A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [115]
At home, it was galling to think of how others were talking about us, bad enough to think of their ridicule or disapproval, but worse to think how they were surely entertained by us, how this stinging, goading, angry self-consciousness that impelled me every day, every minute, to seek relief was nothing to them, something they couldn’t feel and hardly ever gave a thought to. All these neighbors, close enough to know our business, but too infinitely far from us to feel a particle of what we were feeling, themselves feeling animated, more than anything, by the pleasures of curiosity. Away from the farm, though, that was okay, too. Their indifference constituted the goal, the promise that life, my life, the life of our family, was bigger, longer, more resilient than the difficulties we now found ourselves caught in. At the quarry, it was easier to feel that the main requirement was simple endurance.
Away from the farm, it was easier to think of how people went on from these sorts of troubles, it was easier to see a life as a sturdy rope with occasional knots in it. Every life I knew of in Zebulon County was marked by conflict and loss. Weren’t our favorite conversations about just these things—if not how some present tangle was working itself out, then how past tangles prefigured the present world, had made us and our county what it was? And didn’t it always turn out with these conversations that the fact that we were prospering, getting along, or at least feeling our life strong within our flesh proved that everything that had happened had created the present moment, was good enough, was worth it?
I came to the grove of trees and stood in the dappled shade. Just there, I realized that I had been sensing another presence, perhaps hearing steps or the silence of the meadow birds. For some reason, when a man’s figure stepped up to the edge of the water and threw a handful of stones into it (I could hear the plinkety-plunks even from that distance), I was not surprised by the fact that it was Pete. I stayed in the grove, though, unwilling to let my privacy vanish. He watched the water for a few minutes, then turned and walked toward me. I thought of escaping.
But of course I didn’t. The lesson I could not seem to learn was how to refuse the gifts I was to be given.
My feelings about Pete hadn’t lost the shimmer left over from the Monopoly tournament. On the contrary, it was easy to see how, over the years, Pete’s reponses to Daddy had been more honest than Ty’s, destructive but at least not duplicitous, impolitic but passionate, angry but never self-serving, and almost noble in the last four years, after Rose’s revelations about what Daddy had done to her. Didn’t the fact that she had told him itself constitute a recommendation?
He saw me and paused, smiled for me, came on. When he was just within earshot, I called out, “Playing hooky at the swimming hole?”
He came up to me saying, “I took the alternate route back from Mason City. I suppose you might swim here if you were ready to take your life in your hands.”
We turned together and walked back down the path I’d come, toward my car. I said, “Where’s the truck? I didn’t see anyone when I drove in.”
“There’s an old quarry road that runs in up on the north end. The gate’s down, so you can get right up to where it disappears into the water. Must be where they took the stone out in the old days.”
“Somebody in Ty’s class in high school drove a car into the quarry once.”
“Hmm. Well, plenty of things have been driven into this quarry over the years. I guess it’s like windows in abandoned buildings. You hate to see that surface go unbroken.