A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley

Nosy.

    Interfering. Asking for something, though I didn't know what. And then her office didn't like her to get personal calls. The phones were monitored because clients were billed for telephone consultations. I pushed the phone button down again, then put the receiver on the cradle. Sunday would be my deadline. If I didn't hear from her by Sunday, then I really would call.

    I discovered THAT I WAS KEEPING an eye out for Jess Clark.

    Runners, I understood, liked routine, and I would watch, in the cool of the morning, for him to pass our house on his circuit. Except that I didn't know what his circuit was. It might also be true that Harold would insist on Jess's doing some of the farm work, or even that Jess himself would want to do some of the farm work. Running, and conversing, for that matter, could turn out to be city habits that Jess would quickly shuck. Certainly the talks we had then shared, especially the last one, were unique in my experience, and maybe that was why I kept thinking about them.

    I would work in the garden, or water my tomato plants, or even realize that it was that midmorning time of day, and Jess's anguish would recur to me, and I would feel something physical, a shiver, a kind of shrinking of my diaphragm. I realized that some of the worst things I had feared and imagined had actually happened to him-the sudden death of his fiancee, but also the death of his mother while he was out of touch. For that matter, hadn't he been damned and repudiated, worse than abandoned-cast out-by his father as the opening event of his adult life? Possibly it appeared on the surface that we had nothing in common except childhoods on the farm, but I suspected that there were things he knew that I had been waiting all my life to learn. Even so, I was not exactly eager to see him. It was more like I knew I had something important to wait for, something besides the next pregnancy.

    In fact, it occurred to me that the next pregnancy might be the final stage, the culmination or the reward, for learning what Jess Clark had to teach, a natural outgrowth of some kind of rightness of outlook that I hadn't achieved yet.

    One day, when Ty came in for supper, Jess was behind him. He had on jeans and a light blue T-shirt, and his hands were dirty up to his elbows. Ty said, "Hey Ginny. I got this guy to do some honest work for a change, but now he wants supper." He kissed me on the forehead and went down in the cellar to drop his clothes by the washing machine and change. I said to Jess, "What did they make you do, muck out the farrowing pens with your bare hands?"

    "We were fixing the differential on the old tractor."

    "The Farmall? What are they going to use that for?"

    "I've been assigned to manure spreading behind your dad's house."

    "Lucky you."

    "I don't mind. Anyway, manure spreading is something I believe in, and judging from the size of the manure pile and the condition of the manure spreader, there hasn't been that much manure spread in the last few years. Like forty."

    "We get good yields," shouted Ty. "And that's the name of the game these days. Anyway, wait till I've got that Slurrystore." His heavy step creaked on the cellar stairs. "The we'll have manure spreading every which way. You going to eat with those hands?"

    I handed Jess a towel and he went out to the back sink and turned on the water.

    Ty murmured, "Is there enough supper?"

    I whispered, "Isn't he a vegetarian, though? All I've got is hamburger noodle casserole and some green beans and salad."

    "I forgot about that." He opened the refrigerator. when Jess came back, he handed him a beer, but Jess put it back and took out a Coke.

    They sat down at the kitchen table. Jess said, "Ah, you farmers always think a big new piece of equipment is the answer." I glanced at him.

    His expression was aggressive but merry, and Ty took this as a joke.

    He said, "Nah. Two big new pieces of equipment. That's the answer.

    I set the food on the table, with a