A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [30]
“Why is he cultivating that field? They done planting the beans?”
“I don’t know. Almost, I think.”
He stared silently at the tractor crawling from the left side of the big window to the right.
“Daddy? You can come up to our place for supper if you want. You could ask him then.”
His face was reddening, staring.
“Daddy?”
He didn’t glance at me or respond, even to dismiss me. I got nervous, watching him, impatient to leave, as if there were something here to flee. “Daddy? You want anything before I leave? I’m leaving.” I paused at the kitchen door and watched the unyielding back of his head for a few seconds. When I drove past the front of the house again, he hadn’t moved. I couldn’t shake my sense that his attention menaced Ty, the guiltless cultivator, concentrating innocently on never deviating from the rows laid out before him. The green tractor inched back and forth, and my father’s look followed it like the barrel of a rifle.
About an hour and a half later, Rose called and said, “Why is Daddy sitting in the front window of the house, staring across your south field?”
“Is he still at it?”
“He was there when I went to Cabot for bread and he was there when I got back. I stopped the car in the middle of the road and watched him. He didn’t move a muscle.”
“Where’s Pete?”
“He’s welding something on the planter. He’s been at it since before we got back from Mason City.”
“Is Ty still cultivating out there? I can’t see the back end of the field from here.”
“When I drove by, he was starting up along the fencerow next to the road.”
“I’m sure Daddy’s watching him. I’m sure there’s some fight going on. He was mad about something and didn’t pay any attention to me when I stopped there.”
“Well, lucky for you. He didn’t ask you to do anything for him.”
“Don’t you think this is weird?”
“Well, guess what. This is what his retirement is going to be, him eyeballing Pete or Ty, second-guessing whatever they do. You didn’t think he was going to go fishing, did you? Or move to Florida?”
“I didn’t think that far ahead.”
“Perfecting that death’s-head stare will be his lifework from now on, so we’d better get used to it.”
She hung up.
I had to smile at the thought of her stopping the car and watching him. She would stand at the foot of the hill, her fists on her hips, her own stare roaring up to meet his. Neither would acknowledge the other. They were two of a kind, that was for sure.
I pressed down the telephone button and let it up again, ready to dial Caroline’s work number, except that suddenly I felt a shyness, as if there were a breach between the two of us that I had to brave. Here it was Thursday, and I should have called her Sunday night, that was suddenly clear. Rose, I would have called Sunday afternoon, trying her until she got home, but Caroline I had let slide, Caroline I had hardly thought of in the rush of Daddy and Rose and, well, to be frank, thoughts about Jess Clark. It was true that Caroline and I didn’t have a close, gossipy relationship. Her visits home every third weekend, when she stayed with Daddy and cooked for him, were generally the only times I spoke with her. For one thing, country people, even in 1979, were more suspicious of long-distance calls, and not in the habit of talking on the phone much—we’d been on a party line until 1973, so visiting about private things on the telephone was still considered risky. For another, Rose and I had been so long in the habit of conferring about Daddy and Caroline that it seemed a touch unfamiliar, even scary, to confer with her. Nosy. Interfering. Asking for something, though I didn’t know what. And then her