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Probably that very day, the final pneumonia was setting in, but Philip seemed alert, and Turner could feel no fever. Another thing Henry remembered was that Philip persisted in speaking the Queen’s English all the way to the end—maybe one of the last things Henry heard him say to Turner was a grammatical correction, “may not” rather than “might not.”
    Henry got his pass from the librarian and walked to the elevator. Did the Plague of Justinian look like the Black Death? There were plenty of descriptions of suppurating buboes and black gangrene in the literature. Or did all infections loom, horrifying and gigantic,on the inner eyelids of those who witnessed them, rashes the color of tomatoes, swellings the size of oranges, faces like skulls, never to be forgotten?
    —
    JOE WAS OUT EARLY , before the dogs were awake and before the thermometer hit eighty. When he opened the back door, they rolled over and stretched in their pen, and Rocky made his good-natured yawning noise: Glad to see ya, where’s my breakfast? They stood up with their tails wagging, and Joe let them out. They loped over to the edge of the east field and started sniffing and lifting their legs. Joe expected he would have to clip them in the next couple of days.
    According to Russ Pinckard, the government had three billion, or even four billion stored bushels, so a bad corn crop wasn’t going to help anyone, but the farmers sitting around the café taking in the air conditioning, such as it was, agreed that no one knew what was really stockpiled. Jeff Green, who ran the NPPC hog facility between Denby and Usherton, had relied on government figures to decide when to buy feed, and his estimated cost had turned out to be too low by fifty thousand dollars. Jesse said you could gauge the stockpile by the fluctuations at the Board of Trade in Chicago, but in Joe’s private opinion, if the quantities themselves were rising and falling the way the prices did, then thieves or ghosts were hard at work supplying and removing tons and tons of corn every hour of every day. At any rate, Jesse had admitted the night before at supper that prices were falling because traders were hedging their positions. “Are you doing that?” said Lois, and Jesse nodded one of those Mom-don’t-tell-me-what-to-do nods. So, at least for now, Jesse was betting that a smaller crop would lead to lower prices. Walter the patriarch, Joe’s dad, Jesse’s granddad, would have been vindicated. But upset.
    Lois asserted that either God would provide or the punishment, whatever it was, would be just. However, she was doing some stockpiling herself—two fifty-pound bags of flour, a case of dried beans, and two cases of evaporated milk had appeared in the cellar just this week. She had joined a group based up in Wisconsin that saved the seeds of old-fashioned varieties of vegetables and fruits, and was carefully labeling and saving her best garden seeds—not only tomatoes, peppers, seed potatoes, and squash, which you could justify inthe name of flavor, but onions, beets, turnips, carrots, and parsnips, which all tasted the same to Joe. Stashed-away turnips made him think about wartime. Lois wouldn’t plant a hybrid in her garden; she still gathered butternuts; she still pretended that her apple and pear trees were all about flavor and pies. She tended them not only with care but with prayer.
    Jesse had a soil map of the farm on his computer. Every day or so, he went out with his moisture gauge and his temperature gauge and tested the various soil types, and plugged them into the map. He therefore knew that on the field behind his house, where the soil was loamier, the moisture content was 8 percent greater than it was on the east field, where both dogs were now barking, but 2 percent less than on the west field, where Opa had long kept cattle, sheep, and horses, and for decades had turned their manure under. On the hill behind Joe’s house, where everyone had always been careful to