A Thousand Acres (1992 Pulitzer Prize)

by Jane Smiley

  "And why I send them to boarding school. Though it gave me a little shiver, having him driving all over, down to Des Moines and everything.

  I'm not sure the school would prevent them from going out with him."

  It took me a while to get out my next question. It felt as if fear had literally jammed wadding into my mouth. Finally, I said, "Has he even" "Not that I know of. I bought the books, and we went through all the drills and stuff. I prepared them without mentioning Daddy.

  And I've kept my eyes peeled. And we were in our teens."

  "It didn't happen to me, Rose."

  She shrugged a little.

  I spoke angrily all of a sudden, surprising myself "I don't know what to say! This is ridiculous!" All at once I started to cry. "I mean, the strangest thing is how idiotic I feel, how naive and foolish. God, I am so sorry he did that."

  Rose sat calmly, almost impassive. "Don't make me feel sorry for myself. That's the hardest. The more pissed off I am, the better I feel."

  "Okay. Okay. Okay."

  She moved close to me and put her arms around me. We sat quietly beside each other for a few minutes. I tried to stop crying, but it was like I had been shaken to a jelly and I didn't know how to reconstitute myself. Then, right in my ear, I heard her voice. She was saying, "He won't get away with it, Ginny. I won't let him get away with it. I just won't."

  THE SToRM DIMINISHED AFTER MIDNIGHT, though it was still raining heavily. Ty and Pete came back and went out again. Just after two, Rose and I lay down on our bed, and Rose, I think, went to sleep. I got up to check on the girls, who had thrown off their covers.

  Everyone seemed to have taken refuge in my house, as if pursued.

  Linda's leg was thrown over Pammy's and their hands lay together: they must have been holding hands, but their grip on each other relaxed when they fell asleep. I had known them since they were born, repeatedly hefted that remarkably dense weight that only babies and toddlers have.

  Countless moments with each of them seemed immortal to me-the time when Pammy was about eighteen months and we were all sitting at the dinner table, and Pammy raised her arms overhead and said "Up!" so we all raised our arms over our heads and shouted "Up! Up! Up!" until Pammy slammed both her little palms on the table and cried "Down," her own joke that she laughed at uproariously. When Linda was a baby, she squeezed all her food in her list until it oozed out between her lingers, and only then would she eat it. How could anyone approach them with ill intent? How could anyone be moved not to protect them, but to hurt them, especially like this, in the middle of the night, at the sight of their harmless, resistless sleeping bodies?

  But of course, it hadn't been their bodies, it had been ours, or Rose's, rather. But mine, too, if he entered my room, even if he just closed the windows, even if he only checked to see if I was asleep.

  I lay there then as boneless as they did now, tangled in my nightgown, my hair striped across my face. And the fact was, that though I could not imagine my father doing what Rose said he did, I also could not imagine him doing what I was doing then, looking down on his daughters with appreciation and affection, feeling for us the tenderness I felt for Pammy and Linda. I shivered, pressed the coverlet around them, and backed out of the room. I was still dressed, but I got into the bed beside Rose, who was lying on top of the spread with the quilt pulled over her head. I must have fallen asleep.

  The ligure in the bedroom door, when I awoke, was Jess Clark.

  When he saw me move, he bent down beside me and said, "Your father's at Harold's. They don't know I'm here," and that said everything I needed to know about secrecy, conspiracy, danger. I rolled out of bed without waking Rose, and pushed him ahead of me down the stairs. It was lour-ten by the hall clock.

  Both trucks were still gone.

  The rain had ended and the windows were just beginning to lighten.

  I remembered what Rose had told me.

  I looked at Jess Clark and burst into tears.

  He took me into the kitchen, turned on the light, and made us coffee, held my hand, and searched my face while he talked to me.

  As far as Jess could tell, Daddy had wandered for about forty minutes or an hour until he got near Harold Clark's barn. Instead of going inside, he had staggered around, talking and shouting to himself and that is how Loren Clark had found him when he got home late from the movies in Zebulon Center. Loren brought him in the house and they tried to get him out of his wet clothes, but he'd insisted on calling Ken LaSalle and Marv Carson before he would change. Harold let him, and the two of them came out in the storm and met him at Harold's. "He was raving," said Jess, "and Harold was kind of smiling. He likes people to be stirred up."

  "They all do! It's hateful. This is going to be all over town by breakfast. It's going to be all over town at breakfast, because Marv Carson eats at the cale every morning."

  "So let it. What do you care? Tell me what happened?"

  I smoothed my shirt then, and put my hand to my hair, which was apparently standing on end. The fact was that so many things had happened that as I woke up, I found myself stumbling over them one at a time. I wondered where Ty was, if he had called the sheriff.

  I opened my mouth to speak and there were too many things to speak about, too many ways to speak about them when, to Jess Clark, of all people, I had to speak in just the right way. I looked at his painfully strange and familiar face and instantaneously everything dissolved into a strong solution of shame, even my doings with Jess himself which I realized I had been setting apart and cherishing until then. I dropped my eyes to the vinyl tablecloth, red and white plaid.

  Finally, I said, "What did Daddy say?"

  "He said you whores had sent him out into the storm and that he wished he'd had sons."

  "We didn't! We tried over and over to get him to go home! He cursed us! When we-" He squeezed my hand. "1 didn't believe him, Ginny. I knew there was more to it than meets the eye.

  "I know he was drunk. He always fools me, because when he gets drunk, it's just a change of mood. He doesn't stagger around or slur his words or anything. Then I fall for it. I forget he's just drunk."

  "I don't think you have to excuse him because he was drunk."

  Shame is a distinct feeling. I couldn't look at my hands around the coffee cup or hear my own laments without feeling appalled, wanting desperately to fall silent, grow smaller. More than that, I was uncomfortably conscious of my whole body, from the awkward way that the shafts of my hair were thrusting out of my scalp to my feet, which felt dirty as well as cold. Everywhere, I seemed to feel my skin from the inside, as if it now stood away from my flesh, separated by a millimeter of mortified space. I listened carefully to Jess's talk, and found it unquestionably sound and full of concern through its every vibration, but this wasn't reassuring. My body told me that my shame was a fact awaiting his discovery. He said, "Please do tell me what happened." He smiled, and suddenly, belatedly, my longing for him woke up, but now it was attached to my shame like its Siamese twin, and the longing itself was newly but fully shameful, and I remember thinking of our talks, the kiss, the lovemaking, and saying to myself the good part is over already.

  I found a flat, steady voice to speak in, and I used it. I told him about Daddy's taking Pete's truck and all the aftermath of that; what Daddy had said and how Rose and I had replied; I even told him what Rose had told me later, and how I did not believe her, but didn't not believe, either. He watched me attentively, his usually expressive features still and serious, but his eyes burning into mine.

  Without speaking, he drew everything out of me, and after it was over, I knew that I was somehow at his mercy, not because he had exerted power or claimed me, but because in spite of my shame I had exposed myself to him in every particular.

  He drained his coffee cup and said, "Oh, Ginny." He said, "Oh, Ginny, they have aimed to destroy us, and I don't know why."

  I had forgotten in my own recitation his old grievances against Harold and his mother. I said, "Maybe
they have, Jess. Maybe they have aimed right for it' Ty came in about five-thirty. The sun was well up by that time, and the sky clear and crystalline. Before he had a chance to question Jess Clark's presence, I said, "Jess, tell Ty," and he told Ty where Daddy was, and who was with him. Ty said, "I wondered where he'd got to. I drove every little road, tractor path, and drivable gully between here and Cabot. There weren't too many of those after this storm.

  I got up and poured him some coffee, then asked, "Did you look at the crops?"

  Things look okay, but this was a gully washer for sure."

  "Where's Pete?"

  "I don't know. We had a little disagreement."

  This alarmed me. "What do you mean?"

  "Pete said Larry would turn up and he wasn't going to waste his time on him. That was how we resolved it' Jess said, "Then what did you disagree on?"

  "Pete wanted to shoot him."

  I smiled, thinking this was ajoke, but Ty didn't smile back. I said, "Really shoot him?"

  "Really shoot him. But I think really really shoot him only for about a minute. Pete's pretty fed up. Fortunately, he's only got a twenty-two."

  This wry tone was strange for Ty, but I let it pass for the time being.

  Jess got up and took his poncho off the door hook. Ty didn't say anything, so Jess only cocked his eyebrow and smiled his goodbyes to me. My eyes and my heart followed him right out the door.

  To Ty, I said, "Did you sleep at all?"

  "Naw, not really." He rubbed his hands over his face, ruffling his stubbly beard. I remembered another thing that I still didn't know whether Ty agreed with the things Daddy had said to me. I stood up from the table and opened the refrigerator door. I said, "How about a couple of fried eggs and some of those sausage links?"

  He said, "That's fine." His tone was cool. He was just sitting there, and his expression was distant and unfriendly. He looked out the window, mostly. Broaching all the topics between us took more courage than I possessed at the time, and so I didn't broach them, and so I think it was then that a new formal relationship began for us, and that was when we started to work out what to do with each other and our situation according to our notions of duty and loyalty, and after a while it got to be clear how very much we differed in these notions.

  When he had eaten his breakfast, Ty said, "I guess I'd better check the fields first thing. I promised to help finish those footings this morning, but God knows, with this rain-" His voice trailed him out the door. Rose came down as the truck roared away. She was wearing some jeans of mine and an old shirt of Ty's. She said, "I'm going to run home and get the girls some clothes before they wake up." She was perky enough-her usual morning self.

  I said, "Daddy's at Harold's. He got Ken and Marv over there in the middle of the night."

  "Yeah, well." She shrugged. "All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty together again." She banged out the door, and I put some sausage links in the pan for her and the girls.

  While they were cooking, I went out to check my garden. Something that always has amazed me is the resilience of plants. My tomato vines showed no ill effects from the onslaught of the storm, weren't even muddy, since I had made it a point to mulch them with old newspapers and grass clippings. Some of the tenderest marigolds had been beaten down, and the trellis for the peas had fallen partly off its framework, but all the greenery sparkled with new life. I didn't touch anything, certainly didn't tread among the rows, but I stood off to the side and took it all in as if it were a distant promise.

  The fact is, I was already exhausted with the effort of it all, already hopeless, already recalling those months just after my mother died as if nothing had intervened between that time and this, and what I remembered was the labor of it all, a labor as impossible as standing in your boots and lifting yourself into the air by the bootstraps. I remembered how you are never the same, but you get to the point where relief is good enough. I felt another animal in myself a horse haltered in a tight stall, throwing its head and beating its feet against the floor, but the beams and the bars and the halter rope hold firm, and the horse wears itself out, and accepts the restraint that moments before had been an unendurable goad. I went back in the house and flipped the sausages. Pammy and Linda were sitting sleepily at the table.

  MOST ISSUES ON A FARM return to the issue of keeping up appearances.

  Farmers extrapolate quickly from the farm to the farmer.

  A farmer looks like himself when he goes to the cale, but he also looks like his farm, which everyone has passed on the way into town.

  What his farm looks like boils down to questions of character. Farmers are quick to cite the weather, their luck, the turning tides of prices and government regulations, but among themselves these excuses fall away. A good farmer (a savvy manager, someone with talent for animals and machines, a man willing to work all the time who's raised his children to work the same way) will have a good farm. A poor-looking farm diagrams the farmer's personal failures. Most farmers see farming as an unforgiving way of life, and they are themselves less than indulgent about weedy fields, dirty equipment, delinquent children, badly cared for animals, a farmhouse that looks like the barn. It may be different elsewhere in the country, but in Zebulon County, which was settled mostly by English, Germans, and Scandinavians, a good appearance was the source and the sign of all other good things.

  It was imperative that the growing discord in our family be made to appear minor. The indication that my father truly was beside himself was the way he had carried his argument with us to others.

  But we couldn't give in to that-we were well trained. We knew our roles and our strategies without hesitation and without consultation.

  The paramount value of looking right is not something you walk away from after a single night. After such a night as we had, in fact, it is something you embrace, the broken plank you are left with after the ship has gone down.

  We knew that first and foremost we had to buy time, though I'm sure we would have disagreed on what we were buying it for. Ty probably thought everything would blow over, or, at least, we would get so far in the building that turning back would be impossible-the new world would have risen around us, harder to dismantle than to keep. He was thinking of Marv Carson. Rose certainly thought that with a little time, Daddy would fall back into our hands, her hands. Linda and Pammy must have felt that everything would get back to normal if we all, or at least they, hunkered down and pretended things were fine enough.

  Pete may have been struggling hard with himself buying time for his temper, hoping to be brought willy-nilly to a less furious state of mind. I always imagined that Pete was well-intentioned, that even when he did lose control, he still hoped nothing bad would happen. I wanted time, too, not because I expected it to solve an iota of our problems, but because I would have done anything to put off the future.

  Should none of us appear in public, the belief would become universal that we had something to be ashamed of. Rose shopped harder in Pike and Cabot than she had in a year, riffling through every sales rack, bringing home a hundred dollars' worth of groceries, and deploring my father's drinking (but in an indulgent, daughterly, respectful sort of way) to five or six inquisitive women, including Marv Carson's mother.

  Pete spent the afternoon sitting around the feedstore in Pike, then the John Deere dealer in Zebulon Center, ostensibly doing business, but really doing the same thing Rose had done.

  Ty worked and joked and urged on the builders.

  I made Ken LaSalle two pots of coffee and sat with him in our kitchen, eliciting from him his every doubt, his every concern about Daddy, all the worries he had ever had about our farm and our family situation.

  Marv Carson came knocking on the door about noon. He had a six-pack of little green bottles of Perrier water from France that he'd ordered from a distributor. I offered him some dinner-we'd had macaroni and cheese. "Oh, Ginny," he said, "not cheese. Never cheese. Terrible mucus buildup with cheese. Haven't you no
ticed that?"

  I said, "I thought the point was to eat everything, but keep it running through the system."

  "That is a good basic plan, but I've had to modify the profile of my intake over the summer. Do you have any peanut butter?"

  I got out the bread and the peanut butter and some crab apple jelly.

  Then I got down a sealed jar of hot pepper jelly. He picked that up and made himself a sandwich. I was still finishing my salad from dinner. He opened two bottles of the Perrier water and pushed one over to me. He said, "I can't hide from you I'm worried, Ginny.

  I'm just worried sick. Everyone down at the bank is worried about this thing with your dad."

  I wrinkled my forehead and made a skeptical, good-humored look.

  These worries were absurd. We hadn't even thought of them before Marv got there.

  Marv said, "This is a big loan, Ginny. One of the biggest in our portfolio now, though I shouldn't be telling you that. And frankly, there isn't as much money in the till as you might think. Rural banks are having a hard time this spring finding cash. When the officers considered the loan, there were plenty of other applications on the table, let me tell you."