so that it was a deep cerulean. There was no wind. The fox that was crossing her yard paused, waved its tail, turned its head. They exchanged a glance, and what came into her mind was “Now. Right now.” Then it happened again—she saw her world through the eyes of the fox. It was more monochrome, but also more distinct—it was as if she could see every blade of dry grass, note the ones that were quivering with life. A squirrel on a branch, a rat under the porch, the earth undulating in every direction, the sky far above. She did remember that fox in Iowa: same fox? A different fox? And now she knew that that fox had come to get her, and that she had sent him away because she’d had more lessons to learn. This time, she would not send him away. The weight in the bed shifted. A warmth lifted off him. She closed her eyes. He took her into him, Frank.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Barbara Grossman for plenty of support and advice. I would like to thank the members of the U.S. Congress for being so easy to satirize, and I would like to thank my own personal perfectionist, Robin Desser, for her patience.