to the jokes about bringing baking to a gathering where the only other male contribution to the menu was the carved ham provided by Barbara’s father. The air jostled with the clatter of silverware and competing conversations, the smell of smoky meat, casserole, and potatoes. Mikesh made his way to the living room, where six men sat, and where the ambience was less than jovial.
That week a neighbor, Ed Doyle, was ordered to make a payment to the biggest agribusiness firm in the country for the offense of reusing seed corn. In Doyle’s absence, Dale’s father was defending him.
“I didn’t know what it was to buy seed corn the first twenty years I farmed. And danged if with the new, fancy seed it’s not the same as the old days; for a second or third year you can plant the corn you harvest and get the same quality as if you bought.”
“And how would you know that?” Dale asked. “You better not let the seed police boys catch you airing that view or you’ll find your butt dragged into court for a copyright infringement that will cost you your farm and every penny you don’t already owe to the bank.”
“Copyright infringement!” Dale’s father snorted. “You pay good money for the stuff when you buy it from them. Why should some pencil pusher in St. Louis be able to say how long you keep planting it on your field in Fayette County?”
Dale’s father wasn’t the only farmer who chafed uneasily against the new restrictions. He grew up in a farming world where, if you paid money for an animal or a bushel of shelled corn you owned it, no questions asked. In the agro-industrial world of 2008, he had to keep careful records on every animal, and was being told that he only had renter’s rights to his designer-priced seed corn. There were hotlines set up for reporting comments like the one he had made about replanting, or for sharing your hunch that a neighbor was planting unpaid-for, copyrighted seed. It gave unfriendly farm folks a big stick, because in courts where such accusations got resolved, it was guilty until proven innocent for farmers who mounted a legal defense against the claim that they had DNA in their crop for which they had not paid. On the dusty farm roads around Waucoma and St. Lucas at planting and harvesting time you were more apt to see the black Suburban of an industrial detective, with his camera and his notebook computer, than you were to see a sheriff’s cruiser. Ed Doyle’s seed corn rep filed a complaint with his company when Doyle failed to place an order in the spring of 2007. Detectives richly documented the extent and progress of that year’s corn crop, and collected, under threat of legal action against the elevator, a sample of the grain he brought in fall 2007 to market. With no receipts to prove that he had bought new seed corn, he paid, on March 15, 2008, an undisclosed cash settlement that probably erased his entire business investment of the last two years. But it was either that or a trial against the most successful law firm in the Midwest, funded by a company with pockets as deep as here to New Orleans. The risk was that in the end Doyle would lose everything. As matters stood, he had at best a tiny chance of keeping the farm.
The conversation shifted to less troubling concerns: how spring was late in coming. When the talk moved to commodity prices, Mikesh, sleep-deprived and dazed, offered that he had heard Australia had the same ethanol issues, now, as Iowa.
“Ethanol issues in Australia!” Dale barked. “You gotta dial back the intellectualism, Arnie! Get back down to earth or you’ll die all alone and cold in that bachelor’s shack of yours, with only Australian heifers for company.”
The men chuckled. Mikesh was used to this, so he closed his mouth and just listened.
Twenty minutes later, once everyone was seated, men and women alike, around the long oval table in the big farm kitchen, and the food passed, the conversation meandered to the accident. In a piece on the television news, the reporter speculated what the death would mean for a controversial new Iowa religious movement. There had been talk about the accident after Easter Mass. People in the neighborhood of St. Luke’s basilica knew about Josh. They heard he lured a woman from a few miles west to leave her two children and become a follower, living in some kind of commune—and for what purpose? They knew that in the past two or three years my brother held gatherings at a skating rink north of Calmar and at the fairgrounds over in Decorah, but there were smaller meetings in peoples’ houses and even in farm pastures, though no one in St. Luke’s parish seemed to be able to name one. They said that, like a nineteenth-century doctor or frontier preacher, houses were where the strange religious leader (my brother) moved, doing most of his work. While Mikesh tried to keep track of this, he also kept thinking how his head hurt.
“I was the first person on the scene of that crash,” he offered.
“Arnie, you’re kidding,” Barbara said. “That was a terrible wreck! Did you see it happen? You must feel awful.”
She stopped talking long enough to put her hand on his shoulder as she reached in to take the passing dish for potatoes back to the stove for a refill.
“You should have called us.”
“I didn’t see it happen. I came on the scene about three hours later, at the end of my work shift. The man, King, he was almost dead when I got there.” He paused, realizing that a dozen people were listening. “He didn’t make it.”
The questions that followed kept Mikesh uncomfortable. He didn’t talk religion, even to the Jehovah’s Witnesses who came to his door. His father’s ancestors were buried in the cemetery of the Czech free-thinkers, the Ceska Svobodna obec, where no marker bore a cross and the monument at the center was merely inscribed with the words: “work, sacrifice for families and humanity.” That statement of purpose was a more-than-tall-enough order for him. He lived his life staying clear of every religious group (Catholic, Holy Roller, Lutheran, Mormon) the assembled table of people could name. The accident, however, associated him with something Dale kept calling a “hippie church.”
As people were leaving, Barbara cornered him. “Really Arnie, you aren’t looking good at all. Have you felt sick?”
“No. I’m just shaken up. Just tense enough to have trouble getting to sleep, and to give me a headache.”
Barbara was a heavy-set freckled woman of mild temperament who did not hesitate to air the gaudy clothesline of her thoughts. She grabbed his arm. “You know, Arnie, you should drive into Decorah. Get yourself a massage.”
Barbara’s husband Dale, a compact red-haired man, walked in for a cup of coffee and heard this. “Oh . . . my . . . God,” he mouthed in disbelief. “Barb, maybe I should come along with Arnie. We can make it a two-fer!”
“Hush, Dale. I’m serious. There’s a woman in our office. She was just about ruined by stress for eight weeks. Her doctor was going to medicate her and send her to the medical center for daily physical therapy which would cost her a fortune because it was only half covered by our health plan, and then she went for a session with this lady massage therapist and she came back to work feeling better than she had felt in a year. No meds, no hospital therapy.”
“Like I say,” Dale quipped. “Sign me up!”
“I’m not saying I don’t believe what happened with your woman friend,” Mikesh told Barbara, “but that doesn’t sound like my kind of thing.”
“I know. You’re like Dale. Assume that having a couple of beers, throwing around some hay, tightening bolts for a few hours, will work it out.” Barbara’s eyebrows knit. “But I’ll bet you’ve already tried that. Forgive me for saying it, Arnie, but you look terrible. Listen, if one of your lady Murray Greys developed so much as a sneeze, you’d call out the vet to look at her. Give yourself at least as much respect, and call for an appointment.”
From there the talk shifted
