A Thousand Acres

by Jane Smiley

  "An eight-year-old sedan for a four-year-old pickup?"

  "I wasn't in a position to complain. Anyway, this is kind of a relief.

  And I've never been down there. Or anyplace else for that matter."

  I looked him over without shyness, with the inspecting gaze a wife earns after a certain number of years. I said, "You don't look relieved."

  He shrugged.

  "What about Rose?"

  "I haven't been getting along with Rose all that well."

  This was a touchy subject, so we watched two women come in the front door and order bowls of chili. Finally, he said, "She's getting a crop in and out. She's renting out land. When we split the farm, I took on the whole loan for the buildings, since they were on my land, so she was pretty unencumbered."

  "Except there's nobody to farm the place."

  "It's a big place."

  "A thousand acres.

  "All together," he said, "yeah. My dad would have been scared of that much land."

  "There were bigger places than that out west even when he was alive."

  "You know what he used to say about that? He used to say, 'Those places got the area, but they ain't got the volume."

  We laughed, uneasily but together.

  I said, "It's going to fall apart, isn't it?"

  "Yeah." He said it reluctantly. "Yeah, it is. Rose swears she's going to keep it together. She's grim as death about it, and she goes I around like some queen. He glanced at me. "Well, she does. You should see her. Frankly, she's your dad all over."

  I felt my face get hot.

  He said, "I know what she says, Ginny, about your dad. She told me.

  She's told everybody by now."

  It was clear he didn't believe her. We watched a solitary man come ii dressed in a suit. He ordered a Big Single, large fries, and a water.

  After a moment he said, "Maybe it happened. I don't say it didn't.

  But it doesn't make me like her any more. I think people should keep private things private." His voice was rising as if he could barely contain himself. I was tempted to nod, not because I agreed, but because I recognized how all these things sorted themselves in his I mind, and I realized that with the best will in the world, we could never see them in the same way, and that, more than anything else, more than circumstances or history or will or wishing, divided us from each other. But the Ty I'd known was always on the lookout for agreement, reconciliation, so I didn't nod, knowing how he'd take it. I kept private things private.

  "Anyway," he went on. "That's the past. I signed the whole thing over to her, the land, the buildings, the hogs, the equipment. She's sure prices are going to rise, and she's going to be a land baroness.

  She's got it all figured out, the way she always does, and it's fine with me. I'm going to Texas, so he looked at me.

  "So what?"

  "So, I want to get a divorce."

  I must have looked surprised, and I was, because the feeling of myself as a married person was something else that had lifted off long before.

  He stumbled forward. "It could happen in Texas. There might be someone there I-" "That's fine."

  "I haven't-" "I don't care."

  "You don't?" There was a little wounded surprise in this question that revealed something underneath Ty's cool manner. I leaned forward and surveyed him again. He looked good. He would find someone for sure.

  After a moment, he said, "The thing I don't understand about women is how cut and dried they are. My mother used to say to my dad, 'Ernie, if it can't be, it ain't," and she would clap her hands together and when her hands came apart, I would see that there was nothing there, and whatever we'd been wishing for or talking about, it would be gone, too, just like that."

  "If you'd wanted me back, you'd have come looking for me before this."

  "You don't understand how full my hands were. I couldn't leave the place for a minute. It was all getting away from me all the time-" He broke off. "Anyway, you walked out."

  "Your pride was hurt?"

  "I hated all that mess." His voice rose again. "I hated the way Rose roped you in-" He looked at me. "I thought you'd repent.

  When I thought about things at all, that was my bottom line. I still think-" I flared up. "You were on Caroline's side! You talked to her about me!"

  He sighed, and looked at me, then said, "I was on the side of the farm, that was all."

  "What does that mean? You talked to her! She saw you as her ally!"

  "What was I supposed to do? I didn't call her! If she called me and asked me questions, I told her what I thought. I tried to tell the truth the way I saw it."

  "You didn't know the truth."

  His face got red. "Look, the truth is, it was all wrong. For years, it was right, and we prospered and we got along and we did the way we knew we should be doing, and sure there were little crosses to bear, but it was right. Then Rose got selfish and you went along with her, and then it was all wrong. It wasn't up to her to change things, to screw up the monkey works!" He took a deep breath and lowered his voice. "There was real history there! And of course not everybody got what they wanted, and not everybody acted right all the time, but that's just the way it is. Life is. You got to accept that." I "Rose didn't ask Daddy for the farm!"

  "But she was right there when he came up with that idea. She was all enthusiasm "So were you!"

  "I didn't have any plans to ease him out! My plan was to-I slapped my hand on the table. Two kids behind the counter glanced over at us. Ty fell silent. I wanted to choose my words carefully. Finally, I said, "The thing is, I can remember when I saw it all your way! The proud progress from Grandpa Davis to Grandpa Cook to Daddy. When 'we' bought the first tractor in the county, when 'we' built the big house, when 'we' had the crops sprayed from the air, when 'we' got a car, when 'we' drained Mel's corner, when 'we' got a hundred and seventy-two bushels an acre. I can remember all of that like prayers or like being married. You know. It's good to remember and repeat. You feel good to be a part of that. But then I saw what my part really was. Rose showed me." He opened his mouth to speak, but I stopped him with my hand. "She showed me, but I knew what she showed me was true before she even finished showing me. You see this grand history, but I see blows. I see taking what you want because you want it, then making something up that justifies what you did. I see getting others to pay the price, then covering up and forgetting what the price was. Do I think Daddy came up with beating and fucking us on his own?" Ty winced. "No.

  I think he had lessons, and those lessons were part of the package, along with the land and the lust to run things exactly the way he wanted to no matter what, poisoning the water and destroying the topsoil and buying bigger and bigger machinery, and then feeling certain that all of it was 'right," as you say."

  He was looking at me, but his face was closed over. Finally, he said, "I guess we see things differently."

  "More differently than you imagine."

  "I didn't remember you like this."

  "I wasn't like this. I was a ninny."

  "You were pretty and funny, and you looked at the good side of things."

  I looked at my watch. There was another question I wanted to ask. I let this observation die away, then I said, "That night. The night of the storm. Did you know what Daddy was going to say to us? To me?"

  "I knew he was angry. He was muttering on the way home, but I didn't pay much attention to it."

  I let my gaze travel over his face. I saw that its measure of hope -the feature by which I always used to recognize Ty as my husband-had given way to something more mysterious and remote.

  I said, "Did you agree with him? With what he said?"

  "Ginny-" Resentful frustration edged his tone. He heard it and began again, more carefully. "Ginny, when your father told me what to do and how to farm, I paid attention. Otherwise, I didn't. But he always threw you women into a panic."

  I stood up. "I'm lifteen minutes late now, and I don't want Eileen to get after me. I think fift
een minutes is all the farther I can push her."

  "You've got to have the last word, huh."

  "Well, have it. I don't care.

  But neither of us said anything, leaving Wendy's and crossing the parking lot and street and the Perkins lot to his Malibu. He unlocked the driver's door, then turned to me with a gesture that took in the street, the restaurants, the parking lot, and me. He said, "I don't understand living like this, this ugly way. But I guess I'm gonna be getting used to it." That was the last word. We waved simultaneously as he drove off and that was the last gesture. It made a little pair with the first thing I ever saw him do. He was a senior; I was in junior high. For once, Daddy had let me go to a football game with some other girls, early in the season when it was still hot. I was taking off my sweater when I saw a rangy, good-looking older boy waving at me. I was flattered, so I smiled and waved back in spite of my habitual fearfulness. It was Ty, and when he saw me wave at him, his face went blank. I looked around. The girl he was waving at was two rows in back of me. After we started dating, live years later, he swore he could not remember this incident, and I'm sure he didn't, but it was burned into my memory as a reminder of the shame you courted if ever you made the mistake of thinking too well of yourself.

  ALTHOUGH Ty would have sworn that my loyalty to Rose was unshaken, and probably pathological, he would have been wrong.

  I could not bear getting an envelope from her. Her notes were never more than a paragraph. They were friendly and matter-of fact, with a slight undertone of setting me straight which was simply in the nature of our relationship. It was clear from them that she was still, and consciously, allowing me to define how we would be sisters, and that her patience with me was inexhaustible. That there was, in addition, no escaping being sisters was implicit in every word, even in the address, "Ginny Cook Smith," and the return address, "Rose Cook Lewis."

  It was largely because I feared calls from Rose that I never had a telephone installed.

  Even so, when she really wanted me, she got me. In the October after the April that Ty stopped, the phone rang at the restaurant during my break, and it was Rose. I knew it would be as I walked to the cashier's desk where the incoming phone sat, its receiver so threateningly, demandingly off the hook.

  he was at the hospital in Mason City. That was one thing. The girls were alone on the farm. That was another. She wanted to see me. That was the third. I said, "I'll be there by three."

  Eileen, I knew, would give me the time off. She had been pushing me to take time off for a year. I wore my uniform, which seemed like it would protect me, and it didn't occur to me to pack anything.

  I left from work with only my handbag, just as if I were going home.

  When I got to Mason City, I stopped at a phone booth and called her doctor, who came at once to the phone. He told me that the resurgence of her cancer was already far advanced. The second radical mastectomy had been performed in July, during the summer lull in farm work.

  Radiation and chemotherapy into August had bought Rose another harvest.

  Now the harvest was over.

  She was thin, and little in the bed. When I came into the room, her eyelids lifted like velvet curtains. Her gaze was a spectacle you couldn't look away from. She pushed herself up an inch or two in the bed and patted a spot 011 the edge where I was to sit. I sat. She said, "At the peak of the harvest I drove fifteen truckloads a day to the elevator. We got $3.06 a bushel for corn."

  "Sounds like a good price."

  "We should have made Daddy show us more, and let us get more into the habit of working. If I'd been in the habit of doing it day after day, like Ty or Loren, it wouldn't have been so hard." She took some deep breaths, then reached for a glass and sipped some water through a straw. She said, "Take the girls back with you.

  They're ready to go."

  "You mean, they're packed?"

  "More or less."

  I thought she meant that I was to get them at the farm and take them back to St. Paul that night. I said, "Rose, that's ridiculous."

  "Tell me you'll take them."

  "Of course I'll take them."

  "Tomorrow we'll talk about when."

  "Okay."

  She spoke in bursts that seemed to issue forth rather than in words formed by her tongue and lips. And it tired her. That was all she said for about an hour, and then her eyelids rose again, and she said, "Go home and make them some dinner. Make them fried chicken."

  I stood up. "Rose, I've got as long as I want. I haven't taken any vacation time in three years."

  She nodded heavily.

  Linda wasn't surprised to see me, only surprised that I'd bothered to knock. I was surprised to see her, though. In the last three years, I had sent presents at birthdays and Christmas, but, actually, I had thrown away their thank-you notes unopened, afraid to face the loss of them along with everything else. I composed myself on the porch, and stepped inside. Ty's snapshot hadn't prepared me for the actuality of her height, her flesh, her fifteen-year-old air of confidence, or her deep voice when she called out, "Pam! Aunt Ginny's here!" I stepped across the threshold and she embraced me tightly. Pammy came in from the kitchen wiping her hands on her apron. She said, "Oh, Aunt Ginny!

  You were supposed to take live minutes longer so that I could get the dishes put away!"

  The house looked less functionally bare than it had in Daddy's day, and the white brocade couch formed the center piece of a living room suite that included a new co-ordinating wing-back chair and an oak side table. A lamp with a white pleated shade and a cut-glass base completed the picture. Daddy's old armchair was nowhere to be seen.

  Pete's piano sat in the corner. There were no pictures on it.

  Furniture filled the room exactly to the brim, inviting entrance, civilized at last.

  I sat down in the new chair, and said, "The place looks great.

  Your grandfather always thought his chair facing the window and a stack of magazines within reach was a good enough way to decorate."

  They sat together on the couch. They smiled at my remark.

  Pammy reached for a remote control, then turned off the television.

  She said, "It's just 'Wheel of Fortune."

  I said, "I saw your mom.

  Linda said, "She called us."

  "I guess I'm going to be staying for a while."

  Pammy said, "You could stay closer to the hospital if you want.

  We're old enough to stay alone."

  "That seems kind of lonely."

  Linda nodded at this. Pammy said, "For you or for us?"

  "I guess for everybody."

  After a moment, Linda said, "Are they going to let her come home soon?

  She thinks they are, but I don't really believe her."

  I shrugged. "All she told me was to come and make you some fried chicken. I picked up a chicken on the way.

  Pammy said, "We've been Vegetarians for three years."

  "Do you think you've lost the ability to digest meat?"

  Linda giggled. They looked at each other, and finally she said, "We eat meat at school. We even go to Kentucky Fried Chicken sometimes.

  Are you going to make mashed potatoes and cream gravy?"

  "Would you like me to?"

  They both nodded.

  I thought I was doing quite well. I stood up easily and walked into the kitchen without a hitch. I found the cast iron chicken fryer and a pan for the potatoes. The only trouble was, the kitchen seemed arctic.

  The blue gas flames of the burner fluttered coldly. The grease in the pan popped chillingly. When it spattered my hand, the burned dots felt frozen. I looked around, then took Rose's old beige sweater off the hook behind the door. I huddled into it, browning chicken and shivering. It seemed an impossible defeat that I was back in this kitchen, cooking. Since seeing Ty, I had reduced my links to the old life even more by investing in a microwave oven. For six months, I had microwaved every meal I didn't eat at the restaurant, and my pantry was full of oval
plastic dishes that I thought might come in handy someday.

  In addition to that, although I knew that I would certainly have come had Rose told me about her condition, it galled me that I hadn't even begun to resist. The summons, backed up by the word "hospital," had been enough. I turned the chicken pieces over. It was already dark as midnight outside, and not even six-thirty in the evening. The restaurant would be filling up at this hour, each cheerfully lit table bright with menus and paper place mats. On the other side of the black windows of Rose's kitchen, though, there was only outer space, a lightless, soundless vacuum that on this thousand acres came right down to the ground. I went to the back door, fumbled for the switch, and turned on the yard lights, three spots on tall poles that lit the way between the house and the barn and the machine shed. They helped, but I didn't really believe them.