A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [11]
“One of those tractors costs forty thousand dollars.”
“So, his land’s worth a million and a half. My dad’s farm’s worth almost half a million. I was thinking of selling that and using that money to expand the hog operation.” He looked at me and shrugged. “Hey,” he said, “I’ve been talking to Marv myself.”
“It makes me feel weird to toss around all these high numbers. Anyway, who would buy at these prices? And everybody’s bitching about interest rates.”
“But interest rates are always up, and maybe prices will go higher.”
“Hunh.” I sat down in the window seat and looked down the road toward Rose’s house. All their lights were out. I said, “Rose looked beat when we left the party.”
Ty said, “Those Slurrystores are great. They hold eighty thousand gallons of hog slurry. After it cools off, you can put it right in the field. I’d like one of those. And a hog confinement building. Air-conditioned. I want one of them, too. And, let’s see, how about a couple of champion boars, the kind whose breeding is so pure they can sit up to dinner with you and not spill anything on the tablecloth.” He lay back on the bed. “Sweet old pink boys named Rockefeller and Vanderbilt.”
It was a rare thing for Ty to make wishes, so I listened to him without interrupting. He said, “You get a good breeding line of your own going and you can put those babies up for adoption. Everybody wants one. You can say, ‘Yeah, Jake, but you’ve got to feed him with your own spoon, and let him sleep on your side of the bed,’ and they’ll say, ‘Sure, Ty, anything. I’ve already started his college fund.’ ” He rolled over and smiled at me. “Or hers. Sows with that kind of endowment get all the benefits, too.”
“That’s what I like about hogs. They get to grow up. I used to hate it when the Ericsons slaughtered their veal calves.”
“I didn’t know they had a dairy operation.”
“Cal loved cows. He had pictures of his favorite milkers in his wallet, along with the kids. I actually think he could have gone on with this place, but when the cows went, he didn’t care that much any more.”
“Holsteins?”
“Oh, sure. But there was a little Jersey that he milked for the family. They made wonderful ice cream. Her name was Violet.”
“Whose?”
“The Jersey’s. The kids had these plain-as-a-post names, Dinah and Ruth, but the cows all had flower names like Primrose and Lobelia.”
“Hmm,” said Ty, and his eyes closed. His good humor made everything seem possible. Undoubtedly, each of us interpreted my father’s announcement as the answer to some wish or fear of ours. Ty surely saw it as the long-withheld recognition of his talent with the hogs. I saw it as a kind of illicit reward for years of chores and courtesy. Pete, who had inherited no land, must have seen his status rise from tenancy to ownership right there. Rose would have used the word “reward,” too, but a deserved one, a just one, the right order of things expressing itself as it had when Ty’s father died in the hog pen and left him that farm.
It seemed to me that whatever else was true, it was absolutely the case that Ty deserved to realize some of his wishes. I said, “But what about this thing with Caroline? She’s actually sleeping at Rose’s. That’s going to make him madder.”
“He gets into snits, then he gets talked out of them. She didn’t need to get on her high horse like that, though.”
“She just said she didn’t know.”
“And she said it like she did know, the way she always does.” His voice was mild, sleepy, robbing this remark of any sting. Ty had always liked Caroline and teased her. When Daddy wanted her to pitch in at fourteen and learn to drive the tractor, Ty had talked him out of it, mindful the way lots of farmers weren’t of potential accidents. But I knew, too, that he literally could not imagine why she had done a thing he never would have, left for college and never really come back. He gave out a soft, ruffling snore.
A lot of women I knew