A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [59]
I laughed.
“No, seriously. When I went off to the army, there was no question about whether I would come back to the farm. I was good in 4-H and FFA. Remember that steer I raised? I took him to shows all over the state. Bob. Bob the Beef, I used to call him. I liked him, I liked taking care of him, and I liked the money I made when he was slaughtered. I was the perfect future farmer, psychologically, I mean. My care for old Bob was absolutely real, but it only went so far. From the moment Harold told me he was mine, Bob was dead meat.”
“What happened?”
“I changed my mind about meat, about the way meat is produced in this country, about what it does to your own body. I mean, I suppose Bob lived a good life. I showered him with attention. But he’s the exception. He had a name. You know that the new hybrid breeds of chickens fatten so fast that they can’t support themselves on their own legs? I mean, since they’re all in cages after all, they don’t really have to, and I suppose if their legs are bad, they don’t want to get out, either. But it disgusts me. I don’t want to eat it, I don’t want to do it.”
I went up to him and said, “But, Jess, you don’t have to be a farmer, and if you are, you don’t have to raise livestock. This seems kind of off the track to me. First you were talking about Harold, now you’re talking about why you’re a vegetarian.”
He looked at me speculatively, rubbing his hand over his chin as if he had a beard. “Okay. Okay. The thing is, Harold loves me. He loves me like a lover. I’ve been gone so long that he’s not used to me any more, and he wants to win me, and he thinks he can win me with the farm, even though he must know from things I’ve said that I wouldn’t farm the way he does, I would use the land for other things. And I’m not sure that I want to be fixed, either. Harold wants to fix me right here in Zebulon County.”
His voice sounded horrified. I said, “You sound like he wants to fix you the way Bob the Beef was fixed.”
He laughed. “Well, maybe it would feel like the same thing. I don’t know. But when I think of myself ten years down the road, I wonder if it’ll be Loren and me, the Clark brothers, Frick and Frack, living in their concrete house, hunched over their plates, grunting and shoveling it in with a big spoon, three times a day.”
“We’re here.”
“Yeah, you’re there. You’ve made your families and your lives, and they’re yours.” He sounded as deeply, unself-consciously envious as I’d ever heard anyone sound. I felt struck, pierced. We didn’t say anything more for a long, breezy moment. Finally, I said, “Anyway, how do you know Harold wants to give you the farm? Is he dangling it in front of you?”
“Hints. Just hints. After Pete said the other night that Harold had been talking about changing his will in the co-op, I started paying attention. Lots of hints.”
“Well, wait till he does something concrete.”
“That’s what you all did, and look what happened.”
“We were sort of caught with our pants down, weren’t we?”
Jess laughed and I laughed and for a moment everything seemed remote and not very important. I wondered if maybe that wasn’t the right way to look at things after all, standing in the dump, smelling the wild roses, and taking the long perspective.
Jess said, “I feel better. The more I talk about it, the less important all of this seems. Something will come to pass. Thanks.” He smiled warmly at me, then wrapped his hand around my arm, pulled me toward him, and kissed me. It was a strange sensation, a clumsy stumbling falling being caught, the broad, sunlit world narrowing to the dark focus of his cushiony lips on mine. It scared me to death, but still I discovered how much I had been waiting for it.
Book Three
18
OUT WEST, EVEN AS CLOSE as Nebraska and South Dakota, there were farms that dwarfed my father’s in size, thousands of acres of wheat or pastureland rolling to the horizon, and all