A Thousand Acres (14 page)

I said, "I never looked at it that way.

"That's because he's tricked you, too," said Jess. "Now that I'm back, after all those years away, I'm really amazed at how good Harold is at manipulating the way people think of him."

"What's the reward, though?" said Pete. "He doesn't get the kind of respect other farmers do. People laugh at him. When you're over at the feedstore, and someone sees his truck drive in, it's, oh, there's Harold Clark. And they're grinning already."

"And he comes in with some story, right? He's going to do something crazy, and ugly, too, like surround the house with hay bales, foundation to roofline, then tack polyethylene sheets over them with laths."

"Or he's going to pour cement over the entire farmyard from the house to the barn. He did say that last year. Pete grinned, and I landed on Luxury Tax. Pammy was reading an old Nancy Drew I had found in the attic. She sensed me watching her, and looked up, smiled, and nodded.

It was The Ghost of Blackwood Hall, my old favorite. Linda had fallen asleep with her crocheting in her hand. For a week she had been laboriously crocheting a doll sweater.

"No," saidJess. "That laughter is the point. If they respected him, then he'd have less privacy. All that foolishness is like a smokescreen.

People let down their guard. They're generous with him, too, because they feel a little superior. I mean, neighbor ladies bring Harold and Loren a hotdish once or twice a week. And I'm not saying that he laughs at people behind their backs, or is rubbing his hands with glee at duping them. That's not what I'm getting at. It's just that he's cannier and smarter than he lets on, and in the slippage between what he looks like and what he is, there's a lot of freedom."

"Sounds good," said Rose, "but meanwhile, I own Park Place, and it looks like you owe me a bundle."

"I owe you everything, Rose." He leered at her.

"Don't push me." She laughed.

I couldn't help looking at Jess, a little surprised at his analysis of Harold. Maybe it wasn't true, but truth wasn't what attracted me.

It was the plausibility of such a plan, the perfect way such a plan could deflect the neighbors' knowledge of you. It was such a lovely word, that last word, "freedom," a word that always startled and refreshed me when I heard it. I didn't think of it as having much to do with my life, or the life of anyone I knew-and yet maybe Harold was having some, feeling some.

"So," said Pete. "I was at the feedstore yesterday, too, when Harold came in with another bright idea."

We started grinning.

"What was that?" said Ty.

"He said he was thinking about changing his will."

There was the briefest of silences, the briefest but the most total, and then Jess said, "Uh oh," and laughed. We all knew what everyone was thinking, that Harold would change the will in favor of Jess (assuming that the present will favored Loren, which Harold, of course, had never actually said, but which had become what people "knew" Harold had done), but Jess said, "He's probably going to leave the place to the Nature Conservancy so that they can restore it to its natural wetlands condition."

Ty said, "What's the Nature Conservancy?"

"They buy land and conserve it." Jess looked at Ty in that merry but aggressive way. "Take it out of production, you know."

"God forbid," said Ty.

We didn't say any more about Harold's will, but late in the evening, after Rose and Pete had taken Pammy and Linda home, Jess lingered before stepping off the porch. He said to Ty, "You know that land you have down by Henry Grove? What's the guy been growing on it?"

"Straight corn for the last four years. Before that he had some beans on it.

"Fall plow or spring plow?"

"Fall. And there isn't a house. I let him bulldoze the house and fill in the well about seven years ago. You could live in town, though.

Henry Grove's only a couple of miles away.

"So he's really worked the shit out of that land."

Ty looked out toward the dim glow of Cabot on the western horizon, for a long moment, and ran his forefinger around the corner of his mouth.

I could tell he was offended. Finally, he said, "It's good land.

Michael Rakosi hasn't done anything with it I might not have done. He likes clean fields, is all."

Jess smiled, also realizing that Ty was offended, and said, "I'm not meaning to criticize. If I did farm, I'd try some things. A lot of them probably wouldn't work. I'd probably ask your advice all the time. I'd probably farm out of a book a lot. That used to be Harold's worst insult, he'd say, 'That guy, he farms straight out of a book."

But for me, it wouldn't be worth it, really, unless I was trying some of the stuff I learned out west."

"Well, maybe." Ty smiled.

At breakfast, Ty was mild but insistent. He kept saying, "People don't realize that there isn't any room any more for something that might not work out. I mean, when his income comes solely from the farm, and he's got to make up his mind about the fuel and the time for another pass through the beans, or maybe getting forty-three bushels an acre instead of forty-seven. It's all very well to talk about ten acres of black walnut trees, and then harvesting them for veneer in thirty years at ten thousand dollars a tree, but what about the lost production for that thirty years? It's more complicated than people think, just reading books."

I said, "Are you talking to yourself or to me?"

He looked up from his plate and grinned at me. "Hell, Ginny, this morning there's a whole peanut gallery."

"He wasn't criticizing you. You don't have to feel criticized."

"Yes and no. He doesn't/eel critical, and he wants to be our friend, but he wouldn't do things our way, and he probably wouldn't have us do things our way, truth to tell."

"Maybe, but there's room for lots of ways, isn't there?"

He sat back and wiped his mouth, then pushed back his chair and stood up. Outside, the day was beginning to lighten. He said, "Well, sure, in principle. I sometimes wonder how that principle works in action, though. Anyway, I am going to have another pass through the beans in Mel's corner, because there's a terrible stand of cockleburs that's gotten all over in there." He gave my arm a little squeeze and went out the door.

AFTER Ty LEFT, it took me half an hour to get myself down to my father's. Lots of little things needed picking up, and, in fact, our late nights were beginning to tell on my mornings. I knew Daddy would be annoyed at having to wait for his breakfast. Now that I was no longer cooking for Rose, he wanted it slap on the table at six, even though there were no fields he was hurrying to get to. I dawdled. I mulled over the idea that if he slept later and ate later, then he wouldn't have so much time to fill during the day. I let myself get a little irritated with him, but what I really did was put off seeing him. The memory of Caroline's call, which I should have returned Monday but didn't, had jarred me awake before Ty the early bird had rolled out of bed to check the hogs.

The fact was, Daddy couldn't keep driving around all over the county and even the state, looking for trouble. Retired farmers were supposed to spend their time at the cafe in town, giving free advice, or they were supposed to breed irises or roses or Jersey cows or something.

They were supposed to watch the polls during elections and go fishing, or work part-time at the hardware store.

Except that the thought of Daddy doing any of these sociable, trivial, or, you might say, pleasant things was absurd. He himself had always ridiculed farmers in retirement, and spoken with respect, even envy, of Ty's father's heart attack in the hog pen. Yes, it was freshly evident that he had impulsively betrayed himself by handing over the farm.

That annoyed me, too. I kicked off my slippers and put on my Keds as if I were really going to let him have it.

As I walked down the road, I could see Pete back his silver Ford pickup out of the driveway and turn south. I waved, and his arm shot out of the driver's window and arced a greeting in return. Mostly when you pass farmers on the road, they acknowledge you with the subtlest of signals-a linger lifted off the steering wheel, or even a lifted eyebrow. Pete was a hearty waver. It made him seem a little too eager to please, the way his silver pickup made him seem a little too flashy.

I was appreciating those things about Pete lately, though.

Instead of seeing him in the old way, less competent and reliable than Ty, too volatile and even a little silly, I saw that he did his best to lit in and do his job, and also that his failure to succeed completely was actually an assertion of a different style more than anything. If he had come from around here, if his father had farmed and he had inherited his father's farm, his relative flamboyance, like his musical talent, would have been something for the neighbors to be a little proud of evidence of native genius rather than suspect strangeness.

Since my talk with Jess the day I planted tomatoes, my sense of the men I knew had undergone a subtle shift. I was less automatically critical-yes, they all had misbehaved, and failed, too, but now I saw that you could also say that they had suffered setbacks, suffered them, and suffered, period. That was the key. I would have said that certainly Rose and I had suffered, too, and Caroline and Mary Livingstone and all the women I knew, but there seemed to be a dumb, unknowing quality to the way the men had suffered, as if like animals, it was not possible for them to gain perspective on their suffering.

They had us, Rose and me, in their suffering, but they didn't seem to have what we had with each other, a kind of ongoing narrative and commentary about what was happening that grew out of our conversations, our rolled eyes, our sighs and jokes and irritated remarks. The result for us was that we found ourselves more or less prepared for the blows that fell-we could at least make that oddly comforting remark, "I knew all along something like this was going to happen." The men, and Pete in particular, always seemed a little surprised, and therefore a little more hurt and a little more damaged, by things that happened-the deaths of prized animals, accidents, my father's blowups and contempt, forays into commodity trading that lost money, even-for Ty-my miscarriages.

Of course he refused to try any more. He had counted on each pregnancy as if there were no history.

And then there was my father. As I stepped off the road onto the yard in front of his house, I sensed him looking down at me, but I didn't look up, I just headed for the back door. His kitchen cabinets were still in the driveway, and I had heard nothing of the couch to be delivered. I reflected as I opened the screen door that speculations about my father were never idle or entertaining, but always something to be flinched from. Certainly he must have suffered, but my mind fled from thoughts of him and took refuge in those of Ty, Pete, and Jess.

He met me at the back door. "It's bright day." His tone was accusing.

It meant, I'm hungry, you've made me wait, and also, you're behind, late, slow. I said, "I had a few things to do."

"At six o'clock in the morning?"

"I just picked up the house a little."

"Hmp."

"Sorry."

He backed away from the door and I entered the mudroom and put on the apron that hung from a hook there. He said, "Nobody shopped over the weekend. There's no eggs."

"Oh, darn. I meant to bring them down. I bought some for you yesterday, but I forgot them." I looked him square in the eye. It was my choice, to keep him waiting or to fail to give him his eggs. His gaze was flat, brassily reflective. Not only wasn't he going to help me decide, my decision was a test. I could push past him, give him toast and cereal and bacon, a breakfast without a center of gravity, or I could run home and get the eggs. My choice would show him something about me, either that I was selfish and inconsiderate (no eggs) or that I was incompetent (a flurry of activity where there should be organized procedure). I did it. I smiled foolishly, said I would be right back, and ran out the door and back down the road.

The whole way I was conscious of my body-graceless and hurrying, unlit, panting, ridiculous in its very femininity. It seemed like my father could just look out of his big front window and see me naked, chest heaving, breasts, thighs, and buttocks jiggling, dignity irretrievable.

Later, after I had cooked the breakfast and he had eaten it, what I marveled at was that I hadn't just gone across the road and gotten some eggs from Rose, that he had given me the test, and I had taken it.

By the time I was frying the bacon and eggs and covertly watching him stare out the living-room window toward our south field, my plan to let him have it seemed liked another silly thing. I couldn't find a voice to speak in, to say, "Were you down in Des Moines Thursday or not?" or "Caroline thought you hung up on her when she called." This is something I do often, this phrasing and rephrasing of sentences in my mind, scaling back assertions and direct questions so that they do not offend, so that they can slip sideways into someone's consciousness without my having really asked them.

It was one thing, Monopoly nights, to sit around and laugh at or deplore some of the things that Daddy and Harold did or said.

It was another to confront the monolith that he seemed to be.

Ty's attitude intruded itself soothing me, counseling me to let things slip over me like water or something else harmless but powerful.

So I served up his food silently and told myself that he wasn't senile-it would be insulting to treat him like a child and make him account for his time and his money. My job remained what it had always been-to give him what he asked of me, and if he showed discontent, to try to find out what would please him. At that moment, standing by the stove with my arms crossed over my chest, waiting to pour him more coffee, that seemed like a simple and almost pleasant task.

I have to say that when I called Caroline at nine, she didn't see things my way at all. Yes, it was Daddy who had been to her office (had there really been any doubt?) and the receptionist who had seen him said he was acting weird. Admittedly she was only nineteen, and she couldn't pinpoint exactly what he was doing that was weird, looking around all the time, gawking at everyone, but more than that, throwing his head around sort of the way an animal does when it is frightened or in pain. I said to Caroline, "Well, we asked him at Sunday dinner whether he'd been down there, and he wouldn't tell us. He's as stubborn and close-mouthed as always. What your receptionist said just doesn't seem to lit, as far as I'm concerned."