A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [169]
Things hung from the walls: part of an antique harness that might bring some money, three hurricane lamps, old buckets and feed pans nested precariously together, rakes. A pile of rusted bailing wire. On the workbench, some C clamps, a hammer, which I picked up, a band saw, a spare ax handle. Other tools. A folded tarp. A peck-sized fruit basket. Back in the corner, a ray of sunlight shone on the old pump from the well outside Daddy’s back door, here since they piped water into the house. A half a dozen paint cans. A stack of old windows, some glass broken beneath them. On the workbench, cans of nails, new and used. A box of fuses. The lid of an old chicken incubator. I wondered where it would all go. A few plastic Treflan jugs lay underneath the workbench, both with lids and without. A pyramid of ancient one-gallon tins was stacked in the farthest corner, with a little space cleared around them. It was getting cold as the sun approached the horizon, but I went around the tractor and climbed gingerly over the disk. Dust floated in the air. I picked up one of the dry and dented tins. The label said that it contained DDT. “Handle according to instructions.” I wondered where it could all go.
I moved the truck into Rose’s driveway anyway. Then I got out and walked around Rose’s old house. The butter-colored plywood fading to gray that covered the windows made the place look blind and desolate. The white siding on the western face of the house was dark with grit. Rose would have washed that down.
The boards nailed over the cellar door came up easily enough with the claw hammer, even though my hands were shaking in the frigid dusky breeze. The metal handle turned with barely a creak. I lifted the door. There was no electricity and light outside was fading. I didn’t carry matches. My feet felt their way down the steps one at a time. I knew Rose’s shelves weren’t far from the doorway, so I stepped forward with my hands outstretched. I felt cobwebs drift across my fingers and face.
The rough wooden shelves held smooth cold pints and quarts. I didn’t have to see them to know what they were—jams and pickles, tomatoes, dilled beans, tomato juice, beets, applesauce, peach butter. Rose’s bounty, years of farm summers, a habit we kept up long after most of our neighbors. I felt a box and knew I had found the sausages, shoved in helter-skelter owing to the jumble of passionate events, then later pushed back, pushed aside, forgotten. I carried the box awkwardly up the steps. I closed the cellar door, and in the dark, with the truck lights trained on my work, I nailed the door down again. The kraut and the liquid inside the jars had turned a deep orange, and the lids were rusted a little around the rims. I kept glancing at them beside me on the seat as I drove away, and so I forgot to take a last look at the farm.
Pam was at her boyfriend’s and Linda was asleep when I got home. She had dropped off over her economics text. I marked her place and set it on the floor, then turned out her bedside light and pulled the comforter over her shoulders. After looking at her a moment, I smoothed the hair back from her face. Sleeping, she did look like Rose had looked years ago, before her wedding, when, I suppose, she was happily anticipating a life that never came to pass.
I set the jars by the sink and looked down into the garbage disposal. I was perplexed, actually, perplexed and nervous, as if I were holding live explosives. Gingerly, I twisted off the rings and then pried off the caps. A strong sour odor of vinegar bellied out. Maybe there was a better way to do this—take it to the landfill? Burn it somehow? Perhaps I shouldn’t have taken off the caps? I could have saved it forever in these inert glass bottles. I sat down and thought, but thinking got me nowhere. And so I did it, I did the best I could.