In the Field

by Rachel Pastan

  “Thatch was mistaken,” she said. “I wasn’t sick. I had to go home. To Brooklyn. Suddenly.” My brother, she thought. But Charlie was none of Krause’s business.

  Slowly, with stiff knuckles, he began to stuff tobacco into the bowl. Kate watched him: the long fingers, the hairy backs of his hands through which age spots were visible, matching the stain on the lapel. Once the pipe was going, he seemed to relax. His eyes under his tangled eyebrows looked brighter. “He also said—John Thatcher—that you have been spending a lot of time in the greenhouse.”

  “Yes.” She tried to say more—that she liked it there, that she cared about the work—but no words came.

  “He said you are a quick study,” Dr. Krause said.

  “Thank you.”

  He looked up sharply. “He said! Not me. I will have to see the evidence.”

  “Thatch has explained to me about the experiments you’re doing,” Kate said with effort as puffs of brownish smoke began to straggle from the bowl. “How wonderful if you can figure out what makes the coleus leaves change color.”

  “If!” he echoed indignantly.

  Again Kate was thrown into confusion. “I just meant if you had time, before you retire. I heard you were retiring next year.”

  “Retiring from teaching, yes. I’ve had a lifetime of students already. Two lifetimes! But research—that’s a different story. Once you get the research bug, you do not recover from it so easily. The experiment taking shape in the mind. The excitement of waiting for the plants to reveal themselves. Reveal their secrets, just to you! Do you understand?”

  “I think so,” Kate said.

  The pipe was going nicely now, the smoke feathering diagonally up toward the flaking ceiling. “Well,” he said, “I will give you another chance.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Krause,” Kate said stiffly.

  “Thank John Thatcher.”

  “But there’s one thing.”

  The chair creaked as he leaned back, puffing hard on his pipe, his cheeks bulging and deflating like the rubber bulb of a pipette. “Hmm?”

  “I need to get paid.”

  “What?” Smoke rolled from his long nose in twin dragon streams.

  “Thatch gets paid,” she said. “John Thatcher. For the same work.”

  Dr. Krause banged the pipe against the desk. “Mr. Thatcher is more experienced than you, young lady.”

  “By a month! But I’ve caught up. I can do everything he can.”

  Dr. Krause squinted at her as though he was really looking at her for the first time. She felt cold and exposed, like a salamander when its log is lifted. She raised her chin. He wasn’t the only stubborn one.

  “In another month, I’ll be doing it faster,” she said.

  Slowly, he brought his pipe back to his mouth. His lids drooped, revealing the red-veined skin. Out the window, a crow flapped slowly across the sky, a black shape bisecting the white world.

  “You wouldn’t work for no money, would you?” Kate said.

  “It’s a privilege to do this work!”

  Kate agreed with him—she did! But she couldn’t take the words back. She needed money. If he wouldn’t pay her, she’d have to get a job as a waitress, or washing dishes in the cafeteria, and she wouldn’t have time for both classes and the greenhouse. She blinked furiously to stop the tears. The last thing she wanted was his pity.

  Dr. Krause fumbled in his pocket for his handkerchief, and for one terrible moment Kate thought he was going to offer it to her. But he didn’t. With his gaze fixed on the empty space out the window where the crow had been, he nodded, and wiped his own watery, rheumy eyes. “All right,” he said.

  Thatch was in the greenhouse measuring the plants with a tape measure. “Need help?” Kate said.

  Thatch let the metal tape slither back into the casing. She watched his face open with pleasure, then immediately close up again. He fingered a leaf on the nearest coleus plant. “Where did you go?”

  “Something suddenly came up.”

  “I hope it was important.”

  “You might hope it wasn’t important!” Kate retorted.

  He sighed and let go of the leaf. “You’re right. I hope it wasn’t important.”

  She walked over to the binder and picked it up. “You measure, I’ll record.”

  “Is everything okay?” Thatch asked at last.

  She looked around at the coleus in their tranquil rows, vigorously alchemizing CO2 , and sighed. They stood together awkwardly under the bright lights, among the black coiled hoses, among the silent plants lined up as though in pews. “Shall we get started?” She turned the pages with their neat columns of carefully penciled notations. “I’d hate to waste Dr. Krause’s money.”

  Thatch’s face went scarlet. “What if I split my pay with you,” he said.

  Kate looked up.

  “It’s not fair that I get paid and you don’t. We both know it’s not because I got here first. I wouldn’t have blamed you if you didn’t come back.” He was so thin in his slightly too short khaki pants and white shirt, all ribs and scrawny limbs—almost like a scarecrow except for his warm, serious eyes rimmed with dark lashes.

  “Oh,” she said. “That’s—”

  “I’d hate it if you left,” he said. “I’d feel awful.”

  Kate felt awful. Though she didn’t know why she should.

  “And maybe, after a while, Dr. Krause would change his mind.”

  “He already did,” Kate said. But Thatch wasn’t listening.

  “You wouldn’t have to feel you owed me anything. I mean, there wouldn’t be any strings or …” His face, which had returned to almost its normal color, flushed again. “I couldn’t give you half,” he said, and looked down at a small spider creeping across the concrete floor. “Because I have to—I mean, I could give you forty percent. For now, anyway. Would that … ?” He looked up shyly.

  “He already did,” Kate repeated, louder. “Krause. He changed his mind. He is going to pay me.”

  Thatch blinked. His eyes were hazel, a hue not addressed in the section on eye color in Castle’s Genetics, which covered only blue and brown. “You talked to him?”

  “This morning. In his office.” She paused, waiting for him to catch up. “So, you see, I don’t need your money.”

  The spider, black and thick with short strong legs, detoured to get around a drain in the floor.

  “Good!” Thatch said. “I mean, it’s good he changed his mind.”

  Kate thought he sounded disappointed. Perhaps he had hoped there might be strings after all. But then he smiled—such a warm and generous smile that it almost made him handsome.

  Kate smiled back and ducked her head. The plants around them glowed green as jade. Thatch stepped toward her. Animal heat blazed off him as he stood over her, shading out the light.

  She pushed the binder toward him and moved to the nearest row. “On second thought,” she said, “I’ll measure.”

  PART TWO

  1928

  CHAPTER 9

  “I have an idea.” Kate stood in the doorway of Thatch’s tiny office watching him brew coffee on the hot plate. His back in its white shirt hunched as he measured the grounds.

  “What kind of idea?”

  “How to see maize chromosomes clearly enough to describe them!”

  Thatch lifted his head. No one had been able to see maize chromosomes that clearly. When you managed to capture them under the microscope at all, they were tangled and indistinct, like a litter of kittens in a darkened room. If you could find a way to switch on the lights and really see them, that would change everything. His spoon tapped against the side of the coffee pot in quick triplets, but he only asked calmly, “What does Cole say?”

  Cole was Kate’s graduate adviser, a youngish, literal-minded, nearsighted assistant professor working on tr
isomics in corn. At least, he was her adviser until she figured out how to get a better one. “I haven’t told him yet.” Kate waited for Thatch’s frown. Thatch believed in running everything by one’s adviser. But then, his was a perfectly reasonable Minnesotan named Lund who liked Thatch’s ideas, when he paid attention to them. Thatch sometimes lamented Lund’s lack of attention—“I wish he would actually advise me”—but Kate envied Thatch’s freedom. Cole wanted to know everything she planned to do, and mostly, when she told him, he shot down her ideas. “I wanted to see what you thought first,” Kate said. “Why should Cole ever even have to know about it, if I’ve overlooked something?”

  But she knew she hadn’t overlooked anything.

  In one of their last meetings before his stroke, Dr. Krause had said, “You have a good brain, Miss Croft. That is a piece of luck. Make good use of it.” As though her brain were separate from her: an instrument, like a violin, that she might play well or badly. In the years she worked for Krause, Kate had come to see that he was not a terribly good scientist. He had ideas—possibly even good ideas—but he got so excited about them that he raced ahead instead of proceeding by considered steps. When designing his experiments, he forgot to keep in mind the one simple thing he wanted to prove. She remembered her father’s words: You have to think things through.

  But Krause had helped her in important ways. He had opened the door.

  After college, Kate and Thatch had moved more or less seamlessly into Cornell’s PhD program in botany. Now they were both subjects in the maize kingdom ruled by Evelyn Whitaker, though neither of them worked for the Great Man directly. Still, they attended the lab meetings he presided over on Tuesday afternoons, and he nodded to them when he passed them in the halls, not knowing their names, probably, but recognizing them as stewards of his realm as surely as if they had worn his coat of arms on their lab coats—Thatch’s always shabby-looking, Kate’s laundered and neatly pressed. On first meeting them, people tended to take Kate and Thatch for a couple, but their relationship, whatever it was, wasn’t that. Still, there was no one better than Thatch to toss an idea around with, or to share a pot of coffee or a bottle of whiskey. Kate had learned to appreciate Canadian Club, which Thatch got from a friend (he always had a lot of friends), and which burned down through her all the way to the pit of her stomach, clearing away the static. She had learned a lot over the past five years: how to slice a maize root cell into sections and fix each section to a slide with paraffin; how to tease a glimmer of an idea into a testable hypothesis; how to walk through a field or a greenhouse and see what had changed from the day before—to notice what was worth noticing. How to make it clear to a boy that she wasn’t interested in him that way without having to come out and say it. Not that boys were falling all over her. But there was a certain kind of boy—generally a scientist or a musician—who admired her: her sharp eyes and her deft hands and her quick mind. Her blend of reticence and bluntness. It was nice to be admired. It was even nice, from time to time, after a couple of drinks, to neck in the dark on someone’s sofa or on a park bench, as long as you knew you could call a halt when your body froze up. Which, so far, hers always did.

  “Fine,” Thatch said now. “What’s your idea?”

  Kate came into the cubbyhole and cleared off a space for herself on the desk which was wedged between a wobbly bookshelf and a filing cabinet that didn’t close properly. But at least Thatch had an office. Kate had only a desk in Cole’s lab, the scarred surface of which she cleaned every few days with a solution of sodium bicarbonate and warm water. Her papers were always filed, her books alphabetized, her microscope sheathed when not in use to keep off dust. Cole, whose papers—and, worse, his slides—were scattered everywhere, had complimented her on her “housekeeping skills” with the desultory approval of a man whose wife picks up his socks. “You might bring a little of that elbow grease over here,” he had said once, watching her move the cleaning rag in careful circles. But Kate had replied, “I’d be afraid I’d make a mess of your things,” and that, thankfully, had been that.

  Cole’s research program was struggling, and he had a wife and three small Coles at home, the youngest still in diapers. But he wasn’t an ogre. He tacked his children’s crayoned pictures on the wall over his desk. When he was in a good mood on Mondays, he asked Kate what she had done over the weekend. Though he had to know that mostly what she did with her weekends was work. “All work and no play,” he liked to scold, possibly meaning well.

  Kate had met Mrs. Cole once, when she came into the lab to bring the bagged lunch her husband had forgotten (a neighbor was watching the children, she explained), on which occasion she had looked Kate up and down with curiosity and promised to invite her for dinner. So far, thankfully, she hadn’t gotten around to it. Kate dared to hope she never would.

  Kate accepted a cup of Thatch’s hot-plate coffee and waited until he was seated and looking up at her. With his lanky body and his big square face and his floppy hair, Thatch still looked like a farm boy. But he had won the ag school prize the year they graduated and was gaining a reputation in the botany department for the clarity of his thinking. Last year, he’d had his name on a paper of Lund’s that had been published in Genetics, after which he had gathered his courage and traveled upstate to break it to his father that he would not be coming back to manage the cows.

  “I learned about a new method in my cytogenetics course,” Kate said. She explained, carefully and clearly, about Belling’s technique. There were two things you had to do to make this technique work. First, you prepared a new stain, called acetocarmine, which made the chromosomes stand out vividly under the microscope, like birds against the sky. Second, you squashed the cell under a slip cover, flattening it whole rather than slicing it up like a ham. This was called the squash technique. Belling had done it with Datura cells—jimsonweed, with its pretty, poisonous flowers—but Kate thought it would work with corn, too. “I don’t see why it wouldn’t,” she said.

  “Are you telling me no one has tried?”

  “Well, people have tried,” Kate said. “It just needs a few adjustments. I’m fairly sure I can do it.”

  “Even though nobody else has been able to.” Thatch laughed. But he was listening.

  “So you see why I can’t tell Cole yet.” Again she did her best to control her voice. Even with Thatch she wanted to be careful not to seem overconfident or naïve. But her excitement bubbled up, and she could feel her face glowing. She bent her head and sipped the coffee, which was muddy and strong. Her heart was skipping impatiently. If you could count and characterize the chromosomes of corn—as had been done for fruit flies—the whole field would be busted open!

  Thatch said nothing. He was thinking it over. He knew her track record for doing what she said she would do.

  “If I don’t do something soon,” she burst out, “I’ll never do anything! Cole’s project is going nowhere. You know it. Everybody knows it. Even he must know it! If he would admit it, at least it might be possible to get him to do something else. It’s dishonest, really, if you think about it, the way he keeps plugging pointlessly away. Not to mention a waste of resources.”

  What was especially galling was that Cole’s project was actually promising. It involved trisomics, plants whose cells had an extra copy of one of their chromosomes, an abnormality that made them useful to study. Often, as it turned out, it was the mutants and anomalies—the organisms that flouted the usual rules—that were worthy of attention, shedding light on normal processes. But Cole’s grinding, unimaginative methods weren’t yielding any insights so far, nor did they seem likely ever to.

  “Maybe he’s just in a slow patch,” Thatch said. “Maybe you can help him get through whatever the roadblock is.”

  “Then he’d really hate me.”

  “He doesn’t hate you.”

  “He doesn’t like me,” Kate said.

  “You mean you don’t like him.
Anyway, he doesn’t have to like you. He just has to supervise you.”

  “He’s supervising me, all right,” Kate said. “Right out of the field.” She knew Thatch didn’t like it when she talked like that, but she couldn’t help it. She needed to do some work that stood out. “Maybe I should take the idea to Whitaker,” she said. “He’d see its value.” She looked at Thatch. “Wouldn’t he?”

  “You can’t go over Cole’s head,” Thatch said. “Talk to him. He’s not an idiot.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  Thatch looked annoyed. Then, as though that wasn’t enough, Jax Harrison stuck his head around the doorway. “So sure of what?” he said.

  Kate glared up into Jax’s pale, mobile, snub-nosed face. “We were just gossiping.”

  “Would you like some coffee?” Thatch asked. “There’s still a bit left in the pot.”

  “No, thanks. I prefer mine less sludgy.”

  Jax was a year ahead of Kate and Thatch, already working on his dissertation project. It was said he had defied his father by refusing to take over the family empire of tree farms, paper mills, and pencil factories. He was working on male sterility—nonviable pollen—which seemed to be carried on a single gene. It was an intriguing problem, and possibly an important one, though not one on which he had yet made much progress. Still, if the maize chromosomes could be characterized, even Jackson Henry Harrison III might be able to solve it. He cracked the knuckles of his long white hands. “I have some gossip, though,” he said. “I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.”

  Kate and Thatch glanced at each other. Her look said Make him go away, and Thatch’s said Be nice.

  “We weren’t really gossiping,” Thatch said. “Kate was just running an idea past me.”

  “And Thatch was telling me it was a bad one,” Kate said quickly.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “What’s your gossip, Jax?” Kate said. “You’re dying to tell us.”

  “What do you have to trade?”

  “Don’t be an ass,” Thatch said.