A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [153]
When we drove into our yard, Ty got out even before the engine died, and headed for the barn. It was Friday. I supposed that work on the hog buildings would begin again the following week. The poured floors, which had been exposed to the weather for over three months, were a little discolored, and one had developed a long crack that needed patching, but in spite of potential problems, the project had to go forward. We were too much in debt to stop now.
Every farm after harvest looks neglected and disorganized, but as we drove into our yard, and then as I went into our house, our place seemed lifeless to me, far beyond the power of our usual winter cleaning up, mending, and planning to make it what it had been only the previous spring. The house looked somewhat better, thanks to my obsessive work, but the furnishings were old and mismatched, the carpeting and vinyl dark with stains that simply didn’t respond to the products available for removing them. Shit, blood, oil, and grease eventually hold sway in spite of the most industrious efforts. Usually, I didn’t take in my place as a whole. I focused on a chair I’d just shampooed or a picture I’d found at the antique store in Cabot, or a corner that looked presentable or welcoming. Tonight I came back to my house as a stranger, and I remembered a friend of Daddy’s who told me once about when rural electrification came through. Unlike Daddy’s family, Jim’s family hadn’t had a gasoline generator to light the house. When the wires were strung and the family gathered in the kitchen to witness the great event, the mother’s first words of the new era were, “Everything’s so dirty!” Those could have been my first words of our new era, attesting to how strange and far from home I felt taking meat from my refrigerator and salting it with my old red plastic saltshaker and slapping it onto the broiler pan I’d used for seventeen years.
I peeled potatoes and put them on to boil, then went out in the garden and picked some brussels sprouts off the stalk. If you leave them through the fall, through the frosts, they sweeten up. The same with parsnips. The garden, too, was a ruin. I’d pulled out the tomato vines and hung them over cold water pipes in the cellar. The fruit would ripen slowly until sometime around Thanksgiving. The pepper plants were tall, leafless stalks, the potato bed a jumbled plot of dark earth and wet straw. Only the brussels sprouts on their four-foot stalks looked graceful. A giant green rosette of spreading leaves opened two feet wide at the top, then the stalk curved strongly downward, presenting neat alternating rows of dark knobs. I broke a couple of dozen off, snap, snap, snap, and took them inside. All my motions were familiar—running an inch of water in an old pot, piercing the bottoms of the sprouts with a fork. I turned down the heat under the potatoes. Ty came in, stepping out of his boots and hanging his insulated coverall by the door. I said, “Supper will be ready in twenty minutes.”
“Great.”
I set the pan of sprouts over a low flame.
He finished washing his hands, dried them carefully on a dish towel, and walked out of the room. I turned on the oven to broil and bent down to see if it had lit, because sometimes the pilot light went out. I said, “One new thing we could get would be a range. This one is a menace.”
He was back in the room. He said, “I don’t necessarily think this is the right time to get a new range.”
“Well, maybe it will just blow up, then, and put us out of our misery.”
He heaved an exasperated sigh, then said, “I’ll bring the range over from your father’s place tomorrow. That’s pretty new.”
“Or we could move over there. I’m the oldest.”
“That house is too big for us.” He said this as if he were saying, how dare you?
“Well, it was built to be big. It was built to show off. Maybe now I’ve inherited my turn to show off.”
“I think you’ve shown off plenty this summer, frankly.”
Steam rose from the boiling potatoes and the