‘I’ll call you when we get there,’ said Season, as they approached Wichita Airport. A DC10 was making its approach over on their right and it flashed silver in the morning light before it sank towards the runway. The going-away smell of airplane fuel penetrated the car’s air-conditioning, and Ed suddenly felt very lonesome and even frightened, as if he would never see Season again. Not to hold anyway, and not to love.
He turned right into the airport, and drove them up to the terminal building. ‘I didn’t buy you anything to take with you,’ he said. ‘Do you want a book, a magazine, something like that?’
Season shook her head. ‘I believe I’ll have quite enough thinking to do. And Sally’s never flown over the Grand Canyon before. We’ll keep busy.’
He turned to her, and placed his hand over hers. ‘Well,’ he said hoarsely, ‘there’s one thing I’d like you to take with you.’
She looked at him, but didn’t say anything. He lowered his head, because somehow that made it easier to hold back his emotion. ‘I’d like you to take my love with you,’ he said, wishing the words didn’t sound so much like a Valentine card. ‘And I’d like you to take my best wishes for everything that you do. I love you, Season, and there ain’t two ways about it.’
She kissed him, and her lips were very warm, and she smelled of Joy. ‘I love you, too, Ed. Really dearly I do. And I’m going to miss you badly. But I know that when I get back, I’m going to have my head straightened out and everything’s going to be fine.’
‘Why don’t you come. Daddy?’ asked Sally. ‘You could take me swimming and everything, and Auntie Vee says we’ll go to the ocean.’
Ed turned in his seat and took her hand. ‘I’ve got to harvest all of our wheat, honey, or we won’t have any food to eat for the next year. But maybe I’ll be able to come next time.’
‘I love you. Daddy,’ said Sally. ‘And Merry loves you, too.’
Ed kissed her. ‘I love you, honey.’
He got out of the car. The day was roastingly hot, even though it was only ten o’clock, and the sun rippled off the sidewalk in corrugated waves. He opened the back of the stationwagon, and hefted out their cases. A sky-cap with a bright red face and prickly hair was waiting to collect them.
‘Los Angeles?’ the skycap asked.
Ed nodded. Then he went around to open the car doors for Season and Sally.
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I won’t wait. I have an appointment with Dr Benson at the agricultural laboratory.’
Season held him close. ‘Goodbye, Ed,’ she said, and she was crying. She took hold of Sally’s hand and the two of them walked quickly across the sidewalk and into the reflecting doors of the terminal. Ed stood watching them go, and then he slowly took out his handkerchief and rubbed the sweat from the back of his neck, and maybe some of the tension, too. He climbed back into his car and started the motor.
For a moment, he closed his eyes.
He hadn’t said much to Season this morning about the wheat blight. It was a little worse, he’d admitted, but he was sure they could get it under control. What he hadn’t told her was that Willard had come knocking at the kitchen door at six-thirty in the morning, while Ed had been sitting at the table drinking his first cup of coffee of the day and reading the papers, and that Willard had already been out with Dyson Kane on a circular helicopter tour of the whole spread.
Willard had calculated that almost an eighth of their total wheat acreage had been blighted during the night, and that the disease was spreading even faster than before. If they didn’t find some way of curbing it by Monday or Tuesday, they were going to lose everything.
Ed had shown Willard the news story in the Kansas City Herald-Examiner. Considering how widespread the blight had been, and how many major Kansas farms had been hit, the coverage had seemed almost offhand. It had rated only a second lead on page three, and ‘Our Agricultural Desk’ had simply reported that ‘several Kansas wheat farmers have noticed an unidentified blight on their late crops’, while ‘Our Washington Bureau’ had remarked with distinct unconcern that ‘federal researchers are busy analysing the blight and working on new methods for bringing it under prompt control.’
In fact, Ed had been so disturbed by the paucity of the news story that he had already called Walter Klugman, who owned the neighbouring Penalosa Farm, and checked if his crops were just as seriously affected.
‘Oh, you bet,’ Walter had said. ‘If anything, mine’s worse than yours. I’ve got thirty per cent of my wheat crop turned rotten, and if the state don’t come up with something soon. I’m going to burn the whole damned spread.’
Even when Ed and Willard had turned on the television for the early-morning news, the stories about the wheat blight had been dismissive and superficial. ‘Not a good year for the wheat farmers of Kansas and North Dakota,’ ABC had reported. ‘They’re bothered by a mystery disease which is turning hundreds of acres of harvest-ready crops into black, stinking decay. But federal scientists are said to have the problem in hand, and there’s also news that Kansas Senator Shearson Jones, known for years as the “Farmers’ Friend”, is planning on setting up an appeal fund to help those farmers who might face financial hardship because of the blight.’
Willard, helping himself to a cup of coffee, had shaken his head and whistled. ‘Financial hardship? The way things are going, we’re all going to be wiped out.’
As he drove over the Wichita Valley Flood Control gully, and along Douglas Avenue to the civic centre, Ed tuned into the news on his car radio. But there was nothing at all about the blight – just some long-winded story about a teacher from Wellington who was trying to bring back compulsory prayers. ‘We’ve been without God for nigh on thirty years,’ she was saying. ‘It’s time we turned our faces back in his direction.’
Ed parked the stationwagon in the civic centre parking lot, and took his brown-tinted sunglasses out of the glove-box. Then he walked across the wide, glaring pedestrian precinct, until he reached the shiny office building which announced itself as the Kansas State Agricultural Laboratory – not only with a plaque of brushed stainless-steel, but with a bronze statue of a smiling family growing out of a giant ear of wheat.
Inside, it was cold, echoing, and smelled of polish. A girl receptionist with bright red lipstick and a Titian-tinted beehive hairstyle directed Ed to the ninth floor. He stood in the elevator next to a man in a white lab-coat who was carrying a cardboard box marked ‘Infected Rodents’ and humming Peace In The Valley. There were times when he agreed with Season about Kansas. If you came from New York, or any city larger than Cleveland, you could quite readily believe that the Kansas state mentality was solid cereal from ear to ear.
He walked along the ninth-floor corridor until he reached a half-open office door marked Dr Nils Benson, Head of Disease Control. He knocked.
Dr Benson was standing by the window, peering at a 35mm colour slide. He shouted, ‘Come in!’ very loudly, and then swung around on his heels to see who his visitor was. ‘Ah!’ he said. ‘It’s Mr Hardesty, isn’t it? Mr Hardesty of South Burlington Farm.’
‘You came around at Christmas when I was having that seedling problem,’ said Ed. ‘How are you doing?’
Dr Benson shook his hand. He was a tall, sixtyish man with a marked stoop of the shoulders – mainly brought on by his chronic shortsightedness and his habit of attacking anything that interested him like a Greater Prairie Chicken. He wore large round eyeglasses, and his hair was fraying and white, but whenever he took his glasses off, he looked strangely boyish and young. It was common knowledge in Wichita that Dr Benson had lost his homely but vigorous wife to an interstate truck driver, and that for years he had suffered an alcoholic problem. Some of his unkinder colleagues called him ‘Booze Benson’.