A Thousand Acres_A Novel Read online

  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 twenty-eight, 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?”

  “Maybe. I never know what he knows.”

  “Zebulon County must seem pretty ordinary after that, after being in the mountains and all.”

  “It is beautiful there. I don’t know—” His gaze flicked over my shoulder, then back to my face. He smiled right at me. “We’ll talk about it. I hear you’re the closest neighbors now.”

  “To the east, I guess so.”

  I saw my father’s car drive in. Pete and Ty were with him, I knew that. But Caroline was with him, too. That was unexpected. I waved as she unfolded out of the car, and Jess turned to look. I said, “There she is. That’s my husband, Ty. You must remember him, and Pete, Rose’s husband. Did you ever meet him?”

  Jess said, “No kids?”

  “No kids.” I gave this remark my customary cheery tone, then filled in quickly, “Rose has two, though, Pammy and Linda. I’m very close to them. Actually they’re in boarding school. Down in West Branch.”

  “That’s pretty high class for your average family farmer.”

  I shrugged. By this time, Ty and Caroline had made their way to us through the crowd, peeling off Daddy at the group of farmers standing around Harold and Pete at the tub of iced beer. Ty gave me a squeeze around the waist and a kiss on the cheek.

  I got married to Ty when I was nineteen, and the fact was that even after seventeen years of marriage, I was still pleased to see him every time he appeared.

  I wasn’t the first in my high school class to go, nor the last. Ty was twenty-four. He’d been farming for six years, and his farm was doing well. A hundred and sixty acres, no mortgage. Its size was fine with my father, because it showed a proper history—Ty’s dad, the second Smith boy, had inherited the extra farm, not the original piece of land. There’d been no fiddling with that, which went to Ty’s uncle, and amounted to about four hundred acres, no mortgage. Ty’s dad had shown additional good sense in marrying a plain woman and producing only one child, which was the limit, my father often said, of a hundred and sixty acres. When Ty was twenty-two and had been farming long enough to know what he was doing, his father died of a heart attack, which he suffered out in the hog pen. To my father, this was the ultimate expression of the right order of things, so when Ty started visiting us the year after that, my father was perfectly happy to see him.

  He was well spoken and easy to get along with, and of his own accord he preferred me to Rose. He had good manners, one of the things about a man, I often thought, that lasts and lasts. Every time he came in, he smiled and said, “Hello, Ginny,” and when he went away, he told me when he’d be home, and made a point of saying good-bye. He’d thank me for meals and habitually used the word “please.” Good manners stood him in good stead with my father, too, since they farmed Daddy’s place together, and rented out the hundred and sixty. Daddy didn’t get along as well with Pete, and Ty spent a fair amount of time smoothing things over between them. Over the years, it became clear that Tyler and I were good together, especially by contrast to Rose and Pete, who were generally more stirred up and dissatisfied.

  Ty greeted Jess with his characteristic friendliness, and it was weird to look back and forth between them. The last time I’d seen Jess, he had seemed so young and Ty had seemed so mature. Now they seemed like contemporaries, with Jess, in fact, a shade more sophisticated and self-assured.

  Caroline shook hands with Jess in her brisk, lawyer’s way that Rose always called her “take-me-seriously-or-I’ll-sue-you” demeanor. She may have been, as Daddy thought, old for a breeder, but she was young for a lawyer. I tried hard, for her sake, not to be amused by her, but I could see, right then, that Jess Clark was a little amused, too. She informed us that she planned to spend that night, then go to church with us, and be back in Des Moines by suppertime. Nothing the least unusual. Well, I’ve thought over every moment of that party time and time again, sifting for pointers, signals, ways of knowing how to do things differently from the way they got done. There were no clues.

  3

  MY GRANDMOTHER’S PARENTS, Sam and Arabella Davis, were from the west of England, hilly country, and poor for farming. When they came the first time to Zebulon County, in the spring of 1890, and saw that half the land they had already bought, sight unseen, was under two feet of water part of the year and another quarter of it was spongy, they went back to Mason City and stayed there for the summer and winter. Sam was twenty-one and Arabella was twenty-two. In Mason City, they met another Englishman, John Cook, who, as he was from Norfolk, was undaunted by standing water. Cook was only a clerk in a dry-goods store, but a reading man, interested in the newest agricultural and industrial innovations, and he persuaded my great-grandparents to use the money remaining to them to drain part of their land. He was sixteen years old. He sold my great-grandfather two digging forks, a couple of straight-sided shovels, a leveling hose, a quantity of locally manufactured drainage tiles, and a pair of high boots. When the weather warmed up, John quit his job, and he and Sam went out among the mosquitoes, which were known as gallinippers, and began
digging. On the drier land, my great-grandfather planted twenty acres of flax, which is what every sodbuster planted the first year, and ten acres of oats. Both flourished well enough, compared to what they would have done back in England. In Mason City, my grandmother, Edith, was born. John and Sam dug, leveled, and lay tile lines until the ground was too frozen to receive their forks, then they returned to Mason City, where both made acquaintance with Edith, and both went to work for the Mason City brick and tile works.

  A year later, just after the harvest, John, Arabella, and Sam built a two-bedroom bungalow on the southernmost corner of the farm. Three men from town and another farmer named Hawkins helped. It took three weeks, and they moved in on November 10. For the first winter, John lived with Sam and Arabella, in the second bedroom. Edith slept in a closet. Two years later, John Cook purchased, again for a good price, eighty more acres of swampy ground adjacent to the Davises. He continued to live with them until 1899, when he built a bungalow of his own.

  There was no way to tell by looking that the land beneath my childish feet wasn’t the primeval mold I read about at school, but it was new, created by magic lines of tile my father would talk about with pleasure and reverence. Tile “drew” the water, warmed the soil, and made it easy to work, enabled him to get into the fields with his machinery a mere twenty-four hours after the heaviest storm. Most magically, tile produced prosperity—more bushels per acre of a better crop, year after year, wet or dry. I knew what the tile looked like (when I was very young, five- or twelve-inch cylinders of real tile always lay here and there around the farm, for repairs or extension of tile lines; as I got older, “tile” became long snakes of plastic tubing), but for years, I imagined a floor beneath the topsoil, checkered aqua and yellow like the floor in the girls’ bathroom at the elementary school, a hard shiny floor you could not sink beneath, better than a trust fund, more reliable than crop insurance, a farmer’s best patrimony. It took John and Sam and, at the end, my father, a generation, twenty-five years, to lay the tile lines and dig the drainage wells and cisterns. I in my Sunday dress and hat, driving in the Buick to church, was a beneficiary of this grand effort, someone who would always have a floor to walk on. However much these acres looked like a gift of nature, or of God, they were not. We went to church to pay our respects, not to give thanks.

  It was pretty clear that John Cook had gained, through dint of sweat equity, a share in the Davis farm, and when Edith turned sixteen, John, thirty-three by then, married her. They continued to live in the bungalow, and Sam and Arabella ordered a house from Sears, this one larger and more ostentatious than the bungalow, “The Chelsea.” They took delivery on the Chelsea (four bedrooms, living room, dining room, and reception hall, with indoor bathroom, and sliding doors between living room and dining room, $1129) at the freight delivery point in Cabot. The kit included every board, joist, nail, window frame, and door that they would need, as well as seventy-six pages of instructions. That was the house that we grew up in and that my father lived in. The bungalow was torn down in the thirties and the lumber was used for a chicken house.

  I was always aware, I think, of the water in the soil, the way it travels from particle to particle, molecules adhering, clustering, evaporating, heating, cooling, freezing, rising upward to the surface and fogging the cool air or sinking downward, dissolving this nutrient and that, quick in everything it does, endlessly working and flowing, a river sometimes, a lake sometimes. When I was very young, I imagined it ready at any time to rise and cover the earth again, except for the tile lines. Prairie settlers always saw a sea or an ocean of grass, could never think of any other metaphor, since most of them had lately seen the Atlantic. The Davises did find a shimmering sheet punctuated by cattails and sweet flag. The grass is gone, now, and the marshes, “the big wet prairie,” but the sea is still beneath our feet, and we walk on it.

  4

  HAROLD’S PLACE LOOKED much like ours, flat as flat, though the house was more Victorian in style, with sunrise gable finishes and a big porch swing in front. Harold didn’t have as much land as my father, but he farmed it efficiently, and had prospered for as many years as my father had. At the time of the pig roast, it was still rankling my father that Harold suddenly, in March, and without telling my father ahead of time, bought a brand-new, enclosed, air-conditioned International Harvester tractor with a tape cassette player, for playing old Bob Wills recordings over and over while working in the fields, and not only the tractor, but a new planter as well. My father had taken to greeting Harold every time they met with a Bob Wills-like falsetto “Ah-hanh!” but the real bone of contention was not that Harold had pulled ahead of my father in the machinery competition, but that he hadn’t divulged how he’d financed the purchase, whether cold, out of savings and last year’s profits (in which case, he was doing better than my father thought, and better than my father), or by going to the bank. It may have been that Loren, who had taken farm management courses in college, had finally convinced Harold that a certain amount of debt was desirable for a business. My father didn’t know and that annoyed him. Harold, for his part, let no opportunity pass for praising his new equipment, for marveling at how many years of dust he had eaten, for announcing the number of gears (twelve), for admiring the brilliant red paint job that stood out so nicely against a green field, a blue sky. At the pig roast, Jess Clark and the new machinery were Harold’s twin exhibits, and guests from all over the area couldn’t resist, had no reason to resist, the way he ferried them between the two, asking for and receiving admiration with a kind of shameless innocence that he was known for.

  The other farmers were vocal in their envy of the tractor. Bob Stanley stood in the center of the group gathered around the table where Loren was slicing the pork and said, “We’re all going to be buying those things pretty soon. You got big fields that take days to work, you’re not gonna want to eat dust like you do now. And hell, you think we’ve got fuel problems now. Wait till you got a bunch of those monsters they’re gonna have in the fields.” He rocked back on his heels with a satisfied air. Daddy listened, but held his peace. He complimented Loren on the pork and looked Jess up and down suspiciously and ate a lot of fruit salad. It was generally accepted that Daddy and Bob Stanley, who was about Ty’s age, didn’t get along too well. Pete sometimes said, “Larry knows Bob wants to piss up his tree. Bob knows it, too.” Bob always had more to say—he was a sociable man—but it was true also that the other farmers always glanced at Daddy when Bob made some pronouncement, as if Daddy should have the last word, and Daddy liked to exude skepticism, which he could do with an assortment of heavings and grunts that made Bob seem loquacious and shallow.

  Toward dusk, I began going around and picking up paper plates, and I noticed a little group, including Rose and Caroline, as well as Ty and Pete, clustered on Harold’s back porch, with my father talking earnestly at the center. I remember Rose turned and looked at me across the yard, and I remember a momentary inner clang, an instinctive certainty that wariness was called for, but then Caroline looked up and smiled, waved me over. I went and stood on the bottom step of the porch, plates and plastic forks in both hands. My father said, “That’s the plan.”

  I said, “What’s the plan, Daddy?”

  He glanced at me, then at Caroline, and, looking at her all the while, he said, “We’re going to form this corporation, Ginny, and you girls are all going to have shares, then we’re going to build this new Slurrystore, and maybe a Harvestore, too, and enlarge the hog operation.” He looked at me. “You girls and Ty and Pete and Frank are going to run the show. You’ll each have a third part in the corporation. What do you think?”

  I licked my lips and climbed the two steps onto the porch. Now I could see Harold through the kitchen screen, standing in the dark doorway, grinning. I knew he was thinking that my father had had too much to drink—that’s what I was thinking, too. I looked down at the paper plates in my hands, bluing in the twilight. Ty was looking at me, and I could see in his gaze a ve
iled and tightly contained delight—he had been wanting to increase the hog operation for years. I remember what I thought. I thought, okay. Take it. He is holding it out to you, and all you have to do is take it. Daddy said, “Hell, I’m too old for this. You wouldn’t catch me buying a new tractor at my age. If I want to listen to some singer, I’ll listen in my own house. Anyway, if I died tomorrow, you’d have to pay seven or eight hundred thousand dollars inheritance taxes. People always act like they’re going to live forever when the price of land is up”—here he threw a glance at Harold—“but if you get a heart attack or a stroke or something, then you got to sell off to pay the government.”

  In spite of that inner clang, I tried to sound agreeable. “It’s a good idea.”

  Rose said, “It’s a great idea.”

  Caroline said, “I don’t know.”

  When I went to first grade and the other children said that their fathers were farmers, I simply didn’t believe them. I agreed in order to be polite, but in my heart I knew that those men were impostors, as farmers and as fathers, too. In my youthful estimation, Laurence Cook defined both categories. To really believe that others even existed in either category was to break the First Commandment.