to reply. He’s sucking on a whole radioactive mouthful of sour tarts. The way the sugar makes his heart race, it’s easy to imagine that his bloodstream is nothing but sweet poison now.
5.
The greenhouse has a curved roof like an airplane hangar’s, only the walls are made of heavy-duty plastic. The world beyond seems blurred, a child’s watercolor of field and sky. Beth leads Jack to one of the plywood tables and finds a few cheap plastic flowerpots.
“Too bad we didn’t get these started a couple weeks ago,” Beth says. “We had frost on the ground yesterday morning, but I think Mr. Winter is gone for good now. The weather is turning, and mums need to get a good running start on spring. We’ll begin them inside, just to be safe, and in six weeks they’ll be big enough we can move them outside.”
Beth has an associate’s degree in agricultural science from the U of Iowa and knows what she’s talking about. She has seen to Jack’s education in biology and natural sciences for years. Bloom handled English and history and civics. His father is supposed to be doing that now, but they meet only a couple of times a week, when Hank isn’t busy with the farm or off visiting friends in the Patriot movement. Jack has to say he preferred Bloom’s reading list. They had Harry Potter and the Narnia books. For his father Jack is making his way through Behold a Pale Horse, which is less like a book, more like a collage of manifestos, rants, and confessions.
Even Connor gives Jack lessons. Connor taught Jack how to drive the F-150 through an obstacle course, how to assemble an AR-15 blindfolded, and how to make a pipe bomb. Connor’s lessons are obviously the best, but they are infrequent, as Jack’s cousin is often out of state doing “recon.” Reconnaissance of what, Jack asked Connor once. Connor got him in a headlock and said, “What you don’t know, you can’t tell, even during enhanced interrogation, like this.” And he twisted Jack’s nipple until Jack squealed.
Beth hefts a white plastic bag of soil, and Jack leaps to help her with it. They fill pots with earth as damp and black as crumbs of chocolate cake. Jack peels open the manila packet and sticks a finger in to dig out the seeds.
“Ouch!” he cries, and yanks his thumb back. For an instant he had an impression of being bitten by a small animal—a mouse—and bright red blood gleams around the edges of his thumbnail.
He shakes the seeds out into his palm, and who knows, maybe they did bite him. With his blood on them, they look like the teeth of a carnivore, stained from their last meal.
“What are you doing, Jack?” Beth says. “You want to water ’em, not bleed all over ’em.”
“‘The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots,’” Jack intones ominously, and they both crack up, although Beth casts a shame-faced look around as she laughs. This solemnity is a favorite of Hank McCourt’s, and so naturally it is a giddy delight—and a kind of disloyalty—to make fun of it.
6.
Beth says the mums won’t be ready for the garden until early May, but two weeks after they put them in their pots Jack has a look at them and hurries to find her. Dawn is just pinking the sky, but it’s a rare day Beth isn’t awake by sunup. If she’s got her ears on, she should be able to hear him, even from the cottage at the end of the gravel lane. He crosses the front porch and descends to the dooryard. The big oak in the yard seems heavy with leaves, but when he hollers her name, the leaves erupt into the scarlet morning, a hundred sparrows taking off at once.
“Where’s the fire, bud?” Beth asks, and he turns on his bare heel. She’s already up at the farmhouse, peering at him with drowsy eyes through the bellied-out screen door.
For the tiniest fraction of a moment, he’s surprised to see her there. At this hour he would expect her to be padding around her cottage in her nightdress, helping Connor with his leg and performing her morning ablutions. But then she often serves all three of her men breakfast in the farmhouse kitchen, and perhaps she wanted to get a jump on the biscuits.
He plunges back across the porch, grabs her hand, and tows her toward the greenhouse. He