A Thousand Acres (1992 Pulitzer Prize)

by Jane Smiley

  When he engaged me in conversation about this problem, I tried to sound concerned and helpful, but all the time I was imagining them naked somewhere, relieved to be alone, giddy and giggling and utterly sufficient to themselves. If they thought about me, it would be to plan some little kindness that they thought I needed, that would remind me yet again of who was who and what was what. If even the most clandestine love affair yearns for an audience, then of course I was theirs.

  I saw Rose every day. We made pickles and canned tomatoes and I drove the girls places for her. I noticed her fleeting little smiles.

  We talked, in a way. She alluded to Jess only tactfully, and gave me little hugs from time to time, or compliments. I don't remember any of what she said. It was as if she were just moving her lips.

  Ty decided to sell the last hundred piglets as feeder pigs, instead of finishing them. At the last minute, after we'd loaded the pigs, but before he'd taken down the loading chute, he said, "I'm going to load some of the sows, too. Prices are up enough. I could get something for them."

  I snapped to. I was covered with muck from loading a hundred fifty-pound hogs and ready to get into the shower, but what I was hearing amazed me. I said, "Ty, prices aren't up at all. You'll be lucky to get three-fourths of what those sows are worth. They're prime breeding stock. You can't just cart them off to market on impulse!"

  "That's exactly what I can do. That's the only way I can make myself do it, as a matter of fact."

  "Even if the new buildings don't get built, we can keep on with what we were doing."

  "My heart's not in it." He spat in the dirt. "Anyway, I gotta think about the payment on that loan. It's not going to take care of itself."

  "What about the rent for your place? I thought we earmarked that for the payment."

  "That's going to get eaten up if he works for me at harvest as much as I'm going to need him. Selling off these sows will tide us over till after harvest. That's what we've got to think of now."

  A farm abounds with poisons, though not many of them are fast acting.

  Every farmer knows a chemical dealer's representative who has taken a demonstration drink of some insecticide-sale as mother's milk, etc. Once, when Verna Clark was still alive and everyone was still using chlordane for corn rootworm, Harold dropped his instructions into the tank and reached in with his hand and picked them out. Arsenic is around, in the form of old rat poison. There were plenty of insecticides we used in the hog houses. There was kerosene and diesel fuel and paint thinner and Raid. There were aerosol degreasers and used motor oil. There were atrazine and Treflan and Lasso and Dual. I knew to wear a mask and gloves if I was handling any of these chemicals. I knew never to eat without getting all traces of chemicals off me, especially the odor. But I didn't know what would kill Rose.

  I went to the Earl May Garden Center in Mason City and to the vet's ofhce and to the Farmers' Co-op in Zebulon Center, and I scoped out what was on the shelves and how the shelves were arranged. At Earl May, the clerk watched me because the store was empty and he didn't have anything else to do, so I left without buying anything. At the vet's office, Alice, the receptionist, kept trying to engage me in conversation about some puppies her dog had given birth to, and whether I wanted one. At the Farmers' Co-op, everything except seed, cement, and animal feed was behind one counter or another, and three or four farmers were sitting around, gossiping and watching me. Buying, I realized, would be harder than I thought.

  I went to the Pike library, and found a pamphlet, "Twenty-live Poisonous Common Plants to Beware Of" put out by the Ohio State University Extension Service. It was clear that the fields abounded with plenty of poisons, too, and not onlyjimsonweed and bittersweet and common nightshade, deadly amanita and green death caps and common locoweed, with which I had a passing familiarity.

  Lilies of the valley were poisonous, and daffodils, and horse nettles and ground-cherries, rhubarb leaves, of course, garden foxgloves, English ivy. Lamb's lettuce berries and roots, what the pamphlet called pokeweed. Mistletoe berries. The most poisonous, mentioned in passing but not pictured, was water hemlock. I went back to the shelf and got out a wildflower guide.

  Water hemlock was a member of the carrot and parsley family.

  "Its roots," the book stated, "can be and have been mistaken for parsnips, with fatal results. Livestock may die from grazing on it."

  I looked at the picture. It looked familiar. I memorized the description, noted that it was to be found in freshwater swampy areas, put the book back on the shelf and went home. Certainly, I thought, this is what they meant by "premeditated"- this deliberate savoring of each step, the assembly of each element, the contemplation of how death would be created, how a path of intentional circumstances paralleling and mimicking accidental circumstances would be set out upon. One thing, I have to say, that I especially relished was the secrecy of it.

  In that way, I saw, I had been practicing for just such an event as this all my life.

  It took me about two weeks, the greatest part of that time (which wasn't all that much, since there was perfect order and cleanliness to maintain) spent in learning to distinguish between various members of the parsley family, then scouting wet areas for the hemlock.

  There was none to be found at the quarry, nor was there any in a boggy spot at the southern edge of Harold Clark's farm. Mel's corner had long since been too well drained. On a hunch, one day, I stopped along the Scenic, just where the Zebulon River opened out into a little slough, and where, in the spring, I had seen that flock of pelicans and thought they portended something good. I wore yellow dishwashing gloves, and I picked a tall, erect plant with white flowers, a magenta-streaked stem, and pointed leaves with veins ending at notches between the teeth. The roots were pleasantly fragrant, not quite carrotlike.

  The cabbages in Rose's garden were solid and heavy. I picked two.

  Rose and the girls were out. I thawed a pork liver and some loins in the microwave. I had bought sausage casings at the Supervalu in Pike the day before. All operations as familiar as my own kitchen, as any cooking project I had ever engaged ii, before, except more meaningful.

  The hemlock root I had minced finely with a paring knife. I decided to use it all. The leaves and stems I had left at the river. The root now sat on a piece of paper on the counter. I washed the knife and the fork I'd used to hold the root while I chopped it.

  I ran water down the sink until I was sure the diluted traces ofjuice had gone into the septic tank. I doubted whether they would tear up the ground to investigate the septic system. After grinding the mince into the meat along with pepper, garlic, onion, cumin, red pepper, cinnamon, allspice, a dash of cloves, and plenty of salt, I filled the sausage casings and tied them off every six inches. They were about as thick as a man's thumb. No telling which of them were lethal and which weren't. I carefully washed the meat grinder and the sausage stuffer, using plenty of water, then I packed the canning jars with sausage, shredded cabbage, and brine. It was not unlike the feeling you get when you are baking a birthday cake for someone. That person inhabits your mind. So I thought continuously of Rose.

  I also felt a sense of pleasure and pride in my planning. Liver sausage and sauerkraut couldn't possibly appeal to Jess, and was something both girls had detested the thought of all their lives. It was too strong-tasting even for Ty, who could eat venison and rabbit and lutelisk with the best of them. The perfection of my plan was the way Rose's own appetite would select her death. It would come as a genuine surprise even to me.

  I burned the paper that had contained the minced hemlock, careful to imagine as completely as possible the potential scrutiny of the sheriff. I burned it to ashes, then swept the ashes onto another piece of paper and burned that. Then I buried the ashes in the heap of leaves and grass clippings beside the garden. I sterilized the jars in the pressure canner, reflecting that poisoning by botulism was theoretically possible, but probably not with someone as sophisticated about that sort of danger as Rose. These sausa
ges and kraut would be cooked at a temperature above 212 degrees for more than fifteen minutes for sure. The orderly progress of cooking something put me in the usual serene mood. I was finished and cleaned up by two.

  At live-thirty, I carried a box of twelve full jars down the road to Rose's. It was hot and dusty. Rose was in the kitchen frying hamburgers.

  "Look at this," I said. "There's a surprise." She smiled as she took the jars out of the box and saw what I had brought. Pickled peaches.

  Tomato chutney. Dill pickles. The stalks of dill in the jar looked just like poison. She grinned as she pulled out the jars of sausage and kraut. She said, "What a sweetie you are. You did all this today?"

  "Just the kraut."

  "I guess the others won't eat this, huh?"

  "Not on your life. Blech. I wouldn't, either. I hate sauerkraut.

  And doesn't it make you incredibly flatulent?"

  "Not really. Thanks." She kissed me on the cheek. I could see the girls and Jess in the living room, watching the evening news. Jess caught my eye, smiled, waved to me, went back to the news. One of the jars of sausage was close to the edge of the table. I pushed it back and looked at Jess again. For the first time in weeks what was unbearable felt bearable.

  A cooling breeze came up as I was walking home. I was calm now, interested to see what would happen.

  [I THE KEY TO A GOOD HARVEST is dry weather, because the corn and beans won't store well if they are carrying much moisture; 15 percent is ideal for corn, 13 percent for beans. Corn in the field, ripe and dented, will have over 20 percent. The difference can be exactly measured in the money it costs, and the propane it takes, to drive the excess moisture out of it. Long dry sunny September days are equivalent to money in the bank. Rainy days mean difficult choices, machinery stuck in the mud, long hours as the weather gets colder, complaints at the elevator about moisture content and poor quality, and smaller checks when you decide to sell.

  There is always too much of everything at harvest.

  Starting about the fifteenth of September, and every day after that, Ty took the portable moisture tester out into the fields, hoping against hope that with good weather he could start harvesting early.

  When he came back, he and Jess, with whom he'd made up his mind he had to work, drove the two combines, the big three-year-old six-row picker and the old two-row picker that Daddy had bought used live years earlier, already with four thousand hours on it. There was also the old cornpicker, still sitting in Daddy's barn, that took whole ears instead of shelled grain like the combines. Using the cornpicker would mean more storage, since there were two slatted corncribs at the east edge of Mel's corner, right on Cabot Street Road, but Ty didn't like to use it because it wasn't designed for long modern ears, and tended to shell the biggest ears and leave the corn in the field.

  "Nice for the birds," said Ty. I didn't like to use it because it seemed to me, the way things were going, there was bound to be an accident.

  Accidents were more frequent with cornpickers than combines, and more horrible, too. One day, I saw them hitch it to the tractor and pull it out into the sunshine to have a look at it. Even from that distance (I was standing at the window in our room and looking down the road), it looked menacing.

  We heard people did turn out to help Loren and Harold, including Lyman Livingstone, who put off his departure for Florida by two weeks, and two of the Stanley boys, but we were so busy it was easy not to think about that, and even easier not to mention it. Dollie asked Rose one day in Casey's how Daddy liked it in Des Moines.

  Rose said, "Better than he thought he would," and smiled her cheeriest smile.

  The court date was set for October I 9, more than a month away.

  Mr. Cartier told Rose that since Pete was only involved by marriage, his death didn't affect the legal status of the suit.

  I continued to behave as if I were living in the sight of all our neighbors, as Mr. Cartier had told us to. I waited for Rose to die, but the weather was warm for sauerkraut and liver sausage-that was a winter dish.

  Around the eighteenth, Ty said he thought he might try harvesting some of the corn. An early season variety planted in our southwest corner was down to 19 percent moisture and there was rain predicted for the next day, which would raise the moisture levels and delay harvest for two days or even three. He said, "There's sixty-two acres over there.

  If we run both combines, we can pick most of that."

  I smiled. No doubt about it, no matter what, beginning the harvest was exciting. He smiled back at me. I said, "You want Rose and me?"

  "We'll see what the lines at the elevator are like. Crop report was pretty good before you got up. Corn was up to $2.45, and if the weather is wet for the next three days it could go up another nickel.

  We'll see. We'll see."

  He practically leapt from the table then, as if anticipation were a spring in him that had finally overpowered his natural caution.

  I finished the dishes, swept the floor, wiped the counter, cleaned the seams in the counter with a toothpick, scoured the drip pans and burner grates, applied the toothpick to the assorted corners of the stove, and cleaned the oven door with Winder. These activities coalesced into a kind of waking dream that was punctuated by the rumble of the combines passing on the west side of the house. There was a track that led to that southwest corner, skirting the little dump.

  Jess would be driving one of the combines. I wondered what he would think as he passed, then bent down and began to scrape dirt out of the little round feet that supported the front of the stove.

  Sometime later, the truck, with the grain wagon attached, thundered and rattled by, as well.

  The harvest drama commenced then, with the usual crises and heroics.

  Men against nature, men against machine, men against the swirling, impersonal forces of the market. Victories-finishing the last of a field just before a rain-and defeats-the price of corn dropping thirty cents a bushel in a single day; the strange transforming mix of power and exhaustion. Of course we had the ritual recall of earlier harvests that made me wonder what we would say years hence if this harvest were punctuated by Rose dropping dead at the supper table one night. My hatred of her burned steadily in spite of everything that brought us together. It was separate, but part of everything else, suspended grains that would precipitate to the bottom of the beaker when she chose the fatal jar.

  The harvest was a drama that caught me up, no doubt about it, something that moved me below the level of knowledge, the way a distant view of my father driving a green tractor across a green field had always moved me. I saw that I could give in to the theatrical surge and be delivered in a matter of weeks to a reconciliation with my life. It was tempting. It was tempting.

  What it took to choke off a reconciliation was the sight, in court, not of my father, but of Caroline and Frank. Your eyes couldn't help traveling over them in a kind of wonder, they looked so out of place in the Zebulon County Courthouse. There was Ken LaSalle in his tan suit from J. C. Penney that didn't quite lit him and there was another lawyer in navy blue with a white short-sleeved shirt, a green tie, and brown oxfords, cut from the same pattern as Ken. But even Jean Cartier looked rumpled compared to Caroline and Frank, with their charcoal gray suits from Minneapolis or maybe New York, their oxblood briefcases, and their hundred-dollar shoes. Caroline had her hair smoothed back and pinned up, leaving her forehead and neck clean and bare as pride itself. She sat right up against Daddy.

  And then there was this self-righteous look on her face, for clearly she had taken up Daddy's burden of injustice, and she shouldered it with a sense of injured virtue. She didn't look at Rose or me, though we were sitting in her field of vision. She smiled at Ty. He smiled back.

  I saw Rose give her a long, appraising, self-confident look. But after she looked away, she straightened the shoulders of her suit and sat up taller. She glanced at Jess. Yes, Jess was better-looking than Frank.

  Rose and I were always proud of how well
we had done with Caroline, proud that we had taken good care of our doll, and the reward was the knowledge that she would live a life that each of us had thought about with some longing. That she never called us or seemed close to us did not occur to us as a failure, nor did it occur to us to wonder what she thought of us, whether she liked us. Could we have even said whether we liked her? I don't know.

  But sitting across from her in court was maddening. Every item of her appearance, her very familiarity with the courtroom, where I felt out of place and off balance, her confident glances at Frank, her fellow lawyer, seemed to me to exude the odor of disdain, and the wish to take from us what we had that she wanted, but clearly didn't need.

  She held Daddy's hand in her lap like a handbag. And Daddy looked like a goner. His gaze would drift around the room for a while then fix on something and he'd stare at that thing or person for minutes at a time.

  When Caroline said something to him or patted his hand, he smiled fondly, though not necessarily at her. It was a look that gave me the same room-darkening chill that I had felt eavesdropping on them in Roberta's. Perhaps, along with all the anger and the will to have his way that Daddy carried to me during those strange lost nights, perhaps there might have been just this fondness, too. I shifted my chair so as not to look at them.