Winter Journeys
Chapter 13
Blight
(Author's Note: the scientific talk in this chapter is from a recent book called THE GENOME, by Matt Ridley. Any mistakes are mine, not the talented Mr. Ridley's).
The weekend was a hectic one in the Cavalo household. Jean had foreseen that motherhood would be a psychological shock for Bonnie, and had hoped to prepare her during the final months. Now the crisis was even worse than anybody had anticipated, and Jean wanted to watch over Bonnie. During her own visit Grace heard Bonnie lament that she could not even hold her baby until her arms had healed, and had been moved to sympathetic tears for nearly the first time in her life. The baby itself, of course, was two months premature and had to be treated for all sorts of problems, though the doctors assured Bonnie that its life was not in danger.
But mainly Grace stayed at the farm and helped keep it up and running. On Sunday she even helped at her least favorite chore, mucking out the stable. Returning to her Secret Garden would have to wait until Monday.
By now she was so familiar with her horse's habits -- fortunately, it seemed to have forgotten that slap on the rump -- that she could daydream while riding, giving just minimal attention to guiding her mount on the path. Thus it was a shock when she actually caught sight of the wheat field and realized that something was wrong.
Normally the wheat was a beautiful gold in color. But now nearly a quarter of the grain had turned a nasty greenish-brown color. In just two days? It was as if somebody had cursed her garden; she vaguely remembered a phrase -- from the Christian Bible, not the Torah -- about "the adversary sowing the tares among the wheat".
Snatching her cellphone from her saddlebag -- and no longer fazed by the odd clash in technologies -- she dialed the house and got Jonathan. "Something's wrong with the GE wheat patch. Please, come and have a look."
A few minutes later Jonathan rode up, and as he saw the patch, his face fell. But he was a professional farmer, and he went straight to studying the problem without thinking of ancient texts. "It looks like a plant disease spreading through the patch. Have you noticed any symptoms earlier?"
"A few stalks, Saturday. I put them in my saddlebag. But when the Bonnie matter came up, I forgot about them."
"You still got them?"
Grace checked the other saddlebag. "Yeah. But they're just speckled, not entirely brown."
"OK. We'll package the speckled stalks and the blighted ones, and have Brian take them to town to ship to the GE labs. Meanwhile, we had better cut down the blighted areas before they infect the healthy ones. I'll get the reaper."
One hour later Grace sat in her saddle at a safe distance, watching forlornly as the mechanical reaper chugged and cut through the patch. She understood the necessity perfectly well, but it made it harder and harder to visualize the area as her garden, cultivated by her own hand. What had gone wrong? Was it her fault?
On one of his turns through the patch, Jonathan caught sight of Grace's face. He presumably knew nothing of her Secret Garden fantasy, but he could tell she was upset, and could empathize with a gardener who had lost her plants. "Look, Grace, you don't need to stick around. You've been working your tail off all weekend. Take some time off, go for a ride, do something you enjoy."
"Thank you." Grace thought about it. There was an orchard she remembered from last summer, at the very edge of the farm. It was so far off that she had only visited it once then, but the visit had been delightful. So she urged her horse around and headed for the orchard.
Déjà vu. Luke had been with her then. Not being accustomed to riding horses, he had gotten up behind her and held her tightly around the waist to make sure he didn't fall off. Grace had even galloped faster than necessary just to feel him hold her more tightly. At the end he had gotten off so clumsily that he had pulled off the animal as well, but fortunately the ground was soft and the fall just seemed very funny.
Luke had not touched her since That Night, and Grace's life was not at all fun now.
Diana, the Cowgirl God, had met them in the orchard, and suddenly Grace remembered a scene from the Torah: God meeting Adam and Even in the Garden of Eden, this time not to condemn them but to exchange words of encouragement and friendship.
Then Grace reached the orchard, and felt stupid. It was winter, of course. Not only were there no apples, but most of the foliage was gone. She was riding among dead trees. Maybe the Garden of Eden after his human caretakers had been kicked out.
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That evening Grace was back in the farmhouse. Physically she was comfortable: now she had the room to herself without Bonnie intruding on her space. But emotionally she was strung out -- enough so to call a certain number on her cell phone for the first time in weeks.
"Luke Girardi here."
"This is Polk."
"Whoa! Grace, we're not supposed to talk. I told your parents--"
"Shut up, dude. This isn't a mating ritual. I need help."
"Um, okay. That's different. I think."
"What do you know about GE agriculture?"
"Um, it's an offshoot of research into the genome. Scientists use subtle instruments to alter the DNA of a seed cell, in the hope that it will pass the changes to all of its descendents--"
"Yadayada," taunted Grace with irritation. "That doesn't help me. The Cavalos' crop of GE wheat is dying off. What can I do about it?"
"Um, I don't know. Genetically engineering isn't like Cinderella magic, with a carriage turning back into a pumpkin at midnight. The DNA that they created may have a specific flaw, but I'm not that expert on genetics."
"A fine lot of help you are. You brag about how brainy you are, but the one time I need some expertise, you come up empty. You're as useless as Bonnie was."
"Life isn't like STAR TREK, Grace, with Scotty coming up with every solution before the hour is up. Knowledge is specialized --"
"Oh, shut up," snarled Grace, punching OFF.
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The next day the Cavalos found excuses to have Grace do work in or near the farmhouse. Only at the end of the day was she able to saddle her horse and ride out to her "Garden". Her worse fears were realized. The entire lot had turned nasty. Unlike her fictional heroine Mary Quite Contrary, Grace had simply been contrary. Instead of turning an abandoned garden into a paradise, Grace had taken a working field and turned it into a mess. And in the meantime, Bonnie had brought new life into the world.
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The next morning, while mucking out the stable, Grace was so pre-occupied that she slipped on a patch of dung and fell in the filthy straw, nearly ruining her overalls. To her that was the last straw, and she didn't even find the pun funny.
At lunch she finally made her announcement. "Mr. Cavalo -- Mrs. Cavalo -- I quit. I'm not cut out for this. I want to go home."
Mr. Cavalo sighed. "I know you're stressed out, Grace, and maybe you'd be happier spending holidays at home. But we don't have any complaints about your work."
"No complaints? My main responsibility was tending that field, and it's gone! I failed you, and I failed all those people in the Third World who were relying on the extra food."
"First, there was nobody waiting for the grain in the Third World, Grace. This was a test project. You could say that it was even good news that it failed now, before it went into production and people WERE relying on steady shipments in ton lots to stay alive."
"Besides," Jean Cavalo took over. "We're farmers, Grace. Crop failures are a fact of life. An unpleasant fact, but it's there. Don't blame yourself for fate. And as for failure, you succeeded in the one incident that really counted. The doctors said that another hour of exposure in the cold might have killed the baby, and maybe even Bonnie. You saved his life, and we will remember that every time that we look at our new child."
"And there's something I want to say," blurted out Brian. "I kept my mouth shut the entire time because I knew that you were with my cousin Luke, and would probably go back to him--"
"Ha!"
"--but you're the most wonderful girl I've ever met, Grace."
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A few hours later Grace was sitting in the small-town airport waiting for a plane to fly her back north to Maryland. She had demanded that Brian drive her here without even checking whether one was available; she'd prefer waiting hours in this place to staying in the farm where she had failed.
A check representing her wages was in her pocket. She was still debating whether to deposit it in Arcadia or tear it up.
Somebody walked up. "Hello, Grace."
Grace looked up reluctantly. "Diana. So where's your horse?"
"I decided to leave it behind. People might wonder how I got Pegasus through security. Grace, you left before the lab report came back explaining what happened to the wheat."
"And I suppose you can tell me what it says? You know everything."
The Cowgirl God nodded. "Shorn of a lot of scientific language, it says that in replacing the natural gene sequence with the artificial one, the biologists unwittingly left out an enzyme that protected the wheat against infection. Mistakes like that can easily happen when life hasn't passed through my evolutionary process. While tracking down the mistake, the biologists will track down the enzyme, which will make all the subsequent GE creations that much more stable."
"So what infected it? Me?"
"Not your fault. Your body is full of bacteria and viruses and some things your scientists haven't found yet. You aren't aware of them because your body's immune system keeps them in check, but they could still be passed to the plant."
"It sounds odd to hear you talk science."
"Since I know everything, I can't always match my store of knowledge to my role, though I usually try. But you needed to know about the report, to understand that it wasn't your fault."
Grace took a deep breath, feeling better. "So what was the point of the mission?"
"There wasn't a mission, Grace. You came down here by your choice. I did, though, foresee Bonnie's predicament and made sure your horsemanship was skillful enough to reach her in time. And your argument made a difference when Bonnie was tempted to keep the baby, which would have been disastrous. Keep your wages, Grace. You've earned them. By the way, keep up with the horseback riding."
"Another emergency in the future?"
The divine cowgirl smiled and waved away without an answer.
TBC