The Corn Husk Experiment

by Andrea Cale

  “Boston’s victory party was supposed to take place in the city at a nightclub called the Coconut Grove. The place caught on fire. It went down in flames that night. Almost everybody in there died—491 people gone; 491. Poor, poor souls.”

  The heavy news made Devin’s stress finally evaporate like the steam from a hot shower.

  “Devin, Boston’s loss of the game spared Grandpa’s life as well as everyone else’s on his team. With the loss of the game, there was no victory party that night.”

  The Hustler’s storytelling would mark the only time the hard man gave his son some perspective about the game of football.

  On this night, it was enough to help his boy drift off to sleep.

  CHAPTER 3

  MAXINE

  The Lonely One

  As Devin sat atop the picnic table on the eve of his season opener and longed for his distant days at Disney, a young woman sat stiffly upright aboard the United Airlines Airbus flying over his family’s home. Unlike the people seated around her, she wasn’t reading a book or getting prepared for sleep or planning to ask an attendant for cheap headphones to watch Runaway Bride, the feature presentation that was being offered to the full flight of 138 passengers.

  Instead, Maxine sat and thought. Those were two things she always did on flights, at the grocery store check-out, or in the waiting room of the dentist’s office. She’d think and ponder and stew over a trio of torments.

  She regularly tormented herself about some worry from the day. She would mentally replay whether she filed too many photo options to her editor for his page-one story. On another day, Maxine would worry about whether she gave him too few. She’d feel guilty for arriving late for work even if it had been from being caught in a traffic jam following someone else’s car trouble. In a quiet moment later on, she’d revisit everyone’s stares when she had finally sat down at her desk in the newsroom. Was it her, or had their faces looked annoyed by her tardiness?

  Maxine would also torment herself with an anxiety for every tomorrow. The conversations in her head were packed with so much paranoia that they’d regularly send rushes of nervousness throughout her restless body.

  “What if I can’t get close enough to the congressman for a decent shot at tomorrow’s press conference?”

  “What if the noon sun casts too many shadows on kids’ faces during tomorrow’s Boys’ and Girls’ Club outdoor ribbon cutting?”

  “Am I pressing too hard for caption information? Too little?”

  She’d agonize over social relationships too. She’d conjure up all the negative things other people could possibly think about her. Did her colleague, Ed, the government beat reporter, find her annoying as she put in free overtime while he arrived late, left early, and enjoyed long lunches at the Speak Easy Tavern? Did the old, rough-around-the-edges librarian at the paper think Maxine had the strength of a sickly-sweet gummy worm because she always agreed to step up whenever one of the obituary staffers called in sick? Would her brothers think badly of her for sending a belated birthday card again this year?

  Her worries were as steady as her breath, but the twenty-five-year-old’s constant state of suspicion is what made the photographer at a large northern New York daily newspaper so successful. For almost any hurdle that popped up, Maxine’s mind operated a couple paces ahead. Despite carrying more stress than the average person, she’d lock her thoughts inside a deceptively calm, tough shell of an exterior.

  As a result, the newsroom counted on her for a range of duties. Editors gave her the lame assignments because they knew she wouldn’t complain. They also gave her the most newsworthy ones because they trusted her to do the job. She was an anomaly on staff, but she’d never rested long enough to enjoy that reputation.

  The great appreciation Maxine had received during just a few years of young adulthood contrasted starkly with the lack of attention she had received from elders during her school-age years. From kindergarten through her senior year of college, one pesky cliché had seemed to follow her through the most challenging years of her life. The youngsters who acted up usually got the attention. The ones who hung around after class to complain about the poor grades on their term papers usually got the raises. As the most easygoing of three children in her family, she’d get positioned in the middle seat for long road trips. The squeaky wheels always seemed to get the oil. Maxine disliked all clichés, but the usually forgiving girl secretly loathed that one.

  As she sailed through the transition into adulthood, she had felt a welcome shift. The attention-getting students were now graduates bouncing around from job to job, creating friction wherever they went at her place of work and others, while she was the one left getting the raise despite being the only employee in her department who never asked for one. The higher-ups at the paper needed to keep her around. She was talented and hardworking without unnecessarily ruffling the newspapers on others’ desks.

  Maxine never had reason to worry about her social relationships either. Everyone appreciated her easy way. Her friends found Maxine enjoyable to be around. Colleagues at the paper, even Beatrice the librarian, found her polite but tough—a quiet lion.

  As the plane reached its cruising altitude and relayed the pilot’s permission to unfasten seat belts, Maxine continued to sit stiffly in the upright position to avoid disrupting the person behind her.

  Her worry of the moment had come from a simple act that made even the strongest reporters in her newsroom cringe each morning: the act of checking voicemail.

  In perhaps no other industry is it so clear that you can’t make everyone—or sometimes anyone—happy. While Maxine’s northern New York news team strived for accuracy, that was also the very thing that most often evoked emotion from readers.

  If a dozen of the local high-school basketball players got caught in violation of a zero-tolerance-for-alcohol policy and their parents confronted the school board about the suspensions at a lively public meeting, the same parents would unleash their anger the following morning on the journalist who reported the facts in the paper. Knowing their friends, neighbors, and coworkers were reading and gossiping about the article that morning over scrambled eggs and sausage patties always added to the frantic tone of a reader’s voice in a message.

  “Why didn’t you cover the carwash we did for fundraising or the fact that my kid went to Camp Neyaga Hoop Dreams over the summer? All you care about is the negative stuff. Why don’t you go back to the dump, you worthless hack?” went a typical voicemail.

  In reality, Maxine and her colleagues felt it was their responsibility to cover news that was relevant and interesting to their readers. While a carwash or a trip to summer camp might warrant a local brief on a slow news day, readers would undoubtedly want to know more about why their well-supported basketball team had to forfeit their next several games.

  In the newsroom, a wide range of tough and conflicting personalities bonded over one common motivator: the truth. The news team took pride in its own local investigative pieces that influenced local change as well as the legendary ones by their professional heroes, including the great Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, or the journalism students of Northwestern University who had uncovered a few years earlier that more than a dozen innocent people were on death row. In extreme cases, journalists were saving lives and redirecting them in significant ways.

  This not-so-simple task of delivering simply the truth to readers is what often made even the crankiest editors to tell a reporter to “just blame it on me” in preparation of the inevitable hate calls over an A1 story on a local politician’s embezzlement or a company’s local layoffs.

  As a photographer, Maxine absorbed far fewer abusive voicemails than her counterparts in reporting, but her personality fed into a deep dread of checking messages just the same.

  Prior to her flight’s departure from Dulles, Maxine had picked up a greasy pay phone to check her voicemail. She had hoped for the robotic woman on the other end to say “No. New. Messages.” This time,
she was correct to brace for attack.

  “Maxine. This is Elizabeth Washburn here. I don’t have to tell you I am the wife of the Carthage Supervisor, and I am also responsible for managing the Carthage Play Town fundraising campaign. I also probably don’t have to tell you how immensely distressed and disappointed I am over the unsatisfactory photo in today’s rag.”

  Maxine had raised her eyebrows as she listened to the message. She had tried visualizing the details of her picture that had featured construction workers as they broke ground on the massive playground with delighted faces of children in the background. Her goal had been to make a somewhat boring story, if she was being honest with herself, as captivating as possible by showing the action of hard construction work juxtaposed with the warmth and excitement on the kids’ faces. There were smiles. There was news. There was motion.

  Pleasing the manager of the Carthage Play Town fundraising campaign hadn’t been a task she set out to achieve—nor was it her job—but she thought the woman would’ve been thrilled with the photo choice nonetheless. The message continued.

  “Well, it wasn’t so much the photo—that was just, well, OK. It was the horrible writing you used under the picture. Absolutely horrendous. What were you thinking anyway?”

  Maxine’s eyebrows remained up, but her delicate chin dropped the slightest bit now. She felt a rare pride in her captions. While other photographers on staff jotted down names, ages, and titles of subjects in their photos—just enough to get the job done so they could head back to the office and finish their remaining assignments—Maxine often pressed further. Her approach was very different. She’d often stay out of the way of the reporter and listen. When the perfect moment arose, she’d follow up with a question or two to learn something extra. Maxine’s captions weren’t fancy, but they enhanced the story. Editors and reporters often complimented her on them. On occasion, a reader would do the same.

  Not this time.

  The message had continued.

  “You put in there that our campaign is 95 percent complete! How could you do that? What were you thinking? Clearly, you were not thinking. Here I was, sharing that information with you because you asked and I thought I’d be nice, and then you go ahead and print it! No one is going to make a damn contribution because they already think we’re successful. How could you do this to the children?”

  “First. Saved. Message.”

  Not even Maxine could’ve predicted Washburn’s blow, but she had little time to dwell on it now. She was two minutes late pay-phoning her editor for a scheduled check-in thanks to traveling with Ed, the government beat reporter who was more often found at the local tavern than in the newsroom.

  “Max,” their editor had shouted through the phone. “Another minute later and I was going to have you paged in the damn airport. He’s on my damn back. What the hell did you get for a photo? I don’t have to tell you that it better be good.”

  Maxine knew that whenever her editor said “he” without naming names, he was referring to their publisher. She was also well aware of the pressure riding on her to get the perfect shot during the trip.

  When Maxine’s editor had first pulled Ed and her into his office to assign them coverage of northern New York farmers’ testimony for federal crop insurance reform in Washington, DC, he had made clear that Maxine’s reward for being sent on the biggest trip of her career would be having her job hang delicately on the line.

  “Max, Max, Max,” he had said as Ed coolly doodled in his government beat notepad and Maxine sat eagerly on the hard, uncomfortable edge of the old wooden seat in their editor’s office. Her concentration had broken only for a second as she observed that newsrooms are never as glamorous as they appear in movies.

  “You know we always rely on the wire for out-of-state shots. We never send one of our own. That is until now.”

  The editor’s pen cap began tapping the top of his desk with each new sentence.

  “You are the lucky one. You get to cover this for us. I am the one who fought for you to go. Both of our necks are on the line if you don’t capture more emotion on these farmers’ faces than the local TV station—they’re also sending a team. He will snatch both of our positions, our lives, away if you don’t get this one right. Am I being dramatic enough?”

  Maxine had understood the pressure all too well. The local television news team was her daily newspaper’s only source of competition in a rural network of smaller, weekly newspapers. The publisher was obsessed, as any successful person would be, with doing the better job. Maxine’s editor was too. The competition trickled down to everyone else on staff.

  As a result, Maxine had felt panicked every night leading up to the trip. When it came to capturing emotion, her broadcast competitors had the edge. The station had the advantage of motion. It could also capture more than a single snapshot of time. It had the upper hand with sound too.

  In advance of the trip, Maxine had phoned the Northern New York Agriculture Development Program to learn the names of the three northern New York farmers who were scheduled to give a voice to the forty-five hundred other farm owners in the region. On three separate mornings before the warmth of daylight, she had met each of them on their land with cups of coffee fixed just how they said they liked them. All three were requested black.

  At each meeting’s dawn, she had wrapped the cups in tinfoil to keep them hot throughout the bumpy rides in her used, small car. She dressed as she would for any high-profile press conference. She sat on prickly hay in her best work khakis, leaned against a chilly John Deere Harvester in navy suit pants, and squatted in a knee-length cotton skirt next to a cow being milked amidst a sharp smell that reminded Maxine of a summer’s drive by a ripe farm. She had resisted laying a finger to her nostrils.

  As hard as Maxine worked and as stressed as she was, she had quickly realized that her situation could not compare to the work or stress of a farmer.

  She had been honest. She looked each man in the eye. She was respectful. She cared about understanding their positions. She was ethical, even explaining in advance of the meetings that she was happy to deliver the coffee, but she didn’t want the farmers to mistake the small gifts as bribes for good shots during their upcoming trip. She had let them pay the 95 cents for each of their cups, returning five cents per dollar.

  From every conversation, Maxine had pieced together that nearly as frustrating to the farmers as the lack of adequate insurance itself was planning a day or two away from their farms to travel to Washington and testify.

  In three short meetings over cups of coffee that weren’t even drunk, she had successfully built some relationships.

  Maxine had woken long before the autumn sun could break over the nation’s capital on the day of testimony. Her sleeplessness was reminiscent of her premature awakenings in more youthful times, whenever a day marked the first of a school year.

  As the farmers had readied themselves in these wee hours for the biggest—and only—public speeches of their lives within a hotel suite the three men shared, one of them had proactively dialed Maxine and invited her to join them during their nervous preparations to take a few shots.

  “I’ll be there in five,” she had answered immediately.

  The advance informal meeting would ultimately allow Maxine to present her editor with an option that would surpass both his and her expectations.

  The foreground of her best shot would bring to life one of the men clumsily tying his colleagues’ ties as their more practical work dungarees hung lifeless, yet cared for, on the sill of a hotel window featuring a contrasting city life on the opposite side. The image would perfectly summarize the story of men forgoing a day of hard work to step into a life that didn’t fit them, only to testify for insurance reform that probably should’ve taken place long ago. But it was the third man in the corner who had made the image special. He sat at a desk as an overworked thumb and forefinger of one hand held his speech notes while the callused fingers of his opposite one pinched the inn
er corners of his eyes and the bridge of his nose.

  Later on, back at the newspaper, Maxine would draft the following caption:

  At 5:23 a.m. on a harvesting day, James R. Shaw (left) would ordinarily be feeding the cattle on his dairy farm. Rick M. Dailey (center) would be fueling up his combine harvester for a long day of work. Bill C. Lantzy (right) would be cleaning the chicken coops with his wife Laura. Instead, the northern New York men got ready in a Washington, DC, Marriott Hotel room before successfully urging the U.S. House of Representatives to strengthen the country’s crop insurance law.

  Maxine had sprinted in dress shoes to hail a cab to the Capitol building, where she had met Ed, her sleepy reporter, to take more shots during the testimony as backup. She kept her eyes on her competitors. She noticed the station’s cameraman focusing his lens on the politicians’ speeches instead of the intent faces of the farmers. She felt confident about capturing the emotion her higher-ups wanted.

  Through the grimy airport payphone, with a New York Times tucked neatly under her arm, Maxine had relayed to her editor the success of her private meeting with the farmers.

  “Hey Max,” he had said in a tone that sounded a bit like air coming out of a deflating, hot tire. “Listen, you’re doing a great job. Sorry I don’t say it darn near enough. You make me look smart for hiring you.”

  He normally would’ve considered that compliment more than enough. This time, he had continued.

  “Everything all right? You don’t sound as happy as you should under the circumstances.”

  “Oh, I’m OK, thanks.”

  “What is it, Max? Where’s your robotic ‘I’m great, thanks, how are you?’”

  The rare concern in his voice had prompted an even more rare look into Maxine’s overworked brain.

  “Well, it’s not really that big a deal. This is going to sound silly coming off the heels of political reform, but I just checked messages before I called you, and I got a voicemail from Elizabeth Washburn.”