“Just growing up, just from around,” Steve said.
“That’s nice,” said Shauna. She meant it; you grow up and it gets harder to meet people, but there are shrinking places in the world where the people you meet growing up are the people you know later on. These places seem less nice when you feel trapped in them, but once you get free they seem sweet. “You all look so happy.”
Jeremy didn’t mean to hold his breath for a half second: it just happened, there at the top of the inhale. “Mom was excited for the pictures,” he said, letting it go. “They were doing Christmas scenes too if you wanted to get your Christmas cards made there, so we did those. We were giving her a little bit of a hard time about it.”
“About Christmas?”
“About how when they brought out the tree you could see her getting really excited.”
“Like a kid,” said Steve.
Jeremy felt pressure in his temples, psychic strain, the sort of stuff he’d once been adept at evading. The moment was tugging at him like it had a hook in the roof of his mouth: they could all stay there, they could see what else might come out. But he picked up a green sponge and turned the water on in the sink.
“Dad, could you put the rest of the potatoes in the Tupperware?” he said.
“I’ve got it,” said Shauna.
*
At sixty-five miles an hour, the cornfields flicker against the window like stock footage; shadows in between the rows pulse steadily in shades of yellow and green and early brown. There are as many bean fields now as corn, but nobody remembers those, their rows green and spiky and nearer to the ground. Corn, though: it hoists itself skyward all by itself, determinate, until the long green leaves on the stalks grow heavy and begin to droop in autumn. From the road it’s like a painting, a huge mural, endless, ongoing.
You see cars pulled over and people who’ve gotten out to take pictures sometimes, around midday—families or couples who’re driving cross-country. There’s plenty of corn west in Nebraska, of course, and more of it east in Illinois, but there’s something about these gently rolling fields that makes people want to get a closer look. Near sunset, long, wheeling shadows suggest a different sort of picture, one with maybe a quiet hint of menace to it. But by then most of the people taking pictures have moved on.
The highway abutting the fields is miraculously uniform for miles on end; this is true on both the east-west and the north-south routes. Are they separate fields on either side of the highway, or does the road mark an artificial division through a single, uniform field? It’s a stupid question, because it only matters to whoever owns the land, but you get all kinds of thoughts when the sun’s strobe-lighting through the driver’s side window all day; and if you let yourself start thinking about the field without the highway, something happens to the way you take in the land. Your inner vision shifts. You think about fields with no one to see them, all that quiet life continuing on with no purpose beyond self-propagation. Tassels rotting in October. It gets to you, if you let it.
But instead of just driving the whole way from border to border, let’s say you get out into the rows, where the growth is thick and tall enough to dampen sound. You notice this effect even before you begin to speak; your ears register how the air’s a little different. “Hello!” people yell, making sure it’s not just some vague feeling they have, or “Is this Heaven?” They don’t mean that; they’re quoting from a movie about a man who builds a baseball field to coax the ghosts of old baseball players into emerging from the corn. There are other times when people go into the fields and yell different things: “Help!” for example, often repeatedly with increasing volume, or “Where are you taking me?” But nobody usually hears them. A few rows of corn will muffle the human voice so effectively that, even a few insignificant rows away, all is silence, what to speak of out at the highway’s shoulder: all the way back there, already fading into memory now. To make yourself heard, you’d need something substantial: the roar of the combine harvester in autumn, mowing all of this to the ground, and then rolling back over the stubble like a ruthless conqueror from an alien planet. Or something greater, bigger, louder. An airplane. But nobody’s going to land any airplanes out here.
*
“Farmer?” Jeremy was saying, with an air that made him sound older than he was; it made his father feel proud. “He’s got one tractor, no help except one son, and he’s a farmer?” They had adjourned to the living room and were watching Blue Chips, which was a movie about basketball; Nick Nolte was trying to recruit a high school player from rural Louisiana. It was one of the most popular tapes in the store; they had to stock four copies just to keep up with demand. Even then, one went missing.
Shauna smiled. “‘Family farms,’ right?”
“Yeah,” said Steve. “Weird they wouldn’t make him a shrimp fisherman or something.”