Alice. Outward appearances were just a start. Aldah at fifteen had a vocabulary of sixty words, though she was progressing every day—thanks to Alice, not her mother.
Alice was no doctor, but she was convinced that there was something very abnormal about her mother and the way she looked for the darkest possible side of every issue. The approach of the millennium only made things worse: some part of her seemed to relish the most gruesome predictions of what the millennium might bring. That was her mother.
Alice glanced at the clock. She needed sleep. She had to get to sleep. The steers would be as hungry in the morning as they were earlier that night. She breathed deeply and tried to relax, but an uninvited guest came into her mind as she was starting to doze. It was her mother from her shoulders up, looking at Alice with eyes that said, “I know you. I know you better than anyone knows you.” The face hovered against Alice’s closed eyelids. The image of her, yes, perhaps this is what her father saw, a strange warmth. It was love. Alice couldn’t fight the feeling. Her mother, bizarre as she was, loved her. She was like a guardian angel, and no one ever said guardian angels had to be nice.
Maybe she was just trying to forgive her mother so she could get some needed sleep, but the feeling was a comfort. As sleep moved toward her, new pictures came into her mind like a shuffling of photographs: pictures of farms, one after another. Dead farms. Dying farms. Farms that hid their sickness. Chronically ill farms that wheezed through the night with sad and drooping fences, with fence posts that looked like contorted spines, farms with thistles on the loose, cocklebur farms, farms with poorly installed culverts that spring floods spit up into the ditches and fields, soil-depleted farms, farms with rutted driveways and flapping barn doors. And the modern transformed farms, megafarms, feedlot confinement farms, polluting farms, farms that stank to high heaven. Eye-watering-stench farms. Sickening smell, gagging farms. Farms whose odors had color and textures and taste, like dense green fog farms, sticky hot mauve farms. Curdling slime farms. The living-dead farms. Monster farms. With the images flooding her mind, so did the smells.
Fading farms, falling off the landscape one broken piece at a time, the old equipment rusting in the grove, the unterraced hillsides giving way to deeper gullies every year, the sway-backed sheds, the leaning mailbox. The slow death, two decades for shingles to wear out, another decade for barn ribs to show, then years of desertion before vandals smashed all the windows. Until the farm looked terminally ill, overburdened with chemicals, on its last breath, exhausted, one finger on the morphine button.
Like the Den Moolen farm two miles away—first the storage sheds, then the chicken coop, then the hog house, then the cow barn, then the lawn and garden, then the seven-gabled white house with its white picket fence and the blood-red rose bushes. The U-shaped grove like a good-luck horseshoe lingering for years—the ash, the box elder, the cottonwoods, the willows, the mulberry, the apple trees, all hanging on like faithful mourners at a wake, until the big Caterpillars shoved and tore and leveled and dug, a brutal preparation for mass burial. Then only the erasure mark where the farm had been, and finally only the long unbroken rows of beans and corn with their indifferent suggestion that nothing had changed, that things had always been this way and were meant to be this way. Rolling endless fields of beans and corn without the jarring images of barns and sack swings and houses and other nuisance reminders of human habitation. Land that imitated what the settlers saw in the endless ocean of prairie grass, waves of it extending toward the horizons. Miles and miles of uniformity. Fields of corn in full uniform, at attention, tasseling bayonets pointing up. All of the undone farms, like the Den Moolens’, making what travelers looking at the Iowa landscape called boring boring boring.
“Dear God,” she finally prayed, “send a miracle.”
Instead of a miracle, more images swept through her mind: fields of sameness, corn of uniform height and color, bean fields of narrow uniform rows, corrugated metal cattle sheds, the uniform silver ridges, the big round bales stacked in perfect rows, the feeder cattle like huge Walmart sales baskets filled with identical cattle figures with glassy plastic eyes, and milk cows all uniformly sized with uniform bland and white spots and with perfectly sized udders and teats, as if shaped for convenience for the cup size of the milking machine, and their uniform cow eyes, all blue-black, shining, perfectly round, rolling across the level screen of her mind. She counted the eyeball marbles as they rolled past, counted and counted until she fell asleep.
When the electricity came back on at 2:00 a.m., it took only the sudden hum of the electric clock to startle her awake. The lights in the cattle and hoglots were back on too—big fluorescent banners that made the whole world outside look as if it should be awake—or at least be on guard. Everything was silver and luminous and resembled neither winter nor summer. She walked around the upstairs and looked out the windows in all directions. The ground had a sandpapery texture, with earth showing through the glowing ice pebbles. The dark lawn was decorated with a million dull lights. Some hailstones had formed elongated mounds along the buildings in the shape of windrows and had the color of the corrugated metal storage bins.
She put her face to the screen in her bedroom window. The air was cool and quiet. She stared at the icy pebbles for a long time. The sight was storybook beautiful: fairy dust, fairy godmother sparkles. Wisps of steam rose up—like afterthoughts, or a ghostly ascension. Like the cloud that hung over the Israelites to guide them as they made their way to the Promised Land. She was with Noah on the ark, and the dove had returned with a leaf in its beak, promising a new beginning. She thought of her mother’s fear of the millennium and wondered if this might be a foretaste of what it would mean for the millennium to come and go: destruction followed by the promise of a new world.
9
If Alice thought for a moment that the misty cloud had been a message from heaven that a new and better day was dawning, that hope was erased by the revealing light of the next morning. Hail insurance adjusters in four-by-fours and minivans cruised the sticky gravel roads before seven, stopping every quarter mile to measure the damage.
No insurance adjuster stopped by the Krayenbraak farm.
“Dad? Why aren’t they stopping here? Our corn looks worse than anybody’s.”
He shook his head.
“ What?”
“No crop insurance this year. Couldn’t afford it.”
She stood next to her father and pulled on her boots in unison with him. They walked out into the muddy fields together, shoulder to shoulder, two stalky figures approaching the wounded cornfield. The battered ears of corn drooped from the naked stalks. When her father squeezed one in his large hand, milk from the kernels oozed through his fingers.
“This corn is too damaged to mature,” he said. His demeanor was flat and emotionless. It may have been resolute acceptance of what God had given them. The gift of trial. God was seeing if her father could be a Job. He nodded deliberately. “We can harvest it all for silage,” he said. “That will at least be something.”
Alice looked at the pathetic field of battered corn. Her father’s solution would not be that easy. Too much rain had come with the hail, and dark puddles of water glowed between the shattered rows of corn. The dark puddles looked like blood. Which made Alice think of sacrifice. Useless bloodshed of the innocent. Even if the Almighty wasn’t thinking of their well-being, why wouldn’t He think of the innocent corn, those gorgeous fields that one week ago were an endless celebration of green leaves? Didn’t those thousands of stalks declare His glory? Couldn’t He have looked down and said, “They are good,” and spared them? Alice turned toward her father where he stood majestic and calm. He looked better than the corn. How could anyone accept anything this terrible, just look at it, sigh, and go on? Whatever faith her father had, Alice knew she did not have it. Not yet, anyhow.
The
