A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley

build a convenient milking parlor with mechanical milkers, milk a hundred cows, and make it worthwhile for a truck to come out every day, or, say, you could milk only Jerseys, or Guernseys, and sell only the cream-there was an ice cream company in Mason City who might have bought it all, if Cal had sold them on the idea. But Cal had twenty Holsteins and one Jersey for the family, he and Mrs. Ericson milked by hand and they mostly seemed to keep the cows, my father said with a laugh, "because they like them." There was plenty else to complain about-chickens and geese in the road, turkeys panicking in a thunderstorm, everyone having to turn out to help the Ericsons with their haying because they had to have the hay to feed the animals, when everyone else had either gotten rid of animals or fed them silage out of pricey but convenient new silos, which the Ericsons couldn't afford. My father most certainly disapproved of Cal Ericson's aspirations, which seemed to be merely to get along, pay his mortgage, and enjoy himself as much as possible.

    By contrast it was easy to see what my father considered a more acceptable way of life a sort of all-encompassing thrift that blossomed, infrequently but grandly, in the purchase of more land or the improvement of land already owned. His conservatism, however, was only fiscal. Beside it lay his lust for every new method designed to swell productivity. In I957, an article ran in Wallace's Farmer entitled "Will the Farmer's Greatest Machine Soon Be the Airplane?"

    The accompanying pictures were of our farm being sprayed for European corn borers, and my father was quoted as saying, "There isn't any room for the old methods any more. Farmers who embrace the new methods will prosper, but those that don't are already stumbling around." Doubtless he was looking across the road toward the Ericsons.

    We might as well have had a catechism: What is a farmer?

    A farmer is a man who feeds the world.

    What is a farmer's first duty?

    To grow more food.

    What is a farmer's second duty?

    To buy more land.

    What are the signs of a good farm?

    Clean fields, neatly painted buildings, breakfast at six, no debts, no standing water.

    How will you know a good farmer when you meet him?

    He will not ask you for any favors.

    The tile system on my father's farm drained fields that were nearly as level as a table. On land as new and marshy as Zebulon County, water fans out, seeking the slightest depressions, and often moves more slowly across the landscape than it does down through the soil.

    The old watercourses, such as they were, had been filled in and plowed through, so the tile lines drained into drainage wells. These wells, thrusting downward some three hundred feet, still dot the township, and there were seven around the peripheries of our farm.

    A good farmer was a man who so organized his work that the drainage-well catchment basins were cleaned out every spring and the grates were painted black every two years.

    My mother felt a little differently about the Ericsons. She and Mrs. Ericson often canned or made peanut brittle together in the Ericsons' kitchen while Ruthie and I sat on the floor sewing doll clothes, with Dinah and Rose out on the porch in only shorts, pouring water in and out of various vessels. My mother liked to go over there, and at least went for coffee every morning. Mrs. Ericson had a welcoming manner that my mother appreciated but couldn't master. She always said, "When I'm home, I've got to get things done, even if there are visitors.

    Elizabeth knows how to relax in her own house." And then she would shake her head, as if Elizabeth had remarkable powers.

    We knew in our very sinews that the Ericsons' inevitable failure must result from the way they followed their whims. My mother surely knew it with regret, but she knew it all the same. Their farm represented neither history nor discipline, and while they were engaged in training dogs and making ice cream, we were