Read Online A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley - Free Book Online

Behind me, Ty said, "Well, that was pretty much the same as usual."

    "I was thinking that, too."

    "He's said that before, about me doing what I want. Not very often, but once in a while."

    "He's probably glad of a little vacation, especially right now, since corn planting was so quick."

    "No doubt."

    I was putting in tomato plants the next day, a hundred tomato plants, mostly Better Boys, Gurney Girls, and Romas that Rose had grown in her cold frame. I had a knack with tomatoes that I had developed into a fairly ritualized procedure, planting deep in a mIxture of peat, bonemeal, and alfalfa meal, then setting an old tin can around each plant to hold water and repel cutworms. Around that, leaves of the Des Moines Register, then mounds of half-decayed grass cuttings on top of those. Every year, we said we would take tomatoes to Fort Dodge and Ames and sell them at farmers markets, but every year we canned them all instead-sometimes live hundred quarts of tomato juice that we drank like orange juice all winter.

    I pushed my hair back, wiped my nose on my sleeve, and sat up, only to discover less Clark sitting across the corner of the garden from me, smiling. He had on a pair of shorts and those expensive sneakers with soles like inverted soup plates. I remember how automatically I thought of him as a younger man, somehow relatively unformed, and that gave me a kind of ease with him that I don't often feel with strange men. I said, "So, tell me more," just as if no time had passed since we talked Sunday. He looked at me carefully, I thought, then said, "Loren keeps saying, 'No wife or kids, huh? I heard they have nice-looking girls out west. Nice-looking girls."" We laughed.

    Jess watched me for a moment, then said, "I did have a fiancee.

    She was killed in a car accident."

    "When was that?"

    "Six years ago. She was twenty-three, and her name was Alison."

    "That's a pity. I'm sorry.

    "Well, I drank myself silly about it for two years. If you want to drink in Canada, you can find a lot of company.

    "That's true anywhere."

    "In Canada there's no undercurrent of shame. You just drink."

    "I saw at the pig roast that you didn't seem to be drinking anything."

    "On the second anniversary of Alison's accident, I drank two bottles of rye whiskey and nearly died of alcohol poisoning, so I haven't had a drink or a beer since."

    "Oh, Jess." I felt sorry for him. Everything he said about himself revealed the sort of life that I had always been afraid of.

    I picked up the second box of tomato plants and moved down the row. I troweled up a big hole and dumped in the bonemeal mixture, then stripped off the tomato plant's lower leaves and coiled it gently In the hole-with tomatoes, roots grow out of any part of the stem that's underground, so a mature plant can stand a lot of weather.

    When I looked up, Jess's gaze was serious and intent. I said, "I'd like to hear more."

    He said, "You know, Alison saw things very darkly. Her parents lived in Manitoba, and they were extremely religious. When she went to live in Vancouver, they repudiated her in specifically biblical terms. The conviction that they truly thought she was damned dragged at her more and more as time went on. The fact was that she was a very kind person, generous and sweet and careful of people's feelings. Actually, we never really knew whether the accident was an accident. She pulled into the oncoming lane of a two-lane highway, into the path of a semi.

    She had been depressed, that made it look like suicide. But she endangered someone else. That was very unlike her."

    I sat back on my heels and looked at him, but he smiled and said, "Please keep planting. It makes it easier to talk." I dug another hole.

    He said, "I used to call her parents from bars and threaten to come to Manitoba and kill them. They always listened to me. Sometimes one or the other of them would get on the extension. While I was raving, they would be praying for me. I don't think they ever