A Thousand Acres: A Novel

by Jane Smiley

  Or there was the time, when he was ten, that some boys at the school chased him with willow switches. When he got far enough away from them, he turned to face their taunting, picked up a sizable rock, and beaned the ringleader right on the forehead, knocking him unconscious. The teacher took Daddy’s side, as did the rest of the gang, who were impressed by his aim, and the injured boy was suspended from school for two weeks.

  When Mommy, who was visiting a school friend in Mason City, wouldn’t dance with him at a church dance, Daddy got the manager of a local men’s store, someone he knew only by name, to leave the dance and sell him a new suit of clothes, including underwear, socks, shoes, and fedora. He looked so dapper in them, Mommy would say, that she didn’t want to dance with anyone else the rest of the night.

  He was handsome. I could remember that.

  When he smiled or laughed with Harold or some of the other farmers, you felt drawn to him.

  Suddenly and clearly I remembered the accident Harold Clark had with his truck. It was an early memory; possibly I was six or seven. I certainly hadn’t thought of it in years, because it passed the way grown-up events do when you are a child—dreamlike phenomena that happen without warning and vanish without explanation. I was in our truck alone, playing with my dolls. Possibly Daddy didn’t know I was there. At any rate, he ran from the house to the truck. Mommy was behind him, at the door, holding it open and shouting something, and then we were careening across fields and I was huddled down, bouncing in the corner of the box. There was Harold’s truck, navy blue, rounded, a white grille like big teeth, and then we were there, and Harold lay on the ground below his truck, and the back wheel was on top of him, as if cutting him in two at the hips. It was a frightening sight and I screamed, but for once Daddy didn’t get angry with me. He took a board out of the back of Harold’s truck and he laid it down, then he set me on one end of it, put a whiskey bottle in my hand, and he said, “You tiptoe over to Harold and you give him something to drink, because he needs it, and you let him keep that, and then tiptoe back.” It was a strange accident, from which Harold escaped with only abrasions: he had been taking some tiling pipe out of his truck to set it beside a ditch. The ditch was full of thick watery mud, and the truck had rolled back, knocking Harold down, then pinning him in the ooze. Daddy and some other farmers who appeared shortly had to pull Harold’s truck off him. Afterwards there was a lot of laughter, but I felt the real moment had been mine, tiptoeing with my lifesaving burden along the six-inch-wide board, watching Harold’s face greet my approach with welcome relief, and hearing Daddy say, “That’s a girl. Just a ways longer. Good girl. That’s a good girl.”

  I closed my eyes and felt tears sparking under the eyelids. Now that I remembered that little girl and that young, running man, I couldn’t imagine what had happened to them.

  15

  HAROLD CLARK PROMOTED his own local reputation of garrulous thoughtlessness. While many, even most, farmers I knew were laconic and uncomplaining, Harold talked of himself often, and always as if he were almost but not quite two people—the one who had a lot of “great ideas” (Harold put the quotes around the words himself, every time he spoke them) and the dubious one, too, the one who knew none of these ideas would ever pan out. Part of him was always luring the other part of him along on some iffy undertaking, and part of him was always telling stories at the expense of the other part. What it all added up to was that things around the Clark farm, according to Harold, were perennially at the brink of disintegration, while public opinion had it that really Harold was a better manager, and more prosperous, than anyone. My father put it more succinctly. He would say, “The body of Harold’s truck may be muddy, but the engine is clean as a whistle. He doesn’t want you to know that, though.”

  The uncharacteristic flaunting of his new tractor, at the pig roast, was quickly followed by complaints, which Jess faithfully relayed to us. They spent three days adjusting the idle and another three days fiddling with the power take-off. Harold didn’t like the placement of the radio—above on the left. He wished it was above on the right. For his final complaint, “a complaint to last a lifetime,” as Jess called it, he didn’t like the transmission. Ty said, “He’s right. Those IH transmissions are really old-fashioned. If he’d asked someone besides the IH dealer, he would have found out that shifting in a Deere is like silk now. Shifting those Harvesters takes three men and a fat boy.” He held out his hand, and Rose, who had just landed on North Carolina, two houses, counted out his rent.

  “That’s not the point,” said Jess, kneading the dice in his palm, then throwing them. “Actually, this is perfect for him. He can stress what a fool he was for buying that tractor for the next twenty years now.”

  “Daddy will help him,” said Rose.

  “Harold will love that,” said Jess. “You know what comes out of their talks, don’t you?” He slapped his race car past Go and Ty gave him two hundred dollars. He bought a house for New York Avenue and placed it carefully in the orange strip. “They always end up agreeing that Harold has done something crazy, or that Larry was right in the first place. And then Harold lets drop some detail, about money, or bushels per acre, that shows that in spite of his foolishness, he outdid everybody. That he’s such a good farmer that he has a whole lot more leeway than the average guy.”

  I said, “I never looked at it that way.”

  “That’s because he’s tricked you, too,” said Jess. “Now that I’m back, after all those years away, I’m really amazed at how good Harold is at manipulating the way people think of him.”

  “What’s the reward, though?” said Pete. “He doesn’t get the kind of respect other farmers do. People laugh at him. When you’re over at the feedstore, and someone sees his truck drive in, it’s, oh, there’s Harold Clark. And they’re grinning already.”

  “And he comes in with some story, right? He’s going to do something crazy, and ugly, too, like surround the house with hay bales, foundation to roofline, then tack polyethylene sheets over them with laths.”

  “Or he’s going to pour cement over the entire farmyard from the house to the barn. He did say that last year.” Pete grinned, and I landed on Luxury Tax. Pammy was reading an old Nancy Drew I had found in the attic. She sensed me watching her, and looked up, smiled, and nodded. It was The Ghost of Blackwood Hall, my old favorite. Linda had fallen asleep with her crocheting in her hand. For a week she had been laboriously crocheting a doll sweater.

  “No,” said Jess. “That laughter is the point. If they respected him, then he’d have less privacy. All that foolishness is like a smokescreen. People let down their guard. They’re generous with him, too, because they feel a little superior. I mean, neighbor ladies bring Harold and Loren a hotdish once or twice a week. And I’m not saying that he laughs at people behind their backs, or is rubbing his hands with glee at duping them. That’s not what I’m getting at. It’s just that he’s cannier and smarter than he lets on, and in the slippage between what he looks like and what he is, there’s a lot of freedom.”

  “Sounds good,” said Rose, “but meanwhile, I own Park Place, and it looks like you owe me a bundle.”

  “I owe you everything, Rose.” He leered at her.

  “Don’t push me.” She laughed.

  I couldn’t help looking at Jess, a little surprised at his analysis of Harold. Maybe it wasn’t true, but truth wasn’t what attracted me. It was the plausibility of such a plan, the perfect way such a plan could deflect the neighbors’ knowledge of you. It was such a lovely word, that last word, “freedom,” a word that always startled and refreshed me when I heard it. I didn’t think of it as having much to do with my life, or the life of anyone I knew—and yet maybe Harold was having some, feeling some.

  “So,” said Pete. “I was at the feedstore yesterday, too, when Harold came in with another bright idea.”

  We started grinning.

  “What was that?” said Ty.

  “He said he was thinking about changing his will.
”

  There was the briefest of silences, the briefest but the most total, and then Jess said, “Uh oh,” and laughed. We all knew what everyone was thinking, that Harold would change the will in favor of Jess (assuming that the present will favored Loren, which Harold, of course, had never actually said, but which had become what people “knew” Harold had done), but Jess said, “He’s probably going to leave the place to the Nature Conservancy so that they can restore it to its natural wetlands condition.”

  Ty said, “What’s the Nature Conservancy?”

  “They buy land and conserve it.” Jess looked at Ty in that merry but aggressive way. “Take it out of production, you know.”

  “God forbid,” said Ty.

  We didn’t say any more about Harold’s will, but late in the evening, after Rose and Pete had taken Pammy and Linda home, Jess lingered before stepping off the porch. He said to Ty, “You know that land you have down by Henry Grove? What’s the guy been growing on it?”

  “Straight corn for the last four years. Before that he had some beans on it.”

  “Fall plow or spring plow?”

  “Fall. And there isn’t a house. I let him bulldoze the house and fill in the well about seven years ago. You could live in town, though. Henry Grove’s only a couple of miles away.”

  “So he’s really worked the shit out of that land.”

  Ty looked out toward the dim glow of Cabot on the western horizon, for a long moment, and ran his forefinger around the corner of his mouth. I could tell he was offended. Finally, he said, “It’s good land. Michael Rakosi hasn’t done anything with it I might not have done. He likes clean fields, is all.”

  Jess smiled, also realizing that Ty was offended, and said, “I’m not meaning to criticize. If I did farm, I’d try some things. A lot of them probably wouldn’t work. I’d probably ask your advice all the time. I’d probably farm out of a book a lot. That used to be Harold’s worst insult, he’d say, ‘That guy, he farms straight out of a book.’ But for me, it wouldn’t be worth it, really, unless I was trying some of the stuff I learned out west.”

  “Well, maybe.” Ty smiled.

  At breakfast, Ty was mild but insistent. He kept saying, “People don’t realize that there isn’t any room any more for something that might not work out. I mean, when his income comes solely from the farm, and he’s got to make up his mind about the fuel and the time for another pass through the beans, or maybe getting forty-three bushels an acre instead of forty-seven. It’s all very well to talk about ten acres of black walnut trees, and then harvesting them for veneer in thirty years at ten thousand dollars a tree, but what about the lost production for that thirty years? It’s more complicated than people think, just reading books.”

  I said, “Are you talking to yourself or to me?”

  He looked up from his plate and grinned at me. “Hell, Ginny, this morning there’s a whole peanut gallery.”

  “He wasn’t criticizing you. You don’t have to feel criticized.”

  “Yes and no. He doesn’t feel critical, and he wants to be our friend, but he wouldn’t do things our way, and he probably wouldn’t have us do things our way, truth to tell.”

  “Maybe, but there’s room for lots of ways, isn’t there?”

  He sat back and wiped his mouth, then pushed back his chair and stood up. Outside, the day was beginning to lighten. He said, “Well, sure, in principle. I sometimes wonder how that principle works in action, though. Anyway, I am going to have another pass through the beans in Mel’s corner, because there’s a terrible stand of cockleburs that’s gotten all over in there.” He gave my arm a little squeeze and went out the door.

  16

  AFTER TY LEFT, it took me half an hour to get myself down to my father’s. Lots of little things needed picking up, and, in fact, our late nights were beginning to tell on my mornings. I knew Daddy would be annoyed at having to wait for his breakfast. Now that I was no longer cooking for Rose, he wanted it slap on the table at six, even though there were no fields he was hurrying to get to. I dawdled. I mulled over the idea that if he slept later and ate later, then he wouldn’t have so much time to fill during the day. I let myself get a little irritated with him, but what I really did was put off seeing him. The memory of Caroline’s call, which I should have returned Monday but didn’t, had jarred me awake before Ty the early bird had rolled out of bed to check the hogs.

  The fact was, Daddy couldn’t keep driving around all over the county and even the state, looking for trouble. Retired farmers were supposed to spend their time at the café in town, giving free advice, or they were supposed to breed irises or roses or Jersey cows or something. They were supposed to watch the polls during elections and go fishing, or work part-time at the hardware store. Except that the thought of Daddy doing any of these sociable, trivial, or, you might say, pleasant things was absurd. He himself had always ridiculed farmers in retirement, and spoken with respect, even envy, of Ty’s father’s heart attack in the hog pen. Yes, it was freshly evident that he had impulsively betrayed himself by handing over the farm. That annoyed me, too. I kicked off my slippers and put on my Keds as if I were really going to let him have it.

  As I walked down the road, I could see Pete back his silver Ford pickup out of the driveway and turn south. I waved, and his arm shot out of the driver’s window and arced a greeting in return. Mostly when you pass farmers on the road, they acknowledge you with the subtlest of signals—a finger lifted off the steering wheel, or even a lifted eyebrow. Pete was a hearty waver. It made him seem a little too eager to please, the way his silver pickup made him seem a little too flashy. I was appreciating those things about Pete lately, though. Instead of seeing him in the old way, less competent and reliable than Ty, too volatile and even a little silly, I saw that he did his best to fit in and do his job, and also that his failure to succeed completely was actually an assertion of a different style more than anything. If he had come from around here, if his father had farmed and he had inherited his father’s farm, his relative flamboyance, like his musical talent, would have been something for the neighbors to be a little proud of, evidence of native genius rather than suspect strangeness.

  Since my talk with Jess the day I planted tomatoes, my sense of the men I knew had undergone a subtle shift. I was less automatically critical—yes, they all had misbehaved, and failed, too, but now I saw that you could also say that they had suffered setbacks, suffered them, and suffered, period. That was the key. I would have said that certainly Rose and I had suffered, too, and Caroline and Mary Livingstone and all the women I knew, but there seemed to be a dumb, unknowing quality to the way the men had suffered, as if, like animals, it was not possible for them to gain perspective on their suffering. They had us, Rose and me, in their suffering, but they didn’t seem to have what we had with each other, a kind of ongoing narrative and commentary about what was happening that grew out of our conversations, our rolled eyes, our sighs and jokes and irritated remarks. The result for us was that we found ourselves more or less prepared for the blows that fell—we could at least make that oddly comforting remark, “I knew all along something like this was going to happen.” The men, and Pete in particular, always seemed a little surprised, and therefore a little more hurt and a little more damaged, by things that happened—the deaths of prized animals, accidents, my father’s blowups and contempt, forays into commodity trading that lost money, even—for Ty—my miscarriages. Of course he refused to try any more. He had counted on each pregnancy as if there were no history.

  And then there was my father. As I stepped off the road onto the yard in front of his house, I sensed him looking down at me, but I didn’t look up, I just headed for the back door. His kitchen cabinets were still in the driveway, and I had heard nothing of the couch to be delivered. I reflected as I opened the screen door that speculations about my father were never idle or entertaining, but always something to be flinched from. Certainly he must have suffered, but my mind fled from thoughts of him and t
ook refuge in those of Ty, Pete, and Jess.

  He met me at the back door. “It’s bright day.” His tone was accusing. It meant, I’m hungry, you’ve made me wait, and also, you’re behind, late, slow. I said, “I had a few things to do.”

  “At six o’clock in the morning?”

  “I just picked up the house a little.”

  “Hmp.”

  “Sorry.”

  He backed away from the door and I entered the mudroom and put on the apron that hung from a hook there. He said, “Nobody shopped over the weekend. There’s no eggs.”

  “Oh, darn. I meant to bring them down. I bought some for you yesterday, but I forgot them.” I looked him square in the eye. It was my choice, to keep him waiting or to fail to give him his eggs. His gaze was flat, brassily reflective. Not only wasn’t he going to help me decide, my decision was a test. I could push past him, give him toast and cereal and bacon, a breakfast without a center of gravity, or I could run home and get the eggs. My choice would show him something about me, either that I was selfish and inconsiderate (no eggs) or that I was incompetent (a flurry of activity where there should be organized procedure). I did it. I smiled foolishly, said I would be right back, and ran out the door and back down the road. The whole way I was conscious of my body—graceless and hurrying, unfit, panting, ridiculous in its very femininity. It seemed like my father could just look out of his big front window and see me naked, chest heaving, breasts, thighs, and buttocks jiggling, dignity irretrievable. Later, after I had cooked the breakfast and he had eaten it, what I marveled at was that I hadn’t just gone across the road and gotten some eggs from Rose, that he had given me the test, and I had taken it.