by Jane Smiley
"How are you, Dollie?"
"My granddaughter's going to Soviet Russia on a church exchange trip, did you hear about that? Six church members and six -Hers.
She's the youngest. She's going to take along some project she did on hog scours. Bob Stanley rigged it up through Marv Carson, somehow.
Marv knows Senator Jepsen now, through some bank thing."
"Hmm." I must have sounded preoccupied. She looked at me sharply as I turned from the counter, and said, "Those Clark boys should know that Harold's all talk. They shouldn't be counting any chickens. My guess is he don't have a will at all, and certainly no provisions for paying off any taxes."
I thought she must be telling me this as a sideways compliment to my father, to our whole family, for being prepared. Or else as a veiled insult. It was hard for me to tell what the neighbors thought of us.
I said, "If I'm talking to Loren or Jess and it comes up, I'll tell them, Dollie."
"Somebody ought to. But you know, Loren is like Harold's shadow, and I don't really feel comfortable with that older one. I've known him since he was a little boy, but when he comes in here, I always mistake him for a tourist. He's just not familiar any more.
Pammy opened the door and said, "Come on, Aunt Ginny, we're boiling."
Then the Clarks' deep freeze gave out, and Jess brought over packages of steaks and chops for us to keep until they could get the repair man out from Sears. Ty was sitting at the table, eating his breakfast.
Jess asked how Daddy was, if we'd seen the truck, then said, "You'd better go downstairs with me, Ginny, and show me where to put these so they don't get mixed in with your things."
When we were leaning into the freezer, he kissed me on the ear, and whispered, "Meet me at the dump tomorrow afternoon. Harold is taking your dad to Zebulon Center for some extension program, and Ty is going along to the auto parts store."
I stepped away from him. "He told me.
"I want to talk to you.
I turned from the freezer and walked up the cellar steps. My luck held. The kitchen was empty; Ty was out starting the truck. He waved to me as he turned toward the road. When Jess came up from the cellar, I said, "Want me to help you bring the rest of the stuff over?"
I could hear Harold yelling as soon as I opened the door to get out of Jess's truck. He shouted, "Who told you to leave the sprayer in that field?" and then something unintelligible. Loren came around the corner of the house, and I realized I was standing and staring. I smiled, and he smiled sheepishly back at me. I followed Jess into the house. Through the kitchen window on the barn side of the house, I could see Harold heading toward the barn, kicking at some dirt or gravel in his path, but then, when Loren appeared again, carrying a socket wrench, Harold spun toward him with his hands out, as if he were going to strike him or strangle him. Loren set down his tool and kind of deflected Harold's progress toward him. Jess said, "Fuck this!"
and went out of the kitchen. Soon he appeared with the other two, and shouted, "Harold! Dad! Hey!" He grabbed Harold by the arm. I found a brown paper sack and started filling it with the white packages of meat that were wedged into the refrigerator. The freezer stood open, pulled away from the wall, stinking of that sour frozen smell, and, faintly, of meat and blood.
The door opened, and Jess manhandled Harold into the kitchen.
Harold's face was purple. Jess said, "Now sit down!" and halfpushed him into a chair. Then he said, "I told him to leave the sprayer in that field! It was my mistake. Now leave him the fuck alone!"
I thought Harold would turn and explode at Jess, but instead he sniffed a couple of times and gazed at him. Finally, he said, without looking at me, but in a chipper voice, "Ginny, I got quite a temper and that's the truth. I apologize."
Jess was filling a bag with the last few packages and some colorful blocks of frozen succotash and spinach from the grocery store. He rolled his eyes. "You should go out and apologize to Loren is what you'd better do."
Harold pulled out a yellow handkerchief and wiped his nose, then shoved the handkerchief back into his pocket. Now he looked at me.
I was standing with the chilly bag in my arms, ready to get out of there. Harold leaned toward me and confided, "I gotta say, Ginny, that everything about that boy gets me these days. I'm the first to say he don't deserve it, but I just look at him, and it makes me mad.
The way he walks, the way he talks. He's getting fat, too. Hell, the way he says yessir and no sir and jumps when I get on him. That makes me the maddest. This time last year, he couldn't do no wrong for me, now he can't do no right. I expect it's Jess's fault."
"No, Harold," said Jess, "it's your fault, because you give in to it.
If you know how you feel, you ought to control yourself."
"Ginny, I admit I ain't so good at controlling myself." He said this as if I was to absolve him of the necessity of doing so, with a smile or a joke. Harold was actually grinning at this point, looking right at me. I said, "I guess I agree with Jess, Harold. I guess I think you could control yourself if you really wanted to."
Harold got up and headed for the living room, still smiling. He said, "Well, you ain't got any kids, so you don't know what it's like."
Jess shook his head in exasperation and we scurried out. Loren had left in his pickup, I suppose to get the sprayer. We got in Harold's truck and slammed the doors. I said, "I'd like to know what's going on with Daddy and Harold."
"I don't know about Larry, but Harold's just showing off same as always. I wonder if he's really as angry with Loren as he makes out.
He loves to act sly for the sake of acting sly." He started the engine.
"I'm beginning to think there isn't any reward for putting up with all of this."
"A big farm and the chance to run it the way you want is a reward."
"You're kidding."
He pulled onto the blacktop. "No, listen. I got some stuff in the mail. Did you know there's an association of organic farmers in this state? Guys who've never gone to chemicals, or who stopped using chemicals ten or fifteen years ago. It's pretty inspiring. And in spite of no publicity and ridicule and stiff opposition, it's a pretty lively and growing association. There's a guy over near Sac City that I thought I'd go visit, if you want to come along."
I rolled my eyes. Jess laughed and leaned toward me. I could smell the fragrance of him. I pressed my lips together. "You were having a lot of doubts a few days ago.
"That was before I found out about this. Ginny, this is important!
This is something that brings both halves of my life together."
"Harold isn't going to let you farm organically in his lifetime."
"We'll see. He's pretty high on me now, and I haven't held back with him, saying what I think he's doing wrong. He listens to me.
We stopped in front of my back door. There was no one around. I said, "You are so unrealistic. I'm beginning to think that's one of your virtues." As he went through the door, he pinched me lightly on the rear. I laughed, but said, "No, really. You've changed us all now.
You've come along and just turned us all upside down, and it's because you only do what you don't know you're doing." I put the bag I was carrying in his arms and started clearing breakfast dishes off the table. He stood there for a moment-I could feel him there-then ran down the cellar steps. The house seemed to float on him, on his being there. To work at a daily task and sense this was a goading, prickling pleasure for me, invested significance in the plates I was rinsing and the leftovers I was scraping into the garbage can.
The events of that day and the next morning seemed then like they would be only advertisements on the wall of a tunnel that led to the next afternoon. My father's trip to the doctor, where his cuts and simply waited in the waiting room; even the receptionist was out of the office. Dinner with Ty, then the afternoon in the farrowing house, helping him with the last of the newborn pigs. You had to clip out their eyeteeth, which were sharp and would get sharper, and dock their tails so they would
n't get chewed on and infected. The sows didn't love this, our handling the baby pigs, but in the first few days they were still amenable and almost sleepy. We castrated about twenty little boars. By suppertime we were stinking and drenched with sweat, and in spite of the fans the farrowing house was so hot that the air-conditioned living room gave me the shivers when I walked into it.
Showers, then macaroni and cheese for supper, bed before dark.
I lay awake in the hot darkness, naked and covered by the sheet.
Every so often, I lifted the sheet and looked under it, at my blue-white skin, my breasts, with their dark nipples, the foreshortened, rounded triangles of my legs, my jutting feet. I looked at myself while I thought about having sex with Jess Clark and I could feel my flesh turn electric at these thoughts, could feel sensation gather at my nipples, could feel my vagina relax and open, could feel my lips and my fingertips grow sensitive enough to know their own shapes. When I turned on my side and my breasts swam together and I flicked the sheet for a bit of air, I saw only myself turning, my same old shape moving in the same old way. I turned onto my stomach so that I wouldn't be able to look, so that I could bury my face in the black pillow. It wasn't like me to think such thoughts, and though they drew me, they repelled me too. I began to drift off maybe to escape what I couldn't stop thinking about.
Ty, who was asleep, rolled over and put his hand on my shoulder, then ran it down my back, so slowly that my back came to seem about as long and humped as a sow's, running in a smooth arc from my rooting, low-slung head to my little stumpy tail. I woke up with a start and remembered the baby pigs. Ty was very close to me. It was still hot, and he was pressing his erection into my leg. Normally I hated waking in the night with him so close to me, but my earlier fantasies must have primed me, because the very sense of it there, a combination of feeling its insistent pressure and imagining its smooth heavy shape, doused me like a hot wave, and instantly I was breathless. I put my hand around it and turned toward it, then took my hand off it and pulled the curve of his ass toward me. But for once I couldn't stand not touching it, knowing it was there but not holding it in my hand.
Ty woke up. I was panting, and he was on me in a moment. It was something: it was deeply exciting and simultaneously not enough. The part of me that was still a sow longed to wallow, to press my skin against his and be engulfed. Ty whispered, "Don't open your eyes, and I did not. Nothing would wake me from this unaccustomed dream of my body faster than opening my eyes.
Afterward, when we did open our eyes and were ourselves again, I saw that it was only ten-fifteen. I moved away, to the cooler edge of the bed. Ty said, "I liked that. That was nice," and he put his hand affectionately on my hip without actually looking at me. His voice carried just a single quiver of embarrassment. That was pretty good for us. Then I heard the breeze start up, rustling the curtains, and then I heard the rattle of hog feeders and the sound of a car accelerating in the distance. The moon was full, and the shadows of bats fluttered in the moonlight. The sawing of cicadas distinguished itself the barking of a dog. I fell asleep.
With Jess Clark in that old pickup bed in the dump the next afternoon, it was much more awkward. My arms and legs, stiff and stalklike, thumped against the wheel well, the truck bed, poked Jess in the ribs, the back. My skin looked glaringly white, white like some underground sightless creature. When he leaned forward to untie his sneakers, I felt my cheeks. As clammy as clay. Jess eased me backward. I didn't watch while he unbuttoned my shirt. He said, "All right?"
I nodded.
"Really?"
"I'm not very used to this."
He pulled back, away from me, the look on his face unsmiling, suddenly cautious.
"Yes," I said. "Please." It was humiliating to ask, but that was okay, too. Reassuring in a way. He smiled. That was the reward.
Then, afterward, I began all at once to shiver.
He pulled away and I buttoned three buttons on my shirt. He said, "Are you cold? It's only ninety-four degrees out here."
"Maybe t-t-t-terrified."
But I wasn't, not anymore. Now the shaking was pure desire. As I realized what we had done, my body responded as it hadn't while we were doing it-hadn't ever done, I thought. I felt blasted with the desire, irradiated, rendered transparent. Jess said, "Are you okay?"
I said, "Hold me for a while, and keep talking."
He laughed a warm, pleasant, very intimate laugh and said something about let's see, well the Sears man would be out tomorrow, at last, and I came in a drumming rush from toes to head. I buried some moans in his neck and shoulder, and he hugged me tightly enough to crack my ribs, which was just tightly enough to contain me, I thought. He kept talking. Harold was feeling a little sheepish, and making Loren tuna-and-mushroom-soup-with-noodles casserole for dinner. Jess had promised to put it in the oven at four-thirty; what time was it now?
The farmer near Sac City had called him back, four hundred and seventy acres in corn and beans, only green manures and animal manures for fertilizer, the guy's name was Morgan Boone, which sounded familiar, did it sound familiar to me? He said Jess could come any time. Jess held me away from him again, and gazed at me for a long minute or two.
I looked at the creases under his eyes, his beaky nose, his serious expression. His face was deeply familiar to me, as if I'd been staring at it my whole life. I took some deep breaths and lay back on his shoulder. The sky was steel blue, the sun caught in the lacy leaves of the locust trees above us. I wanted to say, what now, but that was a dangerous temptation for sure, so I didn't. I said, "What time is it?
Did we ever ligure that one out?"
"Three-fifteen."
"I left the house at one.
"It seems like a lifetime ago."
"Is that true?" But I found it hard to believe that such episodes as this weren't fairly routine for a good-looking guy on the West Coast.
I tried to sound joking. "You've done this before."
"Well, I've slept with women before. I haven't done this before."
I said, "I haven't slept with men. I've slept with Ty."
"I know, Ginny. I know what that means.
"Maybe you do. Maybe not." I thought of saying, last night was the best ever with Ty, last night when I dreamt I was a sow. I could ask someone likeJess, someone good-looking and experienced, what that meant.
Someone like Jess might be able to tell me.
I sat up and reached for my underpants. The world had an odd look, as if it were not itself but a panoramic, co-degree photograph of itself.
I glanced at Jess again, then lay down on his shoulder. He said, "I trust you. I've trusted you since the first time I saw you again at that pig roast. That's part of what draws me back here."
"Oh," I said. "That."
Jess laughed, but didn't pursue it. I sighed, wondered when Ty and Harold and Daddy and Pete would be back. Rose, too, had gone off to Mason City with the girls. I could feel myself disengaging from Jess.
It was a natural will-less process, an ebbing that was more reassuring than anything else, since it seemed to mean that I could be satisfied as well as full of longing. My nose itched, and I sat up and wiped it on the tail of my shirt. Jess sat up, too. We smiled at each other, another degree of ebb. When he leaned forward to reach for his shirt, he ran his hand down my shin and said, "You have nice ankles. I keep noticing them." Then, "May I ask you a question?"
"Sure."
"You are such a nice person. How come you and Ty don't have any kids?"
"Well, I've had live miscarriages."
"Jesus. Oh, Ginny."
"Ty only knows about three. He couldn't stand it after that, so I've sort of kept the fact that we're still trying to myself." A harsh look crossed Jess's face, and I felt another jolt of fear. I reached for my jeans, saying, "Well, of course I shouldn't deceive him. I know-" "It's the fucking water."
"What?"
"Have you had your well water tested for nitrates?"
"Well, no.
&nbs
p; "Didn't your doctor tell you not to drink the well water?"
"No."
He stood up and started pulling on his jeans, then sat down and put both his socks on without speaking. I could tell he was very upset. I said, "Jess-" He exploded. "People have known for ten years or more that nitrates in well water cause miscarriages and death of infants.
Don't you know that the fertilizer runoff drains into the aquifer? I can't believe this."
"It wasn't that. It just hasn't worked. Rose drank the water-" "It's not uniform. It doesn't affect everyone the same, and not all wells are the same. Yours might be closer to the drainage wells."
