A Thousand Acres (8 page)

If Rose had asked me, not what I had the most trouble with, but what my worst habit was, I would have said it was entertaining thoughts of disaster.

I got out of the car and shut the door, then opened it, got back in, and drove down the road. Through the window I could see that he was still sitting upright in his chair, but I couldn't help thinking that that could be the arms holding him. I saw him lift his hand to his chin. I turned into the driveway relieved, surprised, another near miss averted. When I walked in the door, he said, "What's the matter?"

"Nothing."

"You drove by, and then you drove back for something."

"I drove back to see what you were doing."

"I was reading a magazine."

There were no magazines near his chair, or on the table beside him.

"I was looking out the window."

"That's lnie."

"You bet it's fine."

"Do you need anything?"

"I had some dinner. I warmed it up in that microwave oven.

"Good."

"It gets colder faster if you warm it up that way. My dinner was stone cold before I was finished eating it."

"I've never heard that before."

"Well, it's a fact."

"I took Rose to the doctor today."

He shifted in his chair. I followed his gaze and saw Ty cultivating far off to the west. In the silence I could just hear the roar of the John Deere reduced to a rough buzz by distance. My father said, "She okay?"

"Yeah, she is. The doctor was pleased about everything."

"Something happens to her, and those kids of hers will be stuck."

My father had a way of making unanswerable remarks. Was he intending to show disapproval of Pete? Of my qualilications to step in and raise them? Or was he reflecting on our history since the death of my mother? On his opinion of Rose's primary responsibilities?

Or was this some sort of general reflection on animal breeding? Ty would have said that he meant that he would be stuck, we would be stuck, but he didn't dare to say it. Sometimes I thought it was naive of us to attribute softer sentiments to my father. I said, "She's good. We don't have to worry.

"We don't have to worry about that. There's plenty to worry about."

"Well, yes, of course.

I looked around for some bit of housework to do, to make my return seem as routine as possible. One thing about my habit of expecting the worst was that it embarrassed me; I didn't want people to suspect I'd imagined that they had died. But apart from cooking, clothes washing, and major housecleaning, my father needed little help with his domestic routine. The dishes from his dinner were already rinsed and in the dish drainer. The counters were wiped and the floor swept. In fact, he had always been a living example of the maxim, "Clean as you go."

There was nothing to do. I let my eyes travel back to his face. He was staring out the window. I said, "Okay.

Well, I made a strawberry rhubarb pie. I'll bring some down for your supper. I've got some strawberry plants bearing already, did I tell you that?"

"Why is he cultivating that field? They done planting the beans?"

"I don't know. Almost, I think."

He stared silently at the tractor crawling from the left side of the big window to the right.

"Daddy? You can come up to our place for supper if you want.

You could ask him then."

His face was reddening, staring.

"Daddy?"

He didn't glance at me or respond, even to dismiss me. I got nervous, watching him, impatient to leave, as if there were something here to flee. "Daddy? You want anything before I leave? I'm leaving." I paused at the kitchen door and watched the unyielding back of his head for a few seconds. When I drove past the front of the house again, he hadn't moved. I couldn't shake my sense that his attention menaced Ty, the guiltless cultivator, concentrating innocently on never deviating from the rows laid out before him. The green tractor inched back and forth, and my father's look followed it like the barrel of a rifle.

About an hour and a half later, Rose called and said, "Why is Daddy sitting in the front window of the house, staring across your south field?"

"Is he still at it?"

"He was there when I went to Cabot for bread and he was there when I got back. I stopped the car in the middle of the road and watched him.

He didn't move a muscle."

"Where's Pete?"

"He's welding something on the planter. He's been at it since before we got back from Mason City."

"Is Ty still cultivating out there? I can't see the back end of the field from here."

"When I drove by, he was starting up along the fencerow next to the road."

"I'm sure Daddy's watching him. I'm sure there's some light going on.

He was mad about something and didn't pay any attention to me when I stopped there."

"Well, lucky for you. He didn't ask you to do anything for him."

"Don't you think this is weird?"

"Well, guess what. This is what his retirement is going to be, him eyeballing Pete or Ty, second-guessing whatever they do. You didn't think he was going to go fishing, did you? Or move to Florida?"

"I didn't think that far ahead."

"Perfecting that death's-head stare will be his lifework from now on, so we'd better get used to it."

She hung up.

I had to smile at the thought of her stopping the car and watching him.

She would stand at the foot of the hill, her lists on her hips, her own stare roaring up to meet his. Neither would acknowledge the other.

They were two of a kind, that was for sure.

I pressed down the telephone button and let it up again, ready to dial Caroline's work number, except that suddenly I felt a shyness, as if there were a breach between the two of us that I had to brave.

Here it was Thursday, and I should have called her Sunday night, that was suddenly clear. Rose, I would have called Sunday afternoon, trying her until she got home, but Caroline I had let slide, Caroline I had hardly thought of in the rush of Daddy and Rose and, well, to be frank, thoughts about Jess Clark. It was true that Caroline and I didn't have a close, gossipy relationship. Her visits home every third weekend, when she stayed with Daddy and cooked for him, were generally the only times I spoke with her. For one thing, country people, even in 1979, were more suspicious of long-distance calls, and not in the habit of talking on the phone much-we'd been on a party line until i973, so visiting about private things on the telephone was still considered risky. For another, Rose and I had been so long in the habit of conferring about Daddy and Caroline that it seemed a touch unfamiliar, even scary, to confer with her. 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 bowl of cottage cheese, then said, "Anyway, we'll see what the answer is. We've got plenty of big new pieces of equipment on order."

"Mmmm," said Ty, with dramatic relish.

"I'd forgotten what a nice kitchen this is," said Jess. "Didn't the Ericsons have some kind of bird in here?"

"They had a parrot. But I thought he was always in the living room.

Remember how he used to order the dogs around?" I said to Ty, "From overhearing Cal training them, I suppose, this parrot had learned to give the commands, and when any of the dogs went into the living room, the parrot would start shouting orders, and the dogs would obey. Once we came in from outside, and we heard the parrot squawking and shouting 'Sit! Roll over!" and we went in the living room and there was the collie panting and doing all these tricks.

Mrs. Ericson had to put a sheet over the parrot's cage.

"When did they leave?" asked Jess.

"Oh, I'm sure they were gone before you were. I was fourteen when Daddy bought this farm."

"Stole it from Harold, you mean." Jess stared me down, that audacious twinkle again.

"Oh, right. I forgot."

What I had forgotten was the pleasure of a guest for dinner, someone unrelated, with sociable habits learned far away. While we helped ourselves, Ty said, "What do they think about this oil shortage out west?"

"Oil company scam.

"They've got Carter by the short hairs." Ty glanced at me, because he knew I rather liked Carter, or at least, liked Rosalynn and Miss Lillian. I rolled my eyes.

"The thing is," said Jess, "he's a realist. He looks at all sides. He ponders what he should do in a thoughtful way. You should never have a realist in the White House. Being president is too scary for a realist." I laughed. Ty said, "Ginny likes him. I voted for him, I've got to say, though I don't know a thing about farming peanuts.

But every time something comes up, he just wrings his hands."

"Nah," said Jess. "He says, 'What should I do?" A president's got to say, 'What do I want to do? What will make me feel good now that I'm feelin' so bad?" He's like a farmer, you see, only the big pieces of equipment he's got access to are weapons, that's the difference."

Ty was smiling. When dinner was over, I didn't want Jess to leave.

Ty didn't either. There was a moment, after I had picked up the plates, when we all looked at the table. Then Ty got up and opened the refrigerator again, and said, "How about another beer?"

I was as smooth as a professional hostess. I said, "It's so hot in here. Why don't we go out on the front porch?"

Once Jess had settled on the porch swing and Ty on the top step, his spot, I felt a rare rush of luxuriant delight. The evening lay before me, and all I had to do was receive it.

Jess took two or three deep breaths. The swing chains rattled and twisted against one another. The lilacs were over with, but I'd cut the grass around the house that morning, and the sweet fragrance of chamomile floated on top of the sharper scent of the wet tomato vines I'd watered before dinner. There weren't any lightning bugs, yet, but I could see one or two cabbage moths pale and dim against the dark greenery around the porch. "This is nice," saidJess. "This is exactly what I was looking for."

"Are you going to stick around the area?" Ty never hesitated to ask what others might only hint at.

"We'll see. It's only been, what, ten days. It still feels like a vacation, though Harold is edging me toward a full day's work."

I blurted out, "You wouldn't move in with Harold and Loren for good?