The night was quiet, but foggy. After a few quick words with the janitor whose shift was closing down, there was no one. Checking the buildings, walking down dark corridors whose locks and switches and vents he had memorized, usually calmed Mikesh. Not that night. He turned on more lights than usual, but couldn’t turn down the fog. As he drove his rounds, parked cars swam up at him as he passed. In the parking lot of one rental unit a figure stepped out from the last vehicle in a line of cars and pickups. The eyes glinted in Mikesh’s headlights. He laid on the horn and braked. One terrified kid with a pizza box hurried off to his apartment and Mikesh nosed the security van back to the office. There was an odd pressure in his chest. He told himself to slow down his breathing. Enough patrolling for one night; the campus was secure until half past one.
By the time Mikesh was driving home his head was pounding, though he had taken aspirin steadily over the course of the day. He made sure to take a different route than the night before.
At home he felt restless, his brain like the target of an afternoon’s batting practice. He turned on his computer and cruised the Internet. In a room where the only sounds were the fire settling in the woodstove and a clock ticking, the screen shone and blinked as he clicked on each new site: Duke losing in a basketball upset to West Virginia, cattle prices soft, the Australian grain market pegging itself to ethanol prices, the definition of the word infinity. That was his word, wasn’t it? “Infinity . . . Join in infinity.”
“An assumed limit, increasing without end,” but before that, a different definition: “within a boundary.”
The last words my brother heard were Mikesh telling him he was going to be okay. What had my brother meant with his last requests? To go someplace without end? To join him in that tight crushing space where he was finding it harder and harder to breathe? And what kind of help did Josh think our mother would need? Mikesh remembered the cold of my brother’s cheek. He replayed scenarios of the accident where he didn’t fail my brother: scenes where he had a blanket in the cab, a flask of warm coffee, scenes where an adrenalin surge helped him lift the hulking car with his shoulders. A scene where he pushed underneath the crushing weight of the hood to administer CPR even if it meant he, too, was crushed in trying. Not one of Mikesh’s imagined fantasies was as real as his failure.
He turned off the computer and went to bed.
chapter 5
A few restless hours later Mikesh gave up on the prospect of a night’s sleep, and instead baked the dinner rolls he was under orders to bring to his neighbors’ house for Easter lunch. Smelling the working yeast, punching dough, and working near the oven’s heat blunted the toothy edge of his headache enough to allow him to doze off in his chair before waking for chores. As he walked through the barn and pens, hollow and distracted, enveloped by the smell of fresh manure and hay, his consolation was that he was looking at two days off and a Sunday meal with friends.
That noon, setting the fresh rolls in the roomy kitchen of Dale and Barbara Murphy’s big four-square farmhouse, Mikesh had women to greet: Barbara, the Murphys’ daughter home from university, one of Barbara’s aunts, two mothers-in-law helping at the stove and the sink. He responded 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