All Over Creation. Ruth Ozeki

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СКАЧАТЬ Potato.

      That was the fun, Lloyd always said, in growing potatoes. The randomness. The little bit of luck. In fact, the entire agricultural backbone of the state of Idaho rests on a bit of luck that turned up in a truck garden in Massachusetts in 1872. The garden belonged to Lloyd’s hero, a man known as the Father of the Modern Potato, Luther Burbank. His was an American success story, and Lloyd loved it. He would settle into his big chair and pull me onto his lap and read me Burbank’s own account of how, as a twenty-one-year-old farmer with an elementary school education, he went out to tend his potato patch one day and found a seed ball!

      “ ‘I use an exclamation point,’ ” Luther wrote. “ ‘That is because—well, it was what an astronomer would use if he discovered a new solar system.’ ”

      “Imagine!” Lloyd would interject, putting the book down. It was Burbank’s autobiography, The Harvest of the Years, and Lloyd would look up from the pages, past my head, marveling at Luther’s metaphor and sharing his vision—an entire planetary system in a small ball of seeds!

      “A potato seed-ball was not unheard of,” Lloyd read, “but it was a great rarity, and I couldn’t learn of any one who had done anything about the event even when it occurred. I did something; I planted the seeds in that ball.”

      And here Lloyd would look at me, to make sure I appreciated the radical nature of Luther’s act. Being my father’s daughter, of course I did.

      You see, spudmen don’t propagate potatoes by planting true seeds. They do it by cloning. It’s quick, simple, and reliable, and you can understand its appeal to farmers like my father, who are into total control. First you cut up a potato into small pieces, each containing an eye, and you plant these. The eyes grow into identical replicas of the parent, bearing their bundles of tubers, some of which you eat or sell, others you cut up to clone again. It’s pretty foolproof.

      The reason you clone rather than plant from seed is because potatoes, like human children, are wildly heterozygous. Lloyd taught me that word when I was eight. It simply means that if you try to propagate a domesticated potato using seed, sexually, chances are it will not grow true to type. Instead it will regress, displaying a haphazard variety of characteristics, reminiscent of its uncultivated potato progenitors—it may prove superior to the parent plant or may be wildly inferior. At eight, gazing up at my father’s face, I didn’t know which was worse.

      After nature offered up her seed ball, Lloyd explained, Luther prepared the ground with great care, then planted each seed about a foot from its neighbor. The seed ball contained twenty-three seeds, so tiny that you could fit ten of them on the head of a pin. All twenty-three seeds produced seedlings, and here is where Luther was twice lucky: Of the twenty-three sprouts from his seed ball, he found two that were superior to the others in yield and size. That was his luck. The rest was history.

      “ ‘It was from the potatoes of those two plants,’ ” Lloyd read, his voice triumphant, “ ‘carefully raised, carefully dug, jealously guarded, and painstakingly planted the next year, that I built the Burbank potato.’ ” Lloyd set down the book again. “Imagine!” He stared past me, shaking his head. “Building a potato as fine as that!”

      In 1874 Burbank sold those precious potatoes to a seedman from Massachusetts, who paid young Luther $150, which he used to relocate to California.

      In 1974, exactly one hundred years later, I slept with Elliot Rhodes and split for California, too, and the price of Russet Burbanks soared. There was no correlation between these events, of course. It was entirely coincidental. Ninteen-seventy-four was a year of rotten luck for me, and Elliot was my random factor, but it was a very lucky year for my father, and most farmers in the state, with the exception of our neighbor, Carl Unger. The Nine-Dollar Potato was the random factor that ruined him.

      Because it’s not just about luck, Lloyd would tell you. Potatoes also took guts. Cassie’s daddy was never much of a gambler, and, although greedy, he was a bit of a coward to boot, which was why, early in the year, he thought it safer to contract his entire crop to the processor for a price of $3.25 per hundredweight. It was a sure thing, but where’s the fun in it? Not that my father was anyone’s idea of a high roller, but he did have a stubborn and independent nature, a suspicion of large corporations, and even something you might call vision. He didn’t like to get into bed with anybody for the promise of a safe buck. So he held out, and when the market soared, Lloyd had a mountain of potatoes, free and clear and promised to nobody, piled sixteen feet high, stored at a cool forty-five degrees, in a cellar the size of an airplane hangar. He started to sell.

      Carl had his $3.25 contract and a whole lot of envy. He just could not help himself. Nine dollars per hundredweight was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, so he reneged on his contract and sold at the open-market price, incurring the wrath of the processor. Then, desperate to make amends, he tried to buy potatoes from Lloyd. Lloyd refused. Carl offered 250 acres of land for 35,000 bags of potatoes. Lloyd accepted.

      This deal must have caused a certain rancor to grow in Carl’s heart, rancor that had been building over the years in proportion to the increase of my father’s acreage. After I ran away and Lloyd had his first heart attack, Carl no doubt felt that it served us right. He went to Lloyd’s hospital bed and offered to lease his fields at a rate that was considerably lower than the going rate, but which was nonetheless determined by the Nine-Dollar Potato. Lloyd, in no shape to run his farm, acquiesced to Unger’s demands.

      Not a bad deal, as it turned out. Because by the following fall, when potato prices plummeted to $4.00 a bag, Lloyd made more money on the lease than he would have had he planted the land. Carl Unger, on the other hand, went bankrupt. He was forced to go to work for Lloyd, and the following years were bad ones for Cassie. She and I were best friends, and I ran away without telling her, and she must have felt like I’d fallen right off the edge of the earth. Then my daddy went and ruined her daddy, so in some way my family was to blame for all the lickings she received since that night in the snow. I figured she might have some mixed feelings about me coming home. I know I did.

      reunion

      After all these years. Cass couldn’t get the phrase out of her head. She stood by the window in the arrivals lounge with her forehead pressed to the glass. The reflection of the red and green Christmas lights that decorated the lounge appeared to be floating against the dark tarmac outside. It was cold, and snow conditions east of the Cascades had delayed the plane. She had driven up from Liberty Falls just after one o’clock, and now it was late afternoon, and the prairie wind was whipping the snow around the tarmac, just mocking the plows.

      She went back to the bar to have a cigarette. Not that she was supposed to be smoking. After the operation she’d more or less quit—she didn’t smoke at home at all anymore, didn’t even keep cigarettes around—but when she’d gotten in the car that morning, she knew she would smoke again for old times’ sake, and as soon as she’d passed the Liberty Falls town-limits sign, she pulled into a 7-Eleven and bought a pack of Old Gold Filters. Will would kill her if he found out, but the thought of seeing Yummy made her crave it again. She smoked with the car window open. Her fingers were like ice on the wheel. If Will asked, she could blame the smell on Yummy.

      She ordered another coffee, bypassed the sugar, and dumped in two packets of Nutrasweet. She was trying to be healthy, after all these years.

      At four she phoned Will on the cell phone.

      At five she had a hot dog and a Coors and another cigarette.

      Finally, just after six, she heard the announcement СКАЧАТЬ