A Thousand Acres: A Novel

Acclaim for Jane Smiley’s
A THOUSAND ACRES

“Breathtaking.… Masterly.… Smiley’s most impressive work.”


USA Today

“An extraordinary novel.… A story rich in heart-tugging revelations that explode in an otherwise placid landscape.… Smiley possesses a persuasive and powerful voice all her own.… [She] may be counted among our most perceptive and eloquent realists.”


Newsday

“A tour de force.”


Newsweek

“Not to be missed.… We don’t just read Jane Smiley’s fiction, we fall into it, captivated by the level pitch of her voice, her eye for the stunning detail, her sharp insights.”


The Plain Dealer

“An intricate and dazzling novel, full of brilliant portraits of family relationships that are never what they seem, laced with layers of mysteries and puzzles.”


Cosmopolitan

“Smiley’s characters are so hauntingly real you can spend the better part of a day just brooding about them.… [Smiley’s] the kind of writer other writers pass among themselves like a well-guarded secret.”


The Boston Globe

“Compelling.… Terrific.… This is a novel so rich in themes that one can only marvel at how adeptly Smiley weaves her people and plots and references into a whole as cohesive as the furrowed rows of corn on her fictional farm in Iowa.… A marvelous and moving story of America.”


Detroit Free Press

 

Jane Smiley
A THOUSAND ACRES

Jane Smiley is the author of more than ten works of fiction, including
Good Faith, Horse Heaven, Moo
, and
The Greenlanders
. In 2001 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in northern California.

ALSO BY JANE SMILEY

Good Faith

Horse Heaven

The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton

Moo

Ordinary Love & Good Will

Catskill Crafts

The Greenlanders

The Age of Grief

Duplicate Keys

At Paradise Gate

Barn Blind

FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, DECEMBER 2003

Copyright © 1991 by Jane Smiley

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1991. Subsequently published in paperback by The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1992.

Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Smiley, Jane.
A thousand acres / Jane Smiley,
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-78771-2
1. Fathers and daughters—Fiction. 2. Family farms—Fiction.
3. Farm life—Fiction. 4. Sisters—Fiction. 5. Iowa—Fiction.
I. Title.
PS3569.M39T47 1991
813′.54—dc20
91052720

www.anchorbooks.com

v3.1

To Steve, as simple as that
.

The body repeats the landscape. They are the source of each other and create each other. We were marked by the seasonal body of earth, by the terrible migrations of people, by the swift turn of a century, verging on change never before experienced on this greening planet.

—M
ERIDEL
L
E
S
UEUR
,                                     
“The Ancient People and the Newly Come”

Contents
Book One
1

A
T SIXTY MILES PER HOUR
, you could pass our farm in a minute, on County Road 686, which ran due north into the T intersection at Cabot Street Road. Cabot Street Road was really just another country blacktop, except that five miles west it ran into and out of the town of Cabot. On the western edge of Cabot, it became Zebulon County Scenic Highway, and ran for three miles along the curve of the Zebulon River, before the river turned south and the Scenic continued west into Pike. The T intersection of CR 686 perched on a little rise, a rise nearly as imperceptible as the bump in the center of an inexpensive plate.

From that bump, the earth was unquestionably flat, the sky unquestionably domed, and it seemed to me when I was a child in school, learning about Columbus, that in spite of what my teacher said, ancient cultures might have been onto something. No globe or map fully convinced me that Zebulon County was not the center of the universe. Certainly, Zebulon County, where the earth
was
flat, was one spot where a sphere (a seed, a rubber ball, a ballbearing) must come to perfect rest and once at rest must send a taproot downward into the ten-foot-thick topsoil.

Because the intersection was on this tiny rise, you could see our buildings, a mile distant, at the southern edge of the farm. A mile to the east, you could see three silos that marked the northeastern corner, and if you raked your gaze from the silos to the house and barn, then back again, you would take in the immensity of the piece
of land my father owned, six hundred forty acres, a whole section, paid for, no encumbrances, as flat and fertile, black, friable, and exposed as any piece of land on the face of the earth.

If you looked west from the intersection, you saw no sign of anything remotely scenic in the distance. That was because the Zebulon River had cut down through topsoil and limestone, and made its pretty course a valley below the level of the surrounding farmlands. Nor, except at night, did you see any sign of Cabot. You saw only this, two sets of farm buildings surrounded by fields. In the nearer set lived the Ericsons, who had daughters the ages of my sister Rose and myself, and in the farther set lived the Clarks, whose sons, Loren and Jess, were in grammar school when we were in junior high. Harold Clark was my father’s best friend. He had five hundred acres and no mortgage. The Ericsons had three hundred seventy acres and a mortgage.

Acreage and financing were facts as basic as name and gender in Zebulon County. Harold Clark and my father used to argue at our kitchen table about who should get the Ericson land when they finally lost their mortgage. I was aware of this whenever I played with Ruthie Ericson, Whenever my mother, my sister Rose, and I went over to help can garden produce, whenever Mrs. Ericson brought over some pies or doughnuts, whenever my father loaned Mr. Ericson a tool, whenever we ate Sunday dinner in the Ericsons’ kitchen. I recognized the justice of Harold Clark’s opinion that the Ericson land was on his side of the road, but even so, I thought it should be us. For one thing, Dinah Ericson’s bedroom had a window seat in the closet that I coveted. For another, I thought it appropriate and desirable that the great circle of the flat earth spreading out from the T intersection of County Road 686 and Cabot Street Road be ours. A thousand acres. It was that simple.

It was 1951 and I was eight when I saw the farm and the future in this way. That was the year my father bought his first car, a Buick sedan with prickly gray velvet seats, so rounded and slick that it was easy to slide off the backseat into the footwell when we went over a stiff bump or around a sharp corner. That was also the year my sister Caroline was born, which was undoubtedly the reason my father bought the car. The Ericson children and the Clark children
continued to ride in the back of the farm pickup, but the Cook children kicked their toes against a front seat and stared out the back windows, nicely protected from the dust. The car was the exact measure of six hundred forty acres compared to three hundred or five hundred.

In spite of the price of gasoline, we took a lot of rides that year, something farmers rarely do, and my father never again did after Caroline was born. For me, it was a pleasure like a secret hoard of coins—Rose, whom I adored, sitting against me in the hot musty velvet luxury of the car’s interior, the click of the gravel on its undercarriage, the sensation of the car swimming in the rutted road, the farms passing every minute, reduced from vastness to insignificance by our speed; the unaccustomed sense of leisure; most important, though, the reassuring note of my father’s and mother’s voices commenting on what they saw—he on the progress of the yearly work and the condition of the animals in the pastures, she on the look and size of the house and garden, the colors of the buildings. Their tones of voice were unhurried and self-confident, complacent with the knowledge that the work at our place was farther along, the buildings at our place more imposing and better cared for. When I think of them now, I think how they had probably seen nearly as little of the world as I had by that time. But when I listened to their duet then, I nestled into the certainty of the way, through the repeated comparisons, our farm and our lives seemed secure and good.

2

J
ESS
C
LARK WAS GONE
for thirteen years. He left for a commonplace reason—he was drafted—but within a few months of Harold’s accompanying his son to the bus depot in Zebulon Center, Jess and everything about him slipped into the category of the unmentionable, and no one spoke of him again until the spring of 1979, when I ran into Loren Clark at the bank in Pike and he said that Harold was giving a pig roast for Jess’s homecoming, would all of us come, no need to bring anything. I put my hand on Loren’s arm, which stopped him from turning away and made him look me in the eye. I said, “Well, then, where’s he been?”

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