A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [164]
“Yeah. I’m thirty-seven. It shits, doesn’t it?”
I said, “It’s hard to bear.” At the moment it seemed nearly impossible to bear. I exclaimed, “Oh, Rose.”
She sniffed, dismissing this upsurge. After a moment, she said, “Don’t do that to me. We’re not going to be sad. We’re going to be angry until we die. It’s the only hope.”
“I don’t know if I can do that. Especially without you to goose me. I just fall back into this muddle. At the hearing, I was so shocked. I mean, he was so lost and diminished. I felt like I couldn’t remember what we were so afraid of except that you could, so I could. And then I could see you so clearly all the last three years, how you’d always had your way at my expense, and you’d been selfish all your life. I just saw those words in red letters, ‘Rose is selfish,’ and I didn’t have any trouble being hard and having everything you did and said and had ever done and said go for evidence that you were immovably selfish, and that’s bad. I mean, if we don’t know that being selfish is bad, then what did we learn as children?”
Rose laughed. In the drab hospital room, it was a jolly sound. I liked it and was offended at the same time, so I confessed, maybe just to impress her, make her serious again. I said, “I thought I was going to be angry with you forever, but now I’m not! I mean, I wanted to kill you!”
“So what? I want to kill people all the time.”
“No! I don’t mean that I said, ‘Gee, I could kill that guy.’ I mean, I set out to kill you. I made poisoned sausage for you, and canned it, and waited for you to eat it.”
She looked at me, surprised at last. Finally, she said, “Well, must have worked, huh?”
“Don’t you remember? That liver sausage and sauerkraut I brought over?” She shook her head. “Right around dinner, late in the summer?”
“Vaguely. So much was going on, I must have forgotten about it. Then, of course, I was swept up in the Jess Clark life-style, so I would have spurned liver sausage even if I’d remembered.” She drank some water through a straw.
I said, “Aren’t you even impressed?”
“I guess I think if you’d really wanted to kill me, you would have shot me or something. Ty had a shotgun. So did Daddy and so did Pete. Anyway, you didn’t have to bother. All that well water we drank did the trick.”
I nodded, limp from my confession, slumping in my green chair and damp with sweat. Rose, on the other hand, looked invigorated. I said, “It must be still in your cellar, then.”
“Everything else is. But that house has been boarded up since I moved across the road.”
I felt a surprising flush of relief. We exchanged our first real smile since I’d come.
“I should leave if I want to get home before the girls do. They want to come this afternoon.” Then I said, “What am I going to do without you?”
“Exercise caution while making up your own mind, as always.”
I stood up. “I should go. I promised them.”
She reached for my hand. Hers was cool, and her thumbnail dug into my palm. She jerked me toward her. She said, “I have no accomplishments. I didn’t teach long enough to know what I was doing. I didn’t make a good life with Pete. I didn’t shepherd my daughters into adulthood. I didn’t win Jess Clark. I didn’t work the farm successfully. I was as much of a nothing as Mommy or Grandma Edith. I didn’t even get Daddy to know what he had done, or what it meant. People around town talk about how I wrecked it all. Three generations on the same farm, great land, Daddy a marvelous farmer, and a saint to boot.” She used my hand to pull herself up in the bed. “So all I have is the knowledge that I saw! That I saw without being afraid and without turning away, and that I didn’t forgive the unforgivable. Forgiveness is a reflex for when you can’t stand what you know. I resisted that reflex. That’s my sole, solitary, lonely accomplishment.”
I extricated my hand.
Rose closed her eyes and waved me out the door.
45
WHEN I ARRIVED AT THE