A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [145]
I went to the Earl May Garden Center in Mason City and to the vet’s office and to the Farmers’ Co-op in Zebulon Center, and I scoped out what was on the shelves and how the shelves were arranged. At Earl May, the clerk watched me because the store was empty and he didn’t have anything else to do, so I left without buying anything. At the vet’s office, Alice, the receptionist, kept trying to engage me in conversation about some puppies her dog had given birth to, and whether I wanted one. At the Farmers’ Co-op, everything except seed, cement, and animal feed was behind one counter or another, and three or four farmers were sitting around, gossiping and watching me. Buying, I realized, would be harder than I thought.
I went to the Pike library, and found a pamphlet, “Twenty-five Poisonous Common Plants to Beware Of,” put out by the Ohio State University Extension Service. It was clear that the fields abounded with plenty of poisons, too, and not only jimsonweed and bittersweet and common nightshade, deadly amanita and green death caps and common locoweed, with which I had a passing familiarity. Lilies of the valley were poisonous, and daffodils, and horse nettles and ground-cherries, rhubarb leaves, of course, garden foxgloves, English ivy. Lamb’s lettuce berries and roots, what the pamphlet called pokeweed. Mistletoe berries. The most poisonous, mentioned in passing but not pictured, was water hemlock. I went back to the shelf and got out a wildflower guide.
Water hemlock was a member of the carrot and parsley family. “Its roots,” the book stated, “can be and have been mistaken for parsnips, with fatal results. Livestock may die from grazing on it.” I looked at the picture. It looked familiar. I memorized the description, noted that it was to be found in freshwater swampy areas, put the book back on the shelf, and went home. Certainly, I thought, this is what they meant by “premeditated”—this deliberate savoring of each step, the assembly of each element, the contemplation of how death would be created, how a path of intentional circumstances paralleling and mimicking accidental circumstances would be set out upon. One thing, I have to say, that I especially relished was the secrecy of it. In that way, I saw, I had been practicing for just such an event as this all my life.
It took me about two weeks, the greatest part of that time (which wasn’t all that much, since there was perfect order and cleanliness to maintain) spent in learning to distinguish between various members of the parsley family, then scouting wet areas for the hemlock. There was none to be found at the quarry, nor was there any in a boggy spot at the southern edge of Harold Clark’s farm. Mel’s corner had long since been too well drained. On a hunch, one day, I stopped along the Scenic, just where the Zebulon River opened out into a little slough, and where, in the spring, I had seen that flock of pelicans and thought they portended something good. I wore yellow dishwashing gloves, and I picked a tall, erect plant with white flowers, a magenta-streaked stem, and pointed leaves with veins ending at notches between the teeth. The roots were pleasantly fragrant, not quite carrotlike.
The cabbages in Rose’s garden were solid and heavy. I picked two. Rose and the girls were out. I thawed a pork liver and some loins in the microwave. I had bought sausage casings at the Supervalu in Pike the day before. All operations as familiar as my own kitchen, as any cooking project I had ever engaged in before, except more meaningful. The hemlock root I had minced