A Thousand Acres: A Novel

by Jane Smiley

  “I do think patience is a virtue.” His voice seemed to regard this as if it were just one of his interesting quirks.

  “I think you think patience is everything!” I turned on my knees and faced him. “I feel like I’m waking up from a dream! A dream where you just go along and go along and whatever you do, you’re just looking on, you’re not affecting anything! At least Rose isn’t like that. At least she takes what she wants. I mean, Jess said to me that the reason for the miscarriages is probably in the well water. Runoff in the well water. He says people have known about it for years! We never even asked about anything like that, or looked in a book, or even told people we’d had miscarriages. We kept it all a secret! What if there are women all over the county who’ve had lots of miscarriages, and if they just compared notes—but God forbid we should talk about it!”

  “Oh, Jess. He’s got the most harebrained ideas.”

  “You don’t know! You haven’t read the books he has! You just don’t know!”

  “I know enough! I follow the instructions! I’m careful!”

  “Don’t the tile lines lead right into the drainage wells that lead right into the aquifer that leads right into the drinking well?”

  “The ground filters everything out!”

  “Who says that?”

  “Everybody knows that! Well water’s the best you can drink.”

  “If I got pregnant again, I wouldn’t drink it.” We were facing each other, our foreheads about six inches apart. Simultaneously, we both realized that talking about my getting pregnant again was a dangerous enterprise. I leaned over the side of the bed and picked up my magazine, smoothed the pages. Ty said, “You hid things from me. You lied to me. That’s the fact, and you turn it around. You simply lied. I think that’s a fairly straightforward issue.”

  Possibly he didn’t know the half of it. Possibly he did. At any rate, the accusation, true as it was, cowed me. I felt my face heat up and my scalp prickle with that old familiar sense of shame. I remembered the Sunday school teacher we had in junior high, a man who only taught us for a few months, making us repeat as a group, “Sins lead to other sins. Sin piles on sin. Lord, keep me from committing the first sin.” Sin, sin, sin, sin, sin. It was a powerful and frightening word. I took some deep breaths. What about Caroline? Didn’t he have a secret there? That accusation stood rampant in my brain, wanted to batter its way out. Ty sat back. I looked at him. It was clear to me that there was a deeper level for us to fight on, a level where nothing could be held back, and the true import of our conflicting loyalties would express itself. The next shot was mine, and he was waiting for it. But this was a new world for me, for us. We had spent our life together practicing courtesy, putting the best face on things, harboring secrets. The thought of giving that up, right now, with my next remark, was terrifying.

  Finally, I summoned a firm voice, in which I said, “If I were always perfectly open and truthful, then most of the work of being sure that I agree with you on everything would be already done for you, wouldn’t it?”

  “There was a time I thought we did agree on everything.” He said this in a quiet, and, I thought, sentimental voice. I said, “You’re patronizing me.”

  He said, “I want to stay with you, Ginny. That’s one of those virtues in me you seem to hate now, but it’s true. I think you’ll come back to me. I think we’ll go back to having what we had before. That’s all I ever wanted.”

  “Well, it’s not all I ever wanted, and I can’t go back to it.” I said this with a sense of lifting a lid, just for a peek, just to test the temptation of it.

  “Do you really hate me that much?”

  “Oh, come off it. I don’t hate you.”

  But just saying that smote me unexpectedly. Hadn’t I hated him a little recently, for talking to Caroline behind my back, for failing to defend me when Daddy denounced us, for never bothering to tell me that he didn’t agree with what Daddy said, and even just now, for undermining my trust in Rose? And I hated myself for going along to get along, so didn’t I hate him, too? The fact was, I didn’t feel hatred right then. If I had, I thought, I would have been willing to say anything, do anything, have everything about me be known. My strongest feeling right then was that the feelings that he seemed to think were simple enough were too complicated for me to name, which seemed like a form of lying, felt like a form of coercion. These, my Sunday school teacher might possibly have said, are the wages of sin.

  His voice suddenly barbed with resentment, he said, “Well, you might feel like you’re waking from a dream, but I feel like I’m having a nightmare. I was so excited about the hog operation! That was my dream, and it was coming true. I was working around your father! I was bringing him into things bit by bit. I never thought it would be easy, but I thought I was making progress, and then you women just wrecked it, you just got him all fired up—”

  “He was acting crazy!”

  “But it was basically harmless. Just buying stuff. So what?”

  “He had that accident.”

  “So, we could have gotten him to come around more, but Jess Clark was coming around instead—”

  “Don’t bring Jess Clark into this! Anyway, you said you had fun.”

  “It was fun, but—oh shit. What’s the use?” He slid down under the sheet. “What time is it?”

  “After eleven.”

  “That lumber’s going to be here at six.”

  I turned out the light.

  In the dark he said, “If you wanted to get a job in town, you should have said so.”

  I lay there for a long time, panting with relief and also with a strange disappointment that the truth hadn’t come out, distantly bemused that this was the conclusion he drew from the last five months, from Rose’s operation, from the transfer, from Jess Clark, and Rose’s revelations and my fresh memories. I said, “That wasn’t what I wanted.” Ty gave out a loud snore, then turned on his side.

  When I was certain he was asleep, I slipped out of bed and pulled on a pair of shorts. My sneakers, which I tied on without socks, were beside the back door. In moments I was standing on the blacktop, looking toward Daddy’s house. For the moment, I couldn’t go any farther than that. The moonlight picked up the white hatches of the centerline and the glinting bits that looked like mica mixed with the asphalt. To either side, the corn plants rattled in the eternal breeze in a way that made you aware of how they grew—as tall as a man in a tiny fraction of a man’s lifetime, drawing water from deep in the earth and exhaling it in a vast, slow breath. I stared toward Daddy’s place. It was dark except for a light in the window of my old room. The big cube of a house seemed to expand and vibrate with the presence of Jess Clark.

  Just because everything about him had turned shameful and awkward for me, that didn’t mean the thorn of longing had worked its way out of my flesh. So far, I had restrained myself fairly well, or, maybe, fear had restrained me—fear of being caught out by Ty or Daddy as well as fear of appearing forward or foolish to Jess. Or ugly. Or undesirable. Looking toward the light that surely contained Jess right then—perhaps he was reading?—I knew I was afraid of him, too. More afraid of him than of anyone. That had sprung up along with the shame, hadn’t it? Desire, shame, and fear. A freak, like a woman with three legs, but my freak, that I readily recognized from old days in high school and just after, when every date had the potential to paralyze me. The way I unparalyzed myself then was to break dates with boys who actually attracted me. The best thing about Ty had been that he attracted Daddy. I saw that he was clean and polite and familiar and good. Somehow that enabled the three-legged woman to walk, carefully, and very slowly, but with dignity.

  Now the three-legged woman stood on the blacktop in the moonlight, and each of her legs strained in a different direction. Actually putting one foot in front of the other, carrying myself closer and closer to someone for whom I was soaked with desire, which was what I was doing, seemed like an illusion. Soon this illusion had me standing below the window, then
circling, quietly, around to the back window of that room, where I saw what I had been looking for, Jess Clark, his back and the back of his head, in a white shirt, the slope of his shoulders and the angle of his neck as evocative and promising as anything I had ever seen. But distant and unreal, like a picture on a television screen, as unreal as the imaginary walking me that had left behind the actual motionless me on the blacktop. Now the imaginary me sang out, “Jess! Hey, Jess! Jess Clark!” Magically, the figure turned and came to the window, pushed the sash higher, and bent down. He said, “Hi! Who’s out there?”

  “It’s, uh, Ginny.” Shame and fear rose up around me like a cloud.

  He said, “Hey! What are you doing? Did you knock? I had the radio on.”

  Although the light was behind him, I saw the white flash of a smile. I said, “I guess I haven’t seen you in a while, huh?”

  “Lots going on. I miss you.” His voice softened. He should not have said that. He should not have said it because then I said, “I love you,” and he said, “Oh, Ginny,” and what I heard in his voice was pure, clear remorse that resonated in the ensuing silence like the note of a bell and told me all I needed to know about every question that lingered from earlier in the summer.

  After a moment, he said, “Let me come down. I’ll be right down.” But I wasn’t going to wait for that. I knew the way home, not down the open, revealing road, but between the stiff concealing rows of corn. No apologies or kindness or humiliating clarifications of his feelings would follow me there.

  I was washing the breakfast dishes by six. Ty was pacing the shoulder of Cabot Street Road. At seven the construction workers arrived, already having breakfasted at the café. I started one load of wash and took another outside and began to hang it on the clothesline. I was a good machine, and soon my view of the work site was hidden by sheets and shirts, so I didn’t see two cars pull up behind the lumber truck. What I did see, sometime later, when I was carrying the basket back into the house, was the lumber truck and all the cars—including Marv Carson’s big maroon Pontiac and Ken La-Salle’s powder blue Dodge—pull onto the road in a line and drive away. Ty was standing, watching them go. He took off his cap and wiped the sweat off his face with his sleeve, then he put the cap back on. He stood looking after them for a long time.

  I didn’t need him to tell me that Marv and Ken had made him stop work on the hog buildings, nor did I need him to confess to me that he’d paid for the weekend’s work in a futile attempt to push the construction past some point of no return. I dimly recognized as I watched him that his efforts had been foolish, a waste of our money, an extra fillip of defeat that he could have avoided, but what it looked like at the time was our crowning failure as a couple.

  34

  TWO MORNINGS LATER, I was getting out the vacuum cleaner. Ty was out in the hog barn, and we had spoken very little since our argument.

  “Crops look terrific.”

  I jumped.

  Henry Dodge, our minister, was standing outside the screen with his hand on the latch.

  I said, “Bin buster in the making. We’d better have a long dry spell in September.”

  “Are you going to invite me in?”

  I stood up. My hands dripped suds. I dried them. “Sure. Coffee?”

  He pushed his thumb down on the latch and opened the door in a smoothly aggressive way, as if, I thought meanly, he was practiced at taking advantage of small openings. I recalled that he’d been a missionary at some point early on, maybe in Africa somewhere, or the Philippines.

  He said, “Ginny, I thought we were friends.”

  I said, “Here, sit down. There’s some cake from last night.”

  “It’s a little early for cake.”

  “Ty likes it. He likes pie for breakfast better, though.” I looked at him when I poured the cup of coffee. That word “friends” floated in the air, taking on more complexity the more that I looked at Henry Dodge. I said, “Maybe.”

  “Maybe what?”

  “Maybe we’ve been friends. Maybe you could define the term more clearly.”

  He laughed as if I had made a joke, then said, “You came to visit a while ago.”

  “Well, I did, yeah. But it’s okay.” This remark made him seem inquisitive, and I resented it. I said, “Maybe I should have called you after the church supper. What a stir.” I rolled my eyes.

  “I should have called you, I think. That’s partly why I came.”

  I gazed at him. I said, “Maybe we’ve been friends. Define the term more clearly, and I’ll tell you.”

  He laughed again. I felt a distant recognition of how these responses of mine could seem witty, or ironic, but I was dead serious. Henry sat down and shifted back and forth in the seat as if he were hollowing himself a spot in deep grass. He took a sip of coffee and said, “I think I’m good at seeing wider perspectives, but mostly I’d like you to talk to me.”

  I allowed, “The church supper was embarrassing.”

  “Not everyone thought Harold was right to speak out like that.”

  I gauged this. Finally, I said, “Do you mean that a few disagreed with Harold, or most people, or just how many?”

  “Well—”

  “Actually, I can’t believe anyone thought it was right of Harold to speak out like that.” I felt myself heating up. “He set that up! He came over here especially to set it up, and he was gleeful about it—”

  “In his present affliction, I don’t think—” He turned the handle of his cup toward me and began again, “I’d like to be a peacemaker.”

  “Why?” I tried to make this sound as flat and purely interrogative as possible, but he took it as an accusation. He said, “No one else seems to have. As your pastor and your father’s pastor—”

  “I mean, what purpose is served by making peace?”

  “Oh.”

  Apparently he hadn’t really considered this. I waited for him to think of something.

  Finally, after glancing at me two or three times, he said, “Wouldn’t you prefer it yourself? I’m enough your friend to know you thrive in a happier atmosphere than this. I’ve never seen you to seek a quarrel. That just doesn’t seem like you.” He liked this line, and warmed to it as he spoke. “You look unhappy. You look drawn and tired.”

  The irrefutable evidence of appearance.

  “Are you watching us? Me? Looks aren’t everything.”

  He laughed again, then sobered up. His voice was solemn when he said, “You don’t have to watch to see.”

  My friend? Could I rely on him to see what I saw in our family and our father and Rose and myself? That seemed like the one test of friendship.

  He said, “Families are better together. Working together.”

  “Is that an absolute?”

  He paused to inventory the families he knew, sipping his coffee, then said, “Maybe not quite an absolute, if we’re talking absolutes.” He smiled. “But the exceptions are extremely rare. I know I’m a conservative on this score, Ginny, and that hasn’t always been to my advantage. But in all my years in the ministry, I’ve only seen one divorce I agreed with. One single family breakup.” He paused the way he liked to pause in his sermons, preparatory to driving home a point he was especially fond of, then he said, “The kind of life people lead in this county is getting rarer and rarer. Three generations on one farm, working together, is something to protect.”

  “That seems true in theory.”

  “Helen and I chose to come here partly because we want to help preserve a way of life that we believe in. Some of my best memories are of making hay with my grandfather when my uncles were young men. They worked like one body, they were that close.”

  “Do they all still get along?” I smiled frankly and disingenuously.

  “Mostly.”

  “Mostly?”

  “Well, of course there are spats. Man is fallen. And maybe there’s a value to being yoked to your enemies. You have more opportunity to learn to love them.” He beamed, having solved the puzzl
e I’d proposed.

  I said, “How many haven’t spoken to one or the other in more than ten years?”

  Henry licked his lips. “I don’t know. Listen—”

  “Come on, Henry. Fess up.”

  “You’re asking whether my family is holy, as if only perfect virtue on my part permits me to advise you. That’s a commonly held fallacy, and even ministers fall for it, but—”

  “I just don’t know why you’re here. Who sent you, what you want me to do, what you think I’ve done, why you came here instead of going to Rose. Are we friends? Have you had us over for a barbecue? Do you call me to chat from time to time? Do you solicit my advice on your problems? No, no, and no. I don’t want you coming out here for a purpose. I don’t want to be on your rounds.”

  “There are pastoral duties—”

  Problems. Barbecues. Chatting. There was something I wanted from him after all, wasn’t there? My heartbeat quickened and my palms got damp. I said, “Just tell me what people are saying about us.”

  “Ginny.”

  “I want to know. I really do.”

  “People don’t gossip as much as you think.”

  “Yes, they do.”

  “Well, not to me.” His look was impenetrable. Then he said, “Can’t I reach you? I want to.” His tone and demeanor were warmly sympathetic here, and it occurred to me that in the past he would have suckered me, back when I would have readily called him my friend just because I would have been flattered by the public acknowledgment of such a friendship. Now the whole idea seemed suspect. I couldn’t tell whether I mistrusted his office or him, but either way, there would be no confidences. I set my coffee cup on the table, stood up, and went to the sink, where I wrung out the sponge under a stream of hot water. I began wiping the table. I said, “Lift your cup.”

  He lifted his cup. “At least, keep coming to church on Sundays. Keep the avenue to God open. He’s marvelously forgiving. More forgiving than we are of ourselves.”

  The screen door opened. Ty saw Henry, stepped inside, and greeted him respectfully. Here, I thought, were two people who agreed on so many things that their opinions automatically took on the appearance of reality. It was a small world they lived in, really, small, complete, and forever curving back to itself. Their voices relaxed and lowered, and their world looked far away to me.