A Thousand Acres: A Novel (2 page)

“I guess we’ll find out.”

“I thought he hadn’t been in touch.”

“He wasn’t, till Saturday night.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all.” He gave me a long look and a slow smile, then said, “I notice he waited till we busted our butts finishing up planting before staging this resurrection.”

It was true that butts had been busted, since the spring had been cold and wet, and no one had been able to get into the fields until mid-May. Then almost all the corn in the county had been planted in less than two weeks. Loren smiled. Whatever he said, I knew he was feeling a little heroic, just as the men around our place were feeling. I thought of something. “Does he know about your mom?”

“Dad told him.”

“Is he bringing any family?”

“No wife, no kids. No plans to go back to wherever he is, either. We’ll see.” Loren Clark was a big, sweet guy. When he spoke about Jess, it was in easy, almost amused tones, the same way he spoke about everything. Seeing him somewhere was always a pleasure, like taking a drink of water. Harold put on a terrific pig roast—while the pig was roasting, he would syringe lime juice and paprika under the skin. Even so, I was surprised Harold intended to take a day off from bean planting. Loren shrugged. “There’s time,” he said. “The weather’s holding now. You know Harold. He always likes to go against the grain.”

The real treat would be watching Jess Clark break through the surface of everything that hadn’t been said about him over the years. I felt a quickening of interest, a small eagerness that seemed like a happy omen. When I drove the Scenic toward Cabot a little while later, I thought how pretty the river did look—the willows and silver maples were in full leaf, the cattails green and fleshy-looking, the wild iris out in purple clumps—and I stopped and took a pleased little stroll along the bank.

On Valentine’s Day, my sister Rose had been diagnosed with breast cancer. She was thirty-four. Her mastectomy and ensuing chemotherapy had left her weak and anxious. All through the gloomiest March and April in years, I was cooking for three households—for my father, who insisted on living alone in our old farmhouse, for Rose and her husband, Pete, in their house across the road from Daddy, and also for my husband, Tyler, and myself. We lived where the Ericsons once had, actually. I’d been able to consolidate dinner, and sometimes supper, depending on how Rose was feeling, but breakfast had to be served in each kitchen. My morning at the stove started before five and didn’t end until eight-thirty.

It didn’t help that all the men were sitting around complaining about the weather and worrying that there wouldn’t be tractor fuel for planting. Jimmy Carter ought to do this, Jimmy Carter will certainly do that, all spring long.

And it didn’t help that Rose had suddenly made up her mind the previous fall to send Pammy and Linda, her daughters, away to boarding school. Pammy was in seventh grade, Linda in sixth. They
hated to go, fought against going, enlisting me and their father against Rose, but she labeled their clothes, packed their trunks, and drove them down to the Quaker school in West Branch. She exhibited a sustained resolve in the face of even our father’s opposition that was like a natural force.

The girls’ departure was unbearable for me, since they were nearly my own daughters, and when Rose got the news from her doctor, the first thing I said was, “Let’s let Pammy and Linda come home for a while. This is a good time. They can finish the school year here, then maybe go back.”

She said, “Never.”

Linda was just born when I had my first miscarriage, and for a while, six months maybe, the sight of those two babies, whom I had loved and cared for with real interest and satisfaction, affected me like a poison. All my tissues hurt when I saw them, when I saw Rose with them, as if my capillaries were carrying acid into the furthest reaches of my system. I was so jealous, and so freshly jealous every time I saw them, that I could hardly speak, and I wasn’t very nice to Rose, since some visceral part of me simply blamed her for having what I wanted, and for having it so easily (it had taken me three years just to get pregnant—she had gotten pregnant six months after getting married). Of course, fault had nothing to do with it, and I got over my jealousy then by reminding myself over and over, with a kind of litany of the central fact of my life—no day of my remembered life was without Rose. Compared to our sisterhood, every other relationship was marked by some sort of absence—before Caroline, after our mother, before our husbands, pregnancies, her children, before and after and apart from friends and neighbors. We’ve always known families in Zebulon County that live together for years without speaking, for whom a historic dispute over land or money burns so hot that it engulfs every other subject, every other point of relationship or affection. I didn’t want that, I wanted that least of all, so I got over my jealousy and made my relationship with Rose better than ever. Still, her refusal to bring them back from boarding school reminded me in no uncertain terms that they would always be her children, never mine.

Well, I felt it and I set it aside. I threw myself into feeding her,
cleaning her house, doing her laundry, driving her to Zebulon Center for her treatments, bathing her, helping her find a prosthesis, encouraging her with her exercises. I talked about the girls, read the letters they sent home, sent them banana bread and ginger snaps. But after the girls were sent away, I had a hint, again, for the first time since Linda was born, of how it was in those families, how generations of silence could flow from a single choice.

Jess Clark’s return: something that had looked impossible turning out possible. Now it was the end of May, and Rose felt pretty good. Another possibility realized. And she looked better, too, since she was getting some color back. And the weather would be warm, they said on the TV. My walk along the riverbank carried me to where the river spread out into a little marsh, or where, you could also say, where the surface of the earth dipped below the surface of the sea within it, and blue water sparkled in the still limpid sunlight of mid-spring. And there was a flock of pelicans, maybe twenty-five birds, cloud white against the shine of the water. Ninety years ago, when my great-grandparents settled in Zebulon County and the whole county was wet, marshy, glistening like this, hundreds of thousands of pelicans nested in the cattails, but I hadn’t seen even one since the early sixties. I watched them. The view along the Scenic, I thought, taught me a lesson about what is below the level of the visible.

The Clark brothers were both good-looking, but with Loren you had to gaze for a moment to find the handsomely set eyes and the neatly carved lips. His pleasant disposition gave him a goofy quality that was probably what most people mean when they use the word “hick.” And maybe he’d gotten a little thick in the middle, the way you do when there’s plenty of meat and potatoes around. I’d never even noticed it, till I saw Jess for the first time at the pig roast, and he was like this alternative edition of Loren. Jess was about a year older than Loren, I think, but in those thirteen years they’d gotten to be like twins raised apart that you see on TV. They cocked their heads the same way, they laughed at the same jokes. But the years hadn’t taken the toll on Jess that they had on Loren: his waist came straight up out of his waistband; his thighs seemed to bow a little, so you got the sense of the muscles inside his jeans. From behind, too, he didn’t look like anyone else at the pig roast. The small of
his back narrowed into his belt, then there was just a little swell, nicely defined by the back yoke and the pockets. He didn’t walk like a farmer, either, that’s something else you noticed from behind. Most men walk in their hip sockets, just kicking their legs out one at a time, but Jess Clark moved from the small of his back, as if, any time, he might do a few handsprings.

Rose noticed him, too, right when I did. We put our casseroles on the trestle table, I looked at Jess turning from talking to Marlene Stanley, and Rose said, “Hunh. Look at that.”

His face wasn’t smooth like Loren’s, though. There’s where he had aged. Lines fanned out from the corners of his eyes, framed his smile, drew your attention to his nose, which was long and beaky, unsoftened by flesh or years of mild, harmless thoughts. He had Loren’s blue eyes, but there was no sweetness in them, and Loren’s dark brown ringlets, but they were cut close. Nicely cut. He was wearing fancy sneakers, too, and a light blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Actually, he looked good, but not like he was going to quickly ease any neighborhood suspicions. Everybody would be friendly to him, though. People in Zebulon County saw friendliness as a moral virtue.

He gave me a hug, then Rose, and said, “Hey, it’s the big girls.”

Rose said, “Hey, it’s the pest.”

“I wasn’t that bad. I was just interested.”

“The word ‘relentless’ was coined to describe you, Jess,” said Rose.

“I was nice to Caroline. Caroline was crazy about me. Did she come?”

I said, “Caroline’s down in Des Moines now. She’s getting married in the fall, you know. To another lawyer. Frank Ras—” I stopped talking, I sounded so serious and dull.

“So soon?”

Rose cocked her head and pushed her hair back. “She’s twenty-eight, Jess,” said Rose. “According to Daddy, it’s almost too late to breed her. Ask him. He’ll tell you all about sows and heifers and things drying up and empty chambers. It’s a whole theoretical system.”

Jess laughed. “I remember that about your father. He always had a lot of ideas. He and Harold could sit at the kitchen table and eat a
whole pie, wedge by wedge, and drink two or three pots of coffee and one-up each other.”

“They still do that,” said Rose. “You shouldn’t think something’s changed just because you haven’t seen it in thirteen years.”

Jess looked at her. I said, “I guess you remember that Rose always offers her unvarnished opinion. That hasn’t changed, either.” He smiled at me. Rose, who is never embarrassed, said, “I remembered something, too. I remembered that Jess used to like his mom’s Swiss steak, so that’s what I brought.” She lifted the lid on her dish and Jess raised his eyebrows. He said, “I haven’t eaten meat in seven years.”

“Well, then, you’re probably going to starve to death around here. There’s Eileen Dahl, Ginny. She sent me those flowers in the hospital. I’m going to talk to her.” She strode away. Jess didn’t watch her. Instead, he lifted the lid on my dish. It was cheese garbanzo enchiladas. I said, “Where’ve you been living, then?”

“Seattle, lately. I lived in Vancouver before the amnesty.”

“We never heard you’d gone to Canada.”

“I’ll bet. I went right after infantry training, on my first leave.”

“Did your dad know?”

“Maybe. I never know what he knows.”

“Zebulon County must seem pretty ordinary after that, after being in the mountains and all.”

“It is beautiful there. I don’t know—” His gaze flicked over my shoulder, then back to my face. He smiled right at me. “We’ll talk about it. I hear you’re the closest neighbors now.”

“To the east, I guess so.”

I saw my father’s car drive in. Pete and Ty were with him, I knew that. But Caroline was with him, too. That was unexpected. I waved as she unfolded out of the car, and Jess turned to look. I said, “There she is. That’s my husband, Ty. You must remember him, and Pete, Rose’s husband. Did you ever meet him?”

Jess said, “No kids?”

“No kids.” I gave this remark my customary cheery tone, then filled in quickly, “Rose has two, though, Pammy and Linda. I’m very close to them. Actually they’re in boarding school. Down in West Branch.”

“That’s pretty high class for your average family farmer.”

I shrugged. By this time, Ty and Caroline had made their way to us through the crowd, peeling off Daddy at the group of farmers standing around Harold and Pete at the tub of iced beer. Ty gave me a squeeze around the waist and a kiss on the cheek.

I got married to Ty when I was nineteen, and the fact was that even after seventeen years of marriage, I was still pleased to see him every time he appeared.

I wasn’t the first in my high school class to go, nor the last. Ty was twenty-four. He’d been farming for six years, and his farm was doing well. A hundred and sixty acres, no mortgage. Its size was fine with my father, because it showed a proper history—Ty’s dad, the second Smith boy, had inherited the extra farm, not the original piece of land. There’d been no fiddling with that, which went to Ty’s uncle, and amounted to about four hundred acres, no mortgage. Ty’s dad had shown additional good sense in marrying a plain woman and producing only one child, which was the limit, my father often said, of a hundred and sixty acres. When Ty was twenty-two and had been farming long enough to know what he was doing, his father died of a heart attack, which he suffered out in the hog pen. To my father, this was the ultimate expression of the right order of things, so when Ty started visiting us the year after that, my father was perfectly happy to see him.

He was well spoken and easy to get along with, and of his own accord he preferred me to Rose. He had good manners, one of the things about a man, I often thought, that lasts and lasts. Every time he came in, he smiled and said, “Hello, Ginny,” and when he went away, he told me when he’d be home, and made a point of saying good-bye. He’d thank me for meals and habitually used the word “please.” Good manners stood him in good stead with my father, too, since they farmed Daddy’s place together, and rented out the hundred and sixty. Daddy didn’t get along as well with Pete, and Ty spent a fair amount of time smoothing things over between them. Over the years, it became clear that Tyler and I were good together, especially by contrast to Rose and Pete, who were generally more stirred up and dissatisfied.

Ty greeted Jess with his characteristic friendliness, and it was weird
to look back and forth between them. The last time I’d seen Jess, he had seemed so young and Ty had seemed so mature. Now they seemed like contemporaries, with Jess, in fact, a shade more sophisticated and self-assured.

Caroline shook hands with Jess in her brisk, lawyer’s way that Rose always called her “take-me-seriously-or-I’ll-sue-you” demeanor. She may have been, as Daddy thought, old for a breeder, but she was young for a lawyer. I tried hard, for her sake, not to be amused by her, but I could see, right then, that Jess Clark was a little amused, too. She informed us that she planned to spend that night, then go to church with us, and be back in Des Moines by suppertime. Nothing the least unusual. Well, I’ve thought over every moment of that party time and time again, sifting for pointers, signals, ways of knowing how to do things differently from the way they got done. There were no clues.