A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [49]
Or there was the time, when he was ten, that some boys at the school chased him with willow switches. When he got far enough away from them, he turned to face their taunting, picked up a sizable rock, and beaned the ringleader right on the forehead, knocking him unconscious. The teacher took Daddy’s side, as did the rest of the gang, who were impressed by his aim, and the injured boy was suspended from school for two weeks.
When Mommy, who was visiting a school friend in Mason City, wouldn’t dance with him at a church dance, Daddy got the manager of a local men’s store, someone he knew only by name, to leave the dance and sell him a new suit of clothes, including underwear, socks, shoes, and fedora. He looked so dapper in them, Mommy would say, that she didn’t want to dance with anyone else the rest of the night.
He was handsome. I could remember that.
When he smiled or laughed with Harold or some of the other farmers, you felt drawn to him.
Suddenly and clearly I remembered the accident Harold Clark had with his truck. It was an early memory; possibly I was six or seven. I certainly hadn’t thought of it in years, because it passed the way grown-up events do when you are a child—dreamlike phenomena that happen without warning and vanish without explanation. I was in our truck alone, playing with my dolls. Possibly Daddy didn’t know I was there. At any rate, he ran from the house to the truck. Mommy was behind him, at the door, holding it open and shouting something, and then we were careening across fields and I was huddled down, bouncing in the corner of the box. There was Harold’s truck, navy blue, rounded, a white grille like big teeth, and then we were there, and Harold lay on the ground below his truck, and the back wheel was on top of him, as if cutting him in two at the hips. It was a frightening sight and I screamed, but for once Daddy didn’t get angry with me. He took a board out of the back of Harold’s truck and he laid it down, then he set me on one end of it, put a whiskey bottle in my hand, and he said, “You tiptoe over to Harold and you give him something to drink, because he needs it, and you let him keep that, and then tiptoe back.” It was a strange accident, from which Harold escaped with only abrasions: he had been taking some tiling pipe out of his truck to set it beside a ditch. The ditch was full of thick watery mud, and the truck had rolled back, knocking Harold down, then pinning him in the ooze. Daddy and some other farmers who appeared shortly had to pull Harold’s truck off him. Afterwards there was a lot of laughter, but I felt the real moment had been mine, tiptoeing with my lifesaving burden along the six-inch-wide board, watching Harold’s face greet my approach with welcome relief, and hearing Daddy say, “That’s a girl. Just a ways longer. Good girl. That’s a good girl.”
I closed my eyes and felt tears sparking under the eyelids. Now that I remembered that little girl and that young, running man, I couldn’t imagine what had happened to them.
15
HAROLD CLARK PROMOTED his own local reputation of garrulous thoughtlessness. While many, even most, farmers I knew were laconic and uncomplaining, Harold talked of himself often, and always as if he were almost but not quite two people—the one who had a lot of “great ideas” (Harold put the quotes around the words himself, every time he spoke them) and the dubious one, too, the one who knew none of these ideas would ever pan out. Part of him was always luring the other part of him along on some iffy undertaking, and part of him was always telling stories at the expense of the other part. What it all added up to was that things around the Clark farm, according to Harold, were perennially at the brink of disintegration, while public opinion had it that really Harold was a better manager, and more prosperous, than anyone. My father put it more succinctly. He would say, “The body of Harold’s truck may be muddy, but the engine is clean as a whistle.