A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [18]
She put the coffeecake in my hands and I carried it to the kitchen counter, where the men gathered around it. Laid out in neat fans on the dark dining-room table were stacks of papers with little red X’s scattered over them. They reminded me of mushrooms that suddenly appear after a wet night, uncannily white and fully formed, miraculous but ominous. Ty got a lot of backslapping, and I could hear the words “hog operation” over and over like an incantation. I straightened a couple of stacks of Reader’s Digests. Daddy hadn’t thought to clean the place up for a party, probably because there hadn’t been a party here in twenty-five years.
Clearly, Daddy wasn’t himself, except in the way he lorded it over Harold. Somehow, he had found out about the loan for the tractor, because he kept saying, “Yeah, I’ll be sitting here watching other people work for me, while you’re out running that tractor, trying to pay it off. I bet you can’t even hear that radio thing with the engine noise.”
Harold was nodding ruefully, but grinning like a maniac, grinning just the way everyone else was, except Ken LaSalle, but Ken’s wife had left him at Christmas, gone off to get a job in the Twin Cities. You didn’t have to take his gloomy attitude to mean anything.
And me? I was happy, too. I was smiling, too. For one thing, I was always relieved when my father got into a good mood, and he was laughing and throwing his arm around Ty. This was maybe his best mood ever. He kept saying, “Okay, Kenny, let’s get to it. Now’s the time.”
Ken said, “Let’s just wait a bit longer, Larry.” And he looked out the front door, and so did I, and here came Caroline, across the road from Rose’s, up the porch steps. At that sight, I gave up my last reservations, felt the thrust of real confidence, so when she stepped onto the porch, composing herself to be conciliatory—I could see that—I opened the door for her. But my father stepped around me and took the door in his hand and slammed it shut in her face, and then he whirled Ken around with a hand on his arm, and said, “Now.” We went into the dining room. When I had finished signing things, I sneaked out onto the porch and looked toward Rose’s across the road. Caroline’s Honda was nowhere to be seen.
Book Two
8
MY FATHER HAD LIKED CAL ERICSON, but he disapproved of him, and I am often astonished when I look back and realize how our proximity to the Ericsons shaped all of my opinions and expectations. The Ericsons came to farming late, already married. Cal had gone to West Point, trained as a civil engineer, and been injured early in the Second World War. After a year in the hospital, he had received some money—perhaps a settlement of some sort, or an inheritance—and he had purchased the farm from an elderly cousin of his before it came on the market. Mrs. Ericson, whose name was Elizabeth, was from a suburb of Chicago. Her family had owned horses, and she had been an avid equestrienne, which I suppose she thought prepared her for farm life.
The Ericson farm was more like a petting zoo—there were hogs and dairy cows and beef cattle and sheep, which was not so unusual. There were also ponies and dogs and chickens and geese and turkeys and goats and gerbils and guinea pigs and, of course, cats who were allowed in the house, as well as two parakeets and a parrot. All of the Ericsons shared a fondness for these animals, and Mr. Ericson was always showing us what he had taught the dogs (a Scotch collie, a German shepherd, and a Yorkshire terrier) to do. They had mastered all the normal tricks and some unusual ones—the shepherd could balance a matchbox on his nose, then toss it in the air and catch it in