A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [92]
This wry tone was strange for Ty, but I let it pass for the time being. Jess got up and took his poncho off the door hook. Ty didn’t say anything, so Jess only cocked his eyebrow and smiled his goodbyes to me. My eyes and my heart followed him right out the door.
To Ty, I said, “Did you sleep at all?”
“Naw, not really.” He rubbed his hands over his face, ruffling his stubbly beard. I remembered another thing—that I still didn’t know whether Ty agreed with the things Daddy had said to me. I stood up from the table and opened the refrigerator door. I said, “How about a couple of fried eggs and some of those sausage links?”
He said, “That’s fine.” His tone was cool. He was just sitting there, and his expression was distant and unfriendly. He looked out the window, mostly. Broaching all the topics between us took more courage than I possessed at the time, and so I didn’t broach them, and so I think it was then that a new formal relationship began for us, and that was when we started to work out what to do with each other and our situation according to our notions of duty and loyalty, and after a while it got to be clear how very much we differed in these notions.
When he had eaten his breakfast, Ty said, “I guess I’d better check the fields first thing. I promised to help finish those footings this morning, but God knows, with this rain—” His voice trailed him out the door. Rose came down as the truck roared away. She was wearing some jeans of mine and an old shirt of Ty’s. She said, “I’m going to run home and get the girls some clothes before they wake up.” She was perky enough—her usual morning self.
I said, “Daddy’s at Harold’s. He got Ken and Marv over there in the middle of the night.”
“Yeah, well.” She shrugged. “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again.” She banged out the door, and I put some sausage links in the pan for her and the girls.
While they were cooking, I went out to check my garden. Something that always has amazed me is the resilience of plants. My tomato vines showed no ill effects from the onslaught of the storm, weren’t even muddy, since I had made it a point to mulch them with old newspapers and grass clippings. Some of the tenderest marigolds had been beaten down, and the trellis for the peas had fallen partly off its framework, but all the greenery sparkled with new life. I didn’t touch anything, certainly didn’t tread among the rows, but I stood off to the side and took it all in as if it were a distant promise.
The fact is, I was already exhausted with the effort of it all, already hopeless, already recalling those months just after my mother died as if nothing had intervened between that time and this, and what I remembered was the labor of it all, a labor as impossible as standing in your boots and lifting yourself into the air by the bootstraps. I remembered how you are never the same, but you get to the point where relief is good enough. I felt another animal in myself, a horse haltered in a tight stall, throwing its head and beating its feet against the floor, but the beams and the bars and the halter rope hold firm, and the horse wears itself out, and accepts the restraint that moments before had been an unendurable goad. I went back in the house and flipped the sausages. Pammy and Linda were sitting sleepily at the table.
26
MOST ISSUES ON A FARM return to the issue of keeping up appearances. Farmers extrapolate quickly from the farm to the farmer. A farmer looks like himself, when he goes to the café, but he also looks like his farm, which everyone has passed on the way into town. What his farm looks like boils down to questions of character. Farmers are quick to cite the weather, their luck, the turning tides of prices and government regulations, but among themselves these excuses fall away. A good farmer (a savvy manager, someone with talent for animals and machines, a man willing to work all the time who’s raised his children