Famine Read online

  Willard nodded and backed up a few feet before turning the wheel and taking the Jeep in a slow, bumpy circle around the darkened edge of the crops. Ed reached into the pocket of his red plaid shirt and took out a pack of small cigars. He stuck one between his lips without offering them around. He knew that neither Willard nor Jack smoked, although Willard had been known to make short work of a half-bottle of Old Grandad.

  Jack said, ‘It must be some kind of airborne fungus. Otherwise, it couldn’t spread so damned fast. But the question is – what made it start here? And where did it come from?’

  ‘You haven’t had any reports of it elsewhere on the farm, have you?’ asked Ed.

  ‘Not so far. But I’ve been kind of incommunicado today. My walkie-talkie’s been on the fritz for a week, and I put it in for repair.’

  ‘I think we’d better take the chopper out at first light, and see if there’s any more of it,’ said Ed. ‘If it’s spreading as fast as you say it is, we could finish up with only half a crop, or maybe no crop at all.’

  He turned around to Jack, who was sitting in the back seat. Jack gave him an uneasy grin, almost as if the blight was his fault.

  ‘You’ve taken samples, I suppose?’ said Ed.

  Jack nodded. ‘I took about twenty or thirty while Willard was going down to the farm to get you. I’ll try to analyse some of them myself, but the rest of them can go to Dr Benson, down at the State Agricultural Laboratory.’

  ‘You think Benson’s capable of finding out what it is?’

  ‘He’s as capable as anyone. I mean, sure, he’s a little eccentric, but there’s nothing wrong with his technique. He isolated that seed fungus way before the Federal people came up with anything.’

  ‘All right,’ said Ed. ‘But I don’t want to have to wait for a week while he fiddles around with crackpot theories, the way we had to with that boosted fertiliser.’

  ‘I’ll tell him to play it straight.’

  ‘And sober, I hope.’

  ‘Sure.’

  They had reached the crest of a gentle rise in the ground, and now, by the light of the moon, they were looking down on the five-mile slope that took the northern wheatfields of South Burlington as far as the Mystic River, a tributary of the South River, itself a tributary of the South Ninnescah. Ed felt the skin on the back of his neck tingle at what he saw. Across the silvery wheat, a dark corroded stain had already spread for a mile in each direction, and westwards it reached as far as he could see.

  He touched Willard’s arm and whispered, ‘Stop.’ Then, when the Jeep was halted, he climbed down into the wheat and stood there silent, unmoving, like the witness to an accident which he was helpless to prevent.

  Willard and Jack watched him as he knelt down and studied the ears of wheat all around him. Some were blighted, some were still clear. But even as he watched them, the clear wheat gradually began to darken, and within minutes it was as rotten as the rest. He stayed where he was for a while, and then he stood up and came back to the Jeep.

  ‘What do you think if we burn a circle around it?’ he asked Willard. ‘Isolate it, like a fire with a firebreak?’

  ‘We could try,’ said Willard. ‘Do you want to go back to the farm and round up the men?’

  Jack said: ‘If the blight is airborne, which I think it is, then clearing a firebreak really isn’t going to do much good. The wind’s erratic tonight, west to north-west. It’s going to spread the fungus all over the farm before you can do anything worthwhile about it.’

  Ed looked at him. ‘Have you got a better idea?’ he asked. He tried to control the sharpness in his voice, but it was difficult. His father had always taught him that it was better to do something than nothing, and he knew just what Jack would have suggested. Sitting on their backsides waiting for the laboratory report, while the whole eighty-five thousand acres turned black all around them.

  ‘We could try spraying,’ said Jack. ‘Maybe a dose of Twenty-four D would do it.’

  ‘Oh yes, and who’s going to fly a crop-duster at night? And what are we going to say to the health authorities, when they find that the fungicide levels in our grain are ten per cent higher than anybody else’s? We might just as well set fire to the whole damned farm, or let it go rot.’

  ‘Ed – there’s no need to lose your cool,’ said Willard, gently. ‘I’ll try anything you say. But even if we wait until morning, we’re only going to lose a fraction of the total crop. I think the best answer is to leave it alone until we have some reasonable idea of what it is.’

  ‘And supposing nobody can find out? Even you, Jack, or your eccentric Dr Benson?’

  Willard tugged at his moustache. ‘They’re just darn well going to have to find out. That’s all. I’ve put too much of my life into South Burlington Farm to see a whole year’s wheat harvest go bad, and Jack knows that. Don’t you. Jack?’

  ‘We’ll isolate this blight, don’t you worry,’ said Jack. ‘I know it’s serious, but I’m going to take it back to the farm right now and spend some time on it and Kerry can run some samples over to Wichita first thing in the morning.’ Ed stared out at the acres and acres of drooping black wheat. ‘You really don’t believe that a firebreak would hold it back?’ he asked, almost as if he was speaking to himself.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Jack. ‘I just think you’d be using up energy and manpower and money for no good reason.’ Ed rubbed his eyes. ‘Okay, then,’ he said, ‘Let’s get back. I’d like to put a call in to Charlie Warburg and see if we can claim some compensation for any profits we lose. Henry Pollock ought to be told, too.’

  They climbed back into the Jeep and made their way back across the fields to the track. The moon was higher now, and the light that fell across South Burlington Farm was alien and cold. Ed smoked his cigar half-way down, then stubbed it out in the ashtray. Nobody who worked on a wheat farm ever tossed a glowing butt out of the window.

  As they approached the farm buildings, they could see the pattern of lighted windows in the farmhouse and the outbuildings which meant that all twenty of South Burlington’s John Deere tractors were in for refuelling and maintenance, that all the Jeeps and all the trailers were parked away for the night, and that Season Hardesty was waiting at home for her husband to come back and eat.

  Willard halted the Wagoneer on the red-asphalt yard. ‘I’ll call you later,’ he told Ed. ‘Maybe ten or eleven o’clock. I’d like to know what Charlie has to say.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Ed, and then he turned around to Jack. ‘I want you to call, too, just as soon as you’ve made up your mind what that blight could be. Or even if you can’t decide what it is at all.’

  ‘I sure will,’ said Jack.

  ‘Whatever happens,’ said Jack, ‘I want us all here by six o’clock sharp tomorrow morning, with Dyson Kane if he can make it, and I want us to make a complete chopper tour of the whole spread.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Willard.

  Ed climbed down from the Jeep and closed the door. He looked at Jack for a moment and then he said, ‘Good luck.’ Willard released the Jeep’s handbrake and drove out of the yard and Ed stood with his hands on his hips watching its red tail-lights disappear along the eastbound track. Then he walked slowly across to the house and climbed the verandah steps to the front door.

  Two

  Season was sitting with her feet up in the living-room, reading a copy of Vogue. The television was tuned to a special programme about Mid-Eastern oil, but the volume was turned down to a mutter. She didn’t even look up as Ed came into the room, unzipped his tan leather jacket, and sat down in the big library chair that had once been his father’s. Season always called this chair ‘the witness stand’, and she had wanted to throw it out when they first moved in; but to Ed, sitting in his father’s once-sacrosanct seat was one of those small but important parts of taking over South Burlington. It was no fun being an emperor if you didn’t have the throne that went with the job.

  The living-room was decorated in soft blues – stylish, tas
teful, with antique French furniture upholstered in ultramarine velvet. There were tall vases of flowers all around and a marble bust of Ralph Waldo Emerson on a slender mahogany torchère. The room was a perfect reflection of Season’s personality – cool, ordered, stylish, and discreetly expensive.

  ‘You’re late,’ said Season, turning over a page.

  Ed unlaced his boots. ‘Didn’t Ben tell you I was going to be held up?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But the fact that I was told doesn’t alter the fact that you’re late. It was a fish souffle, and I’ve had to throw it away.’

  ‘You threw away my supper?’

  She turned another page. ‘You don’t really care for flat fish soufflé, do you? I wish you’d told me. I would have kept it for you.’

  ‘Season—’ he said.

  She looked up at last. She was a tall girl of thirty, with a thin oval face and alarmingly wide blue eyes. Her blonde hair was scraped back on her head and held with a tortoiseshell comb. In her silk Japanese pants suit, all pastel colours and loose pleats, she looked as if she was all wrists and ankles. She was pretty, and sharp, and Ed had loved her from only about three minutes after meeting her.

  Some men found Season intimidating, both physically and conversationally. But Ed was a good four inches taller, and he had a slow dark masculine assurance about him – thick black hair, dense black eyebrows, deepset eyes of refreshing green – and the warm seriousness of whatever he said had always seemed to be able to enfold itself around her prickliest comments and render them harmless.

  ‘I’ve asked Dilys to make you an omelette,’ she said. ‘What about you?’

  ‘I don’t feel hungry any more. The act of cooking was enough to satisfy me.’

  ‘What about the act of throwing it all away?’

  ‘That satisfied me too.’

  ‘So I’ve come home to a satisfied wife?’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘We’ve got a serious problem out there in the fields.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ she asked. ‘Don’t tell me the computers are striking for more off-time. Or is it a human problem?’

  ‘It’s a crop problem. There’s a kind of blight. The wheat’s rotting right in front of our eyes. So far it’s spread over fifteen or twenty acres, and it’s still spreading.’

  ‘What are you going to do about it?’

  ‘I’m not sure yet. I don’t even know what kind of a blight it is.’

  ‘It’s probably a curse from your father.’

  ‘Season – we’ve got twenty acres of rotten wheat out there and that isn’t funny.’

  Season uncurled herself from the sofa, stood up and walked across to the inlaid French drinks cabinet. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I’ve drunk enough yet to be funny. Do you want one?’

  ‘Scotch,’ said Ed. He pulled off his boots and laid them down beside his chair. Season glanced at them as if she was expecting them to start tap-dancing on their own. She mixed herself a strong daiquiri and pineapple juice and poured out a Chivas Regal on the rocks for Ed.

  ‘There you are, my lord and master,’ she said, handing him his glass.

  ‘Sally in bed?’ asked Ed, drinking, and then wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

  ‘She went up about a half-hour ago. She despaired of her father, just like I did.’

  Ed let out a short, testy breath. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry about the soufflé. Willard came down like a bat out of hell and wanted me to go take a look at this blight. It’s very serious. Jack’s doing some tests on it tonight and tomorrow we’re going to send some samples across to Wichita. I had to go. I didn’t have any choice.’

  Season sat down again. ‘All right,’ she said, more softly. ‘Abject apology accepted. I just don’t think I’m ever going to get used to the way I went through a wedding ceremony with an actuary in New York City and wound up married to a wheat farmer in Kansas. What do they call it? Not culture shock. Maybe horticulture shock.’

  ‘I’m just hoping this blight doesn’t spread in a compound ratio,’ said Ed.

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ asked Season, trying to look interested.

  ‘Compound growth means that the wider it spreads, the wider it spreads. It starts off by blighting two acres, then six, then ten, and so on. If it goes on like that, we won’t have a farm by the middle of next week.’

  ‘I hope you really don’t believe what you’re saying,’ said Season, wearily. She stirred her cocktail with her finger, and then licked it.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Ed. ‘I’ve seen samples of rust, and the rot you get when you don’t dress your seeds with fungicide, but America has fewer wheat-disease problems than almost any other country in the world. What America spends on crop fungicides in any one year wouldn’t keep the town of Emporia in hotdogs. The only real problem we get is drought.’

  ‘Well, Farmer Hardesty, you should know,’ said Season, sipping her drink and looking at the television.

  Ed stood up. ‘I guess I’ll go say good night to Sally. Do you want to tell Dilys to start my omelette?’

  ‘What did you say?’ asked Season, her attention momentarily distracted by a television picture of running camels.

  ‘I said I’m going up to say good night to Sally.’

  ‘Well, don’t. She’ll be asleep by now.’

  He ignored her and went all the same. When he was halfway up the curving staircase, he heard her call, ‘Your seven-league boots are squealing because you left them behind.’

  He paused, and said, ‘Tell them I’ll send my magic socks down to pick them up later.’

  Season appeared in the doorway, holding his boots in her hand. ‘Take the goddamned things now!’ she snapped, and hurled them after him, one at a time. ‘Every time you come home you make the living-room look like a goddamned thrift store!’

  The boots clumped on the stairs and then rolled back down again. Season kicked them across the hallway and then stalked back into the living-room. Ed slowly descended the staircase, collected them up, and went up to see Sally with an expression that Season had once described as his ‘Grant Wood face’.

  Sally was lying curled up in her old-fashioned carved oak bed, under the early-American patchwork comforter that Season had bought for her at a fashionable store on Lexington Avenue in the eighties. She was almost asleep, but not quite, and when Ed looked in at the door, she stirred and raised her head from the pillow and smiled at him.

  ‘Hi, Daddy,’ she said, sleepily.

  ‘Hi yourself.’

  ‘I waited for you but you didn’t come home. Mommy threw your supper down the sink-disposal.’

  ‘I know,’ said Ed, sitting on the edge of the bed and running his hand through his daughter’s long blonde curls. ‘Dilys is going to fix me an omelette.’

  ‘You’ll have indigestion if you don’t eat regular. My teacher told me.’

  ‘Your teacher’s quite right. I was busy on the farm, that’s all. Some of the wheat went bad.’

  Sally looked up at him. Although she was only six years old, she looked exactly like her mother. Fair-haired and leggy, with those wide blue eyes like some startled character out of a Disney cartoon. Ed leaned over her and kissed her, and she had that childish smell of soap and cookies and clean clothes.

  ‘I love you,’ he said, with a grin.

  ‘I love you, too,’ she told him.

  They were silent for a moment. Then Sally said, ‘Is this a darned farm?’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘I don’t know. Mommy was talking on the telephone to Auntie Vee today and she kept saying “this darned farm”.’ Ed touched the tip of her nose with his finger. ‘Darned is one of those words that grown-ups use when they mean pesky.’

  ‘What does pesky mean?’

  ‘It means something that irritates you. Something that gets on your nerves.’

  ‘Does the farm get on Mommy’s nerves?’

  ‘Sure it does. It gets on my nerves some
times. But it’s important. It’s what people call a heritage. It’s something that’s been handed down from father to son, something that belongs to one family, and stands for everything that family is. You’re a Hardesty, see, and this is the Hardesty farm. When people meet you, they think – aha, that’s the little girl who lives on the big wheat farm in Kingman County, Kansas.’

  Sally thought about that and then she said, ‘Will you come with us?’

  Ed frowned. ‘Will I come with you where?’

  ‘To Los Angeles. To visit Auntie Vee.’

  ‘I didn’t know you were going to Los Angeles to visit Auntie Vee.’

  ‘Well, Mommy said so on the telephone. She said we’d try to get away some time this week.’

  Ed sat up straight. ‘Did she? Well… I guess if she said so, then you must be. I don’t know if I’ll be able to come with you, though. August is a pretty busy time on the farm.’

  ‘Try to come, won’t you? I want you to come.’

  Ed kissed her again and then stood up. ‘Sure, I’ll try to come. Now why don’t you get yourself some sleep?’

  He tucked her in tight, and then closed her door and crossed the landing to the master bedroom. Once more, Season’s taste and stylishness was all around. The rugs were rich pink and there was white-and-gold rococo furniture everywhere, chairs and commodes and side-tables all genuine eighteenth-century French. The bed was a half-tester, draped with pink velour and covered with a gold-embroidered bedspread. Ed watched himself thoughtfully in the gilt cheval mirror as he stripped off his plaid riding-shirt, his faded blue jeans, and his undershorts. Naked, he was lean and muscular, with a crucifix of black hair across his chest. Since he’d taken over South Burlington, he’d lost twenty pounds.

  He was tying up his bathrobe when Season walked in. ‘Dilys is just beating your eggs now,’ she said.

  He turned around. ‘That’s good. Sally’s teacher thinks I’m going to suffer from indigestion if I don’t eat regular.’

  ‘Is Sally still awake?’