Acts of God Read Free Page B

who said that insurance was a good, steady way to lay your foundation. In the end all the schemes for getting rich fell through and insurance was what he did. He learned to take pleasure in it as he took pleasure in most things.
    Though he was a city boy by birth, he came to love the loamy smell of soil, the rich, earthy odor of dirt being overturned, of the freshly planted fields. Even the piquant odor of fertilizer or the stench of a pig farm was somehow pleasing to him. It was not what he ever expected to come to love, but then there were other things Victor Winterstone had not expected he would love. For example, our mother, Lily, the plain, freckle-faced girl who made a beautiful home and ran it like a tight ship.
    He was a claims adjuster who adjusted. That’s what he was, my father who chuckled to himself as he drove; that’s how adjustable he’d become. He was happy as he drove, whistling, two of his children at his side. Head tossed back. He listened to the radio, tapping out the rhythms. Rolling down the window, he got a smell of the fetid earth. Compost. Dead things decaying out there in the fields. The promise of new life.
    In the city he’d never felt the cycles of life. He’d felt the bars he frequented and the music and the parties and the girls who clung to him, but he didn’t feel this. The way life moved on from one moment to the next. Seasonal change, things growing and dying. He wanted to reach out and grab it. Take what was left, hold it by the throat. And never let go.
    I stuck my face out the window like a dog, breathing in the air my father breathed. In the backseat Jeb groaned, “Dad, I’m gonna be sick.” He was mad that I’d displaced him.
    â€œJeb,” my father said sternly, “cut it out.” Jeb had a turkey feather he’d found in the gas station parking lot and he kept tickling my ear. I stuck my tongue out at him in the rearview mirror.
    Illinois was flat. No one had ever told me this before but it was very flat. Sometimes there was a hill or two but then it was flat again. And green, but mostly it was corn and soy. Wheat. The wheat bent in the wind. I waved at farmers on their tractors. If they saw me, they waved back. Some kept waving until we were far away.
    *   *   *
    It took all day to get to where we were going and when we got there, it was all lakes. I’d expected rivers, running streams, but it was as if people were living in the middle of lakes. A cow floated on her back in one. Someone’s bed was in the middle of another. “No one should live here,” my father said under his breath and I knew we’d reached the floodplain.
    My father had an office to go to in town that had the name of the company he worked for on it. Farmers Protection. He said he didn’t just insure farmers, but that’s how it began so they called it “Farmers.” He insured all kinds of people for fire, theft, life. But in the office, people who looked like farmers were sitting, waiting for him. Men in overalls. A woman in a smock was in tears; a boy gripped her arm. Everyone looked weary.
    My father was a practitioner of sleight of hand—small magic tricks he did to amuse children, mainly his own. He pulled quarters out of ears, turned a silver wand to gold. He could cut a rope in two, then make it whole. He made eggs disappear. Jeb told me on previous summers when he’d gone from farm to farm with my father that this was what he did to entertain people who’d lost everything they owned.
    I kept expecting him to do one of his tricks—pluck a quarter from the ear of the boy who wouldn’t let go of the woman in the smock. Instead my father sat at a desk. “Crop insurance,” I heard him say, “that’s what these farmers need.” Then he told me and Jeb to go outside. He gave us money to buy a hamburger and a milk shake. “Now you watch out for her,” my father told