A Thousand Acres: A Novel (17 page)

Rose would just say, “He’s a farmer, Caroline. That is a personality structure that supersedes every childhood influence.”

That’s exactly what my father himself would have said.

The fact was, she’d been away from him for almost ten years, long enough so that, to her, his problems seemed only his, their solutions seemed pretty obvious, and the consequences of “managing” him in a new way seemed easily borne. Rose and I had gotten into the habit of ignoring Caroline’s point of view.

But she had never expressed herself quite as she had in this phone call. I was fully able to explain it to myself—she was worried, she was kind of crazy where Daddy was concerned anyway, she wasn’t on the scene.

Even so, I was shaking when I hung up the phone, just shivering from head to toe as if I were standing in a frigid wind. It felt like a fury, but it also felt like a panic, as if her criticisms were simultaneously unjust and just, and the sequence of events that I remembered perfectly was only a theory, a case made in my own defense that a jury might or might not believe. It wouldn’t do any good to exclaim sincerely that it had actually happened the way it had
actually happened. The guilty always did that. Rose! I thought, I’ll tell Rose, and we will exclaim together, or Ty. But that was a bad idea, confiding in someone. After you’ve confided long enough in someone, he or she assumes the antagonism you might have just been trying out. It was better for now to keep this conversation to myself.

I
SPENT THE MORNING
shampooing the carpet in the living room and the dining room. On a farm, no matter how careful you are about taking off boots and overalls, the dirt just drifts through anyway. Dirt is the least of it. There’s oil and blood and muck, too. I knew women with linoleum in every room, and proud of the way it looked “just like parquet.” Harold’s tinted concrete idea wasn’t much more than a step beyond that, after all. But mostly, farm women are proud of the fact that they can keep the house looking as though the farm stays outside, that the curtains are white and sparkling and starched, that the carpet is clean and the windowsills dusted and the furniture in good shape, or at least neatly slipcovered (by the wife). Just as the farmers cast measuring glances at each other’s buildings, judging states of repair and ages of paint jobs, their wives never fail to give the house a close inspection for dustballs, cobwebs, dirty windows. And just as farmers love new, more efficient equipment, farmwives are real connoisseurs of household appliances: whole-house vacuum cleaners mounted in the walls, microwave ovens and Crock-Pots, chest freezers, through-the-door icemakers on refrigerators, heavy duty washers and dryers, pot-scrubbing dishwashers and electric deep fat fryers. None of us had everything we could wish for. Rose had always wanted a mangle, for instance, because she liked things, including dish towels and bed sheets, neatly ironed.

At any rate, I had rented the Rug Doctor from the Supervalu in
Cabot, and by dinnertime I had worked up a dripping sweat, in spite of the new air conditioner. The shades were drawn, and the whirring sound of the machine was like a den I could curl up in, safe from my father’s vagaries, Caroline’s furies, and Rose’s vigilance. And I was not immune to the accruing virtue of the clean, richly colored swathes in front of the cleaning head. It was like combining a field, except what you left behind seemed deeper and more fertile than before, rather than the other way around. I cleaned without a break, and when I turned off the machine, I had worked myself into a rather floating state of mind, abuzz with white noise, effort, and sweat. I stood up, stretched my back in both directions, and pushed through the door into the kitchen, carrying the reservoir of dirty water. Jess Clark was standing in the middle of the floor, smiling at me. I started, and water sloshed. He said, “So, want to go for a walk?”

“How long have you been here?”

“About a minute. I called fifteen minutes ago, but you must not have heard the phone. You want to go for a walk?”

“I’m exhausted, and I’m hungry, too. You do appear suddenly. I’ve noticed that about you.”

“You’re just oblivious. I’ve noticed that about you.”

That irritated me. I said, “Oh.” I pushed out the back door and carried the dirty water across to the hog pens. When I came back in, Jess was still there. I said, “I’m busy and it’s hot, too. Maybe some other time.”

“Half an hour. I need someone to talk to.”

I caught sight of myself in a window. Hair everywhere, black smudges on my cheek and chin. The irritation I’d voiced floated away under the influence of the buzz and the virtue. He said, “Anyway, I saw Ty in Pike at the implement dealer’s. They were having a promotional barbecue, sponsored by John Deere. There were a lot of guys there, and he said to tell you not to bother with dinner. That’s what I was supposed to tell you when I called you fifteen minutes ago.”

“Rose is doing Daddy’s dinner.”

“There you have it.”

“People don’t go for walks in the noon sun.”

“I know a shady place.”

“You must be kidding.” I smoothed my hair and splashed water on my face. It was potent, him telling me that he needed someone to talk to, implying that he hadn’t gone first to Rose.

He did know a shady spot, as it turned out. It was the little dump at the back of the farm, in a cleft behind a wild rose thicket, that we used and Harold used for refuse. The “shade trees” were an assortment of aspens and honey locusts, the latter of which sported thick, needlelike thorns four or five inches long, armoring the trunk from the ground up. The dump was a place I didn’t go often, especially since we had started paying a monthly fee to use the landfill north of Pike. When I saw where we were going, I slowed down, but Jess pulled me forward. He said, “Don’t you love the dump? I spent whole days out here when I was a kid. This is the third time I’ve been here since I got back. It’s still the most interesting spot on the farm.”

“You’re kidding.”

“It’s fun, I promise. I’ll show you all the native plants I’ve identified. And some of the roses are still blooming, too. They smell out of this world.”

The larger furniture of the dump consisted of a rusted-out automobile chassis, some steel drums, an old iron bedstead, a rusted-out truck bed with a broken-backed vinyl automobile seat in it, a roll of dark reddish brown barbed wire, and a cracked white ceramic toilet tank. Supposedly, we were the only people who had ever used it for refuse, but I didn’t recognize everything there. In the country, trash has a way of attracting other trash. Once Rose found an old hall rack, oak and, after we cleaned it, brass. She sold it for forty dollars to an antique store in Cabot, which inspired us to comb the dump two or three times for other profitable castoffs, but we hadn’t found anything. I said, “I always wonder if other people sneak in here and throw things down the gully. I don’t recognize anything here.”

“I might recognize that automobile seat. It makes me think of Harold’s old ’62 Plymouth Valiant. Remember when he got that? First new car he ever bought.”

“I do remember that. It had a blue stripe along the side that angled upward at the fin.”

“That’s it.”

“Well, he only stopped driving it last year.”

Jess, who was squatting and poking with a stick under the bedstead, looked up at me.

I laughed. “Gotcha. Really it’s been ten years, anyway. I was just teasing you.” He smiled.

I looked around. The rosebushes were nearly as high as my head and hid the dump from the view of my house, though you could see Harold’s house and barn through the trees. On the lower branches of the rosebushes, simple white flowers spread their five petals like the open palm of a tiny hand. I knelt and sniffed. The fragrance was perfumy and strong. Jess said, “Do you ever come out here and gather the hips in the fall? They’re probably as big as cherries.”

“I heard you could do that.”

“Good natural source of vitamin C. Or you could make rose petal jam. I love the fragrance of that.”

“What are you poking at?”

“Snake.”

“What?”

“Snake. Not a rattlesnake or anything. I think it’s an eastern hog-nose, even though this area is sort of out of their range. I saw one last time I was here. They’re funny snakes.” He stood up. “No luck.”

“How are they funny?”

“Well, they have hoods, like cobras, and if they can’t chase you off any other way, they roll over and play dead, right down to the lolling tongue.”

I laughed.

“They’re one of my favorites.”

“I never thought of having favorite snakes.”

“Oh, there’re lots of nice snakes around here. Milk snakes are beautiful, and racers. Rat snakes will climb up into corncribs and trees.”

“Daddy’s killed those.”

“I’m sure.”

“Daddy’s not much for untamed nature. You know, he’s deathly afraid of wasps and hornets. It’s a real phobia with him. He goes all white and his face starts twitching.”

“Huh.”

Through the metal grid of the bedstead, some thin stalks of grass were growing. I broke one off and put it between my teeth. Jess did likewise, and said, “Big bluestem. When the pioneers got here, that was seven feet high.”

“When the pioneers got here, this was all under water.”

“Well, I know that. I was speaking generally.” He grinned at me. “Trying to evoke the romance of it all. Anyway, there’s a bit of prairie here, now that it’s dried out. Here’s some switchgrass, too, and there’s timothy all along the edge of the gully. Know what these are?”

I bent down and fingered the white petals. “The flowers look like pea flowers, but they’re on stalks.”

“Prairie indigo. Poisonous, too.”

“What are those?”

Now it was Jess’s turn to look closely at some short, purple-pink flowers. He said, “I know these.”

“Well?”

“Locoweed?”

“Yup.”

“And you were making out like you didn’t know nothin’.”

“I know shooting stars and wild carrots, and of course, bindweed and Johnsongrass and shatter cane and all that other noxious vegetation that farmers have to kill kill kill. Haven’t you seen Ty’s trophies? Giant cockleburs and world-class velvetleaf?” Now I was grinning, too, though the brightness of our grinning didn’t seem exactly appropriate to the conversation. I had the strong sense that we had stumbled into a kind of daring privacy, and that the secluded nature of the spot where we were standing allowed it but did not create it. It was as venturesome to be out here, poking around in this dump, as it would be to head off to Minneapolis together, knowing you couldn’t return until the next morning. It was also, oddly enough, terrifying. But our gazes were fixed on each other’s faces, and we were unable to keep ourselves from testing the fix by moving, turning, bending down. The fix held, until I climbed into the truck bed, sat down in the filthy car seat, and looked over the roses to the green roof peak of my house. I was breathing hard and trembling. I felt very afraid, but the fear also seemed unusually distant. I inhaled deeply. Jess went back to poking with his stick. I could hear a
rhythmic
tchocking
punctuate the soughing of the breeze. The breeze in Zebulon County is eternal, and life there is marked by those times when you notice it. I noticed it. I noticed that there was a nest in the honey locust tree, too, but the birds were gone, and the nest was possibly an old one. From off in the distance, just under the sound of the breeze, came the zip of a tractor starting up.

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.”