Famine

by Graham Masterton

  ‘I’m not a blackmailer. Senator Jones. That was just a way of getting you on to the phone.’

  ‘All right, you got me. What do you want?’

  ‘You’ve heard about this wheat blight in Kansas?’

  ‘Sure. Something about it. But it doesn’t look too disastrous from where I’m sitting.’

  ‘You’re sitting in Washington, DC, Senator Jones. I’m sitting right in the middle of eighty-five thousand acres that are very rapidly turning black.’

  ‘Well? You’re insured under the Federal Crop Programme, aren’t you? Why don’t you go talk to that nice Mr Deal?’

  ‘I shall,’ said Ed. ‘But you know as well as I do that the Federal Insurance Programme only covers the cost of re-planting.’

  ‘Name me an insurance policy that covers anything else,’ demanded Senator Jones. ‘You could be Cartier-Bresson, and every photograph you ever took could make you ten thousand dollars, but if the laboratory fogs one of your films, what can you claim? The price of the film, that’s all. And it’s the same with crops.’

  ‘I’m aware of that,’ said Ed. ‘But since this blight is so damaging, and so completely unknown, I was wondering if there might be a possibility of further aid from the Department of Agriculture.’

  ‘No,’ said Senator Jones.

  ‘Is that a refusal to help, or an admission that you don’t have the clout to help?’

  ‘That’s a refusal to help. What’s the matter with you farmers? You get deficiency payments, you get guaranteed floor prices, you get nationwide federal insurance. What more do you want? You want me to come out there and harvest your crop for you? You want me to ride a tractor?’

  ‘Senator Jones, the way this blight is spreading, there isn’t going be any crop.’

  ‘Well, you’ll just have to grin and bear it. I’m sorry, Mr Hardesty, but farming’s tough, and there’s nothing that you or I can do about it.’

  Ed drew a breath. ‘Listen, Senator Jones, my daddy may have been a tough and wily old turkey, and he may have built up one of the most successful wheat farms in south Kansas, but he was heavily overstretched on his spending. When I took over this farm, it was right on the verge of financial collapse. Sure – we were harvesting a regular, high-quality crop, and we had all the latest techniques. But we were overmanned, and we’d relied too much on credit, and too much on favours, and the simple fact was that we had a super-efficient farm that wasn’t quite super-efficient enough to meet its interest payments.’

  ‘I hope you realise you’re breaking my heart,’ said Senator Jones.

  ‘I hope you realise I was lying when I said I wasn’t a blackmailer.’

  Senator Jones sniffed. ‘This doesn’t sound like a Hardesty talking. Your daddy was one of those men who always stood on his own two feet. He’d expect a favour from his friends, sure. But he never crawled for anything.’

  ‘I’m not crawling, Senator Jones. I’m asking. My daddy did you a favour, and now I want you to do him a favour in return. Because if this farm goes bankrupt, which it surely will if we don’t get more than a federal insurance payment, then my daddy’s name is going to be dragged all over the Kansas papers like dirt.’

  ‘Hunh,’ said Senator Jones.

  ‘You can “hunh” all you like,’ said Ed. ‘I know you’re thinking that I don’t sound like my daddy, but the reason for that is that I’m not my daddy. He was a farmer, but I’m a businessman, and the way this farm was falling to pieces when I took over, that’s probably just as well. My daddy was very good at what he did, but when it came to the financial jiggery-pokery, he relied too much on people like you. He didn’t know a floor price from a floor mop.’

  ‘Mr Hardesty,’ said Senator Jones, with exaggerated patience, ‘I have to tell you that I’m very sorry for you, and that I’d really like to help. But the truth of the matter is, I’m very busy right now on this soybean problem in Iowa, and I really can’t see that I’m going to be able to spend the time on one single disgruntled wheat farmer from Kansas.’

  ‘All right,’ said Ed. ‘If that’s the way you feel, I’m going straight to the papers with the facts on the wheat-dumping scandal.’

  ‘Who the hell do you think you are?’ snarled Senator Jones. ‘Nancy Drew? Don’t come at me with that going-to-the-papers shit.’

  ‘You think it’s shit?’ asked Ed, although he was trembling with the tension of what he was doing. ‘You read it in print in the Washington Post, and then tell me it’s shit.’ There was silence. Fifteen seconds, thirty seconds of utter silence. Then Senator Jones said, ‘This is a state-wide problem, right? As I understand it.’

  ‘Kansas and North Dakota. That’s what I heard on the news.’

  ‘Well – if it’s a state-wide problem – I may be able to pressure for federal emergency aid. I may be able to arrange a special financial allocation to help farmers wiped out by the blight.’

  ‘That sounds more like it.’

  ‘I can’t promise anything, and I think we ought to meet. I’ll have to get my assistant to do some digging on the background, too. You have to understand that I’m coming into this cold.’

  ‘So am I,’ said Ed. ‘I only found the first traces of blight yesterday evening.’

  ‘All right,’ said Senator Jones. ‘Is there any chance you can get down to Fall River at the week-end? I have a cabin there, by the lake.’

  ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘Then let me call you tomorrow, or maybe Thursday, and I’ll be more in the picture by then.’

  ‘Good,’ said Ed.’

  ‘I’ll tell you something,’ said Senator Jones, ‘you certainly inherited one of your father’s most important qualities.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  ‘Oh, yes. You can bluster like hell. Now, give me your number so that I can call you back.’

  At last, Ed put the phone down. On the scribble pad beside him, he saw that he’d written the word ‘Compensation’ in elaborate, illuminated letters, and sketched a picture of an ear of wheat.

  He sat back in his creaking sheriff’s chair, and rubbed his eyes with his fingertips. Then he looked around him at the leather-bound books on the bookshelves – The Farmer’s Frontier, by Gilbert White, The Great Plains, by Walter Prescott Webb – and at the pipe-rack his father had left and at the bronze statue of plough horses from the early days of dry farming. Stacked on the corner of his desk were the accounts books for the past five years at South Burlington, and as Ed had come to learn since he moved into the farmhouse last fall, these books told the whole story of his father’s greatest successes and his greatest failures.

  He heard a slight noise at the door, and he swivelled around in his chair. His mother was standing there, in her white bathrobe, her hair done up in curlers.

  ‘Mother,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d gone to bed.’

  ‘I heard you talking,’ she said. ‘I came along to say good night.’

  ‘All right,’ he said, nodding. ‘Good night, then.’

  She remained where she was, her face shadowed by the half-open door. ‘Was that true, what you said to Senator Jones?’ she asked him.

  ‘Was what true?’

  ‘You know what I mean, Edward. Was the farm really on the edge of ruin?’

  He stood up, and ripped the doodles off his notepad. ‘Sometimes you have to say things just to put pressure on people,’ he said. ‘Whatever happened, it’s all past, and Daddy’s dead, and that’s all you have to worry about.’

  ‘But I want to know.’

  He turned around and looked at her. ‘You didn’t know when Daddy was alive. He kept it all hidden from you. Why should you want to know now?’

  ‘Because he was my husband. Because I want to understand some of the problems he had to face.’

  Ed picked up one of the accounts books, and flicked through it. ‘You can look if you want to. You may not understand what it all means, if you don’t have any training in reading accounts. Henry Pollock will tell you what went on, because Henry w
as Daddy’s right-hand man. But what it all amounts to is over-spending, under-capitalisation, arbitrary investment and near-sighted financial planning.’ Ursula Hardesty slowly shook her head. ‘I don’t understand it. He was such a good farmer.’

  ‘Oh, yes. No doubt about it. His irrigation system is still one of the finest in the country. Y ou know what people said about him – he could grow wheat on a parking lot. But he relied too much on his personality, and on scratching people’s backs, and having his own back scratched in return. The day he died, the financial future of this farm was hanging by a thread. That’s why the bank needed to talk to Michael the night before his funeral.’

  ‘Are you trying to say that your father killed his own son?’

  ‘Mother, don’t talk nonsense. Michael died because of a terrible and tragic accident.’

  ‘But that’s what you’re saying isn’t it?’ his mother insisted. ‘If the farm had been financially stable, Michael wouldn’t have had to drive into Wichita. If your father hadn’t over-spent and mis-managed the farm, Michael could still be alive.’

  ‘Mother, for God’s sake, you can’t talk like that.’

  The old woman stood up straight. ‘This is my house. I can talk how I like.’

  There was a pause, and then a quiet, firm voice said, ‘No, Ursula. This isn’t your house. Not any more. And if you want to be welcome in it, you’re going to have to keep a check on those irrational outbursts of yours.’

  Season was standing at the far end of the corridor, by the door of the master bedroom, in a long lacey negligee. Mrs Hardesty touched her forehead with her fingertips as if she felt a sudden twinge of headache, and then abruptly turned and walked back to her bedroom, without a word. Season stayed where she was, waiting for Ed to say something.

  ‘I’m going into Wichita tomorrow to see Dr Benson,’ Ed said. ‘If I’m going to press for extra compensation, I think I’m going to have to get myself all the technical information I can lay my hands on.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Season. There was an odd, slightly challenging note in the way she said it.

  ‘Do you want to come with me?’ he asked her. ‘You could do some shopping at the civic centre.’

  ‘It depends what time you go,’ she said. ‘I’m catching an eleven o’clock flight to Los Angeles from Wichita Mid-Continent Airport’

  ‘Season?’ he said, quite urgently; but she had already gone back into the bedroom, and closed the door.

  ‘Season?’ he repeated, knowing that she couldn’t hear him.

  Five

  Senator Jones walked back into his lavish Moroccan-style living-room, with its multi-coloured mosaic tiles and its North African draperies and its elaborate brass-topped tables and stood silent for a moment, lighting up a cigar.

  ‘Well?’ asked the red-headed girl in the silky emerald-green wrap, stretching herself out on the ottoman sofa.

  ‘Well what?’ said Senator Jones, as he pup-pup-pupped his Havana into life.

  ‘Well, who is it who’s so burningly fascinating that you’re prepared to break off right in the middle of courting your favourite newspaper lady? Usually, my darling, you’re not even prepared to answer the phone for the President.’

  ‘The President’s a Democrat,’ growled Senator Jones. ‘Apart from being an uninteresting asshole.’

  ‘And was this a Republican? An interesting asshole?’

  ‘If I told you who it was, and why he’d called me, you’d rush back to the office and print it,’ said Senator Jones.

  ‘It’s as scandalous as all that?’

  ‘It’s no more scandalous than anything else that happens in American politics. Tell me one worthwhile political achievement since seventeen seventy-six that hasn’t been scandalous. It was scandal that made this nation great.’

  Senator Jones lowered his bulky body into a large carved-oak armchair, upholstered in a zig-zag fabric that resembled camel blankets. He crossed his legs by tugging at his left ankle with his right hand and he puffed at his cigar for a while reflectively. He had always been a big man. There were photographs upstairs in his study which showed him as a linebacker for the Washburn University football team. A serious, solid young man with thick lips and eyebrows that looked as if they had been drawn across his face with a black felt-tip pen. He had remained reasonably athletic while he worked in his father’s law firm in Topeka; but when he entered politics, in the Eisenhower landslide of 1956, as one of the state’s youngest-ever representatives, he quickly learned to enjoy the fruits of political success, as well as the steaks and the lobsters and the truffles and the fine vintage wines. By the time Ike’s term was over, Shearson Jones weighed over 250 pounds, and Washington wags were calling him ‘Shearson Jones, Incorporated.’ Time magazine printed a famous picture of him sitting in a committee meeting with his belly protruding so much that they captioned it ‘Kansas Representative and Friend.’

  He may have been overweight, but he stayed light on his feet, both physically and politically. The hours he spent over dinner weren’t wasted, because he chose his dinner-partners carefully, and by the time Kennedy was elected he was known as one of the toughest and most knowledgeable negotiators in Congress. His main power base was the Department of Agriculture, where he formed intricate and lasting alliances with the most influential members of the bureaucracy, the faceless officials who really decided what went on. He ran for senator in 1964, and during the Johnson years he built up several enduring friendships with the heavyweight Southern Democrats who controlled the Agriculture Committee. In 1971, he was the prime mover behind a small but forceful group of senators who blocked attempts to abolish or adjust the parity ratio – the ratio between income and expenditure which was supposed to show how well America’s farmers were faring. The parity ratio usually showed the farmers were doing badly, and that they urgently needed federal support, so that by 1973 the government was handing them more than 2.5 billion dollars a year.

  What the parity ratio didn’t show was that most larger farmers were actually doing very well, and that many of those larger farmers were paying Shearson Jones hundreds of thousands of dollars to maintain their subsidies. By 1973 – when the federal farm programme was eventually changed under the Agriculture and Consumer Protection Act – the senator from Kansas was worth well over seven million dollars.

  He was said to have made another million out of illegal sales of rice to the North Vietnamese, but an exhaustive investigation in the Washington Post failed to come up with any concrete evidence. Shearson Jones had raised his fist in the Senate and asked God to strike him dead instantly if he had ever been guilty of illegal trafficking in grain or rice.

  Today, Shearson Jones was big, balding and buoyant – a huge and ebullient man at the peak of his career. He had occasionally been mentioned as vice-presidential material, although The New York Times had ruled out the possibility of his ever making the White House. ‘Too fat in an age of austerity,’ they had remarked, dismissively.

  The red-haired girl said, ‘What are you going to do now? Kiss me? Kick me out? Or are you going to sit there and seek oral gratification from that cigar for the rest of the night?’

  ‘I’m thinking,’ said Shearson.

  ‘Oh, you’re thinking. In the middle of our romantic courtship, you have to think?’

  He ignored her. ‘Make me another drink,’ he said. ‘I want to make one more phone call.’

  She got up from the ottoman, walked over, and kissed him on his bald forehead. There were pinpricks of sweat on his brow, and he still smelled of garlic from lunchtime. He glanced up at her and gave an appreciative ‘hmmph,’ but then he was used to the attentions of pretty young women. He was very rich, and very powerful, and apart from that the sheer bodily size of him exerted some sort of grotesque attraction over the unlikeliest girls. One of his mistresses had ecstatically described his love-making as ‘something between riding on Moby Dick in a rough sea, and bouncing on a huge feather bed.’

  He had known Della McIntosh fo
r just four days. He had seen her before, of course, because she was the Washington bureau chief for the Kansas City Herald-Examiner, and whenever he held a press conference or handed out prizes or opened his mouth in the Senate, Della McIntosh would have to be there. She had even interviewed his wife Margaret once, for a piece that had run under the headline ‘Living With The Stomach Of The Senate.’

  But four days ago, Margaret had been fortuitously out of town, visiting her diabetic sister in San Diego. And when Shearson and Della had found themselves together on the balcony of Senator Karl Leiderman’s elegant Georgetown house, both taking an oxygen break during a seven o’clock cocktail crush, it had been animal attraction at first sight, with nothing to hold it back.

  Della was petite – snub-nosed, green-eyed, with vivid red hair in a shaggy Farrah bob. Although she was small, her breasts were enormous – Playboy playmate size – and Shearson had taken one look at her and felt an almost irresistible urge to dig his podgy fingers into them. Della had been wearing a low-cut cocktail dress in electric blue, with a small sapphire cross dangling in her cleavage, and Shearson had walked across the balcony in his huge black tuxedo and loomed over her like Mount Baldy on a dark night.

  ‘That cross,’ he had rumbled, ‘is resting in the most desirable spot in the whole of the District of Columbia.’

  They had left the cocktail party separately. There was no way in which Shearson could ever slip out from anywhere unnoticed. They had met up an hour later at Le Faisan Restaurant, where he had treated her to dinner, and to the unparalleled spectacle of an average Shearson Jones repast. He had steadily eaten his way through turtle soup, fresh trout, roasted quails, rack of lamb, boeuf en croûte, salad, cheese, and a heaped plateful of profiteroles, smothered with hot chocolate and cream.

  They had toasted each other wordlessly in Hospices de Beaune.

  Now, over by the African-style cocktail cabinet – stained oak topped by minarets and pierced with mirrors – Della mixed them two vodka tonics. Shearson opened a brass-inlaid box and took out a telephone.