TWTBACD Ch.50 - The Soil and the Screen

Chapter 50

The Soil and the Screen

2052–2053

2052-53: soil and screen, generation four comes of age

[HAYES FAMILY — Fourth Generation]

[SHARMA FAMILY — Priya's children]

Travis Hayes's daughter was born in 2052. He named her Susan, after his mother, who wept when he told her and attributed it to the wind.

The baby arrived in harvest season, which was inconvenient in the practical sense and perfect in the symbolic one. Travis left the field when the call came, drove the truck to the hospital still in his dusty work clothes, and held his daughter in the first hour of her life with the same quality of attention he brought to the fields: complete, patient, present.

She was the fifth generation of Hayes on that land. The soil beneath the farm was deeper now than it had been in 1887, when her great-great-great-grandfather first broke it. This was not how soil was supposed to work — it was supposed to deplete. Travis had spent twelve years reversing the direction. The reversal was not yet complete. It would not be complete in his lifetime. It would be further along when Susan took over from him than it had been when he took over from Dale.

This was the farm's contribution to the great work: a piece of the earth that was healthier than it found it.

In Varanasi, Priya Sharma had a daughter also — born in 2051, named Kamala, after the lotus. Rajan held his granddaughter at the ghat on the morning of her first visit, the way he had held Priya, the way his father had held him. Three generations of attention to the same river. Four now.

He was eighty-one. His body was slow. His mind held everything. He had been writing — not academic papers but something between memoir and theology, an account of one priest's seventy years of relationship with one river, what the river had taught, what it had lost, what it still carried. He wrote in the mornings by the window, the river visible in the middle distance, and the writing was the form his witness took.

He had entitled it: 'What the River Remembers.' He intended to give it to Priya and Kamala. He intended it for after.