A Thousand Acres: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

had a dairy operation.”
    “Cal loved cows. He had pictures of his favorite milkers in his wallet, along with the kids. I actually think he could have gone on with this place, but when the cows went, he didn’t care that much any more.”
    “Holsteins?”
    “Oh, sure. But there was a little Jersey that he milked for the family. They made wonderful ice cream. Her name was Violet.”
    “Whose?”
    “The Jersey’s. The kids had these plain-as-a-post names, Dinah and Ruth, but the cows all had flower names like Primrose and Lobelia.”
    “Hmm,” said Ty, and his eyes closed. His good humor made everything seem possible. Undoubtedly, each of us interpreted my father’s announcement as the answer to some wish or fear of ours. Ty surely saw it as the long-withheld recognition of his talent withthe hogs. I saw it as a kind of illicit reward for years of chores and courtesy. Pete, who had inherited no land, must have seen his status rise from tenancy to ownership right there. Rose would have used the word “reward,” too, but a deserved one, a just one, the right order of things expressing itself as it had when Ty’s father died in the hog pen and left him that farm.
    It seemed to me that whatever else was true, it was absolutely the case that Ty deserved to realize some of his wishes. I said, “But what about this thing with Caroline? She’s actually sleeping at Rose’s. That’s going to make him madder.”
    “He gets into snits, then he gets talked out of them. She didn’t need to get on her high horse like that, though.”
    “She just said she didn’t know.”
    “And she said it like she did know, the way she always does.” His voice was mild, sleepy, robbing this remark of any sting. Ty had always liked Caroline and teased her. When Daddy wanted her to pitch in at fourteen and learn to drive the tractor, Ty had talked him out of it, mindful the way lots of farmers weren’t of potential accidents. But I knew, too, that he literally could not imagine why she had done a thing he never would have, left for college and never really come back. He gave out a soft, ruffling snore.
    A lot of women I knew complained that their husbands hardly talked to them. There are always lots of clubs in farm towns, where the wives are ostensibly doing good works, but the good works are afloat in a river of talk, and that’s the real point, I always thought. Ty told me everything, though, all about his days with my father and Pete, all about the livestock and the crops and what he saw in the fields and who he saw in town. Conversation came so easily to him that other people seemed somehow choked by comparison. And his conversation was hopeful and good-humored. Even when Pete and my father were threatening to kill one another, which happened about once every two years, Ty would say, “Oh, they talk big. But your dad’s got to have Pete irritating him so he can stay young. He knows that.” When I had my miscarriages, Ty always talked me through it, certain there’d be a way to carry the next one to term, certain that this one just wasn’t meant to be, certain that I would be all right, certain that he loved me anyway, no matter what.
    I covered him with an old quilt, and he turned under it, nestling into the pillow, murmuring a half-waking thank-you. Ty thought we’d had three miscarriages. Everyone thought we had stopped trying. Actually, I had had five, the most recent one at Thanksgiving. After the third one, in the summer of ’76, Ty said he couldn’t bring himself to sleep with me unless we were using birth control. He didn’t tell me why, but I knew it was because he couldn’t take another miscarriage. For a year I dutifully resigned myself to not even trying, and then it occurred to me one night in the bathroom that all I had to do was pretend to put the diaphragm in, that pregnancy could become my private project. I imagined how I would carry it to term without a word, waiting to see when Ty or Rose began to