A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [140]
“I can’t believe it.”
“Well, shit, Ginny. He was incredibly focused on Daddy. He blamed him for everything that went wrong in our lives. He always said he was afraid he might kill Daddy in a rage, but I actually think he couldn’t have—Daddy was too strong. But then Daddy got weaker, and when I told him about Jess he went out and drank every night, and every night he drove over to Harold’s place and sat outside in the truck, staring at the windows of the house and drinking. Frankly, it was all right with me. It was better than having him sit across the room staring at me, the way he used to.”
“Is Daddy over there still?”
Rose shrugged. “I told Pete he’d probably gone to Des Moines, but he was nuts. He said he’d seen him. I don’t know.”
I said, “Don’t you think that’s really the strangest thing?”
“What?”
“That after all these years, we don’t know where Daddy actually is.”
We looked at each other. Rose said, “I think of that as freedom.”
After a moment, she said, “Anyway, I’m sure Pete’s dying regret was that he hadn’t gotten back at Daddy.”
“I don’t know what to say. Wasn’t he mad at you?”
“Daddy was the one. He just looked past me and saw Daddy. He was jealous, Ginny! I often thought that when you got right down to it, he was jealous as hell, but too afraid until he saw Daddy weakening—” She stopped and gave a harsh little laugh. “Even then, he couldn’t actually do anything up front. Just threaten.” She sniffed, and then, “Shit, Ginny. At the core, they’re all like that.”
“We think that because of Daddy. If he hadn’t—If he had been—”
She sat up and looked at me. “Say the words, Ginny! If he hadn’t fucked us and beat us we would think differently, right?”
“Well, yeah.”
“But he did fuck us and he did beat us. He beat us more than he fucked us. He beat us routinely. And the thing is, he’s respected. Others of them like him and look up to him. He fits right in. However many of them have fucked their daughters or their stepdaughters or their nieces or not, the fact is that they all accept beating as a way of life. We have two choices when we think about that. Either they don’t know the real him and we do, or else they do know the real him and the fact that he beat us and fucked us doesn’t matter. Either they themselves are evil, or they’re stupid. That’s the thing that kills me. This person who beats and fucks his own daughters can go out into the community and get respect and power, and take it for granted that he deserves it.”
“Mommy spanked us, too.”
“But she didn’t whip us. She didn’t slap our faces or use a strap, or even exert all her strength. He did! And when she tried to stop him, he yelled at her, too.”
She paced around me in a circle. When she spoke again, her voice came out strong and confident. She said, “I was thinking leaving here was the only alternative. But then Pete did me this favor. Us. Not Pammy or Linda. I know that. But me.” She turned to face me. “I want what was Daddy’s. I want it. I feel like I’ve paid for it, don’t you? You think a breast weighs a pound? That’s my pound of flesh. You think a teenaged hooker costs fifty bucks a night? There’s ten thousand bucks. I wanted him to feel remorse and know what he did and what he is, but when you see him around town and they talk about him, he’s just senile. He’s safe from ever knowing. People pat him on the head and sympathize with him and say what bitches we are, and he believes them and that’s that, the end of history. I can’t stand that.” Her voice thrilled up the scale.
I said, “I feel weird. I must be really tired,” but I knew it wasn’t fatigue. Then I said, “Okay. Here’s a question. Did you know that Jess Clark slept with me?”
She smiled. “Oh, sure.”
It hurt more than I had expected it to, even though I wasn’t surprised. I said, “Had he slept with you by that time?”
She paused, then said, “No.”
“He told