A Thousand Acres (1992 Pulitzer Prize)

by Jane Smiley

  It was a freak storm that had dropped golf-ball-size hail in the late afternoon, then turned around and come back through, from the northeast, about four hours later. It had passed south of us, so that all we saw was the lightning in the distance. Wednesday. The thought occurred to Rose and me simultaneously and we looked at each other.

  Ty said, "You hate spending the money for hail insurance, but there must be guys kicking themselves down there now."

  Pete said, "You can't prepare for a storm like that. The paper said that was a really oddball storm."

  Daddy set down his pork bone and wiped his lingers on his napkin.

  He said, "You don't have to prepare for a storm like that. A regular storm will do plenty of damage if there's hail."

  Obviously.

  Pete turned red.

  Rose said, "What were you doing down in Story County, Daddy?"

  Daddy dished himself potatoes and then spooned a dollop of hot pepper pickles next to them. He picked a slice of meat off the serving plate.

  I said, "When was that, Thursday? Wasn't that storm Wednesday afternoon?"

  Daddy said, "No law against taking a little ride now and then."

  Rose said, "With this gasoline shortage, there might be one one of these days."

  "Well there isn't one now." He spoke sharply. They glared at each other. Pete said, "We ought to be saving our gas. It's going to be the end of the month soon, and Jimmy Carter hasn't done a thing about those truckers striking. If we ran alcohol, we wouldn't have a thing to worry about."

  Daddy said, "We aren't going to run alcohol." He clearly meant it as the last word on the issue.

  I said, "Daddy, did you go all the way to Des Moines?"

  "What if I did?"

  Now the glare was for me. It shone into me like a hot beam of sunlight. I couldn't think of anything to say. What if he did? What if he did?

  Rose said, "Caroline was wondering, that's all."

  "You girls talk plenty on that long distance."

  He hated the idea of us talking about him, probably because he knew that we always did, couldn't help it, couldn't stop it. I said, "She was worried about it, that's all."

  "I didn't say I did go to Des Moines, did I?"

  I said, "No."

  "Well, then." He helped himself to the peas.

  At bedtime, Ty said, "You women don't understand your father at all."

  I had washed the sheets that day, and I was making up the bed. I said, "Flip that corner over the mattress, would you?" He tucked the corner of the contour sheet, then smoothed out the lumps. He was wearing only his underwear, ready to climb into bed. His shoulders were wide and muscular. His upper arms were casually brawny, split in half white and golden red, by a sharp tan line. His wrists were as thick as his forearms, which were covered with hair that had whitened in the sun.

  He was smiling.

  I said, "Then we have something in common with him, because he clearly doesn't understand himself."

  "He understands himself fine. He's just secretive, is all."

  "And what are his secrets?"

  "Well, I think one of them is that he's afraid of his daughters."

  "That's a good one." I folded the blanket at the end of the bed. I doubted that we would need it. Ty slipped under the sheet. "What has he got to fear? He's got everyone on this place under his thumb."

  "Not any more.

  "You mean because of the transfer? We all know that's a legal fiction.

  He is this place. Rose and I run around in a panic every time he cocks an eyebrow. All he has to do is turn up mysteriously in Caroline's office, and she's on the phone, asking questions. Most of the time, I forget the transfer even took place."

  "He doesn't."

  "Well, then, he should untransfer it. I don't care." I was stepping out of my shorts. Ty's look caught me and held me. It said that he cared, and that the decision was mine, and that all he could do, finally, was stand back and let me make the decision. The freight of his look was seventeen years of unspoken knowledge that he had married up and been obliged to prove his skills worthy of not a hundred and sixty acres, but a thousand acres. He said, "I still think the transfer was a smart move, taxwise, and otherwise, too. Marv Carson thinks it was real smart." His voice was careful. I laid my shorts on the dresser and pulled my shirt over my head. Ty said, "But you women could handle it better. You could handle him better. You don't always have to take issue. You ought to let a lot of things slide."

  I thought about this. I said, "You're right. I don't understand him.

  But I think a lot of the taking issue that you see is just us trying to ligure out how to understand him better. I feel like there's treacherous undercurrents all the time. I think I'm standing on solid ground, but then I discover that there's something moving underneath it, shifting from place to place. There's always some mystery. He doesn't say what he means.

  "He says what he means. You two always read something into it, whatever it is. Rose does it more than you."

  I put on a short cotton nightgown and buttoned one of the buttons.

  Ty propped himself up on his elbow and folded back the sheet for me.

  It was reassuring and calming to enter his space, the circle of strength radiating from his shoulders and arms. This was something we had always done fairly well-disagree without lighting. We did this better than sex.

  Ty lay back, pulling my head into the crook of his shoulder. For a few moments, I could feel us staring up at the ceiling together. He said, "He's irritable. He doesn't like to be challenged or brought up short.

  But he's a good farmer. Everyone respects him and looks up to him.

  When he states an opinion, people listen. Good times and bad times roll off him all the same. That's a rare thing." Ty's voice rounded and deepened in my ear. Real enthusiasm. We continued to look up at the ceiling, solidly against one another, head to toe. In a few moments, he was asleep.

  Wide awake, I tried to remember my father. Ty's views were not new to me. When he, on rare occasions, found himself angry at my father, I repeated many of the same things back to him, to remind him how much he had learned from my father, for one thing. On the other hand, I thought, I had been with my father so constantly for so long that I knew less and less about him with every passing year. Every meaningful image was jumbled together with the countless moments of our daily life, defeating my efforts to gain some perspective. The easiest things to remember were events I had only heard about: When my father was seventeen, for example, and lights on the farm ran off a gasoline-powered generator, my father was down in the cellar looking for something and was overcome by fumes. He managed to stagger to the stairs and fall upward far enough so that his hand poked out of the doorway into the kitchen. Grandpa Cook came in a few minutes later and dragged him outside into the fresh air.

  Or there was the time, when he was ten, that some boys at the school chased him with willow switches. When he got far enough away from them, he turned to face their taunting, picked up a sizable rock, and beaned the ringleader right on the forehead, knocking him unconscious.

  The teacher took Daddy's side, as did the rest of the gang, who were impressed by his aim, and the injured boy was suspended from school for two weeks.

  When Mommy, who was visiting a school friend in Mason City, wouldn't dance with him at a church dance, Daddy got the manager of a local men's store, someone he knew only by name, to leave the dance and sell him a new suit of clothes, including underwear, socks, shoes, and fedora. He looked so dapper in them, Mommy would say, that she didn't want to dance with anyone else the rest of the night.

  He was handsome. I could remember that.

  When he smiled or laughed with Harold or some of the other farmers, you felt drawn to him.

  Suddenly and clearly I remembered the accident Harold Clark had with his truck. It was an early memory; possibly I was six or seven.

  I certainly hadn't thought of it in years, because it passed the way grown-up events do when you
are a child-dreamlike phenomena that happen without warning and vanish without explanation. I was in our truck alone, playing with my dolls. Possibly Daddy didn't know I was there.

  At any rate, he ran from the house to the truck.

  Mommy was behind him, at the door, holding it open and shouting something, and then we were careening across fields and I was huddled down, bouncing in the corner of the box. There was Harold's truck, navy blue, rounded, a white grille like big teeth, and then we were there, and Harold lay on the ground below his truck, and the back wheel was on top of him, as if cutting him in two at the hips.

  It was a frightening sight and I screamed, but for once Daddy didn't get angry with me. He took a board out of the back of Harold's truck and he laid it down, then he set me on one end of it, put a whiskey bottle in my hand, and he said, "You tiptoe over to Harold and you give him something to drink, because he needs it, and you let him keep that, and then tiptoe back." It was a strange accident, from which Harold escaped with only abrasions: he had been taking some tiling pipe out of his truck to set it beside a ditch. The ditch was full of thick watery mud, and the truck had rolled back, knocking Harold down, then pinning him in the ooze. Daddy and some other farmers who appeared shortly had to pull Harold's truck off him.

  Afterwards there was a lot of laughter, but I felt the real moment had been mine, tiptoeing with my lifesaving burden along the six-inch-wide board, watching Harold's face greet my approach with welcome relief and hearing Daddy say, "That's a girl. Just a ways longer. Good girl.

  That's a good girl."

  I closed my eyes and felt tears sparking under the eyelids. Now that I remembered that little girl and that young, running man, I couldn't imagine what had happened to them.

  HARoLD CLARK PR0M0TED his own local reputation of garrulous thoughtlessness. While many, even most, farmers I knew were laconic and uncomplaining, Harold talked ofhimself often, and always as if he were almost but not quite two people-the one who had a lot of "great ideas" (Harold put the quotes around the words himself every time he spoke them) and the dubious one, too, the one who knew none of these ideas would ever pan out. Part of him was always luring the other part of him along on some iffy undertaking, and part of him was always telling stories at the expense of the other part. What it all added up to was that things around the Clark farm, according to Harold, were perennially at the brink of disintegration, while public opinion had it that really Harold was a better manager, and more prosperous, than anyone. My father put it more succinctly.

  He would say, "The body of Harold's truck may be muddy, but the engine is clean as a whistle. He doesn't want you to know that, though."

  The uncharacteristic flaunting of his new tractor, at the pig roast, was quickly followed by complaints, which Jess faithfully relayed to us. They spent three days adjusting the idle and another three days fiddling with the power take-off. Harold didn't like the placement of the radio-above on the left. He wished it was above on the right.

  For his final complaint, "a complaint to last a lifetime," as Jess called it, he didn't like the transmission. Ty said, "He's right.

  Those I.H transmissions are really old-fashioned. If he'd asked someone besides the I.H dealer, he would have found out that shifting in a Deere is like silk now. Shifting those Harvesters takes three men and a fat oy." He held out his hand, and Rose, who had just landed on North Carolina, two houses, counted out his rent.

  "That's not the point," said Jess, kneading the dice in his palm, then throwing them. "Actually, this is perfect for him. He can stress what a fool he was for buying that tractor for the next twenty years now.

  "Daddy will help him," said Rose.

  "Harold will love that," said Jess. "You know what comes out of their talks, don't you?" He slapped his race car past Go and Ty gave him two hundred dollars. He bought a house for New York Avenue and placed it carefully in the orange strip. "They always end up agreeing that Harold has done something crazy, or that Larry was right in the first place. And then Harold lets drop some detail, about money, or bushels per acre, that shows that in spite of his foolishness, he outdid everybody. That he's such a good farmer that he has a whole lot more leeway than the average guy.

  I said, "I never looked at it that way.

  "That's because he's tricked you, too," said Jess. "Now that I'm back, after all those years away, I'm really amazed at how good Harold is at manipulating the way people think of him."

  "What's the reward, though?" said Pete. "He doesn't get the kind of respect other farmers do. People laugh at him. When you're over at the feedstore, and someone sees his truck drive in, it's, oh, there's Harold Clark. And they're grinning already."

  "And he comes in with some story, right? He's going to do something crazy, and ugly, too, like surround the house with hay bales, foundation to roofline, then tack polyethylene sheets over them with laths."

  "Or he's going to pour cement over the entire farmyard from the house to the barn. He did say that last year. Pete grinned, and I landed on Luxury Tax. Pammy was reading an old Nancy Drew I had found in the attic. She sensed me watching her, and looked up, smiled, and nodded.

  It was The Ghost of Blackwood Hall, my old favorite. Linda had fallen asleep with her crocheting in her hand. For a week she had been laboriously crocheting a doll sweater.

  "No," saidJess. "That laughter is the point. If they respected him, then he'd have less privacy. All that foolishness is like a smokescreen.

  People let down their guard. They're generous with him, too, because they feel a little superior. I mean, neighbor ladies bring Harold and Loren a hotdish once or twice a week. And I'm not saying that he laughs at people behind their backs, or is rubbing his hands with glee at duping them. That's not what I'm getting at. It's just that he's cannier and smarter than he lets on, and in the slippage between what he looks like and what he is, there's a lot of freedom."

  "Sounds good," said Rose, "but meanwhile, I own Park Place, and it looks like you owe me a bundle."

  "I owe you everything, Rose." He leered at her.

  "Don't push me." She laughed.

  I couldn't help looking at Jess, a little surprised at his analysis of Harold. Maybe it wasn't true, but truth wasn't what attracted me.

  It was the plausibility of such a plan, the perfect way such a plan could deflect the neighbors' knowledge of you. It was such a lovely word, that last word, "freedom," a word that always startled and refreshed me when I heard it. I didn't think of it as having much to do with my life, or the life of anyone I knew-and yet maybe Harold was having some, feeling some.

  "So," said Pete. "I was at the feedstore yesterday, too, when Harold came in with another bright idea."

  We started grinning.

  "What was that?" said Ty.

  "He said he was thinking about changing his will."

  There was the briefest of silences, the briefest but the most total, and then Jess said, "Uh oh," and laughed. We all knew what everyone was thinking, that Harold would change the will in favor of Jess (assuming that the present will favored Loren, which Harold, of course, had never actually said, but which had become what people "knew" Harold had done), but Jess said, "He's probably going to leave the place to the Nature Conservancy so that they can restore it to its natural wetlands condition."

  Ty said, "What's the Nature Conservancy?"

  "They buy land and conserve it." Jess looked at Ty in that merry but aggressive way. "Take it out of production, you know."

  "God forbid," said Ty.

  We didn't say any more about Harold's will, but late in the evening, after Rose and Pete had taken Pammy and Linda home, Jess lingered before stepping off the porch. He said to Ty, "You know that land you have down by Henry Grove? What's the guy been growing on it?"

  "Straight corn for the last four years. Before that he had some beans on it.

  "Fall plow or spring plow?"

  "Fall. And there isn't a house. I let him bulldoze the house and fill in the well about seven years ago. You
could live in town, though.

  Henry Grove's only a couple of miles away.

  "So he's really worked the shit out of that land."

  Ty looked out toward the dim glow of Cabot on the western horizon, for a long moment, and ran his forefinger around the corner of his mouth.

  I could tell he was offended. Finally, he said, "It's good land.

  Michael Rakosi hasn't done anything with it I might not have done. He likes clean fields, is all."

  Jess smiled, also realizing that Ty was offended, and said, "I'm not meaning to criticize. If I did farm, I'd try some things. A lot of them probably wouldn't work. I'd probably ask your advice all the time. I'd probably farm out of a book a lot. That used to be Harold's worst insult, he'd say, 'That guy, he farms straight out of a book."