A Thousand Acres: A Novel

by Jane Smiley

  I don’t know why I was surprised to discover everything changed, since it was obvious in retrospect that I had sought to change it.

  And I was surprised to discover how my mind worked over these things, the simultaneity of it. I seemed, on the surface, to be continually talking to myself, giving myself instructions or admonishments, asking myself what I really wanted, making comparisons, busily working my rational faculties over every aspect of Jess and my feelings for him as if there were actually something to decide. Beneath this voice, flowing more sweetly, was the story: what he did and what I did and what he then did and what I did after that, seductive, dreamy, mostly wordless, renewing itself ceaselessly, then projecting itself into impossible futures that wore me out. And beneath this was an animal, a dog living in me, shaking itself, jumping, barking, attacking, gobbling at things the way a dog gulps its food.

  Daddy said, “That Spacelab thing is going to go right over this area, according to the paper.”

  I said, “What?”

  “The thing that’s falling. Goes over here all the time. It’s going to be something when it falls, let me tell you.”

  I glanced at a passing field, flat and defenseless, and thought for a moment about meteorites and space capsules, things glowing in the atmosphere, then making holes in the ground. I felt a visceral flutter of fear. It was his voice that did it, I think. I said, “Don’t worry about it. You could draw it to you.” He turned his big head and looked at me. I smiled. I said, “That was kind of a joke, Daddy.”

  He said, “What happens is people don’t watch out. They get careless because they weren’t taught right.”

  I said, “You can’t watch out for Skylab, Daddy. The pieces are too heavy.”

  “They were careless with that whole thing. Shouldn’t even be falling. The joke’s on them, isn’t it?”

  “I guess so.” After a second I said, “I thought it was supposed to be cooler today.” We came into Pike passing the elevator that sat right by the freight tracks. The chiropractic office was the first office at the bottom of Main Street. I pulled into the shade of the overhang. When I got out, Daddy said, “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going to walk down Main Street. I’ll be back and then we’ll go over to the Pike’s Peak and have dinner.” He huffed. I said, “I don’t want to sit in the car. It’s awfully hot.”

  “What if I’m done before you come back? I gotta wait for you.”

  “It’s air-conditioned in the office. Just chat with Roberta.”

  “You wait. You can window-shop some other time.”

  “I’ll meet you at the Pike’s Peak, then.”

  “I don’t want to walk there in this heat.”

  I squinted down the street at the bank clock: 11:12, 87 degrees. “It’s only a block and a half and it’s not that hot, Daddy. The walk will do you good.” This conversation made me breathless, as if I were wearing a girdle with tight stays.

  “You wait. I want to ride.”

  I glanced toward the chiropractic office. Roberta Stanley, the receptionist, was just inside the door, watching us argue. I said, “It’s boring to wait, Daddy. I didn’t bring a book or a magazine or anything.” I hated the note of pleading that crept into my voice. Where was the power I had felt only a few days before, the power of telling rather than being told?

  Inspired by just that note of pleading, Daddy raised his voice a little. “You wait.”

  I got back in the car. It was the presence of Roberta Stanley that made me get back in the car. Daddy turned and walked heavily toward the door. Roberta got up from behind her desk and opened it for him. After he went in, Roberta lingered a moment, smiling at me. I gave a wave, and she waved back. I scrunched down in the seat. All of the Stanleys would certainly hear about this, since Roberta was a terrible gossip. I hated to think about how people felt about us. It didn’t matter what it was, disapproval, ridicule, even sympathy or fondness. I hated to think of them having any opinion at all.

  There was a remote possibility that I would see Jess Clark in Pike. He was often the one to run into town if they needed something, and he had gotten into the habit of doing all the food shopping, since neither Harold nor Loren ever remembered to accommodate his vegetarianism. That would be nice, I thought, just to see him ambling down the sidewalk, just to watch him from a distance, his figure imbedded in its surroundings. One of many, a manageable size. He didn’t appear, but thinking of him sparked the voices, and I gave into them, sliding farther down into the seat. The effect of sliding down, of relaxing, was to arouse me slightly. I closed my eyes.

  Daddy ordered the full hot dinner special—roast beef with gravy and mashed potatoes, canned string beans, ice cream, three cups of coffee. I had grilled cheese on Roman Meal bread, potato chips, pickle, and a Coke. We sat across from one another, and I saw him eyeballing my plate. He said, “That all the dinner you’re gonna eat?”

  “I’m not hungry for some reason.”

  “Hmmp.”

  “You really shouldn’t be eating all that. That’s too much. It’s a hot day.”

  “You said it wasn’t hot before.”

  “Daddy, if you got more exercise, you’d feel better. A little walk down Main Street from the chiropractor to the café wouldn’t bother you.”

  “I can walk it. I don’t want to. I walked plenty in my time, and now I want to ride.”

  “Did Dr. Hudson talk to you about exercise? It’s important—” He waved me off with his fork.

  “Then I hope you don’t get your license taken away.”

  He drank from his coffee. “You shouldn’t talk to me like you do. I’m your father.”

  “I try to show respect, Daddy.”

  “You don’t try hard enough. You think because I gave you girls the farm, you don’t have to make up to me any more. I know what’s going on.”

  “That’s not true, Daddy. We do our best.” I smiled. “You’re not the easiest person to get along with, you know.”

  “I don’t like it when people are lazy, or when they don’t pay attention. This is a hard business, and takes hard work.”

  I continued to smile. The second half of my sandwich lay on my plate, and I was hungry for it, but instead of eating it, I made myself say, “I don’t think you can say that we’re lazy. Anyway, I don’t think you show us any respect, Daddy. I don’t think you ever think about anything from our point of view.”

  “You don’t, huh? I bust my butt working all my life and I make a good place for you and your husband to live on, with a nice house and good income, hard times or good times, and you think I should be stopping all the time and wondering about your, what did you call it, your ‘point of view’?”

  I felt myself redden to the hairline, and pushed my plate away. “I just want to get along, Daddy. I don’t want to fight. Don’t fight with me?”

  “You know, my girl, I never talked to my father like this. It wasn’t up to me to judge him, or criticize his ways. Let me tell you a story about those old days, and maybe you’ll be reminded what you have to be grateful for.”

  “Okay.” I was smiling like a maniac.

  “There was a family that had a farm south of us. The old man was older than my dad, and he’d come in and drained that land down there, him and his sons. He had four sons, and when the youngest was about twelve, he came down with that polio thing. This was a long time ago, before I even went to school. Well, that boy was all crippled up by the time I remember him, but he didn’t stay in the house, nosiree. The old man got him out there and made him plow his furrows as straight as the other boys, and he whipped him, too, to show him that there wasn’t any way out of it. There were a couple of daughters, and one up and left home when she was about sixteen, calling her father all kinds of a bully and slave driver, but the thing is, that boy did his share, and he respected himself for it. It was the old man’s job to see to that.”

  “How do you know?”

  “What?”

  “How do you know he respected hims
elf for it, that that was what he needed?”

  “I saw it!” He was beginning to huff and puff.

  I said, “Okay, Daddy. Okay. I don’t want you to be mad. Let’s go down to the Supervalu. You need some coffee at your place, and I need some things, too. I don’t know whether these building people expect to eat with us or not.”

  “You girls should listen to me.”

  “We’ll try harder, Daddy.”

  It was easy, sitting there and looking at him, to see it his way. What did we deserve, after all? There he stood, the living source of it all, of us all. I squirmed, remembering my ungrateful thoughts, the deliciousness I had felt putting him in his place. When he talked, he had this effect on me. Of course it was silly to talk about “my point of view.” When my father asserted his point of view, mine vanished. Not even I could remember it.

  23

  LATER ON, WHEN I LOOKED BACK, what I remembered about that day was the morning, my fear that Rose sensed something between Jess and me, my argument with my father at dinner, the ceaseless thoughts of Jess Clark that were simultaneously bewitching and tedious, a kind of work that I could not stop performing. The afternoon slipped by me. It was true that when we went by the building crew and I said, “Want to stick around for a while and watch them pour the footings?” Daddy didn’t answer. But in our life together, we had long passed the point of eloquent silences. When I slowed down to pull in next to my house, he waved me forward, down to his house, and when I pulled in there, he got out without a word. I could, of course, read by his demeanor that he was displeased, but how this displeasure would incubate I could not and did not know.

  At home, there was a definite sense of worthwhile accomplishment. The Harvestore man from Minnesota had a cup of coffee and left to go back to Minnesota. The confinement building man from Kansas was staying at the motel in Zebulon Center, and said that while there was a company policy against meals with the people they were working for, because it screwed up expense account tax deductions, he’d be happy to make one exception and eat with us the next night, if we wanted. I told him we’d barbecue some of our own pork chops. It would be Tuesday, I knew, Daddy’s night, but he might eat barbecued pork chops if a stranger was eating with us. Or he might not. It was a gamble. The Kansan was a pleasant wiry man, half a head shorter than Ty, who’d actually grown up on a wheat farm in Colorado. He kept looking out the window, across the south field. Once he said, “If this had been my dad’s place, I never would have left. This looks like paradise to me, that’s for sure.”

  Ty said, “We try not to forget how lucky we are.”

  We walked him out to his truck. A cool wind had picked up, damp and full of rain. The Kansas man said, “Think we’ll get it?”

  Ty said, “Feels like it.” Dark clouds were piling up on the western horizon; blinding streaks of platinum sunlight shot toward us over their humped crests. “There’s been some good-sized storms this year, but mostly they’ve missed around here. I expect we’re about due.”

  “Now when I was a kid, we used to go tornado chasing.”

  “I did that once.”

  I turned and stared at Ty.

  “Damn risky thing to do, but farm kids are crazy.”

  They laughed. The Kansas man got into his pickup and wheeled onto the blacktop, waving as he left. I said, “I guess he won’t care that that motel doesn’t have a cellar.”

  “Doesn’t sound like it.”

  The weatherman said the storm would come through Mason City about midnight. We were, in fact, already under a tornado watch. I dished up a chicken stew I’d made in the Crock-Pot in the morning and told Ty a little of what had happened at the elevators and in between, about Daddy bringing up Skylab, but I tiptoed around the argument, knowing he would disapprove. He told me about the progress of the building. I listened for news of Jess Clark, but he didn’t mention anything. It looked like a quiet evening. It may be true that just about this time, during our after supper conversation over the dishwashing, I did hear a truck stop at the corner, turn, and accelerate toward Cabot. It may be that I heard that, or it may be that it’s inserted itself into those memories.

  At any rate, Rose called about nine and said that Pete’s truck was gone and that they thought Daddy might have taken it, since he had a key from last winter, when his truck was in the shop. Five minutes later, they blew in the front door, Linda and Pammy in tow. Pete was in a lather, and, though trying to calm Pete, Rose, too, was furious. She kept saying, “I can’t believe this,” and Pete kept saying, “If he wrecks that truck, I’ll kill him. We ought to send the cops out looking for him, or he’s never going to learn.”

  Rose paced back and forth. “If they’d put him in jail for a night or two last week, it might have brought him to his senses. Now he just thinks he can get away with anything.”

  Ty said, “Why don’t I go into Cabot and see if he went there? He might have just gone to the Cool Spot.”

  Rose said, “He’s probably driving all over creation.”

  After they left, Linda said to me, “Did Grandpa steal the truck?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Dad said he did.”

  “Your dad is pretty mad. But we all own the trucks and things together. You can’t steal what you own.”

  “Mommy said that she wanted us to come down here, because she didn’t want us to be alone in the house if Grandpa came back.”

  “Your mom’s pretty mad, too.”

  Rose opened the screen door and came in. She said, “We might get quite a storm. I didn’t notice it before.” Her arms were crossed over her chest. She surveyed Linda and me. Pammy had gone into the kitchen, and in this little silence, I could hear the refrigerator door close. Rose said, “Yes, I am pretty mad, but you make it sound like I’m just mad, as if I were crazy or something. I’m mad at your grandpa, Linda, because of things he has done, not just to get mad.”

  I said, “I realize that, Rose. But we don’t know the explanation. There could be a reason. As soon as he does anything, you shoot first and ask questions later.”

  “We were sitting right there. We would have taken him where he wants to go. He took the truck without asking. He snuck around.” She addressed this to Linda, an admonishment, a moral lesson.

  “Rose, he thinks he has a right to everything. He thinks it’s all basically his.”

  “Yes, he does.” She said this righteously, as if the mistakenness of this perception was self-evident.

  Pammy came into the room, and I said to the two girls, “Maybe there’s something on TV. This could be a long night, with the storm and everything. We ought to have the televison on, anyway.” They moved obediently to the couch, and ended up watching the only thing we could get, which was a performance of the New York City Ballet on PBS.

  During the news they drifted off, Pammy rolled back against the arm of the couch, her head flopped and her hair in her face. Linda lay against Pammy, breathing deeply, her mouth open. I set down my knitting and gazed at them, thinking how they often seemed bewildered and wondering if it had always been thus with them and, bewildered myself, I had taken that to be a normal condition. Rose said, “Let’s carry them up to bed for now anyway. If there’s a warning, we can wake them up and get them into the basement, but it looks more like just a bad rain to me.” After we came down, Rose stood at the door, watching the gathering storm and waiting for the truck.

  A pair of headlights turned off the road, momentarily crossed the back wall of the room, went dark. Rose stayed where she was and didn’t say anything. I sat still. After a long, quiet moment, punctuated by the bang bang of two truck doors closing, Ty’s voice, low and calm, said, “Ginny, come out here please.”

  This was it.

  Rose pushed the screen door and I followed her. Our father was standing in front of the truck. Ty was behind him. He said, “Larry has some things to say. I told him he should tell you them himself.”

  Daddy said, “That’s right.”

  Rose took my hand
and squeezed it, as she had often done when we were kids, and in trouble, waiting for punishment.

  Daddy said, resentfully, “That’s right. Hold hands.”

  I said, “Why shouldn’t we? All we’ve ever really had is each other. Anyway, what are we in trouble for? Why are you getting ready to tell us a bunch of things? We haven’t done anything wrong except try our best with you.”

  Rose said, “It’s going to storm. Why don’t I take you home and we can talk about this in the morning?”

  “I don’t care about the storm. I don’t want to go home. You girls stick me there.”

  I said, “We don’t stick you there, Daddy. It’s the nicest house, and you live there. You’ve lived there all your life.”

  “Let me take you home.” Rose’s tone was wheedling.

  I urged him. “It’s been a long day. Go on with her, and then tomorrow we can—”

  “No! I’d rather stay out in the storm. If you think I haven’t done that before, my girl, you’d be surprised.”

  A wave of exasperation washed over me. I said, “Fine. Do what you want. You will anyway.”

  “Spoken like the bitch you are!”

  Rose said, “Daddy!”

  He leaned his face toward mine. “You don’t have to drive me around any more, or cook the goddamned breakfast or clean the goddamned house.” His voiced modulated into a scream. “Or tell me what I can do and what I can’t do. You barren whore! I know all about you, you slut. You’ve been creeping here and there all your life, making up to this one and that one. But you’re not really a woman, are you? I don’t know what you are, just a bitch, is all, just a dried-up whore bitch.” I admit that I was transfixed; yes, I thought, this is what he’s been thinking all these years, waiting to say it. For the moment, shock was like a clear window that separated us. Spittle formed in the corners of his mouth, but if it flew, I didn’t feel it. Nor did I step back. Over Daddy’s shoulder I saw Ty, also transfixed, unmoving, hands in pockets. Then Pete turned the corner and drove up in his own pickup.

  Rose said, “This is beyond ridiculous. Daddy, you can’t mean those things. This has got to be senility talking, or Alzheimer’s or something. Come on, Pete and I will take you home. You can apologize to Ginny in the morning.” Pete turned out his headlights and got out of the truck, his voice, sounding flat and distant, said, “What’s up?”