A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [104]
After the church dinner, Jess needed a place to stay until everything blew over. Rose suggested that he stay at Daddy’s house, not in Daddy’s bedroom, of course, but in one of the other rooms. There were four bedrooms, after all, three going to waste in any circumstances. After she proposed this, it seemed like a good time to take a look at the house, straighten it up a little, put a few of Daddy’s things in a little bag, in case he ever wanted them.
I went over after breakfast one day, after sharing Ty’s wordless meal and hearing him recite his plans for the day and the incidental information that he wouldn’t be home for dinner. He didn’t ask me my plans. “Fine,” I said, that red flag response, but he didn’t react. I waited until he drove away in the pickup, then headed down the road to Daddy’s. Ty may not have known that Jess was moving closer, was, in some sense usurping Daddy’s place. It was fine, too, that he didn’t know. If he had mentioned it, I would have told him that anything could happen now.
As I neared the house, it seemed like Daddy’s departure had opened up the possibility of finding my mother. It was not as though I forgot that I’d been there every day of my life. I knew that. But now that he was gone, I could look more closely. I could study the closets or the attic, lift things and peer under them, get back into cabinets and the corners of shelves. She would be there if anywhere, her handwriting, the remains of her work and her habits, even, perhaps, her scent. Might there not be a single overlooked drawer, unopened for twenty-two years, that would breathe forth a single, fleeting exhalation? She had known him—what would she have said about him? How would she have interceded? Wasn’t there something to know about him that she had known that would come to me if I found something of her in his house? The hope was enough to quicken my steps. I passed the kitchen display in the driveway, the white brocade sofa still sporting its tag, upended on the back porch. I ignored the fact that the place was depressingly familiar, that Rose and I had spring-cleaned there every year. There had to be something.
Already the attic was baking. It had never been insulated, and the reflective powers of the metal roof did little if anything against the summer sun. A path had been cleared to each of the four windows and the east and west ones were propped open to ventilate the house. Considering that our family had lived in this house for sixty-five years, there wasn’t much up here—a roll of carpet, almost-new gold shag that Daddy must have gotten somewhere—it was never laid in the house. Three floor lamps with those old twisted black cords and round Bakelite plugs. A folded-over mattress. Three boxes of back issues of Successful Farming. Another box of Wallace’s Farmer, dating from the early seventies. An old fan, its black blades unshielded by any grid. Under the eaves there were old-looking boxes, and in them some newspapers from the Second World War, including a copy of the Des Moines Register for VE Day. Folded into this was an invitation to my mother for a wedding in Rochester of some people I had never heard of. I smelled it. It smelled like the newspapers. Deeper in the box were farm receipts for 1945. The other boxes also held farm receipts and a few copies of Life magazine. Nothing else. I crawled back toward the center from under the eaves. My dusty shirt clung to my chest.
The second-floor closets were just as I had known them—full of boots and my father’s clothes, which were largely overalls and khaki pants. Actually, only two of the closets had much in them. The others had collected mostly hangers. In my father’s room, I looked at the pictures on the wall—my Davis great-grandparents standing formally for a portrait on the eve of their departure from England. That was the last picture they ever took. My Cook grandparents