A Thousand Acres_A Novel

by Jane Smiley

  Jess said, “Who’s your father’s favorite child?”

  I turned and looked at him. He was squinting at me, hands on hips. His lithe figure curved against the line of aspens. I said, “It’s always been Caroline, I’m sure.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “You mean especially now that he’s cut her off?”

  “Well, that. But why before, too? I mean, what is there about her that makes her favorite material?”

  “Well, she’s the youngest. Probably the prettiest. The most successful.” This was not something I wanted to talk about.

  “Maybe that’s a result of being the favorite.”

  I put my chin in my hand, let my gaze rest on the old bedstead and thought for a minute. “She was never afraid of him. When she wanted something from him, she just stalked right up to him and asked him for it. He appreciated that, especially after me and Rose. I was terribly afraid of him as a child, and Rose would stand up to him if she had to, but mostly stayed out of his way. With Caroline, it was like she didn’t know there was something to be afraid of. Once, when she was about three, he lost his temper at her, and she just laughed like he was playing a game.” I was sweating.

  “Do you care that Caroline is the favorite?”

  “Hasn’t done her any good lately, has it?”

  “No.” He smiled again. “But really.”

  “Do you really care about that after you’re grown? I don’t think about it, I guess.” I smiled the way you do when you want someone to stop probing a subject, but you don’t want him to know that. I spoke idly. “Who’s Harold’s favorite?”

  “Me.”

  “Even now?”

  “Even now.”

  “But he and Loren are like twins. They see eye to eye about everything.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Every time Loren makes a suggestion, or even does something that he’s used to doing on his own, like deciding where to spray or cultivate, Harold accuses him of trying to take over. It gets worse and worse. Loren has been backpedaling furiously. Now he’s practically asking permission to wipe his ass, but in Harold’s mind, there’s this creeping plan, and Loren’s manner is just a cover for his stealthy progress toward the deep dark goal. Two weeks ago, Harold was saying things like, ‘Who said you should spray those beans?’ Now it’s, ‘You aren’t putting anything over on me! I know what you’re up to.’ ”

  “How weird.”

  “Well, it isn’t so weird.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, for one thing, there’s you guys.” He broke off another stalk of big bluestem and began to stroke his palm with the tip. “I know you didn’t initiate the transfer, and I think even Harold knows it, but people are getting suspicious and wondering how you and Rose got Larry to give you the place, when obviously the whole thing is driving him crazy.”

  “It was a complete surprise to us!”

  “And very out of character for your dad, which is why people don’t believe what appears on the surface.”

  I got out of the truck bed and stood myself right in front of Jess. “What are people saying?”

  “Just things like, ‘There’s more to that than meets the eye.’ ”

  “Shit! But Harold was there! He was there the very moment Daddy told us what he wanted to do. It was at your party, and Harold laughed! I know he was thinking what a fool Daddy was being.”

  “Maybe so. At any rate, the talk will die down. It always does. I wouldn’t worry about it. That’s not Harold’s real problem.”

  “What is?”

  “That I’m here. He wants to keep me here, and I think he thinks the only thing he’s got that would keep me here is the farm.”

  “Is that true?” My heart beat a little faster with this question. Jess said, “The thing is, Harold can’t understand being in a state of flux. I mean, he understands uncertainty. Every farmer understands that, but it’s something that comes from the outside, from the price of grain or the weather, not from within. If Harold’s ever been restless, I’d be amazed.” He turned away from me, tossed down the stem of grass, and picked up a few little stones, which he began tossing over the wild rosebushes. Finally he said, “The thing is, I can’t decide if being like Loren is a disease that I’m too old to get now.”

  I laughed.

  “No, seriously. When I went off to the army, there was no question about whether I would come back to the farm. I was good in 4-H and FFA. Remember that steer I raised? I took him to shows all over the state. Bob. Bob the Beef, I used to call him. I liked him, I liked taking care of him, and I liked the money I made when he was slaughtered. I was the perfect future farmer, psychologically, I mean. My care for old Bob was absolutely real, but it only went so far. From the moment Harold told me he was mine, Bob was dead meat.”

  “What happened?”

  “I changed my mind about meat, about the way meat is produced in this country, about what it does to your own body. I mean, I suppose Bob lived a good life. I showered him with attention. But he’s the exception. He had a name. You know that the new hybrid breeds of chickens fatten so fast that they can’t support themselves on their own legs? I mean, since they’re all in cages after all, they don’t really have to, and I suppose if their legs are bad, they don’t want to get out, either. But it disgusts me. I don’t want to eat it, I don’t want to do it.”

  I went up to him and said, “But, Jess, you don’t have to be a farmer, and if you are, you don’t have to raise livestock. This seems kind of off the track to me. First you were talking about Harold, now you’re talking about why you’re a vegetarian.”

  He looked at me speculatively, rubbing his hand over his chin as if he had a beard. “Okay. Okay. The thing is, Harold loves me. He loves me like a lover. I’ve been gone so long that he’s not used to me any more, and he wants to win me, and he thinks he can win me with the farm, even though he must know from things I’ve said that I wouldn’t farm the way he does, I would use the land for other things. And I’m not sure that I want to be fixed, either. Harold wants to fix me right here in Zebulon County.”

  His voice sounded horrified. I said, “You sound like he wants to fix you the way Bob the Beef was fixed.”

  He laughed. “Well, maybe it would feel like the same thing. I don’t know. But when I think of myself ten years down the road, I wonder if it’ll be Loren and me, the Clark brothers, Frick and Frack, living in their concrete house, hunched over their plates, grunting and shoveling it in with a big spoon, three times a day.”

  “We’re here.”

  “Yeah, you’re there. You’ve made your families and your lives, and they’re yours.” He sounded as deeply, unself-consciously envious as I’d ever heard anyone sound. I felt struck, pierced. We didn’t say anything more for a long, breezy moment. Finally, I said, “Anyway, how do you know Harold wants to give you the farm? Is he dangling it in front of you?”

  “Hints. Just hints. After Pete said the other night that Harold had been talking about changing his will in the co-op, I started paying attention. Lots of hints.”

  “Well, wait till he does something concrete.”

  “That’s what you all did, and look what happened.”

  “We were sort of caught with our pants down, weren’t we?”

  Jess laughed and I laughed and for a moment everything seemed remote and not very important. I wondered if maybe that wasn’t the right way to look at things after all, standing in the dump, smelling the wild roses, and taking the long perspective.

  Jess said, “I feel better. The more I talk about it, the less important all of this seems. Something will come to pass. Thanks.” He smiled warmly at me, then wrapped his hand around my arm, pulled me toward him, and kissed me. It was a strange sensation, a clumsy stumbling falling being caught, the broad, sunlit world narrowing to the dark focus of his cushiony lips on mine. It scared me to death, but still I discovered how much I had been waiting for it.

  Book Three

  18

  OUT WEST,
EVEN AS CLOSE as Nebraska and South Dakota, there were farms that dwarfed my father’s in size, thousands of acres of wheat or pastureland rolling to the horizon, and all owned by one man. In California there were unbroken rows of tomatoes or carrots or broccoli miles long, farmed by corporations. In Zebulon County, though, my father’s thousand acres made him one of the biggest landowners. It was not that the farmers around us were unambitious. Perhaps there were those who dreamed of owning whole townships, even the whole county, but the history of Zebulon County was not the history of wealthy investment, but of poor people who got lucky, who were sold a bill of goods by speculators and discovered they had received a gift of riches beyond the speculators’ wildest lies, land whose fertility surpassed hope.

  For millennia, water lay over the land. Untold generations of water plants, birds, animals, insects, lived, shed bits of themselves, and died. I used to like to imagine how it all drifted down, lazily, in the warm, soupy water—leaves, seeds, feathers, scales, flesh, bones, petals, pollen—then mixed with the saturated soil below and became, itself, soil. I used to like to imagine the millions of birds darkening the sunset, settling the sloughs for a night, or a breeding season, the riot of their cries and chirps, the rushing hough-shhh of twice millions of wings, the swish of their twiglike legs or paddling feet in the water, sounds barely audible until amplified by millions. And the sloughs would be teeming with fish: shiners, suckers, pumpkinseeds, sunfish, minnows, nothing special, but millions or billions of them. I liked to imagine them because they were the soil, and the soil was the treasure, thicker, richer, more alive with a past and future abundance of life than any soil anywhere.

  Once revealed by those precious tile lines, the soil yielded a treasure of schemes and plots, as well. Each acre was something to covet, something hard to get that enough of could not be gotten. Any field or farm was the emblem of some historic passion. On the way to Cabot or Pike or Henry Grove, my father would tell us who owned what indistinguishable flat black acreage, how he had gotten it, what he had done, and should have done, with it, who got it after him and by what tricks or betrayals. Every story, when we were children, revealed a lesson—“work hard” (the pioneers had no machines to dig their drainage lines or plant their crops), or “respect your elders” (an old man had no heirs, and left the farm to the neighbor kid who had cheerfully and obediently worked for him), or “don’t tell your neighbors your business,” or “luck is something you make for yourself.” The story of how my father and his father came to possess a thousand contiguous acres taught us all these lessons, and though we didn’t hear it often, we remembered it perfectly. It was easily told—Sam and John and later my father had saved their money and kept their eyes open, and when their neighbors had no money, they had some, and bought what their neighbors couldn’t keep. Our ownership spread slowly over the landscape, but it spread as inevitably as ink along the threads of a linen napkin, as inevitably and, we were led to know, as ineradicably. It was a satisfying story.

  There were, of course, details to mull over but not to speak about. One of these was my grandmother Edith, daughter of Sam, who married John when she was sixteen and he was thirty-three. The marriage consolidated Sam’s hundred and sixty acres with John’s eighty. My father was born when Edith was eighteen, and after him two girls, Martha and Louise, who died in the flu epidemic of 1917. Edith was reputed to be a silent woman, who died herself in 1938 at forty-three years old. My grandfather, a youthful fifty-nine by then, outlived her by eight more years. I used to wonder what she thought of him, if her reputed silence wasn’t due to temperament at all, but due to fear. She was surrounded by men she had known all her life, by the great plate of land they cherished. She didn’t drive a car. Possibly she had no money of her own. That detail went un-revealed by the stories.

  Land was purchased around the time she died. In fact, land was bought twice, first the hundred and eighty acres in the southwest corner, then, some months later, but also in 1938, the two hundred and twenty acres east of that. My father always said that frugality was the key—his father had managed to save money on machinery, and when the acreage came on the market, they could afford to pay a dollar more per acre for it. Some time later, I found that this was only true of the first piece. The story of the second parcel was more complicated, less clearly imparting one of those simple lessons. The farmer was Mel Scott, who was a cousin by marriage to the Stanleys. He wasn’t known to be much of a farmer, but he had good land, and a reasonable acreage for those times. The trouble was, he refused to go to his cousins for help or advice, because he didn’t want them to know how badly he was doing. He forbade his wife to divulge anything to her family, which eventually meant not seeing them, as her clothing and the children’s clothing fell to rags. No going to church, no invitations made or accepted. Scott, meanwhile, sought advice of my grandfather, and money of my father, his neighbors, which was shameful enough but nothing compared to the humiliation of standing before Newt Stanley or his wife’s other wealthy, powerful, and outspoken cousins, who had not resisted the marriage, but had mocked it a little. He didn’t borrow much money from my father; there wasn’t much to borrow.

  Then it came time to pay the taxes, and Mel Scott came over late one November night and knocked on the beveled glass front door of the big Sears Chelsea. I imagine it as one of those winter nights on the plains, clear and black, when space itself seems to touch the ground with a universal chill, and a farmer who has walked a half mile over the fields, despairing but fearful, too, and full of doubts, arrives at the dark house of his neighbor. He knocks lightly on the door, almost, at first, wishing not to be heard, then again, with more pride (it’s no sin to be struggling—everyone is struggling). No one answers, there are no lights, only the rattle of feed pans from the hogs and cattle in the barn. So he turns, and walks to the edge of the porch, and maybe thinks about just going home. But it is so cold, getting colder, and the half mile expands to a marvelous distance. Surely he will die before he covers it again on foot. So he knocks again, more loudly, and shouts, and my father, who sleeps in one of the front bedrooms, awakens from his hardworking slumbers and comes down. My grandfather gets up. A light is turned on, an agreement is made. My grandfather will pay the taxes if Mel Scott will sign over his land. He can then farm it on shares and buy it back when commodities prices go up. The taxes aren’t much. Twenty years before, a man could have paid them without thinking about it. Those times are sure to return again.

  They shake hands all around, and, a little warmed by the last coals in the kitchen range, Mel sets out for home. He is saved, hopeful—he has gotten what he wants. But getting what he wants removes the veil of panic that has kept him stumbling forward a single step at a time for these last years, and reveals to him that he no longer wants what he wanted before, what he thought he always wanted. Time, Mel thinks, to sell up, to move to the Twin Cities and get a job. How could they make it through the winter, anyway? When he gets home, he is ecstatic with the cold, the crystalline air, the high pressure that hums over the whole defenseless breast of the continent, and ecstatic, too, with a hope that turns failure into success, plans for a trip, a new life, city time. The next day he signed the farm over to my father and grandfather, and he borrowed a little more money to cover the expenses of moving. My father and grandfather took over the land and the few crops still standing in the fields. They knocked down the buildings when I was a teenager, and after that there were only traces, the shadowy depression of the pond in the fields and the circle of the old well, filled in, to show that lives had been lived there.

  The Stanley brothers were furious. Said my father had engineered it all, to get a whole farm for the taxes and something over, a fee, you might call it, for the disposal of the encumbering family. It was a transaction my father never spoke of, knowledge that came to me through gossip thirty years later. When I used to sift through it, I didn’t see how it especially redounded to my father’s or grandfather’s discredit. A land deal was a land deal, and few w
ere neighborly. But I now wonder if there was an element of shame to Daddy’s refusal ever to speak of it. I wonder if it had really landed in his lap, or if there were moments of planning, of manipulation and using a man’s incompetence and poverty against him that soured the whole transaction. On the other hand, one of my father’s favorite remarks about things in general was, “Less said about that, the better.”

  The death of my mother coincided with the departure of the Ericson family, and our purchase of that farm. In fact, I remember that after my mother’s funeral, after the service and the burial and the buffet that Mary Livingstone and Elizabeth Ericson served at our house for the mourners, I followed Mrs. Ericson across the road, carrying some empty serving dishes, and after I put them beside the sink, I walked into the living room. The parrot cage was covered, and the dogs were outside. The rest of the family was still at my house, and the Ericson house, the house I later came to call my own, was the one that was still as death. I pushed aside some books and newspapers, and sat on the sofa. The parrot wasn’t entirely silent beneath his covering. I could hear him scrape the perch with his talons and mutter to himself. A cat walked through the room and marked two chairs by rubbing his arched back against them. I liked the silence and the sense of companionship I felt from the animals, and I experienced, for the first conscious time, the peaceful self-regard of early grief, when the fact that you are still alive and functioning is so strangely similar to your previous life that you think you are okay. It is in that state of mind that people answer when you see them at funerals, and ask how they are doing. They say, “I’m fine. I’m okay, really,” and they really mean, I’m not unrecognizable to myself. Anyway. In the midst of this familiar silence and comfort, Mrs. Ericson came into the room, surveyed me from the doorway, then sat down beside me. She was wearing an apron with a red and white checked dish towel sewn to it, and she wiped her hands on the towel as she sat down. She was not one to mince words, and she said, “Ginny, sweetheart, I have some more bad news for you. Cal and I have sold the farm to your father, and we’re moving back to Chicago. We just can’t make it here. We don’t know enough about farming.”