Golden Age (30 page)

As for Richie’s reelection campaign, his seat was safe—his opponent this time was a thirty-year-old possibly being trained to do such basic operations as read, add, subtract, and sign checks. The boy’s main qualifications as a candidate were an aggressive posture and a readiness to say, “I would like to see what Congressman Langdon has actually done for the businessmen of the ninth district!” The national Democratic Party was on track to raise more money than the Republicans, and more money than they had ever raised before since the fall of Rome. It seemed to Richie that all he had to do to get funds was smile and say thank you; his coffers were at $560,000, including what he hadn’t spent the last time. Nadie found this worrisome, as did her girlfriend who ran a fitness gym in Arlington that was full of Republican women in leotards (“She has claw marks all over her body,” said Nadie). But Richie felt good—he felt that he, too, had survived, just like Clinton and Gore. What he said about Clinton on the campaign trail was that he admired the man. Watching him get through his presidency was like watching someone strolling along on the other side of a nice green hedge. He was smiling, he was chatting on his mobile phone, he was enjoying the landscape, and he seemed to know where he was going and what he was doing. And then there was a break in the hedge, and you saw that vicious dogs were attached to both of his ankles by their teeth, growling, biting, being dragged across the grass, refusing to let go. Riley was right in her way, but Richie thought he was also right, and the donations pouring into Democratic coffers seemed to demonstrate that the voters thought that anyone would be better than the Republicans.

—

JESSE HAD DECIDED
, with some input from Jen and her brothers, that it was better to raise GMO crops than not to do so, and the logic was simple: There was only so much land, and the world population was rising faster and faster. A farmer’s primary moral obligation was
to avoid famine and soil loss, and, at least for now, GMO corn and beans were doing that. You had to be careful, you had to be precise, but Jesse was. His dad might have been a saint (every time he’d said this, his dad shook his head), but when he started farming in the 1930s (
and
grew his own hybrid seed, according to an old story), things were much different. The GMO corn Jesse planted was Roundup-resistant, like his beans. He could and did make the ecological case.

It must have been mid-August, and hot, when Jesse was driving on the other side of Denby, past the Gorman place on Quarry Road, and saw three heads in the cornfield, just visible above the very green and very tall rows. He didn’t think anything of it; no one else mentioned it at the café. But after Labor Day, it came out that Bill Gorman had gotten some legal papers in the mail accusing him of stealing Monsanto property, and Jesse thought of those heads, in feed caps, looking down, pausing once or twice. He realized that those men had been taking samples of Bill’s plants—maybe leaves, maybe kernels—and then they must have tested the genetic material. At first, according to Russ Pinckard, Bill treated this as a joke—he really did think some prankster had forged some papers in order to tease him for not using Roundup Ready seed, which was expensive and picky. Then he had put off addressing it; there was too much else to do around the farm, around any farm, especially at harvest, to waste your time looking for a lawyer and dealing with something that was obviously crap.

Except that he then got a bill, or something of the sort, saying that he owed Monsanto money for stealing their property. Rumors abounded concerning the amount of money—$1,500, $15,000, $34,500. No one, least of all Bill, could take this seriously, and then he went to a lawyer in Usherton with the papers, and the lawyer had never heard of such a thing. However, a lawyer in Des Moines had heard of such a thing. When Bill pointed out (in a rather loud voice) that he did not use Monsanto seed and never had, it was suggested that pollen from the neighboring farm, which belonged to a big operation based in Omaha, must have drifted into his field—a kind of wave of Monsanto-related corn pushing into a larger population of unrelated corn indicated that possibly wind drift “accounted” for the “theft”; however, Monsanto asked permission to test the rest of the field, and to test the crop already harvested, before it was taken to the grain elevator.

But, of course, much of the harvest had already been taken to the grain elevator.

If that was the case, said the Monsanto lawyer, then they would present an estimate of what was owed according to how large the field was, how close the neighboring field was, and the weather patterns over the summer, and they would expect that estimate to be paid out of Bill Gorman’s sales to the grain elevator.

Jesse was not the only one who considered this eye-blinkingly crazy.

Bill’s lawyer presented the Monsanto lawyer with five years of seed-purchasing paperwork—genetically modified corn had only been on the market since ’97, so five years seemed like plenty. No Monsanto seed had ever been purchased at any point. The lawyer made the case that Bill was not responsible for wind-borne pollen. The Monsanto lawyer made the case that Bill had benefited from property that Monsanto owned, and that he was, in effect, selling stolen goods. The law stated that even if someone sold stolen goods unknowingly, once they found out, they had to compensate the rightful owner of the goods. The very fact that Bill had gotten quite a good harvest—165 bushels an acre—indicated that he had, knowingly or unknowingly, benefited. His yield was closer to that of farmers who had planted Monsanto seed than it was to that of farmers who had not.

Jesse had gotten an average of 169 bushels per acre.

Of course, then everyone remembered hearing of this before—somewhere in Ohio, somewhere in Illinois. Finally, one day, at the café, Jesse himself piped up and said, “Well, I did use Monsanto seed, and I did choose to pay more for it, so maybe they have a point,” and without Jesse’s meaning for it to happen, lots of farmers stopped speaking to one another, and all their disagreements were entirely about the principle of the thing.

Garst was in trouble, too, because some of its feed corn that included a pesticide against corn borers turned up in taco shells at a Taco Bell somewhere. Minnie said that her dad had always liked Garst—the company had started over in Coon Rapids, though it was now based down in Slater, and had been the first one anybody knew of that really pushed hybrid seed. Jesse had paused over the Garst seed, called StarLink, in the spring. It was different from the Monsanto,
not resistant to herbicides but resistant to corn borers and caterpillars, really, which could destroy your field, eating not only the ears but the stalks. He had studied corn borers, which originated in Europe, in ag school. They were indeed a pest. But he had decided in the spring that they weren’t enough of a problem around Usherton—more down around Burlington and over into Illinois and Indiana. In addition to that, you had to plant a field of nonresistant corn the next field over, as a refuge for the corn borers. Whether you could do this or not depended on how the fields were configured and where your neighbors were. Jen wouldn’t have liked him to plant the Garst—she was nervous the way his mom had been about contaminants in the kids’ food—but Jesse saw it as a dilemma that was possibly not soluble. Every time the chemical companies said that they had conquered a problem, the moths, or the weeds, regrouped and attacked from another angle. Jen’s dad said that maybe everyone should give a thought to rabies, or trichinosis, or cow pox, or bovine tuberculosis. Those were the diseases his parents and grandparents talked about, not some allergy to some pesticide that was hardly there in the first place.

But old man Guthrie didn’t say anything in the Denby Café, and Jesse stayed away. He figured that the ruckus would die down once the lawyers worked things out for Bill Gorman—chances were, he was only being made an example of, and people would be more careful in the future. By February, everyone would be looking at their bank accounts, not their fields, to decide what to plant and which seed company to stay friends with. Every farmer Jesse knew had principles, but you couldn’t tell what they were by looking at their fields.

—

AFTER LOIS LEFT
, Minnie got restless. Goodness, she was eighty-one now, but she still felt fine, so she went to a travel agent in Usherton and booked herself a trip to Paris. The woman kept saying in a loud voice, “And is this a gift, Mrs. Frederick?” until, finally, Minnie had to stand up, lean over the desk, and use her most principally manner, “No, Vivien Carroll, it is not a gift.
I
am going to Paris.” The only hotel she could afford was south of the Eiffel Tower, near the Bir-Hakeim Métro stop. The trip was to last for ten days; she would
walk off her restlessness, she would explore parts of Paris she had never visited and parts that she had enjoyed before, she would learn to negotiate the Paris Métro at last. For two weeks before her trip, she walked around the farm (the weather was beautiful), repeating French phrases
—“Je vous en prie,” “De rien,” “Où est la toilette, s’il vous plaît?”
Would it be better if she had some old man to go with? Some complainer with a cane? Some aged man-about-town who would always be talking about better times? She didn’t think so.

But Paris turned out to be too much for her. The Métro was well meaning but complex, taxis were expensive, she couldn’t figure out the bus system. She ended up walking around that neighborhood—Boulevard de Grenelle at the Quai Branly—for seven days, a few hours a day. The most cultural thing she did was to walk down the Quai de Grenelle and back up the Avenue Émile Zola, and it exhausted her. It was no help that women her age, small, wrinkled, dressed mostly in black, seemed to putter along on the sidewalks, never looking in shopwindows or at passersby. When she looked in shopwindows, she looked like those women, so she stopped looking in shopwindows.

She told Jesse and Jen that she had had a wonderful time, couldn’t wait to go back, but she knew that this was her last trip, that somehow it had served as a punishment, though exactly for what she couldn’t say, maybe for being so sure of herself all these years.

And yet she was restless. A week after she got back, she drove her old Mazda into Usherton and parked in the lot of the Peaceful Acres Nursing Home. She was wearing her best dress and carrying the handbag, yellow leather, that Claire had sent her at Easter, maybe as a joke. She made herself straight, strong, and determined, and went inside. The young woman at the desk gave her a kindly smile and also spoke rather loudly, forming her words carefully. Minnie said, “May I speak to the manager, please?” Then, “It’s about employment. I would like to apply for a job.” Why not? she thought. All hands on deck. She had just read in the
Register
that young people were deserting Iowa in droves.

The difficult part, it turned out, was telling Jen and Jesse that night at supper. She didn’t tell them that she had told her new boss, Marian Crest, that she would do anything—cook, mop floors, push old people around in their wheelchairs, wash dishes—but since she
had a résumé that Marian (maybe about forty) was vaguely familiar with, Marian had hired her to maintain records; in an old folks’ home, records had to be maintained about every single thing. Her first week or two would be spent filing. The unspoken plan, both she and Marian knew, was that at some point in the future she would live there, perhaps still performing her job.

Jen said, “What are they paying you?”

“Five fifteen an hour, eight hours a day, three days a week. It might go up if I do a good job.”

Felicity said, “Aunt Minnie, you aren’t going to be here when I get home from school!”

“Well,” said Minnie, “three days a week, no. But if you get on the junior high basketball team, I can pick you up on my way home.”

“I’ll never get on the basketball team,” said Felicity.

Jen said, “If you worked on your layups the way I showed you…” But Felicity stared her down. Felicity was almost twelve, ready to consign all of her relatives to the outer darkness. Jen was the first to go, but Minnie thought it wouldn’t be long until she, too, was beneath contempt.

The drive to work was harder than she thought it would be, more full of unpleasant surprises. Like the car she hadn’t seen when she started the left turn, which suddenly appeared in her passenger-side window, honking. Like the bike she did see, but came so close to anyway that the cyclist gave her the finger. Twice, when it was storming at the end of her shift, Marian let her stay in one of the empty “suites” for the night, and the suite had a distinct air of being her future home. As for her job, well, there was nothing an old woman liked better than setting things straight. She even, thanks to Felicity, managed to upload all the records onto a couple of disks and bring them in after a weekend. Marian gave her a harried raise, ten cents an hour; the Peaceful Acres Nursing Home didn’t have a lot of money to spare. It was working out, Minnie thought, but it was working out the way transitions did—organizing itself, smoothing itself, breaking you in to a new, less desirable life, helping you forget what you cherished about the old life. She told Jesse and Jen that everything was fine and kept her other feelings to herself, as she always had.

—

ANDY THOUGHT
that she understood her computer pretty well. Jared had brought it to her—it was an Apple—and he had overseen the installation of her dial-up connection. She enjoyed it. It worked most of the time. She found that she could look at pictures of lots of places that were quite beautiful, and she would never have to visit any of them. She rummaged around in magazines, printed out recipes, communicated with Janet and Richie and Loretta by e-mail, read newspapers and other “Web sites.” But, most of all, every few days, she checked her brokerage account. There were certain mysteries, such as why the connection worked sometimes but not all the time, why pictures came up instantly or not at all, why she was sure she had typed in the proper password but it still didn’t work. She had never encountered the mystery she encountered on November 6, the day before Election Day (Richie had told her to vote for Gore). According to her account information, the previous Friday, she had had $10,765,986.23. On Monday, she had nothing. The first thing she did was reboot the computer, and the second thing she did was call her broker. His line rang and rang, and no one, not even the secretary, picked it up. With some alarm, she then signed into her bank account. She remembered her password, though it took a moment. In her two savings accounts, she had $68,900.23. In her checking account, she had $14,465.87. So her financial obliteration wasn’t global, as they might say on the Internet.