A Thousand Acres (1992 Pulitzer Prize)

by Jane Smiley

  He held my gaze, and said in a low voice, as if to himself "I got nothing."

  I thought he was just trying to get my sympathy. I said, "There's enough for everybody, for one thing." For another, I thought, you gave it away of your own accord. But I didn't dare say it. It made me too mad.

  Ty got him up to bed, but not before I said, "Breakfast at seven, Daddy. Ty will wait for you at our place, and you can work something out about what you want to do tomorrow."

  Back at our place, Ty said, "Maybe he shouldn't work tomorrow.

  We don't know what sort of trauma there's been."

  "Give him an easy job, for a couple of hours. His life doesn't have any structure. That's exactly the problem. Now's the time to do something about it, when he's ashamed of himself."

  Ty got out of his pants and sat down to take off his socks. I roamed the room, picking up objects and putting them down. Power pumped through me. I cruised into the bathroom, the two other bedrooms, one used for guests who never came, one for old furniture. I looked out windows in every direction. It was a benign summer night, breezy and thick. Back to our room. Ty was stretched out on his back, his hands behind his head. I said, "I learned something tonight."

  "Take charge?"

  "Yes, but more than that. It was something physical, not just in my mind. Not just a lesson."

  "Hmm."

  "Do you believe me?"

  "Oh, I believe you."

  "Well, what?"

  "Ginny, it's after midnight. You said you'd have breakfast on your father's table by seVen. Let's just see if the thing you learned tonight is true tomorrow, okay?"

  ú "Fine."

  He closed his eyes. I marched across the hallway to the west-facing bedroom and looked toward the Clark farm, staring and staring until I could hear my husband's breathing deepen and slow.

  In the morning, there was a fair amount of grunting and groaning.

  I was immune to it. I set my father's breakfast-French toast, bacon, a sliced banana and some strawberries, a pot of coffee-in front of him, and I handed him the syrup and the butter, and the sugar for his coffee, and I straightened up the kitchen after myself I served him well, but I withheld my sympathy. On the other hand, he didn't ask for it. He finished eating, pushed his plate away, and stood up.

  I moved to the window after he banged out the door, and watched him trudge up the blacktop toward our place, where Ty was waiting in the barn. Normally he would have climbed into his truck and driven the quarter mile, so he walked as if he were disoriented, surprised by the very act of walking. He was stiff. His shoulders hunched. His legs swung out and around. That was something he needed, too, more exercise. He didn't look back, but Rose waited until he was a dot on the road to cross from her place.

  I was wiping the range with the dishrag. The screen door slapped, and Rose said, "He's okay, then?"

  "He should check in with Dr. Henry in Pike today, and maybe get some more painkillers. They gave him two Percodans, but I don't know if he's taken any. I'll get him there this afternoon. The state troopers won't be coming around for another ten days or so, not until the blood test is back from the lab."

  "They ought to put him in jail. I just can't believe how lenient they are."

  "Nobody got hurt, Rose. It would have been different-" "That's pure luck."

  "You get to take credit for that luck, legally, just like if your luck is bad and somebody does get hurt, you have toRose planted herself in the center of the doorway to the living room, and listed her hands on her hips. "Jeer, Ginny, don't you get tired of seeing his side? Don't you just long to stand back and tell the truth about him for once?

  He's dangerous! He's impulsive and angry, and he doesn't give other people the same benefit of the doubt that they give him!"

  "I know that. Last night I really gave him a talking to-" "Sometimes I hate him. Sometimes waves of hatred just roll through me, and I want him to die, and go to hell and stay there forever, just roasting!"

  "Rose!"

  "Why are you saying 'Rose!" in that shocked way? Because you're not supposed to wish evil on someone, or because you really don't hate him?"

  "I don't. I really don't. He's a bear, but-" "He's not a bear. He's not innocent like that-I raised my voice above hers. "Last night I told him in no uncertain terms that if he drove drunk again, I'd take the truck keys away from him. He heard me, too. He was looking right at me. Ty's putting him to work. I think things'll improve. He's hard to live with-" Rose turned on her heel and stomped into the living room. I followed her. She was standing by a little bookcase. Twenty issues or so of Successful Farming magazine were stacked there, brochures for farm equipment, some National Geographics, a Bible, two Reader's Digests, and a book of American folk songs. Nothing personal, or reminiscent. She was staring down at the Reader's Digests, tapping the top one with her fingernail. She said, "Sometimes I hate you, too."

  I waited. I thought at once of Linda and Pammy, the way they sometimes confided in me instead of in their mother, the way I liked to give them things, or take them places that Rose wouldn't have approved of if she'd known. For years, they had been the unspoken issue between us, and I at once felt guilty, sorry that she could justifiably accuse me of undermining her, of wanting them so much to be mine, sometimes, that I couldn't help imagining what it would be like if they were.

  "I hate you because you're the link between me and him."

  "Who?"

  She threw up her hands in exasperation. "Daddy, of course. Don't be so stupid. You're such a good daughter, so slow to judge, it's like stupidity. It drives me crazy."

  I smiled. "Just last night, I was thinking the exact same thing about Ty-" She ignored me. "Every time I've made up my mind to do something-get off this place, leave Pete, go back to teaching just to earn the money-you stop me. When I was little, I mean really little, three or four, you were like this wall between me and him, but now you're the path, you don't keep him out, you show him the way in, every time you're reasonable, every time you pause to wonder about his point of view. Every time you stop and think! I don't want to stop and think!"

  I stared at her. She pushed her hair back with her hand, then put her list on her hip, defiant. Except that on the way down, her lingers fluttered over the vanished breast, the vanished muscles. She stared me back, then tossed her head and looked out the window. I said, "I'm not like him. I don't always sympathize with him. But I can't say I have any faith that he's going to meet us halfway. I think it's practical to try and work around him sometimes."

  It was funny how I wasn't offended by her angry talk, how I thought it was okay, and even something of a relief for her to talk about hating me sometimes, but in a certain tone of voice, an embarrassed tone of voice. I'd thought Rose's negative feelings would carry more conviction than that. Her embarrassment amounted to a reprieve. I stepped toward her, alive with the sense that I'd had the night before, that the tables could be turned on our father, that he could be taken in hand and controlled; we just had to agree on our plan and stick to it. She looked skeptical. I said, "Anyway, the point is, yes, you're right, I've let him get away with a lot of stuff. We all have. But we can set rules, and I think the rules can be pretty simple."

  Rose walked to the front window and stood with her back to me, staring west across the fields. It was a picture of monochromatic greenness these days. The corn, which grows with mechanical uniformity that can seem a little surreal if you think about it, had put forth six or eight pennant-shaped leaves that floated in smooth jointless arcing opposite pairs, one above the other, and were large enough now to shade out most of the black soil of the field. Corn plants are oddly manlike-the leaves always reminded me of shoulders, the tassels of heads. I stood next to her and looked at her face. After a few moments, she looked back at me. She said, "Ginny, tell me what you really really think about Daddy."

  "Well, I don't know." Except that I did know. All sorts ofthoughts had been crystal clear to me all night long, but now that she asked for them,
their simultaneity made it impossible for me to choose one over the other and have it be the main thing I thought about Daddy.

  I licked my lips. Rose bit hers, I thought, then, to keep from saying anything that would influence me. I sorted, knowing she meant for me to answer. I was also aware of the crisp morning colors of what we were looking at, the shadow just in front of us, the green field and sunny blue sky beyond. I said, "I love Daddy. But he's so in the habit of giving orders, no back talk. You know."

  She looked at me.

  "I mean, he drinks and everything. I don't know how that colors things."

  She continued to look at me.

  "I'm willing to admit that he's been drinking a long time, probably as long as we've known him. I haven't really thought about it, but I'm sure if we sat down and worked it out-" She kept looking at me. I said, "Rose, you're making me nervous.

  What do you want me to say? I mean, the type of thing."

  She looked at me, then out the window. I said, "I mean, Mommy hasn't been around to tell us what to think of Daddy. I wonder about whether they were happy. Whether she liked him. Or he liked her.

  Though everybody liked Mommy. I think different things."

  She cleared her throat, and I took this as my cue to fall silent. She said, "Shit, Ginny."

  I laughed. I guess I had expected her mouth to open and some other voice, some oracular voice, to issue forth, echoing and deep.

  She pursed her lips, rapidly recomposing herself into the Rose I knew and relied on. She rolled her eyes, seemed about to make a joke at Daddy's expense, or mine. That would have been okay, too.

  Finally, she said, "I don't hate you, Ginny. I know what I was saying, but I don't know what it means, exactly. Or how to tell you what it means. Or something. Let's say the real story here is what you think.

  He's a pain in the butt, we divvy up the work. Maybe rules will do the trick. We can try it."

  "I can't describe what it was like, just to say to him, okay you have to do this, and you can't do that. I mean, it's so simple."

  "Famous last words." She put her arms around me, and her grip was strong, stronger than it had been. I said, "Love ya, sis, " in a kind of play tough voice.

  She said, "Me, too. United front, right?"

  "Right."

  Ty AND I DIDN'T PURSUE our conversation, didn't thrash out what it was I had learned or what it meant. I acted more decisive and made rules.

  I sensed that Ty disapproved, but it was a touchy subject, and I was afraid to talk about it because I hated friction with Ty. It was easy to discount his unvoiced opinion, too. After all, his dad had died so conveniently, just when the son was old enough to appreciate afresh what the father knew, while they were still working smoothly together, before age made the father unreliable or cantankerous. Ty loved his father, who was a kindly man, not very ambitious, and it had always been easy for him just to shift that love to my father. When I thought about it, new things came clear, about Ty and my father and us all.

  One was that Daddy's and Pete's storms gave a quiet steady worker like Ty lots of power, because not only would he calmly pursue his aims while they ranted, more often than not each of them would appeal to him for support. He would propose a solution, his solution. One reason for discounting his disapproval, I started to think, was the new way I saw him pursuing his selfinterest all these years, all in the guise of going along and getting along. It made me sort of mad, to tell the truth.

  And then there was the willful positive thinking, the self-induced illusion that everything would turn out fine, when we had all kinds of evidence that it wouldn't. If I was angry at myself for dopily accepting everything that had come to me, I was angry at Ty, too, because every fear I'd had of trying something new, of resisting, of creating conflict was a fear that he'd encouraged. I associated this with his father, with all his family's decades on the farm, never losing any ground, but never gaining any, either. It may have been impossible that someone as hesitant as myself could be seen as potentially wild or impulsive, but in our house I supplied the zip-the hint of the unpredictable, even if it was only an attempt at a Chinese recipe taken from the "Today" section of the Des Moines Register.

  I told myself that it wasn't what Rose and I were going to try with Daddy that Ty objected to, but the fact that we were going to try anything.

  I knew that I shouldn't be mad at Ty for being what he'd always been, patient, understanding, careful, willing to act as the bulwark against my father, but I was mad at him.

  Jess Clark thought Rose and I were taking exactly the right line.

  The fact is that the same sequence of days can arrange themselves into a number of different stories. On the one hand, we had my father's story-the incidents were the occasions of his increasingly erratic behavior, and the representations of that were here and there; the kitchen cabinetry buckling and swelling in the driveway, his impounded truck at wherever the state troopers kept such vehicles, the front right fender, it turned out later, smashed flat against the wheel, the hollowed-out headlight, the bumper twisted up under the right front quarter panel, even the ditch grass and weeds pinched in the cracks.

  And there was the couch that finally came, white brocade, about as inappropriate a couch for a farm living room as you could imagine.

  Then there was the trail of clues to our arguments about him with Caroline-a flurry of phone calls, followed by that number never appearing on our bill again, the item in the paper that appeared innocent but was intended to humiliate and succeeded in doing so, followed by a big bill, over a hundred dollars, for the Cuisinart Rose ordered from Younkers and had sent with the equally humiliating card-"Nice to read of your good news, Rose Lewis and family."

  It was an involving story, frightening and suspenseful, full of significance, if only to our family, and mystery, too, since Daddy only acted, and never revealed his motives. It was a story the neighbors surely followed with relish, eager for clues to what was really going on, and ready to supply any memories or speculation that would explain unaccountable twists in the narrative.

  But really the story of those days was the story of Jess Clark, of the color and richness and distinctness his presence in the neighborhood gave to every passing moment. When I think of him, or of that time, I think vividly of his face and ligure, of how startling it was, for one thing, to see someone nearly naked in running shorts with no shirt in a world where men wore work pants, boots, and feed caps on the hottest days. I think of the muscles of his legs, defined by years of roadwork into sinuous braids of discrete tensions.

  I think of his abdomen and arm and back and shoulder muscles, present in every man, but visible in Jess, like some sort of virtue.

  But the fact is that it's impossible to think of him by himself apart from everything else. What concentrated itself in him diffused through the rest of the world, too. I always expected him to manifest himself at any time, because everything I saw around me had gotten to be him-it reminded me of him, expressed him, promised something about him. When he showed up, things were complete. When he didn't show up, they were about to be.

  Harold Clark began talking frequently and openly about changing his will. Harold was the sort of man who prided himself on knowing everyone, which meant joking in a familiar iashion with men, women, boys, and girls alike. Not long after my father's accident, I was taking Pammy and Linda for an afternoon swim in Pike. I was to drop them and Rose was to pick them up. Halfway to Cabot, I realized that my fuel gauge was on empty, so I pulled in at the Casey's on Dodge Street there and got out to pump some gas. I didn't notice Harold's truck, but when I went in to pay, there were Harold and Loren stocking up on doughnuts and slices of pizza. Loren was paying, and Harold was back by the cooler, picking out a drink. He was laughing, and his voice rang around the room. "Yeah, Dollie," he was saying to the woman behind the counter, "I've got myself into a fix now. One farm, two boys. Two good boys is a boy too many, you know. Pretty soon there are two wives and six or eight children, and you got
to be fair, but there's no fair way to cut that pie. One farm can't support all them people, so some who have The get-up-and-go get work in town, but you don't want to cut them out just because they got some spirit. So the wives start squabbling.

  That's the first thing, ain't it?" By this time he was back at the counter, and he fixed her with an impudent eye. Dollie had gone to eighth grade with Harold, so she looked right back at him, and said, "What you know about wives, Harold Clark, 5 ever impressed me much."

  He laughed as if this were a compliment and went on, now seeing me and including me in his audience. "But the best thing is' I'll be dead when all this happens, and when the Good Lord says, 'Harold, take a look at the mess you left," I'll say, 'I was just trying to be fair. I had two good boys and I followed Scripture, because didn't You Yourself say that everybody gets the same day's wage, whether they show up late to the vineyard or early?" And He'll say, 'Yes, I did," and I'll say, 'Well, there You have it, blame Yourself."

  Harold laughed a full roaring laugh, Loren smiled, and Dollie cocked an eyebrow at me. After Harold left, she said, "It's a crime the way he talks in front of those boys. And only in front of them. When one of them isn't along, Ginny, he don't say boo about his will or after he dies or anything. He talks about buying stuff like he's never going to die."