A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [90]
25
THE STORM DIMINISHED AFTER MIDNIGHT, though it was still raining heavily. Ty and Pete came back and went out again. Just after two, Rose and I lay down on our bed, and Rose, I think, went to sleep. I got up to check on the girls, who had thrown off their covers. Everyone seemed to have taken refuge in my house, as if pursued.
Linda’s leg was thrown over Pammy’s and their hands lay together: they must have been holding hands, but their grip on each other relaxed when they fell asleep. I had known them since they were born, repeatedly hefted that remarkably dense weight that only babies and toddlers have. Countless moments with each of them seemed immortal to me—the time when Pammy was about eighteen months and we were all sitting at the dinner table, and Pammy raised her arms overhead and said “Up!” so we all raised our arms over our heads and shouted “Up! Up! Up!” until Pammy slammed both her little palms on the table and cried “Down,” her own joke that she laughed at uproariously. When Linda was a baby, she squeezed all her food in her fist until it oozed out between her fingers, and only then would she eat it. How could anyone approach them with ill intent? How could anyone be moved not to protect them, but to hurt them, especially like this, in the middle of the night, at the sight of their harmless, resistless sleeping bodies?
But of course, it hadn’t been their bodies, it had been ours, or Rose’s, rather. But mine, too, if he entered my room, even if he just closed the windows, even if he only checked to see if I was asleep.
I lay there then as boneless as they did now, tangled in my nightgown, my hair striped across my face. And the fact was, that though I could not imagine my father doing what Rose said he did, I also could not imagine him doing what I was doing then, looking down on his daughters with appreciation and affection, feeling for us the tenderness I felt for Pammy and Linda. I shivered, pressed the coverlet around them, and backed out of the room. I was still dressed, but I got into the bed beside Rose, who was lying on top of the spread with the quilt pulled over her head. I must have fallen asleep.
The figure in the bedroom door, when I awoke, was Jess Clark. When he saw me move, he bent down beside me and said, “Your father’s at Harold’s. They don’t know I’m here,” and that said everything I needed to know about secrecy, conspiracy, danger. I rolled out of bed without waking Rose, and pushed him ahead of me down the stairs. It was four-ten by the hall clock.
Both trucks were still gone.
The rain had ended and the windows were just beginning to lighten.
I remembered what Rose had told me.
I looked at Jess Clark and burst into tears.
He took me into the kitchen, turned on the light, and made us coffee, held my hand, and searched my face while he talked to me.
As far as Jess could tell, Daddy had wandered for about forty minutes or an hour until he got near Harold Clark’s barn. Instead of going inside, he had staggered around, talking and shouting to himself, and that is how Loren Clark had found him when he got home late from the movies in Zebulon Center. Loren brought him in the house and they tried to get him out of his wet clothes, but he’d insisted on calling Ken LaSalle and Marv Carson before he would change. Harold let him, and the two of them came out in the storm and met him at Harold’s. “He was raving,” said Jess, “and Harold was kind of smiling. He likes people to be stirred up.”
“They all do! It’s hateful. This is going to be all over town by breakfast. It’s going to be all over town at breakfast, because Marv Carson eats at the café every morning.”
“So let it. What do you care? Tell me what happened?”
I smoothed my shirt then, and put my hand to my hair, which was apparently standing on end. The fact was that so many things had happened that as I woke