Early Warning (33 page)

Joe coughed twice. He just could not quite get it out. But then he said, “Eleven hundred an acre.”

Rosanna stared at him.

Jesse said, calmly, “That's a hundred and seventy-six thousand dollars.”

“You did not!” exclaimed Rosanna.

“We did,” said Joe.

“You could sell this whole farm for a million dollars?”

“That's what they say. Well, more than that. Some of the fields, fifteen hundred or sixteen hundred an acre.”

“You did not spend a hundred and sixty thousand dollars on a harvester.”

“About ten,” said Joe.

“What did you do with the rest of it?”

“John and I put fifteen away for college for Annie, Jess, and Gary Jr. and used the rest to pay off loans.”

“Are we free and clear?”

“Just about,” said Joe.

Rosanna stared at him again, for a long moment, and put her hand slowly to her mouth; then the tears started running down her cheeks. Joe said, “Oh, Mama.”

“I don't know what in the world I was thinking when we moved in here, but I certainly did not expect it to take fifty years to pay off the farm. What was it Walter bought, two hundred acres? I can't even remember anymore, that's how bad my memory has gotten, or maybe I put it out of my mind. But, my goodness, I guess I expected to be owned by the bank until the day I died.”

But after a bit Rosanna sat up, wiped her eyes, and said to Jesse, “You know, when your dad lived in that old house, he had four rabbits. They were named Eenie, Meenie, Miney, and Moe. And he had two cats and sheep and cattle and chickens and I don't know what all. His sheep was named Emily. He told me that when he was grown up he was going to have animals in every room in the house, and bring the horses in through the back door.” Jesse glanced at his father, who said, “I did always want a flock of Cheviots. They have bare faces.”

“Jesse,” Rosanna said, “when we took that sheep Emily to the fair, I remember your grandfather told me something you should remember.”

“What?” said Jesse.

“This farm was worth eleven dollars an acre.” She leaned toward him. “Eleven! Nothing! Didn't matter what we put into it. He bought it right after the first war—paid a hundred, he said. I always thought maybe a hundred and ten. Exorbitant! But he was bound and determined to get out of his parents' house, mortgage or no.” She slapped
her hands on her knees and looked at Joe. “Well,” she said, “glory be! What now?”

“Worry,” said Joe.

“Oh, for goodness' sake, yes. Just like always. But buy yourself something. At least a couple of Cheviots. You can build a little pen out behind the Osage-orange hedge. Jesse, wouldn't you like some sheep?”

“Ma,” said Joe, “I think you must be losing your mind. I never heard you say a good word about animals.”

“Well,” said Rosanna, “it's dull around here. Minnie's the principal, Lois is running Crest's, Annie and Jesse are in school all day, and you wear earmuffs from the noise. Sheep would be a little company.”

Joe laughed, and then wondered, where would you even get sheep these days? No one had sheep. He did look around when he headed out to the barn before supper. He did say to himself the words “a million dollars.” But he knew enough at his age to know that dollars were like drops of mist—they fluttered around you and then dissipated. The real mystery was how your farm bound you to it, so tightly that you would pay any price (literally, in interest) or make any sacrifice just to take these steps across this familiar undulating ground time and time again.

—

AS BASIL HAD SUSPECTED
, Henry and Philip (never “Phil”) were quite compatible, though if Basil cared about things like how the corners of the pillows on the couch were turned, or whether sweaters were arranged by color right to left (“Always red!” exclaimed Philip as he was rearranging. “How could you make such a basic error?”), or how much garlic was in the spaghetti, Henry would be surprised. As for other matters, Basil had cultivated Philip quite nicely. He thought sex was a lovely game. Like Henry, he had been a magnet for the women and always wondered what they saw in him. He said to Henry, “Then Basil came along and explained to me what was going on. I was thunderstruck.”

“He explained it to you?” said Henry. They were eating from a box of the first strawberries of the season.

“Well, darling, I might as well have been a detached head, I was
so cerebral. Don't you remember the girl I told you about, the one in my class who only realized she was preggers when the infant dropped preparatory to delivery? I mean, she said afterwards that she wondered what that strange sensation was, the kicking, don't you know, but it never occurred to her to ask anyone.” He helped himself to another strawberry, sucked it between his lips, and pulled out the hull. Henry took the opportunity to smooth the hair back from Philip's very lovely forehead. “All the other graduate students said, well, only in America, so I didn't tell them about the time I went swimming and emerged with a leech attached to my bum and never noticed it until it swelled and dropped at my feet while I was chatting up two girls from Sydney.” For Philip was born not in England but in Australia—Brisbane to be exact—though never once had Henry caught him out, pronunciation-wise. He did it like an actor—BBC most of the time, yes, but he would also do Johannesburg, New Orleans, Minnesota (which made Henry laugh), and Parisian-
homme
-speaking-broken-
anglais
, which came in handy for his literary-critical studies.

And then the door opened, and here they were, stark naked on the couch in the middle of the afternoon, and as soon as he saw Claire, Henry remembered that she'd told him she and Paul were coming for the weekend, a getaway, and he had sent her a key in case he was at school. But that was three weeks ago; it had slipped his mind completely. Claire looked at Philip, then at Henry. Her hand was still on the doorknob, and Henry thought for a moment that she would back out the door and disappear, but she said, “Yoohoo! We're here! Did you remember?” And behind her was Paul—and even though he had on a beautiful Harris-tweed sport jacket, he was so stiff and pale that he might as well have been wearing his white coat. Philip said, “I say, you must be Claire. What a spiffing frock, darling. The color is perfect for you. I'm Philip. We're almost finished with the strawberries, but the best ones are left.”

Henry got up, went to his room, and returned with his jeans and Philip's khakis. Claire was on the phone. Philip made a gesture to him to keep silent as Claire was saying, “Yes, Sarah. We got here just fine. I left the snacks in the refrigerator. Did you find them? And no TV until after they eat supper. We are so looking forward to the play. Yes. Kiss the boys for us, and thanks so much for helping us take the
weekend.” Paul held out his hand for the phone, but Henry saw that she turned away, as if not noticing. In the quiet after she hung up, Paul stepped up to Philip and said, “I'm Paul Darnell.”

—

CLAIRE WHISPERED
, “I don't think my mother knows that such a thing exists.”

“They're very open about it.”

“Henry always acted like he's never found the right girl.”

“Your mother told me that no one is boring enough.”

“How wrong she is,” said Claire.

It was only about nine o'clock; the ceiling of the bedroom was still flowing with light, like the surface of a pond. Paul shifted her head on his shoulder, and she said, “I feel like my whole life is being readjusted.”

“He's thirty-eight years old. I can't believe no one thought of this possibility before now.”

“Remember when he brought Jacob to our house for Christmas?”

“Jacob has kids. Whatever he was thinking about Jacob, Jacob wasn't thinking that about him.”

“But he was gorgeous, I must say.”

“Now we know,” said Paul.

Claire hoisted herself onto her elbow and stared at her husband. She would have expected him to be more outraged and to say something about how maybe Henry shouldn't spend time with their boys anymore. She would have expected him not even to shake Philip's hand, or to put on a rubber glove before doing so. But he had been in a good mood all the way over from Des Moines, enjoying the drive and not complaining. She wondered if she was going to have to change her perception of Paul as well as to continue her marriage to him. She said, “You don't want to go to a hotel?”

“Oh, I don't know,” said Paul.

But he made no move toward her. They both lay quietly, and then he said, in his doctory voice, “You know what they're doing, right?”

She hated to admit, “Not exactly.”

Paul shifted against her, and said, “Well, I do, and being near it doesn't turn me on.”

Claire said, “Okay.” The room was now almost dark, which had a way of magnifying the significance of the silence from the other end of the hall.

Paul's voice rose a bit. He said, “I mean, you really didn't know about this?”

“I really didn't. Did you?”

He moved away from her slightly, not as if he did so knowingly, more as if he suddenly felt uncomfortable. She said, “It's only ten after nine. Let's go to a hotel. We can afford it.”

But at the hotel they had a fight—not about Henry, or the boys, or what Paul called “her behavior”; it was about where they had eaten dinner with Henry and Philip. Why would you come to Chicago and not eat Italian? Or at least go for a steak? Why had she just smiled and agreed when Philip suggested Greek food? Paul hated Greek food—too many olives and strange-tasting cheeses, and what was the meat in a gyro? It tasted repellent, and smelled worse.

Claire said, mildly, “You could have said something.”

“Why do I always have to sound like the spoilsport? You just leave it to me, and you agree with me—you picked at yours and only ate bread.”

Claire tried to keep her voice down. “Can't we try something new every so often?” Since the departure of Dr. Martin Sadler, almost a year ago now, she had cultivated a soothing manner.

“I'm over forty years old. I'm from Philadelphia. I've tried everything I intend to try. If you come to Chicago, you do so for a reason. You know that. You said you were looking forward to a steak. You betray me. I'm always the bad guy.”

Claire apologized.

Paul said, “Don't apologize. That makes it worse.”

Claire put her pillow over her face and lay silently on her back while Paul prepared again for bed, as he had done earlier at Henry's—brushing his teeth, washing and drying his feet, lubricating his eyes, adjusting the covers so that they wouldn't weigh too heavily on him, setting his pillows carefully against his body. Since the end of her affair with Dr. Sadler, she had thought over and over of telling Paul, who still didn't seem to have found out about it, even though he mentioned Dr. Sadler and his brother every so often (“They're doing well
enough; I guess pediatric foot problems are commoner than I realized”). Times like these, she thought it would be a kindness to tell him, so that he could understand who was the real bad guy. Or gal.

—

IT WAS COLD
—first of May and hardly above freezing—in fact, there had been a frost the day before yesterday, and Joe expected another one. He was walking along the grass verge he had planted above the creek. It was thick and tough in spite of the bad weather, and the creek was high, too, up to thirty feet across and five to seven feet deep, muddy and a little foamy. He had sprayed this field with atrazine on March 30, and expected the whole thing to be planted in corn by now, but it had been too wet. He had fourteen days left to get his planting done, and he was fretful.

If you farmed nine hundred acres, leaving about two hundred fallow every year (and there weren't all that many farmers Joe knew who still did that), you had to love atrazine. It was cheap, it was safe, it did a wonderful job. You sprayed the field before you planted, and the foxtail and the plantain and the dockweed just didn't come up. No one had to walk down the rows with a hoe, whacking at the stems of the weeds, using the corner of the hoe to drag out as much of the root as possible. When they'd had Jake and Elsa (admittedly, long, long ago) cultivating had been fun, at least for the youthful him, sitting on Jake's back, his fingers twined in the harness as the two horses pulled the cultivator. But riding a tractor was not fun, and it did disturb the soil much more than the horse-drawn cultivator had done. And then along came atrazine, and the manufacturer sent out a rep, and everyone from all around gathered at the feed store and watched the fellow drink a glass of the stuff, burp, laugh, and say, “Mmmm.” Of course Joe knew he was drinking water, but the demonstration was somehow effective. And then there were the magic words “no till,” words he'd never expected to hear in farm country. Lois was careful about the well—for weeks after he applied the stuff, she brought water home from the market. He didn't object, just as he didn't object when she started saying grace before every meal (the first time, he and Minnie had exchanged a glance, but soon they got used to the “dear Lord” and the “amen”).

He had given in on the sheep idea and found Jesse four Suffolks—
black faces, black legs, curious and frisky. Jesse cared for them responsibly, though without much interest, but Joe himself went out to see them ten times a day and laughed at their antics. He'd bought them from an ambitious 4-H'er down in Burlington whose brother was dedicated to Berkshire hogs. Walter had preferred Berkshires; Joe didn't remember them as being so graceful, ears pricked, belly tucked up, feet dainty white in spite of their massive size. Thinking of them and frustrated about planting, Joe was almost ready to build a confinement barn and go into the hog business—breed them, far-row them, feed them for six weeks, and sell them to someone else to finish. Forty-two days equaled fifty pounds each, and off they went, still rather cute. Ten sows might produce three or four litters each in the course of a year and a half. It made him smile to think of it.