Читать книгу Jasmine - Bharati Mukherjee - Страница 7

DARREL was looking a little out of control in the HyVee parking lot last week. He was trying to avoid me, but I didn’t read the signs in time. I called out his name and started running. He was carrying a case of Heileman’s Old Style and a six-pack of blue Charmin. He’d nearly stashed it all in the front seat by the time I got there. His eyes were red and unfocused and he was unsteady on his feet.

Bud always says, of young farmers or the middle-aged ones with shaky operations, Look out for drinking. I don’t know if Darrel’s a drinker. I do not count off-hours drunkenness a sin. I invited him for dinner that night, but he politely refused. That is, it started politely, with a decent enough excuse, but then he saw me watching him and he knew there was no good excuse except that he was drunk and intending to stay that way.

Since his father died, Darrel’s had no time for fun. No dates, no movies, no vacation weekends. In the spring, that’s understandable, but not the winter. Iowa farmers pamper themselves in the winter if they can afford it. Gene and Carol always did. The blond girl who visited for a while didn’t seem too helpful. We had her over with Darrel. She was sullen, cut out for nobler ventures. “It’s the hogs” is his usual excuse, “you have to baby-sit hogs.” He has a hundred and fifty Hampshires; Gene had wanted to build up to three hundred.

Bud says, “It takes a good man to raise hogs.” Gene was a good man. Bud’s talking discipline, strength, patience, character. Husbandry. All of that is in short supply. Maybe Darrel doesn’t have it, in which case a golf course isn’t a betrayal. Most people in Elsa County have lost it. Just look at all the dents and unpainted rust spots on the cars in front of the Hy-Vee.

“I couldn’t go another round with Bud,” Darrel finally admitted.

“He’s just trying to make you see both sides, that’s all.”

“Jane, his mind is closed against me. He’s just dead set against non-ag uses for anyone’s ground, especially Gene Lutz’s ground. But then he turns around and won’t lend me enough to get my crops in and still expand my herd. He thinks he’s my goddamn father.”

I felt awful for him, and worse for myself. I didn’t want to be disloyal. But what he said is true. The First Bank of Baden has survived in harsh times because Bud can read people’s characters. Out here, it’s character that pays the bills or doesn’t, because everything else is just about equal.

“Bud’s trying to tie my hands and pin my ears back. He thinks I’m a lousy manager. He thinks he has all the answers. Well, tell him something from me, tell him to bring me rain if he’s God.” Then, almost immediately, he said, “I’m sorry. I’ve been drinking. I apologize.”

We’re dry right now. The rains will come. “Let me drive you home,” I say.

He lets himself be led, fumbling with his beer and toilet paper, to my Rabbit. He’s drunker than I thought. He drums his fingers on the case of beer. He’s like my brothers, with their scooter repair. They work and drink. It’s the only life they know, and I wouldn’t call them flawed.

All alone he’s backhoed a 40,000-gallon pit for his hogs’ nightsoil, and with sewer men and electricians on the weekends, he’s built a self-sufficient city for hogs. Once the pump is working, they’ll fertilize two hundred acres automatically, organically, and perpetually. A farmer’s dream. I’ve told Bud that financing this project is his best hostage against the golfing boys from Dalton. No farmer could walk away from it. But he thinks it’s too big for Darrel.

Darrel’s right about the bottom line. Bud doesn’t trust him.

Most nights, when Bud and I head to the Dairy Queen after supper, we can see Darrel up on the crossbeams of his hog pen. It’s already bigger than Gene’s old barn, and a lot more secure. Last week when I drove him home down his access lane between the rows of maple and elder, he sobered up as he just stared at the roof skeleton rising high above the poured-concrete floor and the metal sidings. The sheer scale of his achievement! You could smell the hogs and hear their squealing. That unfinished building looked like a landbound Ark. Big sloppy Shadow came out to greet him.

He was slow, more reluctant than drunk, in getting out. “I’d like to invite you in someday,” he says. In seems to be saying something different from over. More exclusive. “I’ve been practicing with some of your recipes. Need an expert to tell me how I’m doing.”