Jane Smiley - Golden Age

After he went back to Chicago that time, Henry sent Charlie a nicely bound notebook and a pen.

—

“LISTEN TO WHAT Warren told me,” said Emily. Janet was stirring the penne so that it wouldn’t stick. Emily had become a vegetarian, so they were having a mushroom sauce with it, and Jared had told her that, although he would miss Emily once she was off to Mount Holyoke with Pattycake, her jumper, he would not be sorry to go back to guilt-free meat eating. Jonah was doing something noisy in his bedroom — maybe jumping on his bed, which Janet would allow for a minute or two. Warren was the farrier at the barn. Emily liked to encourage him to tell sixty years’ worth of stories while he shod the horses.

“I’m listening,” said Janet.

“Did you ever meet Melvin Case? He was one of Mrs. Herman’s whippers-in.”

“No,” said Janet. She stirred the penne again.

“Warren said that he lives in a railroad-style house. I guess that’s long? Anyway, he heard the phone ringing in the middle of the night, so he got out of bed and staggered to the living room to answer it. When he staggered back to bed, a eucalyptus tree had split in two, and half of it had fallen on the house, right through to the bed; the whole end of the house had collapsed.”

Janet’s spoon jumped in the water. She sensed what was coming — didn’t you always?

“So listen to this. It was a friend of his who had had a dream that Mel had died, and the dream was so vivid that he had to get up and call him, just to make sure he was all right. He said that he was fine. The guy apologized for getting him out of bed. Warren said that, the next day, Mel called his friend and told him always to call him if he had any bad feeling about him.” Then, “Do you believe that? I wish I had that kind of friend.”

Janet thought, yes, I believe it, but she said, “I’m more than a little skeptical.”

“I think it’s creepy.”

“It’s definitely creepy.”

When she woke up in the middle of the night, it was to thoughts about that phone call. Had it happened? Their farrier had plenty of stories, and Janet had listened to her share. Mostly she did believe him — peacocks in his trees; a woman mounting her horse, the horse slipping, landing on her, killing her; a trainer forcing his horse against its will (and Warren’s advice) into a stream, the horse and man going under, the trainer’s cowboy hat popping out of the water like a bubble (the horse saved the man). What Janet wondered about was the fact that this story didn’t scare her, that it didn’t trigger any personal reaction, either about eucalyptus trees or about psychic friends. It pinpointed her realization that she wasn’t afraid anymore — something, since she had kept her fears so secret for so long, that no one else would notice.

She knew, lying there, that it had been her father’s death that erased her fears. That, and giving away her inheritance to Fiona’s favorite charity, the Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation; Jared’s favorite, the Big Sur Land Trust; Emily’s favorite, the Jane Goodall Institute; Jonah’s favorite (after some coaching), PBS; and her own favorite, Save the Children. With each check she wrote, she could detect a snort in the empyrean, her father deploring this waste of his hard-earned cash (or maybe that snort was in her own mind). Her mother had said, “How good of you,” but it wasn’t goodness, it was a series of assassinations, and they had worked.

She and Jared had plenty of money, anyway. Their house had doubled in value, and Jared’s stock in his company was at an all-time high. Spending twenty-five thousand a year to send Emily (not to mention Pattycake) to Mount Holyoke seemed prudent, not profligate. People were coming to Jared all the time, asking him to join their start-up — computer animation for every purpose! Once, he was tempted, but when he went into the meeting, he jokingly grabbed the elaborate identifying plaque beside the door of the offices, and it came off in his hands. He took this as a sign and didn’t join them. The entrepreneurs were all twenty-two, anyway. They made him nervous.

But Janet did not think her fears had seeped away because of prosperity or age. Poverty and decrepitude were not what she’d always feared, it was Mutually Assured Destruction. Even after she did avoid Pastor Jones’s version of apocalypse, she worried that she’d only put it off (thinking about it now, she suspected that the knowledge that Lucas, too, had avoided it was what finally eased those fears). The marvel was not that she had dreaded the end of the world; it was that so few others seemed to. When she asked Jared if he remembered the Cold War “duck and cover,” the Cuban Missile Crisis, he shrugged — yes, but no, not really. What she saw now was that she had known all her life that if destruction came her father would not care enough to save her. Now he was gone, and she was safe.

—

JESSE WAS SITTING with his dad, who was propped up but slumping slightly to the right. Jesse hesitated to interfere, because his father seemed to resent the number of times that his mother asked him: Are you okay? Do you need anything? You want me to sit you up a little? You want to get up and sit for a while in the chair by the window? No, no, the answer was always no. He’d be gasping for air as he said it, and then his mother would purse her lips and say, “Well, okay, then. But don’t forget to ask.” Jesse knew that asking was not the same as not forgetting to ask. Farmers hated to ask for things, but they didn’t mind asking about things. Just now his dad said, “You scrape off the paint on the platform of that combine?”

Jesse had bought a new combine a week before, and harvest would begin in a few days. The cornstalks were tall, the ears huge. The kernels were down to about 28 percent moisture now, and the weather was clear and hot for the next couple of days. Jesse liked 26 percent — fewer lost ears. Once, he’d harvested a single field at 28 percent, but a lot of the kernels had been damaged by the equipment. Jesse said, “I did. It’s not at all slippery now.”

“Don’t forget to turn off the machine if the intake gets clogged.” Joe’s voice, once friendly and melodic, had become scratchy.

Jesse wanted to say, “I never do,” but he said, “I won’t.”

“And don’t try to get any twine out of there. Goes in faster than you can react. Don’t care who you are.”

“I know.”

“Who was that, Abel M—”

“I know, Dad. I always turn it off.”

“Make sure Guthrie and Perky stay away from the intake areas.”

“I will.”

“This thing got all the shields in place?”

“It does.”

“That rain we had, you be careful driving that thing through wet spots.”

“I walked the first two fields. The ground is good.”

“Even over above the crick there?”

“Even there.”

“Did you check the spacing on the”—he coughed—“cornhead stripper bars and the belts for wear?”

Jesse did not remind his dad that it was a new machine, that he’d known it was a new machine three minutes before; he said, “Yes.” Harvest made everyone nervous, even Pastor Campbell. How many stubborn men in a hurry does it take to harvest thirty million acres in a month and a half?

Joe said, “Harvest used to be fun. I loved the oat harvest. Now, some of the horses weren’t suited to it — they might take off, run through the fence line — but Jake and Elsa, they were patient. Grandpa Wilmer knew how to breed a horse. Percherons. Good horses, you ask me. We went all around to everyone’s farm and helped each other, and I’ve never eaten like that since.” It took Joe a long time to say this. But Jesse was patient, and when Joe was done he said, “Mom would be sorry to hear that.”