A Thousand Acres

by Jane Smiley

  Marlene Stanley had told this to Rose. Ty, I was sure, had had the same news directly from Harold, but it was not something we talked about.

  When we drove into our yard, Ty got out even before the engine died, and headed for the barn. It was Friday. I supposed that work on the hog buildings would begin again the following week. The poured floors, which had been exposed to the weather for over three months, were a little discolored, and one had developed a long crack that needed patching, but in spite of potential problems, the project had to go forward. We were too much in debt to stop now.

  Every farm after harvest looks neglected and disorganized, but as we drove into our yard, and then as I went into our house, our place seemed lifeless to me, far beyond the power of our usual winter cleaning up, mending, and planning to make it what it had been only the previous spring. The house looked somewhat better, thanks to my obsessive work, but the furnishings were old and mismatched, the carpeting and vinyl dark with stains that simply didn't respond to the products available for removing them. Shit, blood, oil, and grease eventually hold sway in spite of the most industrious efforts.

  Usually, I didn't take in my place as a whole. I focused on a chair I'd just shampooed or a picture I'd found at the antique store in Cabot, or a corner that looked presentable or welcoming. Tonight I came back to my house as a stranger, and I remembered a friend of Daddy's who told me once about when rural electrification came through.

  Unlike Daddy's family, Jim's family hadn't had a gasoline generator to light the house. When the wires were strung and the family gathered in the kitchen to witness the great event, the mother's first words of the new era were, "Everything's so dirty!" Those could have been my first words of our new era, attesting to how strange and far from home I felt taking meat from my refrigerator and salting it with my old red plastic saltshaker and slapping it onto the broiler pan I'd used for seventeen years.

  I peeled potatoes and put them on to boil, then went out in the garden and picked some brussels sprouts off the stalk. If you leave them through the fall, through the frosts, they sweeten up. The same with parsnips. The garden, too, was a ruin. I'd pulled out the tomato vines and hung them over cold water pipes in the cellar. The fruit would ripen slowly until sometime around Thanksgiving. The pepper plants were tall, leafless stalks, the potato bed a jumbled plot of dark earth and wet straw. Only the brussels sprouts on their fourfoot stalks looked graceful. A giant green rosette of spreading leaves opened two feet wide at the top, then the stalk curved strongly downward, presenting neat alternating rows of dark knobs. I broke a couple of dozen off snap, snap, snap, and took them inside. All my motions were familiar-running an inch of water in an old pot, piercing the bottoms of the sprouts with a fork. I turned down the heat under the potatoes. Ty came in, stepping out of his boots and hanging his insulated coverall by the door. I said, "Supper will be ready in twenty minutes."

  "Great."

  I set the pan of sprouts over a low flame.

  He finished washing his hands, dried them carefully on a dish towel, and walked out of the room. I turned on the oven to broil and bent down to see if it had lit, because sometimes the pilot light went out.

  I said, "One new thing we could get would be a range.

  This one is a menace.

  He was back in the room. He said, "I don't necessarily think this is the right time to get a new range.

  "Well, maybe it will just blow up, then, and put us out of our misery."

  He heaved an exasperated sigh, then said, "I'll bring the range over from your father's place tomorrow. That's pretty new.

  "Or we could move over there. I'm the oldest."

  "That house is too big for us." He said this as if he were saying, how dare you?

  "Well, it was built to be big. It was built to show off. Maybe now I've inherited my turn to show off."

  "I think you've shown off plenty this summer, frankly."

  Steam rose from the boiling potatoes and the simmering brussels sprouts. I remembered the broiler, which was now surely heated enough, and I opened the oven door and set the chops under the heat.

  We were silent. The contained roar of the gas and then, a minute later, the first sizzling of meatjuices, took on the volume and weight of oracular mutterings, almost intelligible. With a feeling of punching through a wall, I said, "I need a thousand dollars."

  Ty widened the opening. "I have a thousand dollars in my pocket, from the rent on my place. Fred brought it by last night, but I didn't have a chance to put it in the bank."

  I held out my hand. He took a wad of money out of his pocket.

  It felt large and solid in my palm, larger and soldier than it was. I went to the hall tree and took down my coat and scarf then I went to the key hook and took the keys to my car, and with the meat broiling in the oven and the potatoes and sprouts boiling on the stove, I walked out the door. When he saw, I suppose, that I really meant to get in and drive away, Ty yelled, "I gave my life to this place!"

  Without looking around at him, I yelled back, "Now it's yours!"

  The night was dark already, and moonless. I stumbled over a rut in the yard that threw me against the cold metal skin of the car. I reached for the door handle, but the money was still in my hand, so I thrust it into the pocket of my coat.

  In Mason City, I ate a hot dog at the A and W.

  In St. Paul, I found a room at the Y.W.C.A. They didn't ask any questions when I didn't write down a home address on the registration slip.

  ALL DAY AND ALL NIGHT, even over the hum of the air conditioner in the summer, you could hear the cars passing my apartment on Interstate 35.

  I liked the same thing about that as about working my waitressing job at Perkins, where you could get breakfast, the food of hope and things to be done, any time. There was nothing time-bound, and little that was seasonal about the highway or the restaurant. Even in Minnesota, where the winter was a big topic of conversation and a permanent occasion for people's heroic self regard, it was only winter on the highway a few hours out of the year. The rest of the time, traffic kept moving. Snow and rain were reduced to scenery nearly as much as any other kind of weather, something to look out the window at but nothing that hindered you. The lamps in the restaurant, above the highway, in my neighbors' windows, in the parking lot of my apartment building, cast intersecting orbs of light that I could just walk into, that I didn't have to generate.

  The noise was the same, continuous, reassuring: human intentions (talking, traveling, eating) perennially renewing themselves whether I happened to sleep or wake, feel brisk or lazy.

  The thing I loved most about the restaurant was the small talk.

  People bantered and smiled, thanked you, made polite requests, chatted about early visits or the weather or where they were headed. It went on and on, day and night, pleasant and meant to create pleasantness.

  Eileen, the manageress, encouraged us to follow company guidelines about creating small talk when it was absent, because, she said, people always ate more and enjoyed their food if they didn't have to concentrate on it too single-mindedly. Mostly, though, you didn't have to work at it. You could walk into the small talk the way you walked into the lighted dining room, and it would carry you. Some of the girls didn't like the small talk, so they sounded a tad mechanical when they said, "And how was your meal, sir?" but for me, it was like a tune playing in my head, and the phrases I produced-"What may I bring you?"

  "Will that be all?"

  "Thanks for stopping, come in again"-were me picking up my part of the harmony.

  I saw this as my afterlife, and for a long time it didn't occur to me that it contained a future. That it didn't, in fact, was what I liked about it. I felt a semi-submerged conviction that I had entered upon the changeless eternal. A toothbrush, a beat-up sofa bed, a lamp I found in a trash bin, shaped like a palm tree but perfectly functional, and a cardboard carton to set it upon, a hot-water kettle, a box of teabags in the refrigerator, two bath towels from a J. C. Penney white s
ale, a box of bath-oil beads. Pajamas. My uniforms from work gave every workday a sameness that felt like perpetuity. When I wasn't working I stayed in my sofa bed or my bathtub, reading books from the library, one author at a time, every book in the collection. I preferred them to have been productive, but now to be dead, like Daphne du Maurier or Charles Dickens, so that their books formed a kind of afterlife for them and seemed as distant and self-contained, for me, as Heaven or Hell. News was what I didn't want.

  I didn't own a television or a radio. It didn't occur to me to buy a newspaper.

  It took me until Christmas to address a note to Rose revealing where I was. When I got her note in return, the sight of her handwriting was so surprising that I didn't recognize it at first. I had expected, even more than I consciously realized, that she would have eaten the sausages and died. But she didn't mention the sausages.

  She wrote that live days after the trial, Daddy, who wouldn't let Caroline out of his sight although he still seemed to feel that she had been killed, went along to Dahl's, in Des Moines, for the week's shopping. He was pushing the cart; she was guiding it down the aisles.

  He had a heart attack in the cereal aisle. I imagined him falling into the boxes of cornflakes. The funeral had been a small one. Rose had not gone.

  Rose and Ty had decided to split the farm down the road, the eastern section going to Rose (she and the girls had moved into the big house after Thanksgiving) and the western section going to Ty.

  She and Jess planned to farm the whole section organically, with green manures and oats and South American cover crops interplanted with the corn.

  I sent the girls each a Christmas present, a polka-dot beach towel for Pammy and a stuffed cat for Linda. I didn't write back to Rose, because there was nothing to tell. Everything between us, more, it turned out, than we could stand, was known. Rose, Daddy, Ty, Jess, Caroline, Pete, Pammy, and Linda, so thoroughly and continuously in me, were too present for letters or phone calls.

  In February she wrote again, only a note to say that Jess had gone back to the West Coast, and she had rented most of her land back to Ty until she understood more about organic farming. She wrote, "The girls and I have decided to stay vegetarians, though. And there are some papers coming for you to sign. P.S. I can't say I'm surprised about Jess."

  They came, and I signed them. Ty now had three hundred eighty acres, all his own, and Rose, six hundred forty. I had a garden apartment, two bedrooms up and a living room and kitchen down, with a little deck overlooking the highway in the back and a little concrete stoop and my parking place out front. The rent was $235 a month plus electricity, but the heat was included. Behind a fence at the other end of the building was a small, kidney-shaped swimming pool, about twenty-live feet by twelve feet, nowhere deeper than four feet.

  That Jess had left her didn't seem to make a difference in my vengeful wishes. If anything, the friendly, informative tone of her notes made them burn a little hotter. Didn't she realize how far I was from her?

  Now, as always, wasn't she relying on some changeless loyalty in me, ignoring my angers and complaints as if they were meaningless in comparison with her plans?

  The day I received this news, the transmission went out on my car, so I traded it for an eight-year-old Toyota with eighty thousand miles on the odometer. I liked the way it looked in front of my apartment, unassuming and anonymous.

  Otherwise, my life passed in a blur, that blessing of urban routine.

  The sense of distinct events that is so inescapable on a farm, where every rainstorm is thick with odor and color, and usefulness and timing, where omens of prosperity or ruin to come are sought in every change, where any of the world's details may contain the one thing that above all else you will regret not knowing, this sense lifted off me.

  Maybe another way of saying it is that I forgot I was still alive.

  ONE MORNING, SEVERAL YEARS into this routine, I came up to the table of a solitary man in a cap. From behind, I took him to be a trucker. I was just beginning my six a. m. shift, and there were already four other truckers smoking alone at four other tables. I smiled and said, "What would you like this morning, sir? I can recommend the potato pancakes with applesauce, when I saw a white envelope on the table with my name on it. I looked the man in the face, probably in a startled way, and saw that it was Ty. He said, "Hey. Open it."

  I said, "Hey. How's Rose?" Dead now? I wondered at once. Why else would he come to see me?

  "Same as always."

  It was a birthday card. Inside the card was a picture of Pammy, who was taller and big-busted now, standing next to Rose herself.

  Linda, on the end, was wearing glasses. Her hair had darkened and grown out to a thick, glossy mane. She looked pretty but interesting, like Pete as an intellectual. She was wearing a lot of black. I made myself look carefully at Rose. She looked unchanged. I said, "I guess today is my birthday, isn't it? I hadn't remembered it yet."

  "Thirty-nine." He smiled, but it was easy to tell he wasn't happy.

  This transfixed me, and I forgot my place and my business until he said, "Let me order something," and cocked his eyebrow at Eileen.

  I glanced at her. She smiled. I said, "Oh, she's just curious. She thinks I'm without living relatives."

  "Are you?"

  "Of course not." People started filling up my section. I said, "Have the blueberry pancakes and the sausage. That's the best. I'll bring a pot of coffee."

  "Funny how we fall into this pattern."

  I put my pad in my pocket. I said, "Don't flirt with me."

  He lingered over his breakfast, reading the Des Moines Register he had brought along, as well as a Star and a USA Today that he got out of our newspaper rack (and folded up neatly and replaced). He drank four cups of coffee and asked for hash browns, then a piece of apple pie. I tried to spot our pickup in the parking lot as I scurried from table to table, but I didn't see it. He paid, talked for a moment to the cashier, and walked out. He left a 20 percent tip. Generous for a farmer but cheap for a trucker. I had the birthday card and the picture in my uniform pocket. Once or twice I took it out and looked at it.

  He was back at ten-thirty, my "lunch hour." We went across the street to Wendy's.

  My birthday fell on the twenty-ninth ofApril. The Ty I had known for all of my adult life spent the twenty-ninth of April in the fields.

  I ordered a Coke. Ty asked for another cup of coffee. We sat by the window, fronting the Perkins lot across the street. There were no pickups at all in the lot. I said, "What are you driving?"

  "That Chevy."

  It was a beat-up yellow Malibu. Things piled in the backseat were visible through the rear window. I said, "Why?"

  Ty, I would have to say, did look different. I had seen a lot more men in the last two and a half years, a catalog of American men in every variety, size, and color. Ty looked like the settled ones, those with habits of such long standing that they were now rituals. That, I had come to realize, was the premier sign of masculinity and maturity, a settled conviction, born of experience, that these rituals would and should be catered to. He didn't look unattractive, though.

  Weathered, loose-limbed. I wouldn't have picked him for a trucker from the front.

  He said, "I didn't want to carry all my stuff out in the weather.

  "I'm going to Texas."

  "What for?"

  "They've got big corporate hog operations down there. I thought maybe I could get myself a job at one of those."

  He watched me, waiting, I knew, for the question I was supposed to ask, but I couldn't ask it. Finally, he shifted his feet under the table and said, "Marv Carson wouldn't give me a loan to plant a crop this year. I didn't have any collateral except the crop itself and they decided to stop making those kind of loans, with the farm situation the way it is."

  "I heard it was bad."

  "Bob Stanley shot himself in the head. Right out in the barn.

  Marlene found him. That's been the worst."

  "They
lost the farm?"

  "He knew they were going to. That's why he did it. Marlene's working in Zebulon Center now, as a teacher's aide in the elementary school."

  My mouth was dry. I took a sip of the Coke. I said, "What about you?"

  "Those hog buildings killed me, that's what it was. The winter was so bad after the trial-" "The hearing. Nobody was on trial."

  "I was."

  We glared at each other, then veiled our glares.

  He went on. "There was just one holdup after another with the buildings, and then I had to start over with all new sows, so that was a piece of change. I sold my place, but property values weren't anything like they'd been, and what I got didn't cover much of the loan, with the sows. Just got behind. And then more behind. The Chevy dealer made me a straight trade."