Jane Smiley - Golden Age

To tell the truth, Felicity had indeed been surprised to discover that there was a sort of ape she had never heard of, called a “bonobo,” a much more playful and less vicious ape species, in which the females were dominant and the males had sex all the time in preference to fighting. Felicity had read the book three times, though she still went to church with her parents. She passed the time there by imagining Pastor Diehl as an ape with a mask on — he was definitely from the chimp side, since he was prickly, aggressive, and loud. Felicity could easily imagine him patrolling the grounds of the Worship Center, Bible in hand, eager to wrestle nonbelievers to the pavement. He was already talking about the Iowa presidential straw-poll, which wasn’t until September.

Over supper, she told everyone about the personalities of the dogs she was caring for. Did a dog hang back, waiting for her to take her hand away from the food dish before he approached it, or did he eat as soon as the food was given out? When presented with a rope toy, did a dog immediately pounce and want to play, or did the dog have to be encouraged? Did a dog show sexual behaviors even after being neutered? These would include mounting, humping, masturbating (her parents exchanged a glance but didn’t say anything; Aunt Minnie smiled to herself). Felicity pushed her glasses up her nose and pressed on. Canute, her “boyfriend,” wasn’t much better, but he did ask her a question every so often. Canute had his own passions that Felicity respected — as he said, Canute Rose was his name, and brass instruments were his game. He was a year younger than Felicity, and played the trombone in the school orchestra. In the all-state orchestra, which had given a concert in the winter, he’d played the trumpet, because there were six chairs as opposed to four. Sometimes Canute and Felicity had conversations that she knew were weird, him making remarks about mouthpieces and her making remarks about bonobo grooming behaviors. He was a wonderful musician, and he was good-looking, too. His folks had a farm—754 acres west of town — but Canute had no interest in it. None of their friends gave a shit about farming; they cared less than Felicity did, and she was only distantly interested now. What she imagined was that she would have a small-animal vet clinic somewhere very fancy, like New York City, not far from the alleged palace where the cousins lived, and she would specialize in shih tzus and Cavalier King Charles spaniels while Canute would play in brass quartets and, maybe, the New York Philharmonic. They would not have a shih tzu — they would have several rescue dogs, and parade proudly around Central Park. Iowa State could prepare you for all of that.

—

JEN WAS IN a cleaning mood, so she had left six boxes of books on the front porch. Jesse could see them from his desk. The rule was that he had to go through them, and only those volumes he actually wanted could come back into the house; the rest would go to the Usherton Library. It was midsummer, and there wasn’t much else to do; Jesse had proposed that they take a trip somewhere, only a week or two, but Jen said they didn’t have the money. That was discussable — they could go to a lake somewhere not far away, like Bemidji, Minnesota, for almost nothing, but Jesse also knew that Jen wanted to be around if maybe, by some small chance, Guthrie or Perky might call. Jen and Jesse didn’t talk about either Perky or Guthrie. Perky they didn’t talk about because he was being trained in South Carolina to manage a bomb-sniffing dog, and there was nothing to be said about it. Guthrie they didn’t talk about because he was in Georgia and they never heard from him. And, anyway, they had argued between themselves so many times about every facet of Guthrie’s enlistment and Perky’s enlistment that all they had to do was look at one another in order to know where they stood. The argument was not about whether the boys should have enlisted or what might have prevented them, it was about whether the wars should be there to lure them, to offer them a dangerous alternative to life on the farm. Yes, Jen had a cell phone, but Guthrie or Perky might only try one time, and the signal could be very bad in northern Minnesota.

Life on the farm this summer had been far from dangerous — only strange. The weather was cool, maybe too cool for a really good crop, but it was interesting. Their county and the one just to the west had had normal precipitation; the crops were growing nicely. But due north and due south it was very dry, while due east it was swampy. In Jesse’s whole life he had never seen it so varied. Usually, a system came through, southwest to northeast, and on the edges of the system, storms struck or didn’t. But this summer, it was too cool for really dangerous weather, perfect for really strange weather.

Jesse hoisted himself out of his desk chair (he had been paying bills), went out, and opened one of the boxes, then two more. He saw that most of the books were old ones that Uncle Henry had left behind.

Jesse had thought of going back into the commodities market: he’d had a little surplus in the winter, forty-seven thousand dollars. He hadn’t done badly trading in the old days, when he thought he was so smart playing both ends. He had even rather enjoyed visiting the pit one time and listening to the shouting, but while he was turning over the idea, before he mentioned it to Jen, the Board of Trade decided to consolidate with the Mercantile Exchange, so they would be trading beans in one spot and euros in another, and who knew what else — Ebola-death futures? — somewhere else. However, as soon as he heard the two exchanges were merging, he gave up his nascent plan, and that was the moment he knew he was old, the moment that the feeling he’d had for such a long time of being sharp, knowledgeable, organized, ready for anything, the anointed heir of Frank Langdon, evaporated into the humidity.

Underneath the books, folded up, was a gift from Uncle Henry, a print of a painting by John Constable, an English artist. For a while, Jesse had cherished that print as he cherished his uncle Frank’s letters — an object showing the affection Uncle Henry held for him (the inscription on the back said, “You will like this! To my favorite future farmer! Love, Henry”).

Jesse carried it inside and spread it open. It was large, so he sat with it at his desk, in the morning light. It was a painting of a man with a scythe in his hand, standing at the edge of what looked like a field of wheat. A river, a green meadow, a cathedral, and some trees were in the background. He remembered that the picture had given him a sense of the Langdon and Cheek past — the past behind Great-Grandpa Wilmer, who had died in the early fifties, and Great-Grandma Elizabeth, whom he hardly remembered. The Cheeks were from Wessex, and the Langdons were from the north somewhere. This painting had been made in the southeast, of flatlands that would have been alien to the Cheeks and the Langdons. Now he looked at it rather sadly, as at an old girlfriend whom he had overestimated, who had grown careworn and dull. What struck him was the smallness of the field and the overwhelming weight of the heavy labor. If he had spent his life scything wheat and shocking oats and shoveling manure and hitching and unhitching draft horses, would he still be alive? He and Jen sometimes complained about the passing of youth. He was fifty and Jen was forty-nine, but they hadn’t thought yet to complain about the onset of old age — his joints didn’t ache, he had only just purchased his first pair of glasses, the fifteen pounds he had gained ten years before he had gotten rid of by walking around the farm more and driving less. Jen was the same age that her mother had been when she married Jesse, and looked ten years younger. Were they flattering themselves, or had they arrived at a golden age of agriculture without knowing it? The fields and rivers Constable depicted, Jesse now knew, were rife with cow pox and tuberculosis, rabies (he remembered his dad telling him that they didn’t dare have a dog when he was a boy, because of the danger of introducing rabies) and brucellosis. In the cottage and cathedral, there were no moms and dads reading novels or watching the news or discussing fishing trips that they weren’t going to take.