Jane Smiley - Golden Age

THEY GOT HOME to discover that the propane tank was empty and the house freezing cold — all of Jen’s houseplants were dead, even her favorite, the peace lily. But the propane supplier was there within an hour, and the house was warm by suppertime. They agreed that the death of the plants was a smallish price to pay — if the gas had run out a day later, the tanker truck might never have gotten out of Usherton. The blizzard was another “storm of the century,” except that it really was — thirty-four inches in one twenty-four-hour period, followed by off-and-on accumulations for the next ten days of another twenty inches. Neither Jesse nor Jen was used to being impressed by snowfall. They had seen plenty, especially in the early eighties, and they had heard about even more: Uncle Frank getting out of the second-story window and sliding down a snowdrift on the west side of the old house; tunnels from the house to the barn, where the draft horses and the cows and the chickens huddled in the cold, waiting for three strands of hay and a handful of corn kernels. Oh, yes, popcorn kernels. They made light of it for a few days — the house was warm, no kids to get to school, no problem closing off the upstairs and shutting down those radiators. The house was too large for the two of them, anyway.

The electricity went out, but there were plenty of candles, plenty of books; in France, according to a book Felicity had read, the usual way people got through the winter in the countryside, all the way until the 1950s, had been a sort of hibernation — sleeping from sunset to sunup (some fifteen hours) saved heat and food. For three days, they were really cut off — no Internet, no TV, no recharging the cell phones, no mail. Sun came up after seven-thirty, went down before five — not quite as bad as France. Jen decided to read Middlemarch , and Jesse went through every New Yorker that Felicity had stacked in her room. They ate mostly out of the pantry, put the cuts of meat from the freezer in a box sunk into the snow by the northwest corner of the house, where, in spite of the fluctuation in temperatures, it had a chance of staying chilled. It was Jen’s idea to surround the meat with bags of frozen peas and beans as a gauge. They talked fondly of Lois, who would have cooked every roast and stew the first day before burying them outside — not just survival, but gourmet survival.

The morning after the blizzards had stopped, the electricity came back on and the road was finally plowed. The full results of the November election still weren’t announced; after eight years of Obama, everyone was certain there’d be a Republican sweep, and it looked like the Senate and House were going dramatically in that direction. But even the presidential tally wasn’t in. Because of the twenty-three-state Election Day power outage, there was no telling how many votes were lost, or worse. Rumors abounded that the grid had been hacked, since the polar vortex alone could not have caused the complete electrical shutdown — in, say, Los Angeles.

There was a knock on the door. It was Sheriff — what was his name? — Bill Jenks, standing on the front porch. Jesse thought that there must be some disaster, that the county was sending people out to see if everyone was okay, so he opened the door with a smile, and Sheriff Jenks handed him a paper: Request for a donation? Tickets to some fund-raiser? But it was a copy of a notice of sale, and the property being sold was this very farm — Jesse recognized the parcel number. Sheriff Jenks said, “Shoulda given you this ten days ago, but no one could get here. You can appeal that, and put off the date.” The sale date on the paper was February 1. Jesse didn’t say anything, he was so thunderstruck. Sheriff Jenks handed him a pen, and for a moment Jesse thought of refusing to sign, but he did sign — intimidated by the uniform, no doubt. Sheriff Jenks said, “Well, then,” and made his way carefully down the icy steps and over to his vehicle, which still had three inches of snow frozen on the roof. But the sky was clear, brilliantly clear, almost blinding, in every direction.

Jen was in the kitchen, enjoying the hot water, humming to herself. He set the paper beside the sink and walked out the back door. It was freezing cold and he didn’t feel a thing, he was so enraged. Moments later, the door slammed open behind him, and Jen said, “Is this what I think it is?”

“If you and I both think it is a notice of foreclosure, sale, and eviction, then we agree on what it probably is.”

“How can that happen?”

“I think the real question is, how can it happen this fast, without any response from goddamned Piddinghoe Investments, or the bank.”

“Can we get into town?”

“Not until Monday.” It was Thursday. “There’s no point going tomorrow, because the state and county offices are on four-day weeks. I’m not sure we would get there tomorrow, anyway. The sheriff’s car had chains. We don’t know what the roads are like.” Jesse called the lawyer there, but there was no answer.

It was a difficult weekend. Winds were so strong that they blew the TV dish off the roof of the house, and Jesse had to cover the west windows with plywood. No branches broke through any part of the roof, but they did fall all around, littering the surface of the snow, which, even after melting and freezing, came as high as the porch floor and drifted much higher in some spots. What had seemed to be an amusing adventure now became a test of patience, and since the upstairs was closed off to save on heat, there was no escape from one another, either. They agreed to blame Ralph Coester, for lack of anyone else, but Jesse felt blameworthy, too, though he didn’t know why: For going in debt in the first place? For not being a good enough role model to be able to bring at least one of his sons into the farm? For priding himself for so long on his clear-eyed and unsentimental approach? For not going into something else, anything else, and getting out when the getting was good? Even for marrying into a farm family instead of into, say, an engineering family? But Jen was the only girl he ever truly loved. There was another girl he’d asked out, but he now could not remember her name. So he was not going to blame himself for that. On Sunday morning, they had a spat about bacon grease — she had let the grease can get too full, Jesse spilled some when he went to dump it, and then she burst into tears, and he burst into tears, and that was that for rage. On Monday, right after breakfast, they went together into Usherton, to the county courthouse. The results were not good: the paperwork was there, filed by the county attorney on behalf of Piddinghoe Investments, signed by a judge. The old way of having a hearing was gone now, as of last July 1, because the state couldn’t afford to have a judicial hearing about every foreclosure; it took too long and clogged the system. If the papers were in order and the evidence went against the mortgage holder, that was that. As for putting off the date, the snow was an act of God, no provision in the law — the sale of the property would go forward as planned. Jesse asked what his recourse was, and the county clerk asked him if he had a lawyer. He named his lawyer. The county clerk said, “I’d get someone else, if I were you.”

The days progressed both slowly and quickly. Jesse did get another lawyer, and the lawyer was upbeat at first, but after Jesse had called him the fifth time to see what he thought, he got irritable, until he finally said, “Look, I am doing what I can, all right?” In the meantime, Jen started going into closets and opening drawers and getting boxes from a box store in Usherton (the roads were fine now). She was packing up to leave before Jesse had even admitted that they would have to leave. They said nothing about where they might go. Jesse went out to the machine shed and ran his hand over the tractor, the planter, the cultivator, the rest of the machinery, old and new. He stood and stared for a long time at the lister, which his grandfather had dragged along the rows of corn; once the plants got a foot tall, the machine would mound dirt along the stalks, supporting them. It was like looking at a hatchet and contemplating a wood stove.