A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [97]
I looked up Psychiatrists in the Mason City phone book. There were two listings, one for a clinic in Des Moines, and one for a clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. I dialed the one in Rochester and asked to speak to one of the doctors. I was told they were therapists, not doctors. While I held the line, I stared out the window toward Rose’s house and the road down to Daddy’s. I imagined the three-hour drive to Rochester. I imagined each of us taking turns telling our stories: Daddy’s impatience, Ty’s skepticism, Pete’s refusal to say much, Rose’s angry loquacity, my own stomach-churning anxiety, Pammy and Linda’s fear. I imagined writing checks on Daddy’s account for large sums of money. I imagined the three-hour drive back. A therapist came on the line, and I knew that within a few minutes I would have committed myself to what I had imagined, the impossible. I hung up without speaking.
It was then that I thought of Henry Dodge, our pastor. I would not, in the best of times, have said that I was close to Henry Dodge. I doubt that anyone would have, including his wife, Helen, or either of their children. They had once hailed from Fargo, North Dakota, though Henry’s previous ministry, until the mid-seventies sometime, had been in Denver. He told us how he got to us, a fifty-year-old man rotated out of a big suburban church to our little town, and when he told us (didn’t get along with the pastor, became impatient with some of the congregation, had doubts about how his earlier ambitions squared with his faith), he had spoken in a tone of voice that declared openly how moved he was by the crisis that resulted in his coming, but in fact, his confidences had resulted in embarrassment on all sides rather than something that felt like normal friendship. Daddy said he should keep that sort of thing to himself, so I’m sure the other farmers Daddy’s age did, as well. Probably people my age seemed less put off, and so Henry felt that he’d befriended us.
His manner and performance often came up for discussion; the congregation was paying him, after all, which licensed us to discuss at will whether we were getting value for our money. Most people actually liked him, but perhaps for things like his angular frame and slow-spoken manner, his bone-deep understanding of the tact with which you talk to farmers of northern European extraction, his occasional flash of dark wit, no doubt inherited from his mother, who was the only daughter of a long line of Norwegian farmers. His six uncles still farmed around Fargo; people liked him for that, too. But the struggle that was uppermost in his mind, and for which, you always got a feeling, he gave himself a little bit of credit, nobody cared for that.
Once I thought of Henry, I found that I was so eager to talk to someone, anyone, that I ran into my bedroom and changed out of my shorts into a plaid skirt. I had a free afternoon, of sorts. I had intended to bake a peach pie and weed the garden, but until time to get started on supper, I could leave without anyone’s commenting. It was Friday afternoon. I decided that the most casual thing to do would be not to call ahead, but to drop by, as if on my way home from shopping. It was not Henry Dodge himself that attracted me. Confiding in him might be hard, actually. But that word “pastor” promised a patience and capaciousness of understanding that would be just the thing. We could get Daddy into Henry’s office. It wasn’t far and advice would be free. Ty liked Henry better than I did, even praised his sermons from time to time for being “pretty smart.” When I passed the site of the new buildings, I saw the men the company had brought in for the construction, plus Ty, down on their hands and knees, smoothing cement. There were six of them, heads down, crawling backwards. It struck me as funny and I laughed for the first time in what seemed liked days.
Coming into Cabot, I could still see Henry in his office, wearing a brown suit. A diamond of sunlight would lie on the russet carpeting, and the