A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [15]
Their wedding picture used to sit on the piano in their living room, and though Pete put on less weight over the years than any of us, he looked less like his youthful self than any of us—his face was lined and wrinkled from the sun, his hair was bleached pale, his body was knotted and stiff with tension. That laughing, musical boy, the impossible merry James Dean, had been stolen away.
A share in the farm would be the first encouragement my father had ever given Pete, the first dream he had ever allowed Pete to realize, the first time he’d treated Pete like more than a hired hand or a city boy. My fears for Ty were motivated by affection. My fears for Pete were motivated by dread.
The problem, I thought, would be to get my father to acknowledge what he’d said his plans were. I was turning this over in my mind, looking back and forth between Marv Carson’s rosy-peachy cheeks and my father’s dour countenance, when Marv solved everything for me. He said, “I used to work five days a week. Now I work eight. But that’s just it. There isn’t any distinction between work and play. It’s a flow, like everything else. Anyway, I’ve got some papers in the car, and I talked to Ken LaSalle last night. We can meet here after church, and chat about everything, and sign. How’s that?”
“Can’t be soon enough for me,” said my father. “Ginny, you get the others here, and we’ll do it before dinner.” He turned to Marv. “You going to be staying for dinner?”
“Thanks but no.”
“Well, that’s something, anyway.” He went to the door and stepped into his boots, then said to Marv, “Come on. Let’s go take a look at the fields.”
6
THE EASE OF MY BREAKFAST TASK gave me hope for my church task, which at the time seemed significant but not really threatening. My father was easily offended, but normally he was easily mollified, too, if you spoke your prescribed part with a proper appearance of remorse. This was a ritual that hardly bothered me, I was so used to it. For all her remarks and eye rolling, Rose could perform her part, and after the fact, could even get our father to laugh about some things. Caroline, though, was perennially innocent, or stubborn, or maybe just plain dumb about this sort of thing. She was always looking for the rights and wrongs of every argument, trying to figure out who should apologize for what, who should go first, what the exact wording of an apology should be. It was one of those things about her that you could say came from being a lawyer, except that she’d always been that way, and being a lawyer only formalized it and, I suppose, proved to her that blame could indeed be divvied up.
Henry Dodge, our minister, gave his yearly sermon about all worldly riches having their source in the tilling of the soil, which was guaranteed to appeal both to the farmers’ self-regard and to their sense of injury at the hands of the rest of society, so I thought Daddy, who was there, sitting in the back pew with Marv, might be in a good mood.
After church, I said to Caroline, “Come along, be around, go up and give him a kiss on the cheek and a hug, and just say, ‘Sorry, Daddy.’ You can do that. That hardly even amounts to an apology.”
“But I spent the night at Rose’s.”
“Ignore that part.”
“He won’t. That’s the insult added to the injury.”
“If he mentions it, say, ‘I was afraid you were mad at me, Daddy.’ ”
Her lips thinned. “I hate that little girl stuff.”
“Well, weren’t you afraid he was angry with you?”
“No. I was furious with him! All I did was express a little—”
“He’s touchy. He