A Thousand Acres (4 page)

It seemed to me that whatever else was true, it was absolutely the case that Ty deserved to realize some of his wishes. I said, "But what about this thing with Caroline? She's actually sleeping at Rose's.

That's going to make him madder."

"He gets into snits, then he gets talked out of them. She didn't need to get on her high horse like that, though."

"She just said she didn't know."

"And she said it like she did know, the way she always does."

His voice was mild, sleepy, robbing this remark of any sting. Ty had always liked Caroline and teased her. When Daddy wanted her to pitch in at fourteen and learn to drive the tractor, Ty had talked him out of it, mindful the way lots of farmers weren't of potential accidents.

But I knew, too, that he literally could not imagine why she had done a thing he never would have, left for college and never really come back.

He gave out a soft, ruffling snore.

A lot of women I knew complained that their husbands hardly talked to them. There are always lots of clubs in farm towns, where the wives are ostensibly doing good works, but the good works are afloat in a river of talk, and that's the real point, I always thought.

Ty told me everything, though, all about his days with my father and Pete, all about the livestock and the crops and what he saw in the fields and who he saw in town. Conversation came so easily to him that other people seemed somehow choked by comparison. And his conversation was hopeful and good-humored. Even when Pete and my father were threatening to kill one another, which happened about once every two years, Ty would say, "Oh, they talk big. But your dad's got to have Pete irritating him so he can stay young. He knows that." When I had my miscarriages, Ty always talked me through it, certain there'd be a way to carry the next one to term, certain that this one just wasn't meant to be, certain that I would be all right, certain that he loved me anyway, no matter what.

I covered him with an old quilt, and he turned under it, nestling into the pillow, murmuring a half-waking thank-you. Ty thought we'd had three miscarriages. Everyone thought we had stopped trying. Actually, I had had live, the most recent one at Thanksgiving.

After the third one, in the summer of '76, Ty said he couldn't bring himself to sleep with me unless we were using birth control. He didn't tell me why, but I knew it was because he couldn't take another miscarriage. For a year I dutifully resigned myself to not even trying, and then it occurred to me one night in the bathroom that all I had to do was pretend to put the diaphragm in, that pregnancy could become my private project. I imagined how I would carry it to term without a word, waiting to see when Ty or Rose began to stare at me, hesitating to ask if I was putting on too much weight. If I kept the secret, I thought, I could sustain the pregnancy. Except that when I did get pregnant I was so excited that I told Rose, and so when I lost the baby, one day when Ty and my father had gone to the State Fair for the weekend, I had to tell Rose, too. Then she made me promise not to try any more. She said I was getting obsessed and crazy. So I didn't tell her about the next one and when I lost it the day after Thanksgiving, no one knew. I was lucky again-Ty had gotten up early to help Pete with some late bean harvesting-and I just wadded the nightgown and the sheets and the bed pad into a paper bag and took them out and buried them under the dirt floor of the old dairy barn, where the ground wasn't frozen yet. I thought I would dig them up sometime and carry them to the dump, but I hadn't yet. Digging them up would make me want to try again, and I wasn't quite ready. I also wasn't ready to give up. At thirty-six, I had live years left, maybe two or three more chances to come out of my bedroom one morning and say, "Here, Ty, here's our baby."

One of the many benefits of this private project, I thought at the time, was that it showed me a whole secret world, a way to have two lives, to be two selves. I felt larger and more various than I had in years, full of unknowns, and also of untapped possibilities. In fact, I was more hopeful after the two last miscarriages than I had been after the first.

Beyond Rose's house, my father's windows, too, were dark. I realized that I hadn't thought to ask if I needed to go over and get his breakfast in the morning. That was something Rose and I generally agreed upon each night. When Caroline was staying, she liked to do it, but she had gone home with Rose after my father left the party. I opened the window and squinted through the screen. I was sure I could see his truck parked by the barn, Pete's truck parked next to their porch, the roof of our truck, below, glinting in pearly peace. The summer sounds of bullfrogs and cicadas hadn't begun yet, but a breeze was soughing through the pines north of the house, the hogs were clanking their feeders in the barn. It was the same calm and safe vista that was mine every night-the one that I sometimes admitted to myself I'd been afraid to leave when high school was over and the question of doing something else came up. It suited me, and it was easy to let it claim me every night, but I had wishes, too, secret, passionate wishes, and as I sat there enjoying the heavy, moist breeze, I let myself think, maybe this is it, maybe this is what turns the tide, and carries the darling child into shore.

5

AT SEVEN, WHEN I TIPTOED up the stairs to see why my father hadn't answered my announcements of breakfast, I found that he wasn't there.

The bed had been slept on, rather than in, and my father had gone out in shoes-his boots by the back door were the reason I thought he was still in bed. Beside the barn, the truck was cold to the touch, and I was just going over to see if he'd dropped in on Rose and Caroline when a big maroon Pontiac pulled into the yard. My father got out of the passenger side, and Marv Carson got out of the driver's side. Marv looked groggy but willing, already decked out in suit and tie. He scurried eagerly in my father's footsteps as they came toward the porch. My father said, "Ginny, Marv'll be eating. Marv, go wash up, now." Marv looked around as he stepped through the door, for a sink, I suppose. I said, "I'm sure you're clean enough to eat, Marv. Go on and sit down."

I set out sausage, fried eggs, hash brown potatoes, cornflakes, English muffins and toast, coffee and orange juice. My father pulled out his usual chair and sat down, then shoveled the food onto his plate with his usual appetite. I was trying to judge whether he was wearing the same clothes he'd had on the day before, when he glanced at me and said irritably, "You had anything to eat? What are you looking at?"

"I ate with Ty, Daddy."

"Well, then, sit down or go out. You're making me nervous standing there."

I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat down.

He said to Marv, "Something the matter with the food?"

"It's delicious."

"Then why are you eating it that funny way?"

Marv turned pink, but smiled bravely. "People don't know that it's not what you eat, but the order you eat it in that counts."

"Counts for what?"

"Digestibility, efficient use of nutrients, toxin shedding."

"You're not fat."

Indeed he wasn't. He said, "Actually, I don't even think about fat any more. I was obsessed with that for years, but that's very low level body awareness. Thinking about fat and calories is actually a symptom of the problem, not a way to find a solution.

"What's the solution?"

"My main effort now is to be aware of toxins and try to shed them as regularly as possible. I urinate twelve to twenty times a day, now. I sweat freely. I keep a careful eye oil my bowel movements."

He said this utterly without embarrassment. "Knowing that organizes everything. For example, when I used to think about exercise as aerobic conditioning or muscle strengthening, I found it very difficult to motivate myself to do it. Now I think of it as a way to move fluids, to cleanse cells and bathe them afresh, and I want to exercise.

If I don't exercise, I can feel myself getting a little crazy from the toxins in my brain."

I said, "How so?"

"Oh, you know. Negative thoughts. Worries about things at the bank.

Failure of hope. That kind of thing. I used to have that all the time. I can spot someone in the toxic overload stage a mile away.

I said, "What are the toxic foods?"

"Oh, Ginny, goodness me, everything is toxic. That's the point.

You can't avoid toxins. Thinking you can is just another symptom ú of the toxic overload stage. For years I was nuts about eating just the right things. Beef never touched my lips, or chocolate, or coffee.

It got worse and worse. I was cutting out something every month, desperately looking for just the right combination of foods. I was crazy. I was getting thinner, but then you store the toxins in your muscles and organs and it's actually worse."

"When was that?" I said. "I had no idea." Daddy had stopped staring at Marv and started eating, which was a relief.

"No one did." He finished his eggs and began on his sausage. "It was a very isolated time for me. Now I talk about it whenever it comes up.

I feel much better. You blow off toxins through your lungs, too."

"Hmmp," said my father. Marv fell silent, and Daddy looked up to watch Marv eat his English muffin. He said, "You got any hot sauce? Tabasco works the best."

"For what?" said my father.

"Drawing off a good sweat." He gave us an innocent smile. I smiled back at him and shook my head. "We don't eat much spicy food." Marv wiped his mouth and said, "That's okay. I'll get to it later."

Daddy seemed more or less his normal self. He drank every night and was gruff every morning. It was a habit we were used to and was reassuring in its way. I'd made up my mind to ask him pointblank if he'd been serious about incorporating the farm and giving Ty and Pete more say-so in its operation. The fact was, it had taken mere instants for the two of them, and Rose, too, to take possession in their own minds, and mere instants for Caroline to detach herself.

Disbelief or even astonishment, on Harold's back porch had turned with marvelous suddenness into intentions and plans. My talk with Ty had soothed me, but then, when I woke up, it was Pete I worried about.

Pete's natural state of mind was an alternating current of elated certainty and angry disappointment. I was a little afraid of him.

The night before Rose got married, she sat at the foot of my bed rolling up her hair, caroling her amazement that she had actually gotten him to marry her. Secretly, I was amazed, too, and maybe a bit jealous, so handsome was Pete, the image of James Dean, but smiling and ebullient, never rebellious or sullen. And he had real musical talent-he played four or live instruments well enough to put himself through college playing in three different ensembles: the university string quartet (first violin), a country band (fiddle, mandolin, and banjo), and a jazz group (piano, occasionally bass).

He made more money and went to more get-togethers-weddings and parties, concerts, jam sessions, hootenannies, funerals, recitals, rehearsals, gigs in bars-than seemed possible for one kid. He played all over the central part of the state, and Ty and I saw him in all his incarnations-flannel shirt and boots, tux, blue suit, black leather jacket. His energy and his lust for playing music looked inexhaustible.

I never knew what he saw in Rose, not that there was nothing to see-I always adored Rose-only that there was nothing in her that was like anything in him. She was pretty but not beautiful, smart but caustic, never chic, never ambitious, always intent on teaching elementary school for a few years, then getting married and having two children and living back on a farm, though not necessarily our farm-a horse farm in Kentucky was one of her early ambitions.

When she started to date Pete and we met him, his spiral seemed to be widening, carrying him to cities-Chicago, Kansas City, Minneapolis, and beyond. I was worried that Rose would get hurt, would count too much on someone who would have to leave her behind.

Then he announced he was tired of the road, and even of music, that he wanted to settle down and learn how to farm, and they got married and he brought that same enthusiasm to this new venture, but he could never seem to get on the right side of Daddy. I doubt that Rose and Pete actually intended to stay long on this farm-they were more ambitious than that. Pete was up early and late, brimming with ideas, fevered with ideas. Pete wanted to make a killing, and an idea hatched was already in his own estimation a killing made, concrete and cherished.

Doubt, especially my father's doubt, was much more than a challenge, it was more like the sudden disappearance of something almost in his grasp. It took me years to understand the depth of Pete's disappointment when his enthusiasms met with my father's inevitable skepticism. His anger would be quiet, but corrosive, later erupting at odd times toward Ty or Rose, even ú at me or his daughters, wildly, viciously eloquent, insults and threats, mounting crazily until you couldn't believe your ears. It frightened ú me, but it didn't frighten Rose. She would stand back, her arms crossed over her chest, slowly shaking her head, saying, "You should hear yourself you really should hear yourself." Cool, dismissive, Inviting punishment. Punishment came, later, not often, but enough.

Then, one night, he broke her arm, and after that, that was four years ago, he never touched her again, went through another change, into a kind of settled, sour despair. He drank. My father drank. They came to see eye to eye on this.

Their wedding picture used to sit on the piano in their living room, and though Pete put on less weight over the years than any of us, he looked less like his youthful self than any of us-his face was lined and wrinkled from the sun, his hair was bleached pale, his body was knotted and stiff with tension. That laughing, musical boy, the impossible merry James Dean, had been stolen away.

A share in the farm would be the first encouragement my father had ever given Pete, the first dream he had ever allowed Pete to realize, the first time he'd treated Pete like more than a hired hand or a city boy.

My fears for Ty were motivated by affection. My fears for Pete were motivated by dread.