Golden Age (24 page)

So Charlie read books on the train. He would get on at his station, read and ride to Dupont Circle, then get out and run three miles to the store where he sold hiking boots, kayaking gear, climbing gear. Henry was good for Riley, too, though not because he made her spend a couple of hours every so often walking around in the presence of art and artifacts. And he didn’t mind her talking about global warming—he was born in 1932, and his first memories were of the winter of ’35–’36, when the downstairs windows were blanked by snow, and his brothers, who would have been thirteen and fifteen, would jump out the upstairs windows (and Frank out of the attic window) and slide down the snow mounded against the house. Then Frank disappeared, and that snow-enshrouded season turned into a terribly dusty, hot summer, when, his mother later told him, he lay in his crib covered with hives, sweating and miserable. It was so hot that she had to spread wrung-out wet cloths over him—he sort of remembered that, too, though not as clearly as the snow. In ’56, another drought year—oh, ’56! And his stories wandered away from the weather to how he fell in love with his cousin Rosa, unrequited of course, and how the big scandal in the family was the reappearance of Minnie’s father, a ne’er-do-well drunk who had disappeared years before. Walked into the house while Lois was away and Joe was out cultivating one of the fields, and fell down the basement stairs and died. Henry said, “Frank would whisper in your ear that Lois pushed him, but that was Frank. Yes, it was a drought year, but scandals overwhelmed the weather for me.” Charlie felt his unknown past vibrating. He said, “Our family seems to have a lot of those,” and even as Henry was smiling and shaking his head, Riley burst out,
“My grandfather proposed to my great-aunt, and then, behind her back, he married her younger sister, who was my grandmother. And she lived with them for the rest of her life.”

After he went back to Chicago that time, Henry sent Charlie a nicely bound notebook and a pen.

—

“
LISTEN TO WHAT
Warren told me,” said Emily. Janet was stirring the penne so that it wouldn’t stick. Emily had become a vegetarian, so they were having a mushroom sauce with it, and Jared had told her that, although he would miss Emily once she was off to Mount Holyoke with Pattycake, her jumper, he would not be sorry to go back to guilt-free meat eating. Jonah was doing something noisy in his bedroom—maybe jumping on his bed, which Janet would allow for a minute or two. Warren was the farrier at the barn. Emily liked to encourage him to tell sixty years’ worth of stories while he shod the horses.

“I’m listening,” said Janet.

“Did you ever meet Melvin Case? He was one of Mrs. Herman’s whippers-in.”

“No,” said Janet. She stirred the penne again.

“Warren said that he lives in a railroad-style house. I guess that’s long? Anyway, he heard the phone ringing in the middle of the night, so he got out of bed and staggered to the living room to answer it. When he staggered back to bed, a eucalyptus tree had split in two, and half of it had fallen on the house, right through to the bed; the whole end of the house had collapsed.”

Janet’s spoon jumped in the water. She sensed what was coming—didn’t you always?

“So listen to this. It was a friend of his who had had a dream that Mel had died, and the dream was so vivid that he had to get up and call him, just to make sure he was all right. He said that he was fine. The guy apologized for getting him out of bed. Warren said that, the next day, Mel called his friend and told him always to call him if he had any bad feeling about him.” Then, “Do you believe that? I wish I had that kind of friend.”

Janet thought, yes, I believe it, but she said, “I’m more than a little skeptical.”

“I think it’s creepy.”

“It’s definitely creepy.”

When she woke up in the middle of the night, it was to thoughts about that phone call. Had it happened? Their farrier had plenty of stories, and Janet had listened to her share. Mostly she did believe him—peacocks in his trees; a woman mounting her horse, the horse slipping, landing on her, killing her; a trainer forcing his horse against its will (and Warren’s advice) into a stream, the horse and man going under, the trainer’s cowboy hat popping out of the water like a bubble (the horse saved the man). What Janet wondered about was the fact that this story didn’t scare her, that it didn’t trigger any personal reaction, either about eucalyptus trees or about psychic friends. It pinpointed her realization that she wasn’t afraid anymore—something, since she had kept her fears so secret for so long, that no one else would notice.

She knew, lying there, that it had been her father’s death that erased her fears. That, and giving away her inheritance to Fiona’s favorite charity, the Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation; Jared’s favorite, the Big Sur Land Trust; Emily’s favorite, the Jane Goodall Institute; Jonah’s favorite (after some coaching), PBS; and her own favorite, Save the Children. With each check she wrote, she could detect a snort in the empyrean, her father deploring this waste of his hard-earned cash (or maybe that snort was in her own mind). Her mother had said, “How good of you,” but it wasn’t goodness, it was a series of assassinations, and they had worked.

She and Jared had plenty of money, anyway. Their house had doubled in value, and Jared’s stock in his company was at an all-time high. Spending twenty-five thousand a year to send Emily (not to mention Pattycake) to Mount Holyoke seemed prudent, not profligate. People were coming to Jared all the time, asking him to join their start-up—computer animation for every purpose! Once, he was tempted, but when he went into the meeting, he jokingly grabbed the elaborate identifying plaque beside the door of the offices, and it came off in his hands. He took this as a sign and didn’t join them. The entrepreneurs were all twenty-two, anyway. They made him nervous.

But Janet did not think her fears had seeped away because of prosperity or age. Poverty and decrepitude were not what she’d always feared, it was Mutually Assured Destruction. Even after she did avoid
Pastor Jones’s version of apocalypse, she worried that she’d only put it off (thinking about it now, she suspected that the knowledge that Lucas, too, had avoided it was what finally eased those fears). The marvel was not that she had dreaded the end of the world; it was that so few others seemed to. When she asked Jared if he remembered the Cold War “duck and cover,” the Cuban Missile Crisis, he shrugged—yes, but no, not really. What she saw now was that she had known all her life that if destruction came her father would not care enough to save her. Now he was gone, and she was safe.

—

JESSE WAS SITTING
with his dad, who was propped up but slumping slightly to the right. Jesse hesitated to interfere, because his father seemed to resent the number of times that his mother asked him: Are you okay? Do you need anything? You want me to sit you up a little? You want to get up and sit for a while in the chair by the window? No, no, the answer was always no. He’d be gasping for air as he said it, and then his mother would purse her lips and say, “Well, okay, then. But don’t forget to ask.” Jesse knew that asking was not the same as not forgetting to ask. Farmers hated to ask
for
things, but they didn’t mind asking
about
things. Just now his dad said, “You scrape off the paint on the platform of that combine?”

Jesse had bought a new combine a week before, and harvest would begin in a few days. The cornstalks were tall, the ears huge. The kernels were down to about 28 percent moisture now, and the weather was clear and hot for the next couple of days. Jesse liked 26 percent—fewer lost ears. Once, he’d harvested a single field at 28 percent, but a lot of the kernels had been damaged by the equipment. Jesse said, “I did. It’s not at all slippery now.”

“Don’t forget to turn off the machine if the intake gets clogged.” Joe’s voice, once friendly and melodic, had become scratchy.

Jesse wanted to say, “I never do,” but he said, “I won’t.”

“And don’t try to get any twine out of there. Goes in faster than you can react. Don’t care who you are.”

“I know.”

“Who was that, Abel M—”

“I know, Dad. I always turn it off.”

“Make sure Guthrie and Perky stay away from the intake areas.”

“I will.”

“This thing got all the shields in place?”

“It does.”

“That rain we had, you be careful driving that thing through wet spots.”

“I walked the first two fields. The ground is good.”

“Even over above the crick there?”

“Even there.”

“Did you check the spacing on the”—he coughed—“cornhead stripper bars and the belts for wear?”

Jesse did not remind his dad that it was a new machine, that he’d known it was a new machine three minutes before; he said, “Yes.” Harvest made everyone nervous, even Pastor Campbell. How many stubborn men in a hurry does it take to harvest thirty million acres in a month and a half?

Joe said, “Harvest used to be fun. I loved the oat harvest. Now, some of the horses weren’t suited to it—they might take off, run through the fence line—but Jake and Elsa, they were patient. Grandpa Wilmer knew how to breed a horse. Percherons. Good horses, you ask me. We went all around to everyone’s farm and helped each other, and I’ve never eaten like that since.” It took Joe a long time to say this. But Jesse was patient, and when Joe was done he said, “Mom would be sorry to hear that.”

“Oh, I don’t mean that the food was good. Sometimes it was and sometimes it wasn’t. But the conversation was good. Not so much complaining as these days. More like, well, we made it another year, thank the Lord.”

“Thank the Lord,” said Jesse.

Now there was a long silence. Joe’s oxygen tank was across the room, but he hated to use it. He called his condition “farmer’s lung,” as if that was a joke, but Jesse knew it was emphysema, caused by all kinds of dust (but do you really wear a mask when you are cultivating or plowing or closed up in the barn, maintaining equipment over the winter? To do so seemed both silly and frightening). When had the illness come on? If his dad had caught it early, what would he have done, moved to town? Gone to work in his mom’s shop? Now Jesse
cleared his own throat, and then he wondered if he would start panicking every time he got a cold.

Suddenly Joe said, “She’s going to rope me into a big funeral and put up a headstone twice as tall and twice as wide as Frank’s.”

Jesse shifted in his chair. His dad hadn’t mentioned his funeral before.

“You make sure I get cremated. Pastor Campbell be damned.”

“I’ll tell her—”

“Yes, you do that. I put it in a letter and I put it in my will, but she’s going to ignore that, sure as rain. You know, when my dad died, I sat with him out under the Osage hedge there, and I knew in my heart that when I was going to die—and I thought that would be forever and a day in the future, or maybe never, you know how it is—I would make sure that I got buried under the Osage tree. I hated that old graveyard where they put Uncle Rolf and everyone. But here I go. Can’t do a thing about it.” He coughed again.

“I don’t think she’ll let me bury you under the Osage hedge,” said Jesse, “but I will sprinkle some ashes there. I will do that. I promise.”

His dad nodded.

It was funny how they talked about this, so matter-of-fact, Jesse thought. No tears were coming to his eyes, though he loved and respected his father. Nor did his dad pity himself. Death was death. If you went to church every Sunday, which they did, you had to accept that death was a release—they certainly told you that over and over, a harvest to be prepared for and then performed.

His dad said, “Don’t you let those boys ride along unless they’ve got a seat to sit on.”

Jesse said, “I won’t, Dad.”

“And don’t you let Pastor Campbell say that I’ve been gathered into the arms of the Lord. I nearly walked out when he said that about your uncle Frank. Frank would have punched him in the nose for that. You know, when my Opa first came here, if an old man died in the winter, well, they just put him in the cellar for a few months, until the ground thawed. That wasn’t a bad idea.”

The door opened. His mom said, “Hi, sweetie. You two have a nice afternoon?”

Jesse said, “We did.”

His mom said, “I roasted some extra Brussels sprouts and sprinkled
them with olive oil and Parmesan. I made up a container for you to take home.”

“Thanks, Mom. Those are always good.” Jesse’s hand was resting on his dad’s hand, on top of the sheet, and now he looked down. So similar in shape—not beautiful or graceful, but strong and built for work. His dad’s hand felt dry, hard, cool, ready to fix something or plant something, as if it didn’t know that the system was shutting down. It was the hand of a kind man, a hand that had gently squeezed his shoulder or patted him on the back countless times. How did you deserve such a dad? he thought. But he said nothing, looked away. There would be some point when he would express all of this, but it frightened him now—bad luck, asking for trouble. He gave his father’s hand a squeeze and said, “I guess I’d better check the weather.”

“Could be good,” said Joe.

—

BEFORE SHE WENT
to Kyoto for the Convention on Climate Change, Riley moaned incessantly about the carbon footprint of her flight, how could she justify it, why couldn’t they have the conference in…(but she couldn’t come up with a sustainable spot). After she got back (and Richie had paid for the trip, out of pocket, not in his official capacity), she showed no gratitude at all—simply came into his office at all hours of the day and continued arguing with him about the new treaty, about emissions, about money for wind and solar. As far as Richie was concerned, Al getting Bill to sign the treaty was a major victory. The strategy now should be to back off, let Clinton regain his footing and his cool, and move forward from there. But no promise was sufficient for Riley, or for the World Wildlife Fund, or for any other environmental group. He said to her, “Look. The Senate is not going to ratify it. And they would like to tar and feather him for signing it. Can’t you shut up for once?” What he did not say was that there was something else brewing, something that Riley might not care about in any way, but that the Republicans would certainly take advantage of.