Jane Smiley - Early Warning

Henry was not ready to give thanks for his lifelong abstemiousness — even in the last couple of years of comparative excess, he had mostly observed and analyzed rather than partaken, but wasn’t his whole life about going to France in June rather than August, dressing neatly rather than beautifully, loving wisely and never too well? Speaking of Baudelaire, the first sight of a fleur du mal would have sent Henry quietly out of the room, not once tempted to take a whiff.

His thoughts returned to the Cathars. He wished he remembered what they’d called themselves; perhaps it was “Parfaits,” or “Perfected Ones”? In years of eyeballing religion from a greater or lesser distance, which was something you had to do if you read twenty thousand books about the history and culture of Europe, he had never encountered one that drew him at all, but there was something about the Cathars’ rejection of earthly filth, their revulsion at the wealth and corruption of the Church, their belief in the equality of the sexes, and their disparagement of the importance of the Crucifixion that appealed to him. He had never been able to imagine himself as a Mercian or a West Saxon — he’d loved them for their strangeness — but he could imagine himself as a chaste vegetarian who considered the God of the Old Testament a satanic usurper who in six days created a Hell on Earth. The evidence of that was everywhere.

—

JOE DIDN’T GO to church during harvest, but Lois, of course, did. She had incorporated whatever Pastor Campbell wanted into her schedule as smoothly as possible, and Pastor Campbell relied on Lois for everything. Minnie did not agree with Joe that Pastor Campbell was harmless — he had gotten into a brouhaha with the minister at the Lutheran church — Kellogg, his name was — as a result of passing out leaflets outside Kellogg’s church and swiping twenty of his members, his justification being that the end was at hand and Kellogg was wasting valuable minutes preaching about the church parking lot and the used-clothing drive. Campbell never asked for money, and he never talked about this world — he talked about the Rapture, which Joe had thought, at first, was a hymn-singing group. It took him a while to realize that the Rapture was more about punishment than reward, but he still saw it as a figure of speech. Only in the last few months had Minnie impressed upon Joe that neither Pastor Campbell nor Lois was kidding — they expected their very bodies to be swept upward, no matter what they were doing, and they did not like any jokes about it. Joe kept his mouth shut, except to complain about the price of corn and beans; at any rate, he was too tired to think about it.

However, when he did get to church after three weeks, the first thing he heard, even before everyone sat down and Pastor Campbell came in, was about Marsh Whitehead’s killing himself. That reminded him so totally of his uncle Rolf that Lois had to tell him three times that Marsh had shot himself. Shot himself in the head with his.22, right in the mouth. Hanging had nothing to do with it. Joe came to his senses.

Marsh Whitehead was a good farmer. They knew each other well enough to touch their caps on the street, to compare seed prices at the feed store and to smile indulgently if Sarah Whitehead and Lois happened to get into a conversation about sin. They knew each other well enough so that Joe might be asked to be a coffin bearer — you needed eight of those, and Marsh didn’t have any sons. But they did not know each other well enough for Joe to ask probing questions about debtor interest, about that quarter-section Marsh had snapped up the previous year. The best he could do was keep his ears open.

When Pastor Campbell appeared, he didn’t say a word about Marsh Whitehead for half an hour — his text was “What do workers gain from their toil? I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race.” He then went on to talk about everyone’s favorite subject, which was the failure of just about every farm in the neighborhood to make a profit, which meant, of course (and Joe knew he was being cynical), not much money for the church. However, Pastor Campbell focused not on gold but on goodness — the goodness of the toil itself, the tilling of the soil, the richness of the ears of corn, the miracle of soybeans, which “the Israelites would have loved if they had had the chance to grow them.” Were we not lucky, in spite of passing weather, nuclear winter followed by scorching summer, still to be here, among friends and relatives, sitting quietly, and contemplating the Lord, in whom there is peace? Why has God laid his burden on the human race? God has laid this burden on us as a reminder, and some days the burden is heavy, but only by feeling the burden at its heaviest can we sense when it lightens. There will come a time when the burden floats away from us of its own accord, and unless we feel our toil, we cannot gain this understanding — nay, pleasure. Pastor Campbell, when he got wound up, did use the word “nay.” “You will have heard, my friends in Jesus, of a certain event. I almost said ‘sad’ event, but I stopped myself. I put before you that I myself do not know if this is a sad event or not a sad event. How we think of this event depends on how we think of the Lord, on whether we truly believe in his mercy and his love. On whether we allow ourselves to ask prideful questions, or whether we simply bow our heads and say, ‘So be it.’ Our hearts do, indeed, go out to our friend and sister, Sarah Whitehead, and to her children. We are like Sarah in that we must step back and say, ‘Father, thy will be done,’ but we are not like Sarah in that we do not have to wrestle as immediately as she does with the burden of this event. Sarah is not present this morning. She wished to be, but she was advised to let a day or two pass, so that she might compose her thoughts and look to Jesus for solace. I know, my friends in Jesus, that you will help our sister in all the best ways you know. I have great faith in you.”

Joe thought that was a little ham-handed, but he saw that Lois was moved. Her fists were clenched in her lap. After the pastor stepped back, Ethel Roach started playing the organ, and they all stood up — first the usual “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” then one they hadn’t sung since last year, which did, in fact, bring tears to his eyes:

Bringing in the sheaves, bringing in the sheaves,

We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves.

Bringing in the sheaves, bringing in the sheaves,

We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves.

Of course, as soon as the service broke up, all anyone talked about was Marsh — how the heat had affected his crops, what prosperous farmers the Whiteheads had always been, to come to this; well, the bank was going after them. Joe walked away. That was all he needed to know, that and the scared looks on the faces of the other farmers, who were probably not in much better shape than Marsh had been. Joe knew that he was the man with the ideal setup, maybe the only one in the county — Minnie had a well-paid job, Lois’s shop benefited from being just far enough from Usherton to seem like it was in the country, and Denby had turned out to be picturesque. Not only that, Lois had made herself a network of dealers: if she somehow came up with a picture or a piece of furniture that actually had craft value or rarity, she knew how to estimate its value and get it to a decent market. This year, he and Jesse were living mostly off that bounty, even though they had gotten fifty-four thousand bushels of corn and eighteen thousand bushels of beans. The price of corn was $2.40, and the price of beans was $5.45 (and lucky to get that out of a record harvest). Joe and Jesse had therefore made $228,000 off of the nine hundred acres they planted, but after paying for seed, fuel, tractor repair, herbicide, fertilizer, and the 19 percent interest on their loan to buy the seed and fertilizer, they had cleared only $18,000, which they put away for next year’s crop.