A Thousand Acres: A Novel

by Jane Smiley

  I looked at her looking at me, and in retrospect, I think that I did feel everything gentle and fun and happy draining away around me. I think that though I was only fourteen and not accustomed to judging my life or my father, or demanding more of our world than it offered of itself, I knew exactly what was to come, how unrelenting it would be, the working round of the seasons, the isolation, the responsibility for Caroline, who was only six. I didn’t cry then. I had been crying all morning and I was at the end of tears. I said, “I wish you would take me with you,” and Mrs. Ericson said, “I wish we could,” and then she cried, and then some people came in the back door with more plates, and she got up from the couch. I said, “Can you uncover the parrot’s cage?” She nodded. When she left the room, I sat staring at the green back of the parrot and his preternaturally limber neck. His head worked up and down and swiveled around like an oiled machine, then, finally, carefully, using his beak, he rotated on his perch and cocked his head to eyeball me. I said, “Hi, Magellan.” He said, “Sit up! Reach for it!” And I laughed.

  Three weeks later, the Ericsons were gone, and my father carefully boarded the farmhouse against the wind and dust. Five years later, when he took off the boards and Ty and I moved in, I had stopped thinking about the past—my mother, the Ericsons, my childhood. I loved the house the way you would any new house, because it is populated by your future, the family of children who will fill it with noise and chaos and satisfying busy pleasures.

  Nothing about the death of my mother stopped time for my father, prevented him from reckoning his assets and liabilities and spreading himself more widely over the landscape. No aspect of his plans was undermined, put off, questioned. How many thousands of times have I seen him in the fields, driving the tractor or the combine, steadily, with certainty, from one end of the field to another. How many thousands of times has this sight aroused in me a distant, amused affection for my father, a feeling of forgiveness when I hadn’t consciously been harboring any annoyance. It is tempting to feel, at those moments, that what is, is, and what is, is fine. At those moments your own spirit is quiet, and that quiet seems achievable by will.

  But if I look past the buzzing machine monotonously unzipping the crusted soil, at the field itself and the fields around it, I remember that the seemingly stationary fields are always flowing toward one farmer and away from another. The lesson my father might say they prove is that a man gets what he deserves by creating his own good luck.

  19

  THE MONOPOLY GAME ENDED with the news that Caroline and Frank had gotten married in a civil ceremony in Des Moines. The paragraph, in the Pike Journal Weekly that was published the twenty-second of June, said, “Miss Caroline Cook, daughter of Laurence Cook, Route 2, Cabot, and the late Ann Rose Amundson Cook, was married to Francis Rasmussen of Des Moines, on Thursday, June 14. The ceremony took place at the Renwick Hotel in New York City, New York. Mr. Rasmussen’s parents are Roger and Jane Rasmussen, of St. Cloud, Minnesota. Congratulations! The bride, a lawyer in Des Moines, will continue to use her maiden name—more girls are, these days!”

  We might not even have seen it if Rose hadn’t taken the girls into Pike to buy some sneakers at the dime store and picked the newly printed Journal Weekly from a stack on the counter. Dorothy, checking her purchases, said, “I see your sister got married,” and Rose, for whom this was the freshest possible news, said, “Yes, it was a very small ceremony.”

  Dorothy said, “Those are nice, too.”

  Rose followed the girls to the car, gripping the paper and reading the item over and over. In the car, Linda said, “Why weren’t we invited to Aunt Caroline’s wedding?”

  Rose said, “I don’t know. Maybe she’s mad at us.”

  Rose was beyond mad and well into beside herself when she banged into my kitchen and slapped the paper, open to the paragraph, down on the counter in front of me. I was peeling potatoes for potato salad. I read the paragraph.

  Rose said, “She didn’t mention a word about this when you talked to her Friday, did she?”

  “No.”

  “Or Tuesday?”

  “Well, no. She had other things on her—”

  “Don’t say that! Don’t come up with an excuse! Just look at it, and admit what it shows!”

  “I don’t quite understand. I mean, this wedding has already taken place?” I glanced at the publication date, today, then at the paragraph again. “Don’t you think there’s a mistake?”

  “Do you want to call Mary Lou Humboldt and ask her about it? Then next week, she can put in a little item about how the Cook sisters don’t seem to know what’s going on with Caroline.”

  “Maybe we should call Caroline.”

  “For what? This is for us! This is how she’s letting us know.” Then she told me what she’d said to Dorothy at the dime store. “The thing is just to take it in stride, to not even be surprised. And I’m going to send her a present! An expensive present, with just a little card saying, ‘From Rose and Pete and the girls, thinking of you both.’ ”

  I laughed, but when Rose left, I realized that I felt the insult physically, an internal injury. It reminded me that she wasn’t in the habit of sending birthday cards, or calling to chat, that when she used to come home to take care of Daddy, she didn’t bother to walk down the road to say “Hi” unless she needed something. It reminded me of how she was, a way that Rose found annoying and I usually tried to accept. It reminded me that we could have taught her better manners, had we known ourselves that good manners were more than yessir, nosir, please, thank you, and you’re welcome.

  The men didn’t agree that Caroline had done anything especially insulting. The wedding, the marriage, was her business and Frank’s, and they probably didn’t want to make a big deal of it. Ty, especially, was annoyingly dismissive. Pete kept saying, “Come on, let’s play. Rose, take your turn. I’ve heard enough about this goddamned wedding to last me the rest of my life.” He was winning. He had all the green properties and Boardwalk, plus all the railroads. The dice were working for him, and we kept landing on his properties. Every time he laughed in greedy glee, I got more irritated. Ty was driving me crazy, too. He kept muttering, “Ginny, settle down.” I blazed a couple of looks at him, but he didn’t pay any attention. Rose and I locked eyes across the table just as Pete and Ty spoke simultaneously. Pete said, “My turn, pass Go, collect two hundred dollars! Yeah!” And Ty said, “I think if we all just concentrate on the game we’ll have a better time.”

  Rose said, “Aren’t you having a good time, Ty?” in a sugary and deeply sarcastic voice, and Ty, taking her seriously, began, “Well, not really—” and the mere fact that he couldn’t read her tone of voice was the last straw for me, and I said, “My God!” with evident exasperation.

  I was watching Jess. I had been watching Jess all evening. Along with watching everything else, I had a third eye for Jess alone, a telescopic lens that detected every expression that crossed his face. At the sound of my voice, shrill, angry, yes, I admit it was both those things, his expression was one of irritation, so immediate but fleeting that he himself might possibly have forgotten the flicker of that response. But I could not. Seeing his expression, and recognizing it, was stunning, like running headfirst into a brick wall. Ty said, “Settle down, Ginny.”

  Pete said, “Take your turn, Jess. You are looking straight at Boardwalk, brother.”

  Rose said, “I’m tired of this game,” and she picked up the table by the legs and dumped the board and the pieces in Pete’s lap.

  There was a long silence. Pete’s face reddened and he bit his lip. The girls, on the couch, looked up and stared: Ty looked at me as if this were the result of my failure to settle down, and Jess bent down to pick up his property cards. He said, “Unrestrained capitalism always ends in war. I think Rosa Luxemburg said that. Shall we count our points overall?”

  I looked at Pete. He was furious. My own ill-humor vanished and I felt a muscle-clenching anxiety rise in my chest and begin to grip my thr
oat. The fact was that Rose hadn’t complained of him hitting her in about four years—he had reformed after he broke her arm, and there was no reason to believe that he was more likely to strike out tonight than any other of the nights in the last four years when Rose had acted provoking. Even so, I was at once in a panic, much more so than Rose, who seemed rather elated by her action. I have to say about Rose that it often seemed like fear wasn’t in her, or caution, either. In Pete’s worst years, it never seemed to occur to her to scale back her behavior, to seek fewer disagreements, or to be more conciliatory. Most of the time she wouldn’t even live by that basic wifely rule of thumb, “What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.” He was supposed to know, and supposed to agree, or at least accept. She’d say, “This is the real me, the stand-up me. He’s got to get used to that. If I let him beat me into submission, then what kind of life would I have?”

  “What kind of life do you have now?” I would say.

  And she would reply, “One with self-respect, at least.”

  When he broke her arm, by knocking or pushing her down in the bathroom (I was never quite able to picture it when she told me) so that she fell on her wrist on the tile floor, she was relentless. She wore a cast for eight weeks, and she made a sleeve for it with the words PETE DID THIS glued on it in felt letters. Every time he raised his hand, or even his voice, she threatened to wear the sleeve. She did wear it once, to show that she was unashamed and meant what she said. Pete, I suppose much intimidated by the thought of the jokes that he would have to endure at the feedstore and all over town, changed after that. His manner with everyone else grew a little more irritable, and his battles with my father sharpened, but it was a small price to pay. When the doctors discovered Rose’s cancer, one of the first things she said was, “I guess I don’t want to die just when Pete and I are finally figuring it out.”

  Her idea was that there was no such thing as provocation, that no matter what she did, Pete simply should not hit her, and therefore if he did hit her he was entirely wrong, and therefore she was perfectly free to do whatever she wanted. The result was that I lived in fear for her. Once she said, “If it were you being hit, you wouldn’t be afraid, either. You’d be mad, I promise.”

  Now she said, “Pete, why don’t you go outside and have a smoke? I’m going to make some decaf.”

  The girls went back to their projects, and I said, “You girls getting tired? You can go upstairs if you want.” They shook their heads without looking at me.

  Jess had set the table back up and retrieved all the game pieces. Now he began putting them in the box. Ty was adding points. He said, “What happened to our hundred bucks?”

  Jess said, “We never collected it. We never decided what the prize was going to be.”

  “We’d better decide before we find out who won.”

  I glanced over at the list. A couple of columns were decidedly longer than the others, but I couldn’t read the scribbled initials at the head of each column. I said, “We played. That was the—” and Rose came in from the kitchen with the coffeepot, and Pete opened the front door and stepped in, flicking his cigarette butt behind him, and the telephone rang, and Rose said, I’ll never forget it, “What’s that?” as if she’d never heard a telephone before in her life.

  Ty answered and listened, said, “Okay. Okay. Thanks. Thanks. We’ll be right over.” My sense of panic, which had eased back, slipped over me again. Ty put down the phone and said, “Your old man’s wrecked his truck. He’s in the emergency room in Mason City, and it doesn’t look like he’ll have to stay, so they want us to come get him. The truck’s in the ditch over by the state park. They’re going to pull it out with one of the park vehicles tomorrow morning and impound it until the results of his blood test come back.”

  Rose said, “Was he drunk?”

  “They won’t know that officially for ten days or so.”

  “Did they arrest him?”

  “Not yet.”

  Rose said, “It’s about time.”

  I said, “Is he hurt?”

  “Banged up. He hit his cheek on the steering wheel and cut it. They think that’s all.”

  “We’d better go, huh?” Ty nodded and took his car keys off the hook at the bottom of the stairs. As we were walking around the house to the car, I saw Jess through the windows, picking things up. He looked perfectly at home.

  My car then was an eight-year-old Chevy; usually, when I drove Rose to Mason City, I borrowed her car, which was almost new, a ’78 Dodge. It was odd, I suppose, how Ty and I never rode in the Chevy together. If we went to a movie or somewhere for supper, we took the pickup, but now he went straight for the car and got in on the driver’s side. The seat belt on the passenger’s side was twisted and stiffened with disuse. I gave up on it, and all the way to Mason City, I couldn’t get accustomed to the sense of danger I felt, of imminent disaster. Ty drove smoothly and silently. The car breasted the gravel roads, seeming, like a moldboard plow, to roll the fields and the ditches to either side of us. I shook my head to get rid of the illusion, but I could not. It came of driving so low to the ground. Ty rolled down his window an inch or two and the wind carried fear right into my face. I could feel myself focusing on these sensations—the car speeding into the earth, the wind slapping me with dread—and Ty said, “Ginny, you and Rose are going about this all wrong.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You could just endure it. You could just cross each bridge as you come to it.”

  “As if things aren’t getting worse.”

  “I don’t know if they’re getting worse.”

  “You must be blind.”

  “And what if they are getting worse? Taking this attitude isn’t going to make them better.”

  “What attitude?”

  “An attitude like Rose’s. Making everything he does into a big deal.”

  “I think going in a ditch and getting picked up for drunk driving is a big deal.”

  “Well, that is. That is. But this other stuff—” Ty glanced at me, rubbed the corners of his mouth with his thumb and forefinger, then slowed down and pulled to the side of the road. He looked at me for a long time. He said, “Ginny, I don’t exactly know what to do, but I’ve always thought the best way to deal with your father is to sort of hunker down and let it blow over. In one ear and out the other. Grin and bear it. Water off a duck’s back. All those things.”

  I stared at him, too. I stared at him from a long distance, seeing his flat cheeks and square face, the creviced fans at the corners of his eyes, the bill of his cap, the plain hopeful visage of a plain man. The other face, Jess’s face, was never out of my mind, leaner and more hawkish, more suspicious, less benign. One face somehow met you, looked back at you, was the impenetrable and almost simple face of innocence. The other, the more you looked at it, the more it escaped you. Its very features seemed elusive, seemed to promise a meaning, or even a truth, that was more complex and interesting than anything you had ever before imagined. I kept staring at Ty. God knows what he was thinking. But I was wondering whose face was truer. He smiled. His upper lip stretched into a long archer’s bow, Ty’s big smile that made him look handsome and mischievous. I smiled, too. I said, “You’re right.” He put the car in drive and pulled back onto the blacktop.

  It was easy enough to say. And it was true that I didn’t want to be angry the way Rose was. Ty didn’t like it, and Jess, too, just for that one moment at the game table, had registered a visceral recoil that frightened me. But Rose’s anger! Some of my clearest memories were of watching her, unable to look away, watching her shine with anger. No matter how well you knew to keep back from it, you couldn’t keep back all the time.

  It was nearly forty miles from our place to Mason City. We drove it in a kind of wholesome silence, carrying our whole long marriage, all the hope and kindness that it represented, with us. What it felt like was sitting in Sunday school singing “Jesus Loves Me,” sitting in the little chairs, surrounded by sunlight and bright dra
wings, and having those first inklings of doubt, except that doubt presents itself simply as added knowledge, something new, for the moment, to set beside what is already known. As if nothing were contradictory and all things could be believed simultaneously. My love for Ty, which I had never questioned, felt simple like that, like belief. But I believed I was going to sleep with Jess Clark with as full a certainty.

  20

  MY FATHER WAS SITTING UP at one end of a bench, leaning back against the wall with his eyes wide open. A square of white gauze was pressed to his cheek with adhesive tape that ran into his hair. Instinctively, I followed his gaze, just to check on what he might be thinking about before disturbing him. Ty, though, walked right up to him and said, “Dad? Larry? You okay?” He stood up and began to walk out of the emergency room, without speaking to us or to the nurse behind the desk, who called, “Mr. Cook? Mr. Cook?” She looked at me. I stepped forward, announcing that I was his daughter.

  “Oh,” she said, still evidently disconcerted. “Oh. Well, he has some Percodan to take for pain, just two pills. If he needs more, he’ll have to get a prescription from his family physician.” Then, apologetically, for some reason, “There wasn’t any loss of consciousness. He’s been wide awake for, let’s see, the whole time he’s been here. We had him in observation for two hours.” She patted my arm. “He’ll be fine.”