Early Warning

1982

HALF ASLEEP, Janet saw that face again — a black man in a doctor’s scrubs, striding down the hospital corridor, tossing off some medical terms as if he knew what they meant. She sat up with a cry that made Jared turn over and ask her what was going on: was Emily okay?

Janet said, “I’ll see,” and snaked out of bed, wide awake. Emily, of course, was fine. Janet stood in the darkness outside of Emily’s room and tried to stop shaking. That it was Lucas was impossible. Lucas was dead; even Marla agreed that he was dead. The worst part was that she could not remember which show it was. She had been clicking through to MTV, hoping for a Pat Benatar or a Blondie video — Emily loved to dance around the living room to “Heart of Glass.”

Two days of exploring, and she saw him again — he had a pretty good part on the soap, but not a lead. There was also a black nurse, who would probably end up his girlfriend but wasn’t paying much attention to him yet. She gathered that “Dr. Thompson” was a new character.

She wrote to Marla, but Marla knew nothing. In Paris, Marla had thought Janet and Lucas had both gone to Guyana. When she heard from Janet the first time (gosh, two years ago now), she was so happy to hear from her — and that she was alive — but she wrote that she hadn’t dared ask about Lucas, because Janet hadn’t mentioned him. Now that she was in New York, they wrote from time to time, but never about Lucas.

What with Emily and day care and her own classes and Jared’s schedule, she put it out of her mind, because, thank God, he was alive, and once she got used to his being alive, well, why stir up old business — curiosity killed the cat. That worked for exactly one month.

Right before moving day (Solon to Iowa City), she was packing books to give away, and out of one of them (the Bible, in fact, which was why she had never opened it after leaving San Francisco) fell a note. It read, “Too much is going on. I’ve got to get out of here. I’ve got a possible gig at a recording studio in L.A. I’m hitchhiking, and will call you when I can. Lucas.” She turned the note over and turned it back. She smoothed it out. Why he had tucked it into the Bible, she had no idea. But she had given in to panic and let Aunt Eloise take her off to Iowa City. She knelt there for a moment, looking at the note, and imagined the phone ringing in her old room after her departure. Or of Lucas getting that message, “The number you are trying to reach is not in service at this time.” Not only was he not dead, she turned out to be the betrayer. Did he know that she was alive? It was entirely possible that he assumed she was the one to change her mind and go to Guyana, that he had read the newspapers horrified. Hadn’t she, after all, been more accepting of Reverend Jones than Lucas had been? She perused the note several more times. It was dated, too—“Friday,” the night he never returned from the gig she thought he had.

She stuck it in her sock drawer and left it there. But as she made scrambled eggs for Emily (it was Jared’s late night), she kept jiggling her legs and walking around. When Emily wanted to go out onto the porch and work on the snowman she was building, Janet jumped about as if she were cold, though the weather was pleasant. When it was time for Emily to go to bed, she could hardly read the book. When Emily pointed out letters and even short words she recognized, Janet was too distracted to be enthusiastic. Janet kissed Emily good night, turned out the light, closed the door, and she went straight to her sock drawer, got out the note, read it again. She would do nothing.

Jared rented a truck. Seven of their friends turned out to help with the move. Everyone was a little excited: Janet and Jared were buying a house, a first in their group. It cost $55,000; the sellers were holding the mortgage and letting them pay 12 percent. The house was a brown house on Brown Street, with screened-in porches front and back, three bedrooms upstairs, and a spacious if not modern kitchen. Janet and Jared had, painfully, come up with $10,000, and their mortgage payment would be $450 per month, which seemed huge, especially compared with their $160 rent in Solon. But the price of gas was $1.30 and didn’t look like it was going down. Jared thought they could save $120 a month on his commute, not even counting the few occasions where they came into town to go to a movie or to the Mill to listen to music.

Salt crunched under their feet, and Janet kept having to sweep it off the entry floor just inside the front door. Everything was out of the rental in an hour and fifteen minutes. The guys drove off in the truck, and Janet, Leslie, and Gina cleaned. When the girls and Emily got to Brown Street, though, the former owners were sitting glumly on their own boxes. The driver of their moving van, which had the name of a religious organization painted along the side, had gotten lost in Illinois and then again in Iowa City — he and the two movers were too tired from their long trip to do anything. Jared and Janet and the seven friends moved all of the previous owners’ furniture and boxes into the van while the movers looked on, and then Janet gave the movers five sandwiches she had made. She knew the look of their faces — the obedient look of people being “given a new life.” She wanted them to go away. When the owner thanked her and gave her a hug, Janet said, “Be careful; good luck, and I hope you get there.”

She put him out of her mind by focusing intently on everything she was doing, whether it was reading a book, listening to one of her professors, playing Legos with Emily, or chatting with Jared. She could feel herself getting louder, brighter, weirder, the way she always got when she was converting herself. As a result, she could sense Emily withdrawing, Jared looking at her sideways, her Realism and Naturalism professor watching for some other student’s raised hand. Finally, one day when Jared was home with Emily, and she was supposed to be going to class, she went to Student Health Services and talked to a Dr. Constance. She talked so fast that Dr. Constance stopped writing things down, had no opportunity to ask questions, just stared at her. She talked for exactly forty-five minutes, thereby giving Dr. Constance five minutes to tell her what to do. The silence was total. Janet waited. Clearly, Dr. Constance had no idea, either. The silence continued. There were three minutes left. Janet shifted her gaze from the woman’s gray curls to the window and the brick wall outside, and remembered how her own mother disappeared so often, heading out to see Dr. Somebody. “Dr. Dix,” her father had called him. Dr. Constance said, “I think maybe you should consider your marriage and your feelings for your husband.”

“I consider my family all the time.”

“No, I mean ponder them, not take them into consideration. Whenever we are feeling something strongly, it is related to what is going on in the present.”

Janet said, “I guess now you are going to tell me to live in the moment and take things one day at a time.”

“That isn’t bad advice.”

Janet looked at her watch. She really, really didn’t want to be rude, so she smiled and said, “Well, anyway, thanks for listening to me, and I think that’s a good idea.” Then she ran.

Yet another blizzard was in the offing — the snow already on the ground seemed to vaporize upward into the low-hanging clouds. She put on her gloves and pulled the hood of her down jacket over her head, snapped it closed over her chin and mouth. She stepped carefully around the puddles that were slickening as the afternoon cooled and darkened. She had almost done it, almost fallen right into the trap. It didn’t matter, Janet thought, who they were or how well meaning they might think they were; as soon as they started talking to you about your problems, their language captured you and put you in a prison of cause and effect, and you had to go along inside that, whether it was Oedipus complex or vitamin deficiency or admitting you were powerless or accepting Jesus, questing for a result that you could feel in yourself. The last thing Janet wanted in this life was to say, Maybe I still love Lucas, he was beautiful, a charismatic and fascinating person — and for the person to whom she was saying this to reply, Tell me about your father. She would of course reply, My father is an asshole, I wouldn’t ask him for a penny. And she certainly did not want then to hear, Define what you mean by asshole? She would be thirty-two this year. She had to accept the system that was herself. It had to move forward as well as it could. When she got home — sliding a little as she climbed the hill between Dubuque and Linn — Emily was standing in the middle of the living-room rug, and Jared was sitting on the floor cross-legged in front of her, juggling three of her dolls and saying, “Look at them fly, Emmy. Boom! Up and over! Can I catch it? I can’t catch it! Oh, I caught it! There goes another one!” It was Janet who laughed, not Emily. Since they were going to be snowbound for another couple of days, she decided that that was enough for the time being. Then, looking at the daughter who reminded her so much of herself, she thought, If I don’t get over this by the first of April, we’re getting a dog. She felt better at once.

—

WHEN RICHIE GOT HOME from work, Ivy told him that Michael and Loretta would be there for dinner in twenty minutes. He put his coat in the closet. The intercom buzzed, and when he pressed the button, Michael’s voice said, “This is going to take both of us.”

Richie said, aloud, “Isn’t she due, like, last week? I can’t believe they came.” He knew that Michael could hear him. Ivy walked over and removed his hand from proximity to the intercom and said, “Why would you think that she wouldn’t rise to the challenge? Just because she, who once weighed a hundred pounds, now weighs a hundred and forty-eight?”

“Why are you so mean to her?”

“It’s a fact. She’s going crazy waiting. And I don’t think inviting them to supper, doing all the cooking and dishes, and giving them a way to twiddle their thumbs in public is mean.”

Richie wasn’t so sure about that when he got downstairs and discovered that, because their building didn’t have an elevator, he and Michael had to get Loretta up the steps. Michael, without seeming to find it strange, came up behind her and pushed, one hand on each cheek. Richie held her arm. It took a long time.

Loretta kept talking: “Don’t you think I’m in good shape? I feel absolutely fine. The doctor says he’s never really seen anyone sail through a pregnancy like this before. When I went to my appointment yesterday, he estimated at least eight pounds, and that must come from your side, because I weighed six and a half, and my cousins were all six to seven, too. Ungh! There!”

Ivy was standing in the open doorway, wooden spoon in her hand. She said, “Oh, darling. I hope this is worth it, but I did make all your favorite dishes.”

This turned out to be rib-eyes, baked potatoes, and broccoli. But, in fact, Richie wasn’t as interested in Loretta as he was in Michael, since Michael was being especially nice to Loretta, not teasing her, gazing at her fondly, saying “mmm-hmm” when she spoke. What this meant to Richie was that Michael probably had a girlfriend — he had always been nice as pie for about the first six weeks of any new relationship. Michael knew better than to confide in Richie, but Richie did not snitch any longer, even to Ivy. Knowing was enough. Richie thought of himself as “profiling” Michael.

Part of Michael’s profile these days was letting Loretta go on in detail about how they were going to raise their son. There were two larger parts: On a horse by the time he was a year old. (Didn’t they know there was a stable in Central Park? The horses went up and down in a freight elevator.) And the other part was structure. A child felt more secure with structure, a boy especially. Girls, you could be a little lazy; Loretta had seen that in her child-development classes, but boys, no meant no. She shifted position and let out an involuntary groan. Ivy said nothing as she placed the platter of steaks on the table. Richie said, “I can’t think of a single structure that either of us ever liked.”

Loretta looked right at him. She said, “I doubt that was your fault. And anyway, you were in an incubator for weeks. That interferes with the attachment process.” As always, Loretta spoke crisply and with conviction; she had never had a doubt in her life. Michael nodded at this as if he had come to some understanding of their upbringing, a subject Richie preferred to ignore.

As if by common agreement, the conversation backed away from these subjects. Michael said that he expected Braniff to shut down, then that the market had closed at 807 (“But not before I sold a lot of GM stock — no one is buying cars anymore”), crude prices were sinking, gold at 345 an ounce, blah, blah, blah, and then Richie felt a splash. As he bent down to look under the table, Loretta half rose out of her chair, and Ivy said, “What?”

Michael said, “Did your waters break, babe?” And he said it calmly. Loretta said, “Worse than that.”

“What?”

“I feel like pushing.”

“Pushing what?” said Richie.

“Pushing the baby!” shouted Loretta, who then closed her eyes, stood up, and staggered toward the doorway. Ivy went after her. She said, “Have you been in labor?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe. I’ve had Braxton Hicks for days.”

Ivy grabbed her shoulders and steered her toward the bathroom. Richie and Michael followed. Richie felt that he was gaping. He said, “Didn’t you guys go to some kind of class?”

“Kind of,” said Michael. “We kept forgetting. We went the first time. It was stupid. Hh-hh-hh-hh, a-a-a! We couldn’t stop laughing, so they asked us not to come back.”

Where had Richie heard this before?

Ivy said, “I worked on a book a couple of years ago about nonviolent birth and baby massage. It said the baby should be born into water. Like in a bathtub.” She steered Loretta to the tub, and began stripping off her pants. Richie said, “I’m calling an ambulance!” As he left, Ivy shouted, “Don’t forget to tell them about the stairs!” Michael followed him, and Ivy slammed the bathroom door.

The whole time Richie was looking for the phone book, then leafing through to the emergency page, then realizing that all he had to do was dial 911, then dialing 911, Michael was practically on top of him, not saying a word. As he gave his address, said “unexpected labor,” described the stairs, then repeated, “Okay, maybe ten minutes, thanks,” Michael looked unlike Richie had ever seen him, struck dumb. Richie bumped against him, experimentally. No response. He said, “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“I can’t believe she’s having a baby.”

“What did you think was in there, a pillow?”

“I can’t believe it. I have to call the nurse.” They had arranged for a nurse for the first six weeks. But Michael made no move. He said, “I don’t have her number. Loretta has the number somewhere.”

Richie said, “I had no idea you were such a fucking idiot.”

Michael gazed at him.

He nudged Michael back toward the bathroom door, but when they got there, he knew in his very being that neither of them wanted to open it. They stood. From inside, Richie could hear the sound of the bathtub faucet as well as Loretta’s cries and Ivy’s lower, reassuring tones as she said, “Bite this washcloth. It’s clean.” Then a more muffled grunt, then the sound of the tap being turned off. Richie was used to thinking of Ivy as knowledgeable and competent, but he knew for a fact that she had never assisted in childbirth before. Then a siren sounded in the distance, came closer. Richie bumped Michael gently on the shoulder. “Go downstairs and let them in.”

“Where’s the freight elevator?”

“There is no freight elevator.”

“You’re shitting me!” Now Michael looked very white and close to panic. But the howl of the siren retreated and disappeared. Richie said, “Just go. Maybe you can wave down a cop car or something, if the ambulance doesn’t get here.”

Michael nodded. Loretta gave out a cry. Ivy mumbled something, then said, “It’s nice and warm. Just relax. Try to reeeellaaaxxxxx. There you go. Mummble mumble.” There was another cry, but softer, less desperate.

“Go down,” said Richie.

“Shout if something happens.”

“Why should I do that?”

Michael gaped.

“I’m joking! Go!”

Michael sailed out of the apartment, leaving the door wide open. When he had pounded down at least a flight of stairs, Richie gave in to his curiosity and slowly turned the handle. Loretta was sitting naked in the tub, huge and pale, her breasts resting on her belly. She had a washcloth in her mouth and her head was back, but as she cried out again, it tilted forward. Ivy was on her knees, leaning over the rim of the tub. On the toilet lid, she had set several folded towels. Loretta cried out again, a rich, even scary, vibrato howl. Richie looked at his watch. There was no more, and maybe less, than a minute between the cries. According to every movie he had ever seen, that was a bad sign if you were waiting for an ambulance and three guys to carry a stretcher up and a mom down lots and lots of steps. He said, “Can I do anything?”

Ivy turned and looked at him. “Where’s Michael?”

“Watching for the ambulance.”

“I can feel hair.”

He said, “What?”

“I can feel the baby’s hair. There’s a lot of it. It’s right there.” Loretta’s head fell back and she groaned. Ivy said, “Oh, shit!” and leaned forward. Richie stepped into the bathroom and stood on his tiptoes. Loretta said, “Ohhhh Goddddd helppp meee!” and here it came, dark hair, dark squinched face, little crossed arms, little chest, first slowly and then shooting out, completely under the surface of the water, and therefore ripply and strange. Ivy half rose, leaned way over, and slipped her hands under the baby, back and shoulders and head; then, very carefully, sort of hooking her thumbs under its armpits, she lifted it out of the water, hair, forehead, nose, mouth, chin. The water sluiced over closed eyelids, plump cheeks, and full lips; then the mouth opened, silently. Then it let out a cry. Without being asked, Richie opened one of the towels and held it toward the baby. But there was a problem that they hadn’t foreseen. Richie and Ivy exchanged a look, and then Ivy leaned forward and bit the umbilical cord in two, spitting out a little blood. Richie wrapped the baby in the towel. It was tiny, much tinier than he had expected. He opened the towel again, just for a look, and said, “Boy.”

Now Loretta, who had seemed to pass out, her arms spread over the rim of the tub and her head dropped back, sat up. She said, “Is he okay?”

As if in answer, the baby opened his mouth again and wailed, a healthy and not painful sound. Ivy said, “He seems fine.” She pulled the plug. The red, bloody water began to drain away. When it was all gone, she laid another of the towels across Loretta’s thighs, and handed her the wrapped-up baby. Richie had to admit that he was sorry to give him up: he wasn’t the mother or the father, but somehow that tiny face, with the dark hair and the bowed lips, was imprinted on him. Moments later, Michael burst through the door, saying, “They’re here, they’re coming up!” And then he stood there, his eyes wide, his arms dangling at his sides. Richie said, “What’s his name?”

Michael and Loretta, both now staring at the tiny wrapped thing, said, simultaneously, “Chance.”

Ivy said, “You are naming this baby ‘Chance’?”

Michael took a deep breath. “Loretta’s grandfather was named Chance. Jonathan Chance. He was a cattle rustler.”

“He was not!” exclaimed Loretta. “He was a perfectly respectable businessman.” But she was grinning from ear to ear. She said, “Chance Markham Langdon. What a boy.”

Michael stepped forward, and Richie stepped back to make way. Moments later, a medic appeared in the doorway. He called out, “Looks like we’re too late again, Benny!”

—

IT WAS HOT. The worst winter Henry could remember (worse even than the winter of ’78, which drove him out of town), fifty-nine inches of snow, into April — his daffodils had worn snow hats for three days — had given way to the hottest summer. All he was doing lately was sitting around in his shorts, drinking ice water with lime juice and trying not to look at the thermometer. But how could he help himself? He had never seen it hit 108 before, much less for three days running. And at his place, he had a little bit of a breeze off the lake. He was almost ready to keep his air conditioner on all day, though so far he had limited himself to nights, spending at least some of the day at the Lee Street Beach, under an umbrella, where he was now, or in the water. He had also given himself express permission to do absolutely nothing. In his entire life, Henry could not remember doing nothing. His present exile in Chicago was his own fault, since he was the one who had talked Philip (they had resumed their relationship, but only as friends) and Philip’s current lover, Yves, who taught at the university in Rennes, into taking their little tour in June, to avoid the August crowds. Two young men escorting a fifty-year-old all over Cathar country, Narbonne to Béziers to Mazamet to Carcassonne, then Tarascon to Montségur, to Foix to Mirepoix, one slaughter after another, rolling fields and vineyards giving way to precipitous mountains and perfectly groomed beaches. Philip, whose specialty was structuralist criticism, and Yves, whose specialty was Baudelaire, had been genuinely shocked at Henry’s tales — Simon de Montfort slaughtering all the inhabitants of Béziers, even the Catholics who were seeking sanctuary in the cathedral, which he burned to the ground, saying, “Kill them all, God will recognize His own.” Subsequently, Simon’s head was smashed to bits by a stone catapulted from inside the walls of Toulouse by “ladies and girls and women.” A fitting end, they all thought. It was admittedly strange to drive through such a beautiful landscape and contemplate decades of religiously inspired cruelty and horror, but Henry had enjoyed himself.

He thought that Philip deserved someone like Yves. Philip was thirty-six now, tenured, published, often asked questions about incomprehensible subjects like semiotics and post-structuralism, which he answered with musical good nature. Metacriticism was much more glamorous than etymology, of course. Yves had reservations about Lacan and Saussure and approached Baudelaire with a more generalized perspective, situating him in his historical moment and cultural milieu, writing articles about the various ways in which Baudelaire and his contemporaries had infused this and that. Yves was twenty-nine, but well on his way from Rennes to Paris or Columbia. Henry was like an uncle to them (maybe a great-uncle to Yves), but they put up with him, and moderated the speed of their chatter in French so that Henry could understand most of what they said. The other thing Yves did was live in a large house between Rennes and Fougères. If you wanted medieval, you could hardly ask for anything more wonderful than the former frontier between Bretagne and France — with castles every few leagues — and then on down to Aquitaine, with its fortified hill towns, and below that, of course, Navarre, Ariège, Languedoc. His colleagues vacationed with their families on a continuum between Ottawa and Minneapolis; Henry flew off to Manhattan and Toulouse.

But he felt apocalyptic anyway, and it wasn’t only the heat and the contemplation of Pope Innocent III. One thing Philip and Yves had talked about as they drove around was what was happening to friends of theirs, strange lesions in their mouths, weird infections, night sweats, swollen glands. Henry had eavesdropped, only asking a question every so often. He knew, though, that as he talked about Pope Innocent III, who had sicced Simon de Montfort on the Cathars (who held unorthodox Gnostic and Manichean beliefs, didn’t give oaths, engage in marriage or reproduction, or eat meat), they were both wondering about curses, about such mysterious and medieval illnesses as the bloody flux, St. Anthony’s fire, St. Vitus’ dance, the ague, leprosy, the black death. Narbonne, Carcassonne, and Foix put them in the mood — God’s curse, bodies piled upon bodies, the sense of one citizen recoiling from another only to flee into the wilds and be eaten by wolves. Henry was sure that Philip’s and Yves’s residences had seemed as welcoming upon their return as his little duplex had to him.

Now, though, in the midst of all this heat and ennui, there was a name. Not the curse of God, but “acquired immunodeficiency syndrome,” every word easily sourced, three from Latin, one from Greek, a stiff, dry phrase, not medieval at all, but right up to date. Henry was falsely soothed by this phrase, somehow. It didn’t seem possible, now that he knew it, that he could go into the bathroom to brush his teeth, as he had a day or so after getting home from France, look in the mirror, see a blue lesion on his gum right above his incisors, and nearly jump out of his skin, practically dying of a heart attack before touching the bump and realizing it was a bit of a popcorn husk that he had carelessly missed when brushing his teeth the night before. He felt now that he could somehow review his own immune system, and establish in his own mind whether it was functioning up to capacity: Coughs? Two yesterday, three the day before. Sneezes? Only when confined in the same room with the air conditioner. Skin? No sores, no blemishes. Aches and pains? Nothing mysterious — a filling that needed to be replaced and an occasional migraine (thank God for the telltale flashes and halos). Bowel movements? Regular and consistent in every way.

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.

Two hundred twenty-eight thousand dollars! Walter would have been speechless, Joe thought. Hadn’t there been a year or so when Joe was about ten when their corn yield was thirty-five bushels and they were happy to get it? But the one thing Walter had never stopped saying, so that Joe had had to put his hands over his ears, was: Bigger yields, lower profits. You’ve got to sell it to someone.

Joe did not understand the purpose of going to church, at least these days. When the farmers talked to one another, they talked about bad times — lately, the way the Reagan administration was doing its best to put that gasohol idea to death, even though processing plants were already being built. When the farmers kept their mouths shut, their wives talked about what in the world they were going to do, and when they all shut up and listened to Pastor Campbell, the only good news he had to offer was about somewhere far away that they might get to or might not, depending not, Joe realized, on following the rules, but on whether God liked you. That’s why the pastor had pussyfooted around Marsh Whitehead so carefully — he had committed suicide, but there was no guarantee that God didn’t like that, because God worked in mysterious ways and thought mysterious thoughts, and that would be the only thing Pastor Campbell could say in good conscience to Sarah Whitehead and those three girls.