A Thousand Acres: A Novel

by Jane Smiley

  Caroline looked at me for a long moment before she smiled, and then her smile was formal, you might even say careful. She remarked, “I wasn’t sure when you’d get here.”

  “I’m an early riser.”

  “That’s my favorite part of the day, too.”

  I don’t know that an independent observer would have suspected we were related—the same ethnic stock, perhaps, though my hair was dark, with gray streaks by then, and Caroline’s was almost red, but the difference now ran deeper than our clothes, to body type and stance, to skin and hair, to social class and whether we expected to be seen or not. She dressed to look good, and I dressed for obscurity.

  I knew I seemed hostile. I said, “There’s a kerosene heater in the barn. I could set that up.”

  “Some couple in Johnston died from one of those last year.”

  “We could open the window a little. You just need ventilation.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “Daddy used it for years out in the shop.”

  Her eyebrows lifted a millimeter and dropped again. She said, “If we work quickly, we can stand the cold. It’s above freezing.”

  “Fine. Where do you want to start?”

  “Why not right here?”

  “Fine.”

  So we started. Taking dishes out of the pantry, and glassware and stainless and old cake plates and coffee makers and cut-glass dessert plates and clear cups and saucers that I hadn’t seen for thirty years, since Mommy would have the Lutheran ladies over for coffee and cake on a Sunday afternoon. I felt a small, chilled inner blossom of surprise. There were Christmas napkins in a drawer that I’d never seen, white linen with embroidered holly wreaths in one corner. A waffle iron, the pressure canner, an electric frying pan with a broken handle. There were three vases with dried-up flower cubes crumbling in their bottoms, a soup tureen shaped like a lemon, a Tupperware cake holder and two Tupperware pie holders, a ten-inch pie plate, a nine-inch pie plate, and four cupcake tins that I knew well, but also a china cream and sugar set with roses painted around the rim that I hadn’t seen in thirty years. There were eight glass jars with lids, old olive jars and pickle jars and peanut butter jars. There was a box of corks that Rose must have thought would come in handy. I said, “Once I looked around for some of Mommy’s things, and I didn’t find any. I thought they’d all gone to the Lutheran Church, but I guess Rose had them.” Did I mind? I couldn’t have said.

  “Which things are Rose’s and which things are Mother’s?”

  “At this point, they’re all Rose’s, I guess.”

  “But some things—these Christmas napkins, for instance. You must remember—”

  “I remember the cups and saucers.” I gestured toward the glass coffee things on the counter. “I remember because I thought it must be a sign of festivity to have the coffee visible like that.”

  “Well, we’ll set those aside then.” She carried the set carefully to the table.

  I said, “I don’t know anything about the napkins. They seem more like Mommy than Rose, but they’re new to me.”

  She left them where they were.

  She said, “What about the dishes? What dishes did Daddy eat off of?”

  “Some white with a turquoise rim. I don’t see them. Maybe Rose put them away.”

  “Or sold them.”

  “Or gave them to the church.”

  She said, “I remember those. I’d like to have them.”

  “They were just glass. From the fifties. They weren’t valuable.”

  “From that point of view, what is valuable here?” She had her hands on her hips and her tone was rising. I said, “I don’t know, Caroline,” and I could feel my own eagerness gearing up to match hers. She said, “Those Corningware plates must have been Rose’s. You can have those.”

  I spoke with conscious coolness. “You don’t want anything of Rose’s?”

  She was taking some mugs off cup hooks. The one in her hand said “Pete’s Joe” on it. I held out my hand for it, and she gave it to me. Then she said, “Not really, no.”

  I was about to challenge her. I thought I could make my “why not” feel like a slap, but I suddenly wasn’t as ready as I thought. I was disoriented by the array of unfamiliar goods arrayed about. I said, “You finish this. Set aside what you want. I’ll go upstairs.”

  The girls and I had cleared their bedrooms, so I left those doors closed. The bathroom, on the north side of the house, was freezing cold and inhospitable. I opened the medicine chest. Some generic aspirin, of which I took four, Gaviscon and Pepto-Bismol, an unfinished course of Amoxicillin, hydrogen peroxide, syrup of ipecac, Bactine, iodine, Band-Aids and gauze patches. I closed the medicine chest. Towels still hung over the towel racks. I began to fold them over my arm. I stopped after two and put them down on the toilet seat. The cold seemed to play over my skin like a fever. I walked out of the bathroom, looked around. There would be more towels in the towel closet, sheets in the drawers beneath it. I stared at those drawers, beautiful dark oak that you could order from Sears in 1910 that you couldn’t even get any more. The floors. The door frames. The tiny hexagonal white tile in the bathroom that as a child I used to try and fit my toes into. It seemed to me that if I only knew the trick—just a small trick—I could look around this familiar hallway with Rose’s eyes, and if I could do that, then I could sense everything she had sensed in the last few years. That, it seemed, would be one way to stop missing her. The cold beat against me in rhythmic blows. A headache pushed up from beneath the aspirin and swelled to fill my skull. I went back down the stairs.

  Caroline’s face met mine as soon as I entered the kitchen. I said, “You must think you’re going to take all of Mommy’s and Daddy’s things, and I’m going to take all of Rose’s.”

  “I’m sure there’s more that was Rose’s—”

  “That’s not the point.” I realized I was gasping. She looked at me, and I saw that for once she was a little afraid.

  Her eyes widened, but she didn’t speak.

  I said, “Let’s hear it.”

  “What?”

  “Let’s hear what you’re thinking?”

  “Why do you want to?” Her momentary fear hardened. “I think it’s better if we just divide up the stuff and go home.”

  “How can we divide up the stuff without knowing what it means?”

  She smiled at this.

  I turned and ran back upstairs. I opened the door to what had been Daddy’s room, after that Rose’s room. The pictures were gone, leaving vivid squares on the faded wallpaper. I pulled open the closet door and fought my way back toward the shelf above the window. They were there, in a stack, just where I knew Rose would have stored them. In the kitchen, I laid them out on the table, the nameless baby at the top, kicking on a pale blanket, smiling in his or her little white hat. I said, “Okay, tell me who all these people were.”

  Caroline sauntered over and surveyed them. She said, “I’m not taking tests.”

  “Just tell me.”

  “Well, those must be the Davises. Those would be the Cooks. Grandfather Cook again, with the tractor. Mother.”

  “Who’s the baby?”

  “You, probably. You’re the oldest.”

  “We didn’t have a camera when I was a baby.”

  “Rose, then. Or me. Who is it?”

  “I don’t know. Rose didn’t know. You don’t know.”

  “So what?”

  “So this. Everyone here is a stranger, even the baby. These are our ancestors, but they don’t look familiar. Even Daddy doesn’t look familiar. They might as well be anyone.”

  “Daddy looks familiar.” She smiled.

  “How familiar?”

  “He looks like Daddy, that’s all.”

  “How familiar?”

  She turned her gaze from the pictures to my face, took her hands out of her pockets and picked up the picture. It was from the thirties, when Daddy would have been about twenty-five. He looked handsome but a little exasperated,
as if this picture taking were a waste of time. Finally, she said, “As familiar as a father should look, no more, no less.”

  I said, “You’re lucky.”

  “What does that mean?”

  I didn’t answer. She put down the picture, then picked up the one of the baby and scrutinized it. I said, “Isn’t it strange there’s only one? I looked for other pictures, but they start in school. This is all, before that.”

  “Well, so what?”

  “So why do you want these things? Pictures of strangers, dishes and cups and saucers that you don’t remember? It’s like you’re just taking home somebody else’s farm childhood. You don’t know what it means!”

  “So I can’t pass some test.”

  “What if I weren’t truthful? What if I sent you off, on purpose, with all of Rose’s things, and kept Mommy’s things for myself?”

  “I thought of that.” Now her look flared at last. She exclaimed, “Have you got to wreck everything? Why are we having this sale? Because you and Rose bankrupted the farm. I can’t even accept that, but I’ve got to. So I come here, and you can’t leave me alone. You’re going to tell me something terrible about Daddy, or Mommy, or Grandpa Cook or somebody. You’re going to wreck my childhood for me. I can see it in your face. You’re dying to do it, just like Rose was. She used to call me, but I wouldn’t talk to her!” She walked over to the sink and turned on the faucet. When nothing came out, she stared fixedly at it for a moment, then said, “I told Frank last night, ‘I don’t know what makes them tick. It’s like they seek out bad things. They don’t see what’s there—they see beyond that to something terrible, and it’s like they’re finally happy when they see that!’ ” Now she looked at me. “I think things generally are what they seem to be! I think that people are basically good, and sorry to make mistakes, and ready to make amends! Look at Daddy! He knew he’d treated me unfairly, but that we really felt love for each other. He made amends. We got really close at the end.”

  “He thought you were dead.”

  “That was the very end! Before that, he was just as sweet as he could be. We talked about things. It was a side to him that didn’t come out much before that, but suffering brought it out. That was the real him.”

  “How did he mistreat you?”

  “Well, by getting mad and cutting me out of the farm. He knew he’d been unfair.”

  I found myself shaking my head.

  She flared up again. “I know you don’t believe me! I don’t expect you to believe me, but it’s true.”

  “Caroline—”

  “I just won’t listen to you! You never have any evidence! The evidence isn’t there! You have a thing against Daddy. It’s just greed or something.” She abruptly looked me in the face. “I realize that some people are just evil.” For a second, I thought she was referring to Daddy. Then I realized she was referring to me. But I was unmoved. There was not even the usual inner clang of encountering dislike. This was Caroline. Truly we were beyond like and dislike by now.

  I said, “You don’t know what—”

  Her hands dropped to her sides. It was clear that she couldn’t think what to do for a moment, that I could tell her everything, pour it right into her ear, with no resistance on her part.

  Rose would have.

  I didn’t.

  Then Caroline turned suddenly and ran out of the house, slamming the back door behind her.

  I continued to sort things, in the living room, where I wouldn’t be tempted to look out the window for her. The living room, I realized, hurt me the most, because that was where Rose made her last stand, with the couch and the lamp and the chairs, and other things, too, like a subscription to The New Yorker and another one to Scientific American. In the bench of Pete’s piano was a beginning piano method for adults; in the bookcase, where stacks of Successful Farming used to sit, were some course catalogs from the community college in Clear Lake. It was easier, from these artifacts, to imagine Rose by herself, in this room, contemplating her past, planning her future, reckoning up what it was possible to recover. It was a grievous but soothing picture of Rose, one to set against the memory I had of her in which she was shaking me and shaking me, trying to wake me up, work me up, push me out of my natural muddle.

  A truck engine roared outside of the house. I looked at my watch. Caroline had been out there a half an hour. I looked out the front window. Her truck, a new red Ford, I noticed, turned north and passed the big picture window, between me and the old south field across the road. A frozen rind of snow lay between the furrows and drifted against the fence posts. It was nearly blackened by the fine dust of wind-borne soil.

  I sat down on the couch and stuck my hands in the pockets of my sweatshirt. I sensed Rose there, pressing on me like a bad conscience, and I remembered her saying, with that mixture of irony and eagerness that was hers alone, “Ask me something. I want to tell you the truth.”

  I should have told Caroline the truth.

  I cast my gaze around the frigid room. I said, aloud, “Rose. Rose, she didn’t ask. There are just some things you have to ask for.”

  After half an hour, when Caroline had not returned, I went out to my own borrowed truck to wait for her. I turned on the engine and the heater, and sat for another half hour. By then it was nearly one in the afternoon, and I was numb with the cold. I drove into town and had some lunch at the Cabot Café, and then I drove to Pike.

  Marv Carson was in his office. He had tall bottles of three different kinds of mineral water on his desk, one from Italy, one from France, and one from Sweden. I said, “We don’t want anything, Marv. Everything can go.”

  He said, “Well, that’s terrific, Ginny. I’ll tell the Boone brothers to haul it all out. You coming down for the auction? It’s a hard thing to watch, let me warn you.”

  “No. I’ve got to work that day. Just let me know.”

  But in the end, I couldn’t drive away.

  It was nearly four when I got back to the farm. I turned down County 686, and drove dead slowly, as slowly as if I were walking, or driving a tractor, or horses, mules, or even oxen, which Grandpa Davis had used the first two summers ninety years before. I passed the drainage wells, two on each side of the road, their grates a little rusted but still bolted firmly down. I stopped the truck and went and stood on one. Under the noise of the wind, I could faintly hear the eternal drip and trickle of the sea beneath the soil.

  The house repelled me now, but the barn drew me. I crossed the frosted, snow-patched grass and pushed the big door back on its slider, then back farther, because the westering sun made up for the electric lights that had been shut off. The big green and yellow pieces of equipment were icy to the touch, parked expertly by someone, taking up every inch of floor space. They had not been cleaned yet—Rose might have weakened too fast for that—and all the tire treads, the metal joints, the knives and hoses were covered with dried black mud and pale corn husks, furry dark fragments of bean pods and stalks. I kicked a crust of mud off the front wheel of the tractor. The big room smelled of diesel fuel and grease.

  Things hung from the walls: part of an antique harness that might bring some money, three hurricane lamps, old buckets and feed pans nested precariously together, rakes. A pile of rusted bailing wire. On the workbench, some C clamps, a hammer, which I picked up, a band saw, a spare ax handle. Other tools. A folded tarp. A peck-sized fruit basket. Back in the corner, a ray of sunlight shone on the old pump from the well outside Daddy’s back door, here since they piped water into the house. A half a dozen paint cans. A stack of old windows, some glass broken beneath them. On the workbench, cans of nails, new and used. A box of fuses. The lid of an old chicken incubator. I wondered where it would all go. A few plastic Treflan jugs lay underneath the workbench, both with lids and without. A pyramid of ancient one-gallon tins was stacked in the farthest corner, with a little space cleared around them. It was getting cold as the sun approached the horizon, but I went around the tractor and climbed gingerly over the disk.
Dust floated in the air. I picked up one of the dry and dented tins. The label said that it contained DDT. “Handle according to instructions.” I wondered where it could all go.

  I moved the truck into Rose’s driveway anyway. Then I got out and walked around Rose’s old house. The butter-colored plywood fading to gray that covered the windows made the place look blind and desolate. The white siding on the western face of the house was dark with grit. Rose would have washed that down.

  The boards nailed over the cellar door came up easily enough with the claw hammer, even though my hands were shaking in the frigid dusky breeze. The metal handle turned with barely a creak. I lifted the door. There was no electricity and light outside was fading. I didn’t carry matches. My feet felt their way down the steps one at a time. I knew Rose’s shelves weren’t far from the doorway, so I stepped forward with my hands outstretched. I felt cobwebs drift across my fingers and face.

  The rough wooden shelves held smooth cold pints and quarts. I didn’t have to see them to know what they were—jams and pickles, tomatoes, dilled beans, tomato juice, beets, applesauce, peach butter. Rose’s bounty, years of farm summers, a habit we kept up long after most of our neighbors. I felt a box and knew I had found the sausages, shoved in helter-skelter owing to the jumble of passionate events, then later pushed back, pushed aside, forgotten. I carried the box awkwardly up the steps. I closed the cellar door, and in the dark, with the truck lights trained on my work, I nailed the door down again. The kraut and the liquid inside the jars had turned a deep orange, and the lids were rusted a little around the rims. I kept glancing at them beside me on the seat as I drove away, and so I forgot to take a last look at the farm.