A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [48]
I said, “Then we have something in common with him, because he clearly doesn’t understand himself.”
“He understands himself fine. He’s just secretive, is all.”
“And what are his secrets?”
“Well, I think one of them is that he’s afraid of his daughters.”
“That’s a good one.” I folded the blanket at the end of the bed. I doubted that we would need it. Ty slipped under the sheet. “What has he got to fear? He’s got everyone on this place under his thumb.”
“Not any more.”
“You mean because of the transfer? We all know that’s a legal fiction. He is this place. Rose and I run around in a panic every time he cocks an eyebrow. All he has to do is turn up mysteriously in Caroline’s office, and she’s on the phone, asking questions. Most of the time, I forget the transfer even took place.”
“He doesn’t.”
“Well, then, he should untransfer it. I don’t care.” I was stepping out of my shorts. Ty’s look caught me and held me. It said that he cared, and that the decision was mine, and that all he could do, finally, was stand back and let me make the decision. The freight of his look was seventeen years of unspoken knowledge that he had married up and been obliged to prove his skills worthy of, not a hundred and sixty acres, but a thousand acres. He said, “I still think the transfer was a smart move, taxwise, and otherwise, too. Marv Carson thinks it was real smart.” His voice was careful. I laid my shorts on the dresser and pulled my shirt over my head. Ty said, “But you women could handle it better. You could handle him better. You don’t always have to take issue. You ought to let a lot of things slide.”
I thought about this. I said, “You’re right. I don’t understand him. But I think a lot of the taking issue that you see is just us trying to figure out how to understand him better. I feel like there’s treacherous undercurrents all the time. I think I’m standing on solid ground, but then I discover that there’s something moving underneath it, shifting from place to place. There’s always some mystery. He doesn’t say what he means.”
“He says what he means. You two always read something into it, whatever it is. Rose does it more than you.”
I put on a short cotton nightgown and buttoned one of the buttons. Ty propped himself up on his elbow and folded back the sheet for me. It was reassuring and calming to enter his space, the circle of strength radiating from his shoulders and arms. This was something we had always done fairly well—disagree without fighting. We did this better than sex.
Ty lay back, pulling my head into the crook of his shoulder. For a few moments, I could feel us staring up at the ceiling together. He said, “He’s irritable. He doesn’t like to be challenged or brought up short. But he’s a good farmer. Everyone respects him and looks up to him. When he states an opinion, people listen. Good times and bad times roll off him all the same. That’s a rare thing.” Ty’s voice rounded and deepened in my ear. Real enthusiasm. We continued to look up at the ceiling, solidly against one another, head to toe. In a few moments, he was asleep.
Wide awake, I tried to remember my father. Ty’s views were not new to me. When he, on rare occasions, found himself angry at my father, I repeated many of the same things back to him, to remind him how much he had learned from my father, for one thing. On the other hand, I thought, I had been with my father so constantly for so long that I knew less and less about him with every passing year. Every meaningful image was jumbled together with the countless moments of our daily life, defeating my efforts to gain some perspective. The easiest things to remember were events I had only heard about: When my father was seventeen, for example, and lights on the farm ran off a gasoline-powered generator, my father was down in the cellar looking for something and was overcome by fumes. He managed to stagger to the stairs and fall upward far enough so that his hand poked out of the doorway