A Thousand Acres: A Novel (31 page)

The second-floor closets were just as I had known them—full of boots and my father’s clothes, which were largely overalls and khaki pants. Actually, only two of the closets had much in them. The others had collected mostly hangers. In my father’s room, I looked at the pictures on the wall—my Davis great-grandparents standing formally for a portrait on the eve of their departure from England. That was the last picture they ever took. My Cook grandparents had their wedding portrait taken in Mason City, and there was also a later picture of Grandfather Cook standing beside his first tractor, a Ford with spiked, tire-less wheels. My mother’s engagement picture, as printed in the Rochester
Post-Bulletin
, which I had seen over and over. I looked more deeply into it this time, but I found nothing. The impenetrable face of a hopeful girl, dressed in the unrevealing uniform of the time; her demeanor was sturdily virtuous. Also on the wall was one black-and-white picture of a baby in a hat, but it could have been any of the three of us. I had seen it many times, but it was a measure of my distance from my father that I had never
admitted to him that I didn’t know who it was. Perhaps he would have said he didn’t remember. It was us, then, interchangeable youth. I looked under the bed. A sock, an empty bottle for aspirin, dustballs.

I opened the drawers that once had held her white gloves for church, her garter belts and girdles and stockings, her full slips and half slips, her brassieres, her long nightgowns, her pink bedjacket with three silvery frog closures that she always wore if she was sick in bed and wore day after day before she died. Now they held only old man’s shorts and undershirts, bandannas, thick white socks, thick wool socks, black socks for dress (three pairs). Thermal underwear. I’d put it all in here, so I knew that it was here. The newspapers folded across the bottom of the drawer were dated April 12, 1972, too late, too late.

Her collection of decorative plates marched around the dining room, on an oak rail just below the ceiling. I’d dusted them the previous spring, not that spring when Rose was sick, but a year earlier. There were no yellowing notes taped to the bottom of any of them. Grandma Edith’s breakfront held nothing but clean linen, clean dishes, clean silver. How did we get so well trained, Rose and I, that we never missed a corner, never left a cleaning job undone, always, automatically, turned our houses inside out once a year?

All at once, I remembered how it was that our mother disappeared. It was Mary Livingstone who did it. Daddy would have called her. At any rate, some weeks after Mommy died, Rose and I came home from school to find all the ladies from Mommy’s church club moving her things out, taking her clothes and her sewing fabrics and her dress patterns and her cookbooks for the poor people in Mason City. It was the accepted course of action for disposing of the effects of the deceased and we didn’t question anything about it. The Lutheran ladies, of course, were as thorough as Mommy herself would have been.

After remembering this, I climbed the stairs, intending to make a bed in one of the rooms for Jess Clark, and the only conscious sense I had of renewed grief at this memory was a kind of self-conscious distance from my body as it rose up the staircase. My hand on the banister looked white and strange, my feet seemed oddly careful as they counted out the steps. I turned on the landing and the downstairs
seemed to vanish while the upstairs seemed to fling itself at me. I put Jess in my old bedroom. The sheets were in the hall linen closet, yellow flowered, the same sheets I’d slept in for four or five years.

In the linen closet was where I found the past, and the reason was that Rose and I always washed the sheets on Daddy’s bed and put them back on, and we always washed the towels and washcloths in the bathroom hamper and hung them back up. It may be that no one looked in the linen closet more than once a year. There were sheets and towels and bed pads and an unopened box of Sweetheart soap. Behind the stack of towels, hidden entirely from sight, was a half-full box of Kotex pads and in the box was an old elastic belt, the kind no one had worn in years. Certainly these were not artifacts of my mother, but of myself. I took out the sheets and pillowcase, reflecting only that this was sort of interesting. If Rose were here, she would assert that Daddy had seen the Kotex box plenty over the years, he’d just never dared to touch it. I smiled.

The sheets fit smoothly over the single bed in the yellow bedroom. I folded back the top edge over the blanket, plumped the pillow. I thought that Jess would sleep there, and I lay down where he would be lying down. The dressing table was beside the window; the closet door was ajar; the yellow paint on the empty chest was peeling; some bronze circles floated in the mirror; a water spot had formed in the ceiling. Lying here, I knew that he had been in there to me, that my father had lain with me on that bed, that I had looked at the top of his head, at his balding spot in the brown grizzled hair, while feeling him suck my breasts. That was the only memory I could endure before I jumped out of the bed with a cry.

My whole body was shaking and moans flowed out of my mouth. The yellow of the room seemed to flash like a strobe light, in time to blood pounding in my head. It was a memory associated with the memory of my mother’s things going to the poor people of Mason City, with the sight of the church ladies in their cars with my mother’s dresses in the backseats, with the sight of Mary Livingstone’s face turned toward me with sober concern, asking me if I wanted to keep anything, and I said no. I lay down on the wooden flooring of the hallway because I felt as if I would faint and fall down the stairs.

Rose was supposed to meet me here at some point, and for a while I just said her name, “Rose, Rose, Rose,” hoping that I could materialize her at the top of the stairs in spite of the fact that no door had slammed, no voice had shouted for me. If she’d been there, I’d have insisted that accepting this knowledge, knowing it all the time, every day for the rest of my life, was simply beyond my strength. And certainly there was more to know. Behind that one image bulked others, mysterious bulging items in a dark sack, unseen as yet, but felt. I feared them. I feared how I would have to store them in my brain, plastic explosives or radioactive wastes that would mutate or even wipe out everything else in there. If Rose had been here, I would somehow have given these images to her to keep for me. She was not there.

So I screamed. I screamed in a way that I had never screamed before, full out, throat-wrenching, unafraid-of-making-a-fuss-and-drawing-attention-to-myself sorts of screams that I made myself concentrate on, becoming all mouth, all tongue, all vibration.

They did the trick. They wore me out, made me feel physical pain which brought me back to the present, that house, that floor, that moment. After a bit, I got up and brushed myself off. I had given myself a headache, so I went into the bathroom and took four aspirin. Rose never came. When I got back to my house, it was nearly nine o’clock. Only nine o’clock. My new life, yet another new life, had begun early in the day.

I
N THE DAYS AFTER THE CHURCH SUPPER
, I looked for Jess Clark to come by. There seemed to be a lot to talk about, but as it turned out, I only saw him twice. Even then, he was quiet and inaccessible. The candor of our earlier talks, which I longed for in spite of myself, had vanished. All he said was, “I’m surprised at how lost I feel”; “I can’t believe how sure I was that he’d changed”; and “I can’t think of anywhere to go now.” These three remarks went unelaborated upon. When I answered them, my responses hung between us—before I finished speaking, Jess was already preoccupied with his own thoughts again. His bearing changed, too. His former fluid grace, the acceptance of change and movement that ran through him, had stiffened. He held himself upright.

It hurt and embarrassed me to see him. I ventured awkward sympathy that failed to ease or soften his demeanor. I knew he was, as always, telling me the truth. He was lost.

I didn’t tell him about my revelation when I lay down on the very bed he was sleeping in every night, even though I couldn’t think of his sleeping in my old room without thinking of it. Nor, after all, had I told Rose, though I’d come close. For one thing, I’d been so certain that she was wrong—suspicious and dismissive of her memories. For another, it was easier to be her sympathetic supporter than her fellow victim. And she would surely remind me of incidents that I could not bear to remember. As certain as sunrise, discussion would open that terrible sack and shine a light into it, and she would press me and I would not be able to resist her, until the drama and anger
of it would sweep me up, too, and I would feel a growing obsession to remember surging through me, seizing me, taking me into a danger that I could not endure yet.

We talked about what Harold had done at the church supper. What I thought was that Jess’s driving up to that organic farm, then caroling on and on about it had been some kind of last straw. I had never thought Harold would be sympathetic to Jess’s organic farming idea, but I thought he had been of two minds about Jess himself. Rose took a darker view: that Harold had been plotting to humiliate Jess for a long time—maybe since Jess’s return—that he’d been playing him off against Loren and encouraging him with the will talk in order to get his hopes up. That was the Harold we had discussed during our Monopoly games, the Harold who hid calculating purposes behind foolishness. I related the incident I’d seen helping Jess transfer their frozen food from their freezer to ours—the way Harold snapped from rage to repartee without even a moment to collect himself. “Doesn’t that prove,” said Rose, “that it’s all a game with him? That everything he does is the result of some calculation? He gets people to laugh at him, but he’s not laughing.”

Then Harold Clark decided to side-dress his corn, maybe so he could get out there on his new tractor one more time. It was not something he did every year, and as far as I could tell, everybody’s corn looked fine. There had certainly been plenty of rain—our corn was an intense, healthy green. But why not, Harold must have thought. A little insurance for the yield, and the pleasure of driving that shiny red piece of machinery along the fencerow next to Cabot Street Road.

The only thing Harold said later was that one of the outside knives looked clogged. What he would have done then was to pull the rope that shut the valve on top of the tank. Maybe he was in a hurry, because then he got down off the tractor and went around to the malfunctioning knife where it bit a few inches into the soil. No one knows why he jiggled the hose. Possibly he only touched it while bending down, brushed against it with his hand or his sleeve. At any rate, the hose jerked off the knife, and with the last puff of pressure remaining in the line, sprayed him in the face. He wasn’t wearing goggles.

Anhydrous ammonia isn’t “drawn to the eyes” because of their
moisture, the way people sometimes say, it only feels that way, because the moisture in the eyes reacts with the fumes and creates a powerful alkali.

In spite of the pain, Harold staggered to the water tank on top of the ammonia tank, knowing that his only hope was to flush his eyes and neutralize the ammonia. The water tank was empty. At this point, Harold was overcome, and he simply keeled over in the field. It was Dollie, on her way to work at Casey’s in Cabot, who saw him. He was kneeling among the rows of corn, rocking back and forth with his hands over his face. There wasn’t any water anywhere out there. She drove him back to the house and helped him get his face under the outdoor spigot. Then Loren got home, and he drove Harold to the hospital in Mason City.

Jess was out running.

Pete was in Pike buying cement.

Rose was helping Linda sew a pair of polka-dot shorts and a halter top.

Daddy was sitting in the glider on Harold’s porch, talking to Marv Carson about getting his farm back.

Ty was working at the top of one of the new Harvestores with the crew of three Minnesota men.

I was dropping Pammy off at Mary Louise Mackenzie’s house in Cabot.

I imagine this news rolling toward each of us like a dust cloud on a sunny day, so unusual that at first it seems more interesting than scary, that it seems, in the distance, rather small, smaller certainly than the vast expanse of the sky, which is where we usually look for signs of danger, and where, still, the sun shines with friendly brightness. But they said in the thirties the dust storms were the worst, for the way that the dust got in everywhere, no matter how you sealed windows and doors and closed your eyes and put blankets over your head. So it was that Harold’s accident and its aftermath got in everywhere, into the solidest relationships, the firmest beliefs, the strongest loyalties, the most deeply held convictions you had about the people you had known most of your life.

The thing about anhydrous is that it does the damage almost instantly. After two minutes or so the corneas are eaten away. There isn’t much the doctors can do besides transplants, and those don’t
work too well. But they kept Harold in the hospital, his eyes patched, for a week, on account of the pain.

This would have been the Thursday after the Sunday of the church supper, three days after Jess Clark moved into Daddy’s house. Feelings were still running high. When I came home from dropping Pammy, Ty was standing in the kitchen. He whirled to face me and said, “Harold Clark’s had an anhydrous accident. He’s blind now,” as if to say, was I satisfied?

“My God.”

“He can’t farm any more, that’s for sure.”

“Where’d you hear this? What happened?”

“Dollie got us down from the Harvestore. Loren took him to the hospital.”

“Then we don’t really know—”

“Shit, Ginny!” he shouted in my face. “We know! The water tank was empty!”

“Maybe the doctors—”

“Stop it!”

“Stop what?”

“Stop being this way, this quiet reasonable way! Don’t you care? The fucking water tank was empty! You know what it means as well as I do!”

I said evenly, “It means he’s blind.”

“Don’t you care? This is a friend of ours! What happened to you? I don’t know you any more.” He headed for the door.