7

WE STOPPED BY OUR PLACE FIRST, where I took off my hat and changed my dress and Ty put on work clothes-there would be plenty to do after dinner. When I got to my dad's, the only person in the house was Jess Clark. He was making coffee and everyone else was out in the fields, looking things over. Ty took the pickup and went to find them. Jess poured me a cup of coffee and said, "Things are moving pretty quick, huh?" He sat down across the table.

"Well, I've never thought of my father as a creature of impulse before.

Today I'm thinking I should be more optimistic. Anyway, I don't think much will change, really."

"New buildings? Expanded hog operation? A plantation of black walnuts? Ten acres of gladiolus? Those are changes."

"Ten acres of gladiolus?"

"Oh, your brother-in-law Pete was talking about that before you came.

Eighty thousand bulbs an acre.

"Eight hundred thousand gladiolus?"

"He says he can sell them at five for a dollar in Minneapolis. That's a hundred and sixty thousand bucks."

'"Oh, Pete."

"I was impressed. I talked to him for fifteen minutes and he must have come up with five or six well-thought-out ideas. Over at our place, Loren and my father don't have any ideas at all. Just corn and beans, beans and corn. When I was a kid, at least there were some hogs and cattle, and those sheep Loren raised for 4-H. And my mom's garden, too. She was always trying new varieties, or buying a few okra seeds to see if she could get them to grow this far north. Now even hogs would seem radical to them."

"The markets are different these days. Anyway, I'm tired oftalking about farming. That's all anyone around here ever talks about. Tell me what sort of things you did in Seattle."

"Delving into my secret life, huh?" He looked at me until I felt myself blushing, then he smiled and said, "I'll tell you. Actually, I'm flattered by the interest. Harold acts like I've been in prison or something; he hasn't even asked me what I've been doing, and Loren just said one thing, 'You buy any land out there?" and when I said I didn't, he said, 'Huh. Too bad."" "What did you do?"

"I ran a food co-op. Generally, we sold organically grown produce, range-fed chickens, undyed cheeses, stuff like that. In Vancouver, I ran the community gardens, too, worked at the crisis center, things like that. I tended bar for a while, worked in a fancy restaurant."

"Doesn't sound very settled."

"It wasn't. When it got close to being settled, I quit and did something else."

"You must not have had much of a sense of security."

"For security, I cultivated inner peace."

I thought he was joking, and laughed.

He fixed me with his gaze, serious, more serious than I'd thought he was capable of. He said, "In the Far East, there are plenty of people who own a robe and a bowl. That's all. They throw themselves on the waters of the world, and they know they will be borne up. They are more secure than you or I. I know by now that I can't be like that.

I'm too American. But I know it's possible. That gives me a sense of security." Then his eyes twinkled, and he said, "Don't tell Harold any of this. He thinks I'm talking about Communists."

"You told him this?"

"I started to, when he asked when I was going to get ready for church."

"You were at church."

"That's because I saw the handwriting on the wall." He grinned.

"It said, 'Keep your mouth shut."" A car drove up with a rattle of gravel. I jumped up and looked out the window. It was Marv Carson, and Ken LaSalle was with him. And I could see Ty's pickup coming from the fields, too, Harold, Pete, and Loren in the back. Jess got up and stood behind me, and I must have tensed up, because he squeezed the back of my neck and said, "The coffee's made. Everything will be fine.

Life is good. Change is good."

People started coming in the back, talking quickly in outdoor voices about corn germination, stepping out of boots, and lining up for cups of coffee. There was hope everywhere. I went into the living room and looked across the road. Pammy and Linda were leaning over with their heads together, looking at something in the ditch.

Rose was holding the back screen door in her right hand, looking into the house, and shouting something I couldn't hear. Balanced on her left palm was a platter of coffeecake. Pretty soon, Pete, who must have run across the road for something, came out, and they walked together down their driveway. They walked across the road, the way you do in the country when you cross the same road a hundred times a day, without looking for cars. At one point, Pete said something and Rose tossed her head back and laughed. I opened the window just then, just to hear her. They all looked happy. Rose was still grinning when they got to Daddy's front door.

She put the coffeecake in my hands and I carried it to the kitchen counter, where the men gathered around it. Laid out in neat fans on the dark dining-room table were stacks of papers with little red X's scattered over them. They reminded me of mushrooms that suddenly appear after a wet night, uncannily white and fully formed, miraculous but ominous. Ty got a lot of backslapping, and I could hear the words "hog operation" over and over like an incantation. I straightened a couple of stacks of Reader's Digests. Daddy hadn't thought to clean the place up for a party, probably because there hadn't been a party here in twenty-live years.

Clearly, Daddy wasn't himself, except in the way he lorded it over Harold. Somehow, he had found out about the loan for the tractor, because he kept saying, "Yeah, I'll be sitting here watching other people work for me, while you're out running that tractor, trying to pay it off. I bet you can't even hear that radio thing with the engine noise."

Harold was nodding ruefully, but grinning like a maniac, grinning just the way everyone else was, except Ken LaSalle, but Ken's wife had left him at Christmas, gone off to get a job in the Twin Cities.

You didn't have to take his gloomy attitude to mean anything.

And me? I was happy, too. I was smiling, too. For one thing, I was always relieved when my father got into a good mood, and he was laughing and throwing his arm around Ty. This was maybe his ú best mood ever. He kept saying, "Okay, Kenny, let's get to it. Now's the time."

Ken said, "Let's just wait a bit longer, Larry." And he looked out ú the front door, and so did I, and here came Caroline, across the road from Rose's, up the porch steps. At that sight, I gave up my last reservations, felt the thrust of real confidence, so when she stepped onto the porch, composing herself to be conciliatory-I could see that-I opened the door for her. But my father stepped around me and took the door in his hand and slammed it shut in her face, and ú then he whirled Ken around with a hand on his arm, and said, "Now." We went into the dining room. When I had finished signing things, I sneaked out onto the porch and looked toward Rose's across the road. Caroline's Honda was nowhere to be seen.