A Thousand Acres_A Novel

by Jane Smiley

  He didn’t say anything. We walked along the path, which followed the cyclone fence. Bindweed petered out, replaced by ground-cherry. Bunches of milkweed were beginning to blossom white along the fence line. I said, “I can’t believe the way all of this has blown up. I mean, I didn’t have a good feeling about it when Daddy first came up with the idea, but I can’t say I sensed any of this coming.”

  Still we walked. I stopped for a second and wiped the sweat off my forehead with the tail of my shirt. We were completely out in the sun, now. When I caught up to Pete, he said, “Ginny, what do you think Rose wants?”

  “I don’t know.” What I meant was, I thought I had known, I thought it was obvious, until he raised the possibility of doubt. “A stake in something of her own. A life she can call her own, maybe. It seems fairly clear. For the girls to be all right, too.”

  “What do you want? You’re the oldest, but Rose always seems like the oldest.”

  I said, “For all this to be over. That’s all, at this point. For these feelings to end.”

  “Huh.”

  The path narrowed and he went ahead of me. He was wearing cowboy boots, the ones he always wore off the farm. He had two or three pairs, and the high heels made his legs look long. He was in better shape than Ty, although not without a little thickness at the middle. When the path widened, I jogged a little to catch up to him. I said, “Why do you ask?”

  He looked at me as if he couldn’t remember where I had come from. I said, “Pete? Why do you ask about what Rose wants? She’s pretty straightforward about it.”

  “Is she?”

  The ease of our earlier conversation seemed to be gone, and I didn’t say anything. He stared at me for another moment, then walked on. We were walking fast, approaching the southwest corner of the quarry, where an old implement that looked like it might be a harrow of some kind jutted out of the water. Pete stopped, picked up a couple of pebbles, and threw one, hitting a half-submerged tine with a ringing ping. I walked on, toward another grove of trees, then came back. Pete had moved to the edge of the water. I thought I would tell him I had to get to the grocery store. I looked at my watch. It was already nearly three. Ty, looking for his dinner, would have seen the papers by now.

  Pete said, “Sometimes, all I want is to hurt someone. Not even for any purpose.”

  “That’s understandable, when you’ve been hurt.”

  “Maybe. You know what Ty says, about when the hogs get on one another and start fighting, how the underdog never fights back, he just looks for a smaller one? Ty always says, ‘Shit rolls downhill.’ ”

  I smiled.

  Pete stared past me. A breeze had come up, shattering the surface of the water into shards of light. I said, “Pete, are you okay? When I get away from the farm, I feel like all of this is going to turn out okay. Not the same as before, but okay. I mean, maybe that’s the definition of okay. Jess would say change is good.” I tried to say the name neutrally, glad I hadn’t said it before in this conversation. It was important in all circumstances not to say it too often.

  “Oh, Jess.”

  “Don’t you like Jess?”

  “Oh, sure.”

  Now we stood together in true awkwardness, Pete rolling stones in his hand and looking over the water, me not knowing what to do with my hands, looking at the distant white roof of my car. It was apparent that Pete, too, knew of my feelings for Jess, that this information had escaped from me somehow, though I had tried desperately to contain it. Pete wasn’t even especially observant, nor very interested in me. It was terrifying to think of myself so obvious, so transparent. I remembered just then how my mother used to say that God could see to the very bottom of every soul, a soul was as clear to God as a rippling brook. The implication, I knew even then, was that my mother could do the same thing. My lips were dry and hot, and I thought of right then just asking Pete what he knew, how he found it out—from Ty or Rose or Daddy or Jess himself. Wouldn’t it be a relief to have everything out in the open for once?

  But that question was easy to answer, too. And the answer was negative. The last few weeks had shown well enough for anyone to understand that the one thing our family couldn’t tolerate, that maybe no family could tolerate, was things coming into the open. So I didn’t ask Pete. I said, “I guess I’d better get to the store. It’ll be suppertime before long. Ty will wonder where I am.”

  “I’ve got chores to do myself. More and more I can’t resist stopping here, though. It’s such a weird place.”

  We began back along the path to my car. A snake appeared, vanished, leaving the low sound of grass rustling in the air. I halted, Pete ran into me. That close, there was plenty we had to say to one another, but habit and probably fear prevented us. Later, it was strange to think of his body bumping me, how solid that was; the smell of his sweat mixed with the plant and water smells of that place; the sight of his face that close, his gray-blue eyes with their long pale lashes, turning toward me, holding me then releasing me. I barked, “Snake!”

  “Huh,” said Pete, in that same oddly disinterested, curious tone, as if, I see now, all he was doing by then was waiting to see what would happen.

  33

  IT WAS APPARENT THAT TY HAD EATEN and gone out again—dirty plates in the sink, chicken bones in the garbage can, and the coffeepot warm on the burner. He had moved the legal papers to the kitchen table. I read them again and looked around for a place to put them. Finally, I opened the desk and stuck them in with the tax receipts. There were books to do—we were overdue on that. The last day of June had come and gone without our monthly accounting session, though I had paid the regular bills. I couldn’t eat, so I began straightening the house up. It didn’t take long—it was the one thing I still knew how to do.

  The building crew from Mason City had spent the week pouring the specially designed concrete subfloor for the breeding and gestation building, over which a slatted steel floor would be laid. An automatic flush system would eventually flush the slurry along the subfloor to the Slurrystore. You couldn’t see the site from the house—it was hidden by the old dairy barn that would itself be converted into the farrowing and nursing rooms. The Harvestores now rose, blue and efficient, with clean lines and rounded edges, just south of the dairy barn, right beside one another. A cement mixing truck was parked permanently on the shoulder of Cabot Street Road, ready for the crew to progress to the subfloors of the grower and the finisher buildings. Another three-man crew had spent the week tearing out the dairy stalls in the barn. As hogs are far more inquisitive and destructive than dairy cattle, the plan was to install concrete partitions to about five feet, then wood frame walls above that.

  Eventually, every hog in every building would reside in an aluminum alloy pen with hot water heat in the floors, automatic feeders and nipple waterers for the shoats. There would be, as the brochure said, “several comfort zones to accommodate varying sizes of hogs.” Supposedly, it would take six months at the least and eight or nine at the most to complete all the buildings, but the plan was to move the first ten sows into gestation stalls by the beginning of August. Ty had written two checks so far—a $20,000 check to the Harvestore builder and a down payment check to the confinement system builder for $27,500. By the first of August, he would write another check to the Harvestore builder for $20,000 and another check to the confinement system manufacturer for 20 percent of the remaining building cost, or $49,300. If hog prices remained steady, and the sows weren’t stressed by the new buildings or the noise from construction, and he managed to finish an average of six hogs from each litter to an average of two hundred thirty pounds each, he could expect his first check in late winter, for almost $20,000. But by then he would have written two more checks for $49,300, as work on the other buildings progressed. In a quieter time, these numbers would have made me gasp, lie awake at night, comb the books for savings here and there. With everything else that was happening, their effect was to make me merely giddy.

  Their effect on Ty was as
strong—he had rigged lights around the gestation floor, and he and the crew worked out there until almost eleven. They were back the next day, although it was Saturday, and the next, Sunday. Each day they put in twelve or fourteen hours, and after the crew had gone home, Ty and Pete continued to work until it was dark. From time to time, I wandered out there and looked at the work for a few minutes, but Ty and I did not speak about it. Nor would he talk about the suit, even whether he had known it was coming. I was certain he had. When I said so, he just kept hammering nails into the forms he was setting as if I hadn’t spoken.

  Over the weekend, they finished the Slurrystore, set the footings for the grower building, and carted away the innards of the old dairy barn. I served two big meals Friday, two Saturday, and three Sunday, because the café in town wasn’t open for breakfast. No one went to church. Rose came by each day and helped cook. They had been served with their own set of papers, but we didn’t talk about it, either; there was too much to do and, maybe, too much to say. Anyway, the kitchen was like a steambath, too hot for getting worked up.

  Sunday afternoon, I was basting a turkey for supper and washing dinner dishes when Ty came in the back door and threw some dirty rags on the floor. I said, “What’s that?”

  He said, “You tell me.”

  I looked closer. Pink stripes. My nightgown, some underwear. I didn’t have to look again to know what the rusty stains were. I hadn’t actually forgotten them; it was more like I hadn’t had the occasion to dig them up, and, as busy as we were, I had forgotten that they might be excavating that floor so quickly. I said, “Where was that?”

  “Where do you think?”

  Our gazes locked, and I wondered if I could bluff him, simply deny knowledge, and then I wondered if it was worth it. I dried my hands on a dish towel, wiped the counter with the dishrag for a moment. Finally, I said, “Floor of the dairy barn?”

  “I didn’t think you would admit it.”

  “Well, I did.”

  “Then I guess we have something to talk about tonight.”

  “I guess I don’t think so.”

  But by that time he was out the door. Though he certainly heard me, he could pretend he hadn’t. I picked up the nightgown and threw it in the trash can. If he had found it six months before, it would have been an innocent thing, a testament to undying hope, evidence of bravery, however secretive, on my part, as well as of my commitment to our future. To a forgiving and affectionate man, these clothes would have seemed tragic at the worst, not for a moment guilty or injurious. But that was one thing about Ty. He knew how to make up his mind, and to keep it made up. I jammed the clothes farther down among the strawberry hulls and the turkey giblets with my foot. There was a difference in me, too. If he’d found the clothes six months before, I would have been ashamed at the subterfuge. Now I was only annoyed that I’d forgotten and left them there.

  Had there been no miscarriage, the baby would have been a week or two old now, a startling thought. I would have been eight months pregnant for the coming of Jess Clark, the ponderous focus of witty remarks during all our Monopoly games. A restraining influence would certainly have been exerted on me, on Ty, possibly on my father. With the future visible, growing, getting ready to present itself (assumed to be a boy until the last possible minute), it would have been unwise to question the past, a tempting of fate. There would have been no new buildings, because we would have taken a conservative fiscal line. We would have sought instead to present a different picture: five generations on the same land. In honor of my son, wouldn’t I warm enthusiastically to such a picture? All the other mothers of sons in Zebulon County did.

  The fact was, in theory it was all still possible. If Jess were right and our well water was at fault, I could drink and cook with bottled water. And then there would be a grandson. Our neighbors who were now inflaming my father with phrases like “Some things just aren’t right,” would be saying, “Let bygones be bygones.”

  Except our feelings stood around us like ramparts, and we could not unknow what we knew. For one thing, Ty clearly thought that some unacceptable true nature had been revealed in Rose and communicated to me. I was sure his real loyalties lay with Daddy, and I could readily envision him in long phone discussions with Caroline, uncomfortable, maybe, but dogged. I recoiled from telling him—the trust that would allow confidences had disappeared into formality. For another, there had been no sex between us of any kind since before the memory of my father had returned to me. Sex itself, which I had rarely if ever actually enjoyed, seemed now like it would be too close to those memories for comfort.

  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 of jokes 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 five, right?”

  “Number five?”

  “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!”