A Thousand Acres: A Novel (49 page)

I sat down on the couch and stuck my hands in the pockets of my sweatshirt. I sensed Rose there, pressing on me like a bad conscience, and I remembered her saying, with that mixture of irony and eagerness that was hers alone, “Ask me something. I want to tell you the truth.”

I should have told Caroline the truth.

I cast my gaze around the frigid room. I said, aloud, “Rose. Rose, she didn’t ask. There are just some things you have to ask for.”

After half an hour, when Caroline had not returned, I went out to my own borrowed truck to wait for her. I turned on the engine and the heater, and sat for another half hour. By then it was nearly one in the afternoon, and I was numb with the cold. I drove into town and had some lunch at the Cabot Café, and then I drove to Pike.

Marv Carson was in his office. He had tall bottles of three different kinds of mineral water on his desk, one from Italy, one from France, and one from Sweden. I said, “We don’t want anything, Marv. Everything can go.”

He said, “Well, that’s terrific, Ginny. I’ll tell the Boone brothers to haul it all out. You coming down for the auction? It’s a hard thing to watch, let me warn you.”

“No. I’ve got to work that day. Just let me know.”

But in the end, I couldn’t drive away.

It was nearly four when I got back to the farm. I turned down County 686, and drove dead slowly, as slowly as if I were walking, or driving a tractor, or horses, mules, or even oxen, which Grandpa Davis had used the first two summers ninety years before. I passed the drainage wells, two on each side of the road, their grates a little rusted but still bolted firmly down. I stopped the truck and went
and stood on one. Under the noise of the wind, I could faintly hear the eternal drip and trickle of the sea beneath the soil.

The house repelled me now, but the barn drew me. I crossed the frosted, snow-patched grass and pushed the big door back on its slider, then back farther, because the westering sun made up for the electric lights that had been shut off. The big green and yellow pieces of equipment were icy to the touch, parked expertly by someone, taking up every inch of floor space. They had not been cleaned yet—Rose might have weakened too fast for that—and all the tire treads, the metal joints, the knives and hoses were covered with dried black mud and pale corn husks, furry dark fragments of bean pods and stalks. I kicked a crust of mud off the front wheel of the tractor. The big room smelled of diesel fuel and grease.

Things hung from the walls: part of an antique harness that might bring some money, three hurricane lamps, old buckets and feed pans nested precariously together, rakes. A pile of rusted bailing wire. On the workbench, some C clamps, a hammer, which I picked up, a band saw, a spare ax handle. Other tools. A folded tarp. A peck-sized fruit basket. Back in the corner, a ray of sunlight shone on the old pump from the well outside Daddy’s back door, here since they piped water into the house. A half a dozen paint cans. A stack of old windows, some glass broken beneath them. On the workbench, cans of nails, new and used. A box of fuses. The lid of an old chicken incubator. I wondered where it would all go. A few plastic Treflan jugs lay underneath the workbench, both with lids and without. A pyramid of ancient one-gallon tins was stacked in the farthest corner, with a little space cleared around them. It was getting cold as the sun approached the horizon, but I went around the tractor and climbed gingerly over the disk. Dust floated in the air. I picked up one of the dry and dented tins. The label said that it contained DDT. “Handle according to instructions.” I wondered where it could all go.

I moved the truck into Rose’s driveway anyway. Then I got out and walked around Rose’s old house. The butter-colored plywood fading to gray that covered the windows made the place look blind and desolate. The white siding on the western face of the house was dark with grit. Rose would have washed that down.

The boards nailed over the cellar door came up easily enough with
the claw hammer, even though my hands were shaking in the frigid dusky breeze. The metal handle turned with barely a creak. I lifted the door. There was no electricity and light outside was fading. I didn’t carry matches. My feet felt their way down the steps one at a time. I knew Rose’s shelves weren’t far from the doorway, so I stepped forward with my hands outstretched. I felt cobwebs drift across my fingers and face.

The rough wooden shelves held smooth cold pints and quarts. I didn’t have to see them to know what they were—jams and pickles, tomatoes, dilled beans, tomato juice, beets, applesauce, peach butter. Rose’s bounty, years of farm summers, a habit we kept up long after most of our neighbors. I felt a box and knew I had found the sausages, shoved in helter-skelter owing to the jumble of passionate events, then later pushed back, pushed aside, forgotten. I carried the box awkwardly up the steps. I closed the cellar door, and in the dark, with the truck lights trained on my work, I nailed the door down again. The kraut and the liquid inside the jars had turned a deep orange, and the lids were rusted a little around the rims. I kept glancing at them beside me on the seat as I drove away, and so I forgot to take a last look at the farm.

Pam was at her boyfriend’s and Linda was asleep when I got home. She had dropped off over her economics text. I marked her place and set it on the floor, then turned out her bedside light and pulled the comforter over her shoulders. After looking at her a moment, I smoothed the hair back from her face. Sleeping, she did look like Rose had looked years ago, before her wedding, when, I suppose, she was happily anticipating a life that never came to pass.

I set the jars by the sink and looked down into the garbage disposal. I was perplexed, actually, perplexed and nervous, as if I were holding live explosives. Gingerly, I twisted off the rings and then pried off the caps. A strong sour odor of vinegar bellied out. Maybe there was a better way to do this—take it to the landfill? Burn it somehow? Perhaps I shouldn’t have taken off the caps? I could have saved it forever in these inert glass bottles. I sat down and thought, but thinking got me nowhere. And so I did it, I did the best I could. I poured the sausages and sauerkraut down the disposal, I ground them up, I washed them away with fifteen minutes of water, full blast. I
relied, as I always did now that I lived in the city, on the sewage treatment plant that I had never seen. I had misgivings.

But then I had something else, too. I had a burden lift off me that I hadn’t even felt the heaviness of until then, and it was the burden of having to wait and see what was going to happen.

T
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B
OONE
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ROTHERS
A
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H
OUSE
was plenty busy that spring, and for years to come, riding on the surging waves of the land as it rolled and shifted from farmer to farmer. I wasn’t told where our dishes and our couches and our tractors and our pictures and our frying pans washed up. Our thousand acres seems to have gone to The Heartland Corporation, which may or may not have had some of the Stanleys in it—perhaps some of the Stanley cousins who’d long ago moved to Chicago. The Chelsea, that once came on a train, was too big to move, so they bulldozed it. Rose’s bungalow went to Henry Grove, as it had once come from Columbus, and my house, too, was taken down to make room for an expansion of the hog buildings to give them a five-thousand-sow capacity. When you stand at the intersection of County 686 and Cabot Street Road now, you see that the fields make no room for houses or barnyards or people. No lives are lived any more within the horizon of your gaze.

Caroline and I did share a legacy, our $34,000 tax bill on the sale of the properties. Caroline paid her half, I was told. About my half, the IRS and I have an agreement. I work extra hours, and they don’t press Pam and Linda for money. I pay two hundred dollars a month, every month, and I think of it as my “regret money,” and though what I am regretful for mutates and evolves, I am glad to pay it, the only mortgage I will ever be given. They have calculated that I will have my regret paid off in fourteen years, and maybe by that time I will know what it is. At any rate, regret is part of my inheritance.

Solitude is part of my inheritance, too. Men are friendly to me at the restaurant, and sometimes they ask me to a movie, but there is no man like Jess, graceful and mysterious, no man like Ty, forthright and good and blind, no man like Pete, mercurial and haunted, no man like Daddy, who is what he is and can’t be labeled. The men who ask me out are simple and strange, defeated by their own solitude. It is easier, and more seductive, to leave those doors closed.

I have inherited Pam and Linda. Pam looks like a heftier Rose, and her major in college was music education. Linda looks like a more skeptical, less passionate Pete, and her major in college is prebusiness. She is especially interested in vertical food conglomerates, and may go to work for General Foods. We talk sometimes, with reasonable calm, about Daddy and Rose and Pete and Caroline and even Jess. They understand that all Rose could bequeath them was her view of things. Her honesty has given them some confidence. They are also cautious, and I doubt they will ever throw that caution to the winds. They are closer and more protective of one another than they ever were as children. I recognize that they don’t have a great deal of faith in my guardianship, though they like me, and we get along smoothly.

I see in them what I am too close to see in myself, the fusing and mixing of their parents. I see how their inheritance takes place right there, in the shape of their eyes and their glance, the weight of their bodies and their movements, in their intelligence and their thoughts.

Looking at them forces me to know that although the farm and all its burdens and gifts are scattered, my inheritance is with me, sitting in my chair. Lodged in my every cell, along with the DNA, are molecules of topsoil and atrazine and paraquat and anhydrous ammonia and diesel fuel and plant dust, and also molecules of memory: the bracing summer chill of floating on my back in Mel’s pond, staring at the sky; the exotic redolence of the dresses in my mother’s closet; the sharp odor of wet tomato vines; the stripes of pain my father’s belt laid across my skin; the deep chill of waiting for the school bus in the blue of a winter’s dawn. All of it is present now, here; each particle weighs some fraction of the hundred and thirty-six pounds that attaches me to the earth, perhaps as much as the print weighs in other sorts of histories.

Let us say that each vanished person left me something, and that I feel my inheritance when I am reminded of one of them. When I am reminded of Jess, I think of the loop of poison we drank from, the water running down through the soil, into the drainage wells, into the lightless mysterious underground chemical sea, then being drawn up, cold and appetizing, from the drinking well into Rose’s faucet, my faucet. I am reminded of Jess when I drive in the country, and see the anhydrous trucks in the distance, or the herbicide incorporators, or the farmers plowing their fields in the fall, or hills that are ringed with black earth and crowned with soil so pale that the corn only stands in it, as in gravel, because there are no nutrients to draw from it. Jess left me the eyes to see that. I am reminded of Jess when I see one of my five children on the street, an eleven-year-old, a thirteen-year-old, a fifteen-year-old, a nineteen-year-old, a twenty-two-year-old. Jess left me some anger at that.

Anger itself reminds me of Rose, but so do most of the women I see on the street, who wear dresses she would have liked, ride children on their hips with the swaying grace that she had, raise their voices wishfully, knowingly, indignantly, ruefully, ironically, affectionately, candidly, and even wrongly. Rose left me a riddle I haven’t solved, of how we judge those who have hurt us when they have shown no remorse or even understanding.

Remorse reminds me of Daddy, who had none, at least none for me. My body reminds me of Daddy, too, of what it feels like to resist without seeming to resist, to absent yourself while seeming respectful and attentive. Waking in the dark reminds me of Daddy, cooking reminds me of Daddy, the whole wide expanse of the mid-continental sky, which is where we look for signs of trouble—that, too, reminds me of Daddy.

A certain type of man reminds me of Ty, and when I think of him I remember the ordered, hardworking world I used to live in, Ty’s good little planet.

And when I remember that world, I remember my dead young self, who left me something, too, which is her canning jar of poisoned sausage and the ability it confers, of remembering what you can’t imagine. I can’t say that I forgive my father, but now I can imagine what he probably chose never to remember—the goad of an unthinkable
urge, pricking him, pressing him, wrapping him in an impenetrable fog of self that must have seemed, when he wandered around the house late at night after working and drinking, like the very darkness. This is the gleaming obsidian shard I safeguard above all the others.