Jane Smiley - Golden Age

Claire had never heard this.

Anyway, school started after the weekend. Henry had given Charlie a couple of books — not hard ones, fellow named Hinton, for kids, really, but he made Charlie promise to write him a short letter every fifty pages. Charlie swore he hadn’t read a book in ten years, since he barely graduated from college.

Claire saw that Henry was out to change that.

—

EVERY YEAR, Jesse pondered the glyphosate conundrum, usually while lying in bed after Jen fell asleep. It was fortunate that the windows of their room looked south, away from the farm. Otherwise, he would be standing there, staring at the fields. This way, he just lay quietly beside her, trying to push thoughts about glyphosate out of his mind while coordinating his breathing with hers. The thing was, you could have the well water tested for calcium and magnesium salts. Supposedly, the hardness of the water did not change much year to year; supposedly, it had to do with the rock layers that the water seeped through. He had had the water tested, and discovered that the water from his dad’s well was harder than the water from either the well by the old farm or his own well. The evidence was there — his folks went through a hot-water heater in seven years because of calcium and magnesium buildup in the tank. His had lasted ten years already. If the water was hard, you added ammonium sulfate to the glyphosate — Jesse usually added eight pounds, or maybe nine, though if your water was hard enough you could add up to seventeen pounds. When the mix was right, the emerging weeds drank it up and died. Sometimes the velvetleaf was harder to get rid of, but it did a great job on the foxtail. He turned over, opened his eyes. The moonlight made the pattern of the wallpaper look like a fence, though Jesse knew it was really flowers. He closed his eyes.

His dad was skeptical about all these chemicals (and they were pretty expensive, too), but what was the alternative? Repeated cultivating, sending the soil in clouds east to Illinois? Hoeing? His dad had plenty of stories about the kids hoeing the fields in the thirties, or maybe it was their own parents doing that in the 1890s. When Jesse imagined Uncle Frank with a hoe, Uncle Frank was wearing his army uniform from the war and aiming the hoe at deer in the distance. Perky hoeing? Guthrie hoeing? Felicity, maybe — even at seven, she was determined to outdo her eleven- and twelve-year-old brothers. And then he couldn’t help stilling his body and listening for any sound that might indicate that a certain seven-year-old was up in the night; sometimes she woke up and read, though she was forbidden to go downstairs. No sounds.

Jesse was as precise as any farmer he knew. He sprayed between nine and ten in the morning, when all the leaves of all the weeds were stretching out, taking in the day’s sunlight. Before he sprayed, he kept a record of morning temperatures for a week, and he noted the dew (enough dew and the glyphosate just slid off the leaves, nothing taken in). He thought that if he sprayed as precisely as possible, he would use less glyphosate and still get the same results. All of this was a constant topic of discussion at the Denby Café. A few farmers thought a light dew made the glyphosate more effective—“opened the pores,” they said. “Hell, no, sun does that,” said the others. Jesse didn’t say much, but every year he wondered if he should be more precise, or less. More than one farmer at the Denby Café scoffed at all the complicated stuff and “just added some, don’t know how much. What seems to work.” One of his letters from Uncle Frank had a line about his friend the cranberry farmer dipping rags in glyphosate and then dragging them in the water behind a boat. His mom said her mother had been as casual with her baking: “Oh, some butter. A nice piece about the size of your thumb.” Jesse didn’t understand how anyone could farm this way, as if you could look at the ground and figure out whether it was time to plant, as if you could look off to the west and figure out what the weather was going to be. Once, his dad had said that all those years at college must have driven out his instincts, and his mom had said, “Hush!” so his dad had never said that again (and Jesse never complained about his dad; all those years at college had proved to him that he had the kindest and most easygoing dad of all). But you couldn’t farm with instincts if you were aiming at 150 bushels of corn to the acre and 45 bushels of beans.

Or you could. There was something attractive about taking it day by day, following your instincts, hoping for the best, maybe worrying, but not parsing out every little detail night after night. Yes, the crop might fail, but God would provide, as his mom said, giving him a little kiss on the cheek, or Uncle Frank would provide (not anymore), or the bank would provide (for a price), or Monsanto would provide (as the local rep kept telling him).

That was what brought the subject of the beans into his brain every night.

His mom subscribed to a cooking magazine, and she was the one who showed him the tomato article a few years back: why tomatoes from Florida were so tasteless. Here it was — her fingernail tapped on the spot where the author went into the tomato field in Florida and ate a tomato. It was delicious! But as soon as you picked those tomatoes and put them into a chilled truck and sent them north, the flavor rose off of them like a vapor. Just the way she’d always said: You don’t put a tomato in the refrigerator! Everyone knows that! And so they added a gene to tomatoes that slowed ripening — they could ripen on the truck or at the grocery store. Still tasted terrible, and, for that matter, against God’s will, said his mom.

Jesse sat up very quietly, looked at the clock, moved softly toward the bathroom, turned out Felicity’s bedside light on the way (Felicity was sound asleep, some Care Bear or other tight against her), lifted the toilet lid, took a pee, lowered the toilet lid, went back to bed. Jen was now on her stomach, her head turned toward the door. He bent down. Her eyes were closed; her breathing was steady.

Sometimes your glyphosate went ahead and killed your beans. You had to measure your poison accurately, and sometimes you didn’t, or the margin of danger overlapped the margin of safety. Now you could buy beans from Monsanto that resisted Monsanto’s own herbicide, and the margin of safety was expanded — the beans wouldn’t die, but maybe the bank account would, since every improvement costs money. The rep said he would give him a deal. His dad said that there were no deals. His mom said that all deals were with the devil. Jen said that Felicity needed braces: one of her canines was coming in through the gum and had to be extracted, the other as well, and then two years of braces, uppers and lowers. Jesse closed his eyes.

—

ANDY KNEW that her new house looked like a servants’ quarters to Loretta and to Janet, a piece of Iowa that had lost its way, somehow transported to Far Hills, New Jersey, but she liked it. It was, maybe, the first house she’d ever lived in that truly suited her. Why it was in Far Hills was a funny story. All during the Republican primaries, she’d paid little attention to Bob Dole, no attention to Pat Buchanan, but intermittent attention to Steve Forbes. It had taken her two months to realize that he was Malcolm Forbes’s son; she kept looking at him and thinking he reminded her of someone. That day, which was a Sunday, she got into the car and drove to Far Hills — not far, though she had never bothered to drive there in her whole life before. The house, on Spring Street, was the third one she saw with a “For Sale” sign, modest in every way. For the first few years, she could have her bedroom in the attic, then on the ground floor, in the back. It was in a pleasant neighborhood and made for an old lady. She did not want to move into Manhattan (Loretta thought the right thing would be for Andy to live with them, but she didn’t actually want her, Andy felt). She bought the house, called the movers the next day, paid with a check when it closed a week later, moved in six days after she saw it. The house in Englewood Cliffs sold for six times the price of the house in Far Hills, and Uncle Jens received a nice sum, which he put into Jared’s computer-animation business. He also contributed the maximum allowed amount to Richie’s campaign, the third one, and for this reason, perhaps, she opened the door one afternoon in October to find her son, the congressman himself, standing on the porch, his hands in his pockets, gazing around.