A Thousand Acres (43 page)

That Jess had left her didn't seem to make a difference in my vengeful wishes. If anything, the friendly, informative tone of her notes made them burn a little hotter. Didn't she realize how far I was from her?

Now, as always, wasn't she relying on some changeless loyalty in me, ignoring my angers and complaints as if they were meaningless in comparison with her plans?

The day I received this news, the transmission went out on my car, so I traded it for an eight-year-old Toyota with eighty thousand miles on the odometer. I liked the way it looked in front of my apartment, unassuming and anonymous.

Otherwise, my life passed in a blur, that blessing of urban routine.

The sense of distinct events that is so inescapable on a farm, where every rainstorm is thick with odor and color, and usefulness and timing, where omens of prosperity or ruin to come are sought in every change, where any of the world's details may contain the one thing that above all else you will regret not knowing, this sense lifted off me.

Maybe another way of saying it is that I forgot I was still alive.

ONE MORNING, SEVERAL YEARS into this routine, I came up to the table of a solitary man in a cap. From behind, I took him to be a trucker. I was just beginning my six a. m. shift, and there were already four other truckers smoking alone at four other tables. I smiled and said, "What would you like this morning, sir? I can recommend the potato pancakes with applesauce, when I saw a white envelope on the table with my name on it. I looked the man in the face, probably in a startled way, and saw that it was Ty. He said, "Hey. Open it."

I said, "Hey. How's Rose?" Dead now? I wondered at once. Why else would he come to see me?

"Same as always."

It was a birthday card. Inside the card was a picture of Pammy, who was taller and big-busted now, standing next to Rose herself.

Linda, on the end, was wearing glasses. Her hair had darkened and grown out to a thick, glossy mane. She looked pretty but interesting, like Pete as an intellectual. She was wearing a lot of black. I made myself look carefully at Rose. She looked unchanged. I said, "I guess today is my birthday, isn't it? I hadn't remembered it yet."

"Thirty-nine." He smiled, but it was easy to tell he wasn't happy.

This transfixed me, and I forgot my place and my business until he said, "Let me order something," and cocked his eyebrow at Eileen.

I glanced at her. She smiled. I said, "Oh, she's just curious. She thinks I'm without living relatives."

"Are you?"

"Of course not." People started filling up my section. I said, "Have the blueberry pancakes and the sausage. That's the best. I'll bring a pot of coffee."

"Funny how we fall into this pattern."

I put my pad in my pocket. I said, "Don't flirt with me."

He lingered over his breakfast, reading the Des Moines Register he had brought along, as well as a Star and a USA Today that he got out of our newspaper rack (and folded up neatly and replaced). He drank four cups of coffee and asked for hash browns, then a piece of apple pie. I tried to spot our pickup in the parking lot as I scurried from table to table, but I didn't see it. He paid, talked for a moment to the cashier, and walked out. He left a 20 percent tip. Generous for a farmer but cheap for a trucker. I had the birthday card and the picture in my uniform pocket. Once or twice I took it out and looked at it.

He was back at ten-thirty, my "lunch hour." We went across the street to Wendy's.

My birthday fell on the twenty-ninth ofApril. The Ty I had known for all of my adult life spent the twenty-ninth of April in the fields.

I ordered a Coke. Ty asked for another cup of coffee. We sat by the window, fronting the Perkins lot across the street. There were no pickups at all in the lot. I said, "What are you driving?"

"That Chevy."

It was a beat-up yellow Malibu. Things piled in the backseat were visible through the rear window. I said, "Why?"

Ty, I would have to say, did look different. I had seen a lot more men in the last two and a half years, a catalog of American men in every variety, size, and color. Ty looked like the settled ones, those with habits of such long standing that they were now rituals. That, I had come to realize, was the premier sign of masculinity and maturity, a settled conviction, born of experience, that these rituals would and should be catered to. He didn't look unattractive, though.

Weathered, loose-limbed. I wouldn't have picked him for a trucker from the front.

He said, "I didn't want to carry all my stuff out in the weather.

"I'm going to Texas."

"What for?"

"They've got big corporate hog operations down there. I thought maybe I could get myself a job at one of those."

He watched me, waiting, I knew, for the question I was supposed to ask, but I couldn't ask it. Finally, he shifted his feet under the table and said, "Marv Carson wouldn't give me a loan to plant a crop this year. I didn't have any collateral except the crop itself and they decided to stop making those kind of loans, with the farm situation the way it is."

"I heard it was bad."

"Bob Stanley shot himself in the head. Right out in the barn.

Marlene found him. That's been the worst."

"They lost the farm?"

"He knew they were going to. That's why he did it. Marlene's working in Zebulon Center now, as a teacher's aide in the elementary school."

My mouth was dry. I took a sip of the Coke. I said, "What about you?"

"Those hog buildings killed me, that's what it was. The winter was so bad after the trial-" "The hearing. Nobody was on trial."

"I was."

We glared at each other, then veiled our glares.

He went on. "There was just one holdup after another with the buildings, and then I had to start over with all new sows, so that was a piece of change. I sold my place, but property values weren't anything like they'd been, and what I got didn't cover much of the loan, with the sows. Just got behind. And then more behind. The Chevy dealer made me a straight trade."

"An eight-year-old sedan for a four-year-old pickup?"

"I wasn't in a position to complain. Anyway, this is kind of a relief.

And I've never been down there. Or anyplace else for that matter."

I looked him over without shyness, with the inspecting gaze a wife earns after a certain number of years. I said, "You don't look relieved."

He shrugged.

"What about Rose?"

"I haven't been getting along with Rose all that well."

This was a touchy subject, so we watched two women come in the front door and order bowls of chili. Finally, he said, "She's getting a crop in and out. She's renting out land. When we split the farm, I took on the whole loan for the buildings, since they were on my land, so she was pretty unencumbered."

"Except there's nobody to farm the place."

"It's a big place."

"A thousand acres.

"All together," he said, "yeah. My dad would have been scared of that much land."

"There were bigger places than that out west even when he was alive."

"You know what he used to say about that? He used to say, 'Those places got the area, but they ain't got the volume."

We laughed, uneasily but together.

I said, "It's going to fall apart, isn't it?"

"Yeah." He said it reluctantly. "Yeah, it is. Rose swears she's going to keep it together. She's grim as death about it, and she goes I around like some queen. He glanced at me. "Well, she does. You should see her. Frankly, she's your dad all over."

I felt my face get hot.

He said, "I know what she says, Ginny, about your dad. She told me.

She's told everybody by now."

It was clear he didn't believe her. We watched a solitary man come ii dressed in a suit. He ordered a Big Single, large fries, and a water.

After a moment he said, "Maybe it happened. I don't say it didn't.

But it doesn't make me like her any more. I think people should keep private things private." His voice was rising as if he could barely contain himself. I was tempted to nod, not because I agreed, but because I recognized how all these things sorted themselves in his I mind, and I realized that with the best will in the world, we could never see them in the same way, and that, more than anything else, more than circumstances or history or will or wishing, divided us from each other. But the Ty I'd known was always on the lookout for agreement, reconciliation, so I didn't nod, knowing how he'd take it. I kept private things private.

"Anyway," he went on. "That's the past. I signed the whole thing over to her, the land, the buildings, the hogs, the equipment. She's sure prices are going to rise, and she's going to be a land baroness.

She's got it all figured out, the way she always does, and it's fine with me. I'm going to Texas, so he looked at me.

"So what?"

"So, I want to get a divorce."

I must have looked surprised, and I was, because the feeling of myself as a married person was something else that had lifted off long before.

He stumbled forward. "It could happen in Texas. There might be someone there I-" "That's fine."

"I haven't-" "I don't care."

"You don't?" There was a little wounded surprise in this question that revealed something underneath Ty's cool manner. I leaned forward and surveyed him again. He looked good. He would find someone for sure.

After a moment, he said, "The thing I don't understand about women is how cut and dried they are. My mother used to say to my dad, 'Ernie, if it can't be, it ain't," and she would clap her hands together and when her hands came apart, I would see that there was nothing there, and whatever we'd been wishing for or talking about, it would be gone, too, just like that."

"If you'd wanted me back, you'd have come looking for me before this."

"You don't understand how full my hands were. I couldn't leave the place for a minute. It was all getting away from me all the time-" He broke off. "Anyway, you walked out."

"Your pride was hurt?"

"I hated all that mess." His voice rose again. "I hated the way Rose roped you in-" He looked at me. "I thought you'd repent.

When I thought about things at all, that was my bottom line. I still think-" I flared up. "You were on Caroline's side! You talked to her about me!"

He sighed, and looked at me, then said, "I was on the side of the farm, that was all."

"What does that mean? You talked to her! She saw you as her ally!"

"What was I supposed to do? I didn't call her! If she called me and asked me questions, I told her what I thought. I tried to tell the truth the way I saw it."

"You didn't know the truth."

His face got red. "Look, the truth is, it was all wrong. For years, it was right, and we prospered and we got along and we did the way we knew we should be doing, and sure there were little crosses to bear, but it was right. Then Rose got selfish and you went along with her, and then it was all wrong. It wasn't up to her to change things, to screw up the monkey works!" He took a deep breath and lowered his voice. "There was real history there! And of course not everybody got what they wanted, and not everybody acted right all the time, but that's just the way it is. Life is. You got to accept that." I "Rose didn't ask Daddy for the farm!"

"But she was right there when he came up with that idea. She was all enthusiasm "So were you!"

"I didn't have any plans to ease him out! My plan was to-I slapped my hand on the table. Two kids behind the counter glanced over at us. Ty fell silent. I wanted to choose my words carefully. Finally, I said, "The thing is, I can remember when I saw it all your way! The proud progress from Grandpa Davis to Grandpa Cook to Daddy. When 'we' bought the first tractor in the county, when 'we' built the big house, when 'we' had the crops sprayed from the air, when 'we' got a car, when 'we' drained Mel's corner, when 'we' got a hundred and seventy-two bushels an acre. I can remember all of that like prayers or like being married. You know. It's good to remember and repeat. You feel good to be a part of that. But then I saw what my part really was. Rose showed me." He opened his mouth to speak, but I stopped him with my hand. "She showed me, but I knew what she showed me was true before she even finished showing me. You see this grand history, but I see blows. I see taking what you want because you want it, then making something up that justifies what you did. I see getting others to pay the price, then covering up and forgetting what the price was. Do I think Daddy came up with beating and fucking us on his own?" Ty winced. "No.

I think he had lessons, and those lessons were part of the package, along with the land and the lust to run things exactly the way he wanted to no matter what, poisoning the water and destroying the topsoil and buying bigger and bigger machinery, and then feeling certain that all of it was 'right," as you say."

He was looking at me, but his face was closed over. Finally, he said, "I guess we see things differently."

"More differently than you imagine."

"I didn't remember you like this."

"I wasn't like this. I was a ninny."

"You were pretty and funny, and you looked at the good side of things."

I looked at my watch. There was another question I wanted to ask. I let this observation die away, then I said, "That night. The night of the storm. Did you know what Daddy was going to say to us? To me?"

"I knew he was angry. He was muttering on the way home, but I didn't pay much attention to it."

I let my gaze travel over his face. I saw that its measure of hope -the feature by which I always used to recognize Ty as my husband-had given way to something more mysterious and remote.

I said, "Did you agree with him? With what he said?"

"Ginny-" Resentful frustration edged his tone. He heard it and began again, more carefully. "Ginny, when your father told me what to do and how to farm, I paid attention. Otherwise, I didn't. But he always threw you women into a panic."

I stood up. "I'm lifteen minutes late now, and I don't want Eileen to get after me. I think fifteen minutes is all the farther I can push her."