Грэм Мастертон - Famine

He was crossing the red-asphalt yard in front of the farmhouse when he heard a car-horn blaring from the direction of the north-west gate. He shifted the saddle he was carrying to his right arm and raised his hand to shield his eyes from the dazzling scarlet glare of the setting sun. A Jeep Wagoneer was bouncing along the track towards him, stirring up a high trail of shining dust, and whoever was driving it was in enough of a panic to ignore South Burlington Farm’s strict 5 mph speed limit.

He laid the saddle down on the ground as the Jeep squealed and bucked to a stop in front of him. The door swung open and out scrambled his cereal-crop manager, Willard Noakes, as quickly as if the Jeep were about to explode. He was one of those skinny, awkward, jerky kind of people, Willard Noakes, and Season had once compared him to a Swiss army knife. ‘He seems to have so many arms and legs. He can open a door, and light a cigarette, and knock over a mug of coffee, and scratch his head, all at one time,’ she had laughed.

But there was nothing funny or awkward about the way Willard hurried across to him now. Willard’s bony, sun-leathered face was smudged with dirt and there was dust in his walrus moustache. He said: ‘Ed, you’d best come quick. And I mean quick. It’s something real serious.’

‘What’s wrong, Willard?’ Ed asked him. ‘You came down that track like Evel Knievel.’

‘I’m sorry, Ed. But it’s something you got to see.’

‘An accident? Someone hurt?’

‘Well, you could call it some kind of accident, although I’m darned if I know what sort. And if anybody’s going to get themselves hurt, it’s going to be you.’

‘Okay.’ Ed raised his arm and beckoned to one of his engineering hands, who was hunkered outside of the garage, cleaning out a fuel-oil pump. The man laid down his tools and came across the yard, wiping his hands on a rag.

‘You wanted something, Mr Hardesty?’

‘Yes, please, Ben. Take this saddle into the house for me, would you, and make sure it’s hung up right. And tell Mrs Hardesty I might be a half-hour late.’

‘Sure thing, Mr Hardesty.’

Ed climbed up into the Jeep’s passenger seat while Willard started the engine. They swung around the yard and then headed back towards the north-west gate, past the stables and the garages, and out through the white-painted fence.

The Jeep’s FM radio was playing Coward of the County , almost inaudibly. Ed reached across and switched it off.

‘You want to tell me what’s wrong?’ he asked Willard.

Willard glanced at him. They were driving along the wide dusty track that ran beside one of their finest stands of shellbark hickories, and then out across the twenty-three thousand acre expanse of South Burlington’s northern wheatfields. The sun was almost melted away now, except for one smouldering crimson crescent and the miles of ripening wheat appeared to be an odd bright pink.

‘I don’t know,’ said Willard, unhappily. ‘I think maybe you’d better see it for yourself. I don’t drink I’m competent to judge.’

‘ You’re not competent? How competent do you think I am?’ demanded Ed. ‘You’ve been growing wheat for nearly forty years, and all I’ve been doing is sitting on my butt in a stuffy New York office, telling little old ladies how to salt away their surplus dollars for a rainy day.’

Willard thought about that and then shrugged. ‘All I can say is. I’ve never seen anything like it before. I’ve never even heard about anything like it before. But I’m not asking you to take a look at it because I think you might know what it is. I’m sine you won’t. I’m asking you to take a look at it because it’s your farm.’

‘Is it the crops?’

Willard nodded. ‘I can’t even describe it, Ed. I’ve never seen anything like it before. I mean that. Forty years or not.’

The Jeep sped them across the flat, early-evening landscape. The sky faded gradually from a florid rose-colour to a dusky ceramic blue and a cold and creamy moon hung above the horizon. Ed sat sideways in his seat, his arm slung over the back, watching his fields revolve slowly around him.

His fields. He still couldn’t quite believe it. The idea that he actually owned all eighty-five thousand acres of South Burlington Farm – the idea that each handful of dirt he could dig his fingers into for more than ten miles was his own personal property – it all seemed like a strange waking fantasy.

South Burlington had always been his father’s, by ownership and by deed and by that special kind of title that only a lifetime of sweat and pain and sheer arrogance can earn. His father, Dan Hardesty, had been short, stocky, and pugnacious, a tough little bustling pig in Levis. He had built his farm by aggressive mechanisation, shrewd marketing, ruthless buying of agricultural real-estate, and by never sleeping for more than four hours a night.

To Ed, and to Ed’s mother, and to Ed’s older brother Michael, the old man had seemed to be immortal and indestructible and it was only when he had collapsed from a stroke in the middle of last year’s harvesting, felled in one of his own fields under a sky like boiling blue ink, that the family had come to understand at last that he wasn’t going to live for ever. Dan Hardesty, the creator of South Burlington Farm, the wealthiest, toughest man in Kingman County, Kansas, was only days away from death, and someone was going to have to take over.

Michael, as stubby and proud as his father, had been the legal and natural successor. During his teenage years, Michael had stayed on the farm, learning the modem and computerised business of growing wheat, while Ed, who was tall and wiry and thoughtful, like his maternal grandfather, gravitated away from the farm, and then the county, and eventually, the state. In the years of Kennedy and Johnson, flower-power and Vietnam, Ed had gone to Kansas University in Manhattan, Kansas, on a financial study course and then to Columbia Business College, and eventually made his way to New York, where he had been taken on by a smart new investment corporation called Blyth, Thalberg & Wong.

As a boy, Ed had always disliked the farm – maybe for no other reason than he knew it was never going to be his. The farm was all dust and heat and just like his father had been demanding of his mother, he had been equally demanding of Ed, as if he was trying to test him, and maybe break him. Whenever Ed had tried to slip out on a date with one of the girls from the neighbouring farms, or from town, his father had invariably caught him at the gate and given him some last-minute chore like folding sacks or sweeping up dust, so that if he ever made it to the girl’s house, he was always at least an hour late and perspiring, and prickly as a scarecrow with wheat chaff. One pretty and unkind young girl had nicknamed him Li’l Abner.

On the day before Dan Hardesty’s funeral, however, as the family were solemnly gathered on the farm to pay their last respects to the man who had built their lives for them, Ed’s whole existence had been turned upside down. Michael had been obliged to drive over to Wichita late in the afternoon for an urgent meeting with the bank. On the way back, just after midnight, he had tried to overtake a truck on route 54 where it crossed the South Ninnescah River, and he had failed to see another car coming towards him in the mist. The Kansas Highway Patrol had estimated the collision speed to be 125 mph, head-on.