A Thousand Acres: A Novel (20 page)

“We’d better go, huh?” Ty nodded and took his car keys off the hook at the bottom of the stairs. As we were walking around the house to the car, I saw Jess through the windows, picking things up. He looked perfectly at home.

My car then was an eight-year-old Chevy; usually, when I drove
Rose to Mason City, I borrowed her car, which was almost new, a ’78 Dodge. It was odd, I suppose, how Ty and I never rode in the Chevy together. If we went to a movie or somewhere for supper, we took the pickup, but now he went straight for the car and got in on the driver’s side. The seat belt on the passenger’s side was twisted and stiffened with disuse. I gave up on it, and all the way to Mason City, I couldn’t get accustomed to the sense of danger I felt, of imminent disaster. Ty drove smoothly and silently. The car breasted the gravel roads, seeming, like a moldboard plow, to roll the fields and the ditches to either side of us. I shook my head to get rid of the illusion, but I could not. It came of driving so low to the ground. Ty rolled down his window an inch or two and the wind carried fear right into my face. I could feel myself focusing on these sensations—the car speeding into the earth, the wind slapping me with dread—and Ty said, “Ginny, you and Rose are going about this all wrong.”

“How’s that?”

“You could just endure it. You could just cross each bridge as you come to it.”

“As if things aren’t getting worse.”

“I don’t know if they’re getting worse.”

“You must be blind.”

“And what if they are getting worse? Taking this attitude isn’t going to make them better.”

“What attitude?”

“An attitude like Rose’s. Making everything he does into a big deal.”

“I think going in a ditch and getting picked up for drunk driving is a big deal.”

“Well, that is. That is. But this other stuff—” Ty glanced at me, rubbed the corners of his mouth with his thumb and forefinger, then slowed down and pulled to the side of the road. He looked at me for a long time. He said, “Ginny, I don’t exactly know what to do, but I’ve always thought the best way to deal with your father is to sort of hunker down and let it blow over. In one ear and out the other. Grin and bear it. Water off a duck’s back. All those things.”

I stared at him, too. I stared at him from a long distance, seeing
his flat cheeks and square face, the creviced fans at the corners of his eyes, the bill of his cap, the plain hopeful visage of a plain man. The other face, Jess’s face, was never out of my mind, leaner and more hawkish, more suspicious, less benign. One face somehow met you, looked back at you, was the impenetrable and almost simple face of innocence. The other, the more you looked at it, the more it escaped you. Its very features seemed elusive, seemed to promise a meaning, or even a truth, that was more complex and interesting than anything you had ever before imagined. I kept staring at Ty. God knows what he was thinking. But I was wondering whose face was truer. He smiled. His upper lip stretched into a long archer’s bow, Ty’s big smile that made him look handsome and mischievous. I smiled, too. I said, “You’re right.” He put the car in drive and pulled back onto the blacktop.

It was easy enough to say. And it was true that I didn’t want to be angry the way Rose was. Ty didn’t like it, and Jess, too, just for that one moment at the game table, had registered a visceral recoil that frightened me. But Rose’s anger! Some of my clearest memories were of watching her, unable to look away, watching her shine with anger. No matter how well you knew to keep back from it, you couldn’t keep back all the time.

It was nearly forty miles from our place to Mason City. We drove it in a kind of wholesome silence, carrying our whole long marriage, all the hope and kindness that it represented, with us. What it felt like was sitting in Sunday school singing “Jesus Loves Me,” sitting in the little chairs, surrounded by sunlight and bright drawings, and having those first inklings of doubt, except that doubt presents itself simply as added knowledge, something new, for the moment, to set beside what is already known. As if nothing were contradictory and all things could be believed simultaneously. My love for Ty, which I had never questioned, felt simple like that, like belief. But I believed I was going to sleep with Jess Clark with as full a certainty.

M
Y FATHER WAS SITTING UP
at one end of a bench, leaning back against the wall with his eyes wide open. A square of white gauze was pressed to his cheek with adhesive tape that ran into his hair. Instinctively, I followed his gaze, just to check on what he might be thinking about before disturbing him. Ty, though, walked right up to him and said, “Dad? Larry? You okay?” He stood up and began to walk out of the emergency room, without speaking to us or to the nurse behind the desk, who called, “Mr. Cook? Mr. Cook?” She looked at me. I stepped forward, announcing that I was his daughter.

“Oh,” she said, still evidently disconcerted. “Oh. Well, he has some Percodan to take for pain, just two pills. If he needs more, he’ll have to get a prescription from his family physician.” Then, apologetically, for some reason, “There wasn’t any loss of consciousness. He’s been wide awake for, let’s see, the whole time he’s been here. We had him in observation for two hours.” She patted my arm. “He’ll be fine.”

“How has he been acting?”

She smiled, actually looking at me for the first time. She said, “He isn’t very talkative, is he? When the doctors were working on him, right at first? Well, one of them said, ‘You know, I think he can talk. He just won’t.’ That’s kind of unusual.” She spoke brightly.

I said, “Not for him, lately. Is that all? We can just leave now?”

She lowered her voice. “You can. But I think the police will be calling you. It takes about ten days for the blood level test to come back, though.”

“You mean the blood alcohol level?”

“But you can be thankful he wasn’t seriously injured. He’s just fine, really.” She returned to her spot behind the desk.

He was sitting in the backseat, on the passenger side. After I got in and arranged myself, Ty turned and said, “Ready to go, Dad?” but there wasn’t any response. We turned out of the hospital parking lot and onto the empty avenue of light and gloom that we had just turned off. Each house, large and close to its neighbors, rose like a solid and discreet blossom out of its neat lawn and thick embracing shrubbery. It was nearly midnight. Every window on the long protected block was dark.

My father was so quiet that it was easy to believe that he had learned his lesson, that there would have to be no discussion of keys or drinking or of the whole situation we found ourselves in. It was easy to believe that he was quiet because chastened, even embarrassed. Ty, too, was quiet. Perhaps they had already talked, come to some agreement, and Ty would present me with that when we got home. I said, “Daddy, have you got those pills the nurse gave you?”

The question went unanswered, so unanswered that it got to be like a question that no one had ever expected would be answered. Whether or not he had the pills turned out to be none of my business. That was the answer.

In the silence, it was easy for my mind to drift, and it drifted back to the thoughts of Ty and Jess and my future that I had been thinking a very short time—half an hour—before. With my father in the car, such thoughts took on a new coloring. What had seemed scary but pleasant, even innocent (only thoughts after all), now seemed real and shocking. Even the comfort I had felt in Ty’s and my privacy as we were driving in the dark seemed fugitive, luxurious. I looked again at the houses we passed, now not so prosperous as those around the hospital, and I saw a new meaning in them, in the obvious differences between them—junk on a porch here, two nice cars in an open garage there, a painted swing set and a homemade sandbox across the street. The families who lived here had only the most tenuous links to one another. Each lived a distinct style, to divergent ends. That was what was to be envied, not, as I had thought as a
child, the closeness or the sociability, but the uniqueness of each family’s fate, each family’s, each couple’s, freedom to make or find something apart from the others.

My father groaned. I froze, staring ahead. Ty said, “Are you having some pain, Larry? You sure you want to leave the hospital? We can go right back.” To this there was no response either. We were left to assume that our course of action, taking him home, was what he wanted. We drove on. The front end of the car looked higher. I caught myself listening to the engine, as if we were hauling a trailer, as if carrying my father home were taxing more than just my peace of mind.

Ty and I traded a couple of secretive, eye-rolling glances, and he smiled at me. His smile told me what to do—be patient, endure, maintain hope—and I wondered where it came from with him, this endless stoicism. It was so heavy and dumb and good! So foolishly receptive! When would taking it turn into asking for it? Maybe it already had. Maybe if we had conducted our lives differently in the past, had not been so accommodating, nor so malleable—how was it that everyone had left the land and we had stayed behind? How was it that I had not even thought of college, of trying something else, of moving to Des Moines or even Mason City? Then there was the image that things always looped back to, those five miscarried children. It was my habit to think that if I could be a certain way, embody a certain attitude, a child would come to me and stay with me. The attitudes I had tried were obvious—receptive to conception, then protective. Now I saw my error, though. Who would stay with a mother who merely waited? Who accepted things so dully, who could say so easily, something will happen, we’ll get another chance. No! It was time to sit up, to reach out, to choose this and not that! Ty’s steadiness was getting us, getting me, nowhere. I shifted in my seat and noticed that we were turning onto Cabot Street Road. Almost home. I spun around and said, “Daddy!”

His eyes had been closed, but now they popped open. He lifted himself in the seat with a grunt. Ty’s head swiveled toward me.

“I know you’re hurt, and I’m sorry you got in an accident, but now’s the time to talk about it. You’re going to be in real trouble pretty soon, when the state troopers come over. You’ve got to take
this to heart. You simply can’t drive all over creation, and you especially can’t do it when you’re drinking. It’s not right. You could kill somebody. Or kill yourself, for that matter.”

He looked at me.

“They’re probably going to revoke your license, but even if they don’t, I will, if you do it again. I’ll take away the keys to your truck, and if you do it after that, I’ll sell it. When I was little, you always said that one warning ought to be enough. Well, this is your warning, and I expect you to pay attention to it. And another thing, you’re fully capable of helping around the farm, and I can tell that you’re bored without it. Rose or I will give you your breakfast at the regular time from now on, and you can just go out and work afterwards. We aren’t going to let you sit around. You’re used to working, and there’s no reason why you can’t keep working. Ty and Pete can’t do everything all of a sudden.”

It was exhilarating, talking to my father as if he were my child, more than exhilarating to see him as my child. This laying down the law was a marvelous way of talking. It created a whole orderly future within me, a vista of manageable days clicking past, myself in the foreground, large and purposeful. It wasn’t a way of talking that I was used to—possibly I had never talked that way before—but I knew I could get used to it in a heartbeat, that here I had stumbled on a prerogative of parenthood I hadn’t thought of before (I’d thought only how I would be tender and affectionate and patient and instructive). I eyed the old man. I said, “I mean it about the driving, and Rose will back me up.”

He held my gaze, and said in a low voice, as if to himself, “I got nothing.”

I thought he was just trying to get my sympathy. I said, “There’s enough for everybody, for one thing.” For another, I thought, you gave it away of your own accord. But I didn’t dare say it. It made me too mad.

Ty got him up to bed, but not before I said, “Breakfast at seven, Daddy. Ty will wait for you at our place, and you can work something out about what you want to do tomorrow.”

Back at our place, Ty said, “Maybe he shouldn’t work tomorrow. We don’t know what sort of trauma there’s been.”

“Give him an easy job, for a couple of hours. His life doesn’t have any structure. That’s exactly the problem. Now’s the time to do something about it, when he’s ashamed of himself.”

Ty got out of his pants and sat down to take off his socks. I roamed the room, picking up objects and putting them down. Power pumped through me. I cruised into the bathroom, the two other bedrooms, one used for guests who never came, one for old furniture. I looked out windows in every direction. It was a benign summer night, breezy and thick. Back to our room. Ty was stretched out on his back, his hands behind his head. I said, “I learned something tonight.”

“Take charge?”

“Yes, but more than that. It was something physical, not just in my mind. Not just a lesson.”

“Hmm.”

“Do you believe me?”

“Oh, I believe you.”

“Well, what?”

“Ginny, it’s after midnight. You said you’d have breakfast on your father’s table by seven. Let’s just see if the thing you learned tonight is true tomorrow, okay?”

“Fine.”

He closed his eyes. I marched across the hallway to the west-facing bedroom and looked toward the Clark farm, staring and staring until I could hear my husband’s breathing deepen and slow.

In the morning, there was a fair amount of grunting and groaning. I was immune to it. I set my father’s breakfast—French toast, bacon, a sliced banana and some strawberries, a pot of coffee—in front of him, and I handed him the syrup and the butter, and the sugar for his coffee, and I straightened up the kitchen after myself. I served him well, but I withheld my sympathy. On the other hand, he didn’t ask for it. He finished eating, pushed his plate away, and stood up. I moved to the window after he banged out the door, and watched him trudge up the blacktop toward our place, where Ty was waiting in the barn. Normally he would have climbed into his truck and driven the quarter mile, so he walked as if he were disoriented, surprised by the very act of walking. He was stiff. His shoulders
hunched. His legs swung out and around. That was something he needed, too, more exercise. He didn’t look back, but Rose waited until he was a dot on the road to cross from her place.