A Thousand Acres (29 page)

In the linen closet was where I found the past, and the reason was that Rose and I always washed the sheets on Daddy's bed and put them back on, and we always washed the towels and washcloths in the bathroom hamper and hung them back up. It may be that no one looked in the linen closet more than once a year. There were sheets and towels and bed pads and an unopened box of Sweetheart soap. Behind the stack of towels, hidden entirely from sight, was a half-full box of Kotex pads and in the box was an old elastic belt, the kind no one had worn in years. Certainly these were not artifacts of my mother, but of myself.

I took out the sheets and pillowcase, reflecting only that this was sort of interesting. If Rose were here, she would assert that Daddy had seen the Kotex box plenty over the years, he'd just never dared to touch it. I smiled.

The sheets lit smoothly over the single bed in the yellow bedroom.

I folded back the top edge over the blanket, plumped the pillow. I thought that Jess would sleep there, and I lay down where he would be lying down. The dressing table was beside the window; the closet door was ajar; the yellow paint on the empty chest was peeling; some bronze circles floated in the mirror; a water spot had formed in the ceiling.

Lying here, I knew that he had been in there to me, that my father had lain with me on that bed, that I had looked at the top of his head, at his balding spot in the brown grizzled hair, while feeling him suck my breasts. That was the only memory I could endure before I jumped out of the bed with a cry.

My whole body was shaking and moans flowed out of my mouth.

The yellow of the room seemed to flash like a strobe light, in time to blood pounding in my head. It was a memory associated with the memory of my mother's things going to the poor people of Mason City, with the sight of the church ladies in their cars with my mother's dresses in the backseats, with the sight of Mary Livingstone's face turned toward me with sober concern, asking me if I wanted to keep anything, and I said no. I lay down on the wooden flooring of the hallway because I felt as if I would faint and fall down the stairs.

Rose was supposed to meet me here at some point, and for a while I just said her name, Rose, Rose, Rose," hoping that I could materialize her at the top of the stairs in spite of the fact that no door had slammed, no voice had shouted for me. If she'd been there, I'd have insisted that accepting this knowledge, knowing it all the time, every day for the rest of my life, was simply beyond my strength.

And certainly there was more to know. Behind that one image bulked others, mysterious bulging items in a dark sack, unseen as yet, but felt. I feared them. I feared how I would have to store them in my brain, plastic explosives or radioactive wastes that would mutate or even wipe out everything else in there. If Rose had been here, I would somehow have given these images to her to keep for me. She was not there.

So I screamed. I screamed in a way that I had never screamed before, full out, throat-wrenching, unafraid-of-making-a-fuss-anddrawing-attention-to-myself sorts of screams that I made myself concentrate on, becoming all mouth, all tongue, all vibration.

They did the trick. They wore me out, made me feel physical pain which brought me back to the present, that house, that floor, that moment.

After a bit, I got up and brushed myself off. I had given myselfa headache, so I went into the bathroom and took four aspirin.

Rose never came. When I got back to my house, it was nearly nine o'clock. Only nine o'clock. My new life, yet another new life, had begun early in the day.

IN THE DAYS AFTER THE CHURCH supper, I looked for Jess Clark to come by.

There seemed to be a lot to talk about, but as it turned out, I only saw him twice. Even then, he was quiet and inaccessible.

The candor of our earlier talks, which I longed for in spite of myself had vanished. All he said was, "I'm surprised at how lost I feel"; "I can't believe how sure I was that he'd changed"; and "I can't think of anywhere to go now. These three remarks went unelaborated upon. When I answered them, my responses hung between us before I finished speaking, Jess was already preoccupied with his own thoughts again.

His bearing changed, too. His former fluid grace, the acceptance of change and movement that ran through him, had stiffened. He held himself upright.

It hurt and embarrassed me to see him. I ventured awkward sympathy that failed to ease or soften his demeanor. I knew he was, as always, telling me the truth. He was lost.

I didn't tell him about my revelation when I lay down on the very bed he was sleeping in every night, even though I couldn't think of his sleeping in my old room without thinking of it. Nor, after all, had I Rose, though I'd come close. For one thing, I'd been so certain that she was wrong-suspicious and dismissive of her memories. For another, it was easier to be her sympathetic supporter than her fellow victim.

And she would surely remind me of incidents that I could not bear to remember. As certain as sunrise, discussion would open that terrible sack and shine a light into it, and she would press me and I would not be able to resist her, until the drama and anger of it would sweep me up, too, and I would feel a growing obsession to remember surging through me, seizing me, taking me into a danger that I could not endure yet.

We talked about what Harold had done at the church supper. What I thought was that Jess's driving up to that organic farm, then caroling on and on about it had been some kind of last straw. I had never thought Harold would be sympathetic to Jess's organic farming idea, but I thought he had been of two minds about Jess himself. Rose took a darker view: that Harold had been plotting to humiliate Jess for a long time-maybe since Jess's return-that he'd been playing him off against Loren and encouraging him with the will talk in order to get his hopes up. That was the Harold we had discussed during our Monopoly games, the Harold who hid calculating purposes behind foolishness. I related the incident I'd seen helping Jess transfer their frozen food from their freezer to ours-the way Harold snapped from rage to repartee without even a moment to collect himself. "Doesn't that prove, said Rose, "that it's all a game with him? That everything he does is the result of some calculation? He gets people to laugh at him, but he's not laughing."

Then Harold Clark decided to side-dress his corn, maybe so he could get out there on his new tractor one more time. It was not something he did every year, and as far as I could tell, everybody's corn looked fine. There had certainly been plenty of rain-our corn was an intense, healthy green. But why not, Harold must have thought. A little insurance for the yield, and the pleasure of driving that shiny red piece of machinery along the fencerow next to Cabot Street Road.

The only thing Harold said later was that one of the outside knives looked clogged. What he would have done then was to pull the rope that shut the valve on top of the tank. Maybe he was in a hurry, because then he got down off the tractor and went around to the malfunctioning knife where it bit a few inches into the soil. No one knows why he jiggled the hose. Possibly he only touched it while bending down, brushed against it with his hand or his sleeve. At any rate, the hose jerked off the knife, and with the last puff of pressure remaining in the line, sprayed him in the face. He wasn't wearing goggles.

Anhydrous ammonia isn't "drawn to the eyes" because of their moisture, the way people sometimes say, it only feels that way, because the moisture in the eyes reacts with the fumes and creates a powerful alkali.

In spite of the pain, Harold staggered to the water tank on top of the ammonia tank, knowing that his only hope was to flush his eyes and neutralize the ammonia. The water tank was empty. At this point, Harold was overcome, and he simply keeled over in the field.

It was Dollie, on her way to work at Casey's ii, Cabot, who saw him.

He was kneeling among the rows of corn, rocking back and forth with his hands over his face. There wasn't any water anywhere out there. She drove him back to the house and helped him get his face under the outdoor spigot. Then Loren got home, and he drove Harold to the hospital in Mason City.

Jess was out running.

Pete was in Pike buying cement.

Rose was helping Linda sew a pair of polka-dot shorts and a halter top.

Daddy was sitting in the glider on Harold's porch, talking to Marv Carson about getting his farm back.

Ty was working at the top of one of the new Harvestores with the crew of three Minnisota men.

I was dropping Pammy off at Mary Louise Mackenzie's house in Cabot.

I imagine this news rolling toward each of us like a dust cloud on a sunny day, so unusual that at first it seems more interesting than scary, that it seems, in the distance, rather small, smaller certainly than the vast expanse of the sky, which is where we usually look for signs of danger, and where, still, the sun shines with friendly brightness. But they said in the thirties the dust storms were the worst, for the way that the dust got in everywhere, no matter how you sealed windows and doors and closed your eyes and put blankets over your head. So it was that Harold's accident and its aftermath got in everywhere, into the solidest relationships, the firmest beliefs, the strongest loyalties, the most deeply held convictions you had about the people you had known most of your life.

The thing about anhydrous is that it does the damage almost instantly.

After two minutes or so the corneas are eaten away. There isn't much the doctors can do besides transplants, and those don't work too well.

But they kept Harold in the hospital, his eyes patched, for a week, on account of the pain.

This would have been the Thursday after the Sunday of the church supper, three days after Jess Clark moved into Daddy's house. Feelings were still running high. When I came home from dropping Pammy, Ty was standing in the kitchen. He whirled to face me and said, "Harold Clark's had an anhydrous accident. He's blind now, as if to say, was I satisfied?

"My God."

"He can't farm any more, that's for sure."

"Where'd you hear this? What happened?"

"Dollie got us down from the Harvestore. Loren took him to the hospital."

"Then we don't really know-" "Shit, Ginny!" he shouted in my face.

"We know! The water tank was empty!"

"Maybe the doctors-" "Stop it!"

"Stop what?"

"Stop being this way, this quiet reasonable way! Don't you care?

The fucking water tank was empty! You know what it means as wellasIdo!"

I said evenly, "It means he's blind."

"Don't you care? This is a friend of ours! What happened to you?

I don't know you any more." He headed for the door.

I followed him, my voice rising, "What's wrong? What am I saying that's wrong?" He got in the truck and drove off his tires squealing on the asphalt.

The fact is, I was too astonished to think anything. The imagination runs first to the physical, doesn't it, so that no matter what, you recoil from the pain, imagine yourself blind, your tissues resonating from the power of what has happened. I actually don't remember how I imagined the accident then, when I hadn't learned any of the details, but it entered my life with a crash and I do remember my hands trembling so violently as I tried to do the dishes that a plate broke against the faucet and I had to stop and sit down.

Then I remember almost throwing up sitting there.

I got up and hurried down to Rose's place. I burst in with the news, and Rose at once sent Linda out to play, to watch for Pete, to see if she could see Jess down the road. "He's running," she said to me as Linda ran out, "I saw him take off about a half hour ago."

I said, "My God. Can you believe this?" I stepped over the pattern pinned to the fabric on the floor and fell into an armchair. Rose knelt down and resumed setting the facing pieces on the fabric.

"Rose?"

"What?" She sounded annoyed.

I didn't dare say anything else. I guess what I thought was that I'd offended her somehow. I always do feel a little guilty when I break bad news to someone, because that energy, of knowing something others don't know, sort of puffs you up. She picked pins out of her tomato pincushion and poked then into the oniony tissue paper, then sat back on her heels and cocked her head, surveying the fabric. She was wearing a ponytail. She lifted her arms and idly pulled her liquid dark hair out of the elastic, then made the ponytail again, more tightly. The hang of her blouse revealed that she had not bothered with her prosthesis that morning. She said, "Well?"

"Well, it just struck me so vividly, that's all. It's every farmer's nightmare. I almost threw up.

"The actual event is shocking. I admit that." She picked up her scissors and looked at me. "But I said it the other night. Weakness does nothing for me. I don't care if they suffer. When they suffer, then they're convinced they're innocent again. Don't you think Hitler was afraid and in pain when he died? Do you care? If he died thinking his cause was just and right, that all those Jews and everybody deserved to be exterminated, that at least he lived long enough to perform his life's work, wouldn't you have enjoyed his pain and wished him more? There has to be remorse. There has to be making amends to the ones you destroyed, otherwise the books are never balanced."

"But this is Harold, not Daddy."

"What's the difference? You know what Jess told me? Once Harold was driving the cornpicker, when Jess was a boy, and there was a fawn lying in the corn, and Harold drove right over it rather than leave the row standing, or turn, or even just stop and chase it away.

"Maybe he didn't see it' "After he drove over it, he didn't stop to kill it, either. He just let it die."

"Oh, Rose." The tears burst from my eyes.

"Daddy killed animals in the fields every year. Just because they were rabbits and birds instead of fawns-I don't know." She looked at me and smiled slightly. "when Jess told me, I cried, too. Then the next day I helped Pete load hogs for the sale barn. I thought about Daddy saying, that's life. That's farming. So, I say to Harold, gee, Harold, you should have checked the water tank. That's farming.