Jane Smiley - Golden Age

No one talked much about the Plague of Justinian. It had occurred in the darkest of the Dark Ages, but it was at least as interesting as the Black Death. It was easy for Henry to imagine Gerald, 650 years later, standing there as they lifted the mortal remains of the famous Arthur and his famous second wife. Gerald would have been in his mid-sixties, simultaneously repulsed and fascinated by the ragged-clothed skeletons, noticing bits of jewelry and perhaps finery clinging to the bones, thinking: So this is him, what really did happen so long ago, here they are, exposed to the sunlight of the modern era, how did they die, what were their lives like? Was he the tyrant that Henry Plantagenet was? In 1191, Henry had been dead for two years, and the murder of Thomas Becket was twenty years in the past. Did Gerald of Wales think of that at once, or not at all? Did he think of it the way Henry thought of the assassination of JFK, an emblem of his youth? And it was also true that, if you drove three or four miles past the University of Chicago, you came to Avalon Park. Supposedly, Arthur won the Battle of Badon — was that Bath? And he called his Britain “Avalon”—the Isle of Apples (from the Indo-European root, *ab ( e ) l ). Henry imagined Gerald of Wales turning these ideas over in his mind, going into libraries, asking questions.

He found a parking spot.

There were two editions of the works of Procopius, the major historian of Emperor Justinian’s reign — an old edition from before the First World War of the De bellis ( Of Wars ) and an edition of the Historia Arcana ( Secret History ) that was about fifty years old. Henry supposed it was possible that the U. of Chicago Library would loan these to the Northwestern University Library — they weren’t terribly valuable — or Henry could buy them on the used-book market, but, really, he enjoyed this sense of the fan vaulting drawing his gaze as he walked into the library. The door closed behind him, shutting out the wind and the cold. Philip had gotten his doctorate from this very university, and had surely spent hours and hours in this library, but Henry had never visited him here.

A plague was a plague, no matter what the infection. That was all Henry was interested in anymore, not friendship or love or student careers or his own advancement, only the nature of infection and its passage around the world by means of things that seemed like good ideas at the time, such as grain storage, such as ships passing from one city to another, such as trade routes opening from China to Ireland, such as conquest, such as vast armies needing food and something to do. The Plague of Justinian (40 percent of the population dying in Constantinople, a quarter of everyone else) made AIDS seem very small, a flutter of mortality, not nearly as large as Philip, thin as wires in his bed, taking sips of water and listening avidly as Henry read an article to him from People magazine, oh, back in the early fall sometime, about a family in northern Florida who got a court order so that they could send their three hemophiliac-AIDS-infected sons to public school and promptly had their house burned down. By that time, Philip was past feeling sorry for those boys: however long they lived, it would be longer than Philip himself. What amazed and delighted him were the ideas of the hate-group that threatened the family before setting fire to their house — they thought you could buy a skin cream, like sunscreen, that would protect your child in case an AIDS-infected fellow student touched him, their headquarters was the back room of a beauty parlor, they asserted that head lice were only surpassed in their ability as carriers by body lice (Philip had laughed so hard at this idea that he and Turner had to sit him up and give him water to stop the coughing), and that horses were the original carriers. Henry had stopped reading twice, but Philip gripped his forearm with his own mottled claw until he went on. Then Philip drifted off to sleep, and Turner and Henry sat in chairs on either side of the bed, watching him. Probably that very day, the final pneumonia was setting in, but Philip seemed alert, and Turner could feel no fever. Another thing Henry remembered was that Philip persisted in speaking the Queen’s English all the way to the end — maybe one of the last things Henry heard him say to Turner was a grammatical correction, “may not” rather than “might not.”

Henry got his pass from the librarian and walked to the elevator. Did the Plague of Justinian look like the Black Death? There were plenty of descriptions of suppurating buboes and black gangrene in the literature. Or did all infections loom, horrifying and gigantic, on the inner eyelids of those who witnessed them, rashes the color of tomatoes, swellings the size of oranges, faces like skulls, never to be forgotten?

—

JOE WAS OUT EARLY, before the dogs were awake and before the thermometer hit eighty. When he opened the back door, they rolled over and stretched in their pen, and Rocky made his good-natured yawning noise: Glad to see ya, where’s my breakfast? They stood up with their tails wagging, and Joe let them out. They loped over to the edge of the east field and started sniffing and lifting their legs. Joe expected he would have to clip them in the next couple of days.

According to Russ Pinckard, the government had three billion, or even four billion stored bushels, so a bad corn crop wasn’t going to help anyone, but the farmers sitting around the café taking in the air conditioning, such as it was, agreed that no one knew what was really stockpiled. Jeff Green, who ran the NPPC hog facility between Denby and Usherton, had relied on government figures to decide when to buy feed, and his estimated cost had turned out to be too low by fifty thousand dollars. Jesse said you could gauge the stockpile by the fluctuations at the Board of Trade in Chicago, but in Joe’s private opinion, if the quantities themselves were rising and falling the way the prices did, then thieves or ghosts were hard at work supplying and removing tons and tons of corn every hour of every day. At any rate, Jesse had admitted the night before at supper that prices were falling because traders were hedging their positions. “Are you doing that?” said Lois, and Jesse nodded one of those Mom-don’t-tell-me-what-to-do nods. So, at least for now, Jesse was betting that a smaller crop would lead to lower prices. Walter the patriarch, Joe’s dad, Jesse’s granddad, would have been vindicated. But upset.

Lois asserted that either God would provide or the punishment, whatever it was, would be just. However, she was doing some stockpiling herself — two fifty-pound bags of flour, a case of dried beans, and two cases of evaporated milk had appeared in the cellar just this week. She had joined a group based up in Wisconsin that saved the seeds of old-fashioned varieties of vegetables and fruits, and was carefully labeling and saving her best garden seeds — not only tomatoes, peppers, seed potatoes, and squash, which you could justify in the name of flavor, but onions, beets, turnips, carrots, and parsnips, which all tasted the same to Joe. Stashed-away turnips made him think about wartime. Lois wouldn’t plant a hybrid in her garden; she still gathered butternuts; she still pretended that her apple and pear trees were all about flavor and pies. She tended them not only with care but with prayer.

Jesse had a soil map of the farm on his computer. Every day or so, he went out with his moisture gauge and his temperature gauge and tested the various soil types, and plugged them into the map. He therefore knew that on the field behind his house, where the soil was loamier, the moisture content was 8 percent greater than it was on the east field, where both dogs were now barking, but 2 percent less than on the west field, where Opa had long kept cattle, sheep, and horses, and for decades had turned their manure under. On the hill behind Joe’s house, where everyone had always been careful to terrace if they planted it at all, you could see the soil shading from dark chocolate to caramel just by looking at it; the dust blowing off the brow of the hill was as dry as sand, while on the lower terraces the beans looked like they might survive; but Jesse had mapped it anyway. The map was in and of itself interesting, and Joe liked to look at it and remember what had happened in this or that spot over the last sixty years. Not every event had improved the soil, but every one had deepened his attachment to the farm, like it or not. The savior Jesse prayed to was Frank. He didn’t ask him for money (which reminded Joe that his mother had always said that you were never to “pray for goods, only for goodness”), but he did ask him for advice. Frank’s most recent advice, handed out yesterday, over the phone from wherever Frank and Andy were spending the summer, had been to sell the place, take the money, move to Cedar Falls, and start a commodities-trading office. Jesse laughed, Jen looked shocked, Lois said, “Good Lord, Cedar Falls! Might as well move to Milwaukee and live with Annie!” Joe thought with an inward shudder of being confined to a fenced-in yard with his two dogs and having to greet the neighbors twenty times a day. And whatever the weather was in Iowa, it was worse in Milwaukee.