A Thousand Acres: A Novel Read online

  My earliest memories of him are of being afraid to look him in the eye, to look at him at all. He was too big and his voice was too deep. If I had to speak to him, I addressed his overalls, his shirt, his boots. If he lifted me near his face, I shrank away from him. If he kissed me, I endured it, offered a little hug in return. At the same time, his very fearsomeness was reassuring when I thought about things like robbers or monsters, and we lived on what was clearly the best, most capably cultivated farm. The biggest farm farmed by the biggest farmer. That fit, or maybe formed, my own sense of the right order of things.

  Perhaps there is a distance that is the optimum distance for seeing one’s father, farther than across the supper table or across the room, somewhere in the middle distance: he is dwarfed by trees or the sweep of a hill, but his features are still visible, his body language still distinct. Well, that is a distance I never found. He was never dwarfed by the landscape—the fields, the buildings, the white pine windbreak were as much my father as if he had grown them and shed them like a husk.

  Trying to understand my father had always felt something like going to church week after week and listening to the minister we had, Dr. Fremont, marshal the evidence for God’s goodness, or omniscience, or whatever. He would sort through recent events, biblical events, moments in his own life, things that people had told him, and make up a picture that gelled for the few moments before other events that didn’t fit the picture had a chance to occur to you. Finally, though, the minister would admit, even glory in the fact, that things didn’t add up, that the reality was incomprehensible, and furthermore the failure of our understandings was the greatest proof of all, not of goodness or omniscience or whatever the subject of the day was, but of power. And talk of power made Dr. Fremont’s voice deepen and his gestures widen and his eyes light up.

  My father had no minister, no one to make him gel for us even momentarily. My mother died before she could present him to us as only a man, with habits and quirks and preferences, before she could diminish him in our eyes enough for us to understand him. I wish we had understood him. That, I see now, was our only hope.

  When my father turned his head to look at Caroline, his movement was slow and startled, a big movement of the whole body, reminding me how bulky he was—well over six feet and two hundred thirty pounds.

  Caroline would have said, if she’d dared, that she didn’t want to live on the farm, that she was trained as a lawyer and was marrying another lawyer, but that was a sore subject. She shifted in her chair and swept the darkening horizon with her gaze. Harold turned on the porch light. Caroline would have seen my father’s plan as a trapdoor plunging her into a chute that would deposit her right back on the farm. My father glared at her. In the sudden light of the porch, there was no way to signal her to shut up, just shut up, he’d had too much to drink. He said, “You don’t want it, my girl, you’re out. It’s as simple as that.” Then he pushed himself up from his chair and lumbered past me down the porch steps and into the darkness.

  Caroline looked startled, but no one else did. I said, “This is ridiculous. He’s drunk.” But after that, everyone got up and moved off silently, knowing that something important had just happened, and what it was, too. My father’s pride, always touchy, had been injured to the quick. It would be no use telling him that she had only said that she didn’t know, that she hadn’t turned him down, that she had expressed a perfectly reasonable doubt, perhaps even doubt a lawyer must express, that his own lawyer would express when my father set this project before him. I saw that maybe Caroline had mistaken what we were talking about, and spoken as a lawyer when she should have spoken as a daughter. On the other hand, perhaps she hadn’t mistaken anything at all, and had simply spoken as a woman rather than as a daughter. That was something, I realized in a flash, that Rose and I were pretty careful never to do.

  I went into the Clarks’ kitchen and put the plates and forks into the trash can. When I turned toward the back door, Jess Clark was standing right beside me, and I could see his quizzical look in the light from the porch. His face was familiar and exotic at the same time, friendly and interested but strange, promising knowledge that none of my neighbors could possibly have. In my movement toward the door, I bumped against him, and he gripped my arm to help me get my balance. I said, “Where did you come from?”

  “Didn’t you hear me bang the door?” His hand lingered on my arm, then he lowered it. “I was looking for some more trash bags. You know, I’ve been thinking that there’s something missing in this kitchen, and now I realize what it is. It’s the cylinder of bull semen. I used to eat with my foot up on it.”

  I gave out a distracted, “Is that so?” He looked into my face. He said, “What’s the matter, Ginny? I didn’t mean to scare you. I was sure you heard me.”

  “I was thinking that my father is acting crazy. I mean, I wasn’t actually thinking it, I was panicking about it.”

  “You mean the corporation thing? It’s probably a good idea, actually.”

  “But he’s not the good idea type. That wasn’t him talking, that was some banker talking. Or else, if it was him talking, he was talking about something besides accepting his mortality and avoiding inheritance taxes. That would be an awfully farsighted and levelheaded thing for him to do.”

  “Well, wait and see what happens. Maybe he’ll wake up tomorrow and have forgotten all about it.” Jess’s voice was confident and flat, without resonance, as if everything he might say would be the simple truth.

  “But it’s already a tangle. It’s already an impossible tangle and it’s only been five minutes.”

  “I don’t see why. You said yourself you were panicking—” He went on, “Anyway, I always think that things have to happen the way they do happen, that there are so many inner and outer forces joining at every event that it becomes a kind of fate. I learned from studying Buddhism that there’s beauty, and certainly a lot of peace, in accepting that.” I sniffed. A smile twinkled sheepishly across his face. “Okay, okay,” he said, “how about this? If you worry about it, you draw it to you.”

  “My mother said that about tornadoes.”

  “See? The wisdom of the plains. Pretend nothing happened.”

  “We always do.”

  I felt suddenly shy about speaking so openly to someone I hadn’t seen in thirteen years. I said, “Let’s keep my doubt between us, okay?” The thought of Harold broadcasting this around the neighborhood as he liked to do was a chilling one. Jess caught my gaze and held it. He said, “I don’t gossip with Harold, Ginny. Don’t worry.” I believed him. I believed everything he said, and felt reassured.

  It was true that if my father was to keel over right then, we would have to sell part of the farm to pay the inheritance taxes. Sam and Arabella had paid $52 an acre for a quarter section, a hundred sixty acres. The price was low because of the standing water, and Sam and Arabella were right in suspecting that some of their neighbors in Mason City were amused at their expense, imagine having bought a piece of land, sight unseen, a piece of malarial marsh, imagine having been such a latecomer, and so foolish, and so young.

  In the thirties, when my father and grandfather added two more pieces, they still paid less than $90 an acre, and that was for tiled, improved land. The family they bought the land from moved away to Minneapolis first, then California, but when I was a child in the fifties, Bob Stanley’s father, Newt, still wasn’t speaking to my father because he had aced the Stanley brothers out of some sort of a deal—Newt and the wife in the departed family were cousins. The Depression, for our family, was a time of careful consolidation of holdings through hard work, good luck, smart farming. Of course, that wasn’t how everyone in Zebulon County saw it, but my father would say, “Envy likes to talk.” At any rate, all that marshy land was like compost, pure fertility, and in 1979 the market value of my father’s land was $3200 an acre, at the very pinnacle of land values in Zebulon County and in the whole state. His thousand acres, then, made him a millionaire more
than three times over, especially as it was paid for.

  “It’s Marv Carson who’s put this bug in his ear,” was what Ty said to me when we were getting ready for bed that night.

  I said, “It was Harold’s tractor that drove him over the edge.”

  “The tractor was Marv’s idea, too. Loren told me tonight that Marv’s been working on Harold since Christmas. Harold would like your dad to think he paid for it outright, but he didn’t. Loren wouldn’t tell me how much they put down, though. He said, ‘Shit, Ty, that little debt nestled right into our net worth and got lost.’ ”

  “One of those tractors costs forty thousand dollars.”

  “So, his land’s worth a million and a half. My dad’s farm’s worth almost half a million. I was thinking of selling that and using that money to expand the hog operation.” He looked at me and shrugged. “Hey,” he said, “I’ve been talking to Marv myself.”

  “It makes me feel weird to toss around all these high numbers. Anyway, who would buy at these prices? And everybody’s bitching about interest rates.”

  “But interest rates are always up, and maybe prices will go higher.”

  “Hunh.” I sat down in the window seat and looked down the road toward Rose’s house. All their lights were out. I said, “Rose looked beat when we left the party.”

  Ty said, “Those Slurrystores are great. They hold eighty thousand gallons of hog slurry. After it cools off, you can put it right in the field. I’d like one of those. And a hog confinement building. Air-conditioned. I want one of them, too. And, let’s see, how about a couple of champion boars, the kind whose breeding is so pure they can sit up to dinner with you and not spill anything on the tablecloth.” He lay back on the bed. “Sweet old pink boys named Rockefeller and Vanderbilt.”

  It was a rare thing for Ty to make wishes, so I listened to him without interrupting. He said, “You get a good breeding line of your own going and you can put those babies up for adoption. Everybody wants one. You can say, ‘Yeah, Jake, but you’ve got to feed him with your own spoon, and let him sleep on your side of the bed,’ and they’ll say, ‘Sure, Ty, anything. I’ve already started his college fund.’ ” He rolled over and smiled at me. “Or hers. Sows with that kind of endowment get all the benefits, too.”

  “That’s what I like about hogs. They get to grow up. I used to hate it when the Ericsons slaughtered their veal calves.”

  “I didn’t know they had a dairy operation.”

  “Cal loved cows. He had pictures of his favorite milkers in his wallet, along with the kids. I actually think he could have gone on with this place, but when the cows went, he didn’t care that much any more.”

  “Holsteins?”

  “Oh, sure. But there was a little Jersey that he milked for the family. They made wonderful ice cream. Her name was Violet.”

  “Whose?”

  “The Jersey’s. The kids had these plain-as-a-post names, Dinah and Ruth, but the cows all had flower names like Primrose and Lobelia.”

  “Hmm,” said Ty, and his eyes closed. His good humor made everything seem possible. Undoubtedly, each of us interpreted my father’s announcement as the answer to some wish or fear of ours. Ty surely saw it as the long-withheld recognition of his talent with the hogs. I saw it as a kind of illicit reward for years of chores and courtesy. Pete, who had inherited no land, must have seen his status rise from tenancy to ownership right there. Rose would have used the word “reward,” too, but a deserved one, a just one, the right order of things expressing itself as it had when Ty’s father died in the hog pen and left him that farm.

  It seemed to me that whatever else was true, it was absolutely the case that Ty deserved to realize some of his wishes. I said, “But what about this thing with Caroline? She’s actually sleeping at Rose’s. That’s going to make him madder.”

  “He gets into snits, then he gets talked out of them. She didn’t need to get on her high horse like that, though.”

  “She just said she didn’t know.”

  “And she said it like she did know, the way she always does.” His voice was mild, sleepy, robbing this remark of any sting. Ty had always liked Caroline and teased her. When Daddy wanted her to pitch in at fourteen and learn to drive the tractor, Ty had talked him out of it, mindful the way lots of farmers weren’t of potential accidents. But I knew, too, that he literally could not imagine why she had done a thing he never would have, left for college and never really come back. He gave out a soft, ruffling snore.

  A lot of women I knew complained that their husbands hardly talked to them. There are always lots of clubs in farm towns, where the wives are ostensibly doing good works, but the good works are afloat in a river of talk, and that’s the real point, I always thought. Ty told me everything, though, all about his days with my father and Pete, all about the livestock and the crops and what he saw in the fields and who he saw in town. Conversation came so easily to him that other people seemed somehow choked by comparison. And his conversation was hopeful and good-humored. Even when Pete and my father were threatening to kill one another, which happened about once every two years, Ty would say, “Oh, they talk big. But your dad’s got to have Pete irritating him so he can stay young. He knows that.” When I had my miscarriages, Ty always talked me through it, certain there’d be a way to carry the next one to term, certain that this one just wasn’t meant to be, certain that I would be all right, certain that he loved me anyway, no matter what.

  I covered him with an old quilt, and he turned under it, nestling into the pillow, murmuring a half-waking thank-you. Ty thought we’d had three miscarriages. Everyone thought we had stopped trying. Actually, I had had five, the most recent one at Thanksgiving. After the third one, in the summer of ’76, Ty said he couldn’t bring himself to sleep with me unless we were using birth control. He didn’t tell me why, but I knew it was because he couldn’t take another miscarriage. For a year I dutifully resigned myself to not even trying, and then it occurred to me one night in the bathroom that all I had to do was pretend to put the diaphragm in, that pregnancy could become my private project. I imagined how I would carry it to term without a word, waiting to see when Ty or Rose began to stare at me, hesitating to ask if I was putting on too much weight. If I kept the secret, I thought, I could sustain the pregnancy. Except that when I did get pregnant I was so excited that I told Rose, and so when I lost the baby, one day when Ty and my father had gone to the State Fair for the weekend, I had to tell Rose, too. Then she made me promise not to try any more. She said I was getting obsessed and crazy. So I didn’t tell her about the next one and when I lost it the day after Thanksgiving, no one knew. I was lucky again—Ty had gotten up early to help Pete with some late bean harvesting—and I just wadded the nightgown and the sheets and the bed pad into a paper bag and took them out and buried them under the dirt floor of the old dairy barn, where the ground wasn’t frozen yet. I thought I would dig them up sometime and carry them to the dump, but I hadn’t yet. Digging them up would make me want to try again, and I wasn’t quite ready. I also wasn’t ready to give up. At thirty-six, I had five years left, maybe two or three more chances to come out of my bedroom one morning and say, “Here, Ty, here’s our baby.”

  One of the many benefits of this private project, I thought at the time, was that it showed me a whole secret world, a way to have two lives, to be two selves. I felt larger and more various than I had in years, full of unknowns, and also of untapped possibilities. In fact, I was more hopeful after the two last miscarriages than I had been after the first.

  Beyond Rose’s house, my father’s windows, too, were dark. I realized that I hadn’t thought to ask if I needed to go over and get his breakfast in the morning. That was something Rose and I generally agreed upon each night. When Caroline was staying, she liked to do it, but she had gone home with Rose after my father left the party. I opened the window and squinted through the screen. I was sure I could see his truck parked by the barn, Pete’s truck parked next to their porch, the
roof of our truck, below, glinting in pearly peace. The summer sounds of bullfrogs and cicadas hadn’t begun yet, but a breeze was soughing through the pines north of the house, the hogs were clanking their feeders in the barn. It was the same calm and safe vista that was mine every night—the one that I sometimes admitted to myself I’d been afraid to leave when high school was over and the question of doing something else came up. It suited me, and it was easy to let it claim me every night, but I had wishes, too, secret, passionate wishes, and as I sat there enjoying the heavy, moist breeze, I let myself think, maybe this is it, maybe this is what turns the tide, and carries the darling child into shore.

  5

  AT SEVEN, WHEN I TIPTOED up the stairs to see why my father hadn’t answered my announcements of breakfast, I found that he wasn’t there. The bed had been slept on, rather than in, and my father had gone out in shoes—his boots by the back door were the reason I thought he was still in bed. Beside the barn, the truck was cold to the touch, and I was just going over to see if he’d dropped in on Rose and Caroline when a big maroon Pontiac pulled into the yard. My father got out of the passenger side, and Marv Carson got out of the driver’s side. Marv looked groggy but willing, already decked out in suit and tie. He scurried eagerly in my father’s footsteps as they came toward the porch. My father said, “Ginny, Marv’ll be eating. Marv, go wash up, now.” Marv looked around as he stepped through the door, for a sink, I suppose. I said, “I’m sure you’re clean enough to eat, Marv. Go on and sit down.”

  I set out sausage, fried eggs, hash brown potatoes, cornflakes, English muffins and toast, coffee and orange juice. My father pulled out his usual chair and sat down, then shoveled the food onto his plate with his usual appetite. I was trying to judge whether he was wearing the same clothes he’d had on the day before, when he glanced at me and said irritably, “You had anything to eat? What are you looking at?”