In the Field

by Rachel Pastan

  Or maybe she wouldn’t talk to Jax! Why should she? Her legs ached as the hill grew steeper, but it wasn’t a bad feeling.

  Back at the lab, she set to work on Cole’s endless tables. She worked slowly, careful not to make a mistake. The night ground on: ten o’clock, eleven o’clock, eleven thirty, eleven fifty-two. Her stomach was leaden and her head ached. A nap would help, but the floor was too hard to lie down on. It wasn’t even very late, not by her standards. She often worked till one or two in the morning. They all did. She thought about what Paul had said. We want to get the answers right. That’s what science is. Under that theory, doing this useless work for Cole was wrong—more wrong than what Jax had done to her.

  She got up and stretched, took a lap around the room to wake herself up. Past Cole’s desk, past the laboratory benches, past the filing cabinet and the equipment shelves. Up on the highest shelf, toward the back, her little bottle of carmine stain seemed to call to her as she went by. Here I am, it said in its soundless voice. Here I am, waiting. She took another lap, thinking how she would reward herself for finishing the tables by looking at the material from the pollen. Next week maybe, if she worked fast. The clock in the library quad began to toll, one day wheeling into the next. It was the hour of ghosts, of deadlines missed and enchantments broken. The last stroke rang out. She could feel its reverberations in her body for a long time.

  On her third lap, as she passed the shelf, she stopped and took the bottle down.

  CHAPTER 14

  Kate was still at her desk at nine a.m. when Cole came in. “Good morning, Miss Croft,” he said, pulling on his lab coat. Dust hung motionless in bright swaths of sunlight. The sky out the window was a clear, liquid blue.

  “Good morning, Dr. Cole.”

  “How are those tables coming along?”

  She stared up at her advisor blankly. A great arm, like the arm of a giant, turned over a page in her mind. She pulled a few sheets of the trisomics table over what she had been working on. “Fine! They’re coming along fine.”

  “Don’t tell me you’ve been here all night,” he said.

  “I’m not tired.”

  It was true: she was too thrilled to be tired! How could she be tired when she’d spent the last few hours looking at the sharpest, clearest maize chromosomes anyone had ever seen? The squash technique on the new material had worked beautifully. And now, hidden under the half-completed trisomics tables, was the diagram she’d made.

  There were ten chromosomes: ten exactly. People had guessed there might be, but she was the first person to know for certain—the first person in the world.

  In her diagram, which she’d titled “A Preliminary Sketch of the Ten Chromosomes of Zea Mays,” Kate had arranged and numbered them from tallest to shortest. Already each of the ten, with its own characteristic shape and markings, was familiar to her. Knobs of various sizes bulged like burls on tree trunks, while the arms on either side of the centromere were distinct, distinguishable, like the shapes of different sorts of leaves. Clear as day! She felt as if she were absorbing light from the air through her skin and turning it into electricity.

  “I know I told you to hurry,” Cole said. “But there’s no need to go to extremes. A person needs his sleep.”

  She blinked up at him. “Don’t worry about me.”

  “It’s my job to worry about you.” His face softened, and he sighed, and took a step toward Kate’s desk. “Go home and take a nap,” he said. And then he added, “I’d hate you to make a mistake because you were tired. Not that I think you will. I know you’ll do a good job. You’re always so careful and thorough.”

  The words, meant more or less kindly, choked Kate. Careful and thorough! An epitaph for a shoeshine boy.

  Cole went over to his desk by the window and got to work: looking at notecards, scribbling on a pad. His back in his overstarched lab coat was a dull white oblong against the rectangle of sky. Kate slipped the diagram into a folder, slipped the folder under her arm. “I guess I will,” she said.

  No one answered when she knocked on Thatch’s office door. He might be in the lab, of course, but really what she wanted more than anything was a cup of coffee and a quiet place to think. She opened the door, which was never locked, and went in. She turned on the hot plate, measured the water, and scooped out the grounds, using the precise, deliberate movements she’d seen Thatch use a hundred times. She sat in his chair, waiting while the coffee brewed. Behind her eyelids she could see the chromosomes lined up in their perfect order, one through ten. Warmth pulsed through her. The rich smell filled the room.

  She must have drifted off, because the next thing she knew the door was opening and a voice that wasn’t Thatch’s was saying, “You can smell that halfway down the hall.” Startling awake, she saw Paul filling the doorway, the ends of his tawny hair brushing the top of the frame. “Well,” he said, seeing it was her. “I hope you made it home last night before your coach turned into a pumpkin.”

  She jumped up, annoyed that he’d caught her sleeping. “You’re not mistaking yourself for Prince Charming, I hope.” She poured the coffee and passed him a mug.

  “You get a lot done on Cole’s trisomics?”

  “Not really.” She tried to keep her voice steady. “Not on the trisomics.”

  The way he was looking at her—steadily, attentively, the way she looked at her slides—it was as though he already knew. “What?” he asked, stepping forward into the tiny room. She could feel the heat of him, smell the clean cotton of his shirt.

  “Shut the door.”

  He did as she said. She hesitated, then she opened the folder and pushed the diagram toward him.

  Paul studied the sheet of paper. Kate watched his face as comprehension broke over him. For a moment, his expression cracked open and she could see the excitement on his naked face before the mask snapped back on. “My God, Kate,” he said, his eyes boring into her. “You really did it!”

  “Well,” she said as casually as she could manage. “Belling’s stain worked like a charm.” But her heart was pounding. The room didn’t seem big enough for the two of them.

  Paul looked back down at the diagram. “The slides I saw weren’t clear enough for this,” he said. “What else did you do?”

  She told him about using the material from the pollen instead of the root tips.

  “What gave you the idea to do that?”

  “The root tips weren’t working very well.”

  He looked up into her glowing face. “That’s not an answer.”

  She cast her mind back, trying to remember how the idea had come to her. “I just thought of it. That’s all.”

  He studied the diagram some more. “You know,” he said after a minute, “you could get Whitaker to write a covering note to the PNAS.”

  PNAS was the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Paul was saying the work was good enough to publish in a place like that. Kate was startled. She hadn’t thought that far ahead. “Do you think he would?”

  “He’d be an idiot not to.”

  When the door swung open, they both jumped. “Drinking my coffee in my office and you couldn’t even leave me a cup?” Thatch said. But Kate could see he was happy to find them there.

  “Take a look at what Kate’s done,” Paul said.

  Thatch took the paper Paul held out. A bright rosy flush came over his face as he examined it. “Oh!” he said, looking up. “Oh, Kate!”

  Ripples of pleasure spread through her.

  “You said you could do it,” Thatch said, so joyfully that she half expected him to embrace her.

  “It wasn’t hard,” she said. “Once you had the idea.”

  But then, in the pause that followed, something seemed to slip, or shift, like the sun going behind a cloud. “I can’t wait to see the slides,” Thatch said.

  Paul set down his empty cup on the de
sk. “Let’s go look at them now!”

  Kate panicked. She thought of Cole in the lab amid a snowstorm of papers, desperately trying to hammer his trisomics data into some kind of shape. “I’ll show you later.”

  And then Kate saw Paul understand what Thatch had already guessed: that Cole still didn’t know. It didn’t bother Paul—she could see that, too. “The thing now is to publish it,” he said. “As soon as possible. If you could do it, maybe somebody else has done it, too.”

  “Paul thinks Whitaker might send it to PNAS,” Kate told Thatch, looking just past the side of his face.

  “Well,” Thatch said coldly. “Paul knows Whitaker best.”

  “I’d be glad to talk to him about it,” Paul offered.

  “No,” Kate said, flushing. “I’ll do it.”

  “After you talk to Cole,” Thatch said. “After all, he worked on this for two years.”

  “Tell Cole what?” From the hallway, Jax’s head appeared over Thatch’s shoulder. “Worked on what?”

  Nobody answered him. Thatch turned slowly around. “I’d invite you in, Jax,” he said, “but you can see there’s no room.”

  “I’m just going,” Paul said. “Congratulations on your result, Jax. It was brilliant of you to notice those subtle separations.” He pushed past Thatch and clapped Jax on the shoulder.

  “Hello, Kate,” Jax said. “Is there any coffee left?”

  She couldn’t answer him.

  “I thought you liked yours less sludgy,” Thatch said.

  Jax shrugged. Then he saw the piece of paper lying on the desk. “What’s this?” he said, picking it up. “A preliminary sketch of…? Oh, wow!” Agog, he stared at Thatch. “Where did you get this?”

  Kate found her voice. “It’s mine.”

  “Yours?”

  “I made it.”

  Jax laughed, his snub nose flaring.

  If she hadn’t labeled it, she thought, speechless with rage and shame, he never would have even known what he was looking at!

  “She did make it, you idiot,” Thatch said. “What’s wrong with you?”

  Kate’s face burned. All of her was burning: with fury and pride and exhaustion. Thatch’s disappointment in her for not telling Cole had ruined her moment of triumph. His anger at Jax, though it moved her, didn’t change that. She seized the diagram from Jax’s hand and slapped it back into the folder. “It’s just a preliminary finding,” she said.

  “I don’t understand,” Jax said. “How did you…?” His mouth twitched into an abashed smile. “It’s amazing, Kate,” he said. “It really is.”

  “If it holds up,” she said.

  “I mean it! It’s incredible, really, what you’ve— Assigning linkage groups comes next, doesn’t it? After that, I bet we can track down sterility without much trouble at all!”

  “We?” Kate said. But Jax’s head was full of sterility. She could see he was picturing the problem nicely solved and written up. Would he credit her even then? Would he bother to put her in a footnote? “Jax,” she said. “I have to tell you something.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I hope you won’t be upset. It was meant as a joke, but I realize now … Well. What happened was, I stopped by your lab to talk to you, but you weren’t there. There were some envelopes of seed on the bench. W-618 and W-623. And—I switched them. I’m sure you noticed. But just in case you didn’t.”

  Jax’s face went tight. “My seeds?” he said.

  “I switched them,” Kate repeated, feeling calmer. “It seemed funny at the time. I thought … Anyway, I’m sorry. It was stupid. But no harm done, I trust.”

  “You tampered with my corn?” Jax’s ears had turned bright red and he stepped toward her.

  “She said she was sorry,” Thatch said.

  “You twit!” Jax said.

  “Don’t you yell at me!” Kate cried. “You didn’t even mention me when you presented on Tuesday. You didn’t say I helped you see what was on that slide!”

  “You didn’t help me,” Jax said.

  “You didn’t see anything before I showed you!”

  “You’re a crazy bag,” Jax said. “That’s what you are.”

  “Stop it,” Thatch said.

  Jax wheeled toward Thatch. “As for you,” he said, “what you see in that titless know-it-all is anyone’s guess!”

  “Get out of my office!” Thatch said.

  “I bet you’re not even getting any.” Jax swatted at the empty mug Paul had left, which fell to the floor. Too solid to break, it rolled slowly and heavily under the desk, a few drops of sludge spilling across the boards.

  CHAPTER 15

  Kate couldn’t show the diagram to Cole while he was in such a state about his trisomics, but she was reluctant to go over his head and show it to Whitaker either. Thatch was right about that. Like it or not, Cole was her advisor, and she didn’t know how Whitaker would respond if she failed to respect the chain of command.

  In the meantime, she worked on Cole’s tables. Cole had started coming in early, sitting at his desk all day long with a stubborn, anxious, miserable expression, laboring to draft his paper. Over and over he drew black slashes through whole paragraphs and started them again. He crumpled sheets and threw them away, rubbed his red tired eyes, and groaned. And all the time Kate’s diagram lay in its folder in her top left-hand drawer where she could feel it glowing darkly like a hot coal. She avoided Thatch and Paul as much as she could, coming and going when they were unlikely to be around. But even when they were both in their labs and she was working at her desk, she could feel them—the same way she could feel the presence of the diagram, or Cole’s anguish, or Jax’s malice.

  It was Jax—the fact that he knew about the diagram—that made her have to do something soon.

  At the Tuesday lab meeting, Kate could hardly listen to the presentation. The weather had grown even hotter and more stifling, and everyone was out of sorts. Thatch looked tired and unhappy. Cole looked even tireder and more unhappy. Jax acted as though she were invisible, which was a relief. Only Paul seemed unaffected, greeting her in his usual ironic, aloof friendly manner. Even Whitaker, sitting at the head of the table with his unlit pipe in his teeth, looked wilted, his eyes falling shut almost immediately after Vargas began his presentation, an audible snore rumbling from his throat toward the end, startling him awake. As soon as the meeting finished, she slipped out of the room, took the stairs to the lobby, and pushed through the big double doors into the blazing afternoon.

  The experimental fields were at the far end of campus, a twenty-minute walk. Down and up a hill, past the dairy barns, beyond a little windbreak of trees. It probably wasn’t any cooler here, but it seemed cooler. The air moved with a slight breeze, and a yellow finch bounced cheerfully through the shimmering blue.

  In Kate’s field—which was really Cole’s field—the corn hissed and whispered in a friendly, familiar way. The plants were getting tall now, they were almost up to her shoulders. On the scattered surface of puddles from last night’s rain, water striders crouched weightlessly, and smoky clouds of gnats drifted by. Kate walked slowly up the first row. Over the tops of the stalks she could see the blue-gray stone of the campus buildings. She crouched down so she was lower than the corn, its sharp sturdy leaves a fortress. Insects whirred. A cloud passed over the sun. She sat on the grass between the rows. To spend time in the field was to be filled with the sense of things beyond sensing—movements too slow to see, scents too faint to smell, sounds too low even for dogs. Inside the shoots, the ears were bulging, the fine silk invisible inside the green sheaths. She lay down. The ground was warm underneath her. It pressed back gently against her chest and stomach and thighs. Sometimes, when she was very tired as she was now, a scrap of memory drifted up: a soft arm, the look in a pair of sharp gray eyes, a long braid swaying. The last time Kate had seen Thea was from far awa
y on the other side of the stage at the teeming graduation ceremony. Thea was camouflaged in her cap and gown, but Kate recognized her instantly. No one else held herself as straight. If you could understand how chromosomes determined what kind of corn plant a seed would become, would it be possible someday to know what made a person want what she wanted?

  The next morning, as soon as she walked into the lobby, Paul said, “Everyone’s been looking for you!” He seemed to have been lingering by the doors.

  It was a few minutes after nine o’clock: later than she usually got in, but hardly late. “Why?”

  “Something happened to your lab.”

  She stared at him. “Happened?”

  “Someone tossed it.”

  Kate rushed to the stairs.

  “Maybe it was you,” Paul said, easily keeping pace as they climbed to the second floor. “Knowing what a jokester you are.”

  Kate stopped short in the doorway of the lab. A messy moat of papers encircled her desk, fanning out across the floor. Her slides were scattered, too, the glass glittering in the sun that streamed in. The air felt like soup. On Kate’s lab bench, her microscope lay on its side like an overturned monument. Yet Cole’s desk—Cole’s lab bench—were untouched. Messy, but no messier than usual. At least, she didn’t think so. She hurried over to her microscope and righted it. Nothing seemed to be broken. “Jax!” she said. “It must have been Jax.”

  Turning slowly around to take in the chaos, Paul shrugged. “Possibly.”