A Thousand Acres (1992 Pulitzer Prize)

by Jane Smiley

  But for me, it wouldn't be worth it, really, unless I was trying some of the stuff I learned out west."

  "Well, maybe." Ty smiled.

  At breakfast, Ty was mild but insistent. He kept saying, "People don't realize that there isn't any room any more for something that might not work out. I mean, when his income comes solely from the farm, and he's got to make up his mind about the fuel and the time for another pass through the beans, or maybe getting forty-three bushels an acre instead of forty-seven. It's all very well to talk about ten acres of black walnut trees, and then harvesting them for veneer in thirty years at ten thousand dollars a tree, but what about the lost production for that thirty years? It's more complicated than people think, just reading books."

  I said, "Are you talking to yourself or to me?"

  He looked up from his plate and grinned at me. "Hell, Ginny, this morning there's a whole peanut gallery."

  "He wasn't criticizing you. You don't have to feel criticized."

  "Yes and no. He doesn't/eel critical, and he wants to be our friend, but he wouldn't do things our way, and he probably wouldn't have us do things our way, truth to tell."

  "Maybe, but there's room for lots of ways, isn't there?"

  He sat back and wiped his mouth, then pushed back his chair and stood up. Outside, the day was beginning to lighten. He said, "Well, sure, in principle. I sometimes wonder how that principle works in action, though. Anyway, I am going to have another pass through the beans in Mel's corner, because there's a terrible stand of cockleburs that's gotten all over in there." He gave my arm a little squeeze and went out the door.

  AFTER Ty LEFT, it took me half an hour to get myself down to my father's. Lots of little things needed picking up, and, in fact, our late nights were beginning to tell on my mornings. I knew Daddy would be annoyed at having to wait for his breakfast. Now that I was no longer cooking for Rose, he wanted it slap on the table at six, even though there were no fields he was hurrying to get to. I dawdled. I mulled over the idea that if he slept later and ate later, then he wouldn't have so much time to fill during the day. I let myself get a little irritated with him, but what I really did was put off seeing him. The memory of Caroline's call, which I should have returned Monday but didn't, had jarred me awake before Ty the early bird had rolled out of bed to check the hogs.

  The fact was, Daddy couldn't keep driving around all over the county and even the state, looking for trouble. Retired farmers were supposed to spend their time at the cafe in town, giving free advice, or they were supposed to breed irises or roses or Jersey cows or something.

  They were supposed to watch the polls during elections and go fishing, or work part-time at the hardware store.

  Except that the thought of Daddy doing any of these sociable, trivial, or, you might say, pleasant things was absurd. He himself had always ridiculed farmers in retirement, and spoken with respect, even envy, of Ty's father's heart attack in the hog pen. Yes, it was freshly evident that he had impulsively betrayed himself by handing over the farm.

  That annoyed me, too. I kicked off my slippers and put on my Keds as if I were really going to let him have it.

  As I walked down the road, I could see Pete back his silver Ford pickup out of the driveway and turn south. I waved, and his arm shot out of the driver's window and arced a greeting in return. Mostly when you pass farmers on the road, they acknowledge you with the subtlest of signals-a linger lifted off the steering wheel, or even a lifted eyebrow. Pete was a hearty waver. It made him seem a little too eager to please, the way his silver pickup made him seem a little too flashy.

  I was appreciating those things about Pete lately, though.

  Instead of seeing him in the old way, less competent and reliable than Ty, too volatile and even a little silly, I saw that he did his best to lit in and do his job, and also that his failure to succeed completely was actually an assertion of a different style more than anything. If he had come from around here, if his father had farmed and he had inherited his father's farm, his relative flamboyance, like his musical talent, would have been something for the neighbors to be a little proud of evidence of native genius rather than suspect strangeness.

  Since my talk with Jess the day I planted tomatoes, my sense of the men I knew had undergone a subtle shift. I was less automatically critical-yes, they all had misbehaved, and failed, too, but now I saw that you could also say that they had suffered setbacks, suffered them, and suffered, period. That was the key. I would have said that certainly Rose and I had suffered, too, and Caroline and Mary Livingstone and all the women I knew, but there seemed to be a dumb, unknowing quality to the way the men had suffered, as if like animals, it was not possible for them to gain perspective on their suffering.

  They had us, Rose and me, in their suffering, but they didn't seem to have what we had with each other, a kind of ongoing narrative and commentary about what was happening that grew out of our conversations, our rolled eyes, our sighs and jokes and irritated remarks. The result for us was that we found ourselves more or less prepared for the blows that fell-we could at least make that oddly comforting remark, "I knew all along something like this was going to happen." The men, and Pete in particular, always seemed a little surprised, and therefore a little more hurt and a little more damaged, by things that happened-the deaths of prized animals, accidents, my father's blowups and contempt, forays into commodity trading that lost money, even-for Ty-my miscarriages.

  Of course he refused to try any more. He had counted on each pregnancy as if there were no history.

  And then there was my father. As I stepped off the road onto the yard in front of his house, I sensed him looking down at me, but I didn't look up, I just headed for the back door. His kitchen cabinets were still in the driveway, and I had heard nothing of the couch to be delivered. I reflected as I opened the screen door that speculations about my father were never idle or entertaining, but always something to be flinched from. Certainly he must have suffered, but my mind fled from thoughts of him and took refuge in those of Ty, Pete, and Jess.

  He met me at the back door. "It's bright day." His tone was accusing.

  It meant, I'm hungry, you've made me wait, and also, you're behind, late, slow. I said, "I had a few things to do."

  "At six o'clock in the morning?"

  "I just picked up the house a little."

  "Hmp."

  "Sorry."

  He backed away from the door and I entered the mudroom and put on the apron that hung from a hook there. He said, "Nobody shopped over the weekend. There's no eggs."

  "Oh, darn. I meant to bring them down. I bought some for you yesterday, but I forgot them." I looked him square in the eye. It was my choice, to keep him waiting or to fail to give him his eggs. His gaze was flat, brassily reflective. Not only wasn't he going to help me decide, my decision was a test. I could push past him, give him toast and cereal and bacon, a breakfast without a center of gravity, or I could run home and get the eggs. My choice would show him something about me, either that I was selfish and inconsiderate (no eggs) or that I was incompetent (a flurry of activity where there should be organized procedure). I did it. I smiled foolishly, said I would be right back, and ran out the door and back down the road.

  The whole way I was conscious of my body-graceless and hurrying, unlit, panting, ridiculous in its very femininity. It seemed like my father could just look out of his big front window and see me naked, chest heaving, breasts, thighs, and buttocks jiggling, dignity irretrievable.

  Later, after I had cooked the breakfast and he had eaten it, what I marveled at was that I hadn't just gone across the road and gotten some eggs from Rose, that he had given me the test, and I had taken it.

  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 lit, 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 ligure 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 ligure 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 ligure, 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 that 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 k
eep this conversation to myself.

  I SPENT THE M0RNING 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, potscrubbing 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.