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  His mood darkened further when he remembered that there was a weigh station about a half hour ahead. Though his truck was well under the eighty thousand-pound maximum, the Department of Transportation sometimes had its inspection agents there as well, and heavy fines were levied for things like out-of-date fire extinguishers, expired transit permits, and the small crack in his windshield that could easily be seen from the inside.

  He radioed eastbound drivers. “The station, are they open?”

  “You bet. Light’s on and they’re hauling ’em in.”

  “See any DOT?”

  “The Suburbans are there and brown uniforms everywhere.”

  “Can you get around? Do you know this area?”

  “Go twenty miles or more before you cut back. DOT’s got another trap set in a wide place in the road about ten miles west.”

  “Thanks, friend.”

  “Back at you.”

  Nate turned onto a country road heading south, deeper into the young cornfields. A cloud of dust rose up behind the trailer, filling his mirrors.

  Most country roads in Iowa are laid out in square miles, but for some reason this one continued for miles without intersecting another. When he found one he turned right onto patched macadam, where the shoveled-in and stamped-down repairs were lumpy and darker than the rest of the faded surface.

  In the far distance, Nate saw a little rise of land. His attention clamped onto this blip on the horizon. He turned at the next intersection to draw closer, and after several miles he could see it more clearly. On top of the little hill was a tree, and it rose up against the sky like a lone plant growing in the middle of an empty lot. When he imagined sitting beneath it, he felt better.

  He turned the Kenworth onto a smaller, narrower road. Later, Nate turned again, this time onto a dirt surface, where he hoped he would not meet another vehicle, because there was barely enough room.

  After another mile, the hill and tree came clearly into view, separated from a weathered house and a small garage by a broad section of corn.

  A poorly maintained drive connected the house to the road.

  Nate did not pull in. Instead, he parked the Kenworth as far into the ditch as he dared go. After turning off the engine, he walked down the lane, with rows of corn on both sides.

  A small garden grew between the garage and the house, connected by a worn path. The inside door was open to allow air from the screen door to enter, and faint music could be heard inside, the kind often played on afternoon public radio programs. Nate knocked and waited as the music stopped and other sounds arranged themselves inside, then gathered and came toward him.

  “Come in,” said a man who appeared to be ancient. He was wearing a pair of faded gray sweatpants and a paint-speckled blue work shirt with an orange patch sewn onto the right shoulder. An impressive growth of fine white hair grew out of his face, but the top of his head appeared to have retired from growing anything a long time ago. His eyes were gray and surprisingly expressive, beneath two white thickets of brow.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” said Nate, “but I was wondering if I could walk over to the little hill behind your house and sit under the tree for a while.”

  “You’re not bothering me at all,” the man said, reaching for the doorframe to steady himself. “You can sit under that tree as long as you want, young fella.”

  “Thank you,” said Nate, amused to suddenly feel a bit younger. “I was driving by and I just thought, well, a little more elevation would be welcome . . . anyway, thank you.”

  “Go right ahead. That’s what the tree’s there for.”

  Nate did not want to prolong the old man’s standing, which seemed to require a great deal of effort.

  “Thank you again, then,” he said, backing away from the door.

  To reach the hill Nate first had to walk through a hundred yards of cornfield, and the young leaves scratched against the sides of his pants. The black dirt was soft under his boots, still holding moisture.

  When the ground began to rise, he walked out of the cornrow and into grass. The soft stems brushed his shoes as he climbed.

  The giant silver maple at the top of the hill had a trunk nearly as wide as a garage door. He looked up into it and saw massive limbs flowing outward and upward, supporting an array of branches and stems and a plantation of leaves that quivered audibly in the breeze. The undersides of the leaves, lighter in color, glittered when the leaves moved.

  It was twenty degrees cooler here in the shade, and Nate immediately felt his body relaxing. He sat down and leaned against the trunk, then looked out across the ocean of cornrows below. On and on the green plants grew, pulling nutrients from the ground and turning them into corn.

  The darkness that had afflicted him earlier evaporated. From up here he could see all the way into the next county. He imagined the roots of the tree entering the hill beneath him, tunneling down, extending tendril threads into the roots of the corn plants, passing from one to another, following the rows, moving in all directions through the ocean of plants, on to the ends of the earth.

  The tree had presided over generations of crops, stretching back a hundred years or more. When the maple first began to grow, there was probably a collection of small farms and homesteads beneath it, hundreds and hundreds of them with different crops, different roads, different colors, different smells, different sounds, different people. All were gone now. Nate let his mind flow into the tree, wanting to feel the sky in the tree’s way of feeling.

  He lost track of how long he had been sitting there, but as the sun fell farther west and the air softened, he thought he could hear a new sound. The sound continued, and when he turned toward it he saw the old man walking out of the cornfield at the bottom of the hill and begin climbing. His movements were slow and halting, and every so often he leaned against his cane to center his equilibrium and nurture his remaining strength. His shadow followed him step for step. A cloth bag hung from his shoulder, and Nate considered going down to help him, but something convinced him to remain sitting.

  When the older man reached the shade of the tree, Nate stood up and said hello.

  “Hope I’m not disturbing you, young fella.”

  “You’re not.”

  “I hoped I wouldn’t be. I thought you might enjoy something to drink. And I brought along a little something for us to eat together, if you wouldn’t mind sharing a meal with an old man who doesn’t see many people anymore.”

  “I’m honored,” said Nate. He helped the old man pull the cloth bag from around his shoulder and eased him onto the grass around the base of the tree.

  His thin wrinkled hands pulled two metal cans of beer from the pack. Next came two red plastic food containers of the kind Nate remembered everyone having forty years ago, when plastic was hard, thick, and brightly colored.

  They opened the cans and drank. The old man handed one of the plastic containers to Nate along with a four-pronged fork. Nate pulled off the lid and a drift of steam came up from what looked like stew.

  “I heated it before I came,” the old man said. “It tastes better than it looks.”

  Nate stuck his fork in and took a bite. A moment later he set the dish down, rose to his feet, and backed away. “Where did you get this?” he demanded.

  “What?”

  “This mashed-potato pie. It’s the exact one. Where did you get it?”

  “I made it myself,” he said, looking at Nate with studied bewilderment.

  Nate sat back down. “I’m sorry. It seemed for a moment like someone was playing a trick on me. Excuse me. This was very kind of you, bringing food up here.”

  “Don’t mention it. Like I said, I don’t get many visitors. And come to think of it, I learned how to make this pie from someone whose car broke down near here about a year ago. As I remember, she had an accent something like yours when she talked. She seldom did, though—a quiet, lovely person.”

  “No kidding. Where was she from?”

  “Somewhere
in Wisconsin.”

  “Who was she?”

  “I don’t know who she was, but the timing chain broke in her car and she couldn’t get it fixed for several days. Because I had an extra room, I offered to put her up. While she was here she made one of these pies for us to eat. I liked it so much she later sent me the recipe. I make it about once a month.”

  “I don’t suppose you remember her name.”

  “Of course I do. Her name was Beulah, but she said most people called her Bee. It’s an unusual name, and I remember it partly because of that.”

  Nate stood up again. “No,” he said. “She’s my cousin.”

  “Well, that accounts for the accent, I guess.”

  “Tell me about her,” said Nate.

  “If she’s your cousin you ought to know already.”

  “I do, or did. I haven’t seen her in many years. Did Bee come up here?” asked Nate.

  “At least twice a day—usually early in the morning and then later at night. She often stood right where you’re standing now.”

  Nate looked out over the ocean of young corn and thought about this. The green leaf-blades yielding to the variable wind seemed to be dancing from their own power, and he understood something that he hadn’t known before: time moved both ways. He felt it pushing him out of his past and pulling him into the future. Before this moment he’d known only the pushed-from-behind part, away from events in the past. But now, standing under the soft maple, he felt the unfinished at work. He and Bee were being drawn together into an as-yet-unrealized actuality. He felt like an infant floating downstream in a basket, and at that moment he shivered.

  The Interview

  Ace Cleaning scheduled a morning interview for Danielle Workhouse. Before the streetlight went out in front of the meat locker, Danielle was up. As usual, she sat at the table for a while, and as Ivan crawled out of bed he could hear the pages turning in her catalogs. Then she took a shower, and when she came out of the bathroom she had on a pair of new jeans, a gray shirt, and sneakers.

  Ivan wore his best brown pants and a white shirt with the store creases still in it. His mother drank a cup of cold coffee to settle her nerves, and Ivan ate a bowl of oatmeal with brown sugar sprinkled on it.

  Outside, the sun had just come up and the air felt misty-cool. Most of the cars still had their lights on. The Bronco didn’t start, because the battery was shot, but Danielle had another one from the Buick her mother had wrecked last winter. She lugged it down from the apartment, clamped on the jumpers, and the motor started on the second try.

  The Roebuck home was not very far from town, set a good distance back from the road. The long driveway leading up the hill was made of poured concrete. Turning onto it, his mother said something in a scornful manner about how wastefully expensive so much concrete must have been. Looking out the window, Ivan thought about this, and privately decided that if someone owned a construction company and a cement plant, they could probably have as much as they wanted. Somehow the idea of wasting didn’t seem to fit with unlimited supply.

  Trees grew on both sides of the drive. A flatbed truck loaded with cement blocks was parked to the right, and farther up, a crawler with wide steel tracks. There were dumpers, graders, front-end loaders, double-cab pickups, and a cab-roller. And all of them said Roebuck Construction.

  There was a parking lot at the top of the hill, with a large pole shed in the middle of it and doors tall enough for eighteen-wheelers. His mother parked in front of the building. Men in work clothes walked in and out of the service door on the side. They watched Ivan’s mother climb out of the Bronco as if she were the last glazed doughnut on the shelf, but they didn’t come over or yell or whistle or anything. Ivan felt relieved. His mother stuffed some papers under her arm, and together they walked up the sidewalk leading to what Ivan thought must surely qualify as a mansion. The men watched all the way.

  Up close, the house looked like a castle. It was tall, with conical roofs, and even the chalky-gray paint looked castle-colored. A covered porch reached all the way around the ground floor. There were porches on the other floors too, but they didn’t go all the way around. Some were just big enough to step outside, turn around, and go back inside.

  They climbed the seven steps to the porch, and were met by a wide wooden door with no window. Danielle rapped with her knuckles, but it didn’t make much noise. Even pounding with the side of her fist didn’t have much effect. Then she noticed the plastic button.

  When the door swung open a woman towered on the other side, dressed sort of like an office worker. Amy Roebuck seemed older than his mother, Ivan thought, but it was hard to tell with grown-ups. And she talked the way women do when they have too much to do.

  His mother handed over the papers she’d brought from Ace. Mrs. Roebuck flipped through the documents quickly, then handed them back.

  “I’ve already seen these,” she said. “Come in. Do you like to be called Danielle?”

  “You can call me Dart.”

  “Like the game?”

  “Just like it. This is my son, Ivan.”

  “Hello, Ivan,” Mrs. Roebuck said, looking down at him.

  “Hi,” said Ivan.

  “Very well, Dart. Thank you for coming. I apologize for all the equipment in the yard. Buck had to vacate a job site in Red Plain on quick notice, and it was easiest to bring it all here. He promised to move it soon, but you know how that goes.”

  Danielle and Ivan didn’t know anything about how that went, but they stepped inside anyway.

  “Take your shoes off, Ivan,” snapped his mother.

  “That’s not necessary,” said Mrs. Roebuck, smiling in a painful way.

  “Yes it is,” said Danielle, and sloughed off her own low-cut sneakers by digging into the heels with the ends of her toes and stepping out of them. On the shiny wood floor her bare feet stood next to a humungous pair of shoes that looked to Ivan more like brown leather infant car seats than shoes. They were so large that both his mother’s shoes could have been dropped down inside one of them. “No sense messing up someone’s hard work.”

  Ivan took off his shoes. The floor felt smooth, hard, and very flat under his white socks.

  They followed Mrs. Roebuck into the first room, which she called the formal dining room. “We almost never use it,” she said, and for some reason this made her look sad. Then they went down the hall.

  There was a big table in the kitchen, with fat wide chairs. A white-whiskered man in suspenders, loose tan pants, and a long-john top sat on a stool at the counter, eating cold cereal. Mrs. Roebuck introduced Wallace Roebuck, explaining that he was her father-in-law and lived on the second floor. He didn’t seem very sociable, at least not this early in the morning, and after scowling at Ivan’s mother he slurped up the rest of his cornflakes and left the kitchen, carrying his cup of coffee.

  Danielle looked through the cupboards and pantry. Every time she opened a cabinet, Mrs. Roebuck shifted her posture, stood straighter, flinched, took a quick breath, or gave some other sign that she wasn’t used to having other people in her kitchen. When Danielle slid a pantry shelf out to look in the back, Mrs. Roebuck leaped forward to catch a falling jar of pickles. But Danielle caught it, prompting a pained smile from Mrs. Roebuck. “That always tips over,” she said, taking the jar from Danielle and setting it back in its place.

  “We’re not real big breakfast eaters,” Mrs. Roebuck explained as she carried the old man’s bowl and spoon over to the sink. “Buck is usually gone before I’m up. It’s unpredictable when Wally gets up, because he’s trying to get ready for the afterlife. He pays a lot of attention to his dreams, and his schedule varies from one day to the next. He prefers to find something himself rather than eat what you put in front of him—except for coffee, which he drinks all day long. He’ll even come down in the middle of the night looking for caffeine. I try to always keep a pot on.”

  “I know folks like that,” said Danielle, and Ivan wondered who they were, because he didn’
t know any. He also had never heard of someone getting ready for the afterlife and wondered what would be involved other than dying. August would probably know, he thought, and he made a mental note to ask him.

  “We should go up now and meet Grandmother Florence. She lives on the third floor.”

  “Your grandmother?” repeated Danielle, as if she’d never heard of such a thing.

  “Yes. Florence is one hundred and eight years old and doesn’t require much help. One meal is all, and she eats the same thing every day.”

  “What’s that?” asked Danielle, as they followed Mrs. Roebuck down the hallway and up the wide wooden staircase. There were enough rooms, Ivan noticed, for five or six families.

  “Sardines and raisin toast.”

  “That’s it?”

  “We argued for years over her diet, but after she reached one hundred the doctors said we should let her eat whatever she wants. They said she’d outlived what medical science could make sense of.”

  “Is she always in bed?”

  “Oh no. She gets up every morning at seven thirty, takes a bath, dresses, lays out her clothes for the following day, and then sits in her chair by the window. She usually stays there most of the day, making her rosaries.”

  “Her what?”

  “Her prayer beads. She’s made over a thousand. The church takes them to less-fortunate countries for people to pray with.”

  Ivan couldn’t think of anything more wacko than praying with beads.

  “A thousand?” repeated his mother.

  “She enjoys it.”

  “She doesn’t need anything else—just sardines and toast?”

  “Not usually. She’s happy as long as she has her supply of beads, crosses, and the special thread to string them. If she needs anything else, she’ll tell you.”