Literary Ruralism (Part L): Farming debates and farmer decision-making in Louise Erdrich's "The Mighty Red"

In a prior post about Louise Erdrich's The Mighty Red, I highlighted some excerpts about small-town life.  In this post, I'm going to feature some excerpts about farming decisions, in particular the debates about soil health and how to deal with weeds.  For those who read the first post, you may recall that the crop of choice in this area of North Dakota is sugar beets. 

I found the commentary on different types of farming--and on urban ignorance of farming--fascinating.  A few reminders about who's who:  Winnie is Gary's mother (see prior post).  We start with part of hte story of how Winnie's family lost their farm to the Geist family, into which Winnie married.

People in towns and cities had strange ideas about farming. People thought you just put a seed in the ground and it grew. Winnie Geist’s husband, Diz, called farming a war, but Winnie said it was a conflict. True, something was always trying to kill your crop, but there were ways and there were ways . . . she drifted off thinking of her parents’ ways. Driving to town over the summers, she had looked out to either side and seen that a field of sugar beets was going to be a good stand, that corn was growing unevenly, that soybeans had been planted too early or too late, that the sunflowers were outstanding. She knew who owned each field too, and so she was glad for or irritated by various families along the way. Now, driving toward the book club meeting, she let her mind relax. 

* * * 

While she was in high school, the government accelerated her family’s loan payments and blow after blow had landed. They’d lost their home, their farm, everything. Except one another, they kept saying, except us.

Sport Geist, father of Diz, had bought Winnie’s family farm from the bank for half of nothing. Her parents had sold their cattle at a loss, the equipment at an auction, moved out of their hand-built home into a rickety little white house in town. Her father had held her shoulders, looked into her face, said that as long as they worked, no job too menial, they’d hold their heads up. She held her head up. And anyway, in town people didn’t care. Most of the town kids had no idea what life on a farm was like. Losing a farm had no meaning for them. Winnie had kept her girlfriends and stayed Diz’s girlfriend, in spite of everything. She’d always loved Diz as much as she hated his father. Sport had mostly regarded his sons as free labor and rarely addressed them except to give an order. All through high school, Diz asked her to marry him. She said the best she could do was go to the local junior college and take bookkeeping so she could keep books for the farm. It was a kind of promise but she wouldn’t marry him until after Sport was dead and buried—in the earth he didn’t deserve to inhabit.  (pp. 84-85) 

This chapter is about Diz and his brother Gusty, both farmers.  The date is 2009.  

As boys they were husky. As men they are bulky. They loom like monoliths. They are chainsaw art. As Diz and Gusty lumbered across the yard, strong bulwark guts atop leg beams, they talked. Their thin exquisite lips barely moved. Their handsome wind-whipped faces were impassive in the shadow of billed caps. They had survived their father by sticking together. They never discussed the past. To speak about the way their father, Sport, had treated them, would be like grabbing an electric fence. 

The sun was fierce, the ground already kicking up heat. Their narrow blue eyes of Roman generals glinted as they entered their shadowy arsenal. Diz unlocked the back room of the tan and green metal pole barn, switching on the light, and the brothers frowned at the supply. Gusty lifted his hand and counted containers, which were kept in a chain-link enclosure with a padlock. 

Dual Magnum. Roundup. Warrant. Outlook.  Chloroacetamide. Betamix. Ethofumesate. UpBeet. Gramoxone. 

‘We should scout again. But I know what we’re gonna find,’ said Gusty. 

Diz switched off the light and they adjusted their hats before they walked into the field planted with his non-improved seeds. In that field the beets were past the emergent stages, the soil dry and powdery despite the recent flood and rain, and the sun was now relentless as hate. But worse than the glare of sunlight was the presence of the 2009 weed of the year, Chenopodium album, one of the most noxious and difficult to eradicate. 

‘Hot damn,’ said Diz. 

His shoulders sagged, and Gusty even took off his hat. They’d sprayed proactively, pre-emergence, using the big guns. But lambsquarters was back. Such a meek name, but their devil had a lot of names—goosefoot, pigweed, shitweed, baconweed, wild spinach. Cheerful shallow lobed leaves, silver undercoat winking in the sun. The men turned. Trundled or strode back toward the same outbuilding and the ninety-foot-boom self-propelled sprayer they had gone into deep debt to purchase. 

In some places, lambsquarters is considered the Prince of Greens, one of the most nutritious greens ever analyzed; it was one of the earliest agricultural crops of the Americas. It also resembles amaranth, but the brothers rarely spoke of that. The rough-cut men were preparing to eradicate one of the most nutritious plants on earth in favor of growing the sugar beet, perhaps the least nutritious plant on earth. Evolution thought this was hilarious.   (pp. 220-221).

This is Kismet's interaction with her mother-in-law, Winnie, Gary's mom, about Kismet's desire to plant a small garden on their propert: 

Kismet started by raking the dirt in the yard smooth. The nice loamy soil that she’d clutched earlier on had disappeared. Scratching at field dirt, she broke up clumps of gray grit and spread the dust around. She was wearing lots of sunblock and a big straw cowboy hat. She would need more sunblock to live out on the land. And for later, she would need more beer to reward herself through the long evening and keep herself in a trance. 

‘Honey, that won’t work,’ said Winnie, coming up behind her. 

Kismet straightened up, holding the rake. 

‘What won’t work?’ 

‘That dirt.’ 

‘What do you mean? It’s dirt.’ 

‘It’s not real dirt. It’s that dirt.’ 

Winnie pointed out into the field. ‘This is sugar beet dirt. Don’t you see? To plant anything else we have to get a pile of real dirt.’ 

‘Dirt’s supposed to grow anything,’ said Kismet. 

‘Regular soil dirt, sure, but this is sugar beet dirt, like I said. Diz and Gusty get this fertilizer that helps the dirt work for the seed. The seed is fixed up so the beet won’t die when it’s sprayed for weeds. Also, bugs. See, it’s all a system they have with the companies.’ 

‘Okay.’ Kismet threw down the rake. 

‘My farm had a lot of real dirt,’ said Winnie vaguely. ‘When I was a kid, my mom had us spreading chicken shit on the garden.’ 

‘Let’s go in and make iced tea.’ 

‘It sounds ridiculous,’ Winnie continued. ‘But we can call up Prairie Lawn to get the dirt. I was going to make a garden someday. But you can do it. I’m going to the grocery so let’s make a big list.’  (pp. 228-229) 

Fast forward to Diz and Gusty in 2023.  This chapter is titled "Evolution." 

Diz said to Gusty, ‘Follow me.’ They drove out to the field that had been the first field where they had used the Roundup Ready sugar beet seeds. He’d never forgotten how after spraying that year, 2009, there just wasn’t a weed in sight, and how the weedless wonder continued until they’d lifted out the beets. Since then, they had rotated the beets every three years with barley. Every time they planted beets the seeds lost some magic. 

‘Remember?’ Diz asked. 

‘I do,’ said Gusty. 

They walked out to the rows. Here and there dead pigweed had nearly melted into the earth. But also, here and there something else was happening. Some of the dead plants were turning green again. A few were lifting their heads. Across the field, as the brothers turned their great bodies, faces keen, eyes implacable in the shade of their caps, hands cupped at their hips, Diz and Gusty saw the resurrection. Silhouetted against the white haze of August heat there were spears of Palmer amaranth. Just here and there. But those plants could mean a million next year. 

‘The goddamn stinkers just pretended to die,’ said Diz. ‘They were dead a week ago, I swear. But now it’s their Easter Sunday out there. Pardon my’—he choked a little on his words—‘irreverence,’ he mumbled. 

‘It’s just a fuckin’ dickens of an outrage,’ said Gusty. 

Diz grabbed his hat and threw it on the ground and stamped on it. ‘There. I feel better,’ he said. He reached down to pick it up. Gusty noticed how his hand shook. Diz dusted the hat off by slapping it on his thigh. He put the hat back on his head. Put his hands in his pockets to try and still them. 

‘If we could grow that monster,’ said Gusty, almost in admiration, ‘bombproof crop.’ 

‘Maybe,’ said Diz, as they walked back to the truck. ‘Soon as we figured out a market for it, yeah. I think it’s something like quinoa. Quinoa ain’t sugar. And there’s nothing on it like a price protection.’ 

‘Sure not. Soon as we tried to grow it, some bug would come along and clean it out anyway.’ 

‘I know,’ said Diz. ‘Nobody ever said farming was easy.’ 

‘It’s not for dummies,’ said Gusty. 

They laughed silently because they’d said exactly this a thousand times before. To outwit nature for even a few years, you had to be a brilliant SOB. 

‘I can see a lot of steps ahead and this weed is gonna win.’ Gusty plodded along, kicking at the half-living weeds. 

‘Ichor says it’s actually metabolizing the poison now. Just eating it. Whatever you throw at this thing, it can break it down. We’re gonna have to handpick. Pay a church group or a football team or hire a bunch of kids and migrant labor like back in the day.’ 

‘Darva’s book group,’ said Gusty. 

‘Oh. wouldn’t that be . . . didn’t Darva hoe beets when she was a kid?’ 

‘Didn’t everybody?’ 

‘What goes around . . .’ 

‘What does go around?’ 

‘Weeds.’ 

‘Believe it.’

That night Diz lay awake staring into the bedroom gloom, Winnie softly burbling and snorting beside him. He saw himself running the thresher on one of those bright cool fall days and the obedient crop was falling into the rolling blades and the amaranth seeds were hissing onto the conveyer belt and down into the bed of a giant grain truck. He and Gusty were slapping their hands together, the way they did that time they’d temporarily beat the weeds. He was talking to Gary at the screen of a computer and they were looking at drone footage of the Red River Valley covered with amaranth. Field to field, that was all there was. His arm was big, a smooth honey bear arm, but he had the sudden childish sense of how tiny their farm was on its plot of earth, and on that plot a house, and in that house a bed with two people on it no bigger than gnats. He felt the weight of all he couldn’t control, tiny little human that he was, working and striving, without really knowing how big it all might be.  (pp. 362-64) 

There is more on weed control in the next chapter, Evolution 2024. 

Look at this,’ said Winnie. She pulled up an issue of Agweek on the computer. The magazine featured a firm of young fellows from the Northwest, based in Fargo now, who’d programmed their robots to recognize weeds and leave crop plants alone. There was a video of the robots plucking weeds out early on at the sugar beet two leaf stage. Winnie called Gary over. Grace came too, her wan crooked little face round now, her eyes bright, cheeks apple red and shiny. 

‘We should hire these guys,’ Gary said to Grace. 

‘Probably an arm and a leg,’ said Diz from his chair. 

He had a special weighted coffee cup because his tremor was getting worse. 

‘I bet you get a good deal for being one of the first,’ said Winnie. ‘And you’ll cut down, maybe cut out, dicamba or whatever.’ 

‘Why not call Ichor?’ said Grace. ‘He must know.’ 

‘Weed resistance,’ said Ichor. ‘Give it a try.’ 

Diz and Gusty talked about the pigweed resurrection and decided why not. 

A few weeks later, they invited people over. Eric held hands tightly with Orelia DeSouza, whom he’d met in college, and Bill and Bonnie stood together with their arms crossed, grinning. Spiral pulled up honking. Ichor brought a pan of bumble bars. Everyone stood at the end of the field watching the robot van pull into the yard. Two thin young men with an urban vibe shook hands all around, then rolled up the back of the van and attached a ramp. Three smallish contraptions came rolling out. The technicians tapped information into their laptops, then guided the robotic weeders onto the first field, ninety acres of beets. There was something appealing about the mechanisms as they trundled along, something earnest, sturdy, slightly comical. The watchers nodded, laughed, broke out in soft applause. (pp. 365-366). 

Here's the last part of the bit about different types of farming:  

Although he got farmers to use them all the time, Ichor didn’t like crop protection chemicals, the ’cides—fungicides, molluscicides, insecticides, rodenticides, bactericides, larvicides, and, most of all, herbicides. The world needed food, but farmers couldn’t keep going this way, ratcheting up the kill strength, adding layers of product. No chemical could be precise and there was no way to really quantify the overall effect. Nobody could adequately factor in the big picture, which was really big, being all of creation. Sometimes he woke at 3 a.m., sweating, having absorbed, say, a new study about the link between the herbicide paraquat and Parkinson’s disease. Glyphosate and depression. Insecticides and schizophrenia. The plunge in insect life was disturbing. The velocity of loss was exponential. He kept going by hoping better things than more chemicals were coming along. He saw no way for things to end well unless they changed course. Most farmers knew this or were becoming aware of it or even agreed, but nobody liked anyone not trying to survive off farming to tell them what to do. 

There were other ways to manage the most pernicious weeds around. In fact there were some methods that made him happy. Take for instance the nemesis of pastures—leafy spurge—a plant to reckon with, sinking roots down fifteen feet and spreading top root systems too, shooting seeds out over twenty feet. The spurge had been considered almost ineradicable, it had taken over whole pastures, crowded out the good forage, killed cows and horses. Poisons had to be applied and reapplied, to only modest effect. Then Ichor started hearing about how leafy spurge beetles went to town on the spurge. Season by season you could see those yellow pastures turn green. 

A while ago, Ichor had been to a barbecue hosted by another weed control officer, Ron Manson Jr. There he ate famously well and took home a cooler of those beetles. Now Ichor was turning those caramel-colored beetles loose regularly on all the pastures in his county, and beyond, too. The beetles went wild eating the stuff they were named for, and better yet, multiplied and sent their larvae down to eat the roots. Every year Ron, and now Ichor too, express-mailed tens of thousands of beetles to farmers and ranchers with infested ranges. The rancher would open the cooler of leafy spurge beetles, release them out onto his problem, and bugs would start eating the problem. After a few years the bugs would be so numerous that Ichor would drive over to shake them off the plants into his tarps. The pasture he was going to was even restoring a section of the river it sloped down to meet. One thing he especially liked about the beetles was that they controlled the weeds but never quite ate all of the spurge, never ate themselves entirely out of existence. They weren’t like people. They respected their existential limits.  (pp. 341-342).

Here's Gary (son of Winnie and Diz) talking to Ichor, the farmer from the passage above who is committed to sustainable practices, about his thinking on how farming should be done.  The first quote is from young Gary, the second from Ichor.

‘Used to be my mom’s pasture.’ 

‘I know.’ 

‘She talks about how farming’s going off a cliff; she wants to farm like her dad and mom farmed, more like Eric’s dad and mom.’ 

‘What’s your dad think?’ 

‘He won’t say it to her, but I know he thinks it’s bullshit. It won’t work at the scale we’re farming.’ 

‘What do you think?’ asked Ichor. ‘Me? Nobody asks.’ Gary cleared his throat. ‘But I read stuff. They’re both right. First, I’d get out of beets, over time because we have a contract. I’d plant nitrogen-fixing crops, plowing them back in, using less fertilizer. I wouldn’t go full-on organic, not for a while, but for every problem that comes at us I’d look for a solution that gets us further along, like toward a goal of getting certified. I think the fastest-growing market’s in organics, so I want to get in there. I haven’t told anybody.’

 It took a second for Ichor to ask, ‘Why not?’ 

‘Obviously,’ Gary said, ‘I’m a dumb jock.’ (pp. 347-348). 

What follows is Diz ruminating about farming with fellow farmer and brother, Gusty:

‘Nobody ever said farming was easy.’ 

‘It’s not for dummies,’ said Gusty. 

They laughed silently because they’d said exactly this a thousand times before. To outwit nature for even a few years, you had to be a brilliant SOB. 

‘I can see a lot of steps ahead and this weed is gonna win.’ Gusty plodded along, kicking at the half-living weeds. 

‘Ichor says it’s actually metabolizing the poison now. Just eating it. Whatever you throw at this thing, it can break it down. We’re gonna have to handpick. Pay a church group or a football team or hire a bunch of kids and migrant labor like back in the day.’ 

‘Darva’s book group,’ said Gusty. 

‘Oh. wouldn’t that be . . . didn’t Darva hoe beets when she was a kid?’ 

‘Didn’t everybody?’ 

‘What goes around . . .’ 

What does go around?’ 

‘Weeds.’ 

‘Believe it.’  (p. 363). 

Literary Ruralism (Part XLIX): Rural life in "The Mighty Red" by Louise Erdrich

I've very much enjoyed Louise Erdrich's latest novel, The Mighty Red (2024), set in the farming exurbs near Fargo, North Dakota, along the Red River.  I'm going to share some excerpts here that reflect on small-town life.  The protagonist is Kismet Poe, a high school senior when the story begins in 2008.  Her mother is Crystal, a Native American.   

Early in the novel, Kismet marries Gary, the somewhat hapless scion of a local sugar beet farming empire. She does this even though she is in love with another young man, the brilliant high-school drop out, Hugo.  Also looming over the novel, Gary has an ominous secret that gets revealed close to the novel's end.  Along the way, we get some vignettes that provide incisive commentary on small-town life.  Indeed, the entire novel is about a community entirely involved in each others' business. 

Also of note are Erdrich's ruminations on farming and different ways of being in relation to the natural world.  I'll save most of those for a separate post.  

In this opening scene, Gary and Kismet are out driving.

However, within a mile or two, Gary’s question whether she was bored made the silence complicated and exposed the fact that she actually was bored, very bored, and being consciously bored reminded her of what her cynical best friend, Stockton, had said—how boredom was a part of small-town life that you had to get drunk to accept. She wasn’t drunk now. She wasn’t drunk very often. She did think that if she spent much time with Gary, though, she’d have to have a bottle handy.  (p. 13) 

Kismet wanted to forestall Gary from sharing his thoughts. He might get solemn and talk about his farming ideas or his philosophy, which was that you should do what your mother told you to do. Kismet had met Gary’s mother and she questioned that. Gary believed that radio frequencies could carry disease. He started many sentences by declaring ‘There are two kinds of people . . .’ He didn’t believe in God but said he could get behind the idea that aliens had manufactured the skein of life. He also talked about, say, the Ten Commandments, and would wonder whether ‘Thou shalt not kill’ applied to deer. He loved deer. He cried when he saw a dead one. He also cried when he saw a living one. This was a thing about Gary that really got to Kismet. He didn’t hunt. His father and uncle tried to take him out hunting. He refused. He loved animals, not only deer, but every animal. Still, she didn’t appreciate it when he said that she reminded him of a deer in winter with her dark brown eyes and matching hair. Deer were lovely creatures but they were prey animals. 

College will get me out of here, thought Kismet, and a tiny rush of fear made her want to sleep. She pushed her seat back. The sun was beaming through the windshield and it was autumn sun, the mellow light of early afternoon. She fell into a dreamy nap as Gary meditated aloud about whether dinosaur bones were real or had been placed there by a super-intelligent race of ancient humans, or by aliens. ‘Aliens again,’ she murmured. 

‘Damn straight,’ said Gary in a heroic voice. 

‘You know the bones are real,’ said Kismet. 

‘Probably,’ said Gary. ‘Here’s the turnoff to that place. Remember Blosnik? He was a hands-on man. There’s two kinds—’ 

‘I know,’ said Kismet. ‘Your mom and dad . . .’ ‘

Yeah, Winnie and Diz.’  

He liked calling them by their first names. 

‘They always say there are two kinds of people, hands-on and hands-off. They really liked how Blosnik took our class out to dig fossils—’  (p. 13-14)

This scene from one of Gary's days at high school, when he is upset about something a teacher has said to him about Gary's still unrevealed secret:      

He knew that Kismet had social studies during third period. He paused outside her classroom. Instantly, his breath slowed and his heart calmed. There was something mysterious and magical about Kismet and dating her helped Gary feel sane. He suspected it was her Indian, oops, Native American, blood—though he never mentioned it again after the first time. Gary was awed by her effect on him, but for most of the years he’d gone to school with her she just seemed weird.  (p. 24) 

On Kismet and her relationship with her mother, especially when Kismet went through a goth phase: 

Like all mothers and daughters, both Kismet and Crystal went through Kismet’s phases. Before she took a job and cleaned up her act, Kismet was a goth, a dollar-store goth, but wasn’t that the point? One bleary night she self-dyed her shiny hair a harsh lusterless blue-black, set off her narrow eyes with thick black lines, and brushed her eyelids with gradations of purple and maroon. Crystal didn’t react when Kismet came downstairs the next morning and went to school. So she upped the ante. Tried to be secretive about her stick and poke tattoos. Kismet and Martin had memorized some of their namesake Edgar Allan’s work. Crystal caught a glimpse of the word nevermore on Kismet’s shoulder blade and a raven that came out looking like a pigeon. She pretended not to notice. In truth, she was depressed about it for weeks. Kismet’s clothes were from rummage sales or Thrifty Life, all black of course. Some she shredded artfully, others were ripped or worn thin already. Kismet was sent home for the slashes beneath her butt that went too high and showed violet panties. She was sent home again for sneaking out of the house wearing a T-shirt printed with fake breasts including nipples—she’d found the T-shirt in a garbage can. 

‘Stop wearing garbage!’ Crystal yelled at her. She was on a 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. schedule and had been roused from crucial sleep by the call from the principal.

‘All we can afford is garbage,’ Kismet said.

This stung and Crystal teared up. Kismet got all hangdog and mumbled she was sorry. (p. 25) 

What follows next speaks to the community and lack-of-anonymity themes.  It has Winne, Gary's mom, arriving at book club--a book club in which it seems every other woman in the novel--and perhaps in their town--is a member:    

[Winnie] turned into Bev’s drive. She cut the engine, but her hands were stuck to the wheel. The others lived in Tabor and saw one another all of the time. She had gone to school with Bev, though, and stayed friends with her. Bev had been a Pavlecky before she’d married Ichor. Bev would stick up for her. Still, Winnie Geist sat outside in her car. She’d arrived early to the book club and had to gather her courage before facing the women who would walk into Bev’s house. This was only the second meeting she’d made it to since the accident, and at the first meeting she hadn’t said a word. So she needed to see who was coming before she entered.

Many women she knew from church would be at the book club meeting. She knew that some actually prayed for her and her family. But on dark days Winnie believed that some prayed against her. She found it hard to bear the sting of their eyes when they’d watch her enter a room, and it was even more difficult to open her mouth and speak. (p. 84-85) 

Here's a scene following Kismet and Gary's wedding, which takes place shortly after Kismet's father and Crystal's long-time partner, Martin, runs off with the local Catholic parish's building fund, also leaving Crystal's home mortgaged without her knowledge.  That gives rise to the need for a lawyer, a very unusual event for folks of such modest means in rural-ish North Dakota: 

Kismet raised the skinny glass to her lips and the gentle bubbles grazed her nose. She took her first-ever sip of champagne. The ghost of a taste, an emotion in her mouth, unreadable. She drank again to try and understand. But it was too fleeting. Then she got it and smiled. An ephemeral blip. She drank until the champagne stopped thought, stopped taste, stopped emotion. People whirled, talking in her face. People watched from the sides of the room. They were talking about her, talking about her father, trying to corner Crystal, who eluded them all. 

After a brutal set of photos, Kismet’s mother squeezed her arm and said that she had to leave. Early. 

‘Are you going to see a lawyer?’ said Kismet. 

‘Oh, honey, yes,’ said Crystal. 

They wrapped each other in a silent hug with eyes squeezed shut. Getting a lawyer? It had never happened to them. It was as apocalyptic as Kismet getting married. They hugged harder, trying not to cry. Everybody looked away. (pp. 126-127) 

What follows is a scene from very near the end of the book, where the women's book group gathers again, this time to discuss Cormac McCarthy's The Road. 

There followed a pleasurable babble containing many theories: nuclear winter, the Rapture, aliens, the flu, ozone holes, this thing about the climate, which split members off in subarguments, China conquers us, Russia conquers us, or maybe . . . Tania White waited patiently so that her theory was the last. She stood up and with a smile of satisfaction unrolled a chart of the Yellowstone volcano, the probable epicenter of destruction, as well as the outlying circles of poisonous gas and falling ash. 

‘So we have here the super-volcano. You see the red circle? Kill zone. Right here, this is us. In the pink zone. We’re in the primary ash zone. The secondary ash zone is this peach circle from Lake Superior over to California, taking in the Texas Panhandle. If this volcano erupted, and I guess it’s overdue, we get covered in volcano ash. It would be another ice age. Everything in the Upper Midwest would die—just like in the book—only a few random apples left—just like in the book,’ said Tania. She paused for maximum effect and tag-teamed Tory, who rose and spoke. ‘This is why we wanted to bring it to the club. This book is a very realistic look at the aftermath of the Yellowstone super-volcano.’ 

‘I’ve read where an asteroid is more likely to hit,’ said Mary Sotovine. 

‘You guys are way off the mark,’ said Winnie, pointing out the window, at the fields. ‘Look. There’s your answer.’ 

The women leaned sideways or forward to stare out the picture window and saw that, as usual, the wind was sending up curls of earth dust and dust devils were crisscrossing the fields. ‘I don’t get it,’ said Tory. 

Across the horizon a band of gray dust wavered. The sun would go down in a bloody stew. Every night was like the end of the world. It was gorgeous! ‘What is going to happen?’ said Mrs. Flossom, excitedly. ‘What can we expect?’ Jeniver went over to the table and opened another bottle of white and one of red. Even Karleen had a few sips. 

‘Don’t you see?’ said Winnie. ‘Every time you look out the window there’s dust rising up.

That’s dirt. We are losing our dirt. No dirt, no food.’ ‘Okay,’ said Karleen, eyes glittering. ‘Round that out for us.’ ‘No dirt, no food, no life. General starvation. My parents’ fields were surrounded by shelterbelts and they left stubble in their fields the way Pavlecky does now. They planted cover crops, but . . . sorry . . . I did some historic reading before Diz and I went to Russia years ago and it curdled my bones. When Stalin made the little farms into humungous collective farms . . .’ ‘

Like the sugar beet collective?’ someone asked. 

‘That’s a voluntary collective and a functional one,’ said Winnie, with a hint of scorn. ‘In Russia it was total and complete retooling where the Soviets kicked out . . . well, starved and murdered, all the landowners and farmers who were growing the wheat and turnips and food crops. Then they tried to organize giant farms, but nobody knew how to farm because most of the farmers-in-charge were dead! It was like when Stalin killed the doctors in Moscow, then he dies because there’s nobody to save him!’

‘Let’s get back to—’ Bev started. 

Winnie blew right past her. ‘Anyway, let’s say present practices continue in our case. No dirt. Nothing to eat.’ 

‘Except people,’ said Jeniver with a stern, conclusive nod all around, as if they were on The Road or on a lifeboat, ready to draw lots. Karleen shrank back. Jeniver’s brown hair, held on top of her head by a small golden sword, flashed in the bloody sunset light. 

‘Correct,’ said Winnie, though Jeniver had stolen her punch line. Winnie nodded her head and looked down into her fuchsia lap. ‘Starving, that’s a bad way to go. You don’t just fade out. Extremely painful, and the cravings! One of the worst . . .’ 

‘Not as bad as—’ Mary Sotovine began like a pitcher winding up. 

‘Let’s not go there,’ Darva cut in. 

Once Mary and Darva began competing over worst-case ways to perish, the book club usually spiraled into ghoulish hysteria. Mary’s glowing round face flattened in disappointment. 

‘How about getting pickled?’ Jeniver wondered. 

The other women looked at Jeniver and she held out her empty wineglass. 

‘Oh, pickled!’ The general mood shifted. 

‘Wasn’t that last line of the book really beautiful?’ said Tiny Johnson, and the book discussion was soon complete, except that suddenly Bev stood up. 

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘While we’ve been talking about the end of the world like we’re looking forward to it, I’ve been thinking how the world as we know, used to know, it really is ending. I thought of what the world was like even when I was a kid, how it was more . . . it was more full.’ 

‘Last call,’ said Tiny. ‘I’m bringing out the ice cream.’ 

‘Don’t you remember?’ Bev went on. ‘How there used to be meadowlarks?’ She looked around. ‘C’mon, when’s the last time you heard a meadowlark? You know, our state bird. When I was growing up they were everywhere, in all the ditches, as soon as you got to the edge of town they started. Am I right?’ 

‘She’s right,’ said Mary Sotovine. ‘I’m older, so ten years before Bev remembers, they were in the ditches, as soon as you got to the edge of town. You’d hear them all the time.’ 

‘She’s right,’ said Winnie. ‘There used to be flocks of those cedar birds, cedar waxwings, and bluebirds, even. And bugs, which they ate. Grasshoppers. Mayflies when you went out to the lakes. Now you don’t even see grasshoppers. And there’s only a mayfly or two. It’s the pesticides.’ 

All of the women suddenly began to talk. 

‘Do you notice how you look at the grille of your car and there’s no bugs? No bugs hit your windshield? And moths. How they used to swirl in the streetlamps?’ 

‘They did. Like snow.’ 

‘And how when it rained the frogs came out and they were everywhere and the grass was thick with frogs?’ ‘Toads. You could always go out and pick up a toad.’ 

‘Now it’s surprising. A toad! It’s special!’ 

‘And there were nighthawks, lots of nighthawks swerving around, after the mosquitoes. And bats everywhere and how we used to scream if they dived at us. And flocks of pigeons on the grain elevators.’

‘What does it mean that prairie falcons are living in town?’ asked Stockton. 

Everyone fell silent. 

‘It means there’s less to eat in the country,’ said Winnie. 

Kismet waved her hand. Winnie recognized her with a nod and called out, ‘Kismet has something to say!’ 

Kismet looked at her mother and said, ‘I don’t think this book is about the end of the world. That’s just the setting, to show what happens between people in extreme situations. The end is about consolation. The father goes to the end of the earth for his son, then dies, satisfied. I mean, it’s a really sentimental book. McCarthy’s not afraid of that. And it’s a brutal adventure book—exciting when they find the food cache, and then there’s that cannibal army.’ 

Jeniver stood up and spoke with urgency. ‘This book is about what’s most important. You know, this kind of love between a parent and a child.’ 

Crystal put her arm around her daughter’s shoulders, and Kismet leaned on her mother. Winnie saw that Kismet would leave. She thought of Gary and started to cry, wondering how she could possibly save him. All of a sudden she had a thought that dried her tears right up. She’d searched for a way to thank Gary’s angel. Well, Kismet was his angel. Oh no! Oh yes! Again she wept. Bev thought about how Hugo had escaped that terrifying pre-apocalyptic landscape [the Bakken oil fields of western North Dakota], and she also started to cry. ...  Mary Sotovine was moved to tears at the thought of the days when she’d see bluebirds in a strip of grassland, now planted in soybeans.  (pp. 328-332).