A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [82]
“You don’t, huh? I bust my butt working all my life and I make a good place for you and your husband to live on, with a nice house and good income, hard times or good times, and you think I should be stopping all the time and wondering about your, what did you call it, your ‘point of view’?”
I felt myself redden to the hairline, and pushed my plate away. “I just want to get along, Daddy. I don’t want to fight. Don’t fight with me?”
“You know, my girl, I never talked to my father like this. It wasn’t up to me to judge him, or criticize his ways. Let me tell you a story about those old days, and maybe you’ll be reminded what you have to be grateful for.”
“Okay.” I was smiling like a maniac.
“There was a family that had a farm south of us. The old man was older than my dad, and he’d come in and drained that land down there, him and his sons. He had four sons, and when the youngest was about twelve, he came down with that polio thing. This was a long time ago, before I even went to school. Well, that boy was all crippled up by the time I remember him, but he didn’t stay in the house, nosiree. The old man got him out there and made him plow his furrows as straight as the other boys, and he whipped him, too, to show him that there wasn’t any way out of it. There were a couple of daughters, and one up and left home when she was about sixteen, calling her father all kinds of a bully and slave driver, but the thing is, that boy did his share, and he respected himself for it. It was the old man’s job to see to that.”
“How do you know?”
“What?”
“How do you know he respected himself for it, that that was what he needed?”
“I saw it!” He was beginning to huff and puff.
I said, “Okay, Daddy. Okay. I don’t want you to be mad. Let’s go down to the Supervalu. You need some coffee at your place, and I need some things, too. I don’t know whether these building people expect to eat with us or not.”
“You girls should listen to me.”
“We’ll try harder, Daddy.”
It was easy, sitting there and looking at him, to see it his way. What did we deserve, after all? There he stood, the living source of it all, of us all. I squirmed, remembering my ungrateful thoughts, the deliciousness I had felt putting him in his place. When he talked, he had this effect on me. Of course it was silly to talk about “my point of view.” When my father asserted his point of view, mine vanished. Not even I could remember it.
23
LATER ON, WHEN I LOOKED BACK, what I remembered about that day was the morning, my fear that Rose sensed something between Jess and me, my argument with my father at dinner, the ceaseless thoughts of Jess Clark that were simultaneously bewitching and tedious, a kind of work that I could not stop performing. The afternoon slipped by me. It was true that when we went by the building crew and I said, “Want to stick around for a while and watch them pour the footings?” Daddy didn’t answer. But in our life together, we had long passed the point of eloquent silences. When I slowed down to pull in next to my house, he waved me forward, down to his house, and when I pulled in there, he got out without a word. I could, of course, read by his demeanor that he was displeased, but how this displeasure would incubate I could not and did not know.
At home, there was a definite sense of worthwhile accomplishment. The Harvestore man from Minnesota had a cup of coffee and left to go back to Minnesota. The confinement building man from Kansas was staying at the motel in Zebulon Center, and said that while there was a company policy against meals with the people they were working for, because it screwed up expense account tax deductions, he’d be happy to make one exception and eat with us the next night, if we wanted. I told him we’d barbecue some of our own pork chops. It would be Tuesday, I knew, Daddy’s night, but he might eat barbecued pork chops if a stranger