A Thousand Acres: A Novel

by Jane Smiley

  But sex did make me touchy. It was full of contradictory little rituals. There had to be some light in the room, if only from the hall. Daytime was better than nighttime, and no surprises. I always wore a nightgown. When he pushed it up, I closed my eyes. When he entered me, though, my eyes were wide open, staring at his face. I hated for him to turn away or look down. I didn’t like it if either of us spoke. He made the best of it, and I never refused him.

  I didn’t want to see my body.

  I assumed that all of this was normal, the way it was for everyone. It went without saying that bodies fell permanently into the category of the unmentionable. I don’t know that there would have been much more communication had our mother lived—though she did tell me never to wear “pointy bras”; they were “too suggestive.” She also advised against nylon underpants, because they were “slippery” and “made you feel funny.”

  One thing Daddy took from me when he came to me in my room at night was the memory of my body.

  I have only one memory of my teenaged body. I was fourteen, in ninth grade, and it was a Saturday night. I was going to bed. I sat down to take off my long underwear, and as I pushed the dimpled cotton down my right leg, I realized that my leg was slim and looked the way magazines said it was supposed to look. Recently, during physical education, Rita Benton had lamented her own legs, calling them tree trunks. I had noted her disappointment, but not related it to myself. Now I saw that I had had better luck than Rita—my leg was slim from heel to crotch. I pulled off the longjohns, put my legs under the covers thankfully. I promised never to be vain about them. I didn’t even look at the other leg; I looked away from it, and made myself concentrate on some math problems to put myself to sleep.

  And so my father came to me and had intercourse with me in the middle of the night. I could remember pretending to be asleep, but knowing he was in the doorway and moving closer. I could remember him saying, “Quiet, now, girl. You don’t need to fight me.” I didn’t remember fighting him, ever, but in all circumstances he was ready to detect resistance, anyway. I remembered his weight, the feeling of his knee pressing between my legs, while I tried to make my legs heavy without seeming to defy him. I remembered that he wore night shirts that were pale in the dim light, and socks. I remembered that his hands were heavily callused, and snagged on the sheets. I remembered that he carried a lot of smells—whiskey, cigarette smoke, the sweeter and sourer smells of the farm work. I remembered, over and over again, what the top of his head looked like. But I never remembered penetration or pain, or even his hands on my body, and I never sorted out how many times there were. I remembered my strategy, which had been desperate limp inertia.

  What I remembered of Daddy did not gel into a full figure, but always remained fragments of sound and smell and presence. That capacity Rose had, of remembering, knowing, judging, as if continually viewing our father through the cross hairs of a bombsight, was her special talent, and didn’t extend to me.

  36

  THE LAWYER IN MASON CITY, Jean Cartier, which most people pronounced “Carteer,” had a surprisingly deluxe office. It was in one of those minimalls, beige brick with white trim and tall, narrow windows, but inside it was paneled with real wood, not Masonite, and carpeted in thick green. What looked like a real Oriental rug lay under Mr. Cartier’s desk. Mr. Cartier, whom I never could call “Zhahn” or, as his secretary called him, “Gene,” had come from Montreal originally. He was married to a woman from Mason City. There was a picture of her and their four children in a silver frame on his desk. Ty had taken the papers to him and asked him to handle them for us. Late in July, he called and asked the four of us to come for a consultation.

  Ty and I drove. Rose and Pete drove. The girls had been dropped at the Mason City public swimming pool.

  We positioned ourselves around the cherrywood consulting table rather like guests at a club who are conspicuously not membership material. Mr. Cartier introduced himself to each of us individually, making eye contact and smiling gravely. He must have estimated our relative worth, because he then addressed Pete and me once for every three times he addressed Ty and Rose.

  He asked lots of careful questions about the farm, Daddy, Ty’s and Pete’s farming methods, the construction, the loans, Marv Carson and Ken LaSalle, Caroline, and Frank, her husband. He explored the family rift in the deliberate way a surgeon might probe a wound, not poking or cutting, but holding one layer out of the way while inspecting deeper ones. He smiled often. He was orderly and each question only advanced a degree or two beyond the previous one. He seemed to leave nothing unconsidered. Compared to him, Ken LaSalle was an earnest bumbler.

  Ty sat across from Rose. For the first hour of the consultation, Ty sat forward in his chair, his legs tucked against the rungs under the seat. A couple of times he stretched, and once he must have bumped into Rose’s legs, because he jumped as if he’d been scalded and curled his legs tight again. He wouldn’t look at her, and when she answered a question, he held his breath, then let it out suddenly when she’d finished speaking. She cast him two or three annoyed glances, but didn’t say anything. Mr. Cartier asked him twice if he had anything to add. Each time, Ty shook his head.

  It is hard to know whether an air of self-confidence precedes or follows success. Certainly, though, when we entered into the world of Jean Cartier, a lot of things began to seem different, less impossible than they had before. Nothing changed, but it all coexisted more agreeably, as if the march of time that would soon make everything crash together were suspended.

  In the second hour of our consultation, Ty stretched his legs out again, and when they bumped Rose’s, he just shifted them to one side after a quick apology. Rose glanced more often toward Pete, as if deferring to his opinion, not a habit of hers. Pete hitched his chair a little closer to hers. Mr. Cartier had his secretary bring in coffee. I slipped off my high heels, which were tight, and ran the sole of one foot over the toes of the other. Mr. Cartier came back to the subject of Daddy. “I gather,” he said with a smile, “that Mr. Cook is in the habit of doing what he wants.”

  “You can say that again,” said Rose.

  “And in the habit of having others do things his way?”

  “More or less,” said Ty.

  Pete said, “Ha!”

  “I see from records that he was arrested for DWI in late June?”

  Rose said, “Yes, they served him with that shortly after he left our farm.”

  In all the excitement, I had forgotten about this, but Rose seemed never to have forgotten a thing.

  Mr. Cartier looked at his papers, then said, “A substantial fine has apparently been paid by Ms. Cook?”

  Rose said, “That would be the way it would go.” She sniffed.

  After a moment of looking at each of us, Mr. Cartier said, “In my experience, passing down the farm is always difficult. If there aren’t enough sons, then there are too many. Or the daughter-in-law isn’t trustworthy. Wants to spend too much time having fun.” He smiled again. “Every farmer remembers what an unusually sober and industrious young man he was himself.”

  Rose coughed impatiently.

  “Even though these aren’t precisely the problems here, it’s well to remember that this transition is always always difficult.” He looked directly at Rose. “And that, in most cases, once the transition has been made, and the older generation is taken care of, things can go back to normal for twenty years or so.”

  “God forbid,” said Rose.

  Cartier’s smile took on a particle of uncertainty. Pete said, rather mildly, “If you don’t mind my saying so, it seems to me that the only course of action is to have all the ownership problems cleared up. That’s the basis for any future, whatever it is.”

  “Oh, they’ll be cleared up,” said Cartier. “No two ways about that.”

  I felt a tightening in my chest at this remark, as if, should we get the farm, Daddy would be consigned to wander around in the rain for the rest of his life. Then I thought, what
in the world are we going to do with him?

  As if in answer to my fear, Mr. Cartier said, “One thing at a time, though.” He looked down at his notes. “You four do intend to farm it, however?”

  “Of course,” said Ty.

  “Isn’t that the point?” said Rose.

  “We’ll see,” said Pete. Rose looked at him in surprise.

  “I don’t know,” was what I said, but this doubt fell unregarded into the flow of everyone’s expectations.

  “Well,” said Mr. Cartier, looking at his watch and folding together his papers, “one thing at a time. The ‘mismanagement or abuse’ clause in the preincorporation agreement is pretty undefined. From what you tell me, they’re certainly not going to be able to prove abuse, and probably not mismanagement, but you’ve got to farm like model farmers until the court date. That means working together yourselves, finding help, and getting the harvest in in good time.” He turned to Rose and me, smiling. “And you ladies, you wear dresses every day, and keep the lawn mowed and the porch swept.”

  Rose said, “Are you kidding?”

  “In part. But appearances are everything with a clause like this. If I have to, I’ll call some of your neighbors to attest to your skills, and their lawyer will call neighbors to attest to your mistakes. If you look good, they won’t be able to touch you.”

  “This is ridiculous,” said Rose.

  “It’s millions of dollars,” said Mr. Cartier. “Millions of dollars is never ridiculous.” He opened the glass door for us, saying, “The court date isn’t set, but it will certainly be after the harvest is in, so use it to your advantage.” And we were suddenly out of his world and in the hot asphalt parking lot of the Houston Avenue Professional Minimall. The office next door was occupied by United Parcel Service.

  Ty opened the door on my side, then went around to his side and got in. I was looking at Pete. He wore a nice shirt—a sharply cut moss-green cotton twill with a pale gray tie that he loosened while he and Rose walked to their silver truck. Rose walked half a step in front of him, not looking at him, though he was blond and tall, graceful and well worth looking at. He wasn’t wearing a cap the way Ty was—he never did, in town—and he ran his hand through his hair. His hands were arresting, wide and veined, dark tan, with long fingers. As I stared at them, I could almost make myself see what they knew about melodies and harmonies and all the other musical mysteries. I dragged my gaze from his hands back to his face. Neither expertise nor confidence was visible there. He said, “It’s after four. I want to stop somewhere for a drink.”

  Rose said, “Oh, for God’s sake. The girls have been waiting for three hours.”

  “They’ll be fine.”

  They got into the truck.

  When I finally sat down in my seat, Ty said, “Need anything at the Supervalu?” I shook my head. He said, “Plenty hot after that air conditioning, huh?”

  “Mmmhm.”

  “Must be ninety-five.” He pulled onto the street. Rose and Pete had disappeared.

  “What time is it?”

  “Four-thirty or so.”

  “Already? It seems like I just made dinner.”

  “Well, it’s a different world in that place, huh?”

  “I thought that, too.”

  We passed the hospital and the enviable houses around it. I said, “Pete really isn’t going to have much more say in the farm operation, is he?”

  Ty said, “Doesn’t look like it to me.”

  Even so, the afternoon at Mr. Cartier’s had its effect.

  I did what he said. I swept the porch, mowed the lawn, weeded the garden, canned tomatoes and pickled peppers and onions, mopped and swept and washed and dusted, and wore housedresses in the heat rather than shorts. I served up meals at six and eleven-thirty and five on the dot as if Ty were a train coming into the station. I waited for Jess Clark to run down the road, but only as you would wait for a recurring dream to seize you again. I took down the curtains, the way I did every fall, though usually after harvest, and washed and bleached and ironed them.

  I was so remarkably comfortable with the discipline of making a good appearance! It was like going back to school or church after a long absence. It had ritual and measure. Tasks proliferated. Once you made a good appearance your goal, you could confidently do things like nest all the spoons and forks in the newly washed and dried silverware tray and face them in the same direction. You could spend an hour or two vacuuming the tops of the floor moldings in the house with an attachment you’d never used before, then go back over what you’d done with a sponge dampened in ammonia, then again with furniture polish. There was cleaning you could do in the bathroom with an old toothbrush that might have repelled you before. There were corners and angles and seams all over the house that could be gotten at. The outside of the house itself could be scrubbed from a ladder, with the hose and a brush. The outside second-story windows could be washed. The grass could be edged and trimmed and raked and rolled for the great open invisible eye of The Neighbors to judge and enjoy. Cars, and trucks, of course, could be washed every day. There could be no limit to your schedule. Even though you had washed the supper dishes as you were cooking, you could jump up from the table when a serving dish got emptied, and wash it and dry it and put it away before finishing your beans. You could follow your husband from the door to the sink, and sweep the dust from his boots into the dustpan and throw it away before he was finished washing his hands, and then you could take the towel he had dried them with and run it downstairs to the washing machine while he was sitting down to his food.

  I was amazed at what I didn’t have time for any more—reading, sewing, watching TV, talking to Rose, talking to Ty, strolling down the road, departing from the directives of my shopping list, taking the girls places. That Eye was always looking, day and night, even when there were no neighbors in sight. Even when no one who could possibly testify for or against me was within miles, I felt the familiar sensation of storing up virtue for a later date. The days passed.

  Around the first of August, Pete got drunk and took a gun over to Harold Clark’s place and threatened Harold, who was sitting on the porch and kept shouting, “Pete, you don’t think I can see you but I can, so you just get away from here before Loren calls the sheriff! Get away now. I see you for sure,” always turning his head the wrong way. Then after he terrorized Harold, he drove his own silver truck into the quarry and drowned, and nobody knew whether it was an accident. According to his blood alcohol level, he shouldn’t have been conscious enough to drive, much less to stay on the road.

  37

  IT MUST HAVE BEEN about six. Ty had eaten his breakfast and headed for the hog pens. I had been upstairs making the beds, so I didn’t see the sheriff’s car go by, but when I went outside with the blankets to hang them on the line for the day, I saw Rose stumbling up the road. That was the oddest thing, how she didn’t seem to know where she was going. I was so struck by the strangeness of it that I didn’t go out to meet her, but let her come.

  I think that was the only time I saw her hesitate. She staggered up the road and when she got to about ten feet from me still standing in the road, she said, “Ginny, Pete’s drowned himself in the quarry and the girls are still asleep, and I don’t know what I’m going to tell them. Can you go down there?” It turned out the sheriff was going to come back and pick her up and take her up to the quarry. She didn’t know if they’d pulled him out or not. Her face was bleached white and her eyes were like holes burnt in paper. I said, “There’s coffee made, you—”

  “I’ll drink some, but just go. Just go down there.”

  I dropped the blankets in a heap and ran toward her house. The one time I stopped and turned to look at her, I saw her standing where I had left her, her arms limp at her sides, her feet wide apart for balance. I ran on. That was the only time I ever saw her flinch.

  She’d been making muffins. The milk and eggs and butter were in the bowl of the mixer. The flour was half measured into the sifter. A gr
een apple and a measuring cup lay on the floor where she’d dropped them or knocked them. I picked them up and finished making the muffins. There was no sound out of the girls, who were allowed to sleep until eight in the summer. Pete’s work clothes, a couple of feed caps, and a fluorescent orange sweatshirt for hunting hung from hooks by the door. A mug that read “Pete’s Joe” was filled with water in the sink. I couldn’t help stare at these remainders.

  I sat down at the table, and except for getting up to take the muffins out when the timer went off, I continued to sit there. I let the girls sleep in. Their rooms were off the kitchen. At eight-thirty, I heard Linda stir. She rustled around, then began talking to herself. At eight-forty, Pammy got up and went to the bathroom, then went back in her room and closed the door. Time was getting shorter.

  At that point, of course, I didn’t know about Harold or the blood alcohol level. I didn’t even know that Pete hadn’t come home the night before, or that he’d done his drinking in Mason City and driven almost thirty-five miles after leaving the bar. I sat at the table. I thought about getting up and going into the living room and looking at the photo on the piano of the old Pete—the young Pete, that is—the lost funny handsome Pete who was the kind of boy mothers are especially fond of, full of tricks and jokes and talents and energy, whose darker side hasn’t shown itself. But I didn’t.

  Pammy came out of her room, entirely dressed with her shoes and socks on. She didn’t seem surprised to see me. She sat in her place, took a muffin off the table, and began to butter it. I said, “How’d you sleep?”