Golden Age

2016

THERE WERE certain things that no one talked about at the Denby Café, and one of them was who was buying, actually paying for, the machinery that was popping up here and there. Jesse had gone into serious debt for a new tractor and planter six years before, and then, right after that, planters were introduced that could plant twenty-four rows of corn in one pass, and do it all night, because the tractors and planters were equipped with GPS control and bright lights, which meant twenty-four-hour-a-day planting and harvesting, at least if there were enough people on the farm to man the shifts. Jesse recognized that, at last, farming had fulfilled its industrial potential. These huge machines were expensive — delve as he might into his accounts, Jesse could not see how he, or anyone, could make the kind of money that paid for such machinery, and you couldn’t buy it cooperatively, since, because the weather was so iffy, everyone had to be planting at the same time. Every year now since 2013 (eleven inches of snow on the first of May followed by fifty degrees the next day, which melted the snow, and then ninety degrees six days later, which evaporated the moisture almost completely; according to Jesse’s moisture sensors, the snow hadn’t done much to rectify drought conditions from the year before), the pressure had been growing to plant more and more quickly. ’14 and ’15 hadn’t been that bad, but it seemed as though everyone panicked. First it was the Sensordrones that reported moisture levels all over the farm every three hours, and then two more of those giant machines popped up, one at the Whiteheads’ and one at a big farm everyone knew was owned by Cargill and was farmed by five Hispanic guys. These days, you would see things in the Torch like “As of May 3, 21 % of the acres devoted to corn were planted. As of May 10, the number was 78 %.”

In principle, Jesse should not have been opposed to these changes. Hadn’t he always been the one to advocate for the most precise, the most efficient, the most scientific, noninstinctual methods? Hadn’t he been very patient with his father, with the stories about the chickens and the hogs and the dairy cows, the oats and the horses, and wetting your finger in your mouth and holding it out in front of you to test the direction of the wind? Hadn’t he been a little thrilled when he referred to everything about the farm as “inputs” and “results”? But he was sixty. Maybe every sixty-year-old deplored change, said that things had gone too far, recalled the good old days of whatever? When he complained about something at supper, Jen laughed at him, not with him.

He complained of not having enough land. He had almost nine hundred acres; to make it, you needed a thousand now, or two thousand. ADM and Cargill and other investors were buying up the old farms, putting on them as tenants farmers from California who had lost their properties to drought. At least, that’s what longtime denizens said at the Denby Café. How could those folks from Los Banos afford to pay thirteen thousand dollars per acre? And rising, since the High Plains Aquifer was about drained and irrigation was a thing of the past, and so Iowa land had gotten ever more valuable (for the time being, said Felicity, who emailed him photos of glacier retreat and viewed the desertification of the “interior” as inevitable). Who would give a stranger a ten-million-dollar loan? Especially when Ralph Coester, at the Northern Iowa Bank in Usherton, always frowned and shook his head at Jesse Langdon, though even in the drought of 2012 he had never missed a payment. Ralph had given him the money for seed this year, but reluctantly — whereas he had once just signed the papers, and pushed them back across his desk with a smile, this year he’d read them over and over on his computer screen, tapping this key and that key, frowning, clucking. Then he said, “Seed gotten to be a big investment, you know. Gus Whitehead told me he puts the seed in the tanks along with the pesticide, does the job lickety-split, and then takes off. This year he’s heading for Chile. Can you imagine that?” No, Jesse could not. Was Ralph bankrolling refugees from the Central Valley? Certainly not. But there were a lot of things that people used to talk about at the café that they didn’t talk about now. The place was mostly dead quiet — the only sounds were slurping and chomping.

One morning at breakfast, he said to Jen, “When you were a kid, did you ever imagine living somewhere else?”

She said, “Sure. Didn’t you?”

Jesse thought for a moment and said, “I don’t think I did. My dad loved the farm so much that he always made it sound terribly romantic.”

“But he lived for a while in that house where some uncle killed himself. That didn’t spook him?”

“If they delved into the whys and wherefores of that, I never heard about it. Why would it have to do with farming and not with, say, a hopeless love affair?”

“I don’t know. I just vaguely remember the gossip.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“Well, there was the Miss Kitty fantasy, where I imagined myself living in Dodge City and running a saloon. I think I was five. Then there was the Christine McVie fantasy. We would be living in London. I guess I was eleven or twelve then. Daddy bought me a ukulele after I pestered him enough. I did spend that summer in Washington, D.C., interning for Congressman Leach. Before I left, I imagined never coming home. That lasted a month. What about you?”

“Well, my uncle Frank kept inviting me to New York City. He would send me postcards of various sights we could see. He was all set to paint the town red. Uncle Henry had me to Chicago a couple of times. I don’t really mind going to see Annie in Milwaukee and fishing in the lake. But back then, I was sort of afraid of New York, or of Uncle Frank. It seemed disloyal to write to him, to talk to him, to go shooting with him, so visiting him in New York would be a big betrayal.”

“Disloyal to whom? Your uncle Frank was like the family god.”

“Oh, to my dad. He never said anything, but I knew by the look on his face when he handed me a letter. They papered it over, but they weren’t close.”

“You know, did I ever tell you about the time I was sitting out on the porch with your dad? It was hot. Your mom was talking all the time about being ‘left behind.’ So your dad turned to me and said, ‘Doesn’t she realize that we’ve already been left behind? Look around — the landscape is empty.’ He laughed, but he looked blue.”

Now Jesse said, “That’s the tragedy of life, I guess — you can only be in one place at a time.”

Jen said, “This is the place I chose. I don’t mind.”

After a moment, Jesse said, “I don’t either, baby.” And they both knew that, these days, she was the reason he didn’t mind.

—

GUTHRIE LIKED Iowa City. He had a room in a house with two other guys and a girl on East Washington Street. He kept completely to himself. His job was at the mall in Coralville, “Ice Arena Representative.” His boss at the mall told him he was to “represent and present” the ice arena to mall customers, so that this “absolutely unique Iowa attraction” would not go to waste. Guthrie, who was a good skater, didn’t mind whooshing here and there. Other than “Do you rent skates?” the most common question he got was “What in the world is this?” He would smile and say, “This is a unique recreational opportunity, right here in Coralville. Would you like me to help you?” He would skate gracefully backward, shifting his hips from side to side, smiling his welcome, feeling like a character straight out of Lake Wobegone.

It was an easy job that paid a little something, and, a bonus, he didn’t have to feel his dad’s worried eyes boring into the back of his head, assessing his “state of mind.” Iowa City, everyone said, was suddenly ringed with pot farms — in some bars, they said, you could get high just sitting in your booth, sniffing the air. At the VA hospital, he chatted with several sympathetic counselors about his anxieties. He thought that he got the most out of the Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing sessions. The counselor was a woman about his mom’s age, Dr. Kingston, who had grown up on a farm in Illinois. She always wore sensible shoes, but almost at once she noticed that while he was talking he would stare at her shoes, so she made him look at her hand. Which memory kept coming back to him?

Guthrie closed his eyes.

Dr. Kingston said, “No, open your eyes.”

Guthrie opened his eyes.

She said, “Tell me the story.”

“We were guarding a checkpoint. I guess there were about six of us. The road was clear. So this kid comes down the road with a Coke can in his hand. I’m guessing he was maybe seven, but the kids there acted older, even though they were very small. He was a cute kid; he had sandals on — I noticed that. Maybe a blue shirt. Anyway, he threw the can into the air, and someone shot it; it was like a game for just a second. I guess we thought it might be a bomb; it wasn’t beyond them over there to use a kid to deliver a bomb in a Coke can.”

Dr. Kingston nodded.

Guthrie cleared his throat. He said, “Anyway, the Coke can broke up and flew into the air, and then someone shot the kid, right in the neck, I saw the blood spurt out on his shirt, into the air; the air was clear. He got this look on his face. We just let the body lie there. We were afraid of it. The longer it lay there, the more afraid of it we got. I kept expecting it to blow up any second. Maybe an hour later, some Iraqis picked it up. It didn’t blow up.” He shrugged.

“What is the most disturbing image you have? Tell me, but stare at my hand, let your gaze follow my hand.”

She put her hand about a foot in front of his face and moved it back and forth. Guthrie stared at her hand, and he could feel his eyeballs swiveling, back and forth, back and forth. After a moment, he said, “I think I shot him.”

The hand kept moving.

She said, “Did you shoot him?”

Guthrie thought for a very long moment, then said, “I don’t know.”

She was well trained. She didn’t react or stop moving her hand. She said, “Do you remember lifting your weapon or looking at the boy through the sight?”

Guthrie said, “I don’t know.”

“Tell me again.”

She kept moving her hand.

“I was afraid of the boy. I meant to hit the Coke can, but when the Coke can was shot, I didn’t have time to change my aim, the boy jerked forward so fast.”

“Keep talking.” His eyeballs went back and forth.

“I was afraid of the boy. I had my hand on my weapon, but I didn’t lift it. Someone else shot him. I looked around. I didn’t see anything except Private Heller. He was the one who hit the can.”

“Maybe the same bullet that hit the can killed the boy.”

“Maybe we all shot him. It was ten years ago. I have thought about it and dreamed about it so many times that a thousand boys have been killed, and I can’t remember what really happened.” He did not add his real thought, which was, What’s the difference? Or, Maybe I saved that boy from joining ISIS. Or being beheaded by ISIS.

Dr. Kingston prescribed him some Zoloft.

They got into a reassuring routine — twelve sessions. He met interesting women at the ice rink (he didn’t dare go into bars, except sometimes for the music and the weedy fragrance), but in fact, he forgot about sex completely. Zoloft was good for that.

Iowa City was a place where people could and did stall out forever. Seated along the bar in the Mill Restaurant was a line of customers that hadn’t changed in thirty years, being served by bartenders ten years older than Guthrie was. If you were from Oelwein or Spencer or Denby, you could wash ashore in Iowa City and be so sated with ease and pleasure that you would never move on, which was not the case in Ames. Ames took them in and popped them out. Iowa City took them in and kept them — that was the difference between pain and pleasure, Guthrie supposed. He had been living here two and a half years, and he did feel better than he had at the Usherton Motel 6, but he also felt that he was reaching a point of no return: another year and he would buy a house on American Legion Road and grow a beard to his waist. He was thirty-two now, a disappointment to everyone but himself and Dr. Kingston, who thought she had done a good job with him. He gave himself six months to come up with a plan. If, when he saw Felicity at Thanksgiving, he still hadn’t thought of anything, he would put himself in her hands.

—

THE CORN WAS knee-high on the Fourth of July. This was not a good thing. Jesse had never, even in 2012, seen corn that was only knee-high on the Fourth of July — hybrid seed didn’t waste time like that. The June weather had been dry, but not in-the-bottom-five-years-of-the-century dry. After the downpours of mid-May, some farmers had replanted seed with a shorter growing season and a lower yield. Jesse had thought of it, but hadn’t dared go back to the bank for more money to buy the “inputs,” and so he had ended up doing what his father had always done — hoping for the best. The problem was not the lack of moisture; it was the weeds. In spite of all the herbicide he had used, more than he had ever used before, the weeds were thriving, and not only the velvetleaf, but the foxtail, the thistles, everything. It was evident that they were sucking whatever moisture there was right out of the soil. Weeds always grew fast and produced seed almost instantly. Corn and beans and, for that matter, peas, tomatoes, zucchini, and peppers, were the slowpokes, rather like educated couples who produced a single precious child when they were in their thirties. If the weeds flourished, you had to get them out before their seed distributed itself (his dad, for example, had never allowed the kids to pick dandelions and blow the seedheads into the air; he had gone around the yard when they first came up and pulled them one by one).

Jesse had cultivated the corn once in June, but the soil was so dry that it had lifted off in waves. In the first few days after he did it, he’d thought he might have gotten control of the weeds, but they came up again, flourishing. There was a part of him that expected this to be his worst crop ever. Everyone at the café was complaining about the glyphosate, which had, apparently, given up the ghost at last, overwhelmed by Darwinian selection. And the Monsanto reps were nowhere to be seen, had nothing to suggest. Jen said that they would be too busy offshoring their money to address customer concerns. Jesse got into his truck every morning and drove around Denby and Usherton, even down toward Grinnell and past Ames to Boone, just looking at fields. Some were better, some were worse. He did not feel singled out, but he did feel his scientific certainties dissipating. He almost never opened the computer, not even to read e-mails from Felicity about record droughts in France, tornadoes in Ontario, the collapse of the oil business in North Dakota, locusts in Minneapolis paving the airport runways so that planes were grounded. As always, Felicity communicated these events with a kind of upbeat fascination (lots of exclamation points!!!!!!) that did not seem to indicate fear. She communicated about Ezra Newmark in the same way — no passion, no pain, only detached enjoyment. His mother had hair to the back of her knees! She owned a yarn shop in Delhi, New York, that was mostly mail-order!!!! She had knitted a lace bedspread on size 1 needles! Queensize!!!! Ezra was surprisingly well endowed for a man of his stature!!!! Jesse and Jen got a good laugh out of this one — it was the oversharing they had always expected from Felicity, the girl whose great-aunt gave her a picture book about the nature of reproduction when she was five.

Felicity was fine, Guthrie was fine (or, at least, Jesse and Jen agreed to always say this), Perky was home from Syria, working at Fort Bragg. He was a major now. No one knew what he did, but he was successful at whatever it was. Jesse knew, even though he and Jen never talked about it, that this was all that mattered. Once you were in your sixties, your own fate was unimportant.

He stepped onto the back porch, slipped off his boots, and checked the thermometer. Ninety-eight degrees, nothing to remark upon anymore. It was almost lunchtime, and there would be pork loin from the night before in the refrigerator, but he wasn’t hungry yet. He went into his office, opened a drawer, and checked the available balance on his Citicard—$5,987.23. Then he opened the computer, went to the Weather Underground, and checked the national temperature map. All red, just a little orangey-yellow in Maine, the Upper Peninsula, and around Bellingham, Washington. Then he looked at Vancouver — beautiful there, yellow shading to green. The towns in British Columbia had amusing names: Chilliwack, Coquitlam, Squamish. He clicked on Orbitz. There were, in fact, flights from Des Moines to Dallas to Vancouver, daily flights, as if people made that trip all the time. He booked flights for two and a nice hotel for a week, reserved a car, put it on the credit card with fifteen hundred to spare. He had to get away from the weeds and the dust. It felt just then like a matter of life and death. He rummaged around in the desk for their passports, which Felicity had made them apply for in 2009. They had never used them.

The weather was ideal in Vancouver, no fires this year, seventy-five during the day, and congenially sunny, about sixty at night, but they only enjoyed it for one day. Maybe if Jesse had told Felicity where they were going for their little vacation, she would have warned them, but maybe not. There was nothing in the paper the morning of the riots but a notice that there would be a peaceful protest against the Chintar Pipeline beginning that afternoon at one in Jonathan Rogers Park, proceeding from there to City Hall, and then to a “Rock the People” concert put on by local bands in Douglas Park. There was no sign of trouble in the morning. Jesse went out onto the balcony of their room with his cup of coffee. They would go to Granville Island for lunch — there was some kind of famous crafts market there — then come back and watch the rally, then go to the concert. Nothing bad ever happened in Canada; well, maybe in Quebec, but not in Vancouver. Well, maybe about ice hockey. Something bad had happened about ice hockey in 2011. After only one day, it was the best vacation they had ever taken. It made Jesse want to go into the heirloom-tomato business.

When all the people first started running toward them as they were walking down Cambie Street toward the concert venue, Jesse’s first thought was “bomb”—that was probably everyone’s first thought after the Boston Marathon bombing. There had been no explosion, not even a popping sound. But people were terrified — Jesse could see it in their faces and the handbags and cell phones they dropped as they ran. Rubes that they were, he and Jen kept standing, staring, holding hands. Then they saw the bodies on the ground, at least five of them, and the line of police in helmets, their weapons raised, marching toward them, stepping over the bodies and the signs the protesters had been carrying vowing resistance against the Harper government. Felicity would have told them that Harper had vowed to get the Chintar Pipeline built no matter what was going on in the oil market, that he had pushed through laws that outlawed protest and imposed draconian punishments on any sort of “insurgent and unauthorized references to so-called climate change.” Planes, especially private planes, could not even fly over or near the tar sands, and all analyses of effluents or river or lake pollution were designated as Top Secret; leaking any findings was punishable by years in prison. Felicity did tell them these things when they finally got home. But first, before that could happen, they were taken into custody, handcuffed with painfully tight yellow textile handcuffs, and pushed into the back of a van, where there were at least twelve other people, some of them bleeding. By nightfall, but not before, they were in separate jail cells in separate wings of the Vancouver police station. Late that night, Jesse was ordered over and over to reveal who was behind the protest and who was funding “his” campaign to undermine Canadian national security. Whenever Jesse said that he was just a tourist, he had a farm in Iowa, his hotel was in that neighborhood, his inquisitors laughed. They demanded to see his passport, but they had taken his wallet, and his passport was back in the safe in his hotel. They said, “Why should we believe you, mister?” He held out his hands — knobby, rough, years of grime under his fingernails. They kept Jen for the night, him for two nights, but they lost interest in him — he thought they only kept him for the second night because they had forgotten all about him.

When they got out, they still had three days left. They walked around the city, recognizing its beauty, but in a state of shock. It was as hard to get up and out in the morning as it was to stay in bed, snuggled under the covers. Jesse had never been so simultaneously reluctant to move and restless. They flew home. When they got into their car at the airport in Des Moines, the thermometer registered 105 degrees.

When the call came, three days after they got back (still sweaty hot at midnight, only nine p.m. West Coast time, though), what Annie said seemed like garble to him. Even as he turned over and repeated it to Jen, he didn’t understand what he was saying.

“She’s dead.”

“Who?”

“My mom.”

Jen sat up, threw off the sheet. “Oh my God!”

“Annie was locking the car, and lost sight of her, and when she went out onto the beach, Mom had disappeared.”

“What does that mean?”

“Something called a ‘rogue wave.’ They found the body just before sunset.”

Even once they were fully awake, this did not seem possible. His mom was eighty-six years old, but when she visited the farm, she seemed unchanged and unchangeable, permanently determined to do what she had decided to do. Once Jesse’s dad had told him how they came to marry — all his mom’s idea, she was twenty, and it had worked out (here his dad had given him a bear-hug — odd thing for a farmer). It might be that some kids (Felicity, for example) analyzed their parents’ marriages looking for signs and symptoms, but Jesse had never done that. The only evidence of Lois’s age was her obsession with trying this delicacy or that, and not just at Lunds or Whole Foods, but wherever they were “sourced,” as she called it. She had gotten obsessed with smoked oysters, gone to Scotland — there had been a little accident on that trip, driving on the wrong side of the road, that scared the pants off her and the driver of the car she didn’t quite hit (a little scrape, knocked off the sideview mirror). She had gotten obsessed with lobster, gone to Maine; gotten obsessed with barbecue, gone to Kansas City. They had joked at Christmas — was she going to get obsessed with tomatoes and go to Hoboken?

And then she had to try abalone before she died — all the items on her bucket list were food. Annie had agreed to take her to Monterey, Jesse had agreed to contribute some money and forgotten all about it.

The next day, there was more information, but none that made his mom’s fate less spooky. The beach was called Monastery Beach, south of Carmel. It was notorious for these events — its dangers were frequently underestimated by tourists because nearby beaches were safer. Annie was out of her mind, not exactly at the surprise of it, but at how it fit their mother’s personality, just to be swept away like that, doing something she was determined to do.

And Jesse had to ask the question that would have seemed trivial to everyone else in the whole world: “Did she get to eat the abalone?”

“No,” said Annie. “She got to look at them, because there is an abalone farm on the wharf, but the restaurant wasn’t serving any right then. She loved the sand dabs, though.” There was a long silence and then they hung up.

After the service, a week later, Jesse had the box of ashes buried beside his dad’s box, as far as possible from Uncle Frank. His mom hadn’t liked Uncle Frank, thought he had ruined Aunt Minnie’s life.

—

JANET HAD no idea where she picked up the infection. She would have had a little cut, maybe from stepping on a stone or a shard of glass, and then the cellulitis spread from her instep, over the top of her foot, and up the inside of her ankle, at first only red, hardly swollen, but then red, hot, painful, sometimes as if invisible knives were stabbing her. It was Saturday. Eliza, at the knitting shop, made her go up to Seton Medical Center, which was a bit of a drive in the weekend traffic, and she had to cancel the afternoon dog walk (four dogs plus Antaeus), that was forty dollars down the drain. And then the antibiotic, erythromycin, wasn’t cheap, either. The scary part was when the doctor said that if there was no improvement in thirty-six hours she should come back. She did not call her mother, she did not call Jonah, she did not call Emily, because she knew that if she did they would look on the Internet and see what she saw — faces destroyed, legs swollen like homemade sausages, the words “flesh-eating bacteria.”

There was no improvement Tuesday morning, and the doctor, whose name she now knew, Dr. Dalal, changed her antibiotic to doxycycline hyclate. It was very expensive, and the brochure included said that it was used to treat malaria, which somehow made her leg, now swollen to the knee, throb. She was to come back on Thursday if there was no improvement, or, to be safe, even if there was improvement.

There was no improvement. In fact, once she was staring at her leg along with Dr. Dalal, she noticed blisters beginning to form under the skin, and when Dr. Dalal touched the largest of them with her gloved finger (it was maybe the size of a BB), it seemed to open up. Dr. Dalal was sending her to Stanford Health Care by ambulance, thirty miles away. While she was telling Janet this (Janet could not drive, because her infection was in her right leg; best not wait any longer, just to be sure), Janet sat there nodding and throbbing, almost in rhythm, and then she texted Mary to please take charge of Antaeus. (“Sure! You off to somewhere nice?”) When the two nurses helped her to the ambulance, she could hardly put weight on her right foot, even though she had gotten up, made her coffee, and driven to the hospital without much difficulty an hour earlier. Janet hadn’t been to Palo Alto since emptying her house seven years before. She always left the coast through Santa Cruz or Daly City, picturing the ridge that 92 crossed above the Crystal Springs Reservoir as a kind of Berlin Wall that she dared not breach.

The ambulance wasn’t screaming, just transporting. It was the kind with a window, a tricked-out Ford truck, so Janet could see the eucalyptus groves. Normally, she hated eucs and never minded going into a diatribe about why they were the worst possible tree to import to California, but now she appreciated, even loved, the sunlight speckling through the branches, perhaps a sign of mortality. Her leg throbbed the affirmative, and she cried out. “Almost there,” said the EMT — oh, Rob, his name was, right there on his shirt. Was she becoming delirious? One thing that could happen with cellulitis was an overwhelming massive infection, foot to leg to liver to heart to brain to grave. She took a deep breath and reminded herself that another of her conversational themes was that she was old enough to die, sixty-eight. The last thing she wanted to do was end up like her mother. She said that all the time.

They came down the mountain and she lay back, watching the reflection of the reservoir ripple across the ceiling of the ambulance.

And then they were flying down 280, and then there she was, being wheeled into the very emergency room where she had nearly given birth to Jonah, and what was the difference, birth, death, a mere twenty-four years, nothing really, nothing at all.

What was different was that, once she was hooked up to the drip and on some sort of painkiller (she ignored everything the doctor said about which antibiotics and which painkiller they put her on, and so what if they decided she was demented), she actually looked around, first at her room, then out the window at the top of one Norfolk pine, several eucs, and the sky. Those three days here with Jonah she remembered not at all, except the sight of Jonah himself, lanky, cross-eyed, darling as could be. And the sight of her own nipple disappearing into his tiny mouth. When the administrative person (not quite human, but humanlike) came in late in the afternoon and asked for her contact information, she gave him Jared’s name and a phone number that was possibly correct. He handed her her bag; she gave him her Medicare card. She was lucky to have that; soon, the Republicans would be in control and repealing all forms of Socialism. She scowled at the thought and the doctor scuttled out. She was alone in the room, and, she thought, the thing that was giving her reason to live was that view she had seen through the ambulance window of the light at the crest of the mountain, the trees through the ambulance window, something beautiful that had nothing at all to do with Janet Langdon Nelson.

The hours passed eventlessly but strangely, the pain coming and going randomly, the heat in her leg seeming to flow here and there, the certainty in her mind rising and falling about whether she would lose her leg or lose her mind or lose her life. She had no computer, and she discovered, as soon as she got some time to herself, that her phone was dead. All the better. She thought about Lois, though she hadn’t seen her in years and could only imagine her young — younger than she herself was.

Sometime in the middle of the night, she awoke when a nurse was changing her bag. The room seemed hot, and her sheet felt sweaty, and in her half-stupor, she was convinced that they had tied her wrists and ankles to the corners of the bed, that she had been screaming, but she had no memory of any dreams at all. Something came out of her mouth, and the nurse said, “Oh, I am sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you up! May I get you some water, or anything? I can help you to the bathroom.”

Janet said, “No, thank you,” and her hands came up and touched the base of her neck, not tied to the bed at all. That was the worst moment, at least in her opinion.

But the doctor’s opinion was different. She might have been lying there, thinking of her old house, trying to calculate exactly how far it was from this bed, or wondering what restaurants were still at the Stanford Shopping Center — was that where she had eaten for the first time at the California Pizza Kitchen — but the doctor said that she had skated on the edge of a real crisis, had she heard of MRSA?

Janet did not say, “Of course”; she only nodded.

Well, she didn’t have that, but he had thought she might. It took forty-eight hours to grow out the pathogen, but after thirty-six, she did seem to be responding to treatment. And now look at her: her leg was still red, but almost back to normal. Get up and walk around a bit, let’s see how your foot feels. Not bad. Thank your immune system; it really drove him bananas the way everyone had turned antibiotics into candy over the last fifty years; he was a vegetarian himself, but what good did it do you? The damage was done. He’d lost a fourteen-year-old boy ten days before, wrestler on the team up in Belmont, lesion on his forearm.

Janet kept quiet. She did not say, “I wouldn’t have minded going instead of him.” It would not have been a lie.

But she was glad when Mary picked her up and drove her home, when Antaeus jumped into her lap and licked her face, when Emily called and asked her why her phone was dead. Four days, not such a long time.

—

LATE IN AUGUST, Jesse got a letter that said that his mortgage had been sold to a company based in Delaware called Piddinghoe Investments. He was given instructions about how to go online and order a payment booklet for his payments. His payments would now be due monthly, not, as before, when the harvest was in and sold. He told Jen that had its benefits; he wasn’t going to complain about that. His official level of debt was $356,893—not much, he privately thought, compared with the value of the farm. The letter actually left him feeling not bad. At 5 percent interest, his monthly payment wasn’t even fifteen hundred. He thought that would be no problem; the crop was poor, but 125 bushels an acre would be enough to get them through the year, and the beans, at least, were better off than the corn. He followed instructions, sent off for his booklet, went about everything with his usual method. He also called Northern Iowa Bank and asked to speak to Ralph Coester. Ralph had left, he was told. Taken a job in Chicago. Ted Kugelhaupt was the loan officer now. Jesse had never met Ted Kugelhaupt, or even heard of him. He said he would get back to them. On August 28, he mailed in his payment and forgot about it.

The first foreclosure notice came in mid-November, a week after he sent in his third payment, a week after he sold his crop, a week after he breathed a sigh of relief because the corn yield was 135 bushels even though the weeds had been a nightmare and an eyesore, causing the harvest to last an extra two weeks, a week after the disastrous presidential election (but he was too distracted to care about that). What he would do in the spring he had no idea, since there was no real replacement for glyphosate, and the Monsanto reps were still scarce on the ground. But that was months away. He went to the Piddinghoe Investments Web site and looked through all the options. There was one, “Have a Problem? Contact a representative,” that gave a phone number (877 877-6543), a chat option, and an e-mail option. He tried the phone number three times and never got through to a “banker.” He tried the chat option, and wrote back and forth for a while with “Kathy,” who said that she would look into the issue and get back to him within twenty-four hours. He e-mailed the manager, the repayments department, and the customer representative. Nothing. Finally, he drove into Usherton and spoke to Ted Kugelhaupt, a nondescript thirty-year-old who sucked his lips and nodded his head the whole time Jesse was explaining his problem, then said that the bundle had been sold, two bundles had been sold, that was all he knew about it, there was no recourse through this bank. And he knew nothing about Piddinghoe Investments — had Mr. Langdon sent his checks by registered mail, and had the checks cleared? Yes, they had. Must be a paperwork problem, then, said Ted. He should try that angle. Otherwise, Ted — suck, suck, nod, nod — couldn’t help him. And he didn’t know where Ralph Coester was. Maybe Cleveland? He had heard something about Cleveland. When Jesse got home, he realized that since Northern Iowa Bank had sold the bundles of mortgages the paperwork problem was theirs, but when he tried to call Ted Kugelhaupt back, Ted could not be reached.

It was rather like the week in Vancouver followed by his mother’s death — it took Jesse and Jen a very long time to assimilate what was happening, ten days for them to go from “Maybe we should call a lawyer,” to calling the lawyer, then another five days to get an appointment. The lawyer had another case with stacks of discovery to be done. Better for Jesse to sort through the paperwork that he had in his files, and refrain from paying the December payment, sending along by certified mail a notice seeking all paperwork appertaining to the mortgage. After that, silence. Jen said, “Well, no news is good news.”

They went to D.C. for Christmas. The day they left, Jesse got a letter stating that their “complaint(s) was being looked into. We request your patience.” Guthrie couldn’t go with them because the mall’s busiest season was Christmas, but he promised to come on the 26th. Perky said he would be there, but then his leave was canceled because of the new crisis in Ukraine. They all knew that this might be Uncle Henry’s last Christmas. It turned out that he had had what he called “a mini — heart attack” right around his birthday in October, and only Riley knew about it; even Richie didn’t hear about it until he and Jessica went there for Thanksgiving. Henry wrote everyone a letter saying that he was fine and not to worry; then Richie wrote everyone a letter saying that Henry was not fine, and Christmas in D.C. was the best option. What with deploring Lois’s “accident,” meeting Ezra for the first time, making their way around D.C. in the ice and snow, and trying not to seem alarmed about Uncle Henry, who smiled a lot but never got out of his chair, there were enough spurs for general anxiety. It was difficult enough to relate the tale of Vancouver two times to many oohs and ahs and jeezes: the foreclosure problem seemed to have subsided enough to go unmentioned. The interesting thing was the pile of presents from Andy — they dwarfed the tree. Among them were a new MacBook for Felicity, a new piano for Alexis, a beautiful brown shearling coat for himself, and the most stylish black Gucci boots for Jen that he had ever seen. Felicity allowed as how Andy had requested sizes, and Felicity of course knew them. Felicity said, “She buys all sorts of presents, but she told me the most expensive ones go to the youngest recipients.” That, Jesse thought, explained the piano, which was a baby grand, a Yamaha.

After Christmas, they were stuck in D.C. for an extra two days because of ice, snow, and hail at both O’Hare and Hartsfield-Jackson.