8

MY FATHER HAD LIKED CAL ERICSON, but he disapproved of him, and I am often astonished when I look back and realize how our proximity to the Ericsons shaped all of my opinions and expectations. The Ericsons came to farming late, already married. Cal had gone to West Point, trained as a civil engineer, and been injured early in the Second World War.

After a year in the hospital, he had received some money-perhaps a settlement of some sort, or an inheritance -and he had purchased the farm from an elderly cousin of his before it came on the market. Mrs. Ericson, whose name was Elizabeth, was from a suburb of Chicago. Her family had owned horses, and she had been an avid equestrienne, which I suppose she thought prepared her for farm life.

The Ericson farm was more like a petting zoo-there were hogs and dairy cows and beef cattle and sheep, which was not so unusual.

There were also ponies and dogs and chickens and geese and turkeys and goats and gerbils and guinea pigs and, of course, cats who were allowed in the house, as well as two parakeets and a parrot. All of the Ericsons shared a fondness for these animals, and Mr. Ericson was always showing us what he had taught the dogs (a Scotch collie, a German shepherd, and a Yorkshire terrier) to do. They had mastered all the normal tricks and some unusual ones-the shepherd could balance a matchbox on his nose, then toss it in the air and catch it in his mouth, while the Yorkie could do backflips, and the collie could be sent to retrieve particular articles of clothing (a sock, a hat) from the various bedrooms and then told to carry them to various members of the family. The collie would also pick up things on the floor and carry them to the trash can when told to "police the area." Most remarkably, the three dogs would perform a kind of drill, walking, lying down, sitting up, lying down again, and rolling over in unison on command.

Animals were Mr. Ericson's talent and love. Machines would do nothing for him. My father, who had no college education, saw in this confirmation of his view that college, even West Point, was a waste of time, since "that so-called engineer can't even fix his own tractor. ' Cal Ericson was truly hopeless with machines, so he, Harold Clark, and my father made a deal that Harold and my father would trade work on the Ericson machines for fresh milk, cream, and ice cream, which Mrs. Ericson liked to make and my father and Harold had a great fondness for.

My father and Harold were no less disapproving of Cal's farming methods. He never consulted the market, they said, only consulted his own desires and didn't focus. It was hard to have a dairy farm in Zebulon County-there was no nearby creamery and other products were more profitable-but you could have one if you really meant to do it, that is, if you'd build a convenient milking parlor with mechanical milkers, milk a hundred cows, and make it worthwhile for a truck to come out every day, or, say, you could milk only Jerseys, or Guernseys, and sell only the cream-there was an ice cream company in Mason City who might have bought it all, if Cal had sold them on the idea. But Cal had twenty Holsteins and one Jersey for the family, he and Mrs. Ericson milked by hand and they mostly seemed to keep the cows, my father said with a laugh, "because they like them." There was plenty else to complain about-chickens and geese in the road, turkeys panicking in a thunderstorm, everyone having to turn out to help the Ericsons with their haying because they had to have the hay to feed the animals, when everyone else had either gotten rid of animals or fed them silage out of pricey but convenient new silos, which the Ericsons couldn't afford. My father most certainly disapproved of Cal Ericson's aspirations, which seemed to be merely to get along, pay his mortgage, and enjoy himself as much as possible.

By contrast it was easy to see what my father considered a more acceptable way of life a sort of all-encompassing thrift that blossomed, infrequently but grandly, in the purchase of more land or the improvement of land already owned. His conservatism, however, was only fiscal. Beside it lay his lust for every new method designed to swell productivity. In I957, an article ran in Wallace's Farmer entitled "Will the Farmer's Greatest Machine Soon Be the Airplane?"

The accompanying pictures were of our farm being sprayed for European corn borers, and my father was quoted as saying, "There isn't any room for the old methods any more. Farmers who embrace the new methods will prosper, but those that don't are already stumbling around." Doubtless he was looking across the road toward the Ericsons.

We might as well have had a catechism: What is a farmer?

A farmer is a man who feeds the world.

What is a farmer's first duty?

To grow more food.

What is a farmer's second duty?

To buy more land.

What are the signs of a good farm?

Clean fields, neatly painted buildings, breakfast at six, no debts, no standing water.

How will you know a good farmer when you meet him?

He will not ask you for any favors.

The tile system on my father's farm drained fields that were nearly as level as a table. On land as new and marshy as Zebulon County, water fans out, seeking the slightest depressions, and often moves more slowly across the landscape than it does down through the soil.

The old watercourses, such as they were, had been filled in and plowed through, so the tile lines drained into drainage wells. These wells, thrusting downward some three hundred feet, still dot the township, and there were seven around the peripheries of our farm.

A good farmer was a man who so organized his work that the drainage-well catchment basins were cleaned out every spring and the grates were painted black every two years.

My mother felt a little differently about the Ericsons. She and Mrs. Ericson often canned or made peanut brittle together in the Ericsons' kitchen while Ruthie and I sat on the floor sewing doll clothes, with Dinah and Rose out on the porch in only shorts, pouring water in and out of various vessels. My mother liked to go over there, and at least went for coffee every morning. Mrs. Ericson had a welcoming manner that my mother appreciated but couldn't master. She always said, "When I'm home, I've got to get things done, even if there are visitors.

Elizabeth knows how to relax in her own house." And then she would shake her head, as if Elizabeth had remarkable powers.

We knew in our very sinews that the Ericsons' inevitable failure must result from the way they followed their whims. My mother surely knew it with regret, but she knew it all the same. Their farm represented neither history nor discipline, and while they were engaged in training dogs and making ice cream, we were engaged in toiling steadily up a slight incline toward a larger goal. My father would not have said he wanted to be rich, or even that he wanted to own the largest farm in the county or possess the round, impressive number of a thousand acres.

He would not have invoked the names of his children or a desire to bequeath to us something substantial.

Possibly he would have named nothing at all, except keeping up with the work, getting in a good crop, making a good appearance among his neighbors. But he always spoke of the land his grandparents found with distaste those gigantic gallinippers, snakes everywhere, cattails, leeches, mud puppies, malaria, an expanse of winter ice skateable, in I 889, from Cabot east, across our land, all the way to Columbus, ten miles away. Although I liked to think of my Davis great-grandparents seeking the American promise, which is only possibilities, and 1 enjoyed the family joke of my grandfather Cook finding possibilities where others saw a cheat, I was uncomfortably aware that my father always sought impossibility, and taught us, using the Ericsons as his example, to do the same-to discipline the farm and ourselves to a life and order transcending many things, but especially mere whim.

I loved going over to the Ericsons', and Ruthie was my best friend.

One of my earliest memories, in fact, is of myself in a red and green plaid pinafore, which must mean I was about three, and Ruthie in a pink shirt, probably not yet three, squatting on one of those drainage well covers, dropping pebbles and bits of sticks through the grate.

The sound of water trickling in the blackness must have drawn us, and even now the memory gives me an eerie feeling, and not because of danger to our infant selves. What I think of is our babyhoods perched thoughtlessly on the filmiest net of the modern world, over layers of rock, Wisconsin till, Mississippian carbonate, Devonian limestone, layers of dark epochs, and we seem not so much in danger (my father checked the grates often) as fleeting, as if our lives simply passed then, and this memory is the only photograph of some nameless and unknown children who may have lived and may have died, but at any rate have vanished into the black well of time.

Of course, I remember this so clearly because we were severely punished for wandering orf, for crossing the road, for climbing onto the well grate, though I don't actually remember the punishment, only the sudden appearance of my mother, in an apron with a yellow Mexican hat appliqued onto it. Maybe because I knew we were going to be punished, I remember looking at Ruthie's intent face and her lingers releasing something through the holes of the grate, and feeling love for her.

To go over to the Ericsons', to laugh at the dogs, to eat the ice cream or a piece of cake, to ride the ponies, to sit too long in Dinah's closet window seat, was to flirt with danger on the one hand, and to step downward or backward on the other. To bring Ruthie to my house, no matter how we ended up occupying ourselves, was to do her character development a favor that it was nevertheless impolite to mention.

IT DID 0CCUR to me that we wouldn't want the problem with Caroline to affect our usual routine, so when it was my turn to have Daddy over for supper, the Tuesday night after the property transfer, I cooked what I always did for him-pork chops baked with tomatoes (my third-to-last quart from the year before), fried potatoes, a salad, and two or three different kinds of pickles. Part of a sweet potato pie was left from a few nights before.

Daddy ate at our house on Tuesdays, Rose's on Fridays. Even that made him impatient. He expected to come in at live and sit right down to the table. When he was finished, he drank a cup of coffee and went home. Maybe twice a year we persuaded him to watch something on television with us, but if it didn't come right on after supper, he paced around the house as if he couldn't find a place to sit.

He had never visited Caroline's apartment in Des Moines, never gone, for pleasure, anywhere but the State Fair, and then he'd rather make two round trips in two days than spend the night in a hotel.

In my memory, there was never a vIsit to a restaurant other than the cale in town, and he never went there later than dinnertime. He didn't mind a picnic or a pig roast, if someone else gave it, but supper he wanted to eat in his own house, at the kitchen table, with the radio on. Ty said he was less self-sufficient than he seemed, but that opinion was more based on the idea that anybody had to be less selfsufficient than Daddy seemed, than it was based on any evidence.

He resisted efforts to change his habitschicken on Tuesdays, or a slice of cake instead of pie, or an absence of pickles meant dissatisfaction, and even resentment.

Rose said our mother had made him like this, catering to whims and inflexible demands, but really, we couldn't remember, didn't know. In my recollections, Daddy's presence in any scene had the effect of dimming the surroundings, and I didn't have many recollections at all of our life with him before her death.

Over supper, Ty spoke enthusiastically about the hog operation.

He had, he said, already called a confinement buildings company, one in Kansas. They were sending brochures that could get to us as soon as tomorrow or the next day.

Daddy helped himself to the bread and butter pickles.

Ty said, "You got these automatic flush systems with these slatted floors. One man can keep the place clean, no trouble."

Daddy didn't say anything.

"A thousand hogs farrow to finish would be easy. Marv Carson says hogs are going to make the difference between turning a good prout and just getting by in the eighties.

Daddy chewed on his meat.

I said, "Rose wants to launder the curtains upstairs. It's been two years. That's what she says. I don't remember." Daddy hated that kind of disruption. "See these? I got out some of these broccoli and cauliflower pickles we made. You liked these."

Daddy ate his potatoes.

I said to Ty, "You eaten with Marv Carson lately? Everything has to be eaten in a special order, with Tabasco sauce last. He says he's shedding toxIns.

Ty rolled his eyes. "Shedding brain cells is more likely. He's always on some fad."

Daddy said, "Owns us now.

I said, "What?"

"Marv Carson's your landlord now, girl. Best be respectful."

Ty said, "Between you and me, Marv Carson is a fool. I like him fine, and he's from this area and treats farmers around here pretty fair, but you can see why no one would ever marry the guy."

"He's got money in his bank, too," said Daddy. "Not all of them do.

We'll see," said Daddy. He wiped his mouth and looked around.

I removed his plate, and took a piece of pie off the counter.

Ty said, "I could plant beans at Mel's corner tomorrow."

Daddy said, "Do what you want."

Ty and I exchanged a glance. Ty said, "The carburetor on the tractor is acting up, though. I hate to spend time on it at this point, but I'm a little nervous about it."

"Do what you want, I said."

I licked my lips. Ty pushed his plate toward me. I got up, put it In the sink, and set a piece of pie in front of him. I turned off the heat under the coffee, which had begun to boil, and poured Daddy a cup.

Ty said to Daddy, "Okay. Okay. I guess I'll take my chances and plant."

I said, "You want to stay and watch some TV, Daddy?"

"Nah."

"There might be something good on."

"Nah. I got some things to do." It was always the same thing. I glanced at Ty and he gave a minuscule shrug.

We sat silently while Daddy drank his coffee then pushed back his chair and got up to go. I followed him to the door. I said, "Call me if you need anything. It'd be nice if you'd stay." I always said this, and he never actually answered but I was given to believe that he might stay next time. I watched him climb into his truck and back out, then drive down toward his place. Behind me, Ty said, "Well, that was pretty much the same as usual."

"I was thinking that, too."

"He's said that before, about me doing what I want. Not very often, but once in a while."

"He's probably glad of a little vacation, especially right now, since corn planting was so quick."

"No doubt."

I was putting in tomato plants the next day, a hundred tomato plants, mostly Better Boys, Gurney Girls, and Romas that Rose had grown in her cold frame. I had a knack with tomatoes that I had developed into a fairly ritualized procedure, planting deep in a mIxture of peat, bonemeal, and alfalfa meal, then setting an old tin can around each plant to hold water and repel cutworms. Around that, leaves of the Des Moines Register, then mounds of half-decayed grass cuttings on top of those. Every year, we said we would take tomatoes to Fort Dodge and Ames and sell them at farmers markets, but every year we canned them all instead-sometimes live hundred quarts of tomato juice that we drank like orange juice all winter.

I pushed my hair back, wiped my nose on my sleeve, and sat up, only to discover less Clark sitting across the corner of the garden from me, smiling. He had on a pair of shorts and those expensive sneakers with soles like inverted soup plates. I remember how automatically I thought of him as a younger man, somehow relatively unformed, and that gave me a kind of ease with him that I don't often feel with strange men. I said, "So, tell me more," just as if no time had passed since we talked Sunday. He looked at me carefully, I thought, then said, "Loren keeps saying, 'No wife or kids, huh? I heard they have nice-looking girls out west. Nice-looking girls."" We laughed.

Jess watched me for a moment, then said, "I did have a fiancee.

She was killed in a car accident."

"When was that?"

"Six years ago. She was twenty-three, and her name was Alison."

"That's a pity. I'm sorry.

"Well, I drank myself silly about it for two years. If you want to drink in Canada, you can find a lot of company.

"That's true anywhere."

"In Canada there's no undercurrent of shame. You just drink."

"I saw at the pig roast that you didn't seem to be drinking anything."

"On the second anniversary of Alison's accident, I drank two bottles of rye whiskey and nearly died of alcohol poisoning, so I haven't had a drink or a beer since."

"Oh, Jess." I felt sorry for him. Everything he said about himself revealed the sort of life that I had always been afraid of.

I picked up the second box of tomato plants and moved down the row. I troweled up a big hole and dumped in the bonemeal mixture, then stripped off the tomato plant's lower leaves and coiled it gently In the hole-with tomatoes, roots grow out of any part of the stem that's underground, so a mature plant can stand a lot of weather.

When I looked up, Jess's gaze was serious and intent. I said, "I'd like to hear more."

He said, "You know, Alison saw things very darkly. Her parents lived in Manitoba, and they were extremely religious. When she went to live in Vancouver, they repudiated her in specifically biblical terms. The conviction that they truly thought she was damned dragged at her more and more as time went on. The fact was that she was a very kind person, generous and sweet and careful of people's feelings. Actually, we never really knew whether the accident was an accident. She pulled into the oncoming lane of a two-lane highway, into the path of a semi.

She had been depressed, that made it look like suicide. But she endangered someone else. That was very unlike her."

I sat back on my heels and looked at him, but he smiled and said, "Please keep planting. It makes it easier to talk." I dug another hole.

He said, "I used to call her parents from bars and threaten to come to Manitoba and kill them. They always listened to me. Sometimes one or the other of them would get on the extension. While I was raving, they would be praying for me. I don't think they ever felt remorse. I stopped doing that when I stopped drinking." I looked up. He smiled more broadly and said, "I'm all sweetness and light these days. Life affirmed."

"I believe in that." I dug another hole, then hazarded, "You look younger than Loren in some ways, but your face looks older. Harder.

Or maybe just more knowing."

"Really?"

"I think so."

"I think you look younger than Rose, ) I didn't have a reply for this, since it scared me a little to think of him looking at me at all. I said, "What did your-Alison look like?"

"Most people would have said she was rather plain. Square and solid, rather a long face. She was transformed by love."

I glanced at him sharply, to see if he was making fun, and he caught my look. He said, "I'm not joking. She had beautiful eyes and nice teeth. When we were making love and other times, too, when she was very happy and excited, the expressions on her face made it beautiful.

She could also be very graceful if she wasn't thinking about her body or feeling self-conscious about it."

"I'm impressed that you noticed."

"We worked together at the crisis center. I watched her a long time before I fell in love with her. There was plenty of time to notice."

"That's the homely woman's dream, you know. That someone will see actual beauty where others never have."

"I know."

I planted three or four more plants before we spoke again. Then I said, "Rose usually looks better, but her operation took a lot out of her."

"What was that?"

"Loren and Harold didn't tell you?"

"That Rose had an operation? No."

"How irritating."

"Why?"

"Because it makes it seem as if it wasn't worth talking about. She had breast cancer. She just had the operation in February."

"I doubt if Harold, or even Loren, has ever let the words 'breast cancer' pass his lips." He smiled.

looked deep into the hole I was digging. "Well, what did they tell you about your mother?"

"They just said cancer."

"Well, it started out as breast cancer. Later on, it was just plain cancer. Lymphatic."

"Now it's your turn to tell me some things."

"Like what?"

"About my mother."

Disapproval ofjess Clark's absence throughout Verna's illness and death was a neighborhood article of faith, so my voice was a little tight when I said, "Are you sure you want to know?"

"No."

"Well, think about it."

"It was that bad, huh?"

"The lymphatic cancer actually wasn't that bad, as cancers go. She felt kind of under the weather for a month or two, but would not go to the doctor, then Loren kind of abducted her into the doctor's office, and he made the diagnosis. She died within two weeks. It was quick, and she was pretty active until the diagnosis.

"What would be hard for me to hear, then?"

I could taste the dust on my lips. "All she talked about was you.

According to Lore, she was convinced that at the last moment you would come or call."

"No one told me anything about it."

"She wouldn't let them. She was relying on some kind of psychic communication. She said that when you were a little boy, you always came before you were called, just when she was thinking of calling you, and that you were a very loving little boy. She was depending on that.

I thought maybe Harold or Loren should call you and engineer a little psychic communication, but they said they had no idea where you were.

Once Loren called a Jessie Clark in Vancouver, but It was a woman.

'How, uh, how was the end?"

"How do you think? Awful, of course. She was very sad."

He didn't say anything for some minutes, and I kept planting. I could tell by the sun that it was getting toward late morning, and I still had twenty-live tomato plants to go. I pushed them farther into the shade and spilled a little water over the dirt they were rooted in.

I had been a little hard with him, maybe. On the other hand, my own mother had died when I was fourteen. Rose and I nursed her for two months, in the living room. I missed two hours of school in the mornings; Rose missed two hours in the afternoons. If there is anything more difficult or more real than the death of one's mother, I don't know what it is. We all thought Jess Clark should have come, no matter what sort ofjail sentence might have been awaiting him for crossing back into the US. It was something Harold had said all the time, and I still agreed. I licked my lips, which were dry from the sudden heat of my angry thoughts. After a moment, I said, "No psychic communication, huh?"

"She died in November of '7I?"

"Two days after Thanksgiving."

"Not a ripple. I was living on a pretty remote island that winter.

I didn't even have a phone."

He spoke in a flat voice, but he had a terrible look on his face, full of pain and anger. Finally he said, "That's the trouble with telepathy, you know. Most of the time, the lines are down." He laughed with a kind of mirthless bark. He breathed heavily, almost panting, and arched his head back. I stared at him. His face was marvelously expressive, more expressive than the face of any man I knew. The lines around his nose and eyes deepened and the corners of his mouth curled downward. His eyes seemed to darken and disappear beneath his eyebrows. He muttered, "Oh, Jesus." I said, "Jess? Are you okay?

It's been nearly eight years."

He exclaimed, "I was so furious at her. I wrote her twice, you know, that first year. I told her I didn't believe in the war and I knew she didn't either. I just wanted a single letter, or a postcard from her saying that she understood, or at least that she was thinking about me.

There were all sorts of draft refusers in Vancouver, and refugees from the army, and lots of their families treated them like heroes, or at least accepted what they did, and sent letters and presents. I didn't expect anything from Harold-I knew how he felt-but I thought she would send me something on her own, anything. I was fucking eighteen when I left here! I look at kids now, and I can't believe how young I was! I still had an inch and a half of growing to do, and twenty pounds! I wasn't even filled out! She knew where I was in I 971, or she could have found out, if she'd called the addresses on those letters. She was forty-three, for God's sake!"

He stood up, then came close to me, into the garden row where I was working, and squatted down right next to me. When I began to say something to defend his mother-she was lighting breast cancer at some point, after all-he interrupted me, staring me down.

But he spoke softly, as if telling me a secret. "Can you believe how they've fucked us over, Ginny? Living and dying! I was her child!

What ideal did she sacrifice me to? Patriotism? Keeping up appearances in the neighborhood? Peace with Harold? Maybe to you it looked like I just vanished, but I was out there, this ignorant farm kid! I'd never seen a fucking checkbook, never owned anything in my own name, never touched a stove or washed my own clothes! I met kids in training camp. One of them had a heart attack on the drilling grounds. The last night of training camp, there was this kid who persuaded our sergeant that he had a blinding headache. He kind of staggered down the aisle between the bunks and went into the bathroom and collapsed. The sergeant started yelling at him that he was faking it, and the guy was moaning and groaning. Some of us crept out of bed and were watching. Anyway, the sergeant was trying to kick him a little, to get him up, and he just rared back and started beating his head against the wall as hard as he could. He must have hit the tiles about six times. The sergeant was struck dumb, just like the rest of us. Then we got to him, and stopped him, and pretty soon they came with a stretcher and carried him off, and all I could think of was that that guy didn't have to go to Vietnam with the rest of us. I was sure that was why he did it. He didn't even have any fucking hair on his chest!" He put his hands on my shoulders and lowered his voice again.

"Don't you realize they've destroyed us at every turn? You bet she was sad, of course she was sad! But why didn't she give me a fucking chance?" He put his face in his hands.

After a minute, I mustered the gumption to say, "I don't know, Jess," but I was shaken and afraid. When I went to take the next tomato plant out of the flat, my hands were trembling so much that I broke the stem in two. Jess, meanwhile, got up and walked around, heaving. Finally he took off his T-shirt, which read, "CASCADES I0K RUN JUNE 4, I978," and wiped his face and neck with it. He said, "I'd better go home."

"You haven't offended me. Anyway, I'm not sure you should see Harold in that mood."

"I mean back to Seattle. Ah shit." He sat down again, took some deep breaths, and managed a smile. "Ginny, none of this is new. It's very old, I'm used to it, and most of the time, I'm better at cultivating inner peace. I stopped being mad all the time when I stopped drinking.

I mean, that was when I realized that maybe Alison and I wouldn't have lasted together. I loved her, I really did, but what I loved most was being mad at her parents for her. Being on her side, when nobody else had been that I could see. I can't believe I'm getting upset like this now."

After a minute, I said, "Don't you think it had to be, whenever you learned about your mother? Now it's been. How am I going to believe that life is good and change is good if you don't?"

"I do think that."

We smiled at each other. I couldn't believe that I had ever found his smile merely charming. Another lesson in that lifelong course of study about the tricks of appearance.

IT HAD BEEN more THAN three months since Rose's operation, and she was making a good recovery. The chemotherapy was over and she had that large-eyed, astonished-but-not-surprised look about her that I've since seen on other cancer patients. They had taken her right breast, the muscles on the right side of her chest, and the lymph glands under her right arm, a traditional radical mastectomy. I was still cooking for her fairly often, and, of course, seeing her every day, but she would pass into a state of irritability if I mentioned her health, so I didn't; but I did watch her closely, looking for signs of fatigue or weakness or pain. The day after my talk with Jess Clark, I drove her to Mason City for her three-month checkup. We hardly spoke on the way there. She was annoyed at little things-the belt of her jacket getting closed in the car door, having to stop for gas, running into a little traffic about ten blocks from the hospital, and then being live or six minutes late for her appointment. Our plan was to shop a little after the hospital, then go to the Brown Bottle for dinner, but our unspoken agreement was that it all depended on the doctor's appointment. If the news was bad, there would be no telling what we would do-the future would lie before us as a blank, and, somehow, we would honor that.

In fact, the appointment went beautifully. The moment we walked in the door, the nurses greeted her with happy warmth, and it was hard not to be comforted by just that, as if they already knew good news, and all they had to do was tell it to us. The doctor found nothing at all suspicious, and congratulated Rose on how much movement and strength she had gotten back in her arm, "in so short a time." Rose smiled at his wording, and I did, too, but just hearing him say it lightened those long, heavy months, somehow, the worst months of the year in our part of the country, when the sky is like iron day after day, and the wind is endless, chill, and hostile, even on those days when a little weak sunlight blossoms through the clouds. It was easy, while he was giving us the good news, to marvel at how depressed we'd been, almost without knowing it, easy to regard his round pink face with affection, easy to feel transformed as we came out of the hospital into the pleasant May air, which was sweetened and colored by the flowering crab apples and beds of tulips and Dutch iris that flanked the entrance, a display we hadn't even noticed upon going in. "It is a nice day!"

exclaimed Rose, inhaling deeply, and for once her left hand didn't stray to the lost muscles just under her arm. This was a habit she had fallen into that hurt me to see, just a light touch, the lingers asking, feathering across, discovering anew. Her hand never went anywhere else-it was as if the other, the breast, the chest muscles, were okay, well lost, an acceptable sacrifice, but this, too? She said, "Hey! Let's eat meat!"

"They've got meat at the Brown Bottle."

"No, I mean, let's go somewhere expensive, like the Starlight Supper Club. Remember when we went for your tenth anniversary?

They had three kinds of herring on the salad bar and some kind of garlic toasts that had been fried slowly in butter until they were as hard as canning jar lids, except that they fragmented and vanished as soon as you put them on your tongue?"

"I can't believe you remember the food like that. It was six years ago.

"I haven't thought about it since, I bet. It's just that I really believe him, you know? I really believe everything he said, and now I want to drink it all in, all the stuff I was going to miss, that I'd pretty much made up my mind not to think about."

We came to the corner, waited for the light, and crossed. I had no idea where we were going. I said, "I didn't realize you were so depressed."

"I was depressed, but that was a side issue. This was more like closing up shop, or, say, having a big garage sale, where you look at everything you've bought in your life, and you remember how much it meant to you, and now you just tag it for a quarter and watch 'em all carry it off, and you don't care. That's more like how it was."

I looked at her without replying. For me it had been more like being a passenger in a car that was going out of control. For three months we'd been swerving across the road, missing light poles and oncoming vehicles. Now the car was under control again, and unimaginable disaster was averted.

She stopped when we got to the opposite corner and ran her hand through her hair. She said, "Anyway, Ginny, I know this was only the three months exam. There's the six months exam and the year exam and live more year exams, and then I'll only be forty. I haven't forgotten that, but I still want to do something special. Something that would scandalize Daddy. Just to mark the occasion.

"I don't think there are any male strippers in Mason City."

"Did you see that on Phil Donahue?" Rose grinned.

"Last Wednesday? Where they were wearing about three square inches of shiny blue underwear?"

"The one guy was in black."

"The blond guy."

"I didn't know you were watching that. I was kind of embarrassed to be having it on."

"I turned off the picture and listened to the sound, like it was on the radio."

"You did not!"

"You're right," I said. "I watched every minute, even after they had their clothes on."

Rose laughed giddily, then exclaimed, "There's a whorehouse in Mason City, did you know that? Pete told me. It's next door to the Golden Corral. There's the USDA office on one side and the whorehouse on the other."

"How does Pete know?"

"Those guys he hired to help him paint the barn last summer told We paused in front of Lundberg's and gazed at the dresses. Rose said, "But we don't have to go that far just to scandalize Daddy. I think shopping would actually do the trick."

"What a relief."

We went in. It was not lost on me that Rose hadn't bought anything to wear since the diagnosis, had possibly not paused for very long in front of a mirror since that time. I concentrated on a rack of blouses, trying to relax the vigilance that kept asserting itselfattention to what sizes she was looking at, what sort of cut she was attracted to; whatever dress she chose to try on first, I wanted it to be flattering. When she took her limit, four, into the dressing room, I lingered outside, looking distractedly at some sweaters. She was in there for a long time, and at one point she said, quietly, "I see your feet," so I had to move off. When she came out, she was subdued again. She handed the dresses to the saleslady with a smile and moved toward the door. I pretended to rummage through some belts, but when she went out into the street, I followed her.

We looked in the next shop window, a shoe store, and the next, the live-and-ten. She stared for a long time at the cold-mist humidifiers.

I said, "You heard from Caroline?"

"No."

"Who do you think's going to make the first move?"

She turned and looked at me, raising her hand to shade her eyes from the sunlight. "Has Daddy ever made a first move? I mean in a reconciliatory way?"

"Well, no. But that's with us. This is with Caroline."

"When water runs uphill is when he'll make a first move."

"You'd think she'd be more careful."

Rose started walking again. "She doesn't have to be careful. She's got an income. Being his daughter is all pretty abstract for her, and I'm sure she wants to keep it that way. Mark my words. She and Frank will get married and produce a son and there'll be a lot of coming together around that. She always does what she has to do."

"You sound annoyed with her, too. She was coming up the steps.

It was Daddy who slammed the door."

"But there didn't have to be any production at all, no breach, no reconciliation, no drama. She just can't stand to be one of us, that's the key. Haven't you ever noticed? When we go along, she balks.

When we resist, she's sweet as pie."

"Maybe."

"Shit! I remember when she was all of about live years oldbefore Mommy died, at any rate. I was sitting at the kitchen table doing homework, and Mommy was cooking dinner and Caroline was coloring, and she looked at each of us and said right out, 'When I grow up, I'm not going to be a farmwife." So Mommy laughed and asked her what she was going to be, and she said, 'A farmer."

I laughed. We walked on, agreeing wordlessly to avoid the subject of Caroline. My stomach growled. I said, "Rosie, let's eat at Golden Corral and see if we can get a look at what the prostitutes wear to work."

"I think I'd rather go home. There's food there."

-'Are you tired?"

'Yeah."

I didn't argue. I never have with Rose. When we got in the car, she said, "You know when we came out of the clinic, and we saw those flower beds that we hadn't seen when we were walking in?

That was so unexpected, I think it made me delirious somehow.

And then it seemed like if we just threw off all restraints and talked wildly and ate wildly and shopped wildly, it would just turn up the delirium, and make it even better, or permanent somehow, but I forgot.

I'm not really to the point where I can take off my clothes in a dressing room yet." She sighed. I pulled out of the parking lot.

A few minutes later, she said, "What's the hardest thing for you?"

"Well, I don't know. Probably being comfortable with people outside the family."

'What do you mean?"

'Oh, you know. I either act too shy, or else I want the person to be my friend so much that I act like an idiot. I never believe that Marlene Stanley or anyone else actually likes me, even though I suppose I know they do."

"God! This is just like how you used to talk in junior high."

I stiffened a little. "What practice have I had since then? Anyway, in junior high, you used to say, 'Wouldn't you like to be friends with so-and-so? Let's bring some cookies and offer one to so-andso, then maybe she'll be our friend."

Rose laughed a full-throated, merry laugh. "Usually it worked, too."

We drove in silence for a few minutes.

Finally, she said, "You know what? The hardest thing for me is not grabbing things. One of the main things I remember about being a kid is Mommy slapping my hands and telling me not to grab.

What's worse is I have this recurring nightmare about grabbing things that hurt me, like that straight razor Daddy used to have, or a jar of some poison that spills on my hands. I know I shouldn't, and I watch myself, but I can't resist."

"I dream about standing in the lunch line naked. It's always the lunch line in ninth grade."

"Nakedness dreams are very common.

"I suppose they are.

We drove the rest of the way silently. A glaring haze lay over the fields to either side of the road, and the rows ofjust-sprouted corn fanned into the distance like seams of tiny bright stitches against dark wool. When I dropped Rose at her house, she kissed me on the cheek. The fact was that we had known each other all our lives but we had never gotten tired of each other. Our bond had a peculiar fertility that I was wise enough to appreciate, and also, perhaps, wise enough to appreciate in silence. Rose wouldn't have stood for any sentimentality.

CARoLINE WAS SIX WHEN our mother died, and at first there was talk that she would go live with my mother's cousin in Rochester, Minnesota.

Cousin Emma was a nursing administrator at the Mayo Clinic, unmarried and without children, and I think there was talk about this "solution" to the "problem" of Caroline during my mother's illness, and I think that some of the church ladies, who were well read in the literature of orphanhood from their own early lives, saw this as a desirable and even romantic course of action. Cousin Emma had plenty of money from her job, so there would be nice clothes, plus grammar school and high school in town. My father, though, simply declared that Rose and I were old enough to care for our sister, and that was that.

She was an agreeable child, not difficult to do for. She played with her dolls that had been our dolls, ate what was put in front of her, listened when she was told to put away her doll clothes or keep her dress clean. She had no interest in the farm equipment-gravity wagons filled with grain, augers, tractors, cornpickers, trucks. She stayed away from the hogs, even the dogs and cats who lived on the place from time to time. She never wandered into the road or went out of sight of the house. She never, as far as I knew, went near the grate over a drainage well. We were lucky, and were able to devote ourselves to the aspects of child raising that we knew best-sewing dresses and doll clothes, baking cookies, reading books aloud, enforcing rules about keeping clean, eating properly, going to bed at a set time, saying ma am to ladies and "sir" to Daddy and other men, and doing homework. We had no principles beyond those that were used with us, but it was true, as Daddy often said, that she was a better child than we had been, neither stubborn and sullen, like me, nor rebellious and back talking, like Rose. He praised her for being a Loving Child, who kissed her dolls, and kissed him, too, when he wanted a kiss. If he said, "Cary, give me a kiss," that way he always did, without warning, half an order, halfa plea, she would pop into his lap and put her arms around his neck and smack him on the lips. Seeing her do it always made me feel odd, as if a heavy stone were floating and turning within me, that stone of stubbornness and reluctance that kept me any more from being asked.

We got more serious principles when Caroline's freshman year of high school rolled around. We agreed that she was going to have a normal high school life, with dates and dances and activities after school.

She wasn't going to be chained to the school bus. She was going to have friends, and she was going to be allowed to sleep over with them in town if she was invited. Rose, who was working at the time, gave her money for clothes. I gave her an allowance. If she got invited to a birthday party, we gave her money to buy a nice present. These were our principles, and they stood in opposition to Daddy's proclaimed view that home was best, homemade was good enough, and if we had to pay for the school bus, then by golly she was going to use it. We were her allies. We covered for her and talked Daddy out of his angers. Junior and senior years, I even talked him into letting her invite a boy to the Sadie Hawkins dance. Rose bought her a subscription to Glamour, and got adept at copying some of the simpler clothing styles that were nevertheless unavailable in Zebulon County.

We got along well with her. She was as agreeable as she had been as a child. She made good grades, conceived large ambitions, and went off as we had planned, no farmwife, or even a farmer, but something brighter and sharper and more promising. Sometimes, without thinking, she would marvel at us, saying, "Lord! Why didn't either of you ever leave? I can't believe you never had any other plans!"

Such remarks would annoy Rose no end, but I liked them. They showed how well and seamlessly we had adhered to our principles.

I made up my mind to call her after I dropped Rose at her house, but when I drove past Daddy's, his pickup was parked in the driveway, and I could see him through the front window, sitting bolt upright in his La-Z-Boy, staring out. There was something about this sight that drove all other thoughts out of my mind. I was too cowardly to turn right around and investigate, but when I got to our place a minute or so later, I couldn't bring myself to get out of the car. I could see the headline in the Pike Weekly News-oCAz FARMER SUCCUMBS IN LIVING RooM.

If Rose had asked me, not what I had the most trouble with, but what my worst habit was, I would have said it was entertaining thoughts of disaster.

I got out of the car and shut the door, then opened it, got back in, and drove down the road. Through the window I could see that he was still sitting upright in his chair, but I couldn't help thinking that that could be the arms holding him. I saw him lift his hand to his chin. I turned into the driveway relieved, surprised, another near miss averted. When I walked in the door, he said, "What's the matter?"

"Nothing."

"You drove by, and then you drove back for something."

"I drove back to see what you were doing."

"I was reading a magazine."

There were no magazines near his chair, or on the table beside him.

"I was looking out the window."

"That's lnie."

"You bet it's fine."

"Do you need anything?"

"I had some dinner. I warmed it up in that microwave oven.

"Good."

"It gets colder faster if you warm it up that way. My dinner was stone cold before I was finished eating it."

"I've never heard that before."

"Well, it's a fact."

"I took Rose to the doctor today."

He shifted in his chair. I followed his gaze and saw Ty cultivating far off to the west. In the silence I could just hear the roar of the John Deere reduced to a rough buzz by distance. My father said, "She okay?"

"Yeah, she is. The doctor was pleased about everything."

"Something happens to her, and those kids of hers will be stuck."

My father had a way of making unanswerable remarks. Was he intending to show disapproval of Pete? Of my qualilications to step in and raise them? Or was he reflecting on our history since the death of my mother? On his opinion of Rose's primary responsibilities?

Or was this some sort of general reflection on animal breeding? Ty would have said that he meant that he would be stuck, we would be stuck, but he didn't dare to say it. Sometimes I thought it was naive of us to attribute softer sentiments to my father. I said, "She's good. We don't have to worry.

"We don't have to worry about that. There's plenty to worry about."

"Well, yes, of course.

I looked around for some bit of housework to do, to make my return seem as routine as possible. One thing about my habit of expecting the worst was that it embarrassed me; I didn't want people to suspect I'd imagined that they had died. But apart from cooking, clothes washing, and major housecleaning, my father needed little help with his domestic routine. The dishes from his dinner were already rinsed and in the dish drainer. The counters were wiped and the floor swept. In fact, he had always been a living example of the maxim, "Clean as you go."

There was nothing to do. I let my eyes travel back to his face. He was staring out the window. I said, "Okay.

Well, I made a strawberry rhubarb pie. I'll bring some down for your supper. I've got some strawberry plants bearing already, did I tell you that?"

"Why is he cultivating that field? They done planting the beans?"

"I don't know. Almost, I think."

He stared silently at the tractor crawling from the left side of the big window to the right.

"Daddy? You can come up to our place for supper if you want.

You could ask him then."

His face was reddening, staring.

"Daddy?"

He didn't glance at me or respond, even to dismiss me. I got nervous, watching him, impatient to leave, as if there were something here to flee. "Daddy? You want anything before I leave? I'm leaving." I paused at the kitchen door and watched the unyielding back of his head for a few seconds. When I drove past the front of the house again, he hadn't moved. I couldn't shake my sense that his attention menaced Ty, the guiltless cultivator, concentrating innocently on never deviating from the rows laid out before him. The green tractor inched back and forth, and my father's look followed it like the barrel of a rifle.

About an hour and a half later, Rose called and said, "Why is Daddy sitting in the front window of the house, staring across your south field?"

"Is he still at it?"

"He was there when I went to Cabot for bread and he was there when I got back. I stopped the car in the middle of the road and watched him.

He didn't move a muscle."

"Where's Pete?"

"He's welding something on the planter. He's been at it since before we got back from Mason City."

"Is Ty still cultivating out there? I can't see the back end of the field from here."

"When I drove by, he was starting up along the fencerow next to the road."

"I'm sure Daddy's watching him. I'm sure there's some light going on.

He was mad about something and didn't pay any attention to me when I stopped there."

"Well, lucky for you. He didn't ask you to do anything for him."

"Don't you think this is weird?"

"Well, guess what. This is what his retirement is going to be, him eyeballing Pete or Ty, second-guessing whatever they do. You didn't think he was going to go fishing, did you? Or move to Florida?"

"I didn't think that far ahead."

"Perfecting that death's-head stare will be his lifework from now on, so we'd better get used to it."

She hung up.

I had to smile at the thought of her stopping the car and watching him.

She would stand at the foot of the hill, her lists on her hips, her own stare roaring up to meet his. Neither would acknowledge the other.

They were two of a kind, that was for sure.

I pressed down the telephone button and let it up again, ready to dial Caroline's work number, except that suddenly I felt a shyness, as if there were a breach between the two of us that I had to brave.

Here it was Thursday, and I should have called her Sunday night, that was suddenly clear. Rose, I would have called Sunday afternoon, trying her until she got home, but Caroline I had let slide, Caroline I had hardly thought of in the rush of Daddy and Rose and, well, to be frank, thoughts about Jess Clark. It was true that Caroline and I didn't have a close, gossipy relationship. Her visits home every third weekend, when she stayed with Daddy and cooked for him, were generally the only times I spoke with her. For one thing, country people, even in 1979, were more suspicious of long-distance calls, and not in the habit of talking on the phone much-we'd been on a party line until i973, so visiting about private things on the telephone was still considered risky. For another, Rose and I had been so long in the habit of conferring about Daddy and Caroline that it seemed a touch unfamiliar, even scary, to confer with her. Nosy.

Interfering. Asking for something, though I didn't know what. And then her office didn't like her to get personal calls. The phones were monitored because clients were billed for telephone consultations. I pushed the phone button down again, then put the receiver on the cradle. Sunday would be my deadline. If I didn't hear from her by Sunday, then I really would call.

I discovered THAT I WAS KEEPING an eye out for Jess Clark.

Runners, I understood, liked routine, and I would watch, in the cool of the morning, for him to pass our house on his circuit. Except that I didn't know what his circuit was. It might also be true that Harold would insist on Jess's doing some of the farm work, or even that Jess himself would want to do some of the farm work. Running, and conversing, for that matter, could turn out to be city habits that Jess would quickly shuck. Certainly the talks we had then shared, especially the last one, were unique in my experience, and maybe that was why I kept thinking about them.

I would work in the garden, or water my tomato plants, or even realize that it was that midmorning time of day, and Jess's anguish would recur to me, and I would feel something physical, a shiver, a kind of shrinking of my diaphragm. I realized that some of the worst things I had feared and imagined had actually happened to him-the sudden death of his fiancee, but also the death of his mother while he was out of touch. For that matter, hadn't he been damned and repudiated, worse than abandoned-cast out-by his father as the opening event of his adult life? Possibly it appeared on the surface that we had nothing in common except childhoods on the farm, but I suspected that there were things he knew that I had been waiting all my life to learn. Even so, I was not exactly eager to see him. It was more like I knew I had something important to wait for, something besides the next pregnancy.

In fact, it occurred to me that the next pregnancy might be the final stage, the culmination or the reward, for learning what Jess Clark had to teach, a natural outgrowth of some kind of rightness of outlook that I hadn't achieved yet.

One day, when Ty came in for supper, Jess was behind him. He had on jeans and a light blue T-shirt, and his hands were dirty up to his elbows. Ty said, "Hey Ginny. I got this guy to do some honest work for a change, but now he wants supper." He kissed me on the forehead and went down in the cellar to drop his clothes by the washing machine and change. I said to Jess, "What did they make you do, muck out the farrowing pens with your bare hands?"

"We were fixing the differential on the old tractor."

"The Farmall? What are they going to use that for?"

"I've been assigned to manure spreading behind your dad's house."

"Lucky you."

"I don't mind. Anyway, manure spreading is something I believe in, and judging from the size of the manure pile and the condition of the manure spreader, there hasn't been that much manure spread in the last few years. Like forty."

"We get good yields," shouted Ty. "And that's the name of the game these days. Anyway, wait till I've got that Slurrystore." His heavy step creaked on the cellar stairs. "The we'll have manure spreading every which way. You going to eat with those hands?"

I handed Jess a towel and he went out to the back sink and turned on the water.

Ty murmured, "Is there enough supper?"

I whispered, "Isn't he a vegetarian, though? All I've got is hamburger noodle casserole and some green beans and salad."

"I forgot about that." He opened the refrigerator. when Jess came back, he handed him a beer, but Jess put it back and took out a Coke.

They sat down at the kitchen table. Jess said, "Ah, you farmers always think a big new piece of equipment is the answer." I glanced at him.

His expression was aggressive but merry, and Ty took this as a joke.

He said, "Nah. Two big new pieces of equipment. That's the answer.

I set the food on the table, with a bowl of cottage cheese, then said, "Anyway, we'll see what the answer is. We've got plenty of big new pieces of equipment on order."

"Mmmm," said Ty, with dramatic relish.

"I'd forgotten what a nice kitchen this is," said Jess. "Didn't the Ericsons have some kind of bird in here?"

"They had a parrot. But I thought he was always in the living room.

Remember how he used to order the dogs around?" I said to Ty, "From overhearing Cal training them, I suppose, this parrot had learned to give the commands, and when any of the dogs went into the living room, the parrot would start shouting orders, and the dogs would obey. Once we came in from outside, and we heard the parrot squawking and shouting 'Sit! Roll over!" and we went in the living room and there was the collie panting and doing all these tricks.

Mrs. Ericson had to put a sheet over the parrot's cage.

"When did they leave?" asked Jess.

"Oh, I'm sure they were gone before you were. I was fourteen when Daddy bought this farm."

"Stole it from Harold, you mean." Jess stared me down, that audacious twinkle again.

"Oh, right. I forgot."

What I had forgotten was the pleasure of a guest for dinner, someone unrelated, with sociable habits learned far away. While we helped ourselves, Ty said, "What do they think about this oil shortage out west?"

"Oil company scam.

"They've got Carter by the short hairs." Ty glanced at me, because he knew I rather liked Carter, or at least, liked Rosalynn and Miss Lillian. I rolled my eyes.

"The thing is," said Jess, "he's a realist. He looks at all sides. He ponders what he should do in a thoughtful way. You should never have a realist in the White House. Being president is too scary for a realist." I laughed. Ty said, "Ginny likes him. I voted for him, I've got to say, though I don't know a thing about farming peanuts.

But every time something comes up, he just wrings his hands."

"Nah," said Jess. "He says, 'What should I do?" A president's got to say, 'What do I want to do? What will make me feel good now that I'm feelin' so bad?" He's like a farmer, you see, only the big pieces of equipment he's got access to are weapons, that's the difference."

Ty was smiling. When dinner was over, I didn't want Jess to leave.

Ty didn't either. There was a moment, after I had picked up the plates, when we all looked at the table. Then Ty got up and opened the refrigerator again, and said, "How about another beer?"

I was as smooth as a professional hostess. I said, "It's so hot in here. Why don't we go out on the front porch?"

Once Jess had settled on the porch swing and Ty on the top step, his spot, I felt a rare rush of luxuriant delight. The evening lay before me, and all I had to do was receive it.

Jess took two or three deep breaths. The swing chains rattled and twisted against one another. The lilacs were over with, but I'd cut the grass around the house that morning, and the sweet fragrance of chamomile floated on top of the sharper scent of the wet tomato vines I'd watered before dinner. There weren't any lightning bugs, yet, but I could see one or two cabbage moths pale and dim against the dark greenery around the porch. "This is nice," saidJess. "This is exactly what I was looking for."

"Are you going to stick around the area?" Ty never hesitated to ask what others might only hint at.

"We'll see. It's only been, what, ten days. It still feels like a vacation, though Harold is edging me toward a full day's work."

I blurted out, "You wouldn't move in with Harold and Loren for good?

After having your own place and your own life for twelve or fourteen years?"

"They do live kind of a strange life, don't they? I asked Loren who he was dating and he just shrugged, as if he didn't want to talk about it."

Ty said, "He told me, 'Girls don't want to move out to the farm.

They'll date you and they'll come pick things out of the garden, but that's all."

Jess laughed. "I'm sure he's not the world's most dynamic suitor.

I think his idea of a heartfelt declaration of passion is, 'We could, you know, get married or something."

Ty said, "In high school, he dated Candy Dahl a little bit."

"She was cute, wasn't she? But she wasn't going to stay on the farm.

Marlene told me a long time ago that she's doing real well in Chicago.

I think she's the weatherlady for some TV station there."

"Well, that's the kind of girls he goes for. Lots of ambition. Good dressers."

I said, "I remember some girl he brought home from college, too.

She was that way. It's sort of sad."

"I've noticed he's gotten to be incredibly like Harold. Sometimes I think of them as the twin robot farmers. Time to plow! Time to plant!

Time to spray! Time to harvest! Time to plow! Every morning they eat the exact same thing for breakfast."

"Do tell," I said.

"Three links of sausage, two fried eggs, a frozen French bread pizza with pepperoni and extra cheese, and three cups of black coffee."

Ty chuckled.

I said, "You should laugh. You always eat the leftover salad from the night before. Anyway, Jess, you didn't answer my question, you only made it more interesting. I can't believe you want to live like that.

And Loren isn't completely wrong about girls, either."

"I don't know. Everything is up in the air. I gave up my lease in Seattle and put all my furniture in storage. I'm thirty-one years old.

I felt like I had to ligure out a life, and it seemed like I should sort this out before I could ligure that out." He sat back, stretching his legs toward me and making the swing jump, then went on, "I've been like one of those cartoon characters who saws off the limb between himself and the tree, and just hangs in midair for a second before the limb drops. But the second has lasted almost fourteen years. I guess I feel like if I reattach the limb, somehow, then the restlessness that's always gotten into me whenever there's been the chance to settle down and ligure out a life will go away.

Ty said, "But do you want to farm? You don't have to live with Harold to do that-you could rent my place next year. That's a quarter-section south of here about halfway to Henry Grove. A guy down there farms it now, but you could get started on that."

Jess rocked his heels, moving the swing back and forth. Ty looked at me and I smiled. He was right. It was worth something to have Jess in the neighborhood.

Jess said, "I don't know. When would you have to know?"

"I have to inform the present tenant in writing before September first."

Jess rocked his heels some more, then said, "That's it. That's what drives me crazy. Yeah, of course I want it. But the idea of sending for all my stuff, and moving it in and being here and saying, yes, this is what I'm going to do, I'm going to practice what I learned when I ran those gardens and I'm going to really dedicate myself to organic farming and make something of my beliefs. It's not the work.

I could do the work. It's saying, this is it."

Ty said, "Organic farming?"

Jess guffawed. "Hey. You make it sound like I offered to shoot your dog! Just think of it as manure spreading on a large scale, okay?"

I said, "Anyway, that's not the point."

Jess said, "Sometimes I think I ought to get married so I'll be forced to ligure this out."

We all fell silent. Thunder rumbled off to the southwest, and Ty said, "An inch of rain would be nice, wouldn't it?"

I said, "I should get the dishes done."

Jess said, "Think that tractor's going to run tomorrow?"

Ty stood up. "That's a question I never ask myself before bedtime."

We all laughed.

Now there was a long silence. The darkness had deepened into real night-time to get to bed-but Jess and I sat rocking and creaking, reluctant. Ty said, "You know, I can't get over that family.

Those people in Dubuque. I've been thinking about them for the past two days."

I said, "You mean where the girl was killed." It had been a shocking murder, especially vivid, even though the paper had a penchant for covering murders in detail. A man had tried to break in to his ex-girlfriend's family's house. When the father and brother chased after him, they happened to leave open the heavy front door, which gave him access after he eluded them. He got in, and the girl hid in a bedroom. Then she came out, apparently hoping to calm him down, and he grabbed her and dragged her into another bedroom and slammed the door.

When the family and the police managed to get that door open (a matter of seconds) they found him stabbing her with a long knife. The police shot him in the head.

I said, "The paper went into a lot of detail."

Ty said, "Yes, but there were just so many things about it that didn't have to be. I keep rewriting it in my head. Remembering to lock the door behind you, for one.

"In a city," said Jess, "the door would have locked behind them automatically."

Ty said, "Anyone could be that father. Anyone could just react by trying to chase the guy, thinking you could do it. Being that mad."

I said, "It was like the movies, where somebody just throws off all his enemies with superhuman strength. Isn't there some drug that gives you that kind of strength?"

Jess said, "Yeah, adrenaline."

Ty leaned back against the railing. "I just couldn't shake the images all day yesterday. Today, too. What they must have seen when they opened the bedroom door."

We mulled this over. I looked atJess once, wondering if we seemed naive to be so interested in something like a murder. In cities they had murders all the time. I said, "I wonder what she thought she was doing, going out to meet him.

Jess stood up and stretched out his arms. I could hear his shoulders crack. He said, "I'm sure she thought he couldn't really want to hurt her."

I stood up. "What a way to end a pleasant evening." Ty looked a little sheepish, and Jess smiled. He said, "Things come up.

After brief good nights, I went into the house, and it was true, there was a privilege to perfunctory farewells-we would resume our conversation tomorrow or the next day. When Ty came in from his bedtime check, he said what I was thinking-"Actually, it would be more fun to have Jess closer than my old place."

"If he were actually farming, there probably wouldn't be all that much time or energy for socializing."

"We'll see."

THE NEXT NIGHT, Jess showed up again, this time on his own, after supper, then Rose called to tell me she would make breakfast for Daddy, since she was leaving early anyway to go pick up Linda and Pammy down in West Branch, which was about a four-hour drive. I did not ask her if she felt well enough to drive all that way, because she wouldn't have told me the truth, and would have been annoyed. I did suggest that she and Pete come over. We talked about playing cards, poker maybe, or bridge, with one person sitting out, but then Rose had an idea, and showed up with an old Monopoly game, and that's how the tournament started, the Million Dollar World Series of Monopoly, that lasted two weeks or so and that none of us could keep away from, in spite of all the work to be done.

We gathered every night and played at least a little. One night, Ty even dozed off at the table, but when he woke up, he made two or three more moves and bought Pacific Avenue before going up to bed.

I wonder if there is anyone who isn't perked up by the sight of a Monopoly board, all the colors, all the bits and pieces, all the possibilities. Jess was the race car, Rose was the shoe, Ty was the dog, and I was the thimble. Pete was torn between the wheelbarrow, which he had won with twice, and the mounted horseman, which had more zip, though with that one he had lost twice. Pete was determined to win. It was Pete, actually, who proposed adding the scores of the games, throwing in bonuses for certain strategies and pieces of luck, and shooting for a million dollars of Monopoly money. There would be a prize, too, a hundred dollars, if we all put twenty into the pool, or a weekend in Minneapolis (how about L. A.?), or two days of farm chores in mid-January. In this Jess and Pete thought alike-like city boys, my father would have said, looking for the payoff in a situation rather than the pitfall. Rose and Ty and I played like farmers, looking for pitfalls, holes, drop-offs, something small that will tip the tractor, break it, eat into your time, your crop, the profits that already exist in your mind, and not only as a result of crop projections and long-range forecasts, but also as an ideal that has never been attained, but could be this year.

iscussions around the Monopoly board were lively. Jess had plenty of adventures to relate, but Pete did, too. He told about hitchhiking across the country in 1967, just graduated from high school in Davenport and hoping to get to San Francisco, where he planned to join the Jefferson Airplane, or at least, the Grateful Dead.

Things were uneventful until he got to Rawlins, Wyoming. He was rich (thirty-seven dollars in his pocket) and had a new guitar (Gibson J-200, dark sunburst, $195, a graduation present). A rancher picked him up late one afternoon and offered him a place to stay, then a ride to Salt Lake in the morning. The rancher had two brothers and a wife.

They gave him a steak for dinner, then waked him up in the middle of the night and shaved his head and beard. The two brothers held him down, the wife held the flashlight. "You know," he said, "I've never figured out why they didn't turn on the lights. There wasn't anybody for miles around." In the morning they gave him more steak and a couple of fried eggs, and drove him to the nearest blacktop. When he realized that he had forgotten his guitar, he tried to walk back to the ranch and got lost. That afternoon, one of the brothers found him trudging along, handed him the guitar, and drove him back to the blacktop. It was nearly dusk, and the only car to pass him was heading east, so he waved it down, and that guy drove him all the way to Des Moines. "When I got out of that car," Pete said, "the guy touched me on the arm and said in a whisper that he hoped my chemotherapy was a success.

"Ha!" Rose exclaimed. We laughed the way we never did by ourselves, without Jess.

"Listen to this," said Jess, and he told about confiding to an American woman in a Vancouver saloon that he was evading the draft.

She asked him to order her another drink, and when he lifted his arm to hail the waitress, he felt her poke him in the side. She muttered that she had a loaded gun, that her boyfriend had died in Vietnam, and that "if I didn't say the magic word, she was going to kill me, so I waved off the waitress and I thought for a while, and I said, 'Bullshit."

She said, 'That's the magic word." She took whatever was poking me out of my ribs and then looked at me with a smile and said, 'Why don't I have a margarita?" I ordered her a margarita, and I paid for it, too."

When he was sixteen, said Pete, and hitchhiking regularly between Davenport and Muscatine to rehearse with his group, he got picked up by a New York couple in a VW bus, with an Afghan hound and two cats. They had been on the road for eighteen months, living in the van. They asked him if he had ever seen any Jews before, "because we've been the first for about seventy-live percent of the people we've met." The husband was writing plays about their travels for the street theater group they were going to found when they got back to New York, and one of the plays was called The First Jews.

He asked Pete if he wanted to drop out of high school and go back to New York with them as a member of their company. They pulled over to the side of the road and smoked a joint with him, then the husband took over the driving, and the wife took him in the back, where the dog and cats were sleeping, and seduced him. Rose smiled all the way through this story, as if the carefree glow it cast originated partly in her as well as Pete.

Pete was an aggressive Monopoly strategist, building houses and hotels every time he could, and letting his liquid assets drop danlow. He also managed to predict three times that he was gerously going to land on Boardwalk in time to purchase it, and twice it was Boardwalk with a hotel on it that broke the back of his most threatening rival, once Jess and once myself. Pete definitely counted on winning. But Rose, by slowly and steadily accumulating money, buying properties only with a certain percentage of it and hoarding the rest, managed to move toward a million dollars without ever actually winning a game.

One thing I noticed about these Monopoly nights was a shift in my feelings about Pete. It had been a long time since I'd realized what fun he was (when I mentioned this to Rose, she said it had been a long time since he'd had fun or been fun, actually), but it was more than that, more a realization that he had certain powers. Those nights he flexed them: he teased me; he charmed his daughters and included them in the game, even allowing them to decide strategy when his play was at a crisis; he topped Jess's stories, and, in some ways, his style of telling them; he sang verses of songs, both familiar and obscure, that were entertaining, but best of all, appropriate, so that you had private realizations, sharp but silly to express, of how everything that was happening at that moment seemed marvelously to lit-that was Pete's gift, and it demonstrated to me an intelligence that I wasn't used to allowing him. In our family life, the inappropriate had always been Pete's special domain.

One night, Jess told us that Harold had a remodeling project in mind for the July lull in farm work. We were grinning already when Pete said, "I've got to hear this."

"Well, he's going to rip out the linoleum and the subfloor of the kitchen. You know, the kitchen isn't over the cellar, it's over a crawl space. So he's going to put a new concrete floor in the kitchen, greentinted concrete that slopes to a drain so he can just hose it down when it gets dirty."

"You're kidding," said Rose.

"Nope. He said if that works out the way he thinks it will, he's going to try it in the downstairs bathroom, too."

We laughed.

Ty said, "Is he going to run the hose in from outside?"

Pete said, "He could put in a hose spigot easy enough."

We laughed again.

I said, "What does Loren think?"

"He doesn't care. He said, 'It's his place, he can do what he wants to it."

" I rolled the dice, landed on St. Charles Place, and paid Rose her rent. She divvied it up between her spend pile and her save pile, and I said, "He's never going to get married at this rate. Nobody wants to cook in a concrete kitchen that slopes toward a drain.

"Harold thinks this is an idea he can patent. He can't ligure out why no one's ever done it before."

Pete said, "I can't wait till he tells Larry this one. Larry will go bananas."

"Or he'll want a concrete kitchen of his own," said Rose. "Or he'll want to go Harold one better and do the whole downstairs, with sheet vinyl on the walls so he could wash those down, too."

We laughed, but the next day, I saw the delivery truck from the lumberyard in Pike pass our house and turn in at my father's. I watched while the driver shouted for Daddy, and when he couldn't roust him, I ran down there to find out what was going on. It was a pantry cabinet, a sink, four base cabinets, and two wall cabinets, as well as eight feet of baby blue laminated countertop, the floor display in the kitchen department of the lumberyard, which my father had bought for a thousand dollars, said the driver ($2500 value, according to the display card taped to the sink). Neither the wood nor the door pattern matched what my father already had-yellow painted cabinets original to the house and linoleum countertops edged in metal-but the display wasn't large enough to replace what was there. I called for Daddy all over the house and out to the barn, but though his truck was there, he wasn't. The driver and his helper unloaded the display onto the driveway, and when I said I didn't have my checkbook, he said the cabinets were already paid for and drove off. I had to laugh, remembering how we'd predicted something the night before, then went home and forgot about it until Ty came in for dinner and told me that he had offered to help Daddy carry the new cabinets into the house and Daddy had said he hadn't decided where he was going to put them yet, so he was going to leave them sit. Pete got the same response at suppertime.

We were a little perplexed, but the affair of the kitchen cabinets seemed mostly funny until two days later, when we got up and saw that it was going to rain soon, certainly before noon. Ty ate quickly, then walked down the road with me to help Daddy put the cabinets under cover, maybe in the barn at least, while I was making breakfast.

Daddy was sitting at the table drinking coffee. I said, "Looks like a good rain today. The radio said it could last till late tomorrow.

"Would have been better for the corn last week. Corn's behind."

I said, "Is it?"

Ty said, "It's not that far behind. Anyway, if we get those cabinets in the house, Ginny will probably be just putting breakfast on the table."

Daddy said, "You eating?"

"No, I ate."

"Then you better cultivate those beans down on Mel's corner, because it's kind of low down there, and you won't get the Deere into that field this week if you let it go till after this rain."

"I was going to do that. The tractor's down there already."

"You left the tractor down there?"

I glanced at Ty There was nothing unusual about leaving the tractor out when work in Mel's corner was planned, since it was the farthest field from the barn and took longer to get there by tractor over the road than on foot across the fields. He caught my look and gave a little shrug, then said, "How about these cabinets? I won't have time to help you with them later, and Pete's got to go into Zebulon Center and file some papers this morning."

Daddy said, "I'm tired of hearing about that damn kitchen junk.

I'll move them when I'm good and ready."

"Daddy, you don't want them to warp in the rain, do you? They're solid oak. They're nice wood."

He drank down his coffee and said, "Quit telling me what to do."

He glared at us, until finally Ty turned and went out. I wished Rose was there, since she knew how to talk back to him, but at last I said, "What are you doing, leaving them out in the rain? Showing Harold a thing or two?" I tried to make my voice cajoling, as inoffensive as possible.

He said, "I'm minding my own business."

I made him breakfast, pointedly not speaking, but he didn't seem to notice. Afterward, he got in his truck and drove off, and I went home.

I watched the sky, though, and when it started to rain, a steady soaker, I put on my slicker and walked down to his place.

The cabinets stood mournfully in the gravel drive, shedding water in rivulets. I didn't know what to think.

I found out that night. Rose was throwing offjokes like a Fourth of July sparkler. Her favorite notion was that Daddy intended to start breeding rabbits on the revolving shelves of the pantry and chickens in the wall cabinets. I could tell she was furious, because she wouldn't drop the subject. Pete was angry, too, and he encouraged her to dwell on it. Finally Ty said, in his mild way, "Larry's done silly things before."

Rose said, "A thousand dollars! Right out the window. He bought them just to top Harold, and then he's too lazy to put them in the house."

Jess said, "Maybe he never intended to put them in the house."

"Why would you have such nice cabinets in the workshop? Most people put the old ones in the workshop and the new ones in the house."

Play around the Monopoly board matched the accelerated rhythm of the conversation, and it was hard for me to keep track of who owed me what.

At her turns, Rose threw the dice off the table and banged her tiny metal shoe around the spaces. I began to feel tense.

"No," said Jess, "I mean, maybe it's just a gesture that's supposed to denigrate whatever Harold does."

"Kind of 'This is what I think about kitchens," "said Ty.

"He's crazy," said Rose. "Anyway, Ginny, you're running out of money and you have all the expensive rentals left before you get to Go. You want to sell your two railroads?"

"Don't sell them to her," said Pete, the edge in his voice not quite playful.

"He is crazy," said Rose. "He gets in his truck every morning and drives off without telling anyone where he's going. He bought a couch, too. Did he tell you that? It hasn't been delivered yet, because he bought it at a place down in Marshalltown and they haven't had time to send a truck up this way. Marshalltown must be two hours from here, so he's not just tooling around the back roads. I don't like his driving down there."

"How much did he spend on that?" asked Ty.

"He said that wasn't any of my business. I only know about the couch because I saw the salesman's card on the kitchen table and I asked him about it. He was proud of himself!"

"We think it was sometime last week," said Pete, "around the same time he bought the cabinets."

I landed on Park Place, and pushed my B&O and Reading Railroad cards over to Rose. She handed me three thousand dollars. It was clear that I was losing this particular game, and I tried to decide whether to quit while I still had some money to add to my total score, but the conversationjangled me. A thousand dollars and more was a lot of money, but Rose seemed too mad even for that much money. On the other hand, Ty acted like he didn't grasp that to spend money like this was a new departure for Daddy, not his routine "silly thing."

Pammy came up to the table next to me, and I put my arm around her waist. She said, "Can I make some popcorn?"

I said, "Sure."

She said, "Will you help me?" She knew one of the great family truths, that aunts always help, while moms always think it would be good for you if you did it yourself. Anyway, I was glad to get away from the others.

In the kitchen, she said, "Is Grandpa crazy?"

I said, "What do you think crazy means?"

"Yelling and screaming and acting weird. And going to a hospital."

"Your mom's just exaggerating. Grandpa has been doing some things that we don't understand."

She shook the pot carefully, eager, as always, to do a good job.

She said, "Mom won't let us go over there. And she told us not to open the door if he comes over when she isn't there."

"Well, that seems a little unnecessary to me, but she must have her reasons. The popcorn finished popping and I held out the bowl.

Pammy took off the lid and set it on one of the cool burners, then poured the popcorn into the bowl. She had always been Rose's own daughter in the precision with which she went about things and her determination to do things right, but there was a difference-Rose always did things right as an assertion of herself. Pammy did things right so that she wouldn't get into trouble. Linda, a year younger, was more carefree. I loved Pammy and was close to her. Linda, who was very pretty and graceful, I admired and delighted in from afar.

I said, "Butter?"

Pammy nodded.

I said, "Does Grandpa scare you?"

"Sort of."

"You should have seen what it was like when we were kids. We had all sorts of hiding places, but if he called our names, we had to answer within ten seconds. That's just the way he is. Your mom isn't afraid of him for a moment, though, so you just rely on her, okay?"

Pammy nodded, and we took the popcorn into the living room.

Rose was saying, "Maybe he has Alzheimer's."

Jess said, "Is he forgetful? That's the first symptom of AIzheimer's."

"Just the opposite," said Pete. "He remembers everything you ever said, every time you ever looked at him cross-eyed, every time you ever doubted some instruction he gave you. Is that a disease?"

"He could try to order us around with the farm work," said Ty.

"That's what I was afraid would happen, but he stays out of the way, or else he asks whether there's something he can do. If I say there is, then he does it."

"But that doesn't stop the complaints," said Pete. "He's full of complaints about what we do do."

"Well," said Ty, "I'd rather have that than constant interference.

I don't even listen to the complaints half the time."

Rose said, "A thousand dollars! I still can't believe the waste. And it just makes me sick to see them out in the weather. I mean, somebody built those! It's actually sad somehow."

I said, "I thought that, too."

"He's out of control," said Rose.

I was tempted to agree.

THE NEXT DAY WAS 0NLY the fifteenth of June, but it was hot, ninety-live and windy. Pammy and Linda wandered down to my house about ten-Rose had already sent them outside because she hated complaining. She was rather like our mother in the brisk way she treated them. I didn't always approve; I suspected I would have been more of a pushover. At least, Pammy and Linda knew where to go when they wanted a favor. I offered to take them swimming in Pike that afternoon if they entertained themselves until dinnertime.

When we were children, Rose and I used to swim in the farm pond down toward Mel's corner. The pond, an ancient pothole that predated the farm, was impressively large to us, with a tire swing hanging over the deep end. Not long before the death of our mother, Daddy drained the pond and took out the trees and stumps around it so he could work that field more efficiently.

This was the first swim of the year for the girls, and they should have been excited, but after we had gotten our suits and were in the car headed toward Pike, they grew quiet. I said, "Do you wish your mom were going?"

Pammy shook her head.

"We'll have fun, you know. Anyway, it's awfully hot to stay home."

Linda sat forward and put her head over the back of the seat. She said, "Aunt Ginny, we don't have any friends there any more.

"Sure you do. All those kids will be glad to see you. You'll be the new faces now.

"I don't see why we have to go to boarding school. Nobody else does."

"Your mom has good reasons. Anyway, I thought you liked it there."

Pammy said, "It isn't bad. The teachers are nice.

"But the kids are all city kids. They're all rich."

"I can't believe they're all rich."

"They pretend like it," said Linda. "We have nicknames."

I felt a tiny pain in my throat, like the pressure of a knife point.

I said, "Well, let's hear them."

Pammy spoke up reluctantly, and I suspected that the nicknames had been something she intended to keep from us. She said, "Well, mine was Lambie, because I gave this oral report about having lambs for 4-H, and Linda's was Mac, for Old MacDonald."

"We wanted them to just call us Pam and Linda."

"Do other kids have nicknames?"

"Some of them." Now came the hardest question. "Just the unpopular kids?"

Pammy rode silently, and Linda sat back in her seat. After a few moments, she said, "No, not really. But mostly it's the boys with nicknames. Not too many girls."

"Well," I said, "nicknames are a sign of affection."

Linda looked at me. "Not with kids, Aunt Ginny."

Pammy said, "Anyway, none of those kids are around here. We don't have any friends around here any more.

"Did anyone write you?"

Linda leaned forward and said with wise condescension, "Aunt Ginny, kids don't write!"

I had to laugh.

After we passed through Cabot, I said, "I don't think it will take long to make friends again. You'll feel uncomfortable for a while, but that's all you'll have to worry about. If you're friendly, they will be friendly."

It sounded good, but the fact was that I really didn't believe it myself. There was a way in which I could look at my life as an unending battle to make friends, and the girls' worries resonated with my own, worries that came in waves, sometimes pricking me and goading me until all I could think was that there were parties all over the county that I wasn't being invited to, and tempting me to drive around to the farms of all our friends, just to see the truth at last. When I complained of this as a teenager, after my mother died, Daddy used to say, "You ought to stay home, anyway. People ought to stay home." I didn't complain very often. it wasn't the boys that I longed to be with, it was the girls. I would have traded any dance at school for any slumber party. It didn't matter that slumber parties weren't allowed for Rose and me; I wanted to be invited.

Rose went out anyway. She didn't even bother to climb out her window and onto the front porch, which she could have done. She walked right out the front door and climbed into the car with whoever was picking her up. She didn't have to reciprocate in order to get invitations, either. She did no driving, no party giving, no inviting to our house of any kind. She was a prize, and her repeated escapes part of her legend. When Daddy confronted her, she talked back, as always. The confrontations weren't as regular as the sneaking out, but there were some terrific battles that I anxiously ignored.

The Pike swimming pool, somewhat past the town on the west side of Pike's Creek, was almost new, and the red maples and beeches planted around it were about ten feet tall and narrow as baseball bats.

The glaring white gravel parking lot was full of big American cars and pickups. It was so windy you had to shade your eyes against the grit.

Flat land ranged on every side, punctuated only by the bluepainted concrete-block bathhouse. There were plans to turn the acreage along the creek into a park, of which the pool would be the centerpiece, but pool revenues hadn't yet generated those funds, so the land was still planted, this year in beans.

Even when my father was a young man, there were so many lakes and pothole ponds in Zebulon County that the idea of building a swimming pool would have been ludicrous, but now every town of any size either had built one or wanted to, and the county newspapers cited these and the three table-flat nine-hole golf courses as "some of Zebulon County's numerous recreational facilities."

We changed, passed through the showers, and spread our towels with self-conscious care about a third of the way down from the shallow end.

Pammy opened her swimming bag, pulled out a pair of black and white polka-dotted sunglasses, and put them on. Linda said, "Where did you get those?"

"When we were in Iowa City. I bought them with my own money.

"Can I wear them?"

I said, "May I wear them."

"May I wear them?"

"No." The sunglasses glanced toward me. "Well, maybe. We'll see."

Pammy leaned back, arranged herself on her elbows, and surveyed the assembled crowd. Just in that moment, it was easy to believe she was twelve, almost thirteen, though her ligure was still wiry and thin.

Not even that first layer of softness underneath the skin had begun to develop. Linda reached into her bag and pulled out a Teen magazine, which she spread open on her towel and began to peruse with concentration. I looked over. The article she was reading was entitled "How Much Makeup Is Too Much?" and began, "Every morning before school, Freshman Tina Smith spends fortyfive minutes on her face."

I smiled to myself and looked around. There were two women I knew, both my father's age, with their grandchildren. One of them, Mary Livingstone, waved to me. She had been a friend of my mother's, and they had served on some church committees together. I took out my Family Circle. If you lay flat and gripped the edges of the magazine tightly, the wind wasn't as bothersome.

Pammy said, "There's Doreen Patrick." She pushed her polka dots up the bridge of her nose. "She has a cute suit on." She turned to me and said, "If she comes over here, Aunt Ginny, may I go lie with them?"

"Sure. But you don't have to wait till she comes over here. You could just go up and say hi."

"I don't know those other kids. It doesn't matter."

I watched her watching them. A few minutes later, Doreen Patrick and another girl walked past us toward the snack bar. Doreen glanced at Pammy but didn't say anything. I said, "Pam, nobody's going to recognize you with those sunglasses on." She didn't respond.

Mary Livingstone came over with her two grandsons, who looked to be about four and live. "Well, Ginny!" she said. "How's your dad?" She lowered herself to the edge of my towel, no mean task.

"Remember Todd and Toby? Margaret's boys? This must be Pammy and Linda. Weren't you girls away for school this year?"

Linda murmured, "Yes, ma'am."

"Didja like it?"

Again, "Yes, ma'am."

"Well, Linda, you take the boys and play with them. They've got some toys over by the ladder there." Linda got to her feet. "Go with Linda, boys. She'll play some nice games with you. Granny's tired."

Mary was like my father in her assumption that children were born to serve their elders, and that their service was to be directed rather than requested. I glanced over at Pammy. She seemed to have shrunk into herself a little. Mary let out a long "Hoooohah," then pinned me with her gaze. "You heard we're selling the farm, didn't you, Ginny?"

"I guess I didn't."

"Selling it to the Stanleys, the boy and the two nephews. We're gonna live there through harvest, but they bought the crops in the field, too."

"The house?"

"House and everything. We got a trailer down in Bradenton, Florida, for the winter, and then next spring, Dad's gonna buy us a place up near Hayward, Wisconsin, for the fishing. A nice little two-bedroom cabin on a lake, or something like that. They got some places up there with two or three little cottages for when the grandkids come." She stretched out her legs and stared at them for a moment. Nothing big or fancy. There's just the two of us."

"We'll be sorry to see you go.

"I'll miss some people."

One of the Livingstone sons had been killed in Vietnam, the other in a car accident between Pike and Zebulon Center. I wondered why neither of the daughters wanted the farm, with land prices going so high, but that could be a touchy subject, so I didn't say anything.

Mary looked at me. "It was Marv Carson who told us what a good time it is to sell. We've got more than a million dollars now. Can you believe that? I never thought I'd see that. We kept some out for new places to live, and a new car, but we put the rest in these treasury bills." My gaze followed hers over to Linda and the boys. Linda was laughing, and the boys were, too. Mary said, "We never had savings before. One time in the Depression, all we had was a dollar to last us a week. That was right after we got married, before Annabeth was born.

You know Annabeth's girl is going to Grinnell, now?

Smart girl."

"Sounds like you have a lot of good news, Mary."

"Oh, I don't know. We'll see if it's good. How's your dad?" She gave me a piercing look, and I wondered if she had seen him on one of his odysseys. I said he was fine.

"How about Rose? I heard Rose got cancer. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Pammy wince. I said, "She's fine. She's really made a good recovery. ' Pammy took off her sunglasses, folded them, wrapped them in her towel, and tucked them inside her swimming bag. Then she said, in an even voice, "Aunt Ginny, I'm going to go swim now." She went over to a spot along the edge of the pool about ten feet from Doreen Patrick and her group, and dove in.

Mary said, "These girls know about Rose's cancer, don't they? I didn't mean-" "Of course they knew about it, but Rose has kept it very quiet.

I'm sure she wants them to know it's there, but not to think about it."

"I always thought-I always thought kids on farms should be made to face facts early on. That's their only hope, seems to me.

We watched the swimmers and sunbathers and I thought about this. Had I faced all the facts? It seemed like I had, but actually, you never know, just by remembering, how many facts there were to have faced.

Your own endurance might be a pleasant fiction allowed you by others who've really faced the facts. The eerie feeling this thought gave me made me shiver in the hot wind.

Mary said, "We might not see you before we leave. Dad isn't much for going around and saying good-bye, and I'm not, either."

"It isn't for months yet. I'm sure"Well, I want to tell you something."

"Oh."

"This thing with Rose reminds me. You girls were about this age when your mom was sick, and your mom used to call me. She was afraid she would die, so afraid."

I didn't know what to say. It was a remark that shouldn't have shocked me-aren't we all afraid to die-but did, because I remembered her illness and death as very sober, almost muffled. When Rose and I cried, we did it under the covers in her bed or mine, with the corners of our pillows stuffed into our mouths. We did most of our crying during the sickness, and what we told each other was that if our mother saw us cry, it would scare her and disturb her.

"I said I would help."

"Pardon me?"

"She was so afraid for you girls, and I said I would help. I said I would be a real friend to you.

"No one can help a dying personShe looked at me. After a moment, she said, "Ginny, your mother wasn't afraid for herself. She was never afraid for herself. She had true faith. She was afraid for you. For the life you would live after she died."

In the long silence after this, Linda and the boys got out of the pool and headed for us. By the rope, Pammy was at last talking to Doreen Patrick. As I watched, Doreen smiled at something Pammy said, and Pammy smiled, too, with good humor but also with relief.

Her fears were not being realized, and she appreciated that. When Linda reached us, before Mary could say anything, I handed her a couple of dollars and said, "They have Popsicles at the snack bar.

Would you boys like a Popsicle? Take them for Popsicles, sweetie, and then we'll talk about what's next. And don't forget, you have to stay in the snack area with food."

When they were out of earshot, Mary went on, She knew what your father was like, even though I think she loved him." Her gaze traveled over my face. After a moment, she went on, "For one thing, she wanted you to have more choices. I know she wanted you to go to college. She never wanted you to marry so young, before seeing some other places and trying some other things. She used to say, 'The Twin Cities aren't such a big deal. The Twin Cities aren't the New Jerusalem!" Then she would throw her head back and laugh.

She had a great laugh when she let it out." Mary looked at me then, and I'm sure she could see the tears standing in my eyes. She said, "Lord, Ginny, I shouldn't have brought this up, but I did promise to be a friend to you, and to try and give you some of the things your mom wanted you to have, but then Jimmy had his accident, and I could hardly move myself, I was so, uh, so, well, it almost killed me. So I let it go. I have to say that before I leave here, even though it must hurt you. I've just thought about it every day for years and years."

I said, "It's okay, Mary. I was just wondering what facts there were that I haven't faced. Anyway, I don't know that I would have had a different life if Mom had lived. Daddy didn't make me marry Ty. I wanted to. And he's very nice."

"Well, his father was a nice man, though I never knew Ty at all.

There was another thing, too-" She eyed me. I said, "What was that?"

Our gazes locked. Finally, she said, "Oh, I don't know. Nothing really."

I found myself a touch disconcerted, so I said, "Rose went to college.

She had the choices Mom wanted, and she chose the farm.

Caroline chose the city, and she's been everywhere now, New York, Washington. So, in a way, Mom really got what she wanted."

Mary smiled. "Maybe so, dear. She was most worried about you.

She used to say, 'Ginny won't stand up to him," but if you're happy, then it's all worked out. I'll say one thing, and that is that you're a good girl, and unselfish, and you will be rewarded. I believe that."

"Thanks, Mary." I picked up Pammy's towel and scrubbed my face with it. Linda returned with the boys, both of them streaked with red Popsicle drippings. Mary heaved to her feet, saying, "Come on, you two. You need to be dipped in the pool." Then she smiled at Linda, a genuine approving smile, and said, "You're a sweet child, Linda. You tell your mom that Mary said so." She walked away.

"Toby's cute," said Linda, almost regretfully.

I said, "You were nice to watch them."

"It was okay. I wish Mom would let me baby-sit, but nobody nearby has any babies, and she said if she had to drive me, she would charge me mileage."

"That sounds like a joke to me.

She rolled her eyes. "Maybe. You can't really tell with Mom.

Anyway, she thinks I'm too young.

I realized that I was almost panting, and I consciously steadied my breath. Linda scanned the pool, then went back to her Teen magazine.

I said, "I'm going for a dip." She nodded without looking up.

The water was chilly and refreshing, and I felt the pressure of my mother and her fears for me like a ballooning, impinging presence.

My mother died before I knew her, before I liked her, before I was old enough for her to be herself with me. As a mother, her manner was matter-of-fact and brisk. I used to watch her feeding Caroline and changing her diapers, lifting her out of messes and trouble. She did everything quickly and never lingered affectionately over these operations, though she could be gently teasing or humorous, joking with even the youngest and most oblivious infant. She bottle-fed Caroline and I'm sure she bottle-fed us, in spite of the fact that farmwives never willingly take on extra work, and her demeanor during the feedings was rather impersonal as I later recalled it. There was no melding with the child into symbiotic fleshy warmth. Her dresses, even her housedresses, were structured and public-seeming, with tucks and darts, decorative buttons and applique work. The span of her motherhood was a short one, just over a decade, only a moment, really, no time for evolution. I have noticed that a mother left eternally young through death comes to seem as remote as your own young self.

It's as easy to judge her misapprehensions and mistakes as it is to judge your own, and to fall into a habit of disrespect, as if all her feelings must have been as shallow and jejeune as you think yours used to be.

That that young woman foresaw my life so clearly unnerved me, as if something intensely private had suddenly been exposed and discussed by people I barely knew. Simultaneously, I recognized and pitied her frustration and fear. That is another bequest from an earlydying parent, her image ever more childlike and powerless compared to your own advancing age.

I hadn't actually made the parallel between Rose's situation and my mother's, no doubt because my main thoughts during Rose's treatment had been selfish ones-my life's companion, little Rose, always four to my six, the way she was when I first became really conscious of her (when I first became really conscious). But of course, when you thought about it, Rose was quite like my mother in many ways-her manner, her looks, even, in part, the name (Ann Rose Amundson-while I swam I formed my mother's maiden name with my lips). Virginia-that was a pretentious name for our family, taken from a book, as was Caroline.

But even though I felt her presence, I also felt the habitual fruitlessness of thinking about her. Her images, partly memories of her, partly memories of photos I had seen of her, yielded no new answers to old mysteries. For a moment I toyed with a magic solution-that Rose, in herself in her reincarnation of our mother, would speak, or act out, the answers. All I had to do was be mindful of the relationship between them (mindful in secret, in a way no one else could be mindful), and gather up the answers, glean the apparently harvested field for overlooked bits. But no. There could be a quest -I might go around to people we knew, or who had known her, and ask them about her. I could, maybe, call her brother ii, Arizona or New Mexico, if he was still alive, if someone dimly remembered the town he used to live in. I could ask my father about her. I could become her biographer, be drawn into her life, and into excuses for her or blame of her, but that seemed like an impractical, laborious, and failing substitute for what I had missed in the last twenty-two years. I was, after all, my hither's daughter, and I automatically did believe in the unbroken surface of the unsaid. After seven laps, I hauled myself out of the water and sat in the hot wind. I noticed that Pammy had peeled away from Doreen Patrick's group and rejoined Linda. Her polka-dotted sunglasses were firmly in place.

There was no reason to go home. The weather was relentless, and I didn't look forward to the hot night to come. Our house had a few shade trees close to it, but my father's house was stationed proudly up a little rise, four or live feet, but the only rise in the area, adjacent to an equally proud stand of ornamental evergreens that looked nice but did nothing for the heat. You could see his roof radiant tin, from a good ways off but if it warded off the heat, I wasn't aware of it.

Even so, sitting around the pool felt like a kind of penance. Pammy said nothing about Doreen Patrick, nor about anyone else, but she raked the area ceaselessly with her gaze, stopping and staring for a few seconds, then starting again. Once or twice she picked up her book, but she couldn't stick with it. Linda finished her magazine and went to play by herself in the water. I couldn't read for the glare, so I sat for a while at the edge of the shallow end and dangled my feet.

What Rose and I once did in our pond, simply float on our backs for what seemed like hours, soaking up the coolness of the water and living in the blue of the sky, was impossible here. There were too many hurtling bodies. There was nowhere to be privately, contemplatively immersed, one of summer's joys. The energy we had brought with us, the expectation of fun, seeped away, and left us even more listlessly reluctant to go home.

It was nearly six when we got into the car. The pool was still crowded; Pike was deserted, air conditioners humming, blinds drawn.

Occasional grills on patios ventilated eastward-pointing arrows of smoke. I felt shocked and dull. Supper, Daddy, Rose wondering when the children would be getting home, Ty's patience, all seemed exceptionally remote. The girls sat quietly, both in the backseat.

Pammy's sunglasses had been put carefully in their case, and she was holding that in her hand. I knew that all children had certain precious belongings, odd things that represented happiness to them, but the way she cradled that case in her hand seemed poignant to me, emblematic of some sort of deprivation that she could feel but not define, or, maybe, admit to. I must have sighed, because Linda sat forward and said, "We had a good time, Aunt Ginny. Anyway, next time, I'm going to call someone and ask them to meet me there."

WHEN WE G0T H0ME, Ty and Pete were installing a new room air conditioner in one of the north-facing windows of our living room.

They were just setting it on the platform they had nailed out from the windowsill, lifting and grunting and telling each other what to do. I herded the girls into the kitchen, where I found Rose drying the last lettuce of the season for a salad. She said, "Jess's coming over at seven. I fed Daddy. He was bound and determined to eat smack on the dot at live, even though I told him he should come over here and eat with all of us."

"It's your night to have him at your house."

"Yes, and this is what I decided that our family was going to do.

You know, it's pretty crazy to have to do the same thing every Friday, week after week, same food, same time. It would have been good for him-" She looked at me. I must have had some look on my face, because she said, "He's rigid like this because we've let him be."

Then she said, "He's fed, okay?"

I nodded.

She went on. And I made hamburgers. They're in the refrigerator. The grill is going, so we can put them on anytime." The girls crowded against her and she pecked the tops of their heads.

I said, "New air conditioner?"

"Almost new. There was an ad in the paper. Ty drove over to Zebulon Center to pick it up. He said he saw you at the pool, but he couldn't get your attention."

I must have looked doubtful, because she said, "Don't say anything about sinus passages or getting used to the heat, the way Daddy does.

People shouldn't be so hot. It's bad for them and it's dangerous."

Pammy started picking at the salad. Rose let her take one cherry tomato, then shooed her away. 'Go on outside and wash your hair under the outside spigot. With shampoo. I can smell the chlorine." Pammy shuffled away. She looked the way I felt, used u p but strengthened by the unaccustomed exercise, already aimed toward a good night's sleep.

I said, "They were good. Mary Livingstone came over and made Linda-" when the phone rang. Rose opened the refrigerator and took out a plate of thick patties, and I picked up the receiver. It was Caroline.

The Sunday that I'd sworn to call her had gone by without me calling her. For one thing, I hadn't been able to get over my reluctance about calling her at the office. And then the evenings had been swept up in the Monopoly games. And then I'd persuaded myself that she'd call when she felt like it. Out driving three times, I had vowed to call her as soon as I got home, but then my hand never went to the phone. All of these rationalizations smote me as soon as I heard her voice. But her "hello" sounded normal and even happy. I said, "Oh, hello, Caroline.

I tried to call you." Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Rose stiffen.

Caroline said, "Is Daddy okay?"

"Well, sure. Rose just was over there giving him his supper. How are you?"

"We're fine. Do you know where Daddy was yesterday?"

"Well, no. I don't keep tabs-" "Well, I was in New York for two days, and when I got back this evening, there was a note on my desk saying, 'Your father came in looking for you at eleven."

"Did you try to call him and ask him?"

Now there was a long silence on the other end of the line. Rose, who had gone outside and put the burgers on the grill, came in with a slam of the screen door, and I raised my eyebrows. She mouthed, "What's going on?" and just then, Caroline said, "Yeah, I did. I tried to call him twice, and both times he wouldn't talk to me. Once he listened for a few minutes but didn't say anything, and the second time he hung up as soon as he heard my voice. Then he wouldn't answer the phone, even though I let it ring thirty times." She sounded embarrassed.

I said, "That's so silly. But are they sure it was Daddy?"

"I assume so, but I can't ask anyone about it till Monday."

"Just a minute." I put my hand over the mouthpiece and told Rose the story. She pursed her lips and shrugged, but went outside carrying the barbecue spatula without saying anything. Ty pushed open the door to the living room and exclaimed, "All done! Where's the beer?" To Caroline, I said, "What?"

She said, "Did you and Rose sign the papers?"

For a moment I was confused and I said, "What papers?"

"The incorporation papers and the transfer papers.

"Oh." I was struck by the coolness of her tone.

She didn't say anything.

I went on, "Well, sure we did. Of course we did. We didn't have any choice."

There was another silence, then she said evenly, "I think you did."

Jess Clark walked in the back door, slamming the screen, and Pammy called for a towel. I could hear Caroline waiting for me to say something, but a molasses feeling of fatigue rendered me unable to rise to the complexities of what it might be. Finally I said, "Caroline, it's a madhouse here. Let me call you later. Or call me and tell me what they say about Daddy's visit."

She said, "Okay," very coolly.

I said, "I mean it. Don't forget." But she was gone by that time.

Jess went on into the living room, and the back door opened almost immediately. It was Rose, who sniffed, "What did she have to say?"

"Are you and Caroline having a light?"

"You'll have to ask her that."

"Well, I'm asking you." Once in a while, I could pull some oldest sister rank.

"I didn't think we were.

"Until?"

"Well, it's been two weeks since my three-month exam, and I haven't heard a word from her. She never called to ask how I was.

In fact, I've thought her attitude from the beginning has been pretty casual."

"She sent flowers and came to visit."

"One time, when she was coming up for the weekend anyway.

There were three or four women outside the family who were more attentive than that."

"She's very busy."

Rose pulled a long, skeptical face. "According to her."

"She said Daddy came to her office yesterday." I thought this would distract her.

"What for?"

"She doesn't know. She was in New York."

Rose mimicked me. "She was in New York."

"Rose!"

"Well, she's always somewhere, isn't she? She's the one who got away, isn't she?"

"I thought we were glad about that. She's not interested in farming.

Rose leaned against the counter and gazed at me. I let her. After a moment, her hand fluttered up toward the empty side of her chest, and she placed it back on the counter, then picked up the salad with both hands. Finally, she said, "When we are good girls and accept our circumstances, we're glad about it." She walked toward the dining-room door and pushed it partly open, then said, "When we are bad girls, it drives us crazy.

I went out and checked the burgers. They were plenty done, a little overdone, in fact, and I began lifting them off the grill. The wind and the high June sun were relentless. The two-foot corn plants fanning away from the other side of the yard looked bleached from the glare, and the ground between them was dusty, even though there had been enough rain this year. I was dumbfounded at the anger that had sprung up around me in the last ten minutes. It was all so easy to imagine: Daddy stalking into Hooker, Williams, Crockett in his boots and overalls and making a fuss, then Caroline being pierced with fear when she found out; Rose silently waiting for Caroline to perform a duty that everyone but she had forgotten about; Caroline incubating her wish that we not sign the transfer papers until it turned into a conviction. She was a lawyer, so it was easy to imagine her cross-examining me, and I fell into defending myself: He wanted us to do it, and why shouldn't we do it?

You could have opened the door and come in, even after Daddy closed it (slammed it?).

I didn't want the farm, but others did, and anyway it was Daddy's idea.

And we can't watch him every minute, either. He's got a driver's license and two vehicles.

There's bound to be some adjustment as his life changes.

We should all stick together instead of getting suspicious of each other.

"You going to bring those slabs of meat inside? People are beginning to wonder where you are."

I jumped. It was Jess Clark, smiling from the open kitchen door.

"I was gathering wool as well as hamburgers."

"Well, come into the living room. You'll be amazed."

"Cool?"

"By contrast."

He wrapped his hand around the back of my arm as I stepped through the door. I said, "Remember this day. This is the day when everything I was worried about came to pass.

"Really?"

I could tell by his face that he didn't know what I was talking about.

I said, "It's too complicated to go into. Just remember that I knew it all ahead of time."

"If you say so.

I pushed through the door into the dim coolness of the dining room.

Every laughing face turned toward me and I held out the plate of hamburgers. In the refreshing coolness, we ate with appetite and joked over our food in a way that was new for us. Pete was laughing and showing off the way Jess seemed to get him to do. Ty expanded into a bemused host, dishing up seconds for everyone and teasing Pammy and Linda, who ate everything they were given without complaint. Rose had three of everything-she was talking too much to notice what I was putting on her plate, and whatever she found there, she ate. No annoyed looks, no studied rejection of my concern.

It was great cover, this mealtime sociability, and it lasted and lasted.

We were still at the table, talking, at ten o'clock. I couldn't help watching Jess, who was sitting at the head. He looked handsome and animated, as if he were really having a good time, and glad of it. Of course, it was clear to me that he carried the good time with him.

When the time came for him to leave, he would carry it away, back to the West Coast.

On Sunday after church, when we gathered at Daddy's for our annual Father's Day dinner, the contrast was clear. Daddy was sitting at the head of the table, and he was not having a good time. The crown pork roast that Shorty Humboldt over at the locker had fashioned for me sat heavily on the white tablecloth, surrounded by ickles and roasted potatoes and a big bowl of peas from the garden.

and Pammy were poking each other angrily under the table, and Pete was in the kitchen getting another beer-I could hear the refrigerator door open and close. Rose said, "You want me to carve it, Daddy? You just go down between the bones."

"I know that."

"I know you do."

"Well, then, don't tell me what to do."

"I wasn't-" But she caught my eye and shut up, as if I had cast her a glance of some kind. Ty said, "These potatoes look great."

Linda said, "What're those little sticks on them?"

I said, "That's rosemary. It's good. It's an herb."

Ty said, "Ginny's been reading the paper again."

Rose said, "Mommy put rosemary in potatoes. I remember because I paid attention to the name of it. It's good on meat, too."

It was exhausting just to hold ourselves at the table, magnets with our northern poles pointing into the center of the circle. You felt a palpable sense of relief when you gave up and let yourself fall away from the table and wound up in the kitchen getting something, or in the bathroom running the water and splashing it on your face.

The funny thing was that this discomfort was not new, but I recognized it newly. Normally I would have attributed it to the heat or the work of having a big dinner on the table by one o'clock or some argument between Pete and Daddy or Rose being in one of her moods. I would have accommodated its inevitability and been glad enough to get home and have Ty say, "Not too bad. Food was good. That's what's important."

Normally I would have reacted like any farmer-trying to look out for the pitfalls and drop-offs ahead of time, trying to be philosophical about them afterwards. We only did this sort of thing three times a year (at Easter we went to the church supper).

But now I saw with fresh conviction that it was us, all of us, who were failing, and the hallmark of our failure was the way we ate with our heads down, hungrily, quickly, because there was nothing else to do at the table.

Daddy spoke up. "Corn down in Story County was all ripped to shreds by that storm."

It was a freak storm that had dropped golf-ball-size hail in the late afternoon, then turned around and come back through, from the northeast, about four hours later. It had passed south of us, so that all we saw was the lightning in the distance. Wednesday. The thought occurred to Rose and me simultaneously and we looked at each other.

Ty said, "You hate spending the money for hail insurance, but there must be guys kicking themselves down there now."

Pete said, "You can't prepare for a storm like that. The paper said that was a really oddball storm."

Daddy set down his pork bone and wiped his lingers on his napkin.

He said, "You don't have to prepare for a storm like that. A regular storm will do plenty of damage if there's hail."

Obviously.

Pete turned red.

Rose said, "What were you doing down in Story County, Daddy?"

Daddy dished himself potatoes and then spooned a dollop of hot pepper pickles next to them. He picked a slice of meat off the serving plate.

I said, "When was that, Thursday? Wasn't that storm Wednesday afternoon?"

Daddy said, "No law against taking a little ride now and then."

Rose said, "With this gasoline shortage, there might be one one of these days."

"Well there isn't one now." He spoke sharply. They glared at each other. Pete said, "We ought to be saving our gas. It's going to be the end of the month soon, and Jimmy Carter hasn't done a thing about those truckers striking. If we ran alcohol, we wouldn't have a thing to worry about."

Daddy said, "We aren't going to run alcohol." He clearly meant it as the last word on the issue.

I said, "Daddy, did you go all the way to Des Moines?"

"What if I did?"

Now the glare was for me. It shone into me like a hot beam of sunlight. I couldn't think of anything to say. What if he did? What if he did?

Rose said, "Caroline was wondering, that's all."

"You girls talk plenty on that long distance."

He hated the idea of us talking about him, probably because he knew that we always did, couldn't help it, couldn't stop it. I said, "She was worried about it, that's all."

"I didn't say I did go to Des Moines, did I?"

I said, "No."

"Well, then." He helped himself to the peas.

At bedtime, Ty said, "You women don't understand your father at all."

I had washed the sheets that day, and I was making up the bed. I said, "Flip that corner over the mattress, would you?" He tucked the corner of the contour sheet, then smoothed out the lumps. He was wearing only his underwear, ready to climb into bed. His shoulders were wide and muscular. His upper arms were casually brawny, split in half white and golden red, by a sharp tan line. His wrists were as thick as his forearms, which were covered with hair that had whitened in the sun.

He was smiling.

I said, "Then we have something in common with him, because he clearly doesn't understand himself."

"He understands himself fine. He's just secretive, is all."

"And what are his secrets?"

"Well, I think one of them is that he's afraid of his daughters."

"That's a good one." I folded the blanket at the end of the bed. I doubted that we would need it. Ty slipped under the sheet. "What has he got to fear? He's got everyone on this place under his thumb."

"Not any more.

"You mean because of the transfer? We all know that's a legal fiction.

He is this place. Rose and I run around in a panic every time he cocks an eyebrow. All he has to do is turn up mysteriously in Caroline's office, and she's on the phone, asking questions. Most of the time, I forget the transfer even took place."

"He doesn't."

"Well, then, he should untransfer it. I don't care." I was stepping out of my shorts. Ty's look caught me and held me. It said that he cared, and that the decision was mine, and that all he could do, finally, was stand back and let me make the decision. The freight of his look was seventeen years of unspoken knowledge that he had married up and been obliged to prove his skills worthy of not a hundred and sixty acres, but a thousand acres. He said, "I still think the transfer was a smart move, taxwise, and otherwise, too. Marv Carson thinks it was real smart." His voice was careful. I laid my shorts on the dresser and pulled my shirt over my head. Ty said, "But you women could handle it better. You could handle him better. You don't always have to take issue. You ought to let a lot of things slide."

I thought about this. I said, "You're right. I don't understand him.

But I think a lot of the taking issue that you see is just us trying to ligure out how to understand him better. I feel like there's treacherous undercurrents all the time. I think I'm standing on solid ground, but then I discover that there's something moving underneath it, shifting from place to place. There's always some mystery. He doesn't say what he means.

"He says what he means. You two always read something into it, whatever it is. Rose does it more than you."

I put on a short cotton nightgown and buttoned one of the buttons.

Ty propped himself up on his elbow and folded back the sheet for me.

It was reassuring and calming to enter his space, the circle of strength radiating from his shoulders and arms. This was something we had always done fairly well-disagree without lighting. We did this better than sex.

Ty lay back, pulling my head into the crook of his shoulder. For a few moments, I could feel us staring up at the ceiling together. He said, "He's irritable. He doesn't like to be challenged or brought up short.

But he's a good farmer. Everyone respects him and looks up to him.

When he states an opinion, people listen. Good times and bad times roll off him all the same. That's a rare thing." Ty's voice rounded and deepened in my ear. Real enthusiasm. We continued to look up at the ceiling, solidly against one another, head to toe. In a few moments, he was asleep.

Wide awake, I tried to remember my father. Ty's views were not new to me. When he, on rare occasions, found himself angry at my father, I repeated many of the same things back to him, to remind him how much he had learned from my father, for one thing. On the other hand, I thought, I had been with my father so constantly for so long that I knew less and less about him with every passing year. Every meaningful image was jumbled together with the countless moments of our daily life, defeating my efforts to gain some perspective. The easiest things to remember were events I had only heard about: When my father was seventeen, for example, and lights on the farm ran off a gasoline-powered generator, my father was down in the cellar looking for something and was overcome by fumes. He managed to stagger to the stairs and fall upward far enough so that his hand poked out of the doorway into the kitchen. Grandpa Cook came in a few minutes later and dragged him outside into the fresh air.

Or there was the time, when he was ten, that some boys at the school chased him with willow switches. When he got far enough away from them, he turned to face their taunting, picked up a sizable rock, and beaned the ringleader right on the forehead, knocking him unconscious.

The teacher took Daddy's side, as did the rest of the gang, who were impressed by his aim, and the injured boy was suspended from school for two weeks.

When Mommy, who was visiting a school friend in Mason City, wouldn't dance with him at a church dance, Daddy got the manager of a local men's store, someone he knew only by name, to leave the dance and sell him a new suit of clothes, including underwear, socks, shoes, and fedora. He looked so dapper in them, Mommy would say, that she didn't want to dance with anyone else the rest of the night.

He was handsome. I could remember that.

When he smiled or laughed with Harold or some of the other farmers, you felt drawn to him.

Suddenly and clearly I remembered the accident Harold Clark had with his truck. It was an early memory; possibly I was six or seven.

I certainly hadn't thought of it in years, because it passed the way grown-up events do when you are a child-dreamlike phenomena that happen without warning and vanish without explanation. I was in our truck alone, playing with my dolls. Possibly Daddy didn't know I was there.

At any rate, he ran from the house to the truck.

Mommy was behind him, at the door, holding it open and shouting something, and then we were careening across fields and I was huddled down, bouncing in the corner of the box. There was Harold's truck, navy blue, rounded, a white grille like big teeth, and then we were there, and Harold lay on the ground below his truck, and the back wheel was on top of him, as if cutting him in two at the hips.

It was a frightening sight and I screamed, but for once Daddy didn't get angry with me. He took a board out of the back of Harold's truck and he laid it down, then he set me on one end of it, put a whiskey bottle in my hand, and he said, "You tiptoe over to Harold and you give him something to drink, because he needs it, and you let him keep that, and then tiptoe back." It was a strange accident, from which Harold escaped with only abrasions: he had been taking some tiling pipe out of his truck to set it beside a ditch. The ditch was full of thick watery mud, and the truck had rolled back, knocking Harold down, then pinning him in the ooze. Daddy and some other farmers who appeared shortly had to pull Harold's truck off him.

Afterwards there was a lot of laughter, but I felt the real moment had been mine, tiptoeing with my lifesaving burden along the six-inch-wide board, watching Harold's face greet my approach with welcome relief and hearing Daddy say, "That's a girl. Just a ways longer. Good girl.

That's a good girl."

I closed my eyes and felt tears sparking under the eyelids. Now that I remembered that little girl and that young, running man, I couldn't imagine what had happened to them.

HARoLD CLARK PR0M0TED his own local reputation of garrulous thoughtlessness. While many, even most, farmers I knew were laconic and uncomplaining, Harold talked ofhimself often, and always as if he were almost but not quite two people-the one who had a lot of "great ideas" (Harold put the quotes around the words himself every time he spoke them) and the dubious one, too, the one who knew none of these ideas would ever pan out. Part of him was always luring the other part of him along on some iffy undertaking, and part of him was always telling stories at the expense of the other part. What it all added up to was that things around the Clark farm, according to Harold, were perennially at the brink of disintegration, while public opinion had it that really Harold was a better manager, and more prosperous, than anyone. My father put it more succinctly.

He would say, "The body of Harold's truck may be muddy, but the engine is clean as a whistle. He doesn't want you to know that, though."

The uncharacteristic flaunting of his new tractor, at the pig roast, was quickly followed by complaints, which Jess faithfully relayed to us. They spent three days adjusting the idle and another three days fiddling with the power take-off. Harold didn't like the placement of the radio-above on the left. He wished it was above on the right.

For his final complaint, "a complaint to last a lifetime," as Jess called it, he didn't like the transmission. Ty said, "He's right.

Those I.H transmissions are really old-fashioned. If he'd asked someone besides the I.H dealer, he would have found out that shifting in a Deere is like silk now. Shifting those Harvesters takes three men and a fat oy." He held out his hand, and Rose, who had just landed on North Carolina, two houses, counted out his rent.

"That's not the point," said Jess, kneading the dice in his palm, then throwing them. "Actually, this is perfect for him. He can stress what a fool he was for buying that tractor for the next twenty years now.

"Daddy will help him," said Rose.

"Harold will love that," said Jess. "You know what comes out of their talks, don't you?" He slapped his race car past Go and Ty gave him two hundred dollars. He bought a house for New York Avenue and placed it carefully in the orange strip. "They always end up agreeing that Harold has done something crazy, or that Larry was right in the first place. And then Harold lets drop some detail, about money, or bushels per acre, that shows that in spite of his foolishness, he outdid everybody. That he's such a good farmer that he has a whole lot more leeway than the average guy.

I said, "I never looked at it that way.

"That's because he's tricked you, too," said Jess. "Now that I'm back, after all those years away, I'm really amazed at how good Harold is at manipulating the way people think of him."

"What's the reward, though?" said Pete. "He doesn't get the kind of respect other farmers do. People laugh at him. When you're over at the feedstore, and someone sees his truck drive in, it's, oh, there's Harold Clark. And they're grinning already."

"And he comes in with some story, right? He's going to do something crazy, and ugly, too, like surround the house with hay bales, foundation to roofline, then tack polyethylene sheets over them with laths."

"Or he's going to pour cement over the entire farmyard from the house to the barn. He did say that last year. Pete grinned, and I landed on Luxury Tax. Pammy was reading an old Nancy Drew I had found in the attic. She sensed me watching her, and looked up, smiled, and nodded.

It was The Ghost of Blackwood Hall, my old favorite. Linda had fallen asleep with her crocheting in her hand. For a week she had been laboriously crocheting a doll sweater.

"No," saidJess. "That laughter is the point. If they respected him, then he'd have less privacy. All that foolishness is like a smokescreen.

People let down their guard. They're generous with him, too, because they feel a little superior. I mean, neighbor ladies bring Harold and Loren a hotdish once or twice a week. And I'm not saying that he laughs at people behind their backs, or is rubbing his hands with glee at duping them. That's not what I'm getting at. It's just that he's cannier and smarter than he lets on, and in the slippage between what he looks like and what he is, there's a lot of freedom."

"Sounds good," said Rose, "but meanwhile, I own Park Place, and it looks like you owe me a bundle."

"I owe you everything, Rose." He leered at her.

"Don't push me." She laughed.

I couldn't help looking at Jess, a little surprised at his analysis of Harold. Maybe it wasn't true, but truth wasn't what attracted me.

It was the plausibility of such a plan, the perfect way such a plan could deflect the neighbors' knowledge of you. It was such a lovely word, that last word, "freedom," a word that always startled and refreshed me when I heard it. I didn't think of it as having much to do with my life, or the life of anyone I knew-and yet maybe Harold was having some, feeling some.

"So," said Pete. "I was at the feedstore yesterday, too, when Harold came in with another bright idea."

We started grinning.

"What was that?" said Ty.

"He said he was thinking about changing his will."

There was the briefest of silences, the briefest but the most total, and then Jess said, "Uh oh," and laughed. We all knew what everyone was thinking, that Harold would change the will in favor of Jess (assuming that the present will favored Loren, which Harold, of course, had never actually said, but which had become what people "knew" Harold had done), but Jess said, "He's probably going to leave the place to the Nature Conservancy so that they can restore it to its natural wetlands condition."

Ty said, "What's the Nature Conservancy?"

"They buy land and conserve it." Jess looked at Ty in that merry but aggressive way. "Take it out of production, you know."

"God forbid," said Ty.

We didn't say any more about Harold's will, but late in the evening, after Rose and Pete had taken Pammy and Linda home, Jess lingered before stepping off the porch. He said to Ty, "You know that land you have down by Henry Grove? What's the guy been growing on it?"

"Straight corn for the last four years. Before that he had some beans on it.

"Fall plow or spring plow?"

"Fall. And there isn't a house. I let him bulldoze the house and fill in the well about seven years ago. You could live in town, though.

Henry Grove's only a couple of miles away.

"So he's really worked the shit out of that land."

Ty looked out toward the dim glow of Cabot on the western horizon, for a long moment, and ran his forefinger around the corner of his mouth.

I could tell he was offended. Finally, he said, "It's good land.

Michael Rakosi hasn't done anything with it I might not have done. He likes clean fields, is all."

Jess smiled, also realizing that Ty was offended, and said, "I'm not meaning to criticize. If I did farm, I'd try some things. A lot of them probably wouldn't work. I'd probably ask your advice all the time. I'd probably farm out of a book a lot. That used to be Harold's worst insult, he'd say, 'That guy, he farms straight out of a book."

But for me, it wouldn't be worth it, really, unless I was trying some of the stuff I learned out west."

"Well, maybe." Ty smiled.

At breakfast, Ty was mild but insistent. He kept saying, "People don't realize that there isn't any room any more for something that might not work out. I mean, when his income comes solely from the farm, and he's got to make up his mind about the fuel and the time for another pass through the beans, or maybe getting forty-three bushels an acre instead of forty-seven. It's all very well to talk about ten acres of black walnut trees, and then harvesting them for veneer in thirty years at ten thousand dollars a tree, but what about the lost production for that thirty years? It's more complicated than people think, just reading books."

I said, "Are you talking to yourself or to me?"

He looked up from his plate and grinned at me. "Hell, Ginny, this morning there's a whole peanut gallery."

"He wasn't criticizing you. You don't have to feel criticized."

"Yes and no. He doesn't/eel critical, and he wants to be our friend, but he wouldn't do things our way, and he probably wouldn't have us do things our way, truth to tell."

"Maybe, but there's room for lots of ways, isn't there?"

He sat back and wiped his mouth, then pushed back his chair and stood up. Outside, the day was beginning to lighten. He said, "Well, sure, in principle. I sometimes wonder how that principle works in action, though. Anyway, I am going to have another pass through the beans in Mel's corner, because there's a terrible stand of cockleburs that's gotten all over in there." He gave my arm a little squeeze and went out the door.

AFTER Ty LEFT, it took me half an hour to get myself down to my father's. Lots of little things needed picking up, and, in fact, our late nights were beginning to tell on my mornings. I knew Daddy would be annoyed at having to wait for his breakfast. Now that I was no longer cooking for Rose, he wanted it slap on the table at six, even though there were no fields he was hurrying to get to. I dawdled. I mulled over the idea that if he slept later and ate later, then he wouldn't have so much time to fill during the day. I let myself get a little irritated with him, but what I really did was put off seeing him. The memory of Caroline's call, which I should have returned Monday but didn't, had jarred me awake before Ty the early bird had rolled out of bed to check the hogs.

The fact was, Daddy couldn't keep driving around all over the county and even the state, looking for trouble. Retired farmers were supposed to spend their time at the cafe in town, giving free advice, or they were supposed to breed irises or roses or Jersey cows or something.

They were supposed to watch the polls during elections and go fishing, or work part-time at the hardware store.

Except that the thought of Daddy doing any of these sociable, trivial, or, you might say, pleasant things was absurd. He himself had always ridiculed farmers in retirement, and spoken with respect, even envy, of Ty's father's heart attack in the hog pen. Yes, it was freshly evident that he had impulsively betrayed himself by handing over the farm.

That annoyed me, too. I kicked off my slippers and put on my Keds as if I were really going to let him have it.

As I walked down the road, I could see Pete back his silver Ford pickup out of the driveway and turn south. I waved, and his arm shot out of the driver's window and arced a greeting in return. Mostly when you pass farmers on the road, they acknowledge you with the subtlest of signals-a linger lifted off the steering wheel, or even a lifted eyebrow. Pete was a hearty waver. It made him seem a little too eager to please, the way his silver pickup made him seem a little too flashy.

I was appreciating those things about Pete lately, though.

Instead of seeing him in the old way, less competent and reliable than Ty, too volatile and even a little silly, I saw that he did his best to lit in and do his job, and also that his failure to succeed completely was actually an assertion of a different style more than anything. If he had come from around here, if his father had farmed and he had inherited his father's farm, his relative flamboyance, like his musical talent, would have been something for the neighbors to be a little proud of evidence of native genius rather than suspect strangeness.

Since my talk with Jess the day I planted tomatoes, my sense of the men I knew had undergone a subtle shift. I was less automatically critical-yes, they all had misbehaved, and failed, too, but now I saw that you could also say that they had suffered setbacks, suffered them, and suffered, period. That was the key. I would have said that certainly Rose and I had suffered, too, and Caroline and Mary Livingstone and all the women I knew, but there seemed to be a dumb, unknowing quality to the way the men had suffered, as if like animals, it was not possible for them to gain perspective on their suffering.

They had us, Rose and me, in their suffering, but they didn't seem to have what we had with each other, a kind of ongoing narrative and commentary about what was happening that grew out of our conversations, our rolled eyes, our sighs and jokes and irritated remarks. The result for us was that we found ourselves more or less prepared for the blows that fell-we could at least make that oddly comforting remark, "I knew all along something like this was going to happen." The men, and Pete in particular, always seemed a little surprised, and therefore a little more hurt and a little more damaged, by things that happened-the deaths of prized animals, accidents, my father's blowups and contempt, forays into commodity trading that lost money, even-for Ty-my miscarriages.

Of course he refused to try any more. He had counted on each pregnancy as if there were no history.

And then there was my father. As I stepped off the road onto the yard in front of his house, I sensed him looking down at me, but I didn't look up, I just headed for the back door. His kitchen cabinets were still in the driveway, and I had heard nothing of the couch to be delivered. I reflected as I opened the screen door that speculations about my father were never idle or entertaining, but always something to be flinched from. Certainly he must have suffered, but my mind fled from thoughts of him and took refuge in those of Ty, Pete, and Jess.

He met me at the back door. "It's bright day." His tone was accusing.

It meant, I'm hungry, you've made me wait, and also, you're behind, late, slow. I said, "I had a few things to do."

"At six o'clock in the morning?"

"I just picked up the house a little."

"Hmp."

"Sorry."

He backed away from the door and I entered the mudroom and put on the apron that hung from a hook there. He said, "Nobody shopped over the weekend. There's no eggs."

"Oh, darn. I meant to bring them down. I bought some for you yesterday, but I forgot them." I looked him square in the eye. It was my choice, to keep him waiting or to fail to give him his eggs. His gaze was flat, brassily reflective. Not only wasn't he going to help me decide, my decision was a test. I could push past him, give him toast and cereal and bacon, a breakfast without a center of gravity, or I could run home and get the eggs. My choice would show him something about me, either that I was selfish and inconsiderate (no eggs) or that I was incompetent (a flurry of activity where there should be organized procedure). I did it. I smiled foolishly, said I would be right back, and ran out the door and back down the road.

The whole way I was conscious of my body-graceless and hurrying, unlit, panting, ridiculous in its very femininity. It seemed like my father could just look out of his big front window and see me naked, chest heaving, breasts, thighs, and buttocks jiggling, dignity irretrievable.

Later, after I had cooked the breakfast and he had eaten it, what I marveled at was that I hadn't just gone across the road and gotten some eggs from Rose, that he had given me the test, and I had taken it.

By the time I was frying the bacon and eggs and covertly watching him stare out the living-room window toward our south field, my plan to let him have it seemed liked another silly thing. I couldn't find a voice to speak in, to say, "Were you down in Des Moines Thursday or not?" or "Caroline thought you hung up on her when she called." This is something I do often, this phrasing and rephrasing of sentences in my mind, scaling back assertions and direct questions so that they do not offend, so that they can slip sideways into someone's consciousness without my having really asked them.

It was one thing, Monopoly nights, to sit around and laugh at or deplore some of the things that Daddy and Harold did or said.

It was another to confront the monolith that he seemed to be.

Ty's attitude intruded itself soothing me, counseling me to let things slip over me like water or something else harmless but powerful.

So I served up his food silently and told myself that he wasn't senile-it would be insulting to treat him like a child and make him account for his time and his money. My job remained what it had always been-to give him what he asked of me, and if he showed discontent, to try to find out what would please him. At that moment, standing by the stove with my arms crossed over my chest, waiting to pour him more coffee, that seemed like a simple and almost pleasant task.

I have to say that when I called Caroline at nine, she didn't see things my way at all. Yes, it was Daddy who had been to her office (had there really been any doubt?) and the receptionist who had seen him said he was acting weird. Admittedly she was only nineteen, and she couldn't pinpoint exactly what he was doing that was weird, looking around all the time, gawking at everyone, but more than that, throwing his head around sort of the way an animal does when it is frightened or in pain. I said to Caroline, "Well, we asked him at Sunday dinner whether he'd been down there, and he wouldn't tell us. He's as stubborn and close-mouthed as always. What your receptionist said just doesn't seem to lit, as far as I'm concerned."

Then, because her silence seemed skeptical, "Of course he was drinking.

He'd probably been to a bar, and then in the unfamiliar surroundings-" "He was drinking and driving?"

"Well, yes, I guess so. I mean, I don't know for sure that he was drinking, but it sounds like-" "You can't let him do that."

"What am I supposed to do about it?"

"Talk to him. Take away his keys if you have to."

I laughed.

"Well, it isn't funny."

"The idea of us taking his keys away is funny. He's a grown man.

Anyway, what's he supposed to do all day, watch soap operas? He likes to get out and drive around."

"You said he was drinking."

"I said maybe he was drinking. It sounded like-" "Why isn't he working?"

"Ty and Pete-" "I knew this whole thing would blow up. As soon as those two started running things-" This time I interrupted her. "They aren't preventing him from working. He doesn't want to do anything.

He never goes out to the barn even to stand around. They do everything now, and that isn't easy either."

Caroline was silent for a while, took an audible drink of something, no doubt her coffee. Finally she spoke in a patient, regretful voice.

"It was obvious to me that this whole transfer was so delicate that if it weren't handled just right everything would get screwed up.

They must have made it clear that his help isn't wanted. At the very least, you should have made sure-" "Made sure what? He doesn't want to help. He's tired of farming.

He's taking the only vacation he knows how to take." This sounded good. I thought, try this. "If you think you can do better with him, invite him to stay with you for a while. That would be a real vacation for him, and a nice change of scene."

"You know that's ridiculous."

"All of this is ridiculous." I softened my tone and made it more wheedling, as if I had suggested Caroline take Daddy in a serious way.

"It's a good idea, him coming to visit you. He could get to know Frank the way he knows Pete and Ty." This remark was unusually sly for me, but I let it stand, as if we both didn't know what it meant.

There was another long silence. Finally Caroline said, very angrily, "Honestly, I can't ligure out what is going on here. Two months ago, Daddy was happily farming his own land. Now he's lost everything he had and he's wandering around, trying to ligure out something to do with himself. You all made a big show of reluctance about this, but it's pretty telling, who's benefited and who hasn't.

All this stuff"-her voice mockingly rose an octave-" 'Marv Carson made him do it. It was all Marv Carson's idea." Well, Marv Carson doesn't stand to gain here. I'm sure-" She paused, probably afraid of what she was going to say.

"Say it. You might as well get everything out in the open."

"I'm sure if Frank and I were on the scene, things would have happened a little differently, that's all."

"Do tell."

"I don't know that Daddy's interests have been primary here."

"He did what he wanted. It was me who urged you not to be put off by him, to go along and be a part of things. You could have just apologized to him! You were mad at him!"

"A little tiff doesn't just turn into something as big as this unless there's something else going on. All I know is, Daddy's lost everything, he's acting crazy, and you all don't care enough to do anything about it!" She finished on a ringing note. I said, "Caroline-" but she cut me off by hanging up.