Jane Smiley - Golden Age

But, of course, much of the harvest had already been taken to the grain elevator.

If that was the case, said the Monsanto lawyer, then they would present an estimate of what was owed according to how large the field was, how close the neighboring field was, and the weather patterns over the summer, and they would expect that estimate to be paid out of Bill Gorman’s sales to the grain elevator.

Jesse was not the only one who considered this eye-blinkingly crazy.

Bill’s lawyer presented the Monsanto lawyer with five years of seed-purchasing paperwork — genetically modified corn had only been on the market since ’97, so five years seemed like plenty. No Monsanto seed had ever been purchased at any point. The lawyer made the case that Bill was not responsible for wind-borne pollen. The Monsanto lawyer made the case that Bill had benefited from property that Monsanto owned, and that he was, in effect, selling stolen goods. The law stated that even if someone sold stolen goods unknowingly, once they found out, they had to compensate the rightful owner of the goods. The very fact that Bill had gotten quite a good harvest—165 bushels an acre — indicated that he had, knowingly or unknowingly, benefited. His yield was closer to that of farmers who had planted Monsanto seed than it was to that of farmers who had not.

Jesse had gotten an average of 169 bushels per acre.

Of course, then everyone remembered hearing of this before — somewhere in Ohio, somewhere in Illinois. Finally, one day, at the café, Jesse himself piped up and said, “Well, I did use Monsanto seed, and I did choose to pay more for it, so maybe they have a point,” and without Jesse’s meaning for it to happen, lots of farmers stopped speaking to one another, and all their disagreements were entirely about the principle of the thing.

Garst was in trouble, too, because some of its feed corn that included a pesticide against corn borers turned up in taco shells at a Taco Bell somewhere. Minnie said that her dad had always liked Garst — the company had started over in Coon Rapids, though it was now based down in Slater, and had been the first one anybody knew of that really pushed hybrid seed. Jesse had paused over the Garst seed, called StarLink, in the spring. It was different from the Monsanto, not resistant to herbicides but resistant to corn borers and caterpillars, really, which could destroy your field, eating not only the ears but the stalks. He had studied corn borers, which originated in Europe, in ag school. They were indeed a pest. But he had decided in the spring that they weren’t enough of a problem around Usherton — more down around Burlington and over into Illinois and Indiana. In addition to that, you had to plant a field of nonresistant corn the next field over, as a refuge for the corn borers. Whether you could do this or not depended on how the fields were configured and where your neighbors were. Jen wouldn’t have liked him to plant the Garst — she was nervous the way his mom had been about contaminants in the kids’ food — but Jesse saw it as a dilemma that was possibly not soluble. Every time the chemical companies said that they had conquered a problem, the moths, or the weeds, regrouped and attacked from another angle. Jen’s dad said that maybe everyone should give a thought to rabies, or trichinosis, or cow pox, or bovine tuberculosis. Those were the diseases his parents and grandparents talked about, not some allergy to some pesticide that was hardly there in the first place.

But old man Guthrie didn’t say anything in the Denby Café, and Jesse stayed away. He figured that the ruckus would die down once the lawyers worked things out for Bill Gorman — chances were, he was only being made an example of, and people would be more careful in the future. By February, everyone would be looking at their bank accounts, not their fields, to decide what to plant and which seed company to stay friends with. Every farmer Jesse knew had principles, but you couldn’t tell what they were by looking at their fields.

—

AFTER LOIS LEFT, Minnie got restless. Goodness, she was eighty-one now, but she still felt fine, so she went to a travel agent in Usherton and booked herself a trip to Paris. The woman kept saying in a loud voice, “And is this a gift, Mrs. Frederick?” until, finally, Minnie had to stand up, lean over the desk, and use her most principally manner, “No, Vivien Carroll, it is not a gift. I am going to Paris.” The only hotel she could afford was south of the Eiffel Tower, near the Bir-Hakeim Métro stop. The trip was to last for ten days; she would walk off her restlessness, she would explore parts of Paris she had never visited and parts that she had enjoyed before, she would learn to negotiate the Paris Métro at last. For two weeks before her trip, she walked around the farm (the weather was beautiful), repeating French phrases —“Je vous en prie,” “De rien,” “Où est la toilette, s’il vous plaît?” Would it be better if she had some old man to go with? Some complainer with a cane? Some aged man-about-town who would always be talking about better times? She didn’t think so.

But Paris turned out to be too much for her. The Métro was well meaning but complex, taxis were expensive, she couldn’t figure out the bus system. She ended up walking around that neighborhood — Boulevard de Grenelle at the Quai Branly — for seven days, a few hours a day. The most cultural thing she did was to walk down the Quai de Grenelle and back up the Avenue Émile Zola, and it exhausted her. It was no help that women her age, small, wrinkled, dressed mostly in black, seemed to putter along on the sidewalks, never looking in shopwindows or at passersby. When she looked in shopwindows, she looked like those women, so she stopped looking in shopwindows.

She told Jesse and Jen that she had had a wonderful time, couldn’t wait to go back, but she knew that this was her last trip, that somehow it had served as a punishment, though exactly for what she couldn’t say, maybe for being so sure of herself all these years.

And yet she was restless. A week after she got back, she drove her old Mazda into Usherton and parked in the lot of the Peaceful Acres Nursing Home. She was wearing her best dress and carrying the handbag, yellow leather, that Claire had sent her at Easter, maybe as a joke. She made herself straight, strong, and determined, and went inside. The young woman at the desk gave her a kindly smile and also spoke rather loudly, forming her words carefully. Minnie said, “May I speak to the manager, please?” Then, “It’s about employment. I would like to apply for a job.” Why not? she thought. All hands on deck. She had just read in the Register that young people were deserting Iowa in droves.

The difficult part, it turned out, was telling Jen and Jesse that night at supper. She didn’t tell them that she had told her new boss, Marian Crest, that she would do anything — cook, mop floors, push old people around in their wheelchairs, wash dishes — but since she had a résumé that Marian (maybe about forty) was vaguely familiar with, Marian had hired her to maintain records; in an old folks’ home, records had to be maintained about every single thing. Her first week or two would be spent filing. The unspoken plan, both she and Marian knew, was that at some point in the future she would live there, perhaps still performing her job.

Jen said, “What are they paying you?”

“Five fifteen an hour, eight hours a day, three days a week. It might go up if I do a good job.”

Felicity said, “Aunt Minnie, you aren’t going to be here when I get home from school!”

“Well,” said Minnie, “three days a week, no. But if you get on the junior high basketball team, I can pick you up on my way home.”