A Thousand Acres: A Novel (44 page)

Only Rose was planning for change. Brooding on her body, her voluptuous, furious, secret, waiting body, had become a habit of mine, a meditation that I hoped would move her appetite toward the sausages and sauerkraut, her hand toward a jar I had canned for her, but now I didn’t think of that. I thought instead of that cell dividing in the dark and then living rather than dying, subdividing, multiplying, growing, Rose’s real third child (“her only third child,” a voice whispered in my head), the one who would not be parted from her. Her dark child, the child of her union with Daddy.

I shook my head, and snapped back to the events in the courtroom.

Caroline had returned and was stepping up to the witness stand. She straightened her skirt and sat down. She smiled at her lawyer, then at Ken LaSalle. The lawyer said, “Ms. Cook, when were your suspicions aroused about the plans going forward for the division of the Cook farm?”

“I was suspicious from the first. The whole project was very untypical of my father.”

He asked her what she meant. They conversed in a friendly way about Daddy, portraying him as a “hands-on manager,” a “lifelong farmer.”

“What was your response to the project?”

“I made my reservations known.”

“How were they greeted?”

“My sister Ginny Smith urged me very strongly to go along with the idea.”

“What did you think of that?”

“I suspected her of ulterior motives. I knew she and Rose both wanted to get their hands—”

Mr. Cartier objected.

Rose said, “Oh my God, listen to this.” The judge cast her a severe glance.

The Des Moines lawyer tried another tack. He said, “Later, it was more than suspicions, right? Later you were really worried about your father’s safety, right?”

“They sent him out into a terrible storm—”

Mr. Cartier objected. Hearsay.

The lawyer tried again, “Mr. Smith told you that they had sent
your father out into a terrible storm, did he not?” Rose leaned toward me and whispered, “Did he?”

I let Caroline speak for me. “Yes, he did. It was common knowledge—”

Rose sat back in her chair. “I’m not surprised.”

Judge Ottarson pulled his reading glasses down on his nose and skimmed a document on his desk. Then he interrupted her. He said, “The mismanagement or abuse clause in the preincorporation agreement that is the occasion for this suit refers, Ms. Cook, to the farm properties only. You may not introduce the subject of your father and his relation to your sisters into this courtroom.”

Caroline flushed red, and said, “But—” Her lawyer shushed her. Then he smiled slyly, comfortingly. I looked over at Mr. Cartier, who was watching with lively interest.

The lawyer said, “Has the Cook farm ever incurred debt?”

Caroline said, “No.”

“Is it now burdened with debt?”

“It certainly is—” She wanted to go on, but she stopped, triumphantly, with a glance at Rose, then at me. After a moment, she turned her face stonily forward again, and smoothed her hair. Mr. Cartier declined to interview her, and she stood up. There was dead silence as her hundred-dollar heels clicked back to her seat, then a loud screech as she pulled out her chair. Marv Carson was called to the stand.

Yes, he said, his bank was owed about $125,000 with the farm as collateral.

Yes, he said, if all went as planned, the bank would loan us $300,000. He smiled proudly.

He said, “This is going to be a first-class hog operation.”

Yes, he said, the Smiths and Mrs. Lewis were up-to-date in their payments.

The Des Moines lawyer said, “Mr. Carson, many would consider it remarkably risky for a family operation to take on this kind of debt. Don’t you?”

“Oh, no. I feel good about it.”

The Des Moines lawyer raised his eyebrows.

“Hogs are an excellent investment. Profit is going to be in hogs.
The idea of being debt-free is a very old-fashioned one. A
family
can be debt-free, that’s one thing. A
business
is different. You’ve got to grasp that a farm is a business first and foremost. Got to have capital improvements in a business. Economy of scale. All that.” Marv was grinning. Clearly, he considered that he was giving everyone in the courtroom a well-deserved lesson. He went on, “What I worry about is the delay, frankly. This delay is very bad for us. These buildings should be almost finished by now, and it’s been almost two months—”

“What a coincidence,” muttered Rose.

The Des Moines lawyer said, “Thank you, Mr. Carson, that’s all for me,” turned his back on Marv, and strode back to his table. Marv paused, startled. Mr. Cartier got up and had Marv elaborate on the costs of the delay. Mr. Cartier was very cheerful.

Marv went back to his seat on our side of the courtroom. He was careful not to look at us, full of his role as “expert witness.” But I realized right then that by watching Marv, just by watching him, you could tell where the money was, and where it was going to go.

After a moment, Judge Ottarson lifted his papers and stacked them together meditatively, straightening the bottom edge against the dark wood of his desk, then both side edges. He pushed his glasses up his nose, then thumbed through the original preincorporation contract.

He said, “I don’t feel I need to take a recess to decide this matter. The arguments are fairly clear, and the plaintiffs have failed to establish either abuse of the property in question or mismanagement of its assets. The fact is, in this state, if you legally sign over your property, it is very hard to change your mind and get it back.” He paused for a long time and seemed to be debating how to go on. Finally, he said, “Obviously, the mental condition of the chief plaintiff, Mr. Cook, must also come under consideration. Were the property to revert to him, it’s not clear, given the deep divisions in the family, who would farm it. But this is only a corollary consideration. The law is clear. I find in favor of the defendants, Mrs. Smith, Mrs. Lewis, and Mr. Smith.”

We began to shift around, but he went on. He said, “I would also like to say to Mr. LaSalle, Mr. Crockett, Mr. Rasmussen, and Ms. Cook that there is merit in the argument of Mr. Cartier that this
may have constituted a frivolous misuse of this court, and Mr. Rasmussen and Ms. Cook, in particular, should have bethought themselves before they decided to carry a family fracas this far. For that reason, the plaintiffs shall be required to pay fees and costs. This court is adjourned.”

Rose was smiling.

Caroline’s face was red and angry.

One thing was surely true about going to court. It had marvelously divided us from each other and from our old lives. There could be no reconciliation now.

I
T DIDN’T SURPRISE ME
that we couldn’t tolerate the verdict. In the first place, there was no precedent to show us how to behave or what to feel. Nor did we do anything that we had not already planned to do—Ty and I went home to feed the hogs in our pickup, Rose went to get the girls in her car, and Jess drove Pete’s pickup back to his place. I noticed that we each thanked Mr. Cartier rather hurriedly and then got out of there, as if we were ashamed.

Ty and I drove home almost in silence. It was the nineteenth of October. The leaves on the trees were the same color as the leaves caught in the ditches and fence lines. The old cornstalks in the harvested fields were almost white by contrast. A few farmers were still out finishing the last of their beans. I could see, and almost hear, from long habit, the sere, reddish-black pods rattling in the breezes as we passed. Hogs and white-faced beef cattle grazed the fenced fields, cleaning up after the combines. Here and there, a farmer was fall plowing. The stiff, chill wind swirled the dry soil into the air. White farmhouses stood out crisply against the umber background, their front yards decorated with corn shocks and dark sun pumpkins.

Last year, Harold and Loren had gone to Arizona for two weeks in October and November, in the cheap period before the season opened. This year, we’d heard, they were planning to move into town. Harold’s eyes were still painful, and he didn’t like to be left alone. A couple of women, sisters, had agreed to watch him during the day while Loren was working the farm, but they didn’t drive,
so Loren had decided to rent a place near the Cabot post office. Marlene Stanley had told this to Rose. Ty, I was sure, had had the same news directly from Harold, but it was not something we talked about.

When we drove into our yard, Ty got out even before the engine died, and headed for the barn. It was Friday. I supposed that work on the hog buildings would begin again the following week. The poured floors, which had been exposed to the weather for over three months, were a little discolored, and one had developed a long crack that needed patching, but in spite of potential problems, the project had to go forward. We were too much in debt to stop now.

Every farm after harvest looks neglected and disorganized, but as we drove into our yard, and then as I went into our house, our place seemed lifeless to me, far beyond the power of our usual winter cleaning up, mending, and planning to make it what it had been only the previous spring. The house looked somewhat better, thanks to my obsessive work, but the furnishings were old and mismatched, the carpeting and vinyl dark with stains that simply didn’t respond to the products available for removing them. Shit, blood, oil, and grease eventually hold sway in spite of the most industrious efforts. Usually, I didn’t take in my place as a whole. I focused on a chair I’d just shampooed or a picture I’d found at the antique store in Cabot, or a corner that looked presentable or welcoming. Tonight I came back to my house as a stranger, and I remembered a friend of Daddy’s who told me once about when rural electrification came through. Unlike Daddy’s family, Jim’s family hadn’t had a gasoline generator to light the house. When the wires were strung and the family gathered in the kitchen to witness the great event, the mother’s first words of the new era were, “Everything’s so dirty!” Those could have been my first words of our new era, attesting to how strange and far from home I felt taking meat from my refrigerator and salting it with my old red plastic saltshaker and slapping it onto the broiler pan I’d used for seventeen years.

I peeled potatoes and put them on to boil, then went out in the garden and picked some brussels sprouts off the stalk. If you leave them through the fall, through the frosts, they sweeten up. The same with parsnips. The garden, too, was a ruin. I’d pulled out the tomato
vines and hung them over cold water pipes in the cellar. The fruit would ripen slowly until sometime around Thanksgiving. The pepper plants were tall, leafless stalks, the potato bed a jumbled plot of dark earth and wet straw. Only the brussels sprouts on their four-foot stalks looked graceful. A giant green rosette of spreading leaves opened two feet wide at the top, then the stalk curved strongly downward, presenting neat alternating rows of dark knobs. I broke a couple of dozen off, snap, snap, snap, and took them inside. All my motions were familiar—running an inch of water in an old pot, piercing the bottoms of the sprouts with a fork. I turned down the heat under the potatoes. Ty came in, stepping out of his boots and hanging his insulated coverall by the door. I said, “Supper will be ready in twenty minutes.”

“Great.”

I set the pan of sprouts over a low flame.

He finished washing his hands, dried them carefully on a dish towel, and walked out of the room. I turned on the oven to broil and bent down to see if it had lit, because sometimes the pilot light went out. I said, “One new thing we could get would be a range. This one is a menace.”

He was back in the room. He said, “I don’t necessarily think this is the right time to get a new range.”

“Well, maybe it will just blow up, then, and put us out of our misery.”

He heaved an exasperated sigh, then said, “I’ll bring the range over from your father’s place tomorrow. That’s pretty new.”

“Or we could move over there. I’m the oldest.”

“That house is too big for us.” He said this as if he were saying, how dare you?

“Well, it was built to be big. It was built to show off. Maybe now I’ve inherited my turn to show off.”

“I think you’ve shown off plenty this summer, frankly.”

Steam rose from the boiling potatoes and the simmering brussels sprouts. I remembered the broiler, which was now surely heated enough, and I opened the oven door and set the chops under the heat.

We were silent. The contained roar of the gas and then, a minute
later, the first sizzling of meat juices, took on the volume and weight of oracular mutterings, almost intelligible. With a feeling of punching through a wall, I said, “I need a thousand dollars.”

Ty widened the opening. “I have a thousand dollars in my pocket, from the rent on my place. Fred brought it by last night, but I didn’t have a chance to put it in the bank.”

I held out my hand. He took a wad of money out of his pocket. It felt large and solid in my palm, larger and solider than it was. I went to the hall tree and took down my coat and scarf, then I went to the key hook and took the keys to my car, and with the meat broiling in the oven and the potatoes and sprouts boiling on the stove, I walked out the door. When he saw, I suppose, that I really meant to get in and drive away, Ty yelled, “I gave my life to this place!”

Without looking around at him, I yelled back, “Now it’s yours!” The night was dark already, and moonless. I stumbled over a rut in the yard that threw me against the cold metal skin of the car. I reached for the door handle, but the money was still in my hand, so I thrust it into the pocket of my coat.

In Mason City, I ate a hot dog at the A and W.

In St. Paul, I found a room at the YWCA. They didn’t ask any questions when I didn’t write down a home address on the registration slip.