A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [24]
“How, uh, how was the end?”
“How do you think? Awful, of course. She was very sad.”
He didn’t say anything for some minutes, and I kept planting. I could tell by the sun that it was getting toward late morning, and I still had twenty-five tomato plants to go. I pushed them farther into the shade and spilled a little water over the dirt they were rooted in. I had been a little hard with him, maybe. On the other hand, my own mother had died when I was fourteen. Rose and I nursed her for two months, in the living room. I missed two hours of school in the mornings; Rose missed two hours in the afternoons. If there is anything more difficult or more real than the death of one’s mother, I don’t know what it is. We all thought Jess Clark should have come, no matter what sort of jail sentence might have been awaiting him for crossing back into the US. It was something Harold had said all the time, and I still agreed. I licked my lips, which were dry from the sudden heat of my angry thoughts. After a moment, I said, “No psychic communication, huh?”
“She died in November of ’71?”
“Two days after Thanksgiving.”
“Not a ripple. I was living on a pretty remote island that winter. I didn’t even have a phone.”
He spoke in a flat voice, but he had a terrible look on his face, full of pain and anger. Finally he said, “That’s the trouble with telepathy, you know. Most of the time, the lines are down.” He laughed with a kind of mirthless bark. He breathed heavily, almost panting, and arched his head back. I stared at him. His face was marvelously expressive, more expressive than the face of any man I knew. The lines around his nose and eyes deepened and the corners of his mouth curled downward. His eyes seemed to darken and disappear beneath his eyebrows. He muttered, “Oh, Jesus.” I said, “Jess? Are you okay? It’s been nearly eight years.”
He exclaimed, “I was so furious at her. I wrote her twice, you know, that first year. I told her I didn’t believe in the war and I knew she didn’t either. I just wanted a single letter, or a postcard from her saying that she understood, or at least that she was thinking about me. There were all sorts of draft refusers in Vancouver, and refugees from the army, and lots of their families treated them like heroes, or at least accepted what they did, and sent letters and presents. I didn’t expect anything from Harold—I knew how he felt—but I thought she would send me something on her own, anything. I was fucking eighteen when I left here! I look at kids now, and I can’t believe how young I was! I still had an inch and a half of growing to do, and twenty pounds! I wasn’t even filled out! She knew where I was in 1971, or she could have found out, if she’d called the addresses on those letters. She was forty-three, for God’s sake!”
He stood up, then came close to me, into the garden row where I was working, and squatted down right next to me. When I began to say something to defend his mother—she was fighting breast cancer at some point, after all—he interrupted me, staring me down. But he spoke softly, as if telling me a secret. “Can you believe how they’ve fucked us over, Ginny? Living and dying! I was her child! What ideal did she sacrifice me to? Patriotism? Keeping up appearances in the neighborhood? Peace with Harold? Maybe to you it looked like I just vanished, but I was out there, this ignorant farm kid! I’d never seen a fucking checkbook, never owned anything in my own name, never touched a stove or washed my own clothes! I met kids in training camp. One of them had a heart attack on the drilling grounds. The last night of training camp, there was this kid who persuaded our sergeant that he had a blinding headache. He kind of staggered down the aisle between the bunks and went into the bathroom and collapsed. The sergeant started yelling at him that he was faking it, and the guy was moaning and groaning.