A Thousand Acres (39 page)

I didn't believe her. More than that, I had no way of comprehending what she was saying to me. The distinctions had become too fine. My head was spinning. I stepped back to the edge of the blacktop. I said, "Rose, I have to go home. I can't stand this."

Walking back, feeling her behind me, not following me but watching me for sure, I felt almost close to Pete. I felt that sense he'd had of being outside his own body, of watching it and hoping for the best.

The sun was rising. I was as alert as a weasel, though, and all my swirling thoughts had narrowed to a single prick of focus, the knowledge that Rose had been too much for me, had done me in. I didn't agree with her that Pete's last thought had been of Daddy.

Surely, surely it had been of Rose herself that she had ineluctably overwhelmed and crushed him.

ONE BENEFIT, WHICH I HAVE LOST, of a life where many things go unsaid, is that you don't have to remember things about yourself that are too bizarre to imagine. What was never given utterance eventually becomes too nebulous to recall.

Before that night, I would have said that the state of mind I entered into afterward was beyond me. Since then, I might have declared that I was "not myself" or "out of my mind" or "beside myself" but the profoundest characteristic of my state of mind was not, in the end, what I did, but how palpably It felt like the real me. It was a state of mind in which I "knew" many things, in which "conviction" was not an abstract, rather dry term referring to moral values or conscious beliefs, but a feeling of being drenched with insight, swollen with it like a wet sponge. Rather than feeling "not myself" I felt intensely, newly, more myself than ever before.

The strongest feeling was that now I knew them all. That whereas for thirty-six years they had swum around me in complicated patterns that I had at best dimly perceived through murky water, now all was clear. I saw each of them from all sides at once. I didn't have to label them as Rose had labeled herself and Pete: "selfish," "mean," 'Jealous."

Labeling them, in fact, prevented knowing them. All I had to do " j5 to imagine them, and how I "knew" them would shimmer around them and through them, a light, an odor, a sound, a taste, a palpability that was all there was to understand about each and every one of them. In a way that I had never felt when all of us were connected by history and habit and duty, or the "love" I had felt for Rose and Ty, I now felt that they were mine.

Here was Daddy, balked, not by a machine (he had talent and patience for machines), but by one of us, or by some trivial circumstance. The flesh of his lower jaw tightens as he grits his teeth. He' blows out a sharp, impatient breath. His face reddens, his eyes seek yours. He says, "You look me in the eye, girly." He says, "I'm not going to stand for it." His voice rises. He says, "I've heard enough of this."

His lists clench. He says, "I'm not going to be your fool."

His forearms and biceps buckle into deeply defined and powerful cords.

He says, "I say what goes around here." He says, "I don't care if-I'm telling you-I mean it." He shouts, "I-I-I-" roaring and glorying in his self-definition. I did this and I did that and don't think you can tell me this and you haven't the foggiest idea about that, and then he impresses us by blows with the weight of his "I" and the feathery nonexistence of ourselves, our questions, our doubts, our differences of opinion. That was Daddy.

Here was Caroline, sitting on the couch, her dirndl skirt fanned out around her, her hands folded in her lap, her lace-trimmed ankle socks and black MaryJanes stuck out in front of her, her eyes darting from one face to another, calculating, always calculating. "Please," she says. "Thank you. You're welcome." She smiles. Chatty Kathy, and proud of her perfect, doll-like behavior. She climbs into Daddy's lap, and her gaze slithers around the room, looking to see if we have noticed how he prefers her. She squirms upward and plants a kiss on his cheek, knowing we are watching, certain we are envious.

Here was Pete, eyes flashing like Daddy's, but saying nothing.

Licking his lips. Waiting for his chance. Watching, focusing, gauging where to land the blow and when to strike. Judging how quick the enemy might be, where the enemy might be weakest. No "I," like Daddy, that inflated with each declaration, but a diminishing point, losing himself more and more bitterly in contemplating the target.

Here was Ty, too, camouflaged with smiles and hope and patience, never losing sight of the goal, fading back only to go around, advancing slowly but steadily, stepping on no twigs, making no splash, casting no shadow, radiating no heat, oozing into cracks, taking advantage of opportunity, unfailingly innocent.

It was amazing how minutely I knew Rose, possibly as a result of nursing her after her surgery. I had sponge-bathed her everywhere -the arches of her feet, the pale insides of her elbows, the back of her neck where the hair circled in a cowlick, the bumps of her spine, her scar, her remaining pear-shaped breast with its heavy nipple and large, dark areola. She had three moles on her back. When we were children, she was always asking me to scratch her back at bedtime, or else she would scratch those moles against the bedpost, the way a sow would.

And so, here, at last, was Rose, all that bone and flesh, right next to, right in the same bed with, Jess Clark. If I remembered hard enough I could smell her odor, feel the exact dry quality of her skin, smell and feel her the way he did during those mysterious times when I wasn't around. I could smell and feel and hear and see him, too, with a force unmatched since the first few days after we had sex at the dump. Every time I could not actually see one or the other of them, I had a visceral conviction that they were together.

I thought about how convenient it was for Rose that Pete had died. How the trap that was our life on the farm had so neatly opened for her.

All my life I had identified with Rose. I'd looked to her, waited a split second to divine her reaction to something, then made up my own mind. My deepest-held habit was assuming that differences between Rose and me were just on the surface, that beneath, beyond all that, we were more than twinlike, that somehow we were each other's real selves, together forever on this thousand acres.

But after all, she wasn't me. Her body wasn't mine. Mine had failed to sustain Jess Clark's interest, to sustain a pregnancy. My love, which I had always believed could transcend the physical, had failed, too-failed with Ty, failed with my children and Rose's, failed, in a bizarre way, with Daddy, who in his fashion loved Caroline and Rose but not me, failed with Jess Clark, and now had failed with Rose herself who clearly understood how to reach past me, to put me aside, to take what she wanted and be glad of it. I was as stuck with my old life as I was with my body, but thanks to Pete's death, a whole new life could bloom for Rose out of her body. More children to set beside Pammy and Linda.

With bottled water and careful diet and Jess's informed concern about risks, there wouldn't be a single miscarriage, a single ghostly child in the house.

What was transformed now was the past, not the future. The future seemed to clamp down upon me like an iron lid, but the past dissolved beneath my feet into something writhing and fluid, and at the center of it, the most changed thing of all, was Rose herself. It was clear that she had answered my foolish love with jealousy and grasping selfishness.

She would have been better off telling me nothing, because now I saw more than she wanted me to see. I saw Daddy, and I also saw her.

It was unbearable.

After the funeral, Rose and Jess must have decided to lie low for a while as a couple, so I almost never saw them together, but I saw them separately often enough. Rose's manner was delicate, speaking eloquently of our changed sisterly condition. I was given to know that my feelings were paramount, that it was up to me to establish the degree of closeness that would be comfortable and the appropriate way for us to behave toward one another. I saw that the delicacy and concern were necessary to her, because they were a thrilling reminder of everything new and delicious.

Jess was friendly, kind, and mildly apologetic. I seemed to be seeing him more than I had been, and then I realized that he had carefully avoided me for some weeks, possibly for most of the summer. Now he was everywhere, speaking to me, joking with me, dropping by for a cup of coffee, once even stopping his run to help me weed the garden, putting our friendship on a new footing, a footing that looked forward to the future. His open, happy kindness that approached tenderness galled me most of all.

It was a tangle. I vacillated among three or four routes into the tangle. I told myself that I had to decide what I really wanted and settle for that-every course of action is a compromise, after all.

Then at night I would wake up deeply surprised, amazed at the day's accumulation of bitterness and calculation. This couldn't be me, in this old familiar nightgown, this old familiar body, hateful as this?

In the mornings I wouldn't think about it for a while-after all, I was still busy seeking perfect order and cleanliness-but then Rose would call or Jess would drop off a half dozen doughnuts, and their voices and their bodies expressed such barely contained voluptuous lust for their future together that I knew I had to do something to rid myself of the sight and sense of their nearness.

It was not entirely lost on me that Ty was himself in a crisis.

Elsewhere in the state, and even in the county, intermittent dry spells had lowered production, but we had had perfect weather, and the corn and the beans were both healthy and thriving. It was clear that without Pete and without Daddy, Ty would be hard put to harvest almost a thousand acres by himself. Rose and I could both drive the combine in a pinch, and I had driven a few loaded grain trucks to the elevator almost every year, but the fact was, we always got pressed into service at the height of the harvest; there was no way that we could fill in for Pete and Daddy. There was Jess, of course, who had driven one of the tractors when we hired six high school kids to ride the bean-bar to spot-spray weeds and volunteer corn in the bean rows. He'd worn coveralls, boots, and a face mask in 93degree weather, and let Ty handle all the chemicals, which Ty found excessively squeamish. Every time Ty worried aloud about what we were going to do, he avoided mentioning Jess, leading me to know that he didn't want to work with Jess again, whatever Jess's talents and skills were. I didn't ask if these suspicions were simply based on differing ideas about farming. I would have been the first to admit that they were well founded, whatever the source. He asked around town, put ads on various bulletin boards and in the Pike paper. His tenant agreed to work for live days in exchange for two days' work at his place. There were no answers to the ads. There seemed to be some reluctance around town to having anything to do with us. Ty widened his campaign, advertising for help in Zebulon Center, Henry Grove, Columbus, and even Mason City. He said we would put people up and pay good wages. It was a problem that did not solve itself. The fact was, the kind of men who were around when my grandfather was farming, men who worked but did not own, were gone from the country by 1979. He began calling around to see if he could get some custom combining done.

When he engaged me in conversation about this problem, I tried to sound concerned and helpful, but all the time I was imagining them naked somewhere, relieved to be alone, giddy and giggling and utterly sufficient to themselves. If they thought about me, it would be to plan some little kindness that they thought I needed, that would remind me yet again of who was who and what was what. If even the most clandestine love affair yearns for an audience, then of course I was theirs.

I saw Rose every day. We made pickles and canned tomatoes and I drove the girls places for her. I noticed her fleeting little smiles.

We talked, in a way. She alluded to Jess only tactfully, and gave me little hugs from time to time, or compliments. I don't remember any of what she said. It was as if she were just moving her lips.

Ty decided to sell the last hundred piglets as feeder pigs, instead of finishing them. At the last minute, after we'd loaded the pigs, but before he'd taken down the loading chute, he said, "I'm going to load some of the sows, too. Prices are up enough. I could get something for them."

I snapped to. I was covered with muck from loading a hundred fifty-pound hogs and ready to get into the shower, but what I was hearing amazed me. I said, "Ty, prices aren't up at all. You'll be lucky to get three-fourths of what those sows are worth. They're prime breeding stock. You can't just cart them off to market on impulse!"

"That's exactly what I can do. That's the only way I can make myself do it, as a matter of fact."

"Even if the new buildings don't get built, we can keep on with what we were doing."

"My heart's not in it." He spat in the dirt. "Anyway, I gotta think about the payment on that loan. It's not going to take care of itself."

"What about the rent for your place? I thought we earmarked that for the payment."

"That's going to get eaten up if he works for me at harvest as much as I'm going to need him. Selling off these sows will tide us over till after harvest. That's what we've got to think of now."

A farm abounds with poisons, though not many of them are fast acting.

Every farmer knows a chemical dealer's representative who has taken a demonstration drink of some insecticide-sale as mother's milk, etc. Once, when Verna Clark was still alive and everyone was still using chlordane for corn rootworm, Harold dropped his instructions into the tank and reached in with his hand and picked them out. Arsenic is around, in the form of old rat poison. There were plenty of insecticides we used in the hog houses. There was kerosene and diesel fuel and paint thinner and Raid. There were aerosol degreasers and used motor oil. There were atrazine and Treflan and Lasso and Dual. I knew to wear a mask and gloves if I was handling any of these chemicals. I knew never to eat without getting all traces of chemicals off me, especially the odor. But I didn't know what would kill Rose.