A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [7]
It was pretty clear that John Cook had gained, through dint of sweat equity, a share in the Davis farm, and when Edith turned sixteen, John, thirty-three by then, married her. They continued to live in the bungalow, and Sam and Arabella ordered a house from Sears, this one larger and more ostentatious than the bungalow, “The Chelsea.” They took delivery on the Chelsea (four bedrooms, living room, dining room, and reception hall, with indoor bathroom, and sliding doors between living room and dining room, $1129) at the freight delivery point in Cabot. The kit included every board, joist, nail, window frame, and door that they would need, as well as seventy-six pages of instructions. That was the house that we grew up in and that my father lived in. The bungalow was torn down in the thirties and the lumber was used for a chicken house.
I was always aware, I think, of the water in the soil, the way it travels from particle to particle, molecules adhering, clustering, evaporating, heating, cooling, freezing, rising upward to the surface and fogging the cool air or sinking downward, dissolving this nutrient and that, quick in everything it does, endlessly working and flowing, a river sometimes, a lake sometimes. When I was very young, I imagined it ready at any time to rise and cover the earth again, except for the tile lines. Prairie settlers always saw a sea or an ocean of grass, could never think of any other metaphor, since most of them had lately seen the Atlantic. The Davises did find a shimmering sheet punctuated by cattails and sweet flag. The grass is gone, now, and the marshes, “the big wet prairie,” but the sea is still beneath our feet, and we walk on it.
4
HAROLD’S PLACE LOOKED much like ours, flat as flat, though the house was more Victorian in style, with sunrise gable finishes and a big porch swing in front. Harold didn’t have as much land as my father, but he farmed it efficiently, and had prospered for as many years as my father had. At the time of the pig roast, it was still rankling my father that Harold suddenly, in March, and without telling my father ahead of time, bought a brand-new, enclosed, air-conditioned International Harvester tractor with a tape cassette player, for playing old Bob Wills recordings over and over while working in the fields, and not only the tractor, but a new planter as well. My father had taken to greeting Harold every time they met with a Bob Wills-like falsetto “Ah-hanh!” but the real bone of contention was not that Harold had pulled ahead of my father in the machinery competition, but that he hadn’t divulged how he’d financed the purchase, whether cold, out of savings and last year’s profits (in which case, he was doing better than my father thought, and better than my father), or by going to the bank. It may have been that Loren, who had taken farm management courses in college, had finally convinced Harold that a certain amount of debt was desirable for a business. My father didn’t know and that annoyed him. Harold, for his part, let no opportunity pass for praising his new equipment, for marveling at how many years of dust he had eaten, for announcing the number of gears (twelve), for admiring the brilliant red paint job that stood out so nicely against a green field, a blue sky. At the pig roast, Jess Clark and the new machinery were Harold’s twin exhibits, and guests from all over the area couldn’t resist, had no reason to resist, the way he ferried them between the two, asking for and receiving admiration with a kind of shameless innocence that he was known for.
The other farmers were vocal in their envy of the tractor. Bob Stanley stood in the center of the group gathered around the table where Loren was slicing the pork and said, “We’re all going to be buying those things pretty soon. You got big fields that take days to work, you’re not gonna want to eat dust like you do now. And hell,