A Thousand Acres: A Novel (45 page)

A
LL DAY AND ALL NIGHT
, even over the hum of the air conditioner in the summer, you could hear the cars passing my apartment on Interstate 35. I liked the same thing about that as about working my waitressing job at Perkins, where you could get breakfast, the food of hope and things to be done, any time. There was nothing time-bound, and little that was seasonal about the highway or the restaurant. Even in Minnesota, where the winter was a big topic of conversation and a permanent occasion for people’s heroic self-regard, it was only winter on the highway a few hours out of the year. The rest of the time, traffic kept moving. Snow and rain were reduced to scenery nearly as much as any other kind of weather, something to look out the window at but nothing that hindered you. The lamps in the restaurant, above the highway, in my neighbors’ windows, in the parking lot of my apartment building, cast intersecting orbs of light that I could just walk into, that I didn’t have to generate. The noise was the same, continuous, reassuring: human intentions (talking, traveling, eating) perennially renewing themselves whether I happened to sleep or wake, feel brisk or lazy.

The thing I loved most about the restaurant was the small talk. People bantered and smiled, thanked you, made polite requests, chatted about early visits or the weather or where they were headed. It went on and on, day and night, pleasant and meant to create pleasantness. Eileen, the manageress, encouraged us to follow company guidelines about creating small talk when it was absent, because, she
said, people always ate more and enjoyed their food if they didn’t have to concentrate on it too single-mindedly. Mostly, though, you didn’t have to work at it. You could walk into the small talk the way you walked into the lighted dining room, and it would carry you. Some of the girls didn’t like the small talk, so they sounded a tad mechanical when they said, “And how was your meal, sir?” but for me, it was like a tune playing in my head, and the phrases I produced—“What may I bring you?” “Will that be all?” “Thanks for stopping, come in again”—were me picking up my part of the harmony.

I saw this as my afterlife, and for a long time it didn’t occur to me that it contained a future. That it didn’t, in fact, was what I liked about it. I felt a semisubmerged conviction that I had entered upon the changeless eternal. A toothbrush, a beat-up sofa bed, a lamp I found in a trash bin, shaped like a palm tree but perfectly functional, and a cardboard carton to set it upon, a hot-water kettle, a box of teabags in the refrigerator, two bath towels from a J. C. Penney white sale, a box of bath-oil beads. Pajamas. My uniforms from work gave every workday a sameness that felt like perpetuity. When I wasn’t working I stayed in my sofa bed or my bathtub, reading books from the library, one author at a time, every book in the collection. I preferred them to have been productive, but now to be dead, like Daphne du Maurier or Charles Dickens, so that their books formed a kind of afterlife for them and seemed as distant and self-contained, for me, as Heaven or Hell. News was what I didn’t want. I didn’t own a television or a radio. It didn’t occur to me to buy a newspaper.

It took me until Christmas to address a note to Rose revealing where I was. When I got her note in return, the sight of her handwriting was so surprising that I didn’t recognize it at first. I had expected, even more than I consciously realized, that she would have eaten the sausages and died. But she didn’t mention the sausages. She wrote that five days after the trial, Daddy, who wouldn’t let Caroline out of his sight although he still seemed to feel that she had been killed, went along to Dahl’s, in Des Moines, for the week’s shopping. He was pushing the cart; she was guiding it down the aisles. He had a heart attack in the cereal aisle. I imagined him falling
into the boxes of cornflakes. The funeral had been a small one. Rose had not gone.

Rose and Ty had decided to split the farm down the road, the eastern section going to Rose (she and the girls had moved into the big house after Thanksgiving) and the western section going to Ty. She and Jess planned to farm the whole section organically, with green manures and oats and South American cover crops interplanted with the corn.

I sent the girls each a Christmas present, a polka-dot beach towel for Pammy and a stuffed cat for Linda. I didn’t write back to Rose, because there was nothing to tell. Everything between us, more, it turned out, than we could stand, was known. Rose, Daddy, Ty, Jess, Caroline, Pete, Pammy, and Linda, so thoroughly and continuously in me, were too present for letters or phone calls.

In February she wrote again, only a note to say that Jess had gone back to the West Coast, and she had rented most of her land back to Ty until she understood more about organic farming. She wrote, “The girls and I have decided to stay vegetarians, though. And there are some papers coming for you to sign. P.S. I can’t say I’m surprised about Jess.”

They came, and I signed them. Ty now had three hundred eighty acres, all his own, and Rose, six hundred forty. I had a garden apartment, two bedrooms up and a living room and kitchen down, with a little deck overlooking the highway in the back and a little concrete stoop and my parking place out front. The rent was $235 a month plus electricity, but the heat was included. Behind a fence at the other end of the building was a small, kidney-shaped swimming pool, about twenty-five feet by twelve feet, nowhere deeper than four feet.

That Jess had left her didn’t seem to make a difference in my vengeful wishes. If anything, the friendly, informative tone of her notes made them burn a little hotter. Didn’t she realize how far I was from her? Now, as always, wasn’t she relying on some changeless loyalty in me, ignoring my angers and complaints as if they were meaningless in comparison with her plans?

The day I received this news, the transmission went out on my car, so I traded it for an eight-year-old Toyota with eighty thousand
miles on the odometer. I liked the way it looked in front of my apartment, unassuming and anonymous.

Otherwise, my life passed in a blur, that blessing of urban routine. The sense of distinct events that is so inescapable on a farm, where every rainstorm is thick with odor and color, and usefulness and timing, where omens of prosperity or ruin to come are sought in every change, where any of the world’s details may contain the one thing that above all else you will regret not knowing, this sense lifted off me. Maybe another way of saying it is that I forgot I was still alive.

O
NE MORNING, SEVERAL YEARS
into this routine, I came up to the table of a solitary man in a cap. From behind, I took him to be a trucker. I was just beginning my six a. m. shift, and there were already four other truckers smoking alone at four other tables. I smiled and said, “What would you like this morning, sir? I can recommend the potato pancakes with applesauce,” when I saw a white envelope on the table with my name on it. I looked the man in the face, probably in a startled way, and saw that it was Ty. He said, “Hey. Open it.”

I said, “Hey. How’s Rose?” Dead now? I wondered at once. Why else would he come to see me?

“Same as always.”

It was a birthday card. Inside the card was a picture of Pammy, who was taller and big-busted now, standing next to Rose herself. Linda, on the end, was wearing glasses. Her hair had darkened and grown out to a thick, glossy mane. She looked pretty but interesting, like Pete as an intellectual. She was wearing a lot of black. I made myself look carefully at Rose. She looked unchanged. I said, “I guess today is my birthday, isn’t it? I hadn’t remembered it yet.”

“Thirty-nine.” He smiled, but it was easy to tell he wasn’t happy. This transfixed me, and I forgot my place and my business until he said, “Let me order something,” and cocked his eyebrow at Eileen. I glanced at her. She smiled. I said, “Oh, she’s just curious. She thinks I’m without living relatives.”

“Are you?”

“Of course not.” People started filling up my section. I said, “Have the blueberry pancakes and the sausage. That’s the best. I’ll bring a pot of coffee.”

“Funny how we fall into this pattern.”

I put my pad in my pocket. I said, “Don’t flirt with me.”

He lingered over his breakfast, reading the Des Moines
Register
he had brought along, as well as a
Star
and a
USA Today
that he got out of our newspaper rack (and folded up neatly and replaced). He drank four cups of coffee and asked for hash browns, then a piece of apple pie. I tried to spot our pickup in the parking lot as I scurried from table to table, but I didn’t see it. He paid, talked for a moment to the cashier, and walked out. He left a 20 percent tip. Generous for a farmer but cheap for a trucker. I had the birthday card and the picture in my uniform pocket. Once or twice I took it out and looked at it.

He was back at ten-thirty, my “lunch hour.” We went across the street to Wendy’s.

My birthday fell on the twenty-ninth of April. The Ty I had known for all of my adult life spent the twenty-ninth of April in the fields. I ordered a Coke. Ty asked for another cup of coffee. We sat by the window, fronting the Perkins lot across the street. There were no pickups at all in the lot. I said, “What are you driving?”

“That Chevy.”

It was a beat-up yellow Malibu. Things piled in the backseat were visible through the rear window. I said, “Why?”

Ty, I would have to say, did look different. I had seen a lot more men in the last two and a half years, a catalog of American men in every variety, size, and color. Ty looked like the settled ones, those with habits of such long standing that they were now rituals. That, I had come to realize, was the premier sign of masculinity and maturity, a settled conviction, born of experience, that these rituals would and should be catered to. He didn’t look unattractive, though. Weathered, loose-limbed. I wouldn’t have picked him for a trucker from the front.

He said, “I didn’t want to carry all my stuff out in the weather. I’m going to Texas.”

“What for?”

“They’ve got big corporate hog operations down there. I thought maybe I could get myself a job at one of those.”

He watched me, waiting, I knew, for the question I was supposed to ask, but I couldn’t ask it. Finally, he shifted his feet under the table and said, “Marv Carson wouldn’t give me a loan to plant a crop this year. I didn’t have any collateral except the crop itself, and they decided to stop making those kind of loans, with the farm situation the way it is.”

“I heard it was bad.”

“Bob Stanley shot himself in the head. Right out in the barn. Marlene found him. That’s been the worst.”

“They lost the farm?”

“He knew they were going to. That’s why he did it. Marlene’s working in Zebulon Center now, as a teacher’s aide in the elementary school.”

My mouth was dry. I took a sip of the Coke. I said, “What about you?”

“Those hog buildings killed me, that’s what it was. The winter was so bad after the trial—”

“The hearing. Nobody was on trial.”

“I was.”

We glared at each other, then veiled our glares.

He went on. “There was just one holdup after another with the buildings, and then I had to start over with all new sows, so that was a piece of change. I sold my place, but property values weren’t anything like they’d been, and what I got didn’t cover much of the loan, with the sows. Just got behind. And then more behind. The Chevy dealer made me a straight trade.”

“An eight-year-old sedan for a four-year-old pickup?”

“I wasn’t in a position to complain. Anyway, this is kind of a relief. And I’ve never been down there. Or anyplace else for that matter.”

I looked him over without shyness, with the inspecting gaze a wife earns after a certain number of years. I said, “You don’t look relieved.”

He shrugged.

“What about Rose?”

“I haven’t been getting along with Rose all that well.”

This was a touchy subject, so we watched two women come in the front door and order bowls of chili. Finally, he said, “She’s getting a crop in and out. She’s renting out land. When we split the farm, I took on the whole loan for the buildings, since they were on my land, so she was pretty unencumbered.”

“Except there’s nobody to farm the place.”

“It’s a big place.”

“A thousand acres.”

“All together,” he said, “yeah. My dad would have been scared of that much land.”

“There were bigger places than that out west even when he was alive.”

“You know what he used to say about that? He used to say, ‘Those places got the area, but they ain’t got the volume.’ ”

We laughed, uneasily but together.

I said, “It’s going to fall apart, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.” He said it reluctantly. “Yeah, it is. Rose swears she’s going to keep it together. She’s grim as death about it, and she goes around like some queen.” He glanced at me. “Well, she does. You should see her. Frankly, she’s your dad all over.”

I felt my face get hot.

He said, “I know what she says, Ginny, about your dad. She told me. She’s told everybody by now.”

It was clear he didn’t believe her. We watched a solitary man come in, dressed in a suit. He ordered a Big Single, large fries, and a water.

After a moment he said, “Maybe it happened. I don’t say it didn’t. But it doesn’t make me like her any more. I think people should keep private things private.” His voice was rising as if he could barely contain himself. I was tempted to nod, not because I agreed, but because I recognized how all these things sorted themselves in his mind, and I realized that with the best will in the world, we could never see them in the same way, and that, more than anything else, more than circumstances or history or will or wishing, divided us from each other. But the Ty I’d known was always on the lookout for agreement, reconciliation, so I didn’t nod, knowing how he’d take it. I kept private things private.

“Anyway,” he went on. “That’s the past. I signed the whole thing over to her, the land, the buildings, the hogs, the equipment. She’s sure prices are going to rise, and she’s going to be a land baroness. She’s got it all figured out, the way she always does, and it’s fine with me. I’m going to Texas, so—”