A Thousand Acres (1992 Pulitzer Prize) Read online

  A Thousand Acres

  by

  Jane Smiley

  ballanti edition (November 1992)

  Fawcett Books; ASIN: 0449907481

  The body repeats the landscape. They are the source of each other and create each other. We were marked by the seasonal body of earth, by the terrible migrations of people, by the swift turn of a century, verging on change never before experienced on this greening planet.

  MERIDEL LE SUEUR, "The Ancient People and the Newly Come" AT SIXTY MILES PER HOUR, you could pass our farm in a minute, on County Road 686, which ran due north into the T intersection at Cabot Street Road.

  Cabot Street Road was really just another country blacktop, except that five miles west it ran into and out of the town of Cabot. On the western edge of Cabot, it became Zebulon County Scenic Highway, and ran for three miles along the curve of the Zebulon River, before the river turned south and the Scenic continued west into Pike. The T intersection of CR 686 perched on a little rise, a rise nearly as imperceptible as the bump in the center of an inexpensive plate.

  From that bump, the earth was unquestionably flat, the sky unquestionably domed, and it seemed to me when I was a child in school, learning about Columbus, that in spite of what my teacher said, ancient cultures might have been onto something. No globe or map fully convinced me that Zebulon County was not the center of the universe.

  Certainly, Zebulon County, where the earth was flat, was one spot where a sphere (a seed, a rubber ball, a ballbearing) must come to perfect rest and once at rest must send a taproot downward into the ten-foot-thick topsoil.

  Because the intersection was on this tiny rise, you could see our buildings, a mile distant, at the southern edge of the farm. A mile to the east, you could see three silos that marked the northeastern corner, and if you raked your gaze from the silos to the house and barn, then back again, you would take in the immensity of the piece

  A THOUSAND ACRES of land my father owned, six hundred forty acres, a whole section, paid for, no encumbrances, as flat and fertile, black, friable, and exposed as any piece of land on the face of the earth.

  If you looked west from the intersection, you saw no sign of anything remotely scenic in the distance. That was because the Zebulon River had cut down through topsoil and limestone, and made its pretty course a valley below the level of the surrounding farmlands. Nor, except at night, did you see any sign of Cabot. You saw only this, two sets of farm buildings surrounded by fields. In the nearer set lived the Ericsons, who had daughters the ages of my sister Rose and myself, and in the farther set lived the Clarks, whose sons, Loren and Jess, were in grammar school when we were in junior high. Harold Clark was my father's best friend. He had five hundred acres and no mortgage. The Ericsons had three hundred seventy acres and a mortgage.

  Acreage and financing were facts as basic as name and gender in Zebulon County. Harold Clark and my father used to argue at our kitchen table about who should get the Ericson land when they finally lost their mortgage. I was aware of this whenever I played with Ruthie Ericson, whenever my mother, my sister Rose, and I went over to help can garden produce, whenever Mrs. Ericson brought over some pies or doughnuts, whenever my father loaned Mr. Ericson a tool, whenever we ate Sunday dinner in the Ericsons' kitchen.

  I recognized the justice of Harold Clark's opinion that the Ericson land was on his side of the road, but even so, I thought it should be us. For one thing, Dinah Ericson's bedroom had a window seat in the closet that I coveted. For another, I thought it appropriate and desirable that the great circle of the flat earth spreading out from the T intersection of County Road 686 and Cabot Street Road be ours.

  A thousand acres. It was that simple.

  It was 1951 and I was eight when I saw the farm and the future in this way. That was the year my father bought his first car, a Buick sedan with prickly gray velvet seats, so rounded and slick that it was easy to slide off the backseat into the footwell when we went over a stiff bump or around a sharp corner. That was also the year my sister Caroline was born, which was undoubtedly the reason my father bought the car. The Ericson children and the Clark children continued to ride in the back of the farm pickup, but the Cook children kicked their toes against a front seat and stared out the back windows, nicely protected from the dust. The car was the exact measure of six hundred forty acres compared to three hundred or five hundred.

  In spite of the price of gasoline, we took a lot of rides that year, something farmers rarely do, and my father never again did after Caroline was born. For me, it was a pleasure like a secret hoard of coins-Rose, whom I adored, sitting against me in the hot musty velvet luxury of the car's interior, the click of the gravel on its undercarriage, the sensation of the car swimming in the rutted road, the farms passing every minute, reduced from vastness to insignificance by our speed; the unaccustomed sense of leisure; most important, though, the reassuring note of my father's and mother's voices commenting on what they saw-he on the progress of the yearly work and the condition of the animals in the pastures, she on the look and size of the house and garden, the colors of the buildings.

  Their tones of voice were unhurried and selfconfident, complacent with the knowledge that the work at our place was farther along, the buildings at our place more imposing and better cared for. When I think of them now, I úthink how they had probably seen nearly as little of the world as I had by that time. But when I listened to their duet then, I nestled into the certainty of the way, through the repeated comparisons, our farm and our lives seemed secure and good.

  JEss CLARK WAS GONE for thirteen years. He left for a commonplace reason-he was drafted-but within a few months of Harold's accompanying his son to the bus depot in Zebulon Center, Jess and everything about him slipped into the category of the unmentionable, and no one spoke of him again until the spring of 1979, when I ran into lLoren Clark at the Thank in Pike and he said that Harold was giving a pig roast for Jess's homecoming, would all of us come, no need to bring anything. I put my hand on Loren's arm, which stopped him from turning away and made him look me in the eye. I said, "Well, then, where's he been?"

  "I guess we'll find out."

  "I thought he hadn't been in touch."

  "He wasn't, till Saturday night."

  "That's all?"

  "That's all." He gave me a long look and a slow smile, then said, "I notice he waited till we busted our butts finishing up planting before staging this resurrection."

  It was true that butts had been busted, since the spring had been cold and wet, and no one had been able to get into the fields until mid-May.

  Then almost all the corn in the county had been planted in less than two weeks. Loren smiled. Whatever he said, I knew he was feeling a little heroic, just as the men around our place were feeling. I thought of something. "Does he know about your mom?"

  "Dad told him."

  "Is he bringing any family?"

  "No wife, no kids. No plans to go back to wherever he is, either.

  We'll see." Loren Clark was a big, sweet guy. When he spoke about Jess, it was in easy, almost amused tones, the same way he spoke about everything. Seeing him somewhere was always a pleasure, like taking a drink of water. Harold put on a terrific pig roast-while the pig was roasting, he would syringe lime juice and paprika under the skin. Even so, I was surprised Harold intended to take a day off from bean planting. Loren shrugged. "There's time," he said. "The ú weather's holding now. You know Harold. He always likes to go against the grain."

  The real treat would be watching Jess Clark break through the ú surface of everything that hadn't been said about him over the years.

  I felt a quickening of interest, a small eagerness tha
t seemed like a happy omen. When I drove the Scenic toward Cabot a little while later, I thought how pretty the river did look-the willows and silver maples were in full leaf the cattails green and fleshy-looking, the wild iris out in purple clumps-and I stopped and took a pleased little stroll along the bank.

  On Valentine's Day, my sister Rose had been diagnosed with breast cancer. She was thirty-four. Her mastectomy and ensuing chemotherapy had left her weak and anxious. All through the gloomlest March and April in years, I was cooking for three households -for my father, who insisted on living alone in our old farmhouse, for Rose and her husband, Pete, in their house across the road from Daddy, and also for my husband, Tyler, and myself. We lived where the Ericsons once had, actually. I'd been able to consolidate dinner, and sometimes supper, depending on how Rose was feeling, but breakfast had to be served in each kitchen. My morning at the stove started before five and didn't end until eight-thirty.

  It didn't help that all the men were sitting around complaining about the weather and worrying that there wouldn't be tractor fuel for planting. Jimmy Carter ought to do this, Jimmy Carter will certainly do that, all spring long.

  And it didn't help that Rose had suddenly made up her mind the previous fall to send Pammy and Linda, her daughters, away to boarding school.

  Pammy was in seventh grade, Linda in sixth. They hated to go, fought against going, enlisting me and their father against Rose, but she labeled their clothes, packed their trunks, and drove them down to the Quaker school in West Branch. She exhibited a sustained resolve in the face of even our father's opposition that was like a natural force.

  The girls' departure was unbearable for me, since they were nearly my own daughters, and when Rose got the news from her doctor, the first thing I said was, "Let's let Pammy and Linda come home for a while.

  This is a good time. They can finish the school year here, then maybe go back."

  She said, "Never."

  Linda was just born when I had my first miscarriage, and for a while, six months maybe, the sight of those two babies, whom I had loved and cared for with real interest and satisfaction, affected me like a poison. All my tissues hurt when I saw them, when I saw Rose with them, as if my capillaries were carrying acid into the furthest reaches of my system. I was so jealous, and so freshly jealous every time I saw them, that I could hardly speak, and I wasn't very nice to Rose, since some visceral part of me simply blamed her for having what I wanted, and for having it so easily (it had taken me three years just to get pregnant-she had gotten pregnant six months after getting married). Of course, fault had nothing to do with it, and I got over my jealousy then by reminding myself over and over, with a kind of litany of the central fact of my life-no day of my remembered life was without Rose. Compared to our sisterhood, every other relationship was marked by some sort of absence-before Caroline, after our mother, before our husbands, pregnancies, her children, before and after and apart from friends and neighbors.

  We've always known families in Zebulon County that live together for years without speaking, for whom a historic dispute over land or money burns so hot that it engulfs every other subject, every other point of relationship or affection. I didn't want that, I wanted that least of all, so I got over my jealousy and made my relationship with Rose better than ever. Still, her refusal to bring them back from boarding school reminded me in no uncertain terms that they would always be her children, never mine.

  Well, I felt it and I set it aside. I threw myself into feeding her, cleaning her house, doing her laundry, driving her to Zebulon Center for her treatments, bathing her, helping her find a prosthesis, encouraging her with her exercises. I talked about the girls, read the letters they sent home, sent them banana bread and ginger snaps.

  But after the girls were sent away, I had a hint, again, for the first time since Linda was born, of how it was in those families, how generations of silence could flow from a single choice.

  Jess Clark's return: something that had looked impossible turning out possible. Now it was the end of May, and Rose felt pretty good.

  Another possibility realized. And she looked better, too, since she was getting some color back. And the weather would be warm, they said on the TV. My walk along the riverbank carried me to where the river spread out into a little marsh, or where, you could also say, where the surface of the earth dipped below the surface of the sea within it, and blue water sparkled in the still limpid sunlight of midspring. And there was a flock of pelicans, maybe twenty-five birds, cloud white against the shine of the water. Ninety years ago, when my great-grandparents settled in Zebulon County and the whole county was wet, marshy, glistening like this, hundreds of thousands of pelicans nested in the cattails, but I hadn't seen even one since the early sixties. I watched them. The view along the Scenic, I thought, taught me a lesson about what is below the level of the visible.

  The Clark brothers were both good-looking, but with Loren you had to gaze for a moment to find the handsomely set eyes and the neatly carved lips. His pleasant disposition gave him a goofy quality that was probably what most people mean when they use the word "hick." And maybe he'd gotten a little thick in the middle, the way you do when there's plenty of meat and potatoes around. I'd never even noticed it, till I saw Jess for the first time at the pig roast, and he was like this alternative edition of Loren. Jess was about a year older than Loren, I think, but in those thirteen years they'd gotten to be like twins raised apart that you see on TV. They cocked their heads the same way, they laughed at the same jokes. But the years hadn't taken the toll on Jess that they had on Loren: his waist came straight up out of his waistband; his thighs seemed to how a little, so you got the sense of the muscles inside his jeans. From behind, too, he didn't look like anyone else at the pig roast. The small of his back narrowed into his belt, then there was just a little swell, nicely defined by the back yoke and the pockets. He didn't walk like a farmer, either, that's something else you noticed from behind. Most men walk in their hip sockets, just kicking their legs out one at a time, but Jess Clark moved from the small of his back, as if any time, he might do a few handsprings.

  Rose noticed him, too, right when I did. We put our casseroles on the trestle table, I looked at Jess turning from talking to Marlene Stanley, and Rose said, "Hunh. Look at that."

  His face wasn't smooth like Loren's, though. There's where he had aged. Lines fanned out from the corners of his eyes, framed his smile, drew your attention to his nose, which was long and beaky, unsoftened by flesh or years of mild, harmless thoughts. He had Loren's blue eyes, but there was no sweetness in them, and Loren's dark brown ringlets, but they were cut close. Nicely cut. He was wearing fancy sneakers, too, and a light blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up.

  Actually, he looked good, but not like he was going to quickly ease any neighborhood suspicions. Everybody would be friendly to him, though.

  People in Zebulon County saw friendliness as a moral virtue.

  He gave me a hug, then Rose, and said, "Hey, it's the big girls."

  Rose said, "Hey, it's the pest."

  "I wasn't that bad. I was just interested."

  "The word 'relentless' was coined to describe you, Jess," said Rose.

  "I was nice to Caroline. Caroline was crazy about me. Did she come?"

  I said, "Caroline's down in Des Moines now. She's getting married in the fall, you know. To another lawyer. Frank Ras-" I stopped talking, I sounded so serious and dull.

  "So soon?"

  Rose cocked her head and pushed her hair back. "She's twentyeight, Jess," said Rose. "According to Daddy, it's almost too late to breed her. Ask him. He'll tell you all about sows and heifers and things drying up and empty chambers. It's a whole theoretical system."

  Jess laughed. "I remember that about your father. He always had a lot of ideas. He and Harold could sit at the kitchen table and eat a whole pie, wedge by wedge, and drink two or three pots of coffee and one-up each other."

  "They still do that," said Rose. "You shouldn
't think something's changed just because you haven't seen it in thirteen years.

  Jess looked at her. I said, "I guess you remember that Rose always offers her unvarnished opinion. That hasn't changed, either." He smiled at me. Rose, who is never embarrassed, said, "I remembered something, too. I remembered that Jess used to like his mom's Swiss steak, so that's what I brought." She lifted the lid on her dish and Jess raised his eyebrows. He said, "I haven't eaten meat in seven years.

  "Well, then, you're probably going to starve to death around here.

  There's Eileen Dahl, Ginny. She sent me those flowers in the hospital.

  I'm going to talk to her." She strode away. Jess didn't watch her.

  Instead, he lifted the lid on my dish. It was cheese garbanzo enchiladas. I said, "Where've you been living, then?"

  "Seattle, lately. I lived in Vancouver before the amnesty."

  "We never heard you'd gone to Canada."

  "I'll bet. I went right after infantry training, on my first leave."

  "Did your dad know?"