A Thousand Acres

by Jane Smiley

  At the sound of my voice, shrill, angry, yes, I admit it was both those things, his expression was one of irritation, so immediate but fleeting that he himself might possibly have forgotten the flicker of that response. But I could not. Seeing his expression, and recognizing it, was stunning, like running headfirst into a brick wall. Ty said, "Settle down, Ginny."

  Pete said, "Take your turn, Jess. You are looking straight at Boardwalk, brother."

  Rose said, "I'm tired of this game," and she picked up the table by the legs and dumped the board and the pieces in Pete's lap.

  There was a long silence. Pete's face reddened and he bit his lip.

  The girls, on the couch, looked up and stared. Ty looked at me as if this were the result of my failure to settle down, and Jess bent down to pick up his property cards. He said, "Unrestrained capitalism always ends in war. I think Rosa Luxemburg said that. Shall we count our points overall?"

  I looked at Pete. He was furious. My own ill-humor vanished and I felt a muscle-clenching anxiety rise in my chest and begin to grip my throat. The fact was that Rose hadn't complained of him hitting her in about four years-he had reformed after he broke her arm, and there was no reason to believe that he was more likely to strike out tonight than any other of the nights in the last four years when Rose had acted provoking. Even so, I was at once in a panic, much more so than Rose, who seemed rather elated by her action. I have to say about Rose that it often seemed like fear wasn't in her, or caution, either. In Pete's worst years, it never seemed to occur to her to scale back her behavior, to seek fewer disagreements, or to be more conciliatory.

  Most of the time she wouldn't even live by that basic wifely rule of thumb, "What he doesn't know won't hurt him." He was supposed to know, and supposed to agree, or at least accept. She'd say, "This is the real me, the stand-up me. He's got to get used to that. If I let him beat me into submission, then what kind of life would I have?"

  'What kind of life do you have now?" I would say.

  And she would reply, "One with self-respect, at least."

  When he broke her arm, by knocking or pushing her down in the bathroom (I was never quite able to picture it when she told me) so that she fell on her wrist on the tile floor, she was relentless. She wore a cast for eight weeks, and she made a sleeve for it with the words PETE DID THIS glued on it in felt letters. Every time he raised his hand, or even his voice, she threatened to wear the sleeve. She did wear it once, to show that she was unashamed and meant what she said. Pete, I suppose much intimidated by the thought of the jokes that he would have to endure at the feedstore and all over town, changed after that. His manner with everyone else grew a little more irritable, and his battles with my father sharpened, but it was a small price to pay. When the doctors discovered Rose's cancer, one of the first things she said was, "I guess I don't want to die just when Pete and I are finally figuring it out."

  Her idea was that there was no such thing as provocation, that no matter what she did, Pete simply should not hit her, and therefore ifhe did hit her he was entirely wrong, and therefore she was perfectly free to do whatever she wanted. The result was that I lived in fear for her. Once she said, "If it were you being hit, you wouldn't be afraid, either. You'd be mad, I promise."

  Now she said, "Pete, why don't you go outside and have a smoke?

  I'm going to make some decaf."

  The girls went back to their projects, and I said, "You girls getting tired? You can go upstairs if you want." They shook their heads without looking at me.

  Jess had set the table back up and retrieved all the game pieces.

  Now he began putting them in the box. Ty was adding points. He said, "What happened to our hundred bucks?"

  Jess said, "We never collected it. We never decided what the prize was going to be."

  "We'd better decide before we find out who won.

  I glanced over at the list. A couple of columns were decidedly longer than the others, but I couldn't read the scribbled initials at the head of each column. I said, "We played. That was the-" and Rose came in from the kitchen with the coffeepot, and Pete opened the front door and stepped in, flicking his cigarette butt behind him, and the telephone rang, and Rose said, I'll never forget it, "What's that?" as if she'd never heard a telephone before in her life.

  Ty answered and listened, said, "Okay. Okay. Thanks. Thanks.

  We'll be right over." My sense of panic, which had eased back, slipped over me again. Ty put down the phone and said, "Your old man's wrecked his truck. He's in the emergency room in Mason City, and it doesn't look like he'll have to stay, so they want us to come get him. The truck's in the ditch over by the state park. They're going to pull it out with one of the park vehicles tomorrow morning and impound it until the results of his blood test come back."

  Rose said, "Was he drunk?"

  "They won't know that officially for ten days or so.

  "Did they arrest him?"

  "Not yet."

  Rose said, "It's about time."

  I said, "Is he hurt?"

  "Banged up. He hit his cheek on the steering wheel and cut it.

  They think that's all."

  "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.

  MY 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 live 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."