A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [168]
I said, “You don’t know what—”
Her hands dropped to her sides. It was clear that she couldn’t think what to do for a moment, that I could tell her everything, pour it right into her ear, with no resistance on her part.
Rose would have.
I didn’t.
Then Caroline turned suddenly and ran out of the house, slamming the back door behind her.
I continued to sort things, in the living room, where I wouldn’t be tempted to look out the window for her. The living room, I realized, hurt me the most, because that was where Rose made her last stand, with the couch and the lamp and the chairs, and other things, too, like a subscription to The New Yorker and another one to Scientific American. In the bench of Pete’s piano was a beginning piano method for adults; in the bookcase, where stacks of Successful Farming used to sit, were some course catalogs from the community college in Clear Lake. It was easier, from these artifacts, to imagine Rose by herself, in this room, contemplating her past, planning her future, reckoning up what it was possible to recover. It was a grievous but soothing picture of Rose, one to set against the memory I had of her in which she was shaking me and shaking me, trying to wake me up, work me up, push me out of my natural muddle.
A truck engine roared outside of the house. I looked at my watch. Caroline had been out there a half an hour. I looked out the front window. Her truck, a new red Ford, I noticed, turned north and passed the big picture window, between me and the old south field across the road. A frozen rind of snow lay between the furrows and drifted against the fence posts. It was nearly blackened by the fine dust of wind-borne soil.
I sat down on the couch and stuck my hands in the pockets of my sweatshirt. I sensed Rose there, pressing on me like a bad conscience, and I remembered her saying, with that mixture of irony and eagerness that was hers alone, “Ask me something. I want to tell you the truth.”
I should have told Caroline the truth.
I cast my gaze around the frigid room. I said, aloud, “Rose. Rose, she didn’t ask. There are just some things you have to ask for.”
After half an hour, when Caroline had not returned, I went out to my own borrowed truck to wait for her. I turned on the engine and the heater, and sat for another half hour. By then it was nearly one in the afternoon, and I was numb with the cold. I drove into town and had some lunch at the Cabot Café, and then I drove to Pike.
Marv Carson was in his office. He had tall bottles of three different kinds of mineral water on his desk, one from Italy, one from France, and one from Sweden. I said, “We don’t want anything, Marv. Everything can go.”
He said, “Well, that’s terrific, Ginny. I’ll tell the Boone brothers to haul it all out. You coming down for the auction? It’s a hard thing to watch, let me warn you.”
“No. I’ve got to work that day. Just let me know.”
But in the end, I couldn’t drive away.
It was nearly four when I got back to the farm. I turned down County 686, and drove dead slowly, as slowly as if I were walking, or driving a tractor, or horses, mules, or even oxen, which Grandpa Davis had used the first two summers ninety years before. I passed the drainage wells, two on each side of the road, their grates a little rusted but still bolted firmly down. I stopped the truck and went and stood on one. Under the noise of the wind, I could faintly hear the eternal drip and trickle of the sea beneath the soil.
The house repelled me now, but the barn drew me. I crossed the frosted, snow-patched grass and pushed the big door back on its slider, then back farther, because the westering sun made up for the electric lights that had been shut off. The big green and yellow pieces of equipment were icy to the touch, parked expertly by someone, taking up every inch of floor space. They had not been cleaned yet—Rose might have weakened too fast for that—and all the tire treads, the