Henry Pollock, the bald and breathy family accountant, had taken Ed aside after his father’s burial and said: ‘If you want South Burlington, son, it’s all yours. You only have to say the word.’
He remembered glancing across towards Season, who had been standing a little way away from the family crowd in her black veil and her black suit like a beautiful and elegant raven; and he remembered thinking – she knows that Pollock’s offering me the farm, and she knows that I’m going to have to say yes. Why doesn’t she come across and support me? Why doesn’t she take my arm and say it’s all right?
Well, he knew now why she hadn’t, he thought to himself, as Willard drove the Jeep across the pale reaches of ripening wheat. He sure knew now.
Willard switched on the Jeep’s headlights. ‘The worst of it’s just about a half-mile up ahead, right over there, to the left. Do you mind if I take her staight across the wheat?’
‘If you have to,’ Ed told him. His father had always gone apoplectic with fury if he found tyre-tracks across the fields, and Ed had tried to keep the same rule about respecting the crops. There was only one way to run a farm like South Burlington, and that was efficient and hard, and with no favours to anyone. He sat uncomfortably in his seat, while Willard veered off the road and drove through the tall, rustling crops.
‘I don’t make a habit of this, Ed, I can tell you,’ said Willard, as if he sensed his employer’s discomfort.
Ed didn’t answer, and for a short while there was nothing but the whining sound of the Jeep’s transmission, the pattering of wheat ears on the bodywork and the occasional tap of a moth on the windshield. Ed thought: if you could drive a car into the ocean, this is what it would be like.
Willard was leaning forward in his seat now and straining his eyes to see where he was. Eventually, a white marker stick appeared through the twilight and a flashlight was waved at them. Willard turned the Jeep in a semi-circle and stopped it. They climbed out into the warm, breezy night.
‘Hi, Mr Hardesty,’ said the man with the flashlight. ‘Glad you could make it so quick.’
‘Hi, Jack,’ said Ed. ‘Willard just caught me going into supper. What goes on here?’
Jack Marowitz was one of Ed’s senior farm managers. He was young – only twenty-eight – but he had a silo-full of honours from the Iowa State University of Science and Technology in the agricultural uses of advanced chemistry, automation and computer techniques. It was Jack’s job to make sure that what grew in the fields came out of those fields in optimum condition and was delivered to the right place at exactly the right moment Jack could plan the harvesting of ten thousand acres down to the last half-hour.
He was quiet, almost diffident, with a thick brown head of hair and Coke-bottle glasses, but Ed liked him because he didn’t rant and rave and he did his job well.
Jack held up an ear of wheat in the palm of his hand and directed his flashlight on it.
‘What do you make of this?’ he asked Ed. Ed peered at it closely, arid then poked it with his finger.
‘It’s rotten,’ he said. ‘The whole damned thing’s rotten.’
The ear of wheat was blackened and every grain inside it was dark and slimy with decay. Ed took it out of Jack’s hand and sniffed it, and he could smell a distinctly sour odour, like whisky mash.
‘It appears to me like some kind of blight,’ said Jack. ‘The only trouble is, what kind? It certainly isn’t rust, arid it sure as hell isn’t smut.’
Ed stood straight and looked around. ‘How much of the crop’s been affected?’ he asked. ‘Maybe it’s just some localised soil complaint. Maybe these seeds weren’t dressed.’
‘Well, that’s the problem,’ put in Willard. ‘And that’s why I wanted you to come take a look for yourself. It covers something like five acres at the moment, but it’s spreading.’
Ed took the flashlight from Jack and walked a little way out into the wheat. He shone the beam this way and that, quickly, and every way he shone it, he saw the same thing. The ears of wheat were drooping on their stalks and they were all dark brown with decay. The smell of sourness was carried on the breeze, and under the light of that pale and emotionless moon, silently suspended on the horizon, Ed felt as if the world had subtly changed position on its axis, as if things would never be quite the same again.
‘You never saw anything like this at Ames?’ he asked Jack, switching off the flashlight and walking back.
‘Nothing at all. And, believe me, I saw some pretty grotesque stuff.’
‘When did you spot it?’
‘Round about two this afternoon,’ Willard explained. ‘We were making out the harvesting rota, just along the track there-a-ways. I was standing on the roof of the Jeep, looking around to see how the crops were lying, what with all those winds we’ve been having and all – and I could see a dark patch from the road. At first I thought it was the shadow from a cloud. But when it didn’t move, like the other shadows did – well, then I knew there was something wrong.’
Two this afternoon?’ asked Ed. ‘It’s only eight now. How can you tell if it’s spreading?’
Jack cleared his throat. ‘At two this afternoon, it was only covering two to three acres.’
‘What do you mean? You mean it’s spread two acres in six hours? That’s crazy.’
Willard’s expression was indistinguishable in the dusk, but Ed could tell from the tone of his voice that he was embarrassed. ‘I’m afraid it’s true, Ed. We didn’t measure exactly, or nothing like that. But it seems like it’s going through the wheat like some kind of a slow fire.’
Ed stood silent for a while, his hand over his mouth, staring at the dark patch of decaying wheat in the middle of his field. If the blight could spread at the rate of two acres in six hours, that meant it could eat up eight acres a day at the very least. The danger was that as the circumference of the blighted area increased, so the speed at which the disease burned up his crops would increase. Willard was right. It was just like a slow fire.
‘Let’s get in the Jeep,’ Ed suggested at last. ‘Then let’s circle the affected wheat and see how much of a problem we’ve got on our hands. I want to watch this blight in action. I want to see it actually spreading.’
They climbed into the Wagoneer, and Willard started up the engine.
‘Make sure you only drive over unblighted wheat,’ Ed told him. ‘If it’s any kind of a fungus, I don’t want it spread around the farm on the tyres of your Jeep.’
Willard nodded and backed up a few feet before turning the wheel and taking the Jeep in a slow, bumpy circle around the darkened edge of the crops. Ed reached into the pocket of his red plaid shirt and took out a pack of small cigars. He stuck one between his lips without offering them around. He knew that neither Willard nor Jack smoked, although Willard had been known to make short work of a half-bottle of Old Grandad.
Jack said, ‘It must be some kind of airborne fungus. Otherwise, it couldn’t spread so damned fast. But the question is – what made it start here? And where did it come from?’
‘You haven’t had any reports of it elsewhere on the farm, have you?’ asked Ed.
‘Not so far. But I’ve been kind of incommunicado today. My walkie-talkie’s been on the fritz for a week, and I put it in for repair.’
‘I think we’d better take the chopper out at first light, and see if there’s any more of it,’ said Ed. ‘If it’s spreading as fast as you say it is, we could finish up with only half a crop, or maybe no crop at all.’
He turned around to Jack, who was sitting in the back seat. Jack gave him an uneasy grin, almost as if the blight was his fault.