A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [14]
“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 point-blank 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 five 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 at me or his daughters, wildly, viciously eloquent, insults and threats, mounting crazily until