Early Warning

The habit of worrying was a hard one to break. His corn yield had been as high as he’d ever seen it — a hundred bushels an acre, with the soybeans almost forty-five — that was almost thirty thousand bushels of corn and about eighteen thousand bushels of beans he had carted to the grain elevator. And somehow, against all probability and history, there had been a market. Minnie had said to him, “Well, if land is up to fifteen hundred an acre”—and it seemed to be, according to all the farmers sitting around the café in Denby—“there must be a reason.” Walter would have shaken his head and said, “No, no reason. Never made sense and never will,” but Joe was beginning to believe that there was a reason and there was a market. Maybe it was true, as many farmers said, that the middlemen — the grain companies and the traders on the exchanges — were getting the longer end of the stick, but the stick was getting fatter, too. What was the world population now? More than three and a half billion, and no sign of slowing down — some book Lois had seen called The Population Bomb or The Population Explosion predicted widespread famine. Or, Joe thought, the arrival of an era when farmers might get paid for what they produced.

Oh well, four lambs was a good start. And a dog, maybe. When Nat died, and then Poppy, he hadn’t replaced them. The wind picked up as he headed back toward the barn. He hunched his head into his shoulders. Not much hair to keep him warm anymore, and his feed cap was worthless. He stopped, though, just to watch a goshawk dive straight down at the bare field, walk about for a minute, peck quickly at something, and then rise into the air with a snake in its talons, long and slender. Joe had never seen that before — in fact, it was maybe two or three years since he’d seen any hawk, longer than that since he’d seen a goshawk. He stood and watched as it rose higher, the snake writhing at first and then drooping. Soon, they disappeared into the clouds, and Joe headed back to the barn. What he would do there, he didn’t know — one thing a long cold spring was good for was making sure that every gear was greased, every joint was oiled, every belt on every piece of farm machinery was tight.

Standing in the doorway of the barn, looking at the four lambs and the rest of the empty, chilly landscape, a bright sky (though not sunny) arching over the spreading dark and waiting fields, Joe didn’t see a soul. The earth, in his experience, was a bigger place than most people could imagine. Sheep made him think of breeding, how the strain of Walter and the strain of Rosanna mixed with the strain of Roland and the strain of Lorena (a little inbreeding there, he knew). He shook his head — breeding was about profit, not love. He fiddled around the barn until late morning, so idle that he began to contemplate dogs. A pointer. A pointer arrowing across the fields after a pheasant or even a rabbit would be a beautiful sight, a luxury, and a friend. And, after all, a man whose land was now worth almost a million and a half dollars maybe deserved a pointer.

—

ON MONDAY, which was a nice day, Rosanna put on her socks and boots and a sweater over her housedress and walked out to the newly painted barn, where she knew she would find Joe. The corn ran in a long towering barrier on the south side of the barn, and the Osage-orange hedge, hardy as ever, hid everything to the east (though Rosanna could hear the ewe Joe had decided to keep and breed — Hasta her name was, for hasta la vista, Joe’s idea of a joke). The puppy was cute, too, a purebred golden retriever named Dory, or D’Ory, which meant “golden” somehow. When she opened the door, the puppy ran over and sat right down, because Joe had taught her that she only got petted if she sat. Rosanna leaned down and scratched her ears, thinking she had turned into a softy for sure, then straightened up and declared, “I want to learn to drive a car.”

Joe stared at her.

She said, “I mean it. I’ve been sitting inside my house for forty-five years. I can’t even remember why I didn’t want to go out. Something to do with looks, I’m sure — I was a very vain young woman.”

“Where would you go?”

Rosanna put her hands on her hips. “Wherever I feel like.” That must have been the right answer, because Joe smiled. “You could drive Lois’s car to start with — that’s an automatic.” Then he said, “Want to try it right now? She hasn’t left for work yet.”

Rosanna took the dare and followed him to his house, where he told Lois, “My mother wants to borrow your car,” and Lois, who was deep into making something complicated and French, must not have heard, because she only waved her hand. “The keys are in it.” They walked out the front door before Lois could come to and stop them.