by Jane Smiley
I said, “I thought the point was to eat everything, but keep it running through the system.”
“That is a good basic plan, but I’ve had to modify the profile of my intake over the summer. Do you have any peanut butter?”
I got out the bread and the peanut butter and some crab apple jelly. Then I got down a sealed jar of hot pepper jelly. He picked that up and made himself a sandwich. I was still finishing my salad from dinner. He opened two bottles of the Perrier water and pushed one over to me. He said, “I can’t hide from you I’m worried, Ginny. I’m just worried sick. Everyone down at the bank is worried about this thing with your dad.”
I wrinkled my forehead and made a skeptical, good-humored look. These worries were absurd. We hadn’t even thought of them before Marv got there.
Marv said, “This is a big loan, Ginny. One of the biggest in our portfolio now, though I shouldn’t be telling you that. And frankly, there isn’t as much money in the till as you might think. Rural banks are having a hard time this spring finding cash. When the officers considered the loan, there were plenty of other applications on the table, let me tell you.”
I was smiling. I had been smiling ceaselessly since he came through the door. I said, “Everything about the farm is the same as it was, except that Ty and Pete and Rose and I have more control than we did. That can only be good, right? Isn’t Ty—” I gestured out the window. “Look at him. He’s healthy as a mule. Isn’t he one of the best in the township? Doesn’t everybody say that?”
“Nobody’s not saying it now, Ginny—” Marv developed and produced an enormous belch, then said, “Ah. I like to keep ahead of things. On the leading edge. I don’t like what I hear about your dad.”
“He’s in a snit about something right now, but he’ll get over it. It doesn’t affect the farm operation. Ty and Pete were way ahead on the farm work all through June. Ask Loren Clark.”
“That did appear to be the case.”
He opened two more little green bottles, and drank his quickly. I was watching him, so he said, “Just flushing the system. You should, too. Everybody should. If you did that regularly, your hair would shine more.”
I said, “Don’t worry, Marv. Promise me you won’t worry. Everything is fine, really.”
“You got a teaspoon of sugar I can have?”
I got him a spoon and handed him the sugar bowl. He looked at his watch, and at exactly twelve-thirty, he dosed himself with a teaspoon of sugar. Our conversation paused while he timed himself. He checked his watch again. He said, “Everybody in this town is friends, Ginny. Even all the feuding parties have been feuding for so long that they’re practically friends. These times we’re in are so unsettled that it makes me nervous. Interest rates flying everywhere. All the old rules disappearing. It’s like Depression times. People can make lots of new enemies in times like these.”
“We’re not going to be your enemy, Marv.” I smoothed my voice, made it soothing. “Just ignore Daddy. He’ll settle down.”
“I’ve got to listen to you, Ginny.” He stood up. “I’m going back to my own office, now. I’ve got some things to do at one, and I forgot the Tabasco. I’ll be by again.”
I was right behind him, smiling and guiding him toward the door.
An hour later I received Harold, though the sight of him hopping, almost dancing, from his truck to my back door, the sight of his glee, incensed me.
“You got a problem, girlie,” he exclaimed as soon as he saw me.
I held the screen door open for him. “You think so, Harold?”
“I know it.” He saw the coffeepot. “I’ll take some of that.”
“I’ll make fresh.”
He sat down at the table. “Your dad don’t want to come home here, don’t want to lay eyes on any of the whole pack of you.”
“I’m sure he’s been ripping us up one side and down the other.”
“The thing about girls is, they always got minds of their own.”
“Don’t you think Jess and Loren have minds of their own?”
“Jess come around, didn’t he?” Harold grinned. “He called me, I didn’t call him.”
“Did you know where to call him?”
“The thing was, I wasn’t going to call him and he knew it.”
“Harold, we’ve treated Daddy perfectly well for years, and you know that as well as anybody.”
“I know it.”
“Then tell him to come home, and don’t encourage him. I know you like to stir him up.” The coffee started boiling, and I poured Harold a cup.
“He’s a stubborn man. It don’t matter what I do or I think. He don’t like being told he’s wrong, especially when it ain’t clear how wrong he is.”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “So what do you tell him?”
“I tell him to wait and see what happens. I tell him that you girls ought to come to him. I told him that.”
“I’m sure Rose doesn’t agree with you, Harold. He stole Pete’s truck! He threatened us and cursed us! One of these days, right in the middle of this, some state trooper’s going to come around and arrest him. That hospital said his blood alcohol level test would take about ten days. He went out in the storm because he wanted to. He was like a baby, yelling threats about what he was and wasn’t going to do. Just like a baby!”
“I know it.”
“How long are you going to keep him there?”
“He’s got a right to stay. We been friends for sixty years and more.”
“Fine.”
“Now that’s a woman’s word, that ‘fine’ business. You know it ain’t fine. But you say that ‘fine’ and then everybody gets mad, and you know it’s going to make everybody mad, too.”
“What do you want me to say, Harold?”
“I want you to say that he’s your dad, and even though he’s a pain in the butt, you owe him. Rose owes him, too. Everything you got here, he made with John Cook. If this ain’t the best farm in the county, then I don’t know what is. Them Stanley boys been twisted in their sheets for years, trying to get a piece of this place, and they got two thousand acres and more. But none of their places are as good as this place, and they know it. That’s what you owe Larry Cook, my girl.”
“A farm isn’t everything, Harold.”
“Well, it’s plenty, isn’t it? It’s more than one person is. One person don’t break a farm up that lots of people have sweated and starved to put together.” Harold was beginning to heave with anger. “If you’d have been sons, you’d understand that. Women don’t understand that.” He stood up, walked to the back door, opened it, and spit off the porch. When he came back, he’d calmed himself a little. He flattened his hair with his hands, sat down again, and looked into his coffee cup.
I said, “Rose doesn’t owe him anything.”
“I’m sure Rose says that. Rose has always been trouble, between you and me.”
“Maybe you’d better shut up, Harold.”
His head swiveled toward me, and I could see that he was startled, but the fact was that I was suddenly actually reeling with anger. I could hardly sit upright in my chair, I was so awash. I gripped the edge of the table to hold myself in place, and I said, “That’s right, Harold. Shut up. Just shut up about Rose and Daddy.” If the coffeepot had been on the table, I would have thrown the hot coffee at him. I could see it across the kitchen, on the cold burner, and I longed to get up and grab it and use it the way you long to drink water when you are thirsty, or climb into bed when you are tired. I held on to the table.
“I’m doing you a favor here.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“This is what I’m going to do. I’m going to take your dad to the church supper on Sunday. And you kids are going to show up there and have a nice meal. Fact is, I think you should work this out. You got your side and Larry’s got his. I know that.” He sought my gaze and smiled at me. “I’ve known you all your life, Ginny. I know you got a side here, and maybe even it’s the right side. But if you work it ou
t, you can get past sides, and keep this place going for another fifty years. That’s worth something, ain’t it?” He talked slowly and steadily, the way Jess talked, and underneath the elderly quaver and the country grammar was a voice like Jess’s. I gave in to it a little, for that. I nodded. “Okay, then,” said Harold.
The man from Kansas stayed for supper. I grilled pork chops over the fire and made salad from our lettuce, had new potatoes from Rose’s garden, and peas. He said, “Man, this is heaven to me, this kind of dinner on this place.”
Ty said, “It is good, isn’t it?”
I said, “Ty, honey, you look really beat,” and the man from Kansas started exclaiming about how much they’d gotten done. He said, “The company doesn’t like me to keep them on overtime, but I saw that we could finish up this evening if we kept at it.”
I said, “Will you be back after the Fourth, then?”
“Naw. I was just telling Ty, here, we’ve got to wait at least four days, so I’m giving everybody a couple of days off.”
I looked at Ty, but he was looking out the window. His plate was clean, so I said, “Sweetie, you want anything more?”
He looked at me abruptly, then got up from his seat. He said, “If I’m going to catch up on my sleep tonight, I’d better go work on the hogs.”
The man from Kansas wanted to talk, so I listened, made coffee, tried not to watch Ty when he came in later, kicked off his boots, washed up, and passed through the kitchen without saying anything. The man from Kansas eyed him, then me, then smiled. After that, he talked on and on about his growing up and his father’s place and the differences between Colorado and Iowa and Kansas, then about his divorce and his teenaged son, who was pretty wild, and how the storm knocked out the electricity over at the motel just when he was sitting down to watch TV. I got rid of him at ten forty-one. Ty was well and truly asleep when I got upstairs. That was the first night.
I have to say that we all avoided each other these few days, though for me, the urge to keep to myself was accompanied by a strange longing, missing those I didn’t need to miss, avoiding those I missed. I didn’t even want to see Jess. Wednesday morning, the Fourth of July, another mild, crystalline day, I walked across the fields in the opposite direction from the dump that now represented Jess to me, toward Mel’s corner. I scouted around, looking for signs of the old pond, but I couldn’t even tell where it might have been—the rows of corn marched straight across black soil as uniform as asphalt. The pond, but also the house, the farm garden, the well, the foundations of the barn, all were obliterated. It was not as though this was mysterious to me—I remembered quite well the coming of the bulldozer, the knocking down and burning of the house and barn. It was a common enough event in the early sixties, when new, bigger tractors meant greater speed and a wider turning radius, fences coming down to create larger fields. The bulldozers were a sight I had glanced at from the window of my bedroom, before going back to doing my algebra or trying my hair in a bouffant style. Now, though, the hallmark of my new life was consternation at even this ancient bit of change. How many times had I walked this way in shorts and a T-shirt (Mommy didn’t think bathing suits were necessary just for swimming in the pond), heading confidently for a swim, knowing precisely where I was going and what pleasures were to come? But in the leafy rows of corn I did not find even the telltale dampness of an old pothole to orient myself.
27
BY THE TIME WE’D CHATTED casually to everyone else, we started to feel calmer ourselves. Or at least I did. Talking about Daddy as if these quirks would iron themselves out encouraged me to think that they would. Not talking to Rose or Pete or Ty very much allowed me to imagine that they were feeling about like I was, shocked by events, but able to cope. Clearly, Daddy needed some psychological help, had needed it for a long time, and Rose needed to confront him with her memories. Pete, too, would have to get in on this, and, of course, Ty would have to know and maybe the girls. I could readily imagine us after all of this confronting, after some set number of visits to a psychiatrist’s office (which I imagined to be just like the office of the chiropractor in Pike). I imagined a resumption of our old life, but with a different spirit, different subterranean currents—not so much anger and disquiet, more affection, or at least, acceptance, and peace. I wouldn’t think about Jess Clark any more, either.
I let myself, just twice, imagine a baby, a child who would turn all my miscarriages, and everything else, into good luck, whose birth, after the onset of self-knowledge (Daddy’s, mainly, but ours, too), was timed for happiness.
The psychiatrist would of course take our side, Rose’s side, that is. When we were all sitting in his sunny office, he would sit in the middle, between Daddy and us, and he would phrase our, Rose’s, accusations perfectly. They would flow smoothly around Daddy’s angers and defenses, dissolve the mortar joints like sugar, crumble the bricks themselves. There would be no yelling or threats, because the psychiatrist wouldn’t allow that. Maybe things would never be perfect, but was Harold Clark entirely wrong? Wasn’t what had been built worth some kind of effort? What I couldn’t imagine was everything flying apart.
I looked up Psychiatrists in the Mason City phone book. There were two listings, one for a clinic in Des Moines, and one for a clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. I dialed the one in Rochester and asked to speak to one of the doctors. I was told they were therapists, not doctors. While I held the line, I stared out the window toward Rose’s house and the road down to Daddy’s. I imagined the three-hour drive to Rochester. I imagined each of us taking turns telling our stories: Daddy’s impatience, Ty’s skepticism, Pete’s refusal to say much, Rose’s angry loquacity, my own stomach-churning anxiety, Pammy and Linda’s fear. I imagined writing checks on Daddy’s account for large sums of money. I imagined the three-hour drive back. A therapist came on the line, and I knew that within a few minutes I would have committed myself to what I had imagined, the impossible. I hung up without speaking.
It was then that I thought of Henry Dodge, our pastor. I would not, in the best of times, have said that I was close to Henry Dodge. I doubt that anyone would have, including his wife, Helen, or either of their children. They had once hailed from Fargo, North Dakota, though Henry’s previous ministry, until the mid-seventies sometime, had been in Denver. He told us how he got to us, a fifty-year-old man rotated out of a big suburban church to our little town, and when he told us (didn’t get along with the pastor, became impatient with some of the congregation, had doubts about how his earlier ambitions squared with his faith), he had spoken in a tone of voice that declared openly how moved he was by the crisis that resulted in his coming, but in fact, his confidences had resulted in embarrassment on all sides rather than something that felt like normal friendship. Daddy said he should keep that sort of thing to himself, so I’m sure the other farmers Daddy’s age did, as well. Probably people my age seemed less put off, and so Henry felt that he’d befriended us.
His manner and performance often came up for discussion; the congregation was paying him, after all, which licensed us to discuss at will whether we were getting value for our money. Most people actually liked him, but perhaps for things like his angular frame and slow-spoken manner, his bone-deep understanding of the tact with which you talk to farmers of northern European extraction, his occasional flash of dark wit, no doubt inherited from his mother, who was the only daughter of a long line of Norwegian farmers. His six uncles still farmed around Fargo; people liked him for that, too. But the struggle that was uppermost in his mind, and for which, you always got a feeling, he gave himself a little bit of credit, nobody cared for that.
Once I thought of Henry, I found that I was so eager to talk to someone, anyone, that I ran into my bedroom and changed out of my shorts into a plaid skirt. I had a free afternoon, of sorts. I had intended to bake a peach pie and weed the garden, but until time to get started on supper, I could leave without anyone’s commenting. It was Friday afternoon. I decided that the most casual thing to do wo
uld be not to call ahead, but to drop by, as if on my way home from shopping. It was not Henry Dodge himself that attracted me. Confiding in him might be hard, actually. But that word “pastor” promised a patience and capaciousness of understanding that would be just the thing. We could get Daddy into Henry’s office. It wasn’t far and advice would be free. Ty liked Henry better than I did, even praised his sermons from time to time for being “pretty smart.” When I passed the site of the new buildings, I saw the men the company had brought in for the construction, plus Ty, down on their hands and knees, smoothing cement. There were six of them, heads down, crawling backwards. It struck me as funny and I laughed for the first time in what seemed liked days.
Coming into Cabot, I could still see Henry in his office, wearing a brown suit. A diamond of sunlight would lie on the russet carpeting, and the seat cushions in the window seat would be a comfortable dusty green. My pastor’s voice would be deep and hollow, a good place for me to stash my story. Even while I was telling it, the comfort of his murmuring would rise around it. And then he would tell me what to do—how to talk to Daddy and Rose and Ty. The result, but faster, because of some kind of miracle, would be the same as with the “therapist.” That was what I really wanted, wasn’t it? The feeling of shame that was still animating my flesh with goading particularity and self-consciousness—it would be enough for that to dissipate.
Henry was not in his office, but he was somewhere—the door to his office was open and his chair was pushed back from the desk. There were no shafts of sunlight—the windows faced east and north. The carpet was beige, and the window seats, I remembered, were actually in the church parlor. They, too, had been covered in beige not too long ago by the ladies’ sewing group. Henry’s office was small and cluttered. Files were stacked on both of the chairs I might have sat in.