A Thousand Acres_A Novel

by Jane Smiley

  I nodded.

  “Really?”

  “I’m not very used to this.”

  He pulled back, away from me, the look on his face unsmiling, suddenly cautious.

  “Yes,” I said. “Please.” It was humiliating to ask, but that was okay, too. Reassuring in a way. He smiled. That was the reward.

  Then, afterward, I began all at once to shiver.

  He pulled away and I buttoned three buttons on my shirt. He said, “Are you cold? It’s only ninety-four degrees out here.”

  “Maybe t-t-t-terrified.”

  But I wasn’t, not anymore. Now the shaking was pure desire. As I realized what we had done, my body responded as it hadn’t while we were doing it—hadn’t ever done, I thought. I felt blasted with the desire, irradiated, rendered transparent. Jess said, “Are you okay?”

  I said, “Hold me for a while, and keep talking.”

  He laughed a warm, pleasant, very intimate laugh and said something about let’s see, well the Sears man would be out tomorrow, at last, and I came in a drumming rush from toes to head. I buried some moans in his neck and shoulder, and he hugged me tightly enough to crack my ribs, which was just tightly enough to contain me, I thought. He kept talking. Harold was feeling a little sheepish, and making Loren tuna-and-mushroom-soup-with-noodles casserole for dinner. Jess had promised to put it in the oven at four-thirty; what time was it now? The farmer near Sac City had called him back, four hundred and seventy acres in corn and beans, only green manures and animal manures for fertilizer, the guy’s name was Morgan Boone, which sounded familiar, did it sound familiar to me? He said Jess could come any time. Jess held me away from him again, and gazed at me for a long minute or two. I looked at the creases under his eyes, his beaky nose, his serious expression. His face was deeply familiar to me, as if I’d been staring at it my whole life. I took some deep breaths and lay back on his shoulder. The sky was steel blue, the sun caught in the lacy leaves of the locust trees above us. I wanted to say, what now, but that was a dangerous temptation for sure, so I didn’t. I said, “What time is it? Did we ever figure that one out?”

  “Three-fifteen.”

  “I left the house at one.”

  “It seems like a lifetime ago.”

  “Is that true?” But I found it hard to believe that such episodes as this weren’t fairly routine for a good-looking guy on the West Coast. I tried to sound joking. “You’ve done this before.”

  “Well, I’ve slept with women before. I haven’t done this before.”

  I said, “I haven’t slept with men. I’ve slept with Ty.”

  “I know, Ginny. I know what that means.”

  “Maybe you do. Maybe not.” I thought of saying, last night was the best ever with Ty, last night when I dreamt I was a sow. I could ask someone like Jess, someone good-looking and experienced, what that meant. Someone like Jess might be able to tell me.

  I sat up and reached for my underpants. The world had an odd look, as if it were not itself, but a panoramic, 360-degree photograph of itself. I glanced at Jess again, then lay down on his shoulder. He said, “I trust you. I’ve trusted you since the first time I saw you again at that pig roast. That’s part of what draws me back here.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That.”

  Jess laughed, but didn’t pursue it. I sighed, wondered when Ty and Harold and Daddy and Pete would be back. Rose, too, had gone off, to Mason City with the girls. I could feel myself disengaging from Jess. It was a natural will-less process, an ebbing that was more reassuring than anything else, since it seemed to mean that I could be satisfied as well as full of longing My nose itched, and I sat up and wiped it on the tail of my shirt. Jess sat up, too. We smiled at each other, another degree of ebb. When he leaned forward to reach for his shirt, he ran his hand down my shin and said, “You have nice ankles. I keep noticing them.” Then, “May I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.”

  “You are such a nice person. How come you and Ty don’t have any kids?”

  “Well, I’ve had five miscarriages.”

  “Jesus. Oh, Ginny.”

  “Ty only knows about three. He couldn’t stand it after that, so I’ve sort of kept the fact that we’re still trying to myself.” A harsh look crossed Jess’s face, and I felt another jolt of fear. I reached for my jeans, saying, “Well, of course I shouldn’t deceive him. I know—”

  “It’s the fucking water.”

  “What?”

  “Have you had your well water tested for nitrates?”

  “Well, no.”

  “Didn’t your doctor tell you not to drink the well water?”

  “No.”

  He stood up and started pulling on his jeans, then sat down and put both his socks on without speaking. I could tell he was very upset. I said, “Jess—”

  He exploded. “People have known for ten years or more that nitrates in well water cause miscarriages and death of infants. Don’t you know that the fertilizer runoff drains into the aquifer? I can’t believe this.”

  “It wasn’t that. It just hasn’t worked. Rose drank the water—”

  “It’s not uniform. It doesn’t affect everyone the same, and not all wells are the same. Yours might be closer to the drainage wells.”

  “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.

  22

  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 five years, Ty had been saying that he would like to double
the size of our hog operation, from five 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 café 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 parklike 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 father’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 café 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 five-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 café.”

  “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 Kmart in Mason City for something like twenty-five bucks. They’re cute, too. But Linda won’t have a thing from Kmart 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 five 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 five 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.