A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [170]
But then I had something else, too. I had a burden lift off me that I hadn’t even felt the heaviness of until then, and it was the burden of having to wait and see what was going to happen.
Epilogue
THE BOONE BROTHERS AUCTION HOUSE was plenty busy that spring, and for years to come, riding on the surging waves of the land as it rolled and shifted from farmer to farmer. I wasn’t told where our dishes and our couches and our tractors and our pictures and our frying pans washed up. Our thousand acres seems to have gone to The Heartland Corporation, which may or may not have had some of the Stanleys in it—perhaps some of the Stanley cousins who’d long ago moved to Chicago. The Chelsea, that once came on a train, was too big to move, so they bulldozed it. Rose’s bungalow went to Henry Grove, as it had once come from Columbus, and my house, too, was taken down to make room for an expansion of the hog buildings to give them a five-thousand-sow capacity. When you stand at the intersection of County 686 and Cabot Street Road now, you see that the fields make no room for houses or barnyards or people. No lives are lived any more within the horizon of your gaze.
Caroline and I did share a legacy, our $34,000 tax bill on the sale of the properties. Caroline paid her half, I was told. About my half, the IRS and I have an agreement. I work extra hours, and they don’t press Pam and Linda for money. I pay two hundred dollars a month, every month, and I think of it as my “regret money,” and though what I am regretful for mutates and evolves, I am glad to pay it, the only mortgage I will ever be given. They have calculated that I will have my regret paid off in fourteen years, and maybe by that time I will know what it is. At any rate, regret is part of my inheritance.
Solitude is part of my inheritance, too. Men are friendly to me at the restaurant, and sometimes they ask me to a movie, but there is no man like Jess, graceful and mysterious, no man like Ty, forthright and good and blind, no man like Pete, mercurial and haunted, no man like Daddy, who is what he is and can’t be labeled. The men who ask me out are simple and strange, defeated by their own solitude. It is easier, and more seductive, to leave those doors closed.
I have inherited Pam and Linda. Pam looks like a heftier Rose, and her major in college was music education. Linda looks like a more skeptical, less passionate Pete, and her major in college is prebusiness. She is especially interested in vertical food conglomerates, and may go to work for General Foods. We talk sometimes, with reasonable calm, about Daddy and Rose and Pete and Caroline and even Jess. They understand that all Rose could bequeath them was her view of things. Her honesty has given them some confidence. They are also cautious, and I doubt they will ever throw that caution to the winds. They are closer and more protective of one another than they ever were as children. I recognize that they don’t have a great deal of faith in my guardianship, though they like me, and we get along smoothly.
I see in them what I am too close to see in myself, the fusing and mixing of their parents. I see how their inheritance takes place right there, in the shape of their eyes and their glance, the weight of their bodies and their movements, in their intelligence and their thoughts.
Looking at them forces me to know that although the farm and all its burdens and gifts are scattered, my inheritance is with me, sitting in my chair. Lodged in my every cell, along with the DNA, are molecules of topsoil and atrazine and paraquat and anhydrous ammonia and diesel fuel and plant dust, and also molecules of memory: the bracing summer chill of floating on my back in Mel’s pond, staring at the sky; the exotic redolence of the dresses in my mother’s closet; the sharp