A Thousand Acres: A Novel (25 page)

Ty said, “Why don’t I go into Cabot and see if he went there? He might have just gone to the Cool Spot.”

Rose said, “He’s probably driving all over creation.”

After they left, Linda said to me, “Did Grandpa steal the truck?”

“Not exactly.”

“Dad said he did.”

“Your dad is pretty mad. But we all own the trucks and things together. You can’t steal what you own.”

“Mommy said that she wanted us to come down here, because she didn’t want us to be alone in the house if Grandpa came back.”

“Your mom’s pretty mad, too.”

Rose opened the screen door and came in. She said, “We might get quite a storm. I didn’t notice it before.” Her arms were crossed over her chest. She surveyed Linda and me. Pammy had gone into the kitchen, and in this little silence, I could hear the refrigerator door close. Rose said, “Yes, I am pretty mad, but you make it sound like I’m just mad, as if I were crazy or something. I’m mad at your grandpa, Linda, because of things he has done, not just to get mad.”

I said, “I realize that, Rose. But we don’t know the explanation. There could be a reason. As soon as he does anything, you shoot first and ask questions later.”

“We were sitting right there. We would have taken him where he wants to go. He took the truck without asking. He snuck around.” She addressed this to Linda, an admonishment, a moral lesson.

“Rose, he thinks he has a right to everything. He thinks it’s all basically his.”

“Yes, he does.” She said this righteously, as if the mistakenness of this perception was self-evident.

Pammy came into the room, and I said to the two girls, “Maybe there’s something on TV. This could be a long night, with the storm
and everything. We ought to have the televison on, anyway.” They moved obediently to the couch, and ended up watching the only thing we could get, which was a performance of the New York City Ballet on PBS.

During the news they drifted off, Pammy rolled back against the arm of the couch, her head flopped and her hair in her face. Linda lay against Pammy, breathing deeply, her mouth open. I set down my knitting and gazed at them, thinking how they often seemed bewildered and wondering if it had always been thus with them and, bewildered myself, I had taken that to be a normal condition. Rose said, “Let’s carry them up to bed for now anyway. If there’s a warning, we can wake them up and get them into the basement, but it looks more like just a bad rain to me.” After we came down, Rose stood at the door, watching the gathering storm and waiting for the truck.

A pair of headlights turned off the road, momentarily crossed the back wall of the room, went dark. Rose stayed where she was and didn’t say anything. I sat still. After a long, quiet moment, punctuated by the bang bang of two truck doors closing, Ty’s voice, low and calm, said, “Ginny, come out here please.”

This was it.

Rose pushed the screen door and I followed her. Our father was standing in front of the truck. Ty was behind him. He said, “Larry has some things to say. I told him he should tell you them himself.”

Daddy said, “That’s right.”

Rose took my hand and squeezed it, as she had often done when we were kids, and in trouble, waiting for punishment.

Daddy said, resentfully, “That’s right. Hold hands.”

I said, “Why shouldn’t we? All we’ve ever really had is each other. Anyway, what are we in trouble for? Why are you getting ready to tell us a bunch of things? We haven’t done anything wrong except try our best with you.”

Rose said, “It’s going to storm. Why don’t I take you home and we can talk about this in the morning?”

“I don’t care about the storm. I don’t want to go home. You girls stick me there.”

I said, “We don’t stick you there, Daddy. It’s the nicest house, and you live there. You’ve lived there all your life.”

“Let me take you home.” Rose’s tone was wheedling.

I urged him. “It’s been a long day. Go on with her, and then tomorrow we can—”

“No! I’d rather stay out in the storm. If you think I haven’t done that before, my girl, you’d be surprised.”

A wave of exasperation washed over me. I said, “Fine. Do what you want. You will anyway.”

“Spoken like the bitch you are!”

Rose said, “Daddy!”

He leaned his face toward mine. “You don’t have to drive me around any more, or cook the goddamned breakfast or clean the goddamned house.” His voiced modulated into a scream. “Or tell me what I can do and what I can’t do. You barren whore! I know all about you, you slut. You’ve been creeping here and there all your life, making up to this one and that one. But you’re not really a woman, are you? I don’t know what you are, just a bitch, is all, just a dried-up whore bitch.” I admit that I was transfixed; yes, I thought, this is what he’s been thinking all these years, waiting to say it. For the moment, shock was like a clear window that separated us. Spittle formed in the corners of his mouth, but if it flew, I didn’t feel it. Nor did I step back. Over Daddy’s shoulder I saw Ty, also transfixed, unmoving, hands in pockets. Then Pete turned the corner and drove up in his own pickup.

Rose said, “This is beyond ridiculous. Daddy, you can’t mean those things. This has got to be senility talking, or Alzheimer’s or something. Come on, Pete and I will take you home. You can apologize to Ginny in the morning.” Pete turned out his headlights and got out of the truck, his voice, sounding flat and distant, said, “What’s up?”

“Don’t you make me out to be crazy! I know your game! The next step is the county home, with that game.”

“I’m not making you out to be crazy, Daddy. I want you to go to your house, and for things to be the way they were. You’ve got to stop drinking and do more work around the place. Ginny thinks so, and I think so even more than she does. I’m not going to put up
with even so much as she does. We do our best for you, and have stuck with you all our lives. You can’t just roll over us. You may be our father, but that doesn’t give you the right to say anything you want to Ginny or to me.”

“It’s you girls that make me crazy! I gave you everything, and I get nothing in return, just some orders about doing this and being that and seeing points of view.”

Rose stood like a fence post, straight, unmoved, her arms crossed over her chest. “We didn’t ask for what you gave us. We never asked for what you gave us, but maybe it was high time we got some reward for what we gave you! You say you know all about Ginny, well, Daddy, I know all about you, and you know I know. This is what we’ve got to offer, this same life, nothing more nothing less. If you don’t want it, go elsewhere. Get someone else to take you in, because I for one have had it.” Her voice was low but penetrating, as deadly serious as ice picks.

Now he looked at me again. “You hear her? She talks to me worse than you do.” Now he sounded almost conciliatory, as if he could divide us and conquer us. I stepped back. All at once I had a distinct memory of a time when Rose and I were nine and eleven, and we had kept him waiting after a school Halloween party that he hadn’t wanted us to go to in the first place. I had lost a shoe in the cloakroom, and Rose and I looked for it madly while the other children put on their coats and left. We never found it, and we were the very last, by five or ten minutes, to come out of the school. Daddy was waiting in the pickup. Rose got in first, in her princess costume, and I got in beside the door, careful to conceal my stockinged foot. I was dressed as a hobo. Daddy was seething, and we knew we would get it just for being late when we got home. There was no telling what would happen if he learned about the shoe.

It was Mommy who betrayed me. When I walked in the door, she said, “Ginny! Where’s your shoe?” and Daddy turned and looked at my foot, and it was like he turned to fire right there. He came for me and started spanking me with the flat of his hand, on the rear and the thighs. I backed up till I got between the range and the window, and I could hear Mommy saying, “Larry! Larry! This is crazy!” He turned to her and said, “You on her side?”

Mommy said, “No, but—”

“Then you tell her to come out from behind there. There’s only one side here, and you’d better be on it.”

There was a silence. Rose was nowhere to be seen. From upstairs I could hear Caroline start to cry and then shush up. Mommy’s head turned toward the sound, then back. He said, “Tell her.”

She said, “Virginia, come out from behind there. Out to the middle of the room. He’s right. You shouldn’t have lost your shoe.”

I did what she said, five steps. I kept my gaze down, on the fringes of my hobo pants that we’d cut earlier in the day. My hands were covered with the makeup I’d rubbed off my face, so they looked strangely red and black. When I got to the middle of the room, he grabbed my arm and pulled me over to the doorway, leaned me up against it, and strapped me with his belt until I fell down. That was what a united front meant to him.

I said, “Daddy, if you think this is bad, then you’d be amazed at what you really deserve. You don’t deserve even the care we give you. As far as I’m concerned, from now on you’re on your own.”

Rose flashed me a look, perplexity mixed with vindication. She said, “Your house is down the road. You know where it is, and you can get there. I’m going inside, out of the storm.”

Daddy said, “How can you treat your father like this? I flattered you when I called you a bitch! What do you want to reduce me to? I’ll stop this building! I’ll get the land back! I’ll throw you whores off this place. You’ll learn what it means to treat your father like this. I curse you! You’ll never have children, Ginny, you haven’t got a hope. And your children are going to laugh when
you
die!”

Rose pulled me into the house, slamming the door behind us. Ty and Pete were left standing out there. Through the window, I saw them sort of urge Daddy toward the truck, but he swung out at them, landing a punch on Pete’s cheek. Pete threw up his hands, then turned and came in the house, sputtering, “What an asshole! This is it. This is really it!” Daddy was now staggering down the road. Ty crept along a little ways behind him. There was lightning by now, and big crashes of thunder. Rose turned on the TV as if she were more interested in the progress of the storm than what we were going to do, or think, or be after this, but her hand was shaking so
much she could hardly manipulate the dial. I turned back to the window. Just when I was thinking that Ty was getting pretty far away, the sky let loose a flood, not drops or sheets but an avalanche of rain that hid Ty and my father completely from sight, even hid the two trucks parked not ten feet from the window.

The electricity went out.

From upstairs, two small voices started calling, “Mommy! Mommy! Come find us!”

Pete said, “Shit!”

Rose said, “I hope he dies in it.” By the lightning flashes, I could see her making her way around the furniture to the bottom of the stairs.

From upstairs came two sharp screams.

Rose called, in a stern voice, “I’m coming! No more screaming!”

Pete said, “You got any kerosene lamps? This could last all night.”

Ty staggered through the door, his boots sloshing, every stitch of clothing sodden, rain streaming down his face and chin. He said, “I lost him. I lost sight of him. I’m surprised I even managed to get back here.”

E
VENTUALLY, WE SETTLED ON THE PLAN
that until the storm passed, Rose and the girls would stay at our house, Pete would go home and check on things there, and Ty would check at Daddy’s and then wait there if Daddy hadn’t gotten home yet. After the storm, they would look around, and if Daddy hadn’t been found in an hour or so, we would call the sheriff.

Things were awkward between Ty and me. What I looked for him to say was that he didn’t believe anything Daddy had said, didn’t believe the unspoken gist of his denunciation, either—that I was a worthless and unlovable person. He said nothing about this, possibly because to mention it would give it more credence than it was worth. I wanted him to say that when he drove Daddy home from town, he didn’t know what Daddy wanted to say to me, but he said nothing about that, either, and I felt an irresistible temptation to imagine that Daddy was speaking for Ty as well as himself, that they had agreed on these things beforehand. I found his dry socks and his poncho.

Of course I wondered why Daddy had chosen just those terms for me, whore, slut. Of course the conviction that he had some knowledge of my time with Jess Clark materialized, whole and fully armed, in my new awareness. Perhaps that was what he and Ty spoke of on their way home. Perhaps this was where the story of my father flowed into the story of Jess Clark. Certainly a child raised with an understanding of her father’s power like mine could not be surprised that even without any apparent source of information he would know her dearest secret. Hadn’t he always?

I sat in the dark after Ty and Pete left. Rose was upstairs, talking to Linda and Pammy, getting them to go to sleep in spite of everything, since because of everything there was something intolerable about their inquisitive and fearful presence. I was still in shock, or maybe in suspension, waiting for the catalyst. It was easy to see, all of a sudden, that my life until now had been, at least, predictable, well-known. What I had had to do I knew I could do, whether I actually preferred to do it or not.

Rose descended the stairs, carrying the kerosene lamp, which she set on the newel post at the bottom. She called up, “There. You can see a little light. It’s right at the bottom of the stairs like I said.”

There was a faint “okay,” just audible over the sound of the rain. She came and sat down across from me. There was nothing to do, since we had already unplugged the appliances and the television. It was clear that we would have to talk about it. I wondered how she would start.

I wondered, too, what Jess Clark would say to all this. It seemed like nothing could batter that out of me. Impossibilities disguised as possibilities floated out of the depths—Jess must have told, Jess must have entertained Harold and Loren with the story, and Harold told Daddy, even if Jess didn’t tell, he probably thinks about me the same way, no, he doesn’t think that way at all, he knows me better than that, he would stick by me if I asked him to—