Jasmine. Bharati Mukherjee

Darrel’s first planting alone. The wheels of his tractor are plumed with dust as fine as talcum. The contour-plowed fields are quilts in shades of pale green and dry brown. Closer in, where our ground slopes into the Lutzes’, Shadow, Darrel’s huge black dog, picks his way through ankle-high tufts of corn. A farm dog knows not to damage leaves, even when it races ahead after a weasel or a field mouse. The topsoil rising from Shadows paws looks like pockets of smoke.

      Last winter Gene and Carol Lutz went to California as they usually did in January, after the money was in and before the taxes were due, and Gene, who was fifty-four years old, choked to death on a piece of Mexican food. He was so heavy Carol couldn’t lift him to do the Heimlich maneuver. The waiters were all illegals who went into hiding as soon as the police were called.

      Gene looked after everything for me when Bud was in the hospital. Now Bud wants to do the same for Darrel and the Lutz farm, but he’s not the man he once was. I can look out Mother Ripplemeyer’s back window and not see to the end of our small empire of ownership. Gene used to say to Bud, “Put our farms smack in the middle of the Loop and we’d about reach from Wrigley to Comiskey.”

      In our three and a half years together, I have given Bud a new trilogy to contemplate: Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. And he has lent me his: Musial, Brock, and Gibson. Bud’s father grew up in southern Iowa, and Gene’s father came from Davenport. Ottumwa got Cardinal broadcasts, and Davenport got the Cubs. Baseball loyalties are passed from fathers to sons. Bud says he’s a Cardinals banker in Cubbie land. He favors speed and execution: he’ll lend to risk takers who’ll plant new crops and try new methods. Gene Lutz went with proven power: corn, beans, and hogs. After a good year, he’d buy himself the latest gadget from the implement dealer: immense tractors with air-conditioned cabs, equipped with stereo tape deck. A typical Cubbie tractor, Bud would joke, all power and no mobility—but he approved the purchase anyhow. Gene even painted an official Cubs logo on its side. I thought it said Ubs. Darrel painted the Hawkeye logo over it.

      Darrel has a sister out in San Diego, married to a naval officer. Carol moved to be near her. With all the old Iowans in Southern California, she does not think she’ll be a widow for long. Darrel had a girl living with him last fall, but she left for Texas after the first Alberta Clipper.

      Darrel talks of selling, and I don’t blame him. A thousand acres is too much for someone who graduated from Northern Iowa just last summer. He’d like to go to New Mexico, he says, and open up a franchise, away from the hogs and cold and farmers hours. Radio Shack, say. He’s only a year younger than I, but I cannot guess his idea of reality. I treat him as an innocent.

      Yesterday he came over for dinner. People are getting used to some of my concoctions, even if they make a show of fanning their mouths. They get disappointed if there’s not something Indian on the table. Last summer Darrel sent away to California for “Oriental herb garden” cuttings and planted some things for me—coriander, mainly, and dill weed, fenugreek and about five kinds of chili peppers. I always make sure to use his herbs.

      Last night he said that two fellows had come up from Dalton in Johnson County with plans for putting in a golf course on his father’s farm. Bud told me later that the fellows from Dalton are big developers. With ground so cheap and farmers so desperate, they’re snapping up huge packages for future non-ag use. Airfields and golf courses and water slides and softball parks. It breaks Bud’s heart even to mention it.

      Darrel’s pretty worked up about it. They’d have night golf with illuminated fairways. Wednesday nights would be Ladies’ Nights, Thursday nights Stags Only, Friday nights for Couples. They’re copying some kind of golf-course franchise that works out West. The plan is to convert the barn into a clubhouse, with a restaurant and what he calls sports facilities. I’m not sure what they’ll do with the pig house and its built-in reservoir of nightsoil.

      “If you’re so set on sticking with a golf course,” Bud said, “why don’t you buy the franchise yourself?”

      “I couldn’t stand watching folks tramping down my fields,” he said.

      “So, what’ll you call the club?” I asked Darrel. It didn’t seem such a bad idea. A water slide, a nighttime golf course, tennis courts inside the weathered, slanting barn.

      “The Barn,” Darrel said. “I was hoping you’d come up with a prettier name. Something in Indian.” He started blushing. I want to say to Darrel, “You mean in Hindi, not Indian, there’s no such thing as Indian,” but he’ll be crushed and won’t say anything for the rest of the night. He comes from a place where the language you speak is what you are.

      The farmers around here are like the farmers I grew up with. Modest people, never boastful, tactful and courtly in their way. A farmer is dependent on too many things outside his control; it makes for modesty. They’re hemmed in by etiquette. When they break out of it, like Harlan Kroener did, you know how terrible things have gotten.

      Baden is what they call a basic German community. Even the Danes and Swedes are thought to be genetically unpredictable at times. I’ve heard the word “inscrutable.” The inscrutable Swedes. The sneaky Dutch. They aren’t Amish, but they’re very fond of old ways of doing things. They’re conservative people with a worldly outlook.

      At dinner, Bud snapped Darrel’s head off. “What farmer is nuts enough to golf three or four nights a week around here?” he asked.

      Darrel tried to joke about it. “Times change. Farmers change. Even Wrigley’s getting lights, Bud.”

      Bud’s probably right. Most times he’s right. But being right, having to point out the cons when the borrower wants to hear only the pros, is eating him up. He pops his stomach pills, on top of everything else. Blood pressure, diuretics, all sorts of skin creams. Immobility has made him more excitable. Later that night I tried to calm him down. I said, “Darrel won’t have to sell. You’ll see, it’ll rain.” Then I took his big pink hand, speckled with golden age spots and silky with reddish blond hairs, and placed it on my stomach. His hair is bushy and mostly white, but once upon a time he was a strawberry blond with bright blue eyes. The eyes are less bright, but still a kind of blue I’ve never seen anywhere else. Purple flecks in a turquoise pond.

      I am carrying Bud Ripplemeyer’s baby. He wants me to marry him before the baby is born. He wants to be able to say, Bud and Jane Ripplemeyer proudly announce …

      He hooks his free hand around my neck and kisses me on the mouth, hard. “Marry me?” he says. I always hear a question mark these days, after everything he says.

      Bud’s not like Taylor—he’s never asked me about India; it scares him. He wouldn’t be interested in the forecast of an old fakir under a banyan tree. Bud was wounded in the war between my fate and my will. I think sometimes I saved his life by not marrying him.

      I feel so potent, a goddess.

      In the kitchen, today as on all Sundays, Mother Ripplemeyer is in charge. We have gone over to Mother’s for our Sunday roast. Bud and his eight brothers and sisters were born in this house. From Baden, it’s the first livable house on the second dirt road after you pass Madame Cleo’s. Madame Cleo cuts and styles hair in a fuchsia pink geodesic dome.

      When Bud and Karin’s divorce became final, Karin got their fancy three-story brick house with the columns in front, their home for twenty-eight years. The house he bought after the divorce is low and squat, a series of addons. It had been a hired mans house. Eventually we’ll take over Mother Ripplemeyer’s house. Until then, we wait out here on three hundred acres, which isn’t bad. My father raised nine of us on thirty acres.

      This was a three-room frame house. He rents out the three hundred acres for hay. We added a new living room with an atrium when we moved in, and a small bedroom when we got word from the adoption agency in Des Moines that Du had made it out to Hong Kong. The house looks small and ugly from the dirt road, but every time I crunch into the driveway and park my old Rabbit between the rusting, abandoned machinery and the empty silo, the add-ons cozy me into thinking that all of us Ripplemeyers, even us new ones, belong.

      Du is a Ripplemeyer. He was Du Thien. He was