Jasmine. Bharati Mukherjee

to the Lutheran Relief Fund craft fair last week. I am subverting the taste buds of Elsa County. I put some of last night’s matar panir in the microwave. It goes well with pork, believe me.

      Bud wheels himself in from his study. “I can’t let the kid do it!” The kid is Darrel, whose financial forms he’s been studying. “It’s plain stupid. Gene would never forgive me.”

      I’ve sent away for the latest in wheelchairs, automated and really maneuverable. The doctor said, “I had a patient once who had his slugs pierced and hung on a chain around his neck.” Bud said to throw them out. He didn’t want to see how flattened they’d got, bouncing off his bones. The doctor is from Montana. I haven’t been west of Lincoln, Nebraska. Every night the frontier creeps a little closer.

      Think of banking as your business, I want to tell Bud. Don’t make moral decisions for Darrel. It’s his farm now. He can make half a million by selling, buy his franchise and a house, and I can look out on a golf course, which won’t kill me. Bud gets too involved. It almost killed him two years ago.

      “Watch him, Dad!” Du whoops. “Watch him take off!”

      Bud puts away the Financial Statement and Supporting Schedules form he’s been penciling. He skids and wheels closer to Du to watch the Python.

      “Can you do a wheelie yet, Mr. R.?” Scott jokes.

      “Boy!” He smiles. “That thing gives the guy great air!”

      The Python’s built himself a fancy floating suspension. Father and son watch the Snakeman win his class.

      On the screen Cut Tire Class vehicles, frail as gnats, skim over churned-up mud. Helmeted men give me victory signs. They all plan on winning tonight. Nitro Express, Brawling Babe, Insane Expectations. Move over, I whisper.

      Over the bleached grounds of Baden, Iowa, loose, lumpy rainclouds are massing. Good times, best times, are coming. Move over.

      Mother paces between the windows. “Poor Vern.” Her hands pick at lint balls I can’t see. “It’s blowing so hard he’ll never find his way back from the barn. A man can die in a storm like this.”

      Bud flashes anxiety at me. His father was Vern. I calm him with a touch. He rests his head on my hip. “Kiss an old fool for love?” He grins. I bring my face down close to his big face. He kisses my chin, my cheeks, my eyelids, my temples. His lips scuttle across my forehead; they warm the cold pale star of my scar. My third eye glows, a spotlight trained on lives to come. This isn’t a vision to share with Bud. He is happy. And I am happy enough.

      The lemon-pale afternoon swirls indoors through torn window screens. The first lightning bugs of summer sparkle. I feel the tug of opposing forces. Hope and pain. Pain and hope.

      Mother moves around the room, turning on lamps. “Seen the quilt?” she says. “How much do you think it’ll bring? Thirty-five? Forty?”

      In the white lamplight, ghosts float toward me. Jane, Jasmine, Jyoti.

      “It’ll depend on the Christian conscience of strangers,” Bud jokes. “You might get more than thirty-five.”

      “Think how many people thirty-five dollars will feed out there.”

      Out there. I am not sure what Mother imagines. On the edge of the world, in flaming deserts, mangled jungles, squelchy swamps, missionaries save the needy. Out There, the darkness. But for me, for Du, In Here, safety. At least for now.

      Oh, the wonder! the wonder!

       3

      DARREL was looking a little out of control in the HyVee parking lot last week. He was trying to avoid me, but I didn’t read the signs in time. I called out his name and started running. He was carrying a case of Heileman’s Old Style and a six-pack of blue Charmin. He’d nearly stashed it all in the front seat by the time I got there. His eyes were red and unfocused and he was unsteady on his feet.

      Bud always says, of young farmers or the middle-aged ones with shaky operations, Look out for drinking. I don’t know if Darrel’s a drinker. I do not count off-hours drunkenness a sin. I invited him for dinner that night, but he politely refused. That is, it started politely, with a decent enough excuse, but then he saw me watching him and he knew there was no good excuse except that he was drunk and intending to stay that way.

      Since his father died, Darrel’s had no time for fun. No dates, no movies, no vacation weekends. In the spring, that’s understandable, but not the winter. Iowa farmers pamper themselves in the winter if they can afford it. Gene and Carol always did. The blond girl who visited for a while didn’t seem too helpful. We had her over with Darrel. She was sullen, cut out for nobler ventures. “It’s the hogs” is his usual excuse, “you have to baby-sit hogs.” He has a hundred and fifty Hampshires; Gene had wanted to build up to three hundred.

      Bud says, “It takes a good man to raise hogs.” Gene was a good man. Bud’s talking discipline, strength, patience, character. Husbandry. All of that is in short supply. Maybe Darrel doesn’t have it, in which case a golf course isn’t a betrayal. Most people in Elsa County have lost it. Just look at all the dents and unpainted rust spots on the cars in front of the Hy-Vee.

      “I couldn’t go another round with Bud,” Darrel finally admitted.

      “He’s just trying to make you see both sides, that’s all.”

      “Jane, his mind is closed against me. He’s just dead set against non-ag uses for anyone’s ground, especially Gene Lutz’s ground. But then he turns around and won’t lend me enough to get my crops in and still expand my herd. He thinks he’s my goddamn father.”

      I felt awful for him, and worse for myself. I didn’t want to be disloyal. But what he said is true. The First Bank of Baden has survived in harsh times because Bud can read people’s characters. Out here, it’s character that pays the bills or doesn’t, because everything else is just about equal.

      “Bud’s trying to tie my hands and pin my ears back. He thinks I’m a lousy manager. He thinks he has all the answers. Well, tell him something from me, tell him to bring me rain if he’s God.” Then, almost immediately, he said, “I’m sorry. I’ve been drinking. I apologize.”

      We’re dry right now. The rains will come. “Let me drive you home,” I say.

      He lets himself be led, fumbling with his beer and toilet paper, to my Rabbit. He’s drunker than I thought. He drums his fingers on the case of beer. He’s like my brothers, with their scooter repair. They work and drink. It’s the only life they know, and I wouldn’t call them flawed.

      All alone he’s backhoed a 40,000-gallon pit for his hogs’ nightsoil, and with sewer men and electricians on the weekends, he’s built a self-sufficient city for hogs. Once the pump is working, they’ll fertilize two hundred acres automatically, organically, and perpetually. A farmer’s dream. I’ve told Bud that financing this project is his best hostage against the golfing boys from Dalton. No farmer could walk away from it. But he thinks it’s too big for Darrel.

      Darrel’s right about the bottom line. Bud doesn’t trust him.

      Most nights, when Bud and I head to the Dairy Queen after supper, we can see Darrel up on the crossbeams of his hog pen. It’s already bigger than Gene’s old barn, and a lot more secure. Last week when I drove him home down his access lane between the rows of maple and elder, he sobered up as he just stared at the roof skeleton rising high above the poured-concrete floor and the metal sidings. The sheer scale of his achievement! You could smell the hogs and hear their squealing. That unfinished building looked like a landbound Ark. Big sloppy Shadow came out to greet him.

      He was slow, more reluctant than drunk, in getting out. “I’d like to invite you in someday,” he says. In seems to be saying something different from over. More exclusive. “I’ve been practicing with some of your recipes. Need an expert to tell me how I’m doing.”