A Thousand Acres (30 page)

They made rules for us to live by. They've got to live by them, too."

I looked around the room. Again, there was a soothing quality to what she was saying, reassuring simplicity. I said, "Would you tell these sorts of things to the girls?"

Her scissors made two crisp sounds in the cotton fabric. Then she let go of them and looked at me. She said, "If Daddy got to them and hurt them in any way I would help them learn about evil and retribution. If he doesn't, then they can have the luxury of learning about mercy and benefits of the doubt."

"You make it seem simple." I thought for a moment. "No. I don't mean that. I mean, you make it seem easy.

"Ginny, I know what I think because I've thought about it for a long time. I thought about it in the hospital, after the operation. You know, Mommy dying, and Daddy, and then Pete being such a mean drunk, and having to send the girls away, and then losing a part of my own body on top of it all. In the face of that, if there aren't some rules, then what is there? There's got to be something, order, rightness. Justice, for God's sake." She cut up the long side of the shirt.

"Listen, I can't tell you how it makes me feel that Daddy's taking some sort of refuge in being crazy now. You know who they blame, don't you?

But it isn't even that."

"What is it?"

"Now there isn't even a chance that I'll look him in the eye, and see that he knows what he did and what it means. As long as he acts crazy, then he gets off scot-free."

Linda slammed open the screen door, pulling Jess behind her. She said, "I ran all the way to the gravel road, Mom." I saw by the color of Jess's face, gray under his tan, that she had told him. I sat up and put my feet on the floor. Jess looked from Rose to me, then me to Rose, then he wiped his face with his T-shirt, revealing his perfect stomach and chest. Rose carefully folded the fabric and the cut pattern pieces into a small square and Jess stepped into the room.

Rose said, "Linda, go pour some lemonade for everybody, then go back outside, because we have some grown-up talking to do." Linda resisted, standing still, for just the merest moment. Rose said, "We'll sew this afternoon."

"No matter what?"

"No matter what, at least for a little while."

"I'm going to make myself some sandwiches and take them outside."

After a moment, Rose said, "Okay." I looked away from them, finding Rose's customary briskness especially irritating in the circumstances.

Linda said "Okay" in return, but didn't move for a second, as if unsure what to do now that she'd gotten permission to do what she wanted. "Go on," said Rose. "I'm thirsty."

Jess sat with his head thrown back against the wall behind the chair, staring at the ceiling molding, it looked like.

Linda brought the glasses of lemonade in on a tray, doing it right, and offered the tray to us each in turn with a little, "Would you like some lemonade, Aunt Ginny?"

"Thank you, Linda." I gave her a particularly warm smile, and she smiled back, relaxing a little.

"You're welcome, Aunt Ginny."

Rose said, "You've got spills on that tray. Be careful."

She went into the kitchen and shortly thereafter banged out the back door. I sipped my drink. Rose said, "It's none of your business, Jess. Just stay out of it."

Jess didn't say anything.

"He humiliated you. Not only that, he set out weeks ago to humiliate you. He intended to humiliate both you and us, and to do it in public.

The fact that he's had an accident doesn't change that."

"I know." Jess's voice was low and rough, so unfamiliar to me that I didn't know how to interpret the tone.

Rose said, "I know what you're feeling. I really do, even if you don't. You think you're feeling sorry for him, but really you're feeling that you can finally get to him, that he'll soften toward you.

If you help him, then he'll be grateful, and then he'll give you what you want. Well, he's never going to do it."

I said, "I don't know-" She continued speaking to Jess. "Ginny is eternally hopeful, you know. She never cuts her losses. She always thinks things could change."

I said, "Harold could change. He could, you know, have remorse.

Sometimes that happens when, you know, people lose things." I'd almost said, see the light. I felt my face redden.

She continued to watch Jess, to address only him. "Not if you forgive him first. Not if you go to him. Not if you act like your mother did, Jess."

I said, "Rose-" When her face swiveled toward me, it was lit up with conviction.

"He should know about how they were together, because that tells how Harold is and how he's going to be."

Jess muttered, "I know how they were together. She was pretty long-suffering."

Rose exclaimed, "She always apologized, even when Harold was in the wrong! Even when he'd been yelling at her or had flown off the handle at her for no reason! She apologized. She told me once, she said, 'Rose, it doesn't do any good to hold out against him. He can hold out longer than I can. And then, he talks about it to everybody. He tells everybody I'm not speaking to him and makes a joke out of it. I think it's just better to wait till he comes around and thinks better of his actions." But he never did! She didn't make him, so why should he?

Guilty conscience?"

Jess was staring at her.

I thought Rose should settle down, but she wasn't saying anything untrue. She wasn't even exaggerating. I said, "He didn't really act like he valued her, Jess. When she found out I was marrying Ty, she said to me, 'You've got to play hard to get, Ginny. If your mother were alive, she'd tell you the same thing. I've never played hard to get, and I regret it. I don't mean with the young men, either.

You've got to find a way for it to be hard for your husband to get you, too.

Jess said, "This is different."

Is it?" said Rose. Now her voice was low but penetrating. Her stare was like a small room he surely couldn't get out of. In spite of everything, a part of me watched with interested detachment the way she surrounded him and captured his agreement. I recognized her intensity from all the years she had turned it on me. "He rejected you. He sent you away. He's been after you for fourteen years, gonna do the same thing to you that you did to him. He set you up when you got here, and then he got his revenge. What kind of guy is that?

If you really think he's going to come around and have remorse, then give him some time to think about it. Give the cure some time to work.

That's my advice. You can go running to him all full of pity and compassion, but pity and compassion have never won Harold's respect in the past, and if you don't win his respect, eventually he's going to humiliate you again, intentionally."

Jess said, "Jesus."

Rose set her glass on the coffee table, stood up, and went over to his chair, then she leaned over him, a hand on each arm of the chair.

He stared at her. She spoke softly, taking direct aim. "You're the one who's always saying they've set out to hurt us! You're the one who's always saying they've subordinated us to every passing principle and whim and desire! You told me that was the lesson of your whole life, the lesson of the whole Vietnam War! You said, 'Rose, every Vietnam vet you see is proof of how far they're capable of going!" You said that!"

He said, "I know. I believe that. But this she encompassed us both in her gaze, and said, "You both seem to think that there's some game going on here, that we can choose to play or not, that we can follow our feelings here and there and just leave when we don't like it any more. Maybe you can. But this is life and death for me. If I don't find some way to get out from under what Daddy's done to me before I die-" She stopped. Her face was white and set. She said, "I can't accept that this is my life, all I get. I can't do it. I thought it would go on longer, long enough to get right. I thought that I would fucking outlive him, and he could have that, half my life his, half my own. But now I bet he's going to outlive me. It's like he's going to smother me, just cover me over as if I were always his, never my own-" Her voice strangled to a halt. Jess and I didn't look at each other.

What soothed me about the way she talked in those days was the simple truth of it, as if we'd finally found the basic atoms of things, hard as they were. I could see that the same thing was going on with Jess, that what happened at the church supper had disoriented him, and Rose's strength of purpose visibly reoriented him.

The result was that the three of us, and Pete, too, kept away from Harold, didn't go to the hospital, didn't visit him or take hot dishes over to the Clark farm when he came home, didn't really ask anyone about him, unless they happened to bring it up. I guess you could say Rose and Jess and I hid. With Pete, there was the edgy sense of something separate going on, and out of long habit, it was easy to avoid delving into that. We knew in general how Harold was. When I ran into Loren in the bank in Pike, we spoke but didn't converse.

I could tell he was exhausted and angry, but even so, I couldn't give up the cool propriety of our behavior. It felt dignified and certain.

Ty and I were behaving the same way to one another and it was working to make life go forward, to make passions cool. It was the ingrained lure of appearances, the way manners seemed to contain things, make them, if not quite comfortable, then clear and hard.

The weather got hotter, and we watched storms tracking the horizon. I had green tomatoes on the vines, yellow banana peppers, onions with green tops as thick as four lingers, almost tall enough to fall over, bush beans dangling among the heart-shaped leaves, and cucumbers starting to vine. I spent most mornings in my garden.

On the seventeenth of July, I heard a car pull up in front of the house. It was only about eight in the morning, and I had been pulling lamb's-quarters out of the rows of beans. I brushed my hands on my shorts as best I could and went around the house. Ken LaSalle was standing on the porch, peering in the window beside the door.

I said, "Can I do something for you?" My voice came out sounding formal and cold. Ken spun around, held out some papers. He said, "These are for you. You and Ty and Rose and Pete."

I held up my soil-blackened hands. "Maybe you better tell me what they are."

"Well, Ginny." He hesitated over the friendly form of my name.

"Your dad is suing you to get the farm back. Your sister Caroline is a party to the suit, too. You better find yourself a lawyer."

"I thought you were our lawyer."

"I can't be. It's not ethical." Now he met my gaze fully. "Besides, I have to say that I don't want to be, either. I don't think you've treated your dad right, to be honest."

"We didn't ask for the farm."

"I don't feel I can be talking about the case. You get yourself a lawyer from Mason City or Fort Dodge or somewhere. That's the best thing to do." He set the papers down on the porch swing and got past me down the porch steps without looking at me again. I felt as though I'd been slapped.

WHEN CAROLINE WAS ABOUT FOURTEEN andIwas twenty-two, already married for almost three years, she came over after supper one evening, and said that she'd been given the lead in the high school play, over all the other older girls. She was to play Maisie in The Boyfriend.

Maisie was a flapper, and had to sing and dance and wear sleeveless flapper dresses. Daddy, she thought, wouldn't like it. I agreed to cover for her rehearsals, and also to pick her up at school two hours after the school bus left. I told Daddy she had a special English project, not too far from the truth, since one of the English teachers was also the drama coach, and I helped with her farm chores when she was late. During rehearsals, I got in the habit of going early to get her and sitting in the auditorium for fifteen minutes, watching her.

She was terrible. She had obviously been picked for her voice she had the most songs to sing, and every other girl on the stage was shrill and off-key compared to Caroline, whose pitch and volume were at least respectable. But she spoke her lines stiffly and her dancing-two Charleston numbers and a waltz-made me wince.

When she had to kiss the boy lead once, a thread of saliva stretched between them as they moved away from one another, and caught the light.

Everyone on the stage snickered, and the boy turned red.

Caroline remained mercifully oblivious. She didn't get any better, either. All the way through the dress rehearsal, her dancing was awkward and her voice pitched every line high at the end, as if she were asking a question no matter what she was saying. I dreaded opening night and was glad that I'd kept her project a secret even from Ty. I called Rose at college that night and together we thrilled with whispered horror over the coming humiliation.

The next day she acted completely normal-no stage fright, no anxiety.

She came over before school to get the costume I had been altering, an aquamarine flapper dress with feathers on the shoulders and rhinestones around the hem, and she ate the crusts of toast off my plate, using them to wipe up bits of jelly, and she talked idly about a boy who wasn't even involved in the play. She went off to the school-bus stop with the dress slung casually over her shoulder.

I had been intending to get Ty to go to the play with me at the last moment, but I decided to go alone. I sat in the back, near the door.

The auditorium was full-lots of feed caps-and there was our name right in the program for every farmer and every farmwife and every person in the township to read.

But the audience inspired her. She knew exactly how to sense us without ever looking at us, exactly how to let us see her smile and cavort and flirt. She even knew how to kiss the boy lead in our presence, and to make him kiss her so that he seemed gawky from passion rather than youth. She kicked up her heels and sang to the back row, and at the end they gave her a standing ovation. Afterwards, I was giddy with the pleasure I felt in this unexpected sight of her. We would bring Daddy. Ty and I would kidnap Daddy and just bring him and sit him down and give him this surprise. Caroline was as calm as ever.