A Thousand Acres: A Novel (7 page)

We knew in our very sinews that the Ericsons’ inevitable failure must result from the way they followed their whims. My mother surely knew it with regret, but she knew it all the same. Their farm represented neither history nor discipline, and while they were engaged in training dogs and making ice cream, we were engaged in toiling steadily up a slight incline toward a larger goal. My father would not have said he wanted to be rich, or even that he wanted to own the largest farm in the county or possess the round, impressive number of a thousand acres. He would not have invoked the names of his children or a desire to bequeath to us something substantial. Possibly he would have named nothing at all, except keeping up with the work, getting in a good crop, making a good appearance among his neighbors. But he always spoke of the land his grandparents found with distaste—those gigantic gallinippers, snakes everywhere, cattails, leeches, mud puppies, malaria, an expanse of winter ice skateable, in 1889, from Cabot east, across our land, all the way to Columbus, ten miles away. Although I liked to think of my Davis great-grandparents seeking the American promise, which is only possibilities, and I enjoyed the family joke of my grandfather Cook finding possibilities where others saw a cheat, I was uncomfortably aware that my father always sought impossibility, and taught us, using the Ericsons as his example, to do the same—to discipline the farm and ourselves to a life and order transcending many things, but especially mere whim.

I loved going over to the Ericsons’, and Ruthie was my best friend. One of my earliest memories, in fact, is of myself in a red and green plaid pinafore, which must mean I was about three, and Ruthie in a
pink shirt, probably not yet three, squatting on one of those drainage-well covers, dropping pebbles and bits of sticks through the grate. The sound of water trickling in the blackness must have drawn us, and even now the memory gives me an eerie feeling, and not because of danger to our infant selves. What I think of is our babyhoods perched thoughtlessly on the filmiest net of the modern world, over layers of rock, Wisconsin till, Mississippian carbonate, Devonian limestone, layers of dark epochs, and we seem not so much in danger (my father checked the grates often) as fleeting, as if our lives simply passed then, and this memory is the only photograph of some nameless and unknown children who may have lived and may have died, but at any rate have vanished into the black well of time.

Of course, I remember this so clearly because we were severely punished for wandering off, for crossing the road, for climbing onto the well grate, though I don’t actually remember the punishment, only the sudden appearance of my mother, in an apron with a yellow Mexican hat appliquéd onto it. Maybe because I knew we were going to be punished, I remember looking at Ruthie’s intent face and her fingers releasing something through the holes of the grate, and feeling love for her.

To go over to the Ericsons’, to laugh at the dogs, to eat the ice cream or a piece of cake, to ride the ponies, to sit too long in Dinah’s closet window seat, was to flirt with danger on the one hand, and to step downward or backward on the other. To bring Ruthie to my house, no matter how we ended up occupying ourselves, was to do her character development a favor that it was nevertheless impolite to mention.

IT DID OCCUR
to me that we wouldn’t want the problem with Caroline to affect our usual routine, so when it was my turn to have Daddy over for supper, the Tuesday night after the property transfer, I cooked what I always did for him—pork chops baked with tomatoes (my third-to-last quart from the year before), fried potatoes, a salad, and two or three different kinds of pickles. Part of a sweet potato pie was left from a few nights before.

Daddy ate at our house on Tuesdays, Rose’s on Fridays. Even that made him impatient. He expected to come in at five and sit right
down to the table. When he was finished, he drank a cup of coffee and went home. Maybe twice a year we persuaded him to watch something on television with us, but if it didn’t come right on after supper, he paced around the house as if he couldn’t find a place to sit.

He had never visited Caroline’s apartment in Des Moines, never gone, for pleasure, anywhere but the State Fair, and then he’d rather make two round trips in two days than spend the night in a hotel. In my memory, there was never a visit to a restaurant other than the café in town, and he never went there later than dinnertime. He didn’t mind a picnic or a pig roast, if someone else gave it, but supper he wanted to eat in his own house, at the kitchen table, with the radio on. Ty said he was less self-sufficient than he seemed, but that opinion was more based on the idea that anybody had to be less self-sufficient than Daddy seemed, than it was based on any evidence. He resisted efforts to change his habits—chicken on Tuesdays, or a slice of cake instead of pie, or an absence of pickles meant dissatisfaction, and even resentment.

Rose said our mother had made him like this, catering to whims and inflexible demands, but really, we couldn’t remember, didn’t know. In my recollections, Daddy’s presence in any scene had the effect of dimming the surroundings, and I didn’t have many recollections at all of our life with him before her death.

Over supper, Ty spoke enthusiastically about the hog operation. He had, he said, already called a confinement buildings company, one in Kansas. They were sending brochures that could get to us as soon as tomorrow or the next day.

Daddy helped himself to the bread and butter pickles.

Ty said, “You got these automatic flush systems with these slatted floors. One man can keep the place clean, no trouble.”

Daddy didn’t say anything.

“A thousand hogs farrow to finish would be easy. Marv Carson says hogs are going to make the difference between turning a good profit and just getting by in the eighties.”

Daddy chewed on his meat.

I said, “Rose wants to launder the curtains upstairs. It’s been two years. That’s what she says. I don’t remember.” Daddy hated that
kind of disruption. “See these? I got out some of these broccoli and cauliflower pickles we made. You liked these.”

Daddy ate his potatoes.

I said to Ty, “You eaten with Marv Carson lately? Everything has to be eaten in a special order, with Tabasco sauce last. He says he’s shedding toxins.”

Ty rolled his eyes. “Shedding brain cells is more likely. He’s always on some fad.”

Daddy said, “Owns us now.”

I said, “What?”

“Marv Carson’s your landlord now, girl. Best be respectful.”

Ty said, “Between you and me, Marv Carson is a fool. I like him fine, and he’s from this area and treats farmers around here pretty fair, but you can see why no one would ever marry the guy.”

“He’s got money in his bank, too,” said Daddy. “Not all of them do. We’ll see,” said Daddy. He wiped his mouth and looked around. I removed his plate, and took a piece of pie off the counter.

Ty said, “I could plant beans at Mel’s corner tomorrow.”

Daddy said, “Do what you want.”

Ty and I exchanged a glance. Ty said, “The carburetor on the tractor is acting up, though. I hate to spend time on it at this point, but I’m a little nervous about it.”

“Do what you want, I said.”

I licked my lips. Ty pushed his plate toward me. I got up, put it in the sink, and set a piece of pie in front of him. I turned off the heat under the coffee, which had begun to boil, and poured Daddy a cup.

Ty said to Daddy, “Okay. Okay. I guess I’ll take my chances and plant.”

I said, “You want to stay and watch some TV, Daddy?”

“Nah.”

“There might be something good on.”

“Nah. I got some things to do.” It was always the same thing. I glanced at Ty and he gave a minuscule shrug.

We sat silently while Daddy drank his coffee then pushed back his chair and got up to go. I followed him to the door. I said, “Call me if you need anything. It’d be nice if you’d stay.” I always said this,
and he never actually answered but I was given to believe that he might stay next time. I watched him climb into his truck and back out, then drive down toward his place. Behind me, Ty said, “Well, that was pretty much the same as usual.”

“I was thinking that, too.”

“He’s said that before, about me doing what I want. Not very often, but once in a while.”

“He’s probably glad of a little vacation, especially right now, since corn planting was so quick.”

“No doubt.”

I was putting in tomato plants the next day, a hundred tomato plants, mostly Better Boys, Gurney Girls, and Romas that Rose had grown in her cold frame. I had a knack with tomatoes that I had developed into a fairly ritualized procedure, planting deep in a mixture of peat, bonemeal, and alfalfa meal, then setting an old tin can around each plant to hold water and repel cutworms. Around that, leaves of the Des Moines
Register
, then mounds of half-decayed grass cuttings on top of those. Every year, we said we would take tomatoes to Fort Dodge and Ames and sell them at farmers markets, but every year we canned them all instead—sometimes five hundred quarts of tomato juice that we drank like orange juice all winter.

I pushed my hair back, wiped my nose on my sleeve, and sat up, only to discover Jess Clark sitting across the corner of the garden from me, smiling. He had on a pair of shorts and those expensive sneakers with soles like inverted soup plates. I remember how automatically I thought of him as a younger man, somehow relatively unformed, and that gave me a kind of ease with him that I don’t often feel with strange men. I said, “So, tell me more,” just as if no time had passed since we talked Sunday. He looked at me carefully, I thought, then said, “Loren keeps saying, ‘No wife or kids, huh? I heard they have nice-looking girls out west. Nice-looking girls.’ ”

We laughed.

Jess watched me for a moment, then said, “I did have a fiancée. She was killed in a car accident.”

“When was that?”

“Six years ago. She was twenty-three, and her name was Alison.”

“That’s a pity. I’m sorry.”

“Well, I drank myself silly about it for two years. If you want to drink in Canada, you can find a lot of company.”

“That’s true anywhere.”

“In Canada there’s no undercurrent of shame. You just drink.”

“I saw at the pig roast that you didn’t seem to be drinking anything.”

“On the second anniversary of Alison’s accident, I drank two bottles of rye whiskey and nearly died of alcohol poisoning, so I haven’t had a drink or a beer since.”

“Oh, Jess.” I felt sorry for him. Everything he said about himself revealed the sort of life that I had always been afraid of.

I picked up the second box of tomato plants and moved down the row. I troweled up a big hole and dumped in the bonemeal mixture, then stripped off the tomato plant’s lower leaves and coiled it gently in the hole—with tomatoes, roots grow out of any part of the stem that’s underground, so a mature plant can stand a lot of weather. When I looked up, Jess’s gaze was serious and intent. I said, “I’d like to hear more.”

He said, “You know, Alison saw things very darkly. Her parents lived in Manitoba, and they were extremely religious. When she went to live in Vancouver, they repudiated her in specifically biblical terms. The conviction that they truly thought she was damned dragged at her more and more as time went on. The fact was that she was a very kind person, generous and sweet and careful of people’s feelings. Actually, we never really knew whether the accident was an accident. She pulled into the oncoming lane of a two-lane highway, into the path of a semi. She had been depressed, that made it look like suicide. But she endangered someone else. That was very unlike her.”

I sat back on my heels and looked at him, but he smiled and said, “Please keep planting. It makes it easier to talk.” I dug another hole. He said, “I used to call her parents from bars and threaten to come to Manitoba and kill them. They always listened to me. Sometimes one or the other of them would get on the extension. While I was raving, they would be praying for me. I don’t think they ever felt remorse. I stopped doing that when I stopped drinking.” I looked
up. He smiled more broadly and said, “I’m all sweetness and light these days. Life affirmed.”

“I believe in that.” I dug another hole, then hazarded, “You look younger than Loren in some ways, but your face looks older. Harder. Or maybe just more knowing.”

“Really?”

“I think so.”

“I think you look younger than Rose, too.”

I didn’t have a reply for this, since it scared me a little to think of him looking at me at all. I said, “What did your—Alison look like?”

“Most people would have said she was rather plain. Square and solid, rather a long face. She was transformed by love.”

I glanced at him sharply, to see if he was making fun, and he caught my look. He said, “I’m not joking. She had beautiful eyes and nice teeth. When we were making love and other times, too, when she was very happy and excited, the expressions on her face made it beautiful. She could also be very graceful if she wasn’t thinking about her body or feeling self-conscious about it.”

“I’m impressed that you noticed.”

“We worked together at the crisis center. I watched her a long time before I fell in love with her. There was plenty of time to notice.”

“That’s the homely woman’s dream, you know. That someone will see actual beauty where others never have.”

“I know.”

I planted three or four more plants before we spoke again. Then I said, “Rose usually looks better, but her operation took a lot out of her.”

“What was that?”

“Loren and Harold didn’t tell you?”

“That Rose had an operation? No.”

“How irritating.”

“Why?”

“Because it makes it seem as if it wasn’t worth talking about. She had breast cancer. She just had the operation in February.”

“I doubt if Harold, or even Loren, has ever let the words ‘breast cancer’ pass his lips.” He smiled.

I looked deep into the hole I was digging. “Well, what did they tell you about your mother?”

“They just said cancer.”

“Well, it started out as breast cancer. Later on, it was just plain cancer. Lymphatic.”