A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [63]
Nothing about the death of my mother stopped time for my father, prevented him from reckoning his assets and liabilities and spreading himself more widely over the landscape. No aspect of his plans was undermined, put off, questioned. How many thousands of times have I seen him in the fields, driving the tractor or the combine, steadily, with certainty, from one end of the field to another. How many thousands of times has this sight aroused in me a distant, amused affection for my father, a feeling of forgiveness when I hadn’t consciously been harboring any annoyance. It is tempting to feel, at those moments, that what is, is, and what is, is fine. At those moments your own spirit is quiet, and that quiet seems achievable by will.
But if I look past the buzzing machine monotonously unzipping the crusted soil, at the field itself and the fields around it, I remember that the seemingly stationary fields are always flowing toward one farmer and away from another. The lesson my father might say they prove is that a man gets what he deserves by creating his own good luck.
19
THE MONOPOLY GAME ENDED with the news that Caroline and Frank had gotten married in a civil ceremony in Des Moines. The paragraph, in the Pike Journal Weekly that was published the twenty-second of June, said, “Miss Caroline Cook, daughter of Laurence Cook, Route 2, Cabot, and the late Ann Rose Amundson Cook, was married to Francis Rasmussen of Des Moines, on Thursday, June 14. The ceremony took place at the Renwick Hotel in New York City, New York. Mr. Rasmussen’s parents are Roger and Jane Rasmussen, of St. Cloud, Minnesota. Congratulations! The bride, a lawyer in Des Moines, will continue to use her maiden name—more girls are, these days!”
We might not even have seen it if Rose hadn’t taken the girls into Pike to buy some sneakers at the dime store and picked the newly printed Journal Weekly from a stack on the counter. Dorothy, checking her purchases, said, “I see your sister got married,” and Rose, for whom this was the freshest possible news, said, “Yes, it was a very small ceremony.”
Dorothy said, “Those are nice, too.”
Rose followed the girls to the car, gripping the paper and reading the item over and over. In the car, Linda said, “Why weren’t we invited to Aunt Caroline’s wedding?”
Rose said, “I don’t know. Maybe she’s mad at us.”
Rose was beyond mad and well into beside herself when she banged into my kitchen and slapped the paper, open to the paragraph, down on the counter in front of me. I was peeling potatoes for potato salad. I read the paragraph.
Rose said, “She didn’t mention a word about this when you talked to her Friday, did she?”
“No.”
“Or Tuesday?”
“Well, no. She had other things on her—”
“Don’t say that! Don’t come up with an excuse! Just look at it, and admit what it shows!”
“I don’t quite understand. I mean, this wedding has already taken place?” I glanced at the publication date, today, then at the paragraph again. “Don’t you think there’s a mistake?”
“Do you want to call Mary Lou Humboldt and ask her about it? Then next week, she can put in a little item about how the Cook sisters don’t seem to know what’s going on with Caroline.”
“Maybe we should call Caroline.”
“For what? This is for us! This is how she’s letting us know.” Then she told me what she’d said to Dorothy at the dime store. “The thing is just to take it in stride, to not even be surprised. And I’m going to send her a present! An expensive present, with just a little card saying, ‘From Rose and Pete and the girls, thinking of you both.’ ”
I laughed, but when Rose left, I realized that I felt the insult physically, an internal injury. It reminded me that she wasn’t in the habit of sending birthday cards, or calling to chat, that when she used to come home to take care of Daddy,