Soil (2 page)

1

Before the flood, a stouthearted young couple was putting down roots in the nearby town of Madrid, where they'd settled after college—a man, his wife, and their young son. They painstakingly refurbished a house and planted an attractive garden in the back, where the father let the toddler dig and explore and pluck green tomatoes too soon from the vine. Smiles were never absent from their thankful faces, and if there were troubles then no one bothered to recall them. But a young man, especially one so clever, will grow restless and sometimes throw away everything when he turns elsewhere to affirm his life's purpose.

The trouble started with compost. He first began making and experimenting with it for his job in soil management at the local Farm Service Agency. He started small, a few wooden bins in the backyard of the home on Nutt Street. He collected kitchen scraps and coffee grounds, raked leaves and grass clippings. He spread one ingredient over the next in lasagna layers, sprayed them down with the water hose, and turned the piles regularly with a garden fork. If properly maintained, the compost would actually become hot to the touch and would belch plumes of steam when stirred on cold mornings. He loved the earthy smell that rose from the mounds, the whiff of rot and fiber, the way the soil broke and fluffed a little more each day. Here was nature at work, made more efficient by man's guiding hand.

He began to judge everything for its recyclability. All matter was either carbon or nitrogen. Soon he was collecting bags of lawn debris from neighborhood curbs and canvassing farms for straw bales and manure. He sorted
leaves by species, made flowcharts of dung potency. Bins and mounds multiplied as he tinkered with ratios and tested fertility. He tilled up every square inch of backyard and planted vegetables and herbs, lined the front walk and driveway with big terra-cotta pots, each plot a test patch for some specially formulated recipe.

When he submitted a sample to a USDA-sanctioned exhibition, earning the highest marks in soil friability, nutrient retention, and water solubility, the local newspaper caught wind of it and dubbed him Compost Man. This gave his colleagues a good laugh. Even his wife joked to their friends about his growing “mudballs” out back and said she'd prefer him sneaking off with her lingerie catalogs than ogling the seed brochures the way he did.

One morning he walked out back to turn the piles and found that someone had laid a cruel turd atop one of his prize mounds. It was definitely human. The stench was complex and he found a fast-food napkin with brown streaks nearby. He couldn't believe the audacity. They'd just hopped up on the bin, draped themselves over the corner, and let one rip.

He paced the back porch and spent hours at the window, profiling every neighbor who walked by with a pet. Every jogger, every biker, every long-haired mischievous teen. What was this compulsion to foul something so pure and constructive? Who was deranged enough to do such a thing? He walked out back with his hammer and studded the rims of each bin with nails. Next time someone came snooping pants-down in the dark, they'd pay with blood.

His colleagues thought it was a hilarious prank. Even his wife suggested gently that he was taking it too hard. “We eat out of that soil, for God's sake!” he replied. “You want to end up in the hospital with a bacterial infection? Can you see our little son, dead from
E. coli
poisoning?”

She was skeptical of this, but he scoured the internet to prove the causes and insufficient cures of various bacteria and infections, moving on from there to viruses, superbugs, pandemics, extinction events. The deeper he dug, the more perils he uncovered.

Likewise the prank grew epic in his imagination. It was a pointed
statement—“I shit on your life”—made by a lone creep and endorsed by a society that deemed him irrelevant. Somehow the smallest things can break a man, and the hairline fracture deep within the young scientist spread over the next several months. It did not depress him or slow his obsession but rather excited his research, leading to more compost mounds and more outlandish experiments. He upset the whole neighborhood when he planted a late-­season crop of corn right there in the front yard. His wife was horrified by bean and cucumber vines planted in the rain gutters, cascading down like gaudy Christmas decorations. “You're turning our beautiful home into a feedlot,” she accused him.

He read incessantly and became an expert on diverse farming techniques from ancient to modern civilizations. His interpretation of historical patterns convinced him that poor soil management had led to the downfall of societies throughout time. He relayed all of these findings to his farmer clients and expounded on the hazards of modern farming. They were hidebound men who planted cotton, soybeans, and corn as their families had for generations, trying to eke out modest livings against increasingly volatile world markets. Times were tough enough. They had no use for antiquarian farming theories promoted by some arrogant, pencil-pushing upshot. Nor did they appreciate his accusations that they were squandering the soil by leaching it with chemical fertilizers and pesticides, casting a blight upon the land and rivers and seas with their shortsighted and unsustainable methods, virtually ensuring that their grandchildren, along with everyone else's, would wander the famished countryside like starving refugees in a desert of poisoned dust. All they wanted from him was help filling out subsidy applications and disaster relief forms.

The soil scientist grew bitter and withdrawn. He felt rather like a young suburban Moses, entrusted with critical information from on high that the general rabble was too distracted to glean. The agency confirmed this by requesting his resignation.

Their idyllic life threatened, his wife went back to school to get her teaching degree while he stayed home with the boy. But he did not mope and feel sorry for himself. Just before his forced retirement, the young farmer had
attended a regional ag conference where he heard a lecture on advances in hydro- and aeroponic technology delivered by a famous environmental scientist who made the stunning admission “Plants don't actually need soil to grow. Just a fissure for their roots to spread and soak up moisture and nourishment.”

It was an offhanded remark, on the way to a larger point, but to the soil scientist it felt like an atom bomb. The statement was so simple and staggering, so obvious.
Soil-free farming
. Why had he never seen it? Look at the bonsais and cacti in their rock gardens, the weeds growing up from cracks in the sidewalk.

His imagination vaulted years ahead to farms that operated indoors, fields stacked one atop the next in glass high-rises, each floor its own crop grown in recycled water and mineral baths. He saw farmers in white lab coats appraising the beautiful plants, no bugs or blemishes, no sweat or sunburn, not a speck of dirt in sight.
The future will be spotless!
Hoes and plows became droppers and beakers. Computers monitored optimal growing conditions. All of the equipment was powered by the sun and the wind, a perfect organic machine. The greatest pitfalls of agriculture—pestilence and disease, the unpredictability of weather, poisonous pollutants and industrial runoff—could be solved by making the whole process simpler, cleaner, and more efficient. He could build it and lead the innovation. He could make the world healthier and more peaceful. There was no time to waste. To proceed authentically, he would have to start from the ground up.

He searched for a piece of land, spent two months sorting through overpriced and unsuitable plots until he found a house with seventeen acres twenty miles south of town. It had been a rental property for years, but the owners had come on hard times and were looking to unload it quickly. The house was a charmless pile of bricks compared to their town cottage, and the backyard was full of castaway equipment and scrap. The fields were grown over, all scrub and marsh and raw potential. Beyond the house was pastureland and forest, even a river, the wild and portentous Tockawah River, which ran along the southwestern edge of the property and would serve as a constant source of
irrigation. It was the perfect site for his experiment. All of it could be his for a song.

He composed his pitch and approached his wife. She listened to him describe the experiments and the laboratory and the farm tower he would erect, how he intended to produce enough fresh food to supply the local population—“Not a farm so much as a growing system, indifferent to the whims of markets and nature.” The way he described it and the completeness of his vision revealed a surprising logic born from his craze, and she became seduced a little.

She wondered about the home they'd made, the comforts they'd earned. Couldn't they live in town and start a farming business on the side?

The start-up capital to make this dream a reality required both the proceeds from the Nutt Street house and the inheritance she'd recently received from her stepmother, an unexpected gift which might have been wisely spent paying off student loans or starting a college fund for the boy.

“What better way to prepare a boy than to raise him in the country?” he asked. Teach a boy to hunt, fish, and farm, and you've paved the way for an honest, salt-of-the-earth man to live free come hell or high water.

She got a far-off look in her eye. Could she see it all before her, just as he had? Or was she scared to say no, knowing that if she kept her husband and his ambition shackled here she risked losing the very things she loved?

She had faith in him and his passion. He was asking her to double down on their young fortune. They took the leap together and spent some of the best days of their marriage in this shared endeavor.

A year later they were ruined.

2

He looked like a scarecrow propped up in a johnboat with his floppy hat and weather-beaten cabana shirt, his sagging cargo shorts and big rubber trash-can boots. Clutching a limp cane pole, he fished idly, occasionally shoving himself into the shade with an old tennis racket he used for an oar. He looked twenty years older than a year ago, all gaunt and strung out now, sporting a wiry beard, hair dripping to his shoulders, sunken eyes hidden behind truck-stop sunglasses.

His name was James Mize. Those who still knew him called him Jay. He was out on the pond photographing the devastation for his insurance adjuster, and there was plenty to document.

The leased tractor, parked under its protective lean-to, was up to its axle in sludge, its engine clogged with mud and soon to be rusted shut. Thousands of dollars of tiered and raised garden beds, hoes and picks and shovels, acres of sprawling PVC irrigation lines—all of it lay submerged and useless beneath the waterline. The steel framework of his uncompleted greenhouse laboratory rose from the swamp like the upturned rib cage of some extinct prehistoric beast. He'd run shy of funds before installing the glass panes and solar panels, so those at least wouldn't have to be replaced.

He was completely out of money, not a dollar to his name. The lights and water had been shut off, along with the phone, internet, satellite TV. A preppy goateed lawyer from town had come snooping around, knocking on windows, jimmying business cards in the door. The bank had grown skeptical of its stake in all of this. Bankruptcy was imminent.

He was near starvation, all the crops destroyed and the last of his non-­perishables consumed. The only sustenance at hand was what he could pull from this miserable fishing hole beneath him. Even if hunger hadn't weakened his will, he had no means to escape this disaster. The gas tank was nearly dry in the sad hand-me-down Bronco given to him by his father, who'd died unexpectedly last winter.

Worse than all of this was being alone. No one to lend a word of encouragement, not even a critique. He reached inside his knapsack for the disposable camera to fire off a few shots for the insurance man, but he found himself fondling instead the little snub-nosed .38 Special he'd brought along to shoot snakes. The thought occurred to him—maybe he should make like his old man, just get it over with. This wasn't the first time he'd sat in the boat and considered it. Every time he guessed he'd hit rock bottom, it was just slow sinking mud underfoot, and there was no telling how low he might get, how long it might take to disappear completely.

Tockawah Bottom was a lump of yellow valley below the petered-out hill country, some of the last shrugs of Appalachia before the countryside pancaked down into the old Mississippi floodplain. It was a thankless hole that gave forth a reliably dull harvest of beans and corn and, if growers were so inclined to cast their lot in with the flagging cotton markets, that white gold for which the state's agriculture was latently famous. These lowlands were the basin for two minor conjoining rivers, the Tockawah and the Bogue Hoka, which dumped out in the Mississippi and then on to the Gulf of Mexico. At their confluence, these two rivers were apt to spill over.

Local naysayers warned him it was fool's play to farm these bottomlands. The river flooded every twenty years or so, and it was due for another. Besides, the market didn't pay out. It was cheaper to feed yourself from the grocery store than to till and plant and hoe and gather alone. You're gambling with your life, they said. If you don't starve, you'll work yourself to an early grave. There's good reason farming went out of fashion, they told him—it's too damn much trouble.

Of course, Jay was aiming to change all of that, and by then he was too deeply invested to take their caution seriously. He'd spent that first autumn engaged in heroic work—clearing brush, digging trenches, building and transferring soil, fashioning rain catches, erecting supports, staking out field plots. He'd cobbled together coops and pens for livestock, hired builders to pour the concrete footing and raise the framing for his lab. He imagined that in a matter of years, students and proselytes from all over the world would travel here to study the latest, most efficient growing methods, and they would adapt his techniques for use in their own cities and villages.

But neither could he completely reject his skeptics. Their warnings played into a concern which had been lurking in the back of his mind, and which had begun to take rapid shape now that he was caught up in real labor and had recognized the fickle tolerance nature held for man.

What the naysayers didn't understand was that it wasn't some quaint old notion or a naïve fondness for yesteryear, not even an entrepreneurial move toward trendy organic farming that made him come out here, all the way to nowhere, to invest the family savings in this house and the soggy field and all the tools and equipment required to make a proper start. He'd read the books on climate change, energy crises, and colony collapse. He'd read
The Road
. He'd studied the ancient prophecies, the newer ones too, noting all the harbingers of environmental and economic ruin. A comeuppance was due, and he didn't want to be stuck in town among the bleating mobs when it all went down. He aimed to be prepared, to protect his family from it when it came, whatever it was and however awful, this thing he'd begun to believe like a religion.

He tried explaining it to his wife, Sandy, but she was a pragmatist who held little patience for his dark projections. He didn't push the issue with her because he knew that when the time came she would be able to adapt to anything, whatever calamities the world might bring them.

And that's why it was such a blow to him when, some ten months after they'd started on this dream together, she came to him out of the blue and surrendered. She was taking their six-year-old son, Jacob, with her back to
town, where the burdens were more civilized and could be blotted out with television and pills.

She told him he was losing his mind, that he was putting the family in jeopardy, all for some paranoid assumption that civilization was sliding into a new dark age. He saw the opposite—society had lost
its
mind and he was only protecting his loved ones from the ramifications—and he couldn't believe they'd become so diametrically opposed over something so obvious to him. He tried to convince her to leave the boy, who had taken a shine to country living and had adopted a puppy and had only just begun to explore the wilderness, but she wouldn't hear of it.

Perhaps his greatest mistake was letting them go, but at the time he was too encumbered to chase them. Bills were pouring in, the summer harvest had to be gathered and sold. Before he ate them all, there were chickens to tend. The orchard had to be planted by fall. The cold frames and greenhouse for next winter's crops wouldn't build themselves. He knew his wife and child would be safe in town with her father, a retired professor with a large house to himself, and that they'd return once the hard foundation work was complete.

As the season wore on, the sky refused to rain; insects seized the crops. He overcompensated with heavy irrigation, which invited mold and rot and disease into his beds. What didn't die, the deer and squirrels and other woodland menaces devoured.

Many days he struggled to remember why he'd started any of this in the first place, and then other days he managed to pump himself up, feeling rather like some tobacco-road Job who would be redeemed only through suffering and whose rewards would be congruent to that which he could bear.

Then came the August rains, which were surely nature's ploy to finish him. The Tockawah overran its banks and engulfed his property, bringing with it all the leaves and limbs and fallen trees from the nearby woods, loads of detritus from upriver too. A turd in the compost was a speck compared to what the Tockawah shat out over his crops, making a lake of his field and a mockery of his attempts to do good by the blessed earth.

And so, finally, this is where ambition had wrung him out—a lonesome little man in a toy boat, bobbing around his mud puddle. It was all in the world he still possessed, and even this, a brief illusion of lakefront property, was retreating daily by the foot, leaving only a stretch of black goop and a band of rotten grass and cane and brush that grew wider every day, hemming him in like razor wire.

He glided along the shrinking margins of his field and snapped photos. He rowed in and out of the rusted armatures of his watermelon forest, under the monkey-bar trellis for his stalled pea vines. It was difficult to imagine what had attracted him to this work in the first place. It seemed nothing would ever grow here again.

But then, in the lump of collapsed mud that was once his ziggurat herb garden, he noticed basil sprouts and remembered that life stubbornly returns every time. Maybe he was no Job after all but instead Noah, the tormented visionary who'd ridden out the flood while the scourge of history was washed away. What if the river had not destroyed his land but wiped clean the old mistakes and deposited a whale-load of rich, free fertilizer—all the river soil and fish meal and rotting plants that make a nice compost—for next season's cultivation?

As he knew so well from his science, civilizations throughout time—in fact, every form of life on the planet—were perpetuated by this cycle of decay and regrowth. It was only his impatience, the tempo of society and not nature, that had prevented him from seeing it before. And as he felt the white numbing warmth of the sun on him and enjoyed a new cleansing breath of pure air, he believed that he could still win his wife and son back, that he could still coax his fields to fertility, and that his setbacks, the ruination of his farm and the disintegration of his family, would one day be charted as necessary bumps in the road over which all great achievement must pass.

Out of this reverie Jay heard an idling engine and then saw it there on the road behind him, a pickup truck with camouflage detailing pulled over to the shoulder. The passenger window was down and the driver leaned out the window, braying, “Hey, buddy. Anythang bitin?”

Jay stared back, trying to recognize this person. He thought it might be an old friend having a laugh, but after a moment he realized it was only an interloper making small talk. Who wanted simply to know how things were biting? The guy was probably angling for money or permission to fish, some preface to a scam.

“This is private land!” Jay shouted back.

He snatched his racket and gave the boat a bitter shove away from the road, back toward the house.

Privacy, he believed, was the fastest vanishing civility among men. He'd already posted a No Trespassing sign by the road, a futile gesture to defend his field from the carloads of illiterate country tramps who showed up with their poles and tackle, fishing the ditches, sometimes casting right from the front seats of their old beat-down cars. Who but a common thief would just walk up and take food from a man's crop? He'd recently caught a pair of shirtless teenagers whipping around his field in their daddy's high-powered Bass Tracker like a couple of Panamanian drug smugglers—as if the spilled river had negated all property division!

Just then a vile stench rambled down his throat and turned his stomach. Something dead, too potent to be beached fish or rotting timber. This was something sweet and worse.

Up ahead some fifty yards, a turkey buzzard balanced itself with awkward wings, betraying the carcass in a clutch of tall mud-tangled grass. Was it truly something or just a wet, gnarled log poking out of the murk? He rowed closer, burying his nose in his shirt. It was hideous, all contorted and half-submerged, reared back and eaten with lesions. He thought it could be a deer or a heifer.

The bird's head bobbed and wrenched, tearing off wet mouthfuls. It stopped midchew to give Jay a daring glance. It made no distinction about its prey. Dead is dead. Something in the bird's savage possession told what it had and the lengths to which it might go to keep it. He turned back toward the road and squinted to see if the camouflage truck was still there, but the road was empty.

He looked again at the buzzard, slurping and gagging, its neck contorting as it choked down scraps of brown meat. Jay took a swing at the bird with the racket. It hissed at him and then rose aloft with much clumsy effort, making a few passes overhead before lighting on a tree branch some twenty yards away.

“Holy God,” said Jay, studying the remains. He leaned over the bow of the boat and looked into the face of it, into scraps of flesh that once gave expression. There were horrible festering holes from which eyes had been plucked and the hollow nasal cavity where a detached bulb of cartilage flapped. Receding lips exposed its teeth so that it looked like a whinnying horse. Some green congealment had bubbled up from a jagged divot in the skull. The face reminded him of the alleged alien autopsy photos from the UFO crash at Roswell, all bloated and fabricated. Against all doubt, he noticed clearly a hand, just under the water's surface, in a rigid palsied gesture. Five fingers grasping for some last mercy.

A car sped past on the road. Jay righted himself and whipped around, his eyes darting nervously over the field. A six-foot wall of tangled scrub and young trees barely shielded him from prying eyes. Any nosy passerby with a pair of binoculars and a pestering, fool-sighted curiosity could observe and jump to conclusions. Next thing you know, the entire sheriff's department would be on the scene by nightfall. It was not outside his own rational line of thought that he might spend the night in county lockup.

Jay thrust his racket under the water and shoved himself furiously toward cover. He wasn't getting anywhere fast enough, so he tumbled out and waded through the sucking mud with the sensation of running away in dreamlike suspension. At last, towing the boat behind him, he made it to the safety of low-hanging willow tree branches on the far side of the field, up near the gravel driveway. He tied the boat to the tree and climbed back inside. He dumped his boots and sat with wet socks for a long time, watching the heap at the far end of the lake.