Heat and Light (8 page)

“We can't go on like this,” she said and said and said, until finally Mack heard her. “I need to go full-time. I don't mind.” It was partly true. Rena minded the hospital, she minded it terribly; but full-time would be no worse than part-time had been. Now she's a floater, working whichever department is shorthanded: Surgical, Medical,
Emergency. Second shift—three to eleven—leaves her mornings free to help Mack with the milking. By the time she leaves for the hospital, the daily chores are done.

YESTERDAY, HER DAY OFF,
Rena spent in Pittsburgh. Her first stop was Verdant. She met with Natalie Lavender in the office above the restaurant—an airy, sun-filled room with blond wood floors, its perimeter ringed with green plants. Glorious smells wafted up through the floorboards: bacon, sautéed onions. A cool breeze floated through the open windows, the hum of urban traffic.

“I'm sorry, Rena. It's nothing personal. Friend-Lea makes a marvelous product.”

Natalie resembled an aging movie actress: tall, slender, her hair a silver blond not found in nature. Rena studied her face in duplicate. There was the real Natalie at her immaculate desk, cool and composed in a pale linen dress; and hanging on the wall behind her, a recent cover of
Three Rivers
magazine, Natalie in her white chef's jacket beneath a bold headline:
FARM TO TABLE
STAR CHEF BRINGS LOCAVORE EATING TO THE
B
URGH
.

“Was it something we did?” As always in Natalie's presence, she felt disheveled, a dowdy farm wife in worn sandals and a cotton skirt she'd made herself, badly, the flowered pattern mismatched at the seams.

“Our customers read the newspaper. They know what's going on in your part of the world.”
Your pat of the wuld.
Natalie was from Australia or New Zealand; Rena could never remember which.

“I don't understand.” Up at dawn to help with the milking; then numbed by hours of highway driving, rattled by the search for a parking space, queasy from the strong coffee served by Natalie's assistant. Rena was not at her best.

“Verdant is completely transparent about its sourcing.” Natalie handed over a sheet of paper. “This is tonight's menu.”

Rena read aloud. “
Angus filet with local microgreens, 30. Diamond
Farms grass-fed beef, Lorain County, OH.
That's a lot of information.”

“Our customers want to know exactly what they're eating, and where it comes from.”

Rena scanned the page. An item on the dessert menu caught her eye. “
Profiteroles with Seasonal Berries, 10. Potter County strawberries, Hillsdale Farm, Eastfield, PA. Saxon County Cream, Friend-Lea Dairy, Bakerton, PA.
What are profit rolls?”

“Cream puffs,” Natalie said.

“Who could eat ten of them?”

“No, that's the price. Ten dollars.”

“For cream puffs.”

“It's an ambitious price point for Pittsburgh, but our customers are willing to pay it.” Apologetic smile. “That's part of the issue, really. If you've spent a couple hundred dollars on dinner, you feel entitled to ask the farmer a few questions. Such as, where does your water come from?”

Rena's face went hot—a regular occurrence in recent months, and stress only made it worse. “We have a well.”

“Which is fed by the water table. Which lies beneath your farm and all the surrounding properties.” Natalie paused significantly. “How many of your neighbors have signed gas leases?”

“A few.”

“Yes. And can you guarantee that none of those chemicals are leaching into the water your animals are drinking?”

“Okay, but what can we do? Should we have the water tested?”

“I would, if I were you. But regardless.” Natalie turned her lovely hands palm up. “That doesn't solve
my
problem. When customers see Saxon County on the menu, they think gas drilling. Not all of them, certainly. But the ones who do are quite vocal about it. And I'm not sure they're wrong.”

“Our land is clean.” The flush spread across Rena's chest, her throat. “We've had gas guys knocking at our door for two years now. I can't tell you how many. I don't even let them in the house.”

“But your neighbors do.”

There was no arguing that point.

“I'm sorry, Rena. Friend-Lea milk is the best I've found anywhere. I'll have a hard time replacing it.” Natalie offered her hand. “Good luck to you.”

Rena left the restaurant through the back door, feeling or imagining the pitying looks of the kitchen staff. She drove around the block to a convenience store parking lot, then dialed Mack's cell phone. The phone lived in a basket on the kitchen table, a catchall for Mack's personal clutter: snuff tins, sweaty bandannas, the odd can of Bag Balm. Rena imagined it ringing in the empty house.

“Verdant dumped us,” she told the voice mail. “I'll explain later. It's kind of complicated.”

What was the point of having a mobile phone, if you never took it with you?

Somewhere behind her, a car alarm shrieked.

The shift to organic had been Rena's idea entirely. While Mack's father was alive, such a thing would have been impossible: Pete had fixed ideas in all matters, and Mack, who idolized him, had inherited his blind spots. Until his death, and for a long time after, she viewed any sort of change as a betrayal of his memory.
You want to do
what
?

Organic,
Rena said, feeling audacious. She was not, herself, a true farmer. A coal miner's daughter, she'd spent her childhood in a back yard the size of a sandbox, behind a company house on Polish Hill. Her young self had envisioned a different future entirely—a city life, like people on television.

Like everything else, that changed when she fell in love with Mack.

As couples did, they split the daily chores according to their aptitudes and interests. Mack's distaste for business matters—indifference verging on hostility—meant that it was Rena who read
Farm News
and
Dairy Week
and
Graze;
who put in for federal
MILC payments; who manned the ledger, money in, money out. In this particular argument, it gave her a clear advantage. While Mack squirmed like a restless schoolboy, Rena made the case for organic, with hard numbers: the higher base price for fluid milk, the lower input costs of rotational grazing, the savings in freight and vet bills.

She wasn't wrong. For nine years her plan had worked. More than worked, according to Mack: it had made farming fun again. Their decisions were no longer made by feed and fertilizer salesmen. To Pete's herd of grade Holsteins, Mack added Jerseys and Jersey crosses. To boost their forages, they rented extra acreage from Peachy Rouse. Within three years, Friend-Lea Acres was certified organic. Their milk check nearly doubled. There was no going back, or so it had seemed.

Rena drove, brooding. Verdant had been a reach for them. They'd landed the account completely by accident, had never heard of the restaurant until Natalie Lavender came to
them.
She'd been buying Friend-Lea milk from a neighborhood health food store, the Village Greengrocer, and was tired of paying the retail markup. She was interested, too, in other products: whipping cream, sour cream. When she called the farm—they still had no separate phone number for the business—Mack was skeptical; but Rena saw a rare opportunity. If Natalie Lavender—author of a popular cookbook, a frequent guest on TV cooking shows—chose Friend-Lea milk and cream, other restaurants would follow. Besides, Rena told Mack, they were already delivering to Pittsburgh. An extra stop at Verdant wouldn't cost them anything.

And just as she predicted, more accounts followed: a gourmet deli, a pastry shop; a new French restaurant, wildly popular, its every table booked until Christmas. Fifty gallons a week, a hundred. How long before those customers were scared away, too?

As many things did, the thought made Rena perspire. She fiddled with the truck's air conditioner, which needed a freon recharge.
The fan blew a feeble stream of tepid air. In the restaurant business, reputation was everything. Did their other customers know that Friend-Lea Acres was surrounded by gas wells? What exactly were people saying?

Ronny Zimmerman would know.

His store, the Village Greengrocer, had been their first Pittsburgh account. Back then Rena had delivered his milk herself, packed into Igloo coolers at the back of her station wagon. Of all her customers, he was the only one she'd call a friend.

She parked in the tiny lot behind the store and went in through the back door. Inside, a lone customer browsed the shelves of supplements and homeopathics, teas, dried herbs, and weird-smelling soaps. A small refrigerated case was stocked with Friend-Lea milk and yogurt. Despite its name, the store sold no other actual food.

She found Ronny at the cash register, hunched over a newspaper, in an old concert T-shirt and his trademark rainbow suspenders—dressed exactly as he had in 1978, possibly in the same actual clothes. Like its owner, the store was resistant to change. The Nag Champa incense he burned to hide his pot smoking; the walls plastered with homemade flyers advertising guitar lessons, vegan potluck suppers, midwives to deliver your baby at home. Faded Tibetan prayer flags gave the place a defeated air, like a used car lot gone out of business.

Ronny looked up from his paper. “Rena! What brings you to my humble emporium?”

“I had a meeting in town. I need to talk to you.”

“You look like you could use some enlightening refreshment.” He reached under the counter for his rolling papers. At that moment, the door opened. “Hey, man!” he called over her shoulder. “Rena, have you met my buddy Lorne?”

She turned.

The man was her own age, lean and wiry, handsome in a long-haired way. He carried a stack of green paper. Later she would try
to reconstruct the moment, her first sight of him—the alert dark eyes, the loose grace of his walk. At the time she noticed none of this; she was simply irritated at the intrusion. Ronny's hippie friends could rant for hours about local politics, the evils of artificial sweeteners, the nutritional bankruptcy of school lunches, diatribes that bled one into another as the joint was passed.

“Lorne Trexler,” he said, offering his hand.

“Rena's my farmer friend. The Friend-Lea Dairy lady. Let me see that.” Ronny plucked a sheet of green paper from Lorne's stack. “Hey, not bad! ‘GET THE FRACK OUT OF PENNSYLVANIA.' I came up with that myself. Clever, right?”

“You're a genius, Ronny.” Trexler handed Rena a flyer. “Sorry to interrupt. But as a landowner, you might be interested.”

Tell the governor we've had enough!
she read.
Get Big Gas out of
OUR BACK YARD!

“There's a protest in Harrisburg next month,” said Trexler. “If there's enough interest we're going to hire a bus. Are you in?”

“No. Maybe. I don't know much about it.” She blotted her forehead with one of Mack's bandannas, stashed in her purse for this purpose.

“You're in luck, Rena. Lorne is an expert. Maybe the greatest living authority on hydro-fracking, water contamination, the whole clusterfuck.”

“That's an exaggeration.” Trexler smiled disarmingly. “I'm just a geologist. And, I guess, a community organizer, though that's a recent development. Where's your farm?”

“Saxon County.”

He regarded her with new interest. “Lots of drilling up there, and it's only going to get worse. Half the county is under lease.”

“No shit? You never told me that.” Ronny eyed her suspiciously, mistrust written on his face, creeping doubts about the purity of Friend-Lea milk. Another account they were destined to lose.

“Well, it's not
that
bad. But I think some people have signed
leases.” Rena thought of the neighbors who'd come calling, Mack's newfound ambivalence:
It's good money, Rena. We could use it.
“Not everyone, though. Not us.”

“If the community is divided, it's the perfect time to organize.”

“I'm not very political,” said Rena.

“Nobody is, until it's too late.” Trexler seemed to be studying her, which was disconcerting. She couldn't remember the last time a man had looked at her.

“This is where to find me, if you change your mind.” He handed her a business card from his pocket:
LORNE TREXLER, CHAIR, DEPARTMENT OF GEOLOGY, STIRLING COLLEGE
.
Rena had never met a professor before. Her nursing instructors at the community college—all local, all female—somehow didn't count.

Ronny pinned the flyer to the bulletin board. “Tell her, Lorne. There's people out west who can light their tap water on fire.”

“That's impossible,” said Rena.

“Oh, yeah? Stay tuned.” Lorne Trexler had a particular way of smiling. His smile took three full seconds to develop. Later Rena would time it, the slow smile she'd always associate with him.

“Remember Love Canal? In a couple years that's going to look like a neighborhood nuisance. They're fracking in twenty states. This is ecological disaster on a grand scale.”

“Love what?”

Ronny gaped. “Love Canal? Toxic waste? Dioxins?
Not In My Back Yard
?”

A lick of sweat trailed down Rena's back. “I must've missed that.”

“Forgive her, Lorne.” Ronny's hands were busy under the counter rolling a surreptitious joint. “Here's the
Reader's Digest
version: they drained the canal and turned it into a dump. Twenty thousand tons of chemical waste buried there, and what did they do? They built a school on it.”

“How do you do that without looking?” Rena said.

“The trees died. The grass died. Black sludge in people's basements. Was that you?”

They all stared at Rena's abdomen. Again her stomach made a creaking noise, like a barn door swinging open. Ronny lit the joint.