A Thousand Acres: A Novel

by Jane Smiley

  People started coming in the back, talking quickly in outdoor voices about corn germination, stepping out of boots, and lining up for cups of coffee. There was hope everywhere. I went into the living room and looked across the road. Pammy and Linda were leaning over with their heads together, looking at something in the ditch. Rose was holding the back screen door in her right hand, looking into the house, and shouting something I couldn’t hear. Balanced on her left palm was a platter of coffeecake. Pretty soon, Pete, who must have run across the road for something, came out, and they walked together down their driveway. They walked across the road, the way you do in the country when you cross the same road a hundred times a day, without looking for cars. At one point, Pete said something and Rose tossed her head back and laughed. I opened the window just then, just to hear her. They all looked happy. Rose was still grinning when they got to Daddy’s front door.

  She put the coffeecake in my hands and I carried it to the kitchen counter, where the men gathered around it. Laid out in neat fans on the dark dining-room table were stacks of papers with little red X’s scattered over them. They reminded me of mushrooms that suddenly appear after a wet night, uncannily white and fully formed, miraculous but ominous. Ty got a lot of backslapping, and I could hear the words “hog operation” over and over like an incantation. I straightened a couple of stacks of Reader’s Digests. Daddy hadn’t thought to clean the place up for a party, probably because there hadn’t been a party here in twenty-five years.

  Clearly, Daddy wasn’t himself, except in the way he lorded it over Harold. Somehow, he had found out about the loan for the tractor, because he kept saying, “Yeah, I’ll be sitting here watching other people work for me, while you’re out running that tractor, trying to pay it off. I bet you can’t even hear that radio thing with the engine noise.”

  Harold was nodding ruefully, but grinning like a maniac, grinning just the way everyone else was, except Ken LaSalle, but Ken’s wife had left him at Christmas, gone off to get a job in the Twin Cities. You didn’t have to take his gloomy attitude to mean anything.

  And me? I was happy, too. I was smiling, too. For one thing, I was always relieved when my father got into a good mood, and he was laughing and throwing his arm around Ty. This was maybe his best mood ever. He kept saying, “Okay, Kenny, let’s get to it. Now’s the time.”

  Ken said, “Let’s just wait a bit longer, Larry.” And he looked out the front door, and so did I, and here came Caroline, across the road from Rose’s, up the porch steps. At that sight, I gave up my last reservations, felt the thrust of real confidence, so when she stepped onto the porch, composing herself to be conciliatory—I could see that—I opened the door for her. But my father stepped around me and took the door in his hand and slammed it shut in her face, and then he whirled Ken around with a hand on his arm, and said, “Now.” We went into the dining room. When I had finished signing things, I sneaked out onto the porch and looked toward Rose’s across the road. Caroline’s Honda was nowhere to be seen.

  Book Two

  8

  MY FATHER HAD LIKED CAL ERICSON, but he disapproved of him, and I am often astonished when I look back and realize how our proximity to the Ericsons shaped all of my opinions and expectations. The Ericsons came to farming late, already married. Cal had gone to West Point, trained as a civil engineer, and been injured early in the Second World War. After a year in the hospital, he had received some money—perhaps a settlement of some sort, or an inheritance—and he had purchased the farm from an elderly cousin of his before it came on the market. Mrs. Ericson, whose name was Elizabeth, was from a suburb of Chicago. Her family had owned horses, and she had been an avid equestrienne, which I suppose she thought prepared her for farm life.

  The Ericson farm was more like a petting zoo—there were hogs and dairy cows and beef cattle and sheep, which was not so unusual. There were also ponies and dogs and chickens and geese and turkeys and goats and gerbils and guinea pigs and, of course, cats who were allowed in the house, as well as two parakeets and a parrot. All of the Ericsons shared a fondness for these animals, and Mr. Ericson was always showing us what he had taught the dogs (a Scotch collie, a German shepherd, and a Yorkshire terrier) to do. They had mastered all the normal tricks and some unusual ones—the shepherd could balance a matchbox on his nose, then toss it in the air and catch it in his mouth, while the Yorkie could do backflips, and the collie could be sent to retrieve particular articles of clothing (a sock, a hat) from the various bedrooms and then told to carry them to various members of the family. The collie would also pick up things on the floor and carry them to the trash can when told to “police the area.” Most remarkably, the three dogs would perform a kind of drill, walking, lying down, sitting up, lying down again, and rolling over in unison on command.

  Animals were Mr. Ericson’s talent and love. Machines would do nothing for him. My father, who had no college education, saw in this confirmation of his view that college, even West Point, was a waste of time, since “that so-called engineer can’t even fix his own tractor.” Cal Ericson was truly hopeless with machines, so he, Harold Clark, and my father made a deal that Harold and my father would trade work on the Ericson machines for fresh milk, cream, and ice cream, which Mrs. Ericson liked to make and my father and Harold had a great fondness for.

  My father and Harold were no less disapproving of Cal’s farming methods. He never consulted the market, they said, only consulted his own desires and didn’t focus. It was hard to have a dairy farm in Zebulon County—there was no nearby creamery and other products were more profitable—but you could have one if you really meant to do it, that is, if you’d build a convenient milking parlor with mechanical milkers, milk a hundred cows, and make it worthwhile for a truck to come out every day, or, say, you could milk only Jerseys, or Guernseys, and sell only the cream—there was an ice cream company in Mason City who might have bought it all, if Cal had sold them on the idea. But Cal had twenty Holsteins and one Jersey for the family, he and Mrs. Ericson milked by hand and they mostly seemed to keep the cows, my father said with a laugh, “because they like them.” There was plenty else to complain about—chickens and geese in the road, turkeys panicking in a thunderstorm, everyone having to turn out to help the Ericsons with their haying because they had to have the hay to feed the animals, when everyone else had either gotten rid of animals or fed them silage out of pricey but convenient new silos, which the Ericsons couldn’t afford. My father most certainly disapproved of Cal Ericson’s aspirations, which seemed to be merely to get along, pay his mortgage, and enjoy himself as much as possible.

  By contrast it was easy to see what my father considered a more acceptable way of life—a sort of all-encompassing thrift that blossomed, infrequently but grandly, in the purchase of more land or the improvement of land already owned. His conservatism, however, was only fiscal. Beside it lay his lust for every new method designed to swell productivity. In 1957, an article ran in Wallace’s Farmer entitled “Will the Farmer’s Greatest Machine Soon Be the Airplane?” The accompanying pictures were of our farm being sprayed for European corn borers, and my father was quoted as saying, “There isn’t any room for the old methods any more. Farmers who embrace the new methods will prosper, but those that don’t are already stumbling around.” Doubtless he was looking across the road toward the Ericsons’.

  We might as well have had a catechism:

  What is a farmer?

  A farmer is a man who feeds the world.

  What is a farmer’s first duty?

  To grow more food.

  What is a farmer’s second duty?

  To buy more land.

  What are the signs of a good farm?

  Clean fields, neatly painted buildings, breakfast at six, no debts, no standing water.

  How will you know a good farmer when you meet him?

  He will not ask you for any favors.

  The tile system on my father’s farm drained fields that were nearly as level as a table. On
land as new and marshy as Zebulon County, water fans out, seeking the slightest depressions, and often moves more slowly across the landscape than it does down through the soil. The old watercourses, such as they were, had been filled in and plowed through, so the tile lines drained into drainage wells. These wells, thrusting downward some three hundred feet, still dot the township, and there were seven around the peripheries of our farm. A good farmer was a man who so organized his work that the drainage-well catchment basins were cleaned out every spring and the grates were painted black every two years.

  My mother felt a little differently about the Ericsons. She and Mrs. Ericson often canned or made peanut brittle together in the Ericsons’ kitchen while Ruthie and I sat on the floor sewing doll clothes, with Dinah and Rose out on the porch in only shorts, pouring water in and out of various vessels. My mother liked to go over there, and at least went for coffee every morning. Mrs. Ericson had a welcoming manner that my mother appreciated but couldn’t master. She always said, “When I’m home, I’ve got to get things done, even if there are visitors. Elizabeth knows how to relax in her own house.” And then she would shake her head, as if Elizabeth had remarkable powers.

  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.