A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [10]
I gave out a distracted, “Is that so?” He looked into my face. He said, “What’s the matter, Ginny? I didn’t mean to scare you. I was sure you heard me.”
“I was thinking that my father is acting crazy. I mean, I wasn’t actually thinking it, I was panicking about it.”
“You mean the corporation thing? It’s probably a good idea, actually.”
“But he’s not the good idea type. That wasn’t him talking, that was some banker talking. Or else, if it was him talking, he was talking about something besides accepting his mortality and avoiding inheritance taxes. That would be an awfully farsighted and levelheaded thing for him to do.”
“Well, wait and see what happens. Maybe he’ll wake up tomorrow and have forgotten all about it.” Jess’s voice was confident and flat, without resonance, as if everything he might say would be the simple truth.
“But it’s already a tangle. It’s already an impossible tangle and it’s only been five minutes.”
“I don’t see why. You said yourself you were panicking—” He went on, “Anyway, I always think that things have to happen the way they do happen, that there are so many inner and outer forces joining at every event that it becomes a kind of fate. I learned from studying Buddhism that there’s beauty, and certainly a lot of peace, in accepting that.” I sniffed. A smile twinkled sheepishly across his face. “Okay, okay,” he said, “how about this? If you worry about it, you draw it to you.”
“My mother said that about tornadoes.”
“See? The wisdom of the plains. Pretend nothing happened.”
“We always do.”
I felt suddenly shy about speaking so openly to someone I hadn’t seen in thirteen years. I said, “Let’s keep my doubt between us, okay?” The thought of Harold broadcasting this around the neighborhood as he liked to do was a chilling one. Jess caught my gaze and held it. He said, “I don’t gossip with Harold, Ginny. Don’t worry.” I believed him. I believed everything he said, and felt reassured.
It was true that if my father was to keel over right then, we would have to sell part of the farm to pay the inheritance taxes. Sam and Arabella had paid $52 an acre for a quarter section, a hundred sixty acres. The price was low because of the standing water, and Sam and Arabella were right in suspecting that some of their neighbors in Mason City were amused at their expense, imagine having bought a piece of land, sight unseen, a piece of malarial marsh, imagine having been such a latecomer, and so foolish, and so young.
In the thirties, when my father and grandfather added two more pieces, they still paid less than $90 an acre, and that was for tiled, improved land. The family they bought the land from moved away to Minneapolis first, then California, but when I was a child in the fifties, Bob Stanley’s father, Newt, still wasn’t speaking to my father because he had aced the Stanley brothers out of some sort of a deal—Newt and the wife in the departed family were cousins. The Depression, for our family, was a time of careful consolidation of holdings through hard work, good luck, smart farming. Of course, that wasn’t how everyone in Zebulon County saw it, but my father would say, “Envy likes to talk.” At any rate, all that marshy land was like compost, pure fertility, and in 1979 the market value of my father’s land was $3200 an acre, at the very pinnacle of land values in Zebulon County and in the whole state. His thousand acres, then, made him a millionaire more than three times over, especially as it was paid for.
“It’s Marv Carson who’s put this bug in his ear,” was what Ty said to me when we were getting ready for bed that night.
I said, “It was Harold’s tractor that drove him over the edge.”
“The tractor was Marv’s idea, too. Loren told me tonight that Marv’s been working on Harold since Christmas. Harold would like your dad to think he paid