Early Warning (54 page)

—

JOE DIDN
'
T GO
to church during harvest, but Lois, of course, did. She had incorporated whatever Pastor Campbell wanted into her schedule as smoothly as possible, and Pastor Campbell relied on Lois for everything. Minnie did not agree with Joe that Pastor Campbell was harmless—he had gotten into a brouhaha with the minister at the Lutheran church—Kellogg, his name was—as a result of passing out leaflets outside Kellogg's church and swiping twenty of his members, his justification being that the end was at hand and Kellogg was wasting valuable minutes preaching about the church parking lot and the used-clothing drive. Campbell never asked for money, and he never talked about this world—he talked about the Rapture, which Joe had thought, at first, was a hymn-singing group. It took him a while to realize that the Rapture was more about punishment than reward, but he still saw it as a figure of speech. Only in the last few months had Minnie impressed upon Joe that neither Pastor Campbell nor Lois was kidding—they expected their very bodies to be swept upward, no matter what they were doing, and they did not like any jokes about it. Joe kept his mouth shut, except to complain about the price of corn and beans; at any rate, he was too tired to think about it.

However, when he did get to church after three weeks, the first thing he heard, even before everyone sat down and Pastor Campbell came in, was about Marsh Whitehead's killing himself. That reminded him so totally of his uncle Rolf that Lois had to tell him three times that Marsh had shot himself. Shot himself in the head with his .22, right in the mouth. Hanging had nothing to do with it. Joe came to his senses.

Marsh Whitehead was a good farmer. They knew each other well enough to touch their caps on the street, to compare seed prices at the feed store and to smile indulgently if Sarah Whitehead and Lois happened to get into a conversation about sin. They knew each other well enough so that Joe might be asked to be a coffin bearer—you
needed eight of those, and Marsh didn't have any sons. But they did not know each other well enough for Joe to ask probing questions about debtor interest, about that quarter-section Marsh had snapped up the previous year. The best he could do was keep his ears open.

When Pastor Campbell appeared, he didn't say a word about Marsh Whitehead for half an hour—his text was “What do workers gain from their toil? I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race.” He then went on to talk about everyone's favorite subject, which was the failure of just about every farm in the neighborhood to make a profit, which meant, of course (and Joe knew he was being cynical), not much money for the church. However, Pastor Campbell focused not on gold but on goodness—the goodness of the toil itself, the tilling of the soil, the richness of the ears of corn, the miracle of soybeans, which “the Israelites would have loved if they had had the chance to grow them.” Were we not lucky, in spite of passing weather, nuclear winter followed by scorching summer, still to be here, among friends and relatives, sitting quietly, and contemplating the Lord, in whom there is peace? Why has God laid his burden on the human race? God has laid this burden on us as a reminder, and some days the burden is heavy, but only by feeling the burden at its heaviest can we sense when it lightens. There will come a time when the burden floats away from us of its own accord, and unless we feel our toil, we cannot gain this understanding—nay, pleasure. Pastor Campbell, when he got wound up, did use the word “nay.” “You will have heard, my friends in Jesus, of a certain event. I almost said ‘sad' event, but I stopped myself. I put before you that I myself do not know if this is a sad event or not a sad event. How we think of this event depends on how we think of the Lord, on whether we truly believe in his mercy and his love. On whether we allow ourselves to ask prideful questions, or whether we simply bow our heads and say, ‘So be it.' Our hearts do, indeed, go out to our friend and sister, Sarah Whitehead, and to her children. We are like Sarah in that we must step back and say, ‘Father, thy will be done,' but we are not like Sarah in that we do not have to wrestle as immediately as she does with the burden of this event. Sarah is not present this morning. She wished to be, but she was advised to let a day or two pass, so that she might compose her thoughts and look to Jesus for solace. I know, my friends
in Jesus, that you will help our sister in all the best ways you know. I have great faith in you.”

Joe thought that was a little ham-handed, but he saw that Lois was moved. Her fists were clenched in her lap. After the pastor stepped back, Ethel Roach started playing the organ, and they all stood up—first the usual “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” then one they hadn't sung since last year, which did, in fact, bring tears to his eyes:

Bringing in the sheaves, bringing in the sheaves,

We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves.

Bringing in the sheaves, bringing in the sheaves,

We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves.

Of course, as soon as the service broke up, all anyone talked about was Marsh—how the heat had affected his crops, what prosperous farmers the Whiteheads had always been, to come to this; well, the bank was going after them. Joe walked away. That was all he needed to know, that and the scared looks on the faces of the other farmers, who were probably not in much better shape than Marsh had been. Joe knew that he was the man with the ideal setup, maybe the only one in the county—Minnie had a well-paid job, Lois's shop benefited from being just far enough from Usherton to seem like it was in the country, and Denby had turned out to be picturesque. Not only that, Lois had made herself a network of dealers: if she somehow came up with a picture or a piece of furniture that actually had craft value or rarity, she knew how to estimate its value and get it to a decent market. This year, he and Jesse were living mostly off that bounty, even though they had gotten fifty-four thousand bushels of corn and eighteen thousand bushels of beans. The price of corn was $2.40, and the price of beans was $5.45 (and lucky to get that out of a record harvest). Joe and Jesse had therefore made $228,000 off of the nine hundred acres they planted, but after paying for seed, fuel, tractor repair, herbicide, fertilizer, and the 19 percent interest on their loan to buy the seed and fertilizer, they had cleared only $18,000, which they put away for next year's crop.

Two hundred twenty-eight thousand dollars! Walter would have been speechless, Joe thought. Hadn't there been a year or so when Joe
was about ten when their corn yield was thirty-five bushels and they were happy to get it? But the one thing Walter had never stopped saying, so that Joe had had to put his hands over his ears, was: Bigger yields, lower profits. You've got to sell it to someone.

Joe did not understand the purpose of going to church, at least these days. When the farmers talked to one another, they talked about bad times—lately, the way the Reagan administration was doing its best to put that gasohol idea to death, even though processing plants were already being built. When the farmers kept their mouths shut, their wives talked about what in the world they were going to do, and when they all shut up and listened to Pastor Campbell, the only good news he had to offer was about somewhere far away that they might get to or might not, depending not, Joe realized, on following the rules, but on whether God liked you. That's why the pastor had pussyfooted around Marsh Whitehead so carefully—he had committed suicide, but there was no guarantee that God didn't like that, because God worked in mysterious ways and thought mysterious thoughts, and that would be the only thing Pastor Campbell could say in good conscience to Sarah Whitehead and those three girls.

T
HE WEDDING
, everyone knew but no one admitted, was very sudden. Lillian had never even heard that Jesse had a girlfriend, and maybe, Debbie implied, but only by raising her eyebrows, he still didn't. However, the girl (her name was Jennifer Guthrie) wasn't far enough gone to look obvious in her wedding dress, and Lillian was sure that, as the date of parturition approached, there would be some discussion of the eight-pound baby's having been born six weeks prematurely. You had to say for Lois that she put on as good a wedding as if she had been hired by the bride and her parents for the purpose, and you had to say for Jesse that he looked happy, and you had to say for Jennifer that she was local and knew what she was getting herself into. Frank was saying that he remembered her grandfather, who had been six or seven when Frank was five, and who maybe was on the first football team ever fielded by North Usherton High School, and didn't he marry Betty Prince, who was what passed for a cheerleader in those days? Lillian had no idea, but she could see that her brother Joe was more cheerful than she had ever seen him in her life, strolling around the Usherton American Legion Hall in a new suit, grabbing elbows and shaking hands, and laughing.

Jesse was a handsome groom, too—muscular the way a twenty-seven-year-old could be. Best to get married at your physical peak and have a year or so of feeling like you really were Warren Beatty and
she really was Natalie Wood, and you could evolve into your humdrum paunchy selves a little at a time. Lillian looked over at Arthur, who was dancing with Andy. Andy had not evolved—she was more like a fly in amber—but she gracefully followed where Arthur led, and every time Arthur swung her around, he looked past her ear, caught Lillian's gaze, and smiled. Lillian said, “Andy is a good dancer.”

“She's pliable,” said Frank.

Lillian disapproved of the casual disrespect Frank always showed when he talked about Andy, but she had to admit that Andy didn't seem to notice, or else seemed to think she deserved it. Lillian said, “She told me her brother broke his leg.”

“His sixty-year-old leg, on a black-diamond slope in Vail. Running the moguls. They had to helicopter him out, and it wasn't easy. But he's getting around. I think he abandoned his crutches after two weeks. Andy said that he doesn't consider pain to be important.”

“Emily is cute.”

“Isn't she?” said Frank. “She likes to stand there with her hands on her hips, giving you a disapproving stare. She reminds me of Mama.”

“She's like Janet. She has high standards.”

“Indeed,” said Frank.

Lillian decided not to pursue this line of conversation. She said, “I would have loved to see Richie, and I'm sorry Michael and Loretta couldn't come.”

“Loretta is calving again, you know,” said Frank. “And the yearling isn't even weaned yet.”

“That's very traditional.”

“Very California. Andy is all in favor. Richie has a new job, and he has to look like he's paying attention for at least three months.”

“Our kids seem better prepared than we were.”

“Do they?” said Frank. “The older I get, the more amazed I am that parenthood is reserved for the young and foolish. Seems like a recipe for doom, if you ask me.”

“You never seemed young and foolish.”

Frank turned and regarded her. His suit fit perfectly, and he still had that predatory look. He said, “The less young and foolish you seem, the more young and foolish you are.”

“If you could give them one piece of advice, what would it be?”

“Don't do what I did. How about you?”

Lillian looked at Arthur, who was spinning Andy around. She, of course, had a catalogue of worries, but they couldn't be boiled down to a single thing to avoid. In fact, she was taken aback by Frank's remark. Finally, she said, “Don't wait too long to go to Paris?”

Frank laughed out loud in a way she'd hardly ever heard him, and she could not help being ignited into merriment herself. He said, “I think I'll write that down.”

Just then, the music ended. Arthur escorted Andy back to the table, where she smiled, picked up her handbag, and wafted toward the ladies' room. Arthur sat down and took a sip of his champagne, then a bite of the wedding cake. He said, “Well, I kept my ears open. You want the news?”

“So much,” said Lillian.

“Let's see. They met at a party in Ames when Jesse was down there last fall, visiting his old roommate, who is now in the engineering school, and when they started talking, they realized that they remembered each other from the crèche at Sunday school, lo these twenty years ago, before her family switched to the Foursquare Gospel in Usherton, and she went to South Usherton High, because their house was just inside the boundary between the two districts. She went to Cornell College over in Mount Vernon and studied chemistry.”

“Due date?” said Frank.

“Hush-hush. Didn't get that one yet,” said Arthur.

“Family income?”

“The farm is paid off,” said Arthur.

“Oh, stop,” said Lillian, then, “Good.”

“She has an aunt by marriage who once knew Frank here.”

“Who was that?” said Frank.

“Do you remember a Eunice someone?”

Lillian saw it—Frank turned pale. Then he said, “Maybe.”

“She's at the wedding.”

“No, she is not,” said Frank.

“She is.”

Lillian thought Frank almost looked angry. Arthur seemed not to notice. He said, “To the left of the buffet, in the blue dress. Short, a little osteoporotic.”

They all stared. Andy, who returned, said, “What are you looking at?” Then, “Oh, Eunice. Poor Eunice. She is unrecognizable.”

Frank said, “But you recognized her.”

“She recognized me. She's Betty Prince's cousin's second wife. He works for Monsanto. They came up from St. Louis.”

And now Lillian saw the really odd thing: Andy, the most dizzy, accepting, hapless woman in the world, drove her gaze into Frank like a knife, daring him to react. Arthur saw it, too. He and Lillian exchanged a glance and dropped their eyes. When they looked up again, normal life had somehow resumed. Frank said, “I should say hi, anyway.”

“Yes, you should,” said Andy.

It was time to toss the bouquet. There wasn't a stairway in the American Legion Hall, but there was a small stage, so the three bridesmaids and two other girls gathered just in front, where the stage bowed out, and Jenny stood above them, now dressed in a green suit with big shoulder pads and white trim. She turned her back and threw the gardenias straight into the air. All the girls in their yellow bridesmaids' dresses threw their arms out and started shouting. It was the youngest who caught them, athletically, as if she were going for a rebound. She laughed and put her face into them, then handed them to someone who looked like her older sister. Now everyone followed Jesse and Jenny out to the car—Rosanna's eleven-year-old Volkswagen, still running like a champ. They were driving to the airport in Des Moines, then honeymooning at a resort in Arizona.

Lillian, who was holding on to Arthur's arm, caught sight of the Eunice woman making her way up to Frank. It was amazing—they didn't even look like members of the same generation. The woman had blue hair and a frail demeanor. More amazing than that, she gave Frank's arm a familiar little squeeze. Arthur said, “Wouldn't you like to know?”

“I'm not sure I would,” said Lillian.

“Just for the drama aspect,” said Arthur.

Lillian shook her head.

That night, settling into the very comfortable bed Joe and Lois had vacated for them, Lillian said, “Do you think Frank has a sense of humor?”

“Frank is a terrible romantic, sweetheart. He has always worn his heart on his sleeve.”

“Frank? I never noticed that,” said Lillian.

“It's a very small heart,” said Arthur.

—

IN THEIR ROOM
at the Usherton Best Western, Andy had taken the bed by the window and Frank had taken the bed by the bathroom. It was the first time they'd shared a room in a number of years, and Frank decided his best bet was to pretend to fall right to sleep, thereby avoiding any conversation. Andy said nothing about Eunice in the car; the only thing she said at all was that Arthur acted worried and Lillian looked pale and tired. In fact, she seemed in pain. Frank had thought so, too, but what business was it of theirs? The more interesting one for him was Claire, who'd come into the church flanked by two tall young men who could not be, but were, Gray and Brad. There was plenty of good news about the boys—Gray had gotten early admission to Penn; Brad was a forward on the junior varsity basketball team, and his team was in contention for the league title. Throughout the wedding and reception, they had shadowed their mother—not as if they were shy, but as if they dared not let her out of their sight. Even when two of Jenny's cousins had come up to flirt openly, Gray kept one eye on his mother. Thinking of Jenny made Frank think of Jesse. Jesse had been quietly attentive, had asked him if he had any advice, had seemed to want to be sure that Frank was not just satisfied with Jen, but impressed by her. He wasn't, but she was a Guthrie—Guthries were harmless. And she had hugged him with easy good nature, as if she was expressing affection rather than obligation.

Content with this small pleasure, Frank began his customary going-to-sleep ritual, which was counting backward in fives from a thousand, but around the time he got to 435, he couldn't help coughing, which unfortunately indicated that he was awake, and when he did, Andy said, in a perfectly clear and nonsleepy voice, “Claire has grown into her looks.”

He said, “I was thinking about Claire, too.”

“I always felt sorry for her.” Her tone was even and cool.

“You did?” said Frank. He opened his eyes. The room was hardly dark at all, with the lights from the parking lot blazing on the ceiling.
Frank wished they had somehow managed to fly home after the wedding, but the weather was threatening even now. There could be another night in the Best Western.

“She only married Dr. Paul because she was still in mourning for your father. But your mother didn't like her enough to notice.”

Frank did not feel that it was his job to defend his mother—she defended herself from the grave perfectly well. However, he didn't disagree with Andy's assessment. Andy said, “But now I think she's lucky.”

“Who's lucky?”

“Claire.” Then she rustled around in her bed and said, ruminatively, “When your parents don't like you, then you are free.”

Frank rolled onto his side and looked at her. There was so much light reflecting off the pale walls that he could see her perfectly. He said, “Your parents liked you.”

“Didn't they, though? My father especially. But, you see, there you are.”

And he knew right then that she meant that she had never been free. That was not what he had assumed she held against him, not at all. He said, “I am sorry if you never felt free, Andy.”

Just then, lying there, staring at her across the little space between the beds, he saw how the architecture of her face remained unchanged by forty years. Her cheekbones and her jawline and her nose were a little more finely modeled, and her blue, blue eyes were a little more deeply set. Her lips were thinner, but not too thin. He laughed at Andy these days, almost as a reflex—but he had not laughed at her at the beginning. He had, in fact, been afraid of her. That was why he had taken refuge in fucking Eunice, in obsessing about Eunice even though he'd hated her, hated her somehow for Lawrence's sake. And now Lawrence had been dead for four decades. Andy smiled, and her smile was still wide and pleasing. She said, “You did your best, Frank.” Which wasn't much—Frank finished the thought in his own mind. Then, just to be sure that he knew she was not being ironic, she reached across the space and squeezed his hand, a reassuring, motherly squeeze. She turned away from him. Frank started his counting ritual over but lost interest at 635. After that, he lay there, looking at the lights blaring and rippling across the ceiling. Andy went to sleep, silent and still. He was always surprised at how people thought of
him, surprised that they did think of him. He thought of himself as the observer, but really, he was the observed, wasn't he? Maybe he had spent his whole life trying to escape that very thing.