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terrace if they planted it at all, you could see the soil shading from dark chocolate to caramel just by looking at it; the dust blowing off the brow of the hill was as dry as sand, while on the lower terraces the beans looked like they might survive; but Jesse had mapped it anyway. The map was in and of itself interesting, and Joe liked to look at it and remember what had happened in this or that spot over the last sixty years. Not every event had improved the soil, but every one had deepened his attachment to the farm, like it or not. The savior Jesse prayed to was Frank. He didn’t ask him for money (which reminded Joe that his mother had always said that you were never to “pray for goods, only for goodness”), but he did ask him for advice. Frank’s most recent advice, handed out yesterday, over the phone from wherever Frank and Andy were spending the summer, had been to sell the place, take the money, move to Cedar Falls, and start a commodities-trading office. Jesse laughed, Jen looked shocked, Lois said, “Good Lord, Cedar Falls! Might as well move to Milwaukee and live with Annie!” Joe thought with an inward shudder of being confined to a fenced-in yard with his two dogs and having to greet the neighbors twenty times a day. And whatever the weather was in Iowa, it was worse in Milwaukee.
    Jen’s fallback position was that everything would work out because it always had. She was an optimist—the last Guthrie pessimist had been Jen’s great-uncle Oliver, father of Donald, who’d goneto the old schoolhouse with Joe and Frank. Oliver had lived to be ninety-five even so; the Guthries saw this as a proof of the power of positive-thinking genetics. Jen was a lovely girl, and very sweet, but she wouldn’t have a stockpile in the house—she thought it was bad luck and bad faith. The Guthrie motto was “Do what you want to do, and everything will be fine.” Wasn’t her second child nicknamed Perky? And a third one was on the way—Jen had driven to Iowa City at the end of June for an ultrasound, and was unsurprised to discover that little Felicity was healthy and already, at twenty weeks, sucking her thumb.
    Joe couldn’t tell if Minnie was worried about the drought (there, he had thought the word). She kept her thoughts to herself, smiled when you looked at her, and didn’t say much. This had always given Joe the feeling that she knew more than she was prepared to divulge. Everyone loved Minnie, including Lois, who was a little afraid of her (but, then, Minnie was a little afraid of Lois). However, should the disaster befall, no matter what it was, anything from a well drying up to the End Times (something Pastor Campbell liked to refer to), you had the feeling that Minnie would sigh and carry on, whether raptured up or left behind, and nothing about either experience would flummox her in the least.
    As for Joe himself, he fell back on memories. He knew exactly when the last drought that was this bad had been—1936, the year his uncle Rolf hanged himself in the barn. He’d been fourteen; Rolf would have been a year or two younger than his mother, Rosanna, probably he was not even thirty-five when he did it. Since Joe had turned sixty-six in March, thirty-five now seemed to him awfully young to give up. But he remembered how old Rolf had looked to him then, how desperate, how trapped on Grandpa Otto’s farm. He remembered in particular Grandpa Otto standing in the barn doorway, yelling at Uncle Rolf in German about something, waving his arm toward the dusty fields and the wizened corn crop. What had been Rolf’s fault or mistake? Joe hadn’t known enough German to understand. Rolf’s death had overshadowed the fact that on their own farm his father, Walter, had gotten only twenty-three bushels an acre that year for the corn, and sixteen for the oats (though they were then mostly growing the oats for themselves and the animals—theoats and the straw did get them through that winter, if only just). This