A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [111]
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 hotdishes 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 fingers, 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