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sharp and dangerous virtues
sharp and
dangerous
virtues
A NOVEL
martha
moody
SWALLOW PRESS
Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio
Swallow Press
An imprint of Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701
© 2012 by Martha Moody
All rights reserved
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Moody, Martha. Sharp and dangerous virtues : a novel / Martha Moody. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-8040-1141-9 (hc : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8040-4051-8 (electronic) 1. Food supply—Government policy—Fiction. 2. United States—Foreign relations—Fiction. 3. Dayton (Ohio)—Fiction. I. Title. PS3563.O553S53 2012 813’.54—dc23 2012016940
For my sons
contents
A Dose of Yearning with the Mashed Potatoes
“Human Folly Is Always Amusing”
2047
a family and a place
HOWARD, AGE TEN, was doing a report on America’s two greatest natural wonders, the Heartland Grid and the Grand Canyon.
“The Heartland Grid’s not natural, son,” Chad said.
Howard gave his father an incredulous look. “It’s plants,” he said. “It’s how America feeds the world.”
North of Dayton, Ohio, where Chad and Sharis (“It rhymes with Paris,” she said) Gribble and their sons, Howard and Leon, lived, there was a polymer fence close to twenty feet high, a fence that went forever, surrounding a dedicated agricultural area of over fifty thousand square miles. The Grid was roughly the shape of a nine-by-twelve casserole. Intentional villages dotted its landscape, roads crisscrossing it at ten-mile intervals.
“We never fed the world,” Chad said. “We feed ourselves.”
