In the Field

by Rachel Pastan

  Jax peered back down the hall as if someone might be listening. Then he stepped into the tiny room and shut the door. Kate inched farther back on the desk. The three of them were crowded together, close enough to touch. The room smelled of coffee and of dry rot, and of Thatch’s plain soap, and of Jax’s awful Gauloises cigarettes, which he claimed to have developed a taste for while wandering around France. “It’s about the new student,” Jax said. “The one from Kansas.”

  “What about him?” Kate hadn’t met Paul Novak, who was transferring to Cornell to work directly with Whitaker. According to Whitaker’s secretary, Miss Floris, he was reputed to be charming as well as brilliant, a rising star offered up by a friend of the Great Man’s to grace the maize kingdom.

  “Have you wondered why he gets to work with Whitaker while the rest of us are farmed out to junior faculty?” Jax said.

  “Presumably because he’s some kind of genius,” Kate said.

  “It turns out he’s related to Whitaker somehow. His mother is Whitaker’s second cousin!”

  “I can’t believe that’s the reason,” Thatch said.

  “That’s not even the good part,” Jax said. “The good part is that he was asked to leave the University of Kansas, after which Whitaker invited him here.” His foxlike face gleamed with pleasure.

  “Asked to leave?” Kate said. “What for?”

  Jax shrugged. “Burglarizing the petty cash? Getting a girl pregnant? Your guess is as good as mine.”

  “Maybe he ran over the dean’s flower garden with his car,” Kate suggested. “Or killed someone.”

  “Where did you get this so-called information?” Thatch said.

  “Don’t believe me if you don’t want to,” Jax said.

  “We’ll believe you if you have some proof,” Kate said.

  Jax pulled a rumpled packet from his pocket and tapped out a cigarette. “What kind of proof would you be looking for? A tear-stained letter from a girl pleading with him to marry her?”

  “That would do,” Kate said.

  “Please don’t smoke in here,” Thatch said.

  “You’ll just have to believe me or not,” Jax said, lighting the Gauloise.

  “Open the door at least.”

  Jax opened the door.

  Kate waited for him to leave, but he just leaned against the jamb, blowing smoke back over his shoulder. “How’s your project coming along?” she asked him.

  Jax’s predatory face pushed forward, making him look more foxlike than ever. “I have some new data, actually,” he said. “The slides are very suggestive.”

  Kate let her heels bang against the desk drawers. “What do you mean, suggestive?” she demanded. “Give me one of those.”

  He passed her the packet and she tapped one out, ignoring the shiny silver lighter he proffered and taking a matchbook from her trousers pocket.

  “What do they suggest?” Thatch asked.

  “I’m working it out,” Jax said.

  Kate inhaled the foul smoke. She was sure the slides were just as uninteresting and unrevealing as Jax’s slides always were. But then, you never knew. Maybe he was actually onto something, while she languished in the wasteland of Cole’s dubious ideas. “Let me know if you want me to look at them,” she said. She was getting a reputation not just for focusing the microscope but for seeing what was of interest on the slide.

  “I can analyze my own data, thank you,” Jax said.

  “If you say so,” Kate said. “But, anyway, let me know.”

  CHAPTER 10

  In the early morning, as every early morning in the growing season, Kate walked out to the field to see the plants. This was the best part of the day: the body moving, the mind fresh and sharp as a wave, taking everything in. She noted daily growth as well as any changes or irregularities, checking for damage from insects or animals or the wind, grateful when there wasn’t any. The crows rasped shrilly in the oaks, calling back and forth across the treetops. They would alert one another when the ears were ripe. People tried foiling them with scarecrows, with tin cans, with ten-year-old boys armed with stones. The men even unbuttoned their flies to water the plants when they thought she couldn’t see. What sometimes worked was to get a dead crow, shot by some farmer, and leave it lying bloody on the ground. The birds got the message. She wouldn’t have minded sitting out in the field with a shotgun. Corn plants were living things just as much as birds were.

  It had thunderstormed in the night, but the rain (three-quarters of an inch according to the gauge on her windowsill) had stopped before dawn. The warm damp air buzzed with gnats and damselflies and a few black wasps. The ground was a lacework of puddles and mud, and the sun, trying to burn through the banked clouds, was a coin of brightness in a vast pale sky. Kate moved slowly down the rows. Drops of water clung to the plants, which were as tall as she was. Water gleamed on the long swords of the leaves, and on the thick strong stalks, and the tight sheaths of the ear shoots, inside which the cobs were developing. A wooden stake at the base of each plant identified its series and parentage, but Kate didn’t need the labels to know which plant was which. Each one was a little different from any other—thicker leaves or thinner, the color deeper or paler, more or fewer side tillers branching off the main stalk.

  Now, pausing partway down the row, she examined a tall plant that held its broad leaves high. She grasped the shoot, trying to judge the state of the ear inside, then ran her hand up along the shaft of the highest furled leaf, testing the tip where the tassel would soon burst through. Then it would be time to fertilize, and the whole department would be out in the fields, working frantically—even Victor, the janitor, a widower with a teenaged son in and out of trouble, as Kate knew from talking to him late at night when everyone else had gone home.

  The plant’s stem was tall and stiff and damp, a deep piney green in the pearly light. Kate had her knife with her to take root cuttings on which to try the new stain. On a sudden impulse, she made a neat slit high up on the stem where the pollen was developing. As she sliced out a sliver of tissue, a few drops of liquid welled up. Under the green, inside each bright grain, a universe hummed. Overhead, the pollen-yellow sun burned a patch of blue in the watery sky. Who said the root tip was the best place to look? Just because they’d been taught to do it that way.

  A few years back, before she got to his lab, Hiram Cole had tried to solve the problem of characterizing maize chromosomes. He hadn’t made much progress, though. Eventually he’d shelved the idea and moved on to trisomics, the problem he was struggling with now. It wasn’t impossible he’d be open to picking the old work back up. Kate was at her lab bench, and Cole was bent over his microscope on the other side of the room, when she blurted out, “This would all be so much easier if we could tell which chromosome was which.”

  Cole grunted. He stood up and stretched, rubbed his hands over his face, then hunched back over and reaffixed his eye to the eyepiece, fiddling with the focus knob.

  “Really!” Kate said. “We should sort out the chromosomes first. It’s an interesting problem. Then we could come back to trisomics afterward.”

  “It’s a hopeless tangle,” Cole said. “Like trying to identify leeches in mud.”

  Now was when she should tell him her new idea. Or would it be better to wait until he was in a better mood? The way things had been going lately, that might be never.

  It was true that chromosomes were famously elusive. Most of the time they were invisible, and you couldn’t see them at all. Sometimes, though, they materialized out of the depths of a cell’s nucleus, wriggling like snakes. What was the secret of their appearances and disappearances? No one knew. Twenty years earlier, working with sea urchins, Theodor Boveri had shown that the chromosomes carried the genetic material, and by now the general choreography of cell division was well understood. Still, much remained unexplained. No matter how many sections she made, or how
carefully she prepared them—no matter how precisely she focused the microscope—the maize chromosomes she studied remained indistinct and confused. Leeches in mud, as Cole said—though with real leeches you could wade into the mud and pull them out, pin them to a board, and dissect them.

  She stared at her supervisor’s hunched back and his thick head of hair. More hair curled at the collar of the lab coat, which had been overstarched by Mrs. Cole. “Dr. Cole?” she said.

  “What?” He had abandoned the microscope now and was pawing through a pile of reprints like an angry bear in a garbage heap. “What?” he repeated, turning toward her, his eyes dark under his blunt black brows. “Go ahead.”

  “It’s nothing.” Kate turned away so she didn’t have to see his face. There had been a teacher in her primary school, Mrs. Donnelly, whom Kate hadn’t been able to bear looking at either. A horrible ugly woman: ugly in her soul. Every morning Kate had cried and kicked and refused to get off the floor and go to school. After going to talk to the teacher, Kate’s mother had let her stay home for the entire winter. “As long as you keep out of my hair,” she’d warned. Kate never knew what had happened between the two women. She never asked, and her mother certainly hadn’t told her. What had she picked up, at eight, that she’d had no name for? Stupidity, callousness, cruelty? Some teachers rapped children’s knuckles back then, but it wasn’t that. All that winter, when she should have been in school, she had walked three miles to the frozen pond by herself to skate. She knew the way through the woods and fields from walking with her father. She could still remember the texture of the bark of certain trees and the friendly creaking of the branches around her.

  Kate knew she should be grateful to her mother for intervening for her that way. She was grateful. Her mother hadn’t been as terrible a mother as Kate sometimes let herself believe. She was a smart woman, a stubborn woman. It wasn’t her fault Kate had been difficult, had loved her father more. Not her fault her husband had died too young.

  And what about Charlie running away? Had their mother made life at home unbearable for him, once his sisters were grown? Kate tried not to ask herself that.

  Charlie was different when he came back from the Merchant Marine. Quieter, moodier. His long curls were gone, his hairline ebbing. He found work as a longshoreman on the wharves in Brooklyn, hardly the career their mother had imagined for him. Like Kate, he was unmarried. Only Laura had turned out anything like what their mother wanted.

  Laura wrote to Kate sometimes: neat, bossy letters on creamy stationery. She harangued Kate about writing back, about coming to visit. She boasted about her boys, who seemed always to be losing teeth, getting As on geography tests, and performing in piano recitals. She wrote, “Mother’s getting old, you know. How hard would it be to come and see her?”

  Kate always read Laura’s letters, often more than once. But she could seldom bring herself to answer them. She would roll a piece of paper into the typewriter and stare at the blankness, exhausted by the effort of thinking of something to say.

  Kate lived by herself in a small upstairs flat on a quiet street. Just a room, really, with a sort of kitchen in one corner. Good enough for heating soup, as she was doing tonight: crumbling crackers on top, eating with one hand and scribbling notes with the other.

  A hopeless tangle.

  Leeches in mud.

  Cole would be home now, snug in his little white house with its neat peaked roof and window boxes (so she imagined, never having seen it), eating creamed chicken and canned peas. Little Cole Number One would be spilling a glass of milk and blaming Little Cole Number Two, and Mrs. Cole would be wiping Baby Cole’s chin, and the dog would have gotten into the garbage again. Now that was a tangle! Snarled, intractable, and dull.

  The maize chromosomes, on the other hand, were an intriguing puzzle. She pictured them in her mind’s eye, dark elongated blobs on the slide in her neat paraffin sections, the nuclei frozen at the metaphase stage of meiosis. Tracing the intricacies of cell division on microscope slides was like trying to re-create Swan Lake from a few scattered photographs. You missed most of it.

  Still, Kate had looked at so many slides over the years—hundreds, maybe thousands! Each time she bent to the eyepiece, she took in a new instant of the ballet. Now the dancer’s arms were level with her chin; now her head tilted upward toward her partner; now her hand opened like a flower. Each image, each instant, lodged in Kate’s mind, precise and fixed. Each one found its place in the sequence. Sitting at her small table on one of her two mismatched chairs, the soup finished, cracker crumbs scattered across the pressed tablecloth, Kate could almost see the corps of dancers swaying, moving together and then pulling apart: the thick, stubby leeches stirring sluggishly in the mud.

  Made from cells taken from the root tips of a growing plant, paraffin sections were the standard in the field. But—precisely because they were sections—each image was only partial: not a snapshot of the whole but just a piece of it. You couldn’t even really know which piece you were looking at: the dancers’ torsos? Their feet? How much better if you could see the entire stage at once! That wholeness was what the squash technique promised.

  The next morning, Cole got into the lab late. Anyone could see the mood he was in from the way he nearly knocked over the coatrack when he hung his jacket up. Kate knew better than to ask what the matter was. Anyway, she didn’t care. When she had the lab to herself, she could sink into the work undisturbed, and she could keep the window open, which made Cole sneeze. He had a pollen allergy: unfortunate in a maize man. When he worked in the field, he had to wrap a handkerchief around his face. Of course, this morning, by the time he blustered in, she had forgotten about the window, which he slammed shut, making the distillate in her beaker jump. “How many times have I asked you?” he said.

  Well, he’d never asked her, actually. He’d only said, the first time she’d gone to open it, That stays closed.

  “Sorry,” she said. “It seemed like you weren’t coming in.”

  Cole grabbed a lab coat and jammed his arms into it.

  Kate waited until he’d had a chance to settle down, but not so long that he’d got too involved in what he was doing. Then she said, “I had an idea about a new way to try and see the chromosomes more clearly. I’ve been reading up on Belling’s technique. What he does is—”

  “I told you we’re not going to do that.” His eyes were inflamed—she really shouldn’t have opened the window—and he had an ink stain on his right lab coat pocket.

  “What you actually said was that it was a hopeless tangle, so we should leave it for later. But it seems to me that with one or two modifications—”

  “It’s not a question of modifications. It’s a question of priorities! Our priority is the trisomics problem, which is more than enough to keep us busy. I’m hoping we can get a paper by the end of the year, but at this rate it’s hardly a sure thing.” Then he took a breath and said in a calmer tone, “I’m not saying characterizing the chromosomes isn’t important. But I worked on it for two years without much to show for the time. However, I don’t consider the project abandoned. Once we get this paper submitted, we can discuss moving forward, if you like.”

  Discuss. The word hissed in her ears with its wary qualification. Hoping, once, if. The obfuscating double negative of not saying it isn’t. She tried to look up at her supervisor, but her eyes could only see as far as the forefinger he was holding up, the black hair sprouting from the knobby knuckle.

  It was true that Cole badly needed this paper: it had been two years since he had published anything. If he didn’t want to be a junior person forever, he’d have to do better than that. Still, she said, “I don’t see it taking a lot of time. And if we could solve it, the trisomics would really go very quickly. Very possibly it could end up saving time.”

  Cole pressed a hand to his red-veined eyes and did not reply.

  “I’m going out for a
cigarette,” Kate said.

  She stalked down the empty hall. There was nothing much wrong with Cole’s plan, except that it was slow and unimaginative. He had been trained to do things a certain way, and that was the way he would do them until he died. He was like those middle-aged matrons you saw still wearing the fashions of 1900. Her mother, for instance.

  She didn’t really feel like smoking. Thatch wasn’t in his office, and he wasn’t in the big airy lab he shared with Lund and Lund’s other students. Kate wandered back the other way, peering into doorways, watching her fellow maize subjects making slides or looking at slides or recording data gleaned from slides, or else compiling and reviewing that data. Everyone was busy, moving purposefully, some with their heads held at a slight angle as though to catch their data from a new vantage point, unawares. Men, every last one of them. Adam’s apples, brash voices, shadows of beards by the end of the day. It was all right, it didn’t matter. But sometimes it exhausted her.

  Jax was in his lab, humming as he peered into his microscope. His hair was slick, carefully parted, and combed back into shiny perfect spines, making him look like a complacent porcupine. If he put as much care into his science as he did into his hair, things would be better all around. “Jax,” she said.

  Jax looked up as though he had been hoping for a distraction. “Hello, Kate.”

  “How’s that suggestive data coming?”

  “Good,” he said. “Not too bad.” He rolled one shoulder, then the other, then the first again.

  She came into the room and nodded toward the microscope. “Let me see.”

  “This isn’t the best preparation,” he said. “The ones I was looking at yesterday were better.”

  “Let me see anyway.” Kate bent over the scope, her fingers reaching for the knobs. The barest pressure of her thumb and suddenly the slide opened into clarity. Kate let out her breath slowly. Yes, there they were, the chromosomes: fat and stubby at this stage like garden slugs. There, too—just emerged from the murk—were the filaments of the spindle that would guide them toward the opposite ends of the cell, after which the cell would divide.