A Thousand Acres: A Novel (26 page)

Rose said, “Well, the almighty has spoken. Trembling yet?” Her tone was drawling and blasé.

“You were shaking. You could barely turn the TV knob before.”

“Shit, Ginny, I’m still shaking. I wish I hadn’t stopped smoking. God, I want a cigarette.”

“I want to throw up.”

“Oh, honey.”

“Just try to maintain the right attitude, or we’ll cry.”

“I’m not going to cry, and you aren’t either.”

“Say, ‘He’s crazy.’ ”

“He is crazy. He’s bananas. You can always tell when they go on and on about some conspiracy at work. Or sex. When they bring up sex that’s a sure sign.”

“Was this what you call foaming at the mouth?”

“Remember that guy who used to pilot the spray plane when
Daddy was having the crops sprayed from the air? He supposedly got very crazy as he got older. They used to find him in the crawl space under the kitchen, hiding out.”

“Who told you that?”

“Marlene Stanley heard it from Bob, who knew that family up near Mason City. And he had this terrible rash. They didn’t know if it was some reaction to all those chemicals, or whether it was from crawling around under the house.”

“You think Daddy’s having some reaction to chemicals?”

She shrugged. “Remember last Christmas when Harold Clark was going on and on about how he didn’t expect to live five more years, and his dad had died at ninety-two? If you drive around, you can pass all the houses. This one lived to be ninety, this one eighty-seven, this couple ninety-three and ninety-two. That generation is gone, though.”

“Grandpa Cook was only sixty-six. Daddy’s two years older than that now. And Grandpa Davis was seventy.”

“Well, I don’t know if they were like the others. Don’t you wonder if they all didn’t just implode? First their wives collapse under the strain, then they take it out on their children for as long as they can, then they just reach the end of their rope. I used to fantasize that Mommy had escaped and taken an assumed name, and someday she would be back for us. You want to hear the life I had picked out for us?”

Sure.

“She was a waitress at the restaurant of a nice hotel, and we lived with her in a Hollywood-style apartment, you know, its own door, two floors, two bedrooms and a bathroom up and living room and kitchen down. Nice shag carpeting, white walls, little sounds from the neighbors on either side, sliding door out to the back deck. There had to be neighbors on both sides. I thought it would be scary to live on the end.”

“I guess I never really thought about not living on the farm. Isn’t that funny? I wanted it to be different, though, in some ways.”

“Ginny, you sound so mild. Aren’t you furious?”

“What good is that? If it is some chemical thing, what good does it do to be furious? We still have to deal with it.”

“It wasn’t any chemical thing twenty years ago.”

“Well, he’s always had rages, I admit. Maybe I would have been more conciliatory tonight if I hadn’t suddenly remembered—”

The phone rang, and I answered it, even though you weren’t supposed to in a thunderstorm. Ty wanted to know if Daddy had reappeared, if I thought the storm was letting up. I said, “No to both. Not there, either, huh?” Rose came over and sat down next to me on the couch. I hung up the phone. The light from the kerosene lamp seemed marvelously bright now that I had adjusted to it, and Rose’s face seemed to gather it and reflect it, her skin the warm glowing color of the light itself. In this forgiving radiance, the angles wrought by the chemotherapy only looked like youth, the largeness and depth of her eyes only looked like beauty. After I hung up the phone, she sought my gaze and held it, then said, in a tight voice, “Ginny, you don’t remember how he came after us, do you?”

“I remember the shoe incident. I was remembering that when he was yelling at me, the way he made Mommy—”

“I don’t mean when we got strapped or spanked.”

“Came after us?”

“When we were teenagers. How he came into our rooms.”

I licked my lips and switched my legs so the right crossed over the left. I said, “We slept together while Mommy was sick.”

“And then, that Christmas, we moved into separate rooms. He said it was time we had separate rooms.”

It was true that we had had separate rooms. Mine had been yellow, our old room, and Rose’s pink, the former guest room. I did not, in fact, remember the transition, which was odd, nor did I remember exactly wanting my own room. I said, “Well, of course I remember having separate rooms. I don’t remember why.”

“He went into your room at night.”

“What for? I don’t remember that at all.”

“How can you not remember? You were fifteen years old!”

“I’m sure I was asleep. Grandpa Cook used to prowl around looking at everybody. It was like checking the hogs or something.”

“It wasn’t like checking the hogs with Daddy.”

“What are you saying, Rose?”

“You know.”

“I promise you I don’t know.” And I didn’t. But I was afraid anyway. I was a captive of her stare, staring back.

Rose inhaled, held her breath. Then she said, “He was having sex with you.”

“He was not!”

“I saw him go in! He stayed for a long time!”

“Times always seem longer in the middle of the night. He was probably closing windows or something.” My voice came out conciliatory.

“I checked my clock.” She looked flushed.

“Oh, Rose. How am I going to believe that you woke up twenty-one years ago and saw Daddy go into my room and checked your clock and then saw him come out and checked your clock, and that constitutes evidence that he was—” Still staring at her, I jumped over this part. I said, skeptically enough, I hoped, “Anyway, Daddy may be a drinker and even a rager, but he goes to church—”

“It’s true.” Now her voice was low, penetrating, demanding belief.

But I felt stumped as well as dismayed. Sometime later, I said, “Okay, say it’s true. Did I ever mention it at the time?”

“He threatened you. He made sure you wouldn’t tell me.”

“How? I told you everything.”

“He said if you told me, I’d be really jealous, and wouldn’t like you any more. You were fifteen. You didn’t have much spunk. You believed that.”

“I told you this at the time?”

“You never said anything at the time.”

“Well, then.” I sat back, breaking away from her gaze, trying to summon some older-sister authority. I said, to the room, because I was afraid to look at her just then, “Why are you saying this?”

“I realized that you don’t remember the other day, in Daddy’s living room.”

I caught my breath in a little surge of angry frustration. “But it didn’t happen.”

“But it did.”

“Well, why don’t I remember? Do you think I’m lying?”

“That’s the way it happened with me.” She might as well have
been reciting a pickle recipe, her tone was that flat. I was certain I hadn’t heard her clearly.

“What?”

“Because after he stopped going in to you, he started coming in to me, and those are the things he said to me, and that’s what we did. We had sex in my bed.”

“You were thirteen!”

“And fourteen and fifteen and sixteen.”

“I don’t believe it!”

She looked at me from a long distance. “I thought you knew. I thought all these years you and I shared this knowledge, sort of underneath everything else. I thought if after that you could go along and treat him normally the way you do, then it was okay to just put it behind us.”

I stared at her. “What about Caroline?”

After a bit she said, “I’m not sure. I mean, he told me that if I went along with him, he wouldn’t get interested in her. He presented it as a kind of biological fact. I suspect he never tried anything with her, mostly because she acts like she feels differently toward him than we do. She humors him and sympathizes with him. He doesn’t overwhelm her the way he does us.”

“But he doesn’t overwhelm you! You stand right up to him!”

“He likes that. All those dates and escapes when I was in high school? It made him think he had to subdue me. He liked it.”

“You sound like you were trying to keep him interested!”

“Well, I was afraid he’d try something with Caroline, and she was only eight or ten. But I was flattered, too. I thought that he’d picked me, me, to be his favorite, not you, not her. On the surface, I thought it was okay, that it must be okay if he said it was, since he was the rule maker. He didn’t rape me, Ginny. He seduced me. He said it was okay, that it was good to please him, that he needed it, that I was special. He said he loved me.”

I said, “I can’t listen to this.”

Rose sat quiet, looking at me. There were three quick thunderclaps, the heavy pressure of rain against the house. I concentrated on that.

“Ginny.”

“What?”

“He went into your room. I watched him.”

“Maybe I was asleep. Maybe he was just thinking about it and decided not to do it for some reason. Maybe you were prettier.”

“That’s not the way it works. I’ve read a little about it. Prettier doesn’t make any difference. You were as much his as I was. There was no reason for him to assert his possession of me more than his possession of you. We were just his, to do with as he pleased, like the pond or the houses or the hogs or the crops. Caroline was his, too. That’s why I don’t know about her.”

Of course I was staring, registering the shifting expressions on her face, the flickering play of the light. Of course I was wondering whether she would lie to me. When we were children, young children, nine and seven or so, she had done a lot of lying. I had been the blurter, always stumbling into self-betrayal without a moment’s thought. She had been more calculating, and even said to me once, “Why do you answer every question they ask you? Just tell them what they like and they’ll leave you alone.” She steadily returned my gaze. Finally, I threw myself back against the couch and exclaimed, “Rose, you’re too calm. You’re so calm that it’s more like you’re lying than it is like you’re dredging up horrors from the past.”

“I am calm. This is a surprise for you, if you say so. But it isn’t a surprise for me. I’ve thought about it for years. I told Pete, too, after my broken arm.”

“Did he believe you?”

“Pete would believe Daddy’s capable of anything. His attitude toward me is more complicated. He knows how he should feel, and he tries to feel that way. It helps that we have daughters. If Daddy did anything to them, Pete would kill him. That’s partly why I stay married to him.”

I glanced toward the stairs, suddenly certain that Linda and Pammy were sitting at the top, taking this all in. The stairs were empty. I said, “Is that why you keep them away from Daddy?”

“And why I send them to boarding school. Though it gave me a little shiver, having him driving all over, down to Des Moines and everything. I’m not sure the school would prevent them from going out with him.”

It took me a while to get out my next question. It felt as if fear had literally jammed wadding into my mouth. Finally, I said, “Has he ever—”

“Not that I know of. I bought the books, and we went through all the drills and stuff. I prepared them without mentioning Daddy. And I’ve kept my eyes peeled. And we were in our teens.”

“It didn’t happen to me, Rose.”

She shrugged a little.

I spoke angrily all of a sudden, surprising myself, “I don’t know what to say! This is ridiculous!” All at once I started to cry. “I mean, the strangest thing is how idiotic I feel, how naive and foolish. God, I am so sorry he did that.”

Rose sat calmly, almost impassive. “Don’t make me feel sorry for myself. That’s the hardest. The more pissed off I am, the better I feel.”

“Okay. Okay. Okay.”

She moved close to me and put her arms around me. We sat quietly beside each other for a few minutes. I tried to stop crying, but it was like I had been shaken to a jelly and I didn’t know how to reconstitute myself. Then, right in my ear, I heard her voice. She was saying, “He won’t get away with it, Ginny. I won’t let him get away with it. I just won’t.”

T
HE STORM DIMINISHED AFTER MIDNIGHT
, though it was still raining heavily. Ty and Pete came back and went out again. Just after two, Rose and I lay down on our bed, and Rose, I think, went to sleep. I got up to check on the girls, who had thrown off their covers. Everyone seemed to have taken refuge in my house, as if pursued.

Linda’s leg was thrown over Pammy’s and their hands lay together: they must have been holding hands, but their grip on each other relaxed when they fell asleep. I had known them since they were born, repeatedly hefted that remarkably dense weight that only babies and toddlers have. Countless moments with each of them seemed immortal to me—the time when Pammy was about eighteen months and we were all sitting at the dinner table, and Pammy raised her arms overhead and said “Up!” so we all raised our arms over our heads and shouted “Up! Up! Up!” until Pammy slammed both her little palms on the table and cried “Down,” her own joke that she laughed at uproariously. When Linda was a baby, she squeezed all her food in her fist until it oozed out between her fingers, and only then would she eat it. How could anyone approach them with ill intent? How could anyone be moved not to protect them, but to hurt them, especially like this, in the middle of the night, at the sight of their harmless, resistless sleeping bodies?

But of course, it hadn’t been their bodies, it had been ours, or Rose’s, rather. But mine, too, if he entered my room, even if he just closed the windows, even if he only checked to see if I was asleep.

I lay there then as boneless as they did now, tangled in my nightgown, my hair striped across my face. And the fact was, that though I could not imagine my father doing what Rose said he did, I also could not imagine him doing what I was doing then, looking down on his daughters with appreciation and affection, feeling for us the tenderness I felt for Pammy and Linda. I shivered, pressed the coverlet around them, and backed out of the room. I was still dressed, but I got into the bed beside Rose, who was lying on top of the spread with the quilt pulled over her head. I must have fallen asleep.