A Thousand Acres (1992 Pulitzer Prize)

by Jane Smiley

  "I don't know."

  "Are you still trying?"

  We looked at each other, both contemplating the absurdity of this question in the circumstances, and smiled. "Not today," I said. "I put in my diaphragm."

  "Hey-" He reached into his pocket and pulled out a blue plastic capsule. I said, "What's that?"

  "A condom. Except that I forgot I remembered to bring it." I took it and rolled it around in the palm of my hand. It was comforting, his forethought. I handed it back to him and he jumped out of the truck bed, then helped me down. We kissed, tenderly and thoughtfully, the way, maybe, people do when they have become unafraid to kiss one another, and then I ducked around the wild rosebushes and headed for home without looking back. I felt distinctly calm, complete and replete, as if I would never have to do that ever again.

  At the supper table, after telling me about his trip to Zebulon Center, who he saw and how my father acted, Ty said, "Say, Gin, were you protected last night?"

  I looked up from my plate and then pushed it away from me. It knocked against the water glass. I said, "Well, not exactly. But I just finished my period. It's all right."

  "You sure?"

  I snapped, "Does that question mean you doubt my knowledge or my truthfulness? Which one?"

  He snapped back, "It means that there are things I'm not ready for yet.

  " "It's been almost two years.

  "It's been almost three years.

  He was right. It was the fourth one I'd been thinking of. I could feel my face get hot. I raised my voice. "All right, then. It's been almost three years. That proves my point even more.

  He got up and left the kitchen, closing the screen door carefully behind him. I watched him out the door without moving from the table.

  He stepped into the road and turned toward the corner of 686 and Cabot Street Road. I watched him stride away, and listened to the thin sound of his boots on the blacktop. I sat there for a long time, staring out the door, struck for the first time at what I had done and thought and felt that day, how, to the eyes of almost any outsider, it would look like I had become my own enemy and the enemy of all my family and friends. That was when the fear settled over me for good. After a while I went upstairs and took out my diaphragm and washed it and put it in its case.

  You DiDN'T HAVE To WAIT LoNG if you had some money to spend and were set on putting up new farm buildings, hardly long enough for a few second thoughts. And it didn't take long, after you looked at the brochures, for your eyes to travel automatically to the best equipment-farrowing crates, ventilation equipment, feed- and waste-handling equipment, heated floors. For live years, Ty had been saying that he would like to double the size of our hog operation, from live hundred finished hogs per year to a thousand, with a small breeding operation on the side-the "Boar Boutique" he called it.

  Loren Clark had minored in Animal Science in college, and they had always passed articles about hog breeding back and forth.

  When we started looking at brochures from confinement systems manufacturers in the week after Daddy signed over the farm, it rapidly became clear that four thousand finished hogs per year was somehow a more optimal number, ambitious but manageable, the sort of number that gained the respect of your neighbors. Four thousand was a number that Marv Carson liked, for one thing, two hundred to two hundred and twenty productive sows, three turns, and it was a number that the Harvestore dealer kept speculating about. It was also the number that bounced off the walls at the cale in town, the number that other farmers fantasized about and "knew" was the best economy of scale, not too large for a family operation but enough to keep you busy, solvent, and interested.

  Pretty soon, four thousand hogs became our plan, and Marv Carson gave us a $300,000 line of credit.

  The plan was to convert what remained of the old dairy barn to enlarge the farrowing and nursery rooms, add a gestation building, a grower building, and a finisher, to build a big Slurrystore for waste, and put up two small Harvestores for the corn that would serve the hogs for feed. These would run along Cabot Street Road from our house west, partly because the dairy barn was already there, but also because Cabot Street Road was a busier road, and better maintained than 686.

  I think Ty, for all his experience with the basics of farm contrivance, where convenience and practicality, and even happenstance, precede any notions of appearance, still envisioned the barn transformed and these other buildings laid out in a park-like setting, perhaps even magically elevated so they could be viewed from a distance and admired, the way we admired farms down near Tama or Cedar Rapids, that crowned hillsides and looked off to the south. At breakfast or dinner, Ty would pick some brochures off the stack that lay next to the telephone in the kitchen and thumb through them, or he would scan the drawing the Harvestore man had given him, with the shapes of our house and barn crisply ruled in, the width of the road and the new driveways marked, the wide circle of the Slurrystore as neat as could be, drawn with a compass, the narrower circles of the Harvestores nestled against the gestation building. After perusing these, he would give a little disbelieving shake of his head, a low "Hmmp" of satisfaction, and sometimes say under his breath, "Isn't that something?"

  As my father got more difficult, it got to be, for Ty, that the new buildings were what would save us, the marvelous new silos, the new hogs, the new order, epitomized by the Slurrystore, where all the waste from the hogs would be saved until it could be returned to the ground-no runoff no smell, no waste, a closed loop. Ty was sure my hither's enthusiasm for the future would blossom when he saw the buildings go up, even though he had no patience for the brochures Ty tried to show him. You couldn't resist baby pigs, how lively and pink they are, eager, climbing all over the sow, scrambling for the forward teats, playing with one another, squealing, watching watching watching through the bars of the farrowing crates, their little black eyes shining with curiosity. If my father could sit tight until our place seethed with this life and movement, he would, Ty was sure, be reborn into a contented retirement, busy, as the farmers at the cafe said, solvent, and interested.

  That field had been planted in corn before we'd thought of any new plans, so on the day when Marv Carson came out with the permits (which he'd been able to hurry through because the president of the bank was the brother-in-law of the county building inspector, and which he brought out to us even though it was a Saturday), Ty got out the plow and plowed under twenty acres of waist-high corn stalks. Daddy was working with Pete that day, cleaning and oiling the combine, which they always tried to do during the midsummer lull. The next day, everyone skipped church. Time was essential, if Ty was to get those sows breeding again, and begin paying off the money that was about to be spent. The site supervisor from Kansas, where we'd ordered the buildings, the Harvestore man from Minnesota, the head contractor from Mason City, and Ty and Pete gathered and started measuring, so that work could begin first thing Monday morning. Sunday night, the cement mixing truck pulled up, and Ty was out of bed and at the site by live-thirty a.m. I was supposed to take Daddy to Pike, to the chiropractor, so he could be aligned after the shock of his accident.

  Rose said, "Get him to shop, too. There must be something he needs, socks or something. You could use up a whole day."

  "We could have dinner at the cate."

  "That's a good idea. Then tomorrow, he and Pete can finish with the combine. That should take a few days. If we're going to keep him busy, then we've got to keep him really busy."

  I nodded at that. We were standing by my back door, and over her shoulder I saw Jess Clark come jogging down the road. He stopped to watch the construction. Rose turned, saw him, looked back at me, and smiled a very small smile. I wondered if I had betrayed myself but said in a light tone, "What are you doing today?"

  "Linda bought some material for a sweat suit outfit. I said I would help her cut it out. You know what that means.

  "Tears and rage?"

  "You got it. You know, you can buy these outfits at the K-mart in Ma
son City for something like twenty-live bucks. They're cute, too.

  But Linda won't have a thing from K-mart now. Does your sewing machine work on that kind of fabric?"

  "I think so. You can do it at my house if you want."

  "We'll see." Now she had turned, and was surveying the construction site. She turned back to me. "One last favor?"

  "Sure."

  "Get the chiropractor to talk to him about exercise. I'm sure that's his problem more than the accident."

  "Whatever you say.

  "You'll see." Her voice was rich with irony. I laughed and got into my car.

  Daddy was waiting beside the kitchen cabinets in his driveway.

  Since breakfast, he had changed out of his overalls and was now wearing clean khaki trousers and a dark blue shirt. I pulled up, and he got in without saying anything. When we turned past the busy construction site, he pivoted in the seat and stared out the back window until long after everything was lost in the dusty haze.

  I could not drive with Daddy, or even be in the same room with him, without a looming sense of his presence, but once he turned forward in the seat and began to look out the window, I took up my now habitual thoughts of Jess Clark. It had been live days since our rendezvous at the dump, two days of rain, the others filled with business, family duties, and now building. It was readily apparent that privacy would be minimal at best, maybe for weeks. Since the Monopoly games had ended, Jess didn't come around as regularly, and so there wasn't even the fearsome pleasure of maybe exposing myself to the scrutiny of the others as I handed him cups of coffee or asked idle questions about Harold.

  I told myself that all of this was okay with me, that a life could be made of this proximity, that maybe that was the only possible life to make, since the other paths, which my imagination had instantaneously traveled, were all equally impossible. To imagine ourselves living together somewhere else, on the West Coast, say, was to imagine that we were not ourselves, and, in a way, that we had nothing for each other, since what we had for each other seemed to grow out of our entwined history and to be specific to this place.

  But to imagine ourselves together in this place was to imagine collisions and explosions, seismic movements of the earth we were standing on. It was to imagine everyone around us dead, in fact.

  And I imagined it, with a current of muted fear that ran under my usual eagerness to imagine the worst. To imagine Jess gone was to imagine two other impossible things, that he had never returned (but he had, and at times I realized this afresh with a pressing feeling that felt a lot like remorse), or, sometimes, that I was the dead one. When I made myself imagine him leaving, going back to Seattle, getting married, having children, being dead certainly seemed preferable to returning to the life I had lived before his return.

  My father said, "That's a nice place."

  I looked right, but we were past it. I said, "Ward LaSalle's place?"

  Ward was Ken's second cousin.

  "Fields were real clean."

  "I see you took the gauze off your cut, Daddy. It looks pretty good."

  "Let the air get at it."

  "Today, maybe. But you don't want to get into the combine with an open wound, do you? Do you have some antibiotic ointment at home?"

  He didn't reply.

  "We can get some.

  It was silly to think that Jess would never marry. Being like Loren was just the way he didn't want to be.

  "What's the matter with you?"

  I started. "What?"

  "What's the matter with you? That semi passed and you acted like you were going to jump out of your skin."

  I hadn't even seen the semi.

  It was remarkable how my state of mind had evolved over the last live days. I could distinctly remember the strength I felt as I walked away from Jess, ducked under the rosebushes and trotted toward my house.

  I'd wanted to put distance between us. I had literally had enough of him, was full of him, and while not precisely happy or elated, I felt finished somehow, made right. We had promised nothing, not even spoken of the future-what we were doing seemed more essentially a culmination of the past, only a culmination of the past.

  I don't know why I was surprised to find how quickly those feelings drained away, how eagerly I longed to have again what I thought had been sufficient for a lifetime.

  I don't know why I was surprised to discover myself questioning all my memories of Jess, sifting through them for clues about his feelings and plans. I knew about his feelings and plans. He was all the things he had told me-restless, fearful, torn between what he would have called American greed and Oriental serenity. I knew what was up with Jess, but it was suddenly all mysterious.

  I don't know why I was surprised to discover everything changed, since it was obvious in retrospect that I had sought to change it.

  And I was surprised to discover how my mind worked over these things, the simultaneity of it. I seemed, on the surface, to be continually talking to myself giving myself instructions or admonishments, asking myself what I really wanted, making comparisons, busily working my rational faculties over every aspect of Jess and my feelings for him as if there were actually something to decide.

  Beneath this voice, flowing more sweetly, was the story: what he did and what I did and what he then did and what I did after that, seductive, dreamy, mostly wordless, renewing itself ceaselessly, then projecting itself into impossible futures that wore me out. And beneath this was an animal, a dog living in me, shaking itself jumping, barking, attacking, gobbling at things the way a dog gulps its food.

  Daddy said, "That Spacelab thing is going to go right over this area, according to the paper."

  I said, "What?"

  "The thing that's falling. Goes over here all the time. It's going to be something when it falls, let me tell you."

  I glanced at a passing field, flat and defenseless, and thought for a moment about meteorites and space capsules, things glowing in the atmosphere, then making holes in the ground. I felt a visceral flutter of fear. It was his voice that did it, I think. I said, "Don't worry about it. You could draw it to you. ' He turned his big head and looked at me. I smiled. I said, "That was kind of a joke, Daddy."

  He said, "What happens is people don't watch out. They get careless because they weren't taught right."

  I said, "You can't watch out for Skylab, Daddy. The pieces are too heavy."

  "They were careless with that whole thing. Shouldn't even be falling.

  The joke's on them, isn't it?"

  "I guess so." After a second I said, "I thought it was supposed to be cooler today." We came into Pike passing the elevator that sat right by the freight tracks. The chiropractic office was the first office at the bottom of Main Street. I pulled into the shade of the overhang.

  When I got out, Daddy said, "What are you doing?"

  "I'm going to walk down Main Street. I'll be back and then we'll go over to the Pike's Peak and have dinner." He huffed. I said, "I don't want to sit in the car. It's awfully hot."

  "What if I'm done before you come back? I gotta wait for you."

  "It's air-conditioned in the office. Just chat with Roberta."

  "You wait. You can window-shop some other time."

  "I'll meet you at the Pike's Peak, then."

  "I don't want to walk there in this heat."

  I squinted down the street at the bank clock: 11:12, 87 degrees.

  "It's only a block and a half and it's not that hot, Daddy. The walk will do you good." This conversation made me breathless, as if I were wearing a girdle with tight stays.

  "You wait. I want to ride."

  I glanced toward the chiropractic office. Roberta Stanley, the receptionist, was just inside the door, watching us argue. I said, "It's boring to wait, Daddy. I didn't bring a book or a magazine or anything." I hated the note of pleading that crept into my voice.

  Where was the power I had felt only a few days before, the power of telling rather than being told?

 
Inspired by just that note of pleading, Daddy raised his voice a little. "You wait."

  I got back in the car. It was the presence of Roberta Stanley that made me get back in the car. Daddy turned and walked heavily toward the door. Roberta got up from behind her desk and opened it for him.

  After he went in, Roberta lingered a moment, smiling at me. I gave a wave, and she waved back. I scrunched down in the seat. All of the Stanleys would certainly hear about this, since Roberta was a terrible gossip. I hated to think about how people felt about us. It didn't matter what it was, disapproval, ridicule, even sympathy or fondness.

  I hated to think of them having any opinion at all.

  There was a remote possibility that I would see Jess Clark in Pike.