A Thousand Acres: A Novel (36 page)

Now the three-legged woman stood on the blacktop in the moonlight, and each of her legs strained in a different direction. Actually putting one foot in front of the other, carrying myself closer and closer to someone for whom I was soaked with desire, which was what I was doing, seemed like an illusion. Soon this illusion had me standing below the window, then circling, quietly, around to the back window of that room, where I saw what I had been looking for, Jess Clark, his back and the back of his head, in a white shirt, the slope of his shoulders and the angle of his neck as evocative and promising as anything I had ever seen. But distant and unreal, like a picture on a television screen, as unreal as the imaginary walking me that had left behind the actual motionless me on the blacktop. Now the imaginary me sang out, “Jess! Hey, Jess! Jess Clark!” Magically, the figure turned and came to the window, pushed the sash higher, and bent down. He said, “Hi! Who’s out there?”

“It’s, uh, Ginny.” Shame and fear rose up around me like a cloud.

He said, “Hey! What are you doing? Did you knock? I had the radio on.”

Although the light was behind him, I saw the white flash of a smile. I said, “I guess I haven’t seen you in a while, huh?”

“Lots going on. I miss you.” His voice softened. He should not have said that. He should not have said it because then I said, “I love you,” and he said, “Oh, Ginny,” and what I heard in his voice was pure, clear remorse that resonated in the ensuing silence like the note of a bell and told me all I needed to know about every question that lingered from earlier in the summer.

After a moment, he said, “Let me come down. I’ll be right down.” But I wasn’t going to wait for that. I knew the way home, not down the open, revealing road, but between the stiff concealing rows of corn. No apologies or kindness or humiliating clarifications of his feelings would follow me there.

I was washing the breakfast dishes by six. Ty was pacing the shoulder of Cabot Street Road. At seven the construction workers arrived, already having breakfasted at the café. I started one load of wash and took another outside and began to hang it on the clothesline. I was a good machine, and soon my view of the work site was hidden by sheets and shirts, so I didn’t see two cars pull up behind the lumber truck. What I did see, sometime later, when I was carrying the basket back into the house, was the lumber truck and all the cars—including Marv Carson’s big maroon Pontiac and Ken La-Salle’s powder blue Dodge—pull onto the road in a line and drive away. Ty was standing, watching them go. He took off his cap and wiped the sweat off his face with his sleeve, then he put the cap back on. He stood looking after them for a long time.

I didn’t need him to tell me that Marv and Ken had made him stop work on the hog buildings, nor did I need him to confess to me that he’d paid for the weekend’s work in a futile attempt to push the construction past some point of no return. I dimly recognized as I watched him that his efforts had been foolish, a waste of our money, an extra fillip of defeat that he could have avoided, but what it looked like at the time was our crowning failure as a couple.

T
WO MORNINGS LATER
, I was getting out the vacuum cleaner. Ty was out in the hog barn, and we had spoken very little since our argument.

“Crops look terrific.”

I jumped.

Henry Dodge, our minister, was standing outside the screen with his hand on the latch.

I said, “Bin buster in the making. We’d better have a long dry spell in September.”

“Are you going to invite me in?”

I stood up. My hands dripped suds. I dried them. “Sure. Coffee?”

He pushed his thumb down on the latch and opened the door in a smoothly aggressive way, as if, I thought meanly, he was practiced at taking advantage of small openings. I recalled that he’d been a missionary at some point early on, maybe in Africa somewhere, or the Philippines.

He said, “Ginny, I thought we were friends.”

I said, “Here, sit down. There’s some cake from last night.”

“It’s a little early for cake.”

“Ty likes it. He likes pie for breakfast better, though.” I looked at him when I poured the cup of coffee. That word “friends” floated in the air, taking on more complexity the more that I looked at Henry Dodge. I said, “Maybe.”

“Maybe what?”

“Maybe we’ve been friends. Maybe you could define the term more clearly.”

He laughed as if I had made a joke, then said, “You came to visit a while ago.”

“Well, I did, yeah. But it’s okay.” This remark made him seem inquisitive, and I resented it. I said, “Maybe I should have called you after the church supper. What a stir.” I rolled my eyes.

“I should have called you, I think. That’s partly why I came.”

I gazed at him. I said, “Maybe we’ve been friends. Define the term more clearly, and I’ll tell you.”

He laughed again. I felt a distant recognition of how these responses of mine could seem witty, or ironic, but I was dead serious. Henry sat down and shifted back and forth in the seat as if he were hollowing himself a spot in deep grass. He took a sip of coffee and said, “I think I’m good at seeing wider perspectives, but mostly I’d like you to talk to me.”

I allowed, “The church supper was embarrassing.”

“Not everyone thought Harold was right to speak out like that.”

I gauged this. Finally, I said, “Do you mean that a few disagreed with Harold, or most people, or just how many?”

“Well—”

“Actually, I can’t believe anyone thought it was right of Harold to speak out like that.” I felt myself heating up. “He set that up! He came over here especially to set it up, and he was gleeful about it—”

“In his present affliction, I don’t think—” He turned the handle of his cup toward me and began again, “I’d like to be a peacemaker.”

“Why?” I tried to make this sound as flat and purely interrogative as possible, but he took it as an accusation. He said, “No one else seems to have. As your pastor and your father’s pastor—”

“I mean, what purpose is served by making peace?”

“Oh.”

Apparently he hadn’t really considered this. I waited for him to think of something.

Finally, after glancing at me two or three times, he said, “Wouldn’t you prefer it yourself? I’m enough your friend to know you thrive in a happier atmosphere than this. I’ve never seen you to seek a
quarrel. That just doesn’t seem like you.” He liked this line, and warmed to it as he spoke. “You
look
unhappy. You look drawn and tired.”

The irrefutable evidence of appearance.

“Are you watching us? Me? Looks aren’t everything.”

He laughed again, then sobered up. His voice was solemn when he said, “You don’t have to watch to see.”

My friend? Could I rely on him to see what I saw in our family and our father and Rose and myself? That seemed like the one test of friendship.

He said, “Families are better together. Working together.”

“Is that an absolute?”

He paused to inventory the families he knew, sipping his coffee, then said, “Maybe not quite an absolute, if we’re talking absolutes.” He smiled. “But the exceptions are extremely rare. I know I’m a conservative on this score, Ginny, and that hasn’t always been to my advantage. But in all my years in the ministry, I’ve only seen one divorce I agreed with. One single family breakup.” He paused the way he liked to pause in his sermons, preparatory to driving home a point he was especially fond of, then he said, “The kind of life people lead in this county is getting rarer and rarer. Three generations on one farm, working together, is something to protect.”

“That seems true in theory.”

“Helen and I chose to come here partly because we want to help preserve a way of life that we believe in. Some of my best memories are of making hay with my grandfather when my uncles were young men. They worked like one body, they were that close.”

“Do they all still get along?” I smiled frankly and disingenuously.

“Mostly.”

“Mostly?”

“Well, of course there are spats. Man is fallen. And maybe there’s a value to being yoked to your enemies. You have more opportunity to learn to love them.” He beamed, having solved the puzzle I’d proposed.

I said, “How many haven’t spoken to one or the other in more than ten years?”

Henry licked his lips. “I don’t know. Listen—”

“Come on, Henry. Fess up.”

“You’re asking whether my family is holy, as if only perfect virtue on my part permits me to advise you. That’s a commonly held fallacy, and even ministers fall for it, but—”

“I just don’t know why you’re here. Who sent you, what you want me to do, what you think I’ve done, why you came here instead of going to Rose. Are we friends? Have you had us over for a barbecue? Do you call me to chat from time to time? Do you solicit my advice on your problems? No, no, and no. I don’t want you coming out here for a purpose. I don’t want to be on your rounds.”

“There are pastoral duties—”

Problems. Barbecues. Chatting. There was something I wanted from him after all, wasn’t there? My heartbeat quickened and my palms got damp. I said, “Just tell me what people are saying about us.”

“Ginny.”

“I want to know. I really do.”

“People don’t gossip as much as you think.”

“Yes, they do.”

“Well, not to me.” His look was impenetrable. Then he said, “Can’t I reach you? I want to.” His tone and demeanor were warmly sympathetic here, and it occurred to me that in the past he would have suckered me, back when I would have readily called him my friend just because I would have been flattered by the public acknowledgment of such a friendship. Now the whole idea seemed suspect. I couldn’t tell whether I mistrusted his office or him, but either way, there would be no confidences. I set my coffee cup on the table, stood up, and went to the sink, where I wrung out the sponge under a stream of hot water. I began wiping the table. I said, “Lift your cup.”

He lifted his cup. “At least, keep coming to church on Sundays. Keep the avenue to God open. He’s marvelously forgiving. More forgiving than we are of ourselves.”

The screen door opened. Ty saw Henry, stepped inside, and greeted him respectfully. Here, I thought, were two people who agreed on so many things that their opinions automatically took on the appearance of reality. It was a small world they lived in, really,
small, complete, and forever curving back to itself. Their voices relaxed and lowered, and their world looked far away to me.

That afternoon, when Ty left to haul a bunch of hogs to Mason City, I cleaned up from helping him load them, and went into Cabot. Henry’s reluctance to disclose the gossip had inflamed me. I figured I could tell what was being said about us by how they looked at me and spoke to me. I toyed with asking Rose to go along, too, for another, more observant set of eyes, but Rose had always scorned such pursuits, so even when she called and asked me what I was making for supper, I didn’t say I was going anywhere.

Cabot wasn’t much of a town, but it was on the only straight road between Mason City and Sioux City, so there were two antique stores and a clothing and fabric store along with the café, the hardware store, the Cool Spot, and the feed and seed. It was a nicer-looking town than Pike or Zebulon Center, either one. Those two towns had both once had hopes, or pretensions, so their main streets were four lanes and wider: old storefronts barely cast shadows a quarter of the way across the glaring expanses. Cabot, on the other hand, was built to the north of Cabot Street Road, and Main Street was lined with maple trees that Verlyn Stanley had donated when all the chestnuts were dying. Lawns in Cabot were big and houses were pretty—late Victorian, about twenty years older than the houses in Pike and Zebulon Center, but well kept up. Lots of farm couples aspired to retire there if it should come time to sell off the place on contract and move to town.

Old Cabot Antiques was where Rose had sold the hall tree she’d found in our dump, so that was where I went first. Dinah Drake set her prices high. She didn’t expect to be selling to people from town, and though you never saw anyone in there, it was rumored that she had contacts in the Twin Cities and Chicago who bought her best pieces. She had a friendly manner, and she liked to show off her new things. A discussion of whose they were always shaded into a discussion of how they’d fallen into her hands. Her habitual manner was one of amazement—that some right-minded Zebulon County person would actually let such a piece get away from the family, or else that some city person would actually pay what Dinah asked for it. Fools on both ends, and Dinah in the middle, tsk-tsk-tsking.

Dinah noticed me right away, and drawled, “Well, hi, Ginny. How are you?”

I gave the standard reply, “I don’t know. Not too bad, I suppose.” I started down her center aisle, but stopped almost at once to look at some figurines sitting on a marble-topped chest. I turned one over. Dinah said, “Royal Copenhagen. Can you believe it? Old, too. When I lock up at night, I put those away.”

The figure I was holding was a shepherdess in a gown rough with dainty china frills. Dinah seemed to expect me to say something, but I knew I would get farther if I kept quiet. I picked up a silver dish. She said, “That’s just plated. I’m sure it’s from the Montgomery Ward catalog. Rather pretty though, don’t you think?”

She came out from behind the rolltop desk she used for a counter.

“That Royal Copenhagen, though. You know Ina Baffin down in Henry Grove?”

I shook my head.

“She was a hundred and four. She got those from her grandma when she was a girl, and her own granddaughter said they didn’t interest her. Ina loved those, I’m sure. This granddaughter said they were just too simpery. Simpery! Something as valuable as that.” She lifted another figurine, a boy playing a flute, and gazed at it, then set it down with care. I moved down the aisle, smiling politely, lifting things and looking at them. Dinah picked up a rag and began to dust with a thoughtful air. There were some
Saturday Evening Post
magazines in a bin. I leafed through one of them. Dinah lingered near the front of the store, then slowly made her way back to me. She dusted each piece of a ruby-colored glass decanter set that was sitting on a dark-colored sideboard, then said, “People say your dad’s moving to Des Moines, now.”