A Thousand Acres Read Free Page B

at school, but it was new, created by magic lines of tile my father would talk about with pleasure and reverence. Tile "drew" the water, warmed the soil, and made it easy to work, enabled him to get into the fields with his machinery a mere twenty-four hours after the heaviest storm. Most magically, tile produced prosperity-more bushels per acre of a better crop, year after year, wet or dry. I knew what the tile looked like (when I was very young, live- or twelve-inch cylinders of real tile always lay here and there around the farm, for repairs or extension of tile lines; as I got older, "tile" became long snakes of plastic tubing), but for years, I imagined a floor beneath the topsoil, checkered aqua and yellow like the floor in the girls' bathroom at the elementary school, a hard shiny floor you could not sink beneath, better than a trust fund, more reliable than crop insurance, a farmer's best patrimony. It took John and Sam and, at the end, my father, a generation, twenty-live years, to lay the tile lines and dig the drainage wells and cisterns. I in my Sunday dress and hat, driving ii, the Buick to church, was a beneficiary of this grand effort, someone who would always have a floor to walk on. However much these acres looked like a gift of nature, or of God, they were not. We went to church to pay our respects, not to give thanks.

    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.

    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, airconditioned 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 ú machinery competition, but that he hadn't divulged how he'd financed the purchase,