A Thousand Acres (1992 Pulitzer Prize)

by Jane Smiley

  I thought about such things all afternoon, basting the turkey, peeling potatoes and carrots, snapping beans, icing the applesauce cake Rose had baked, putting a jug of sun tea in the deep freeze to cool.

  The men on the crew were polite. They thanked me for everything and called me "ma'am." They made a lot ofjokes at one another's expense, and it came out at the table that Ty had been paying them triple time since Saturday morning. There were four of them. At a hundred dollars an hour for twelve hours for two days, that was $2400. I said mildly, "I thought the company pays you." One of them said, "Well, normally they do, ma'am, but it was Ty's idea to work this weekend, so he's picking up the tab on that. I'd just be out drinking somewhere, so the extra cash is fine by me."

  "I'm sure it is."

  "We done a lot, too. You'll probably get some back at the end from the company.

  Ty put down his fork. "We've got the time. It's best to use it.

  The more we get done before harvest, the better off we'll be." He wouldn't look at me.

  After a moment, he went on, "You guys get your smokes or whatever.

  We've got four more hours of light today. Tomorrow you can go back on that vacation schedule the company's been paying you for."

  "Yeah," said the one. "Maybe I'll get time to take a shower."

  "You are getting pretty ripe, Dawson. Phew!" shouted one of the others as they rumbled out. "Thanks for the supper, ma'am. At least you're probably glad to see us go."

  I was sitting up in bed reading when Ty came in. I could hear him downstairs, getting himself a cup of coffee and another piece of cake.

  The chair scraped the kitchen linoleum when he pulled it out. He ran water in the sink to rinse the plate. Then there was a long silence before he climbed the stairs. I turned the page of my Good Housekeeping to an article about strawberry desserts, "On Beyond Shortcake," and that's what I was staring at when he came into the room.

  He was an orderly man. I'd never had any complaints about that.

  He threw his socks and underwear in the hamper, his work clothes in the work clothes bin. He walked around the room for a minute or two, but I don't know whether he looked at me, because I was staring at the magazine. When he went into the bathroom, I turned the page to "New!

  Quick and Easy Strip Quilting." I heard the shower go on. The first line of the article was, "Love to quilt but hate to cut out those pieces one at a time?" I read it over, concentrating on each word.

  None of them made sense. The shower went off. Ty's footsteps returned to the bedroom. A drawer clattered, then slammed. The next line of the article was, "A new technique, utilizing a pizza-wheel-type cutter, makes quick work of a once arduous step. Quilters all over the nation are-" Ty's weight lifted my side of the bed. His skin radiated the coolness of the shower he'd taken, and he smelled of Right Guard soap.

  "-enthusiastic. 'I used to dread-' "He said, "We're ready to pour the subfloor for the grower building and the footings for the interior walls in the barn. I called the company, too. They're going to have the framing lumber out here by six a.m. It's already on the truck."

  "That's good news.

  "I think so."

  "Well, we'd better get to sleep then." I raised my head. His weight shifted in the bed. He said, "When did you bury those things?"

  "Last Thanksgiving, about. The day after."

  "How come?"

  "I don't know." This was short for, it's too complicated to go into.

  "What are those bloodstains from?"

  "Well, I had a miscarriage." The next line of the article I was staring at instead of looking at him said, "the cutting-out part, especially diamonds, since they're so hard to-" "Lots of secrets around here." This came out so mildly that I looked right at him, so that he said, "That's number live, right?"

  "Number live?"

  "After number four from that trip to the State Fair that Rose told me not to tell you she told me about."

  "I'm surprised Rose would betray me like that."

  "Your desires aren't at the top of Rose's agenda, Ginny."

  "What is?"

  "I wonder about that myself."

  "I know you think Rose and I are plotting something, but we aren't."

  "What I think is that you can't stand up to Rose. She bulldozes you every time."

  I still couldn't look at him. I was staring out the bedroom door, across the hall at the corner of the bed in the guest room. "And so do you and so does Daddy. You want to know why I kept it secret about the pregnancies and the miscarriages? Because I didn't agree with you about stopping, but you drew the line. I didn't ever want to draw the line. I wanted to keep trying forever, but I couldn't stand up to you.

  Compared to anything having to do with Rose, that's what's important.

  People keep secrets when other people don't want to hear the truth."

  "I just couldn't take it, the big buildup and the letdown. I'd think you would understand that."

  "But I could take it. I wanted to take it. Taking it was better than not trying at all, just giving in. You always just give in! You think whatever happens, if we just wait a while it'll turn out okay! I can't live like that any more!"

  "I do think patience is a virtue." His voice seemed to regard this as if it were just one of his illteresting quirks.

  "I think you think patience is everything!" I turned on my knees and faced him. "I feel like I'm waking up from a dream! A dream where you just go along and go along and whatever you do, you're just looking on, you're not affecting anything! At least Rose isn't like that. At least she takes what she wants. I mean, Jess said to me that the reason for the miscarriages is probably in the well water.

  Runoff in the well water. He says people have known about it for years! We never even asked about anything like that, or looked in a book, or even told people we'd had miscarriages. We kept it all a secret! What if there are women all over the county who've had lots of miscarriages, and if they just compared notes-but God forbid we should talk about it!"

  "Oh, Jess. He's got the most harebrained ideas."

  "You don't know! You havent read the books he has! You just don't know!"

  "I know enough! I follow the instructions! I'm careful!"

  "Don't the tile lines lead right into the drainage wells that lead right into the aquifer that leads right into the drinking well?"

  "The ground filters everything out!"

  "Who says that?"

  "Everybody knows that! Well water's the best you can drink."

  "If I got pregnant again, I wouldn't drink it." We were facing each other, our foreheads about six inches apart. Simultaneously, we both realized that talking about my getting pregnant again was a dangerous enterprise. I leaned over the side of the bed and picked up my magazine, smoothed the pages. Ty said, "You hid things from me. You lied to me. That's the fact, and you turn it around. You simply lied.

  I think that's a fairly straightforward issue."

  Possibly he didn't know the half of it. Possibly he did. At any rate, the accusation, true as it was, cowed me. I felt my face heat up and my scalp prickle with that old familiar sense of shame. I remembered the Sunday school teacher we had in junior high, a man who only taught us for a few months, making us repeat as a group, "Sins lead to other sins. Sin piles on sin. Lord, keep me from committing the first sin."

  Sin, sin, sin, sin, sin. It was a powerful and frightening word. I took some deep breaths. What about Caroline?

  Didn't he have a secret there? That accusation stood rampant in my brain, wanted to batter its way out. Ty sat back. I looked at him.

  It was clear to me that there was a deeper level for us to light on, a level where nothing could be held back, and the true import of our conflicting loyalties would express itself. The next shot was mine, and he was waiting for it. But this was a new world for me, for us.

  We had spent our life together practicing courtesy, putting the best face on things, harboring secrets. The thought of giving that up, right now, with my next re
mark, was terrifying.

  Finally, I summoned a firm voice, in which I said, "If I were always perfectly open and truthful, then most of the work of being sure that I agree with you on everything would be already done for you, wouldn't it?"

  "There was a time I thought we did agree on everything." He said this in a quiet, and, I thought, sentimental voice. I said, "You're patronizing me."

  He said, "I want to stay with you, Ginny. That's one of those virtues in me you seem to hate now, but it's true. I think you'll come back to me. I think we'll go back to having what we had before.

  That's all I ever wanted."

  "Well, it's not all I ever wanted, and I can't go back to it." I said this with a sense of lifting a lid, just for a peek, just to test the temptation of it.

  "Do you really hate me that much?"

  "Oh, come off it. I don't hate you."

  But just saying that smote me unexpectedly. Hadn't I hated him a little recently, for talking to Caroline behind my back, for failing to defend me when Daddy denounced us, for never bothering to tell me that he didn't agree with what Daddy said, and even just now, for undermining my trust in Rose? And I hated myself for going along to get along, so didn't I hate him, too? The fact was, I didn't feel hatred right then. If I had, I thought, I would have been willing to say anything, do anything, have everything about me be known.

  My strongest feeling right then was that the feelings that he seemed to think were simple enough were too complicated for me to name, which seemed like a form of lying, felt like a form of coercion.

  These, my Sunday school teacher might possibly have said, are the wages of sin.

  His voice suddenly barbed with resentment, he said, "Well, you might feel like you're waking from a dream, but I feel like I'm having a nightmare. I was so excited about the hog operation! That was my dream, and it was coming true. I was working around your father!

  I was bringing him into things bit by bit. I never thought it would be easy, but I thought I was making progress, and then you women just wrecked it, you just got him all fired up. He was acting crazy!"

  "But it was basically harmless. Just buying stuff. So what?"

  "He had that accident."

  "So, we could have gotten him to come around more, but Jess Clark was ming around instead "Don't bringJess Clark into this! Anyway, you said you had fun."

  "It was fun, but-oh shit. What's the use?" He slid down under the sheet. "What time is it?"

  "After eleven."

  "That lumber's going to be here at six."

  I turned out the light.

  In the dark he said, "If you wanted to get a job in town, you should have said so."

  I lay there for a long time, panting with relief and also with a Strange disappointment that the truth hadn't come out, distantly bemused that this was the conclusion he drew from the last live months, from Rose's operation, from the transfer, from Jess Clark, and Rose's revelations and my fresh memories. I said, "That wasn't what I wanted." Ty gave out a loud snore, then turned on his side.

  When I was certain he was asleep, I slipped out of bed and pulled on a pair of shorts. My sneakers, which I tied on without socks, were beside the back door. In moments I was standing on the blacktop, looking toward Daddy's house. For the moment, I couldn't go any farther than that. The moonlight picked up the white hatches of the centerline and the glinting bits that looked like mica mixed with the asphalt. To either side, the corn plants rattled in the eternal breeze in a way that made you aware of how they grew-as tall as a man in a tiny fraction of a man's lifetime, drawing water from deep in the earth and exhaling it in a vast, slow breath. I stared toward Daddy's place.

  It was dark except for a light in the window of my old room. The big cube of a house seemed to expand and vibrate with the presence of Jess Clark.

  Just because everything about him had turned shameful and awkward for me, that didn't mean the thorn of longing had worked its way out of my flesh. So far, I had restrained myself fairly well, or, maybe, fear had restrained me-fear of being caught out by Ty or Daddy as well as fear of appearing forward or foolish to Jess. Or ugly. Or undesirable. Looking toward the light that surely contained less right then-perhaps he was reading?-I knew I was afraid of him, too. More afraid of him than of anyone. That had sprung up along with the shame, hadn't it? Desire, shame, and fear. A freak, like a woman with three legs, but my freak, that I readily recognized from old days in high school and just after, when every date had the potential to paralyze me. The way I unparalyzed myself then was to break dates with boys who actually attracted me. The best thing about Ty had been that he attracted Daddy. I saw that he was clean and polite and familiar and good. Somehow that enabled the three-legged woman to walk, carefully, and very slowly, but with dignity.

  Now the three-legged woman stood on the blacktop in the moonlight, and each of her legs strained in a different direction. Actually putting one foot in front of the other, carrying myself closer and closer to someone for whom I was soaked with desire, which was what I was doing, seemed like an illusion. Soon this illusion had me standing below the window, then circling, quietly, around to the back window of that room, where I saw what I had been looking for, Jess Clark, his back and the back of his head, in a white shirt, the slope of his shoulders and the angle of his neck as evocative and promising as anything I had ever seen. But distant and unreal, like a picture on a television screen, as unreal as the imaginary walking me that had left behind the actual motionless me on the blacktop.

  Now the imaginary me sang out, "Jess! Hey, Jess! Jess Clark!"

  Magically, the ligure turned and came to the window, pushed the sash higher, and bent down. He said, "Hi! Who's out there?"

  "It's, uh, Ginny." Shame and fear rose up around me like a cloud.

  He said, "Hey! What are you doing? Did you knock? I had the radio on."

  Although the light was behind him, I saw the white flash of a smile. I said, "I guess I haven't seen you in a while, huh?"

  "Lots going on. I miss you." His voice softened. He should not have said that. He should not have said it because then I said, "I love you," and he said, "Oh, Ginny," and what I heard in his voice was pure, clear remorse that resonated in the ensuing silence like the note of a bell and told me all I needed to know about every question that lingered from earlier in the summer.

  After a moment, he said, "Let me come down. I'll be right down."

  But I wasn't going to wait for that. I knew the way home, not down the open, revealing road, but between the stiff concealing rows of corn.

  No apologies or kindness or humiliating clarilications of his feelings would follow me there.

  I was washing the breakfast dishes by six. Ty was pacing the shoulder of Cabot Street Road. At seven the construction workers arrived, already having breakfasted at the cafe. I started one load of wash and took another outside and began to hang it on the clothesline.

  I was a good machine, and soon my view of the work site was hidden by sheets and shirts, so I didn't see two cars pull up behind the lumber truck. What I did see, sometime later, when I was carrying the basket back into the house, was the lumber truck and all the cars-including Marv Carson's big maroon Pontiac and Ken LaSalle's powder blue Dodge-pull onto the road in a line and drive away. Ty was standing, watching them go. He took off his cap and wiped the sweat off his face with his sleeve, then he put the cap back on. He stood looking after them for a long time.

  I didn't need him to tell me that Marv and Ken had made him stop work on the hog buildings, nor did I need him to confess to me that he'd paid for the weekend's work in a futile attempt to push the construction past some point of no return. I dimly recognized as I watched him that his efforts had been foolish, a waste of our money, an extra fillip of defeat that he could have avoided, but what it looked like at the time was our crowning failure as a couple.

  TWO MORNINGS LATER, I was getting out the vacuum cleaner.

  Ty was out in the hog barn, and we had spoken very little since our
argument.

  "Crops look terrific."

  Ijumped.

  Henry Dodge, our minister, was standing outside the screen with his hand on the latch.