A Thousand Acres_A Novel

by Jane Smiley

  She looked at me. I must have had some look on my face, because she said, “He’s rigid like this because we’ve let him be.”

  Then she said, “He’s fed, okay?”

  I nodded.

  She went on. “And I made hamburgers. They’re in the refrigerator. The grill is going, so we can put them on anytime.” The girls crowded against her and she pecked the tops of their heads.

  I said, “New air conditioner?”

  “Almost new. There was an ad in the paper. Ty drove over to Zebulon Center to pick it up. He said he saw you at the pool, but he couldn’t get your attention.”

  I must have looked doubtful, because she said, “Don’t say anything about sinus passages or getting used to the heat, the way Daddy does. People shouldn’t be so hot. It’s bad for them and it’s dangerous.” Pammy started picking at the salad. Rose let her take one cherry tomato, then shooed her away. “Go on outside and wash your hair under the outside spigot. With shampoo. I can smell the chlorine.” Pammy shuffled away. She looked the way I felt, used up but strengthened by the unaccustomed exercise, already aimed toward a good night’s sleep. I said, “They were good. Mary Livingstone came over and made Linda—” when the phone rang. Rose opened the refrigerator and took out a plate of thick patties, and I picked up the receiver. It was Caroline.

  The Sunday that I’d sworn to call her had gone by without me calling her. For one thing, I hadn’t been able to get over my reluctance about calling her at the office. And then the evenings had been swept up in the Monopoly games. And then I’d persuaded myself that she’d call when she felt like it. Out driving three times, I had vowed to call her as soon as I got home, but then my hand never went to the phone. All of these rationalizations smote me as soon as I heard her voice. But her “hello” sounded normal and even happy. I said, “Oh, hello, Caroline. I tried to call you.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Rose stiffen.

  Caroline said, “Is Daddy okay?”

  “Well, sure. Rose just was over there giving him his supper. How are you?”

  “We’re fine. Do you know where Daddy was yesterday?”

  “Well, no. I don’t keep tabs—”

  “Well, I was in New York for two days, and when I got back this evening, there was a note on my desk saying, ‘Your father came in looking for you at eleven.’ ”

  “Did you try to call him and ask him?”

  Now there was a long silence on the other end of the line. Rose, who had gone outside and put the burgers on the grill, came in with a slam of the screen door, and I raised my eyebrows. She mouthed, “What’s going on?” and just then, Caroline said, “Yeah, I did. I tried to call him twice, and both times he wouldn’t talk to me. Once he listened for a few minutes but didn’t say anything, and the second time he hung up as soon as he heard my voice. Then he wouldn’t answer the phone, even though I let it ring thirty times.” She sounded embarrassed.

  I said, “That’s so silly. But are they sure it was Daddy?”

  “I assume so, but I can’t ask anyone about it till Monday.”

  “Just a minute.” I put my hand over the mouthpiece and told Rose the story. She pursed her lips and shrugged, but went outside carrying the barbecue spatula without saying anything. Ty pushed open the door to the living room and exclaimed, “All done! Where’s the beer?” To Caroline, I said, “What?”

  She said, “Did you and Rose sign the papers?”

  For a moment I was confused and I said, “What papers?”

  “The incorporation papers and the transfer papers.”

  “Oh.” I was struck by the coolness of her tone.

  She didn’t say anything.

  I went on, “Well, sure we did. Of course we did. We didn’t have any choice.”

  There was another silence, then she said evenly, “I think you did.”

  Jess Clark walked in the back door, slamming the screen, and Pammy called for a towel. I could hear Caroline waiting for me to say something, but a molasses feeling of fatigue rendered me unable to rise to the complexities of what it might be. Finally I said, “Caroline, it’s a madhouse here. Let me call you later. Or call me and tell me what they say about Daddy’s visit.”

  She said, “Okay,” very coolly.

  I said, “I mean it. Don’t forget.” But she was gone by that time.

  Jess went on into the living room, and the back door opened almost immediately. It was Rose, who sniffed, “What did she have to say?”

  “Are you and Caroline having a fight?”

  “You’ll have to ask her that.”

  “Well, I’m asking you.” Once in a while, I could pull some oldest sister rank.

  “I didn’t think we were.”

  “Until?”

  “Well, it’s been two weeks since my three-month exam, and I haven’t heard a word from her. She never called to ask how I was. In fact, I’ve thought her attitude from the beginning has been pretty casual.”

  “She sent flowers and came to visit.”

  “One time, when she was coming up for the weekend anyway. There were three or four women outside the family who were more attentive than that.”

  “She’s very busy.”

  Rose pulled a long, skeptical face. “According to her.”

  “She said Daddy came to her office yesterday.” I thought this would distract her.

  “What for?”

  “She doesn’t know. She was in New York.”

  Rose mimicked me. “She was in New York.”

  “Rose!”

  “Well, she’s always somewhere, isn’t she? She’s the one who got away, isn’t she?”

  “I thought we were glad about that. She’s not interested in farming.”

  Rose leaned against the counter and gazed at me. I let her. After a moment, her hand fluttered up toward the empty side of her chest, and she placed it back on the counter, then picked up the salad with both hands. Finally, she said, “When we are good girls and accept our circumstances, we’re glad about it.” She walked toward the dining-room door and pushed it partly open, then said, “When we are bad girls, it drives us crazy.”

  I went out and checked the burgers. They were plenty done, a little overdone, in fact, and I began lifting them off the grill. The wind and the high June sun were relentless. The two-foot corn plants fanning away from the other side of the yard looked bleached from the glare, and the ground between them was dusty, even though there had been enough rain this year. I was dumbfounded at the anger that had sprung up around me in the last ten minutes. It was all so easy to imagine: Daddy stalking into Hooker, Williams, Crockett in his boots and overalls and making a fuss, then Caroline being pierced with fear when she found out; Rose silently waiting for Caroline to perform a duty that everyone but she had forgotten about; Caroline incubating her wish that we not sign the transfer papers until it turned into a conviction. She was a lawyer, so it was easy to imagine her cross-examining me, and I fell into defending myself:

  He wanted us to do it, and why shouldn’t we do it?

  You could have opened the door and come in, even after Daddy closed it (slammed it?).

  I didn’t want the farm, but others did, and anyway it was Daddy’s idea.

  And we can’t watch him every minute, either. He’s got a driver’s license and two vehicles.

  There’s bound to be some adjustment as his life changes.

  We should all stick together instead of getting suspicious of each other.

  “You going to bring those slabs of meat inside? People are beginning to wonder where you are.”

  I jumped. It was Jess Clark, smiling from the open kitchen door.

  “I was gathering wool as well as hamburgers.”

  “Well, come into the living room. You’ll be amazed.”

  “Cool?”

  “By contrast.”

  He wrapped his hand around the back of my arm as I stepped through the door. I said, “Remember this day. This is the day when everything I was worried about came to pass.”

>   “Really?”

  I could tell by his face that he didn’t know what I was talking about. I said, “It’s too complicated to go into. Just remember that I knew it all ahead of time.”

  “If you say so.”

  I pushed through the door into the dim coolness of the dining room. Every laughing face turned toward me and I held out the plate of hamburgers. In the refreshing coolness, we ate with appetite and joked over our food in a way that was new for us. Pete was laughing and showing off, the way Jess seemed to get him to do. Ty expanded into a bemused host, dishing up seconds for everyone and teasing Pammy and Linda, who ate everything they were given without complaint. Rose had three of everything—she was talking too much to notice what I was putting on her plate, and whatever she found there, she ate. No annoyed looks, no studied rejection of my concern. It was great cover, this mealtime sociability, and it lasted and lasted. We were still at the table, talking, at ten o’clock. I couldn’t help watching Jess, who was sitting at the head. He looked handsome and animated, as if he were really having a good time, and glad of it. Of course, it was clear to me that he carried the good time with him. When the time came for him to leave, he would carry it away, back to the West Coast.

  On Sunday after church, when we gathered at Daddy’s for our annual Father’s Day dinner, the contrast was clear. Daddy was sitting at the head of the table, and he was not having a good time. The crown pork roast that Shorty Humboldt over at the locker had fashioned for me sat heavily on the white tablecloth, surrounded by pickles and roasted potatoes and a big bowl of peas from the garden. Linda and Pammy were poking each other angrily under the table, and Pete was in the kitchen getting another beer—I could hear the refrigerator door open and close. Rose said, “You want me to carve it, Daddy? You just go down between the bones.”

  “I know that.”

  “I know you do.”

  “Well, then, don’t tell me what to do.”

  “I wasn’t—” But she caught my eye and shut up, as if I had cast her a glance of some kind. Ty said, “These potatoes look great.”

  Linda said, “What’re those little sticks on them?”

  I said, “That’s rosemary. It’s good. It’s an herb.”

  Ty said, “Ginny’s been reading the paper again.”

  Rose said, “Mommy put rosemary in potatoes. I remember because I paid attention to the name of it. It’s good on meat, too.”

  It was exhausting just to hold ourselves at the table, magnets with our northern poles pointing into the center of the circle. You felt a palpable sense of relief when you gave up and let yourself fall away from the table and wound up in the kitchen getting something, or in the bathroom running the water and splashing it on your face.

  The funny thing was that this discomfort was not new, but I recognized it newly. Normally I would have attributed it to the heat or the work of having a big dinner on the table by one o’clock or some argument between Pete and Daddy or Rose being in one of her moods. I would have accommodated its inevitability and been glad enough to get home and have Ty say, “Not too bad. Food was good. That’s what’s important.” Normally I would have reacted like any farmer—trying to look out for the pitfalls and drop-offs ahead of time, trying to be philosophical about them afterwards. We only did this sort of thing three times a year (at Easter we went to the church supper).

  But now I saw with fresh conviction that it was us, all of us, who were failing, and the hallmark of our failure was the way we ate with our heads down, hungrily, quickly, because there was nothing else to do at the table.

  Daddy spoke up. “Corn down in Story County was all ripped to shreds by that storm.”

  It was a freak storm that had dropped golf-ball-size hail in the late afternoon, then turned around and come back through, from the northeast, about four hours later. It had passed south of us, so that all we saw was the lightning in the distance. Wednesday. The thought occurred to Rose and me simultaneously and we looked at each other.

  Ty said, “You hate spending the money for hail insurance, but there must be guys kicking themselves down there now.”

  Pete said, “You can’t prepare for a storm like that. The paper said that was a really oddball storm.”

  Daddy set down his pork bone and wiped his fingers on his napkin. He said, “You don’t have to prepare for a storm like that. A regular storm will do plenty of damage if there’s hail.”

  Obviously.

  Pete turned red.

  Rose said, “What were you doing down in Story County, Daddy?”

  Daddy dished himself potatoes and then spooned a dollop of hot pepper pickles next to them. He picked a slice of meat off the serving plate.

  I said, “When was that, Thursday? Wasn’t that storm Wednesday afternoon?”

  Daddy said, “No law against taking a little ride now and then.”

  Rose said, “With this gasoline shortage, there might be one one of these days.”

  “Well there isn’t one now.” He spoke sharply. They glared at each other. Pete said, “We ought to be saving our gas. It’s going to be the end of the month soon, and Jimmy Carter hasn’t done a thing about those truckers striking. If we ran alcohol, we wouldn’t have a thing to worry about.”

  Daddy said, “We aren’t going to run alcohol.” He clearly meant it as the last word on the issue.

  I said, “Daddy, did you go all the way to Des Moines?”

  “What if I did?”

  Now the glare was for me. It shone into me like a hot beam of sunlight. I couldn’t think of anything to say. What if he did? What if he did?

  Rose said, “Caroline was wondering, that’s all.”

  “You girls talk plenty on that long distance.”

  He hated the idea of us talking about him, probably because he knew that we always did, couldn’t help it, couldn’t stop it. I said, “She was worried about it, that’s all.”

  “I didn’t say I did go to Des Moines, did I?”

  I said, “No.”

  “Well, then.” He helped himself to the peas.

  At bedtime, Ty said, “You women don’t understand your father at all.”

  I had washed the sheets that day, and I was making up the bed. I said, “Flip that corner over the mattress, would you?” He tucked the corner of the contour sheet, then smoothed out the lumps. He was wearing only his underwear, ready to climb into bed. His shoulders were wide and muscular. His upper arms were casually brawny, split in half, white and golden red, by a sharp tan line. His wrists were as thick as his forearms, which were covered with hair that had whitened in the sun. He was smiling.

  I said, “Then we have something in common with him, because he clearly doesn’t understand himself.”

  “He understands himself fine. He’s just secretive, is all.”

  “And what are his secrets?”

  “Well, I think one of them is that he’s afraid of his daughters.”

  “That’s a good one.” I folded the blanket at the end of the bed. I doubted that we would need it. Ty slipped under the sheet. “What has he got to fear? He’s got everyone on this place under his thumb.”

  “Not any more.”

  “You mean because of the transfer? We all know that’s a legal fiction. He is this place. Rose and I run around in a panic every time he cocks an eyebrow. All he has to do is turn up mysteriously in Caroline’s office, and she’s on the phone, asking questions. Most of the time, I forget the transfer even took place.”

  “He doesn’t.”

  “Well, then, he should untransfer it. I don’t care.” I was stepping out of my shorts. Ty’s look caught me and held me. It said that he cared, and that the decision was mine, and that all he could do, finally, was stand back and let me make the decision. The freight of his look was seventeen years of unspoken knowledge that he had married up and been obliged to prove his skills worthy of, not a hundred and sixty acres, but a thousand acres. He said, “I still think the transfer was a smart move, taxwise, and otherwise, too. Marv Cars
on thinks it was real smart.” His voice was careful. I laid my shorts on the dresser and pulled my shirt over my head. Ty said, “But you women could handle it better. You could handle him better. You don’t always have to take issue. You ought to let a lot of things slide.”

  I thought about this. I said, “You’re right. I don’t understand him. But I think a lot of the taking issue that you see is just us trying to figure out how to understand him better. I feel like there’s treacherous undercurrents all the time. I think I’m standing on solid ground, but then I discover that there’s something moving underneath it, shifting from place to place. There’s always some mystery. He doesn’t say what he means.”

  “He says what he means. You two always read something into it, whatever it is. Rose does it more than you.”

  I put on a short cotton nightgown and buttoned one of the buttons. Ty propped himself up on his elbow and folded back the sheet for me. It was reassuring and calming to enter his space, the circle of strength radiating from his shoulders and arms. This was something we had always done fairly well—disagree without fighting. We did this better than sex.

  Ty lay back, pulling my head into the crook of his shoulder. For a few moments, I could feel us staring up at the ceiling together. He said, “He’s irritable. He doesn’t like to be challenged or brought up short. But he’s a good farmer. Everyone respects him and looks up to him. When he states an opinion, people listen. Good times and bad times roll off him all the same. That’s a rare thing.” Ty’s voice rounded and deepened in my ear. Real enthusiasm. We continued to look up at the ceiling, solidly against one another, head to toe. In a few moments, he was asleep.

  Wide awake, I tried to remember my father. Ty’s views were not new to me. When he, on rare occasions, found himself angry at my father, I repeated many of the same things back to him, to remind him how much he had learned from my father, for one thing. On the other hand, I thought, I had been with my father so constantly for so long that I knew less and less about him with every passing year. Every meaningful image was jumbled together with the countless moments of our daily life, defeating my efforts to gain some perspective. The easiest things to remember were events I had only heard about: When my father was seventeen, for example, and lights on the farm ran off a gasoline-powered generator, my father was down in the cellar looking for something and was overcome by fumes. He managed to stagger to the stairs and fall upward far enough so that his hand poked out of the doorway into the kitchen. Grandpa Cook came in a few minutes later and dragged him outside into the fresh air.