A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [9]
Perhaps there is a distance that is the optimum distance for seeing one’s father, farther than across the supper table or across the room, somewhere in the middle distance: he is dwarfed by trees or the sweep of a hill, but his features are still visible, his body language still distinct. Well, that is a distance I never found. He was never dwarfed by the landscape—the fields, the buildings, the white pine windbreak were as much my father as if he had grown them and shed them like a husk.
Trying to understand my father had always felt something like going to church week after week and listening to the minister we had, Dr. Fremont, marshal the evidence for God’s goodness, or omniscience, or whatever. He would sort through recent events, biblical events, moments in his own life, things that people had told him, and make up a picture that gelled for the few moments before other events that didn’t fit the picture had a chance to occur to you. Finally, though, the minister would admit, even glory in the fact, that things didn’t add up, that the reality was incomprehensible, and furthermore the failure of our understandings was the greatest proof of all, not of goodness or omniscience or whatever the subject of the day was, but of power. And talk of power made Dr. Fremont’s voice deepen and his gestures widen and his eyes light up.
My father had no minister, no one to make him gel for us even momentarily. My mother died before she could present him to us as only a man, with habits and quirks and preferences, before she could diminish him in our eyes enough for us to understand him. I wish we had understood him. That, I see now, was our only hope.
When my father turned his head to look at Caroline, his movement was slow and startled, a big movement of the whole body, reminding me how bulky he was—well over six feet and two hundred thirty pounds.
Caroline would have said, if she’d dared, that she didn’t want to live on the farm, that she was trained as a lawyer and was marrying another lawyer, but that was a sore subject. She shifted in her chair and swept the darkening horizon with her gaze. Harold turned on the porch light. Caroline would have seen my father’s plan as a trapdoor plunging her into a chute that would deposit her right back on the farm. My father glared at her. In the sudden light of the porch, there was no way to signal her to shut up, just shut up, he’d had too much to drink. He said, “You don’t want it, my girl, you’re out. It’s as simple as that.” Then he pushed himself up from his chair and lumbered past me down the porch steps and into the darkness.
Caroline looked startled, but no one else did. I said, “This is ridiculous. He’s drunk.” But after that, everyone got up and moved off silently, knowing that something important had just happened, and what it was, too. My father’s pride, always touchy, had been injured to the quick. It would be no use telling him that she had only said that she didn’t know, that she hadn’t turned him down, that she had expressed a perfectly reasonable doubt, perhaps even doubt a lawyer must express, that his own lawyer would express when my father set this project before him. I saw that maybe Caroline had mistaken what we were talking about, and spoken as a lawyer when she should have spoken as a daughter. On the other hand, perhaps she hadn’t mistaken anything at all, and had simply spoken as a woman rather than as a daughter. That was something, I realized in a flash, that Rose and I were pretty careful never to do.
I went into the Clarks’ kitchen and put the plates and forks into the trash can. When I turned toward the back door, Jess Clark was standing right beside me, and I could see his quizzical look in the light from the porch. His face was familiar and exotic at the same time, friendly and interested but strange, promising knowledge that none of my neighbors could possibly have. In my movement toward the door, I bumped against him, and he gripped my arm to help me get my balance. I said, “Where did you come from?”
“Didn’t you hear me bang the door?” His