A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [52]
The fact was, Daddy couldn’t keep driving around all over the county and even the state, looking for trouble. Retired farmers were supposed to spend their time at the café in town, giving free advice, or they were supposed to breed irises or roses or Jersey cows or something. They were supposed to watch the polls during elections and go fishing, or work part-time at the hardware store. Except that the thought of Daddy doing any of these sociable, trivial, or, you might say, pleasant things was absurd. He himself had always ridiculed farmers in retirement, and spoken with respect, even envy, of Ty’s father’s heart attack in the hog pen. Yes, it was freshly evident that he had impulsively betrayed himself by handing over the farm. That annoyed me, too. I kicked off my slippers and put on my Keds as if I were really going to let him have it.
As I walked down the road, I could see Pete back his silver Ford pickup out of the driveway and turn south. I waved, and his arm shot out of the driver’s window and arced a greeting in return. Mostly when you pass farmers on the road, they acknowledge you with the subtlest of signals—a finger lifted off the steering wheel, or even a lifted eyebrow. Pete was a hearty waver. It made him seem a little too eager to please, the way his silver pickup made him seem a little too flashy. I was appreciating those things about Pete lately, though. Instead of seeing him in the old way, less competent and reliable than Ty, too volatile and even a little silly, I saw that he did his best to fit in and do his job, and also that his failure to succeed completely was actually an assertion of a different style more than anything. If he had come from around here, if his father had farmed and he had inherited his father’s farm, his relative flamboyance, like his musical talent, would have been something for the neighbors to be a little proud of, evidence of native genius rather than suspect strangeness.
Since my talk with Jess the day I planted tomatoes, my sense of the men I knew had undergone a subtle shift. I was less automatically critical—yes, they all had misbehaved, and failed, too, but now I saw that you could also say that they had suffered setbacks, suffered them, and suffered, period. That was the key. I would have said that certainly Rose and I had suffered, too, and Caroline and Mary Livingstone and all the women I knew, but there seemed to be a dumb, unknowing quality to the way the men had suffered, as if, like animals, it was not possible for them to gain perspective on their suffering. They had us, Rose and me, in their suffering, but they didn’t seem to have what we had with each other, a kind of ongoing narrative and commentary about what was happening that grew out of our conversations, our rolled eyes, our sighs and jokes and irritated remarks. The result for us was that we found ourselves more or less prepared for the blows that fell—we could at least make that oddly comforting remark, “I knew all along something like this was going to happen.” The men, and Pete in particular, always seemed a little surprised, and therefore a little more hurt and a little more damaged, by things that happened—the deaths of prized animals, accidents, my father’s blowups and contempt, forays into commodity trading that lost money, even—for Ty—my miscarriages. Of course he refused to try any more. He had counted on each pregnancy as if there were no history.
And then there was my father. As I stepped off the road onto the yard in front of his house, I sensed him looking down at me, but I didn’t