A Thousand Acres (1992 Pulitzer Prize)

by Jane Smiley

  I said, "Bin buster in the making. We'd better have a long dry spell in September."

  "Are you going to invite me in?"

  I stood up. My hands dripped suds. I dried them. "Sure. Coffee?"

  He pushed his thumb down on the latch and opened the door in a smoothly aggressive way, as if I thought meanly, he was practiced at taking advantage of small openings. I recalled that he'd been a missionary at some point early on, maybe in Africa somewhere, or the Philippines He said, "Ginny, I thought we were friends."

  I said, "Here, sit down. There's some cake from last night."

  "It's a little early for cake."

  "Ty likes it. He likes pie for breakfast better, though." I looked at him when I poured the cup of coffee. That word "friends" floated in the air, taking on more complexity the more that I looked at Henry Dodge. I said, "Maybe."

  "Maybe what?"

  "Maybe we've been friends. Maybe you could define the term more clearly."

  He laughed as if I had made a joke, then said, "You came to visit a while ago."

  "Well, I did, yeah. But it's okay." This remark made him seem inquisitive, and I resented it. I said, "Maybe I should have called you after the church supper. What a stir." I rolled my eyes.

  "I should have called you, I think. That's partly why I came."

  I gazed at him. I said, "Maybe we've been friends. Define the term more clearly, and I'll tell you."

  He laughed again. I felt a distant recognition ofhow these responses of mine could seem witty, or ironic, but I was dead serious. Henry sat down and shifted back and forth in the seat as if he were hollowing himself a spot in deep grass. He took a sip of coffee and said, "I think I'm good at seeing wider perspectives, but mostly I'd like you to talk to me."

  I allowed, "The church supper was embarrassing."

  "Not everyone thought Harold was right to speak out like that."

  I gauged this. Finally, I said, "Do you mean that a few disagreed with Harold, or most people, or just how many?"

  "Well-" "Actually, I can't believe anyone thought it was right of Harold to speak out like that." I felt myself heating up. "He set that up!

  He came over here especially to set it up, and he was gleeful about it-" "In his present affliction, I don't think-" He turned the handle of his cup toward me and began again, "I'd like to be a peacemaker."

  "Why?" I tried to make this sound as flat and purely interrogative as possible, but he took it as an accusation. He said, "No one else seems to have. As your pastor and your father's pastor-" "I mean, what purpose is served by making peace?"

  "Oh."

  Apparently he hadn't really considered this. I waited for him to think of something.

  Finally, after glancing at me two or three times, he said, "Wouldn't you prefer it yourself? I'm enough your friend to know you thrive in a happier atmosphere than this. I've never seen you to seek a quarrel.

  That just doesn't seem like you." He liked this line, and warmed to it as he spoke. "You look unhappy. You look drawn and tired."

  The irrefutable evidence of appearance.

  "Are you watching us? Me? Looks aren't everything."

  He laughed again, then sobered up. His voice was solemn when he said, "You don't have to watch to see."

  My friend? Could I rely on him to see what I saw in our family and our father and Rose and myself? That seemed like the one test of friendship.

  He said, "Families are better together. Working together."

  "Is that an absolute?"

  He paused to inventory the families he knew, sipping his coffee, then said, "Maybe not quite an absolute, if we're talking absolutes."

  He smiled. "But the exceptions are extremely rare. I know I'm a conservative on this score, Ginny, and that hasn't always been to my advantage. But in all my years in the ministry, I've only seen one divorce I agreed with. One single family breakup." He paused the way he liked to pause in his sermons, preparatory to driving home a point he was especially fond of then he said, "The kind of life people lead in this county is getting rarer and rarer. Three generations on one farm, working together, is something to protect."

  "That seems true in theory."

  "Helen and I chose to come here partly because we want to help preserve a way of life that we believe in. Some of my best memories are of making hay with my grandfather when my uncles were young men. They worked like one body, they were that close."

  "Do they all still get along?" I smiled frankly and disingenuously.

  "Mostly."

  "Mostly?"

  "Well, of course there are spats. Man is fallen. And maybe there's a value to being yoked to your enemies. You have more opportunity to learn to love them." He beamed, having solved the puzzle I'd proposed.

  I said, "How many haven't spoken to one or the other in more than ten years?"

  Henry licked his lips. "I don't know. Listen-" "Come on, Henry. Fess up.

  "You're asking whether my family is holy, as if only perfect virtue on my part permits me to advise you. That's a commonly held fallacy, and even ministers fall for it, but-" "I just don't know why you're here.

  Who sent you, what you want me to do, what you think I've done, why you came here instead of going to Rose. Are we friends? Have you had us over for a barbecue? Do you call me to chat from time to time? Do you solicit my advice on your problems? No, no, and no. I don't want you coming out here for a purpose. I don't want to be on your rounds."

  "There are pastoral duties-" Problems. Barbecues. Chatting. There was something I wanted from him after all, wasn't there? My heartbeat quickened and my palms got damp. I said, "Just tell me what people are saying about us.

  "Ginny."

  "I want to know. I really do."

  "People don't gossip as much as you think."

  "Yes, they do."

  "Well, not to me. His look was impenetrable. Then he said, "Can't I reach you? I want to." His tone and demeanor were warmly sympathetic here, and it occurred to me that in the past he would have suckered me, back when I would have readily called him my friend just because I would have been flattered by the public acknowledgment of such a friendship. Now the whole idea seemed suspect. I couldn't tell whether I mistrusted his office or him, but either way, there would be no confidences. I set my coffee cup on the table, stood up, and went to the sink, where I wrung out the sponge under a stream of hot water.

  I began wiping the table. I said, "Lift your cup."

  He lifted his cup. "At least, keep coming to church on Sundays.

  Keep the avenue to God open. He's marvelously forgiving. More forgiving than we are of ourselves."

  The screen door opened. Ty saw Henry, stepped inside, and greeted him respectfully. Here, I thought, were two people who agreed on so many things that their opinions automatically took on the appearance of reality. It was a small world they lived in, really, small, complete, and forever curving back to itself. Their voices relaxed and lowered, and their world looked far away to me.

  That afternoon, when Ty left to haul a bunch of hogs to Mason City, I cleaned up from helping him load them, and went into Cabot.

  Henry's reluctance to disclose the gossip had inflamed me. I figured I could tell what was being said about us by how they looked at me and spoke to me. I toyed with asking Rose to go along, too, for another, more observant set of eyes, but Rose had always scorned such pursuits, so even when she called and asked me what I was making for supper, I didn't say I was going anywhere.

  Cabot wasn't much of a town, but it was on the only straight road between Mason City and Sioux City, so there were two antique stores and a clothing and fabric store along with the cale, the hardware store, the Cool Spot, and the feed and seed. It was a nicerlooking town than Pike or Zebulon Center, either one. Those two towns had both once had hopes, or pretensions, so their main streets were four lanes and wider: old storefronts barely cast shadows a quarter of the way across the glaring expanses. Cabot, on the other hand, was built to the north of Cabot Street Road, and Ma
in Street was lined with maple trees that Verlyn Stanley had donated when all the chestnuts were dying. Lawns in Cabot were big and houses were pretty-late Victorian, about twenty years older than the houses in Pike and Zebulon Center, but well kept up. Lots of farm couples aspired to retire there if it should come time to sell off the place on contract and move to town.

  Old Cabot Antiques was where Rose had sold the hall tree she'd found in our dump, so that was where I went first. Dinah Drake set her prices high. She didn't expect to be selling to people from town, and though you never saw anyone in there, it was rumored that she had contacts in the Twin Cities and Chicago who bought her best pieces. She had a friendly manner, and she liked to show off her new things. A discussion of whose they were always shaded into a discussion of how they'd fallen into her hands. Her habitual manner was one of amazement-that some right-minded Zebulon County person would actually let such a piece get away from the family, or else that some city person would actually pay what Dinah asked for it. Fools on both ends, and Dinah in the middle, tsk-tsk-tsking.

  Dinah noticed me right away, and drawled, "Well, hi, Ginny.

  How are you?"

  I gave the standard reply, "I don't know. Not too bad, I suppose.

  I started down her center aisle, but stopped almost at once to look at some figurines sitting on a marble-topped chest. I turned one over.

  Dinah said, "Royal Copenhagen. Can you believe it? Old, too. When I lock up at night, I put those away."

  The ligure I was holding was a shepherdess in a gown rough with dainty china frills. Dinah seemed to expect me to say something, but I knew I would get farther if I kept quiet. I picked up a silver dish. She said, "That'sjust plated. I'm sure it's from the Montgomery Ward catalog. Rather pretty though, don't you think?"

  She came out from behind the rolltop desk she used for a counter.

  "That Royal Copenhagen, though. You know Ina Baffin down in Henry Grove?"

  I shook my head.

  "She was a hundred and four. She got those from her grandma when she was a girl, and her own granddaughter said they didn't interest her.

  Ina loved those, I'm sure. This granddaughter said they were just too simpery. Simpery! Something as valuable as that." She lifted another figurine, a boy playing a flute, and gazed at it, then set it down with care. I moved down the aisle, smiling politely, lifting things and looking at them. Dinah picked up a rag and began to dust with a thoughtful air. There were some Saturday Evening Post magazines in a bin. I leafed through one of them. Dinah lingered near the front of the store, then slowly made her way back to me.

  She dusted each piece of a ruby-colored glass decanter set that was sitting on a dark-colored sideboard, then said, "People say your dad's moving to Des Moines, now.

  "Mmm." I was noncommittal.

  "You know, sometimes people have me over to look at some of the older things, just to see if there's a market for them. The market changes all the time-" Her voice faded, then strengthened. "I wish now I had all that Depression glass I used to see at farm sales, but nobody wanted it in those days. Reminded them of the Depression!"

  She laughed. "I always feel like I should buy everything and just store it, because sooner or later, it's going to come into vogue."

  "I never thought of that."

  "Well, you know-" She wandered away.

  I picked up a stack of old crocheted antimacassars. Not in vogue.

  The most expensive one in the stack was six dollars, an elaborate pineapple design done in the finest thread. I held it up, imagining the work that had gone into it. Six dollars. It made me sad. Dinah came close again.

  "The thing is, what I do when I come to someone's house is give them an idea of what can be done with everything. ArId there's always so much stuff. You have no idea how much people accumulate over the years. I don't guess your father's going to be farming again. You might not realize, but there is a market for old farm tools-" She let her eyes rest on my face. I let my eyes rest on hers. She said, "It can be a touchy subject. But when they move to an apartmenteven old clothes, or shoes. You don't have to let everything go to the church or the Salvation Army."

  I said, "I'll talk to Rose. And Caroline, of course." Her eyebrows lifted at this last. I handed her the piece of lace, and said, "I'd like this. This is pretty."

  She turned and went back to the rolltop desk. I opened my purse and found some money. I noticed that my hand was trembling.

  At the cafe, Nelda served me a cup of coffee and an order of cinnamon toast without more than the most perfunctory politeness, as if she were angry with me but holding her tongue. Another sign, I thought.

  At Roberta's, the clothing and fabric store, I thought I might buy some underwear or a belt or some stockings. Roberta herself wasn't there, so I spoke in a friendly way to her niece, Robin, who was in high school. Robin seemed to know, or at least, to think, nothing.

  The merchandise was set out on the same wide wooden display tables that Roberta's mother, Doris, had used when I was a child and the store was called Doris's. It was easy to ramble from table to table, turning over price tags and unfolding things just for a look.

  Like a lot of village stores, Roberta's had once been half of what it was now, and had expanded into the next building by breaking through an old wall. Roberta's had two front doors, and on summer days, both of them were open, as well as the back door. There was no air-conditioning; Roberta relied on cross-ventilation for comfort.

  I was standing in women's underwear, holding two blouses that I wanted to try on, when I saw Caroline enter the farthest door, followed by Daddy, followed by Roberta, followed by Loren Clark.

  Caroline was turned to help Daddy up the steps, Daddy was looking at his feet, and Roberta's eyes met mine. She stiffened, and I slipped hurriedly into a changing booth nearby. I did not try on the shirts.

  I stood there holding them, immobilized.

  It wasn't hard to hear them getting closer. Caroline was speaking to Daddy in a loud voice, and his tone matched hers. It was as if they both thought the other one was deaf. Loren must have left, because I heard him say, "I'll be back in fifteen minutes."

  Roberta said, "Is there anything in particular you need, Caroline?"

  Caroline said, "Daddy needs some things. Daddy? Mostly some socks and things. He made a list. Daddy? Have you got your list?"

  "I've got it."

  There was a long pause.

  She said, "May I see it?"

  "Daddy? May I see the list?"

  Another long pause.

  Finally, he said, "You got money?"

  "Yes, Daddy."

  "Let me see it."

  "It's in my wallet. I've got plenty. It's okay." I saw Roberta's feet go by my curtained booth, pause, turn, pause, proceed. Caroline said, "Let's look at the socks. You like white, Daddy? These crews are a good buy." Her voice was falsely enthusiastic, the way mine had always been. Urging progress, trying to avert letting this small project mire itself. After a minute or two, she said, "These are nice, Daddy. The heels are reinforced and they're a hundred percent cotton.

  That will feel good on your feet."

  "Let's sit down."

  There was a shuffling, stepping noise, then the scrape of a chair.

  He said, "Come sit down here." His tone was equal parts commanding and wheed]ing. It gave me a chill. I noticed the two blouses I had taken off the rack. They were still clutched in my list. I hung them on the hook, then shook out my hand.

  Caroline said, "Daddy, we should-" "Won't you sit down? Come sit by me?"

  She gave a laugh, and said, "Oh, okay." I peeped from behind the curtain. The chairs they had found were between me and the door. I drew back again into the gloom of the booth. There was no chair, and the gap between the bottom of the curtain and the floor meant that I couldn't sit on the floor without being seen. I leaned against the wall. He said, "You were a little birdy girl. Remember that brown coat you had? Little hat, too. You were so proud of that.

  It woul
d have been that velvet stuff."

  "Velveteen," said Caroline.

  "I called you my birdy girl. You looked just like a little house wren.

  "Did I?"

  I set my lips together "You didn't like it either, nosiree. You didn't want any brown coat and hat. You wanted pink! Candy pink. You had it all worked out in your mind about that pink velveteen, and you took a pink Crayola to that coat, too!" He laughed a full, happy laugh.

  "Your mama had to spank you then for sure!"

  "I don't remember any of that. I remember something red-a jacket with hearts round the-" "Couldn't ever get you to stay away from those drainage wells!