Jane Smiley - Golden Age

Ah, Frank. Vanished without a trace. The picture of him on her bedside table didn’t look like him; there was nothing in the Hut that smelled of him or held his shape. Nothing she did in the garden — separating and replanting bulbs, watering, fertilizing, taking in the fragrance of the lavender, the irises, the clematis, the Russian sage, weeding, watering — reminded her of him or of her former self. He was not to be found in books, or in the looks or demeanor of her children or grandchildren. Janet was getting more and more like Andy’s own mother; Richie and Michael more and more like Sven; Emily and Jonah, Binky and Tia, Leo, even Chance — whatever Frank had been had receded in them. Always elusive, he had at last eluded her. He was forever young, too, since what she remembered most vividly about him was the contrast between the boy she knew before the war — impulsive, selfish, enthusiastic, passionate, but not hard — and the young man she knew after — wary, ambitious, amorous, desperate. In honor of him, she sent something to Guthrie, an REI gift card for five hundred dollars. It was an involving project, offloading sums of money. It must not result in gratitude or suspicion or objects’ making their way into the Hut. She thought of Debbie. She thought of Claire. She thought of Henry and Jesse. Alexis! She had never met Alexis, but Richie spoke highly of her. A little college fund would be nice — say, twenty-five thousand this year and twenty-five thousand next year. After that, they would see.

THERE WERE certain things that no one talked about at the Denby Café, and one of them was who was buying, actually paying for, the machinery that was popping up here and there. Jesse had gone into serious debt for a new tractor and planter six years before, and then, right after that, planters were introduced that could plant twenty-four rows of corn in one pass, and do it all night, because the tractors and planters were equipped with GPS control and bright lights, which meant twenty-four-hour-a-day planting and harvesting, at least if there were enough people on the farm to man the shifts. Jesse recognized that, at last, farming had fulfilled its industrial potential. These huge machines were expensive — delve as he might into his accounts, Jesse could not see how he, or anyone, could make the kind of money that paid for such machinery, and you couldn’t buy it cooperatively, since, because the weather was so iffy, everyone had to be planting at the same time. Every year now since 2013 (eleven inches of snow on the first of May followed by fifty degrees the next day, which melted the snow, and then ninety degrees six days later, which evaporated the moisture almost completely; according to Jesse’s moisture sensors, the snow hadn’t done much to rectify drought conditions from the year before), the pressure had been growing to plant more and more quickly. ’14 and ’15 hadn’t been that bad, but it seemed as though everyone panicked. First it was the Sensordrones that reported moisture levels all over the farm every three hours, and then two more of those giant machines popped up, one at the Whiteheads’ and one at a big farm everyone knew was owned by Cargill and was farmed by five Hispanic guys. These days, you would see things in the Torch like “As of May 3, 21 % of the acres devoted to corn were planted. As of May 10, the number was 78 %.”

In principle, Jesse should not have been opposed to these changes. Hadn’t he always been the one to advocate for the most precise, the most efficient, the most scientific, noninstinctual methods? Hadn’t he been very patient with his father, with the stories about the chickens and the hogs and the dairy cows, the oats and the horses, and wetting your finger in your mouth and holding it out in front of you to test the direction of the wind? Hadn’t he been a little thrilled when he referred to everything about the farm as “inputs” and “results”? But he was sixty. Maybe every sixty-year-old deplored change, said that things had gone too far, recalled the good old days of whatever? When he complained about something at supper, Jen laughed at him, not with him.

He complained of not having enough land. He had almost nine hundred acres; to make it, you needed a thousand now, or two thousand. ADM and Cargill and other investors were buying up the old farms, putting on them as tenants farmers from California who had lost their properties to drought. At least, that’s what longtime denizens said at the Denby Café. How could those folks from Los Banos afford to pay thirteen thousand dollars per acre? And rising, since the High Plains Aquifer was about drained and irrigation was a thing of the past, and so Iowa land had gotten ever more valuable (for the time being, said Felicity, who emailed him photos of glacier retreat and viewed the desertification of the “interior” as inevitable). Who would give a stranger a ten-million-dollar loan? Especially when Ralph Coester, at the Northern Iowa Bank in Usherton, always frowned and shook his head at Jesse Langdon, though even in the drought of 2012 he had never missed a payment. Ralph had given him the money for seed this year, but reluctantly — whereas he had once just signed the papers, and pushed them back across his desk with a smile, this year he’d read them over and over on his computer screen, tapping this key and that key, frowning, clucking. Then he said, “Seed gotten to be a big investment, you know. Gus Whitehead told me he puts the seed in the tanks along with the pesticide, does the job lickety-split, and then takes off. This year he’s heading for Chile. Can you imagine that?” No, Jesse could not. Was Ralph bankrolling refugees from the Central Valley? Certainly not. But there were a lot of things that people used to talk about at the café that they didn’t talk about now. The place was mostly dead quiet — the only sounds were slurping and chomping.

One morning at breakfast, he said to Jen, “When you were a kid, did you ever imagine living somewhere else?”

She said, “Sure. Didn’t you?”

Jesse thought for a moment and said, “I don’t think I did. My dad loved the farm so much that he always made it sound terribly romantic.”

“But he lived for a while in that house where some uncle killed himself. That didn’t spook him?”

“If they delved into the whys and wherefores of that, I never heard about it. Why would it have to do with farming and not with, say, a hopeless love affair?”

“I don’t know. I just vaguely remember the gossip.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“Well, there was the Miss Kitty fantasy, where I imagined myself living in Dodge City and running a saloon. I think I was five. Then there was the Christine McVie fantasy. We would be living in London. I guess I was eleven or twelve then. Daddy bought me a ukulele after I pestered him enough. I did spend that summer in Washington, D.C., interning for Congressman Leach. Before I left, I imagined never coming home. That lasted a month. What about you?”

“Well, my uncle Frank kept inviting me to New York City. He would send me postcards of various sights we could see. He was all set to paint the town red. Uncle Henry had me to Chicago a couple of times. I don’t really mind going to see Annie in Milwaukee and fishing in the lake. But back then, I was sort of afraid of New York, or of Uncle Frank. It seemed disloyal to write to him, to talk to him, to go shooting with him, so visiting him in New York would be a big betrayal.”

“Disloyal to whom? Your uncle Frank was like the family god.”

“Oh, to my dad. He never said anything, but I knew by the look on his face when he handed me a letter. They papered it over, but they weren’t close.”