A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [150]
“Who?” said the judge.
He couldn’t see her. He said, “Well, Caroline, of course.” He looked over her shoulder toward Ken LaSalle. He said, “Help me up, boy. Please. I can’t do like I used to, these days.” He reached out his hand. When Ken took hold of it, Daddy stepped down the little step. To Caroline, he said, “Excuse me.”
Rose leaned over to me and said, “Ten to one, this is an act.”
Caroline, Ken, and Daddy made their slow way down the aisle toward the door. Daddy was saying, “She was the littlest thing. Little knobby knees. Little bitty fingers, always braiding her doll’s hair.” All of a sudden, I shouted, “Daddy, it was Rose who had the velveteen coat! It was Rose who sang! It was me who dropped things through the well grates!” I was squawking, right out there in the courtroom, and everyone’s head swung toward me. All but one. Daddy didn’t pay any attention at all. The judge banged his gavel, my face flushed hot, and my throat seared. I whispered to Ty, “But it was.” He shushed me. I felt icy shakes descend in waves through my body.
The hearing went forward as if I hadn’t spoken. Frank stayed in the room, I suppose to make sure there wasn’t going to be any funny business. Various affidavits were presented attesting to how Ty and Pete, and later, Jess, and Rose and myself had conducted business on the farm over the summer. Receipts for sales, outstanding bills, my books, which I had industriously brought up to date, were all presented. Ty took the stand, told simply and carefully what he had done and why. Mostly his reason was that Daddy had done things that way, and he had gotten into the habit. Rose jiggled her foot constantly, and a joint in her chair squeaked with her jiggling. I watched it all, but mostly I continued wrapped in amazement.
The strangest person in the room, apart from myself, was Jess Clark, and my amazement gradually accumulated focus on him. It was, when I stared hard enough at his face, as if it were May again, and I were only just seeing him for the first time. I noted his hawkish nose, his blue eyes with their orbits of fine lines, his dry, neatly cut lips. He looked relaxed in the courtroom, purely a witness, curious but unimplicated in the developing drama. A stranger, he looked canny, almost calculating. With no one looking at him and no occasion to exercise his charm, his face was cool, without animation or warmth. His estimation of or feelings about what had happened weren’t evident in any way, and something was aroused in me, an instinctive female reaction of caution, as if all that had happened was still before us, as if the sense that caution was in order wasn’t, by now, the result of experience. This flutter of caution felt like déjà vu, and I wondered if I had felt it before, if that hadn’t been the very thing that spurred me forward. I thought, suddenly, of that girl whose boyfriend had stabbed her long ago in June, of how she had gone out to meet him, throwing caution to the winds.
We had all done that, Daddy first, the others after. We had done it without knowing why, or maybe even that that was what we were doing. And then our cautious lives had grown intolerable in retrospect, and every possibility of returning to them equally intolerable. And yet, a year ago, I’d been happy enough, taken up with my little pregnancy project, managing the round of work and the irritations of Daddy’s unreasonableness. Ty had been content enough with his patched-together hog operation, Pete had accepted the bargain of his life—routine frustration, occasional blowups, but at least some larger purpose to participate in. Jess, too, seven months before his return, must have felt that things were settled.
Only Rose was planning for change. Brooding on her body, her voluptuous, furious, secret, waiting body, had