Jane Smiley - Golden Age

As she was realizing that this was impossible — Emily had been away at college when Jonah was five — Tina said, “Oh Lord! I hired a private detective. I employed her off and on for twelve years.”

Janet felt her eyebrows lift.

“Those are just the most interesting images. I have boxes full of film.”

“You had us tailed?”

“My dad would have been proud. He, for one, never had the first notion he was being spied on. I have a whole video of him in his apartment in Hamilton.”

“Is that legal?”

“I have no idea. But the world is full of private detectives.”

Emily laughed, then said, “There are pictures of me and Lila smoking weed in our dorm room.”

“She climbed a tree for those.”

Emily and Tina laughed together.

“Why in the world?” Janet lowered her voice.

Tina said, “Well, it didn’t start out as art. It started out because, after Mom died, everyone just fell apart, and I didn’t hear from anyone. I got lonely, but every time I called anyone, they said, ‘Oh, we’re fine. Don’t worry. How’s business?’ That was all. I would call my dad, and he would pick up the phone and cough — remember how he did that? — and then not answer a single question. He made it seem like he was being interrogated. So, one night, I just thought of this, you know, a sort of payback. But then it got more and more interesting, and I was making plenty of money, so it mushroomed.” She looked up. “Are you going to sue me?”

Emily said, “No! Of course she’s not! It’s such a great show. So great.”

Janet said, “Jared and Jonah should come down and see this.” The dinner proceeded smoothly for another twenty minutes (crème brûlée for Emily, who had come a long way from the picky eater she’d once been); then Emily and Tina called a cab for the ride to LAX, back to Idaho. Janet might have offered to take them, but they seemed so well organized, and she was suddenly so exhausted that she kissed them goodbye and let them go. Once upon a time, she would have stayed at the Ritz-Carlton, but she didn’t do that sort of thing anymore. She checked into the Santa Anita Inn, where she stayed at the horseman’s rate — nice gardens, lots of noise. The horses were running, and although she probably would not hang around until post time, it was nice to have the opportunity. And it was easy to go from there past Fiona’s. When she called Jared, she said she would be coming home the next day, but he should see the show before it was taken down and maybe buy something. They had a pleasant conversation.

The sheets and blankets were thin, and the room was cold. She lay quietly, thinking of the pictures — especially of how young Charlie looked running — hardly more than a teen-ager. It took her a while to realize that there were no images of her father, the famous Frank Langdon. Even Aunt Claire was present — through the window of a passing bus. Even Uncle Henry — also through a window, his finger in the air, expounding before a class. Even Joe, Jen, and Minnie, outside the front of their house, picking up nuts of some kind under a very big tree. But no Frank. If Tina was having Charlie stalked when he was first in New York, then her father had had at least five years still to live. But Tina hadn’t been interested in Frank Langdon. It was a revelation. Cars drove noisily into the parking lot, drunks got out and stumbled up the stairs. Janet burst into tears.

—

IN HIS WHOLE LIFE, Jesse had never experienced the perfect year, at least on the farm, in terms of plowing, planting, and harvesting, but everyone at the Denby Café, and even their wives, agreed that 2004 was the one. The sign in front of the Worship Center flashed over and over “REJOICE!” It was not only that Jesse expected to harvest at least 160 bushels an acre of corn and forty-two of beans, it was that the only astonishing thing about the weather had been no astonishing things — early planting, then sunshine, rain, some heat, some cold (no frost). Not everything else was great. They were constantly worried about Guthrie, who was about to be deployed to Iraq and pretty excited about it; his head was not only shaved, but tattooed in the back with an eagle. (“Mom,” he wheedled when he came home, “when I get out, I’ll just grow my hair over it.” For a while, thought Jesse, but he didn’t say anything. Tattoos were common, these days.) Better to think about the harvest than about Iraq.

Of course, there was that downside — he expected to get about $1.90 a bushel for the corn, if he was lucky, even though his inputs had been up — he’d had to use maybe 10 percent more herbicide because of the foxtail, which took a bite. And where would it be stored? As soon as you had a giant harvest, then you started wondering about moisture content, grain bins, who was going to buy. Fortunately, stocks were down from 2003—as low as they had been in years. As a result, Jesse was driving around, doing something he hadn’t done for a long time, which was looking at cattle.

What was it that his dad had told his granddad he was going to raise when he was grown up? Not Herefords, not Angus — Red Poll, or Belted Galloways, something like that. As far as Jesse knew, the only people in Iowa who raised anything out of the way were kids getting their 4-H projects ready for the state fair. Jen’s nephew David, who was now working as an insurance man in Kansas City, had raised a Blue Brahma once, beautiful but wild, perfect for a Guthrie. Jesse wasn’t looking at anything exotic anywhere but on the Internet. In fact, he wasn’t looking at anything long enough to pull out his checkbook — only long enough to pay some compliments and ponder using some of his own surplus feed corn instead of selling it off for less than two dollars a bushel. On the Internet, he did like to look at the cattle — White Park (beautiful pale hides, black noses, graceful horns), Highland (shaggy hair, deep-red color). But he also looked at houses in Malibu — there were lots of real-estate sites on the Internet.

Or hogs, but for hogs you had to build a confinement building. No one just let the hogs run around in a pen anymore. In fact, now that no one had hogs, everyone remembered that hogs were dangerous — big, fast, and opinionated — they would run you down and trample you. Stories about someone who got in trouble with the hogs back in the old days came up rather often in the Denby Café. Or hogs that had been allowed to run loose, go feral — not in Iowa — oh, yes, in Iowa, grew tusks and bristles, ate acorns, three hundred pounds, five hundred pounds, chased some farmer out of his barn and all the way to his house. When was that? Oh, back in the forties.

It was Felicity who e-mailed him (from her bedroom to his, a distance of about seventeen feet) a pdf of an article from The New York Times . According to the article, there was someone in charge of climate research, and he was forecasting bad weather to come, which Jesse did not intend to report to the farmers at the Denby Café, because if what they were having was the bad weather to come, they would say, “Bring it on!” And most of them were Republicans, so they could say that with pride. Jesse read it idly until the end. Many of his attitudes toward global warming had been shaped by a movie he’d seen with Perky and Felicity early in the summer, The Day After Tomorrow . They had been eating popcorn and gaping, just like everyone else in the audience, and thinking what if what if, and then, apparently, New York City froze solid in the space of about five minutes, and Jesse wasn’t the only person in the audience who laughed out loud.

The end of the article referenced a study someone had done in Colorado, on the short-grass prairie, good cattle country (for those Belted Galloways, in fact, who liked to forage). Whoever had done the study mimicked the effect of doubling the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and then tested the grasses; the carbon dioxide elbowed out the nitrogen, and the resulting grasses (Russ Pinckard often said of carbon dioxide that more would be better for the plants, if not for the people) were less digestible and more fibrous. In the last paragraph, even worse — carbon dioxide was like fertilizer for invasive weeds. The article didn’t say which, and Jesse hadn’t yet found the study on the Internet, but he could imagine: foxtail, thistles, bindweed, velvetleaf, all the weeds that were his nemeses.