A Thousand Acres: A Novel

by Jane Smiley

  By the time I was frying the bacon and eggs and covertly watching him stare out the living-room window toward our south field, my plan to let him have it seemed liked another silly thing. I couldn’t find a voice to speak in, to say, “Were you down in Des Moines Thursday or not?” or “Caroline thought you hung up on her when she called.” This is something I do often, this phrasing and rephrasing of sentences in my mind, scaling back assertions and direct questions so that they do not offend, so that they can slip sideways into someone’s consciousness without my having really asked them.

  It was one thing, Monopoly nights, to sit around and laugh at or deplore some of the things that Daddy and Harold did or said. It was another to confront the monolith that he seemed to be. Ty’s attitude intruded itself, soothing me, counseling me to let things slip over me like water or something else harmless but powerful. So I served up his food silently and told myself that he wasn’t senile—it would be insulting to treat him like a child and make him account for his time and his money. My job remained what it had always been—to give him what he asked of me, and if he showed discontent, to try to find out what would please him. At that moment, standing by the stove with my arms crossed over my chest, waiting to pour him more coffee, that seemed like a simple and almost pleasant task.

  I have to say that when I called Caroline at nine, she didn’t see things my way at all. Yes, it was Daddy who had been to her office (had there really been any doubt?) and the receptionist who had seen him said he was acting weird. Admittedly she was only nineteen, and she couldn’t pinpoint exactly what he was doing that was weird, looking around all the time, gawking at everyone, but more than that, throwing his head around sort of the way an animal does when it is frightened or in pain. I said to Caroline, “Well, we asked him at Sunday dinner whether he’d been down there, and he wouldn’t tell us. He’s as stubborn and close-mouthed as always. What your receptionist said just doesn’t seem to fit, as far as I’m concerned.” Then, because her silence seemed skeptical, “Of course he was drinking. He’d probably been to a bar, and then in the unfamiliar surroundings—”

  “He was drinking and driving?”

  “Well, yes, I guess so. I mean, I don’t know for sure that he was drinking, but it sounds like—”

  “You can’t let him do that.”

  “What am I supposed to do about it?”

  “Talk to him. Take away his keys if you have to.”

  I laughed.

  “Well, it isn’t funny.”

  “The idea of us taking his keys away is funny. He’s a grown man. Anyway, what’s he supposed to do all day, watch soap operas? He likes to get out and drive around.”

  “You said he was drinking.”

  “I said maybe he was drinking. It sounded like—”

  “Why isn’t he working?”

  “Ty and Pete—”

  “I knew this whole thing would blow up. As soon as those two started running things—”

  This time I interrupted her. “They aren’t preventing him from working. He doesn’t want to do anything. He never goes out to the barn even to stand around. They do everything now, and that isn’t easy either.”

  Caroline was silent for a while, took an audible drink of something, no doubt her coffee. Finally she spoke in a patient, regretful voice. “It was obvious to me that this whole transfer was so delicate that if it weren’t handled just right everything would get screwed up. They must have made it clear that his help isn’t wanted. At the very least, you should have made sure—”

  “Made sure what? He doesn’t want to help. He’s tired of farming. He’s taking the only vacation he knows how to take.” This sounded good. I thought, try this. “If you think you can do better with him, invite him to stay with you for a while. That would be a real vacation for him, and a nice change of scene.”

  “You know that’s ridiculous.”

  “All of this is ridiculous.” I softened my tone and made it more wheedling, as if I had suggested Caroline take Daddy in a serious way. “It’s a good idea, him coming to visit you. He could get to know Frank the way he knows Pete and Ty.” This remark was unusually sly for me, but I let it stand, as if we both didn’t know what it meant.

  There was another long silence. Finally Caroline said, very angrily, “Honestly, I can’t figure out what is going on here. Two months ago, Daddy was happily farming his own land. Now he’s lost everything he had and he’s wandering around, trying to figure out something to do with himself. You all made a big show of reluctance about this, but it’s pretty telling, who’s benefited and who hasn’t. All this stuff”—her voice mockingly rose an octave—“ ‘Marv Carson made him do it. It was all Marv Carson’s idea.’ Well, Marv Carson doesn’t stand to gain here. I’m sure—” She paused, probably afraid of what she was going to say.

  “Say it. You might as well get everything out in the open.”

  “I’m sure if Frank and I were on the scene, things would have happened a little differently, that’s all.”

  “Do tell.”

  “I don’t know that Daddy’s interests have been primary here.”

  “He did what he wanted. It was me who urged you not to be put off by him, to go along and be a part of things. You could have just apologized to him! You were mad at him!”

  “A little tiff doesn’t just turn into something as big as this unless there’s something else going on. All I know is, Daddy’s lost everything, he’s acting crazy, and you all don’t care enough to do anything about it!” She finished on a ringing note. I said, “Caroline—” but she cut me off by hanging up.

  I have to say that Rose and I always felt that Caroline’s attitude toward our father was a strange alternation between loyalty and scheming. When she came to take care of him every third weekend, she was solicitous and patient. She cajoled him into watching TV with her, or trying something new for dinner that she brought from Des Moines, or even going for a walk. She brought him magazines or articles that she liked from Psychology Today and The Atlantic. She would consult us about how to get him to do things—go out for supper, go to the movies, buy some new clothes.

  In college, a psych major for a while, she burbled with plausible theories about why he drank, what his personality structure was, how we ought to administer “the Luscher Color Test,” or what we could do to break down “the barriers in his whole oral structure” (he couldn’t cry, and therefore express pain, because in fact he couldn’t bite because no doubt he had been breast-fed and forbidden, probably harshly, to bite the nipple), or he had been potty trained too early, which made him retentive of everything. It went on and on. We were never able to bring things to the conclusion she aimed for, though, because changing him ultimately demanded his own involvement, which would have been impossible. One time she did get him to draw a human figure, and then told us the result was “purely and simply a blueprint of his view of himself,” but once he had drawn it, there was nothing to do with it, and anyway, when he found out she was majoring in psychology he stopped payment on her tuition check.

  Rose would just say, “He’s a farmer, Caroline. That is a personality structure that supersedes every childhood influence.”

  That’s exactly what my father himself would have said.

  The fact was, she’d been away from him for almost ten years, long enough so that, to her, his problems seemed only his, their solutions seemed pretty obvious, and the consequences of “managing” him in a new way seemed easily borne. Rose and I had gotten into the habit of ignoring Caroline’s point of view.

  But she had never expressed herself quite as she had in this phone call. I was fully able to explain it to myself—she was worried, she was kind of crazy where Daddy was concerned anyway, she wasn’t on the scene.

  Even so, I was shaking when I hung up the phone, just shivering from head to toe as if I were standing in a frigid wind. It felt like a fury, but it also felt like a panic, as if her criticisms were simultaneously unjust and just, and the sequence of events tha
t I remembered perfectly was only a theory, a case made in my own defense that a jury might or might not believe. It wouldn’t do any good to exclaim sincerely that it had actually happened the way it had actually happened. The guilty always did that. Rose! I thought, I’ll tell Rose, and we will exclaim together, or Ty. But that was a bad idea, confiding in someone. After you’ve confided long enough in someone, he or she assumes the antagonism you might have just been trying out. It was better for now to keep this conversation to myself.

  17

  I SPENT THE MORNING shampooing the carpet in the living room and the dining room. On a farm, no matter how careful you are about taking off boots and overalls, the dirt just drifts through anyway. Dirt is the least of it. There’s oil and blood and muck, too. I knew women with linoleum in every room, and proud of the way it looked “just like parquet.” Harold’s tinted concrete idea wasn’t much more than a step beyond that, after all. But mostly, farm women are proud of the fact that they can keep the house looking as though the farm stays outside, that the curtains are white and sparkling and starched, that the carpet is clean and the windowsills dusted and the furniture in good shape, or at least neatly slipcovered (by the wife). Just as the farmers cast measuring glances at each other’s buildings, judging states of repair and ages of paint jobs, their wives never fail to give the house a close inspection for dustballs, cobwebs, dirty windows. And just as farmers love new, more efficient equipment, farmwives are real connoisseurs of household appliances: whole-house vacuum cleaners mounted in the walls, microwave ovens and Crock-Pots, chest freezers, through-the-door icemakers on refrigerators, heavy duty washers and dryers, pot-scrubbing dishwashers and electric deep fat fryers. None of us had everything we could wish for. Rose had always wanted a mangle, for instance, because she liked things, including dish towels and bed sheets, neatly ironed.

  At any rate, I had rented the Rug Doctor from the Supervalu in Cabot, and by dinnertime I had worked up a dripping sweat, in spite of the new air conditioner. The shades were drawn, and the whirring sound of the machine was like a den I could curl up in, safe from my father’s vagaries, Caroline’s furies, and Rose’s vigilance. And I was not immune to the accruing virtue of the clean, richly colored swathes in front of the cleaning head. It was like combining a field, except what you left behind seemed deeper and more fertile than before, rather than the other way around. I cleaned without a break, and when I turned off the machine, I had worked myself into a rather floating state of mind, abuzz with white noise, effort, and sweat. I stood up, stretched my back in both directions, and pushed through the door into the kitchen, carrying the reservoir of dirty water. Jess Clark was standing in the middle of the floor, smiling at me. I started, and water sloshed. He said, “So, want to go for a walk?”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “About a minute. I called fifteen minutes ago, but you must not have heard the phone. You want to go for a walk?”

  “I’m exhausted, and I’m hungry, too. You do appear suddenly. I’ve noticed that about you.”

  “You’re just oblivious. I’ve noticed that about you.”

  That irritated me. I said, “Oh.” I pushed out the back door and carried the dirty water across to the hog pens. When I came back in, Jess was still there. I said, “I’m busy and it’s hot, too. Maybe some other time.”

  “Half an hour. I need someone to talk to.”

  I caught sight of myself in a window. Hair everywhere, black smudges on my cheek and chin. The irritation I’d voiced floated away under the influence of the buzz and the virtue. He said, “Anyway, I saw Ty in Pike at the implement dealer’s. They were having a promotional barbecue, sponsored by John Deere. There were a lot of guys there, and he said to tell you not to bother with dinner. That’s what I was supposed to tell you when I called you fifteen minutes ago.”

  “Rose is doing Daddy’s dinner.”

  “There you have it.”

  “People don’t go for walks in the noon sun.”

  “I know a shady place.”

  “You must be kidding.” I smoothed my hair and splashed water on my face. It was potent, him telling me that he needed someone to talk to, implying that he hadn’t gone first to Rose.

  He did know a shady spot, as it turned out. It was the little dump at the back of the farm, in a cleft behind a wild rose thicket, that we used and Harold used for refuse. The “shade trees” were an assortment of aspens and honey locusts, the latter of which sported thick, needlelike thorns four or five inches long, armoring the trunk from the ground up. The dump was a place I didn’t go often, especially since we had started paying a monthly fee to use the landfill north of Pike. When I saw where we were going, I slowed down, but Jess pulled me forward. He said, “Don’t you love the dump? I spent whole days out here when I was a kid. This is the third time I’ve been here since I got back. It’s still the most interesting spot on the farm.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “It’s fun, I promise. I’ll show you all the native plants I’ve identified. And some of the roses are still blooming, too. They smell out of this world.”

  The larger furniture of the dump consisted of a rusted-out automobile chassis, some steel drums, an old iron bedstead, a rusted-out truck bed with a broken-backed vinyl automobile seat in it, a roll of dark reddish brown barbed wire, and a cracked white ceramic toilet tank. Supposedly, we were the only people who had ever used it for refuse, but I didn’t recognize everything there. In the country, trash has a way of attracting other trash. Once Rose found an old hall rack, oak and, after we cleaned it, brass. She sold it for forty dollars to an antique store in Cabot, which inspired us to comb the dump two or three times for other profitable castoffs, but we hadn’t found anything. I said, “I always wonder if other people sneak in here and throw things down the gully. I don’t recognize anything here.”

  “I might recognize that automobile seat. It makes me think of Harold’s old ’62 Plymouth Valiant. Remember when he got that? First new car he ever bought.”

  “I do remember that. It had a blue stripe along the side that angled upward at the fin.”

  “That’s it.”

  “Well, he only stopped driving it last year.”

  Jess, who was squatting and poking with a stick under the bedstead, looked up at me.

  I laughed. “Gotcha. Really it’s been ten years, anyway. I was just teasing you.” He smiled.

  I looked around. The rosebushes were nearly as high as my head and hid the dump from the view of my house, though you could see Harold’s house and barn through the trees. On the lower branches of the rosebushes, simple white flowers spread their five petals like the open palm of a tiny hand. I knelt and sniffed. The fragrance was perfumy and strong. Jess said, “Do you ever come out here and gather the hips in the fall? They’re probably as big as cherries.”

  “I heard you could do that.”

  “Good natural source of vitamin C. Or you could make rose petal jam. I love the fragrance of that.”

  “What are you poking at?”

  “Snake.”

  “What?”

  “Snake. Not a rattlesnake or anything. I think it’s an eastern hog-nose, even though this area is sort of out of their range. I saw one last time I was here. They’re funny snakes.” He stood up. “No luck.”

  “How are they funny?”

  “Well, they have hoods, like cobras, and if they can’t chase you off any other way, they roll over and play dead, right down to the lolling tongue.”

  I laughed.

  “They’re one of my favorites.”

  “I never thought of having favorite snakes.”

  “Oh, there’re lots of nice snakes around here. Milk snakes are beautiful, and racers. Rat snakes will climb up into corncribs and trees.”

  “Daddy’s killed those.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Daddy’s not much for untamed nature. You know, he’s deathly afraid of wasps and hornets. It’s a real phobia with him. He goes all
white and his face starts twitching.”

  “Huh.”

  Through the metal grid of the bedstead, some thin stalks of grass were growing. I broke one off and put it between my teeth. Jess did likewise, and said, “Big bluestem. When the pioneers got here, that was seven feet high.”

  “When the pioneers got here, this was all under water.”

  “Well, I know that. I was speaking generally.” He grinned at me. “Trying to evoke the romance of it all. Anyway, there’s a bit of prairie here, now that it’s dried out. Here’s some switchgrass, too, and there’s timothy all along the edge of the gully. Know what these are?”

  I bent down and fingered the white petals. “The flowers look like pea flowers, but they’re on stalks.”

  “Prairie indigo. Poisonous, too.”

  “What are those?”

  Now it was Jess’s turn to look closely at some short, purple-pink flowers. He said, “I know these.”

  “Well?”

  “Locoweed?”

  “Yup.”

  “And you were making out like you didn’t know nothin’.”

  “I know shooting stars and wild carrots, and of course, bindweed and Johnsongrass and shatter cane and all that other noxious vegetation that farmers have to kill kill kill. Haven’t you seen Ty’s trophies? Giant cockleburs and world-class velvetleaf?” Now I was grinning, too, though the brightness of our grinning didn’t seem exactly appropriate to the conversation. I had the strong sense that we had stumbled into a kind of daring privacy, and that the secluded nature of the spot where we were standing allowed it but did not create it. It was as venturesome to be out here, poking around in this dump, as it would be to head off to Minneapolis together, knowing you couldn’t return until the next morning. It was also, oddly enough, terrifying. But our gazes were fixed on each other’s faces, and we were unable to keep ourselves from testing the fix by moving, turning, bending down. The fix held, until I climbed into the truck bed, sat down in the filthy car seat, and looked over the roses to the green roof peak of my house. I was breathing hard and trembling. I felt very afraid, but the fear also seemed unusually distant. I inhaled deeply. Jess went back to poking with his stick. I could hear a rhythmic tchocking punctuate the soughing of the breeze. The breeze in Zebulon County is eternal, and life there is marked by those times when you notice it. I noticed it. I noticed that there was a nest in the honey locust tree, too, but the birds were gone, and the nest was possibly an old one. From off in the distance, just under the sound of the breeze, came the zip of a tractor starting up.