A Thousand Acres: A Novel (6 page)

W
E STOPPED BY OUR PLACE FIRST
, where I took off my hat and changed my dress and Ty put on work clothes—there would be plenty to do after dinner. When I got to my dad’s, the only person in the house was Jess Clark. He was making coffee and everyone else was out in the fields, looking things over. Ty took the pickup and went to find them. Jess poured me a cup of coffee and said, “Things are moving pretty quick, huh?” He sat down across the table.

“Well, I’ve never thought of my father as a creature of impulse before. Today I’m thinking I should be more optimistic. Anyway, I don’t think much will change, really.”

“New buildings? Expanded hog operation? A plantation of black walnuts? Ten acres of gladiolus? Those are changes.”

“Ten acres of gladiolus?”

“Oh, your brother-in-law Pete was talking about that before you came. Eighty thousand bulbs an acre.”

“Eight hundred thousand gladiolus?”

“He says he can sell them at five for a dollar in Minneapolis. That’s a hundred and sixty thousand bucks.”

“Oh, Pete.”

“I was impressed. I talked to him for fifteen minutes and he must have come up with five or six well-thought-out ideas. Over at our place, Loren and my father don’t have any ideas at all. Just corn and beans, beans and corn. When I was a kid, at least there were some
hogs and cattle, and those sheep Loren raised for 4-H. And my mom’s garden, too. She was always trying new varieties, or buying a few okra seeds to see if she could get them to grow this far north. Now even hogs would seem radical to them.”

“The markets are different these days. Anyway, I’m tired of talking about farming. That’s all anyone around here ever talks about. Tell me what sort of things you did in Seattle.”

“Delving into my secret life, huh?” He looked at me until I felt myself blushing, then he smiled and said, “I’ll tell you. Actually, I’m flattered by the interest. Harold acts like I’ve been in prison or something; he hasn’t even asked me what I’ve been doing, and Loren just said one thing, ‘You buy any land out there?’ and when I said I didn’t, he said, ‘Huh. Too bad.’ ”

“What did you do?”

“I ran a food co-op. Generally, we sold organically grown produce, range-fed chickens, undyed cheeses, stuff like that. In Vancouver, I ran the community gardens, too, worked at the crisis center, things like that. I tended bar for a while, worked in a fancy restaurant.”

“Doesn’t sound very settled.”

“It wasn’t. When it got close to being settled, I quit and did something else.”

“You must not have had much of a sense of security.”

“For security, I cultivated inner peace.”

I thought he was joking, and laughed.

He fixed me with his gaze, serious, more serious than I’d thought he was capable of. He said, “In the Far East, there are plenty of people who own a robe and a bowl. That’s all. They throw themselves on the waters of the world, and they know they will be borne up. They are more secure than you or I. I know by now that I can’t be like that. I’m too American. But I know it’s possible. That gives me a sense of security.” Then his eyes twinkled, and he said, “Don’t tell Harold any of this. He thinks I’m talking about Communists.”

“You told him this?”

“I started to, when he asked when I was going to get ready for church.”

“You were at church.”

“That’s because I saw the handwriting on the wall.” He grinned. “It said, ‘Keep your mouth shut.’ ”

A car drove up with a rattle of gravel. I jumped up and looked out the window. It was Marv Carson, and Ken LaSalle was with him. And I could see Ty’s pickup coming from the fields, too, Harold, Pete, and Loren in the back. Jess got up and stood behind me, and I must have tensed up, because he squeezed the back of my neck and said, “The coffee’s made. Everything will be fine. Life is good. Change is good.”

People started coming in the back, talking quickly in outdoor voices about corn germination, stepping out of boots, and lining up for cups of coffee. There was hope everywhere. I went into the living room and looked across the road. Pammy and Linda were leaning over with their heads together, looking at something in the ditch. Rose was holding the back screen door in her right hand, looking into the house, and shouting something I couldn’t hear. Balanced on her left palm was a platter of coffeecake. Pretty soon, Pete, who must have run across the road for something, came out, and they walked together down their driveway. They walked across the road, the way you do in the country when you cross the same road a hundred times a day, without looking for cars. At one point, Pete said something and Rose tossed her head back and laughed. I opened the window just then, just to hear her. They all looked happy. Rose was still grinning when they got to Daddy’s front door.

She put the coffeecake in my hands and I carried it to the kitchen counter, where the men gathered around it. Laid out in neat fans on the dark dining-room table were stacks of papers with little red X’s scattered over them. They reminded me of mushrooms that suddenly appear after a wet night, uncannily white and fully formed, miraculous but ominous. Ty got a lot of backslapping, and I could hear the words “hog operation” over and over like an incantation. I straightened a couple of stacks of
Reader’s Digest
s. Daddy hadn’t thought to clean the place up for a party, probably because there hadn’t been a party here in twenty-five years.

Clearly, Daddy wasn’t himself, except in the way he lorded it over Harold. Somehow, he had found out about the loan for the tractor, because he kept saying, “Yeah, I’ll be sitting here watching other
people work for me, while you’re out running that tractor, trying to pay it off. I bet you can’t even hear that radio thing with the engine noise.”

Harold was nodding ruefully, but grinning like a maniac, grinning just the way everyone else was, except Ken LaSalle, but Ken’s wife had left him at Christmas, gone off to get a job in the Twin Cities. You didn’t have to take his gloomy attitude to mean anything.

And me? I was happy, too. I was smiling, too. For one thing, I was always relieved when my father got into a good mood, and he was laughing and throwing his arm around Ty. This was maybe his best mood ever. He kept saying, “Okay, Kenny, let’s get to it. Now’s the time.”

Ken said, “Let’s just wait a bit longer, Larry.” And he looked out the front door, and so did I, and here came Caroline, across the road from Rose’s, up the porch steps. At that sight, I gave up my last reservations, felt the thrust of real confidence, so when she stepped onto the porch, composing herself to be conciliatory—I could see that—I opened the door for her. But my father stepped around me and took the door in his hand and slammed it shut in her face, and then he whirled Ken around with a hand on his arm, and said, “Now.” We went into the dining room. When I had finished signing things, I sneaked out onto the porch and looked toward Rose’s across the road. Caroline’s Honda was nowhere to be seen.

M
Y FATHER HAD LIKED
C
AL
E
RICSON
, but he disapproved of him, and I am often astonished when I look back and realize how our proximity to the Ericsons shaped all of my opinions and expectations. The Ericsons came to farming late, already married. Cal had gone to West Point, trained as a civil engineer, and been injured early in the Second World War. After a year in the hospital, he had received some money—perhaps a settlement of some sort, or an inheritance—and he had purchased the farm from an elderly cousin of his before it came on the market. Mrs. Ericson, whose name was Elizabeth, was from a suburb of Chicago. Her family had owned horses, and she had been an avid equestrienne, which I suppose she thought prepared her for farm life.

The Ericson farm was more like a petting zoo—there were hogs and dairy cows and beef cattle and sheep, which was not so unusual. There were also ponies and dogs and chickens and geese and turkeys and goats and gerbils and guinea pigs and, of course, cats who were allowed in the house, as well as two parakeets and a parrot. All of the Ericsons shared a fondness for these animals, and Mr. Ericson was always showing us what he had taught the dogs (a Scotch collie, a German shepherd, and a Yorkshire terrier) to do. They had mastered all the normal tricks and some unusual ones—the shepherd could balance a matchbox on his nose, then toss it in the air and catch it in his mouth, while the Yorkie could do backflips, and the collie could be sent to retrieve particular articles of clothing (a sock,
a hat) from the various bedrooms and then told to carry them to various members of the family. The collie would also pick up things on the floor and carry them to the trash can when told to “police the area.” Most remarkably, the three dogs would perform a kind of drill, walking, lying down, sitting up, lying down again, and rolling over in unison on command.

Animals were Mr. Ericson’s talent and love. Machines would do nothing for him. My father, who had no college education, saw in this confirmation of his view that college, even West Point, was a waste of time, since “that so-called engineer can’t even fix his own tractor.” Cal Ericson was truly hopeless with machines, so he, Harold Clark, and my father made a deal that Harold and my father would trade work on the Ericson machines for fresh milk, cream, and ice cream, which Mrs. Ericson liked to make and my father and Harold had a great fondness for.

My father and Harold were no less disapproving of Cal’s farming methods. He never consulted the market, they said, only consulted his own desires and didn’t focus. It was hard to have a dairy farm in Zebulon County—there was no nearby creamery and other products were more profitable—but you could have one if you really meant to do it, that is, if you’d build a convenient milking parlor with mechanical milkers, milk a hundred cows, and make it worthwhile for a truck to come out every day, or, say, you could milk only Jerseys, or Guernseys, and sell only the cream—there was an ice cream company in Mason City who might have bought it all, if Cal had sold them on the idea. But Cal had twenty Holsteins and one Jersey for the family, he and Mrs. Ericson milked by hand and they mostly seemed to keep the cows, my father said with a laugh, “because they like them.” There was plenty else to complain about—chickens and geese in the road, turkeys panicking in a thunderstorm, everyone having to turn out to help the Ericsons with their haying because they had to have the hay to feed the animals, when everyone else had either gotten rid of animals or fed them silage out of pricey but convenient new silos, which the Ericsons couldn’t afford. My father most certainly disapproved of Cal Ericson’s aspirations, which seemed to be merely to get along, pay his mortgage, and enjoy himself as much as possible.

By contrast it was easy to see what my father considered a more acceptable way of life—a sort of all-encompassing thrift that blossomed, infrequently but grandly, in the purchase of more land or the improvement of land already owned. His conservatism, however, was only fiscal. Beside it lay his lust for every new method designed to swell productivity. In 1957, an article ran in
Wallace’s Farmer
entitled “Will the Farmer’s Greatest Machine Soon Be the Airplane?” The accompanying pictures were of our farm being sprayed for European corn borers, and my father was quoted as saying, “There isn’t any room for the old methods any more. Farmers who embrace the new methods will prosper, but those that don’t are already stumbling around.” Doubtless he was looking across the road toward the Ericsons’.

We might as well have had a catechism:

What is a farmer?

A farmer is a man who feeds the world.

What is a farmer’s first duty?

To grow more food.

What is a farmer’s second duty?

To buy more land.

What are the signs of a good farm?

Clean fields, neatly painted buildings, breakfast at six, no debts, no standing water.

How will you know a good farmer when you meet him?

He will not ask you for any favors.

The tile system on my father’s farm drained fields that were nearly as level as a table. On land as new and marshy as Zebulon County, water fans out, seeking the slightest depressions, and often moves more slowly across the landscape than it does down through the soil. The old watercourses, such as they were, had been filled in and plowed through, so the tile lines drained into drainage wells. These wells, thrusting downward some three hundred feet, still dot the township, and there were seven around the peripheries of our farm. A good farmer was a man who so organized his work that the drainage-well catchment basins were cleaned out every spring and the grates were painted black every two years.

My mother felt a little differently about the Ericsons. She and Mrs.
Ericson often canned or made peanut brittle together in the Ericsons’ kitchen while Ruthie and I sat on the floor sewing doll clothes, with Dinah and Rose out on the porch in only shorts, pouring water in and out of various vessels. My mother liked to go over there, and at least went for coffee every morning. Mrs. Ericson had a welcoming manner that my mother appreciated but couldn’t master. She always said, “When I’m home, I’ve got to get things done, even if there are visitors. Elizabeth knows how to relax in her own house.” And then she would shake her head, as if Elizabeth had remarkable powers.