I have to say that Rose and I always felt that Caroline's attitude toward our father was a strange alternation between loyalty and scheming. When she came to take care of him every third weekend, she was solicitous and patient. She cajoled him into watching TV with her, or trying something new for dinner that she brought from Des Moines, or even going for a walk. She brought him magazines or articles that she liked from Psychology Today and The Atlantic. She would consult us about how to get him to do things-go out for supper, go to the movies, buy some new clothes.

In college, a psych major for a while, she burbled with plausible theories about why he drank, what his personality structure was, how we ought to administer "the Luscher Color Test," or what we could do to break down "the barriers in his whole oral structure" (he couldn't cry, and therefore express pain, because in fact he couldn't bite because no doubt he had been breast-fed and forbidden, probably harshly, to bite the nipple), or he had been potty trained too early, which made him retentive of everything. It went on and on. We were never able to bring things to the conclusion she aimed for, though, because changing him ultimately demanded his own involvement, which would have been impossible. One time she did get him to draw a human ligure, and then told us the result was "purely and simply a blueprint of his view of himself" but once he had drawn it, there was nothing to do with it, and anyway, when he found out she was majoring in psychology he stopped payment on her tuition check.

Rose would just say, "He's a farmer, Caroline. That is a personality structure that supersedes every childhood influence."

That's exactly what my father himself would have said.

The fact was, she'd been away from him for almost ten years, long enough so that, to her, his problems seemed only his, their solutions seemed pretty obvious, and the consequences of "managing" him in a new way seemed easily borne. Rose and I had gotten into the habit of ignoring Caroline's point of view.

But she had never expressed herself quite as she had in this phone call. I was fully able to explain it to myself-she was worried, she was kind of crazy where Daddy was concerned anyway, she wasn't on the scene.

Even so, I was shaking when I hung up the phone, just shivering from head to toe as if I were standing in a frigid wind. It felt like a fury, but it also felt like a panic, as if her criticisms were simultaneously unjust and just, and the sequence of events that I remembered perfectly was only a theory, a case made in my own defense that a jury might or might not believe. It wouldn't do any good to exclaim sincerely that it had actually happened the way it had actually happened. The guilty always did that. Rose! I thought, I'll tell Rose, and we will exclaim together, or Ty. But that was a bad idea, confiding in someone. After you've confided long enough in someone, he or she assumes the antagonism you might have just been trying out. It was better for now to keep this conversation to myself.

I SPENT THE M0RNING shampooing the carpet in the living room and the dining room. On a farm, no matter how careful you are about taking off boots and overalls, the dirt just drifts through anyway. Dirt is the least of it. There's oil and blood and muck, too. I knew women with linoleum in every room, and proud of the way it looked 'just like parquet." Harold's tinted concrete idea wasn't much more than a step beyond that, after all. But mostly, farm women are proud of the fact that they can keep the house looking as though the farm stays outside, that the curtains are white and sparkling and starched, that the carpet is clean and the windowsills dusted and the furniture in good shape, or at least neatly slipcovered (by the wife). Just as the farmers cast measuring glances at each other's buildings, judging states of repair and ages of paint jobs, their wives never fail to give the house a close inspection for dustballs, cobwebs, dirty windows. And just as farmers love new, more efficient equipment, farmwives are real connoisseurs of household appliances: whole-house vacuum cleaners mounted in the walls, microwave ovens and Crock-Pots, chest freezers, through-the-door icemakers on refrigerators, heavy duty washers and dryers, potscrubbing dishwashers and electric deep fat fryers. None of us had everything we could wish for. Rose had always wanted a mangle, for instance, because she liked things, including dish towels and bed sheets, neatly ironed.

At any rate, I had rented the Rug Doctor from the Supervalu in Cabot, and by dinnertime I had worked up a dripping sweat, in spite of the new air conditioner. The shades were drawn, and the whirring sound of the machine was like a den I could curl up in, safe from my father's vagaries, Caroline's furies, and Rose's vigilance. And I was not immune to the accruing virtue of the clean, richly colored swathes in front of the cleaning head. It was like combining a field, except what you left behind seemed deeper and more fertile than before, rather than the other way around. I cleaned without a break, and when I turned off the machine, I had worked myself into a rather floating state of mind, abuzz with white noise, effort, and sweat. I stood up, stretched my back in both directions, and pushed through the door into the kitchen, carrying the reservoir of dirty water. Jess Clark was standing in the middle of the floor, smiling at me. I started, and water sloshed. He said, "So, want to go for a walk?"

"How long have you been here?"

"About a minute. I called fifteen minutes ago, but you must not have heard the phone. You want to go for a walk?"

"I'm exhausted, and I'm hungry, too. You do appear suddenly.

I've noticed that about you.

"You're just oblivious. I've noticed that about you.

That irritated me. I said, "Oh." I pushed out the back door and d the dirty water across to the hog pens. When I came back in, ess was still there. I said, "I'm busy and it's hot, too. Maybe some other time."

"Half an hour. I need someone to talk to."

I caught sight of myself in a window. Hair everywhere, black smudges on my cheek and chin. The irritation I'd voiced floated away under the influence of the buzz and the virtue. He said, "Anyway, I saw Ty in Pike at the implement dealer's. They were having a promotional barbecue, sponsored by John Deere. There were a lot of guys there, and he said to tell you not to bother with dinner.

That's what I was supposed to tell you when I called you fifteen minutes ago."

"Rose is doing Daddy's dinner."

"There you have it."

"People don't go for walks in the noon sun.

"I know a shady place."

"You must be kidding." I smoothed my hair and splashed water on my face. It was potent, him telling me that he needed someone to talk to, implying that he hadn't gone first to Rose.

He did know a shady spot, as it turned out. It was the little dump at the back of the farm, in a cleft behind a wild rose thicket, that we used and Harold used for refuse. The "shade trees" were an assortment of aspens and honey locusts, the latter of which sported thick, needlelike thorns four or live inches long, armoring the trunk from the ground up. The dump was a place I didn't go often, especially since we had started paying a monthly fee to use the landfill north of Pike.

When I saw where we were going, I slowed down, but Jess pulled me forward. He said, "Don't you love the dump? I spent whole days out here when I was a kid. This is the third time I've been here since I got back. It's still the most interesting spot on the farm."

"You're kidding."

"It's fun, I promise. I'll show you all the native plants I've identified. And some of the roses are still blooming, too. They smell out of this world."

The larger furniture of the dump consisted of a rusted-out automobile chassis, some steel drums, an old iron bedstead, a rusted-out truck bed with a broken-backed vinyl automobile seat in it, a roll of dark reddish brown barbed wire, and a cracked white ceramic toilet tank.

Supposedly, we were the only people who had ever used it for refuse, but I didn't recognize everything there. In the country, trash has a way of attracting other trash. Once Rose found an old hall rack, oak and, after we cleaned it, brass. She sold it for forty dollars to an antique store in Cabot, which inspired us to comb the dump two or three times for other profitable castoffs, but we hadn't found anything. I said, "I always wonder if other people sneak in here and throw things down the gully. I don't recognize anything here."

"I might recognize that automobile seat. It makes me think of Harold's old '62 Plymouth Valiant. Remember when he got that?

First new car he ever bought."

"I do remember that. It had a blue stripe along the side that angled upward at the un."

"That's it."

"Well, he only stopped driving it last year."

Jess, who was squatting and poking with a stick under the bedstead, looked up at me.

I laughed. "Gotcha. Really it's been ten years, anyway. I was just teasing you." He smiled.

I looked around. The rosebushes were nearly as high as my head and hid the dump from the view of my house, though you could see Harold's house and barn through the trees. On the lower branches of the rosebushes, simple white flowers spread their live petals like the open palm of a tiny hand. I knelt and sniffed. The fragrance was perfumy and strong.

Jess said, "Do you ever come out here and gather the hips in the fall?

They're probably as big as cherries."

"I heard you could do that."

"Good natural source of vitamin C. Or you could make rose petal jam. I love the fragrance of that."

"What are you poking at?"

"Snake."

"What?"

"Snake. Not a rattlesnake or anything. I think it's an eastern hognose, even though this area is sort of out of their range. I saw one last time I was here. They're funny snakes." He stood up. "No luck."

"How are they funny?"

"Well, they have hoods, like cobras, and if they can't chase you off any other way, they roll over and play dead, right down to the lolling tongue."

I laughed.

"They're one of my favorites."

"I never thought of having favorite snakes."

"Oh, there're lots of nice snakes around here. Milk snakes are beautiful, and racers. Rat snakes will climb up into corncribs and trees."

"Daddy's killed those."

"I'm sure."

"Daddy's not much for untamed nature. You know, he's deathly afraid of wasps and hornets. It's a real phobia with him. He goes all white and his face starts twitching."

"Huh."

Through the metal grid of the bedstead, some thin stalks of grass were growing. I broke one off and put it between my teeth. Jess did likewise, and said, "Big bluestem. When the pioneers got here, that was seven feet high."

"When the pioneers got here, this was all under water."

"Well, I know that. I was speaking generally." He grinned at me.

"Trying to evoke the romance of it all. Anyway, there's a bit of prairie here, now that it's dried out. Here's some switchgrass, too, and there's timothy all along the edge of the gully. Know what these are?"

I bent down and lingered the white petals. "The flowers look like pea flowers, but they're on stalks."

"Prairie indigo. Poisonous, too."

"What are those?"

Now it was Jess's turn to look closely at some short, purple-pink flowers. He said, "I know these."

"Well?"

"Locoweed?"

"Yup."

"And you were making out like you didn't know nothin'."

"I know shooting stars and wild carrots, and of course, bindweed and Johnson grass and shatter cane and all that other noxious vegetation that farmers have to kill kill kill. Haven't you seen Ty's trophies?

Giant cockleburs and world-class velvetleaf?" Now I was grinning, too, though the brightness of our grinning didn't seem exactly appropriate to the conversation. I had the strong sense that we had stumbled into a kind of daring privacy, and that the secluded nature of the spot where we were standing allowed it but did not create it. It was as venturesome to be out here, poking around in this dump, as it would be to head off to Minneapolis together, knowing you couldn't return until the next morning. It was also, oddly enough, terrifying. But our gazes were fixed on each other's faces, and we were unable to keep ourselves from testing the fix by moving, turning, bending down. The fix held, until I climbed into the truck bed, sat down in the filthy car seat, and looked over the roses to the green roof peak of my house.

I was breathing hard and trembling.

I felt very afraid, but the fear also seemed unusually distant. I inhaled deeply. Jess went back to poking with his stick. I could hear a rhythmic tchocking punctuate the soughing of the breeze. The breeze in Zebulon County is eternal, and life there is marked by those times when you notice it. I noticed it. I noticed that there was a nest in the honey locust tree, too, but the birds were gone, and the nest was possibly an old one. From off in the distance, just under the sound of the breeze, came the zip of a tractor starting up.

Jess said, "Who's your father's favorite child?"

I turned and looked at him. He was squinting at me, hands on hips.

His lithe ligure curved against the line of aspens. I said, "It's always been Caroline, I'm sure."

"Why do you think that?"

"You mean especially now that he's cut her off?"

"Well, that. But why before, too? I mean, what is there about her that makes her favorite material?"

"Well, she's the youngest. Probably the prettiest. The most successful." This was not something I wanted to talk about.

"Maybe that's a result of being the favorite."

I put my chin in my hand, let my gaze rest on the old bedstead and thought for a minute. "She was never afraid of him. When she wanted something from him, she just stalked right up to him and asked him for it. He appreciated that, especially after me and Rose.

I was terribly afraid of him as a child, and Rose would stand up to him if she had to, but mostly stayed out of his way. With Caroline, it was like she didn't know there was something to be afraid of.

Once, when she was about three, he lost his temper at her, and she just laughed like he was playing a game." I was sweating.

"Do you care that Caroline is the favorite?"

"Hasn't done her any good lately, has it?"

"No." He smiled again. "But really."

"Do you really care about that after you're grown? I don't think about it, I guess." I smiled the way you do when you want someone to stop probing a subject, but you don't want him to know that. I spoke idly.

"Who's Harold's favorite?"

"Me."

"Even now?"

"Even now.

"But he and Loren are like twins. They see eye to eye about everything."

"Oh, I don't know. Every time Loren makes a suggestion, or even does something that he's used to doing on his own, like deciding where to spray or cultivate, Harold accuses him of trying to take over. It gets worse and worse. Loren has been back pedaling furiously. Now he's practically asking permission to wipe his ass, but in Harold's mind, there's this creeping plan, and Loren's manner is just a cover for his stealthy progress toward the deep dark goal. Two weeks ago, Harold was saying things like, 'Who said you should spray those beans?" Now it's, 'You aren't putting anything over on me! I know what you're up to."

"How weird."

"Well, it isn't so weird."

"Why not?"

"Well, for one thing, there's you guys." He broke off another stalk of big bluestem and began to stroke his palm with the tip. "I know you didn't initiate the transfer, and I think even Harold knows it, but people are getting suspicious and wondering how you and Rose got Larry to give you the place, when obviously the whole thing is driving him crazy.

"It was a complete surprise to us!"

"And very out of character for your dad, which is why people don't believe what appears on the surface."

I got out of the truck bed and stood myself right in front of Jess.

"What are people saying?"

"Just things like, 'There's more to that than meets the eye.

"Shit! But Harold was there! He was there the very moment Daddy told us what he wanted to do. It was at your party, and Harold laughed! I know he was thinking what a fool Daddy was being."

"Maybe so. At any rate, the talk will die down. It always does. I wouldn't worry about it. That's not Harold's real problem."

"What is?"

"That I'm here. He wants to keep me here, and I think he thinks the only thing he's got that would keep me here is the farm."

"Is that true?" My heart beat a little faster with this question.

Jess said, "The thing is, Harold can't understand being in a state of flux.

I mean, he understands uncertainty. Every farmer understands that, but it's something that comes from the outside, from the price of grain or the weather, not from within. If Harold's ever been restless, I'd be amazed." He turned away from me, tossed down the stem of grass, and picked up a few little stones, which he began tossing over the wild rosebushes. Finally he said, "The thing is, I can't decide if being like Loren is a disease that I'm too old to get now."

I laughed.

"No, seriously. When I went off to the army, there was no question about whether I would come back to the farm. I was good in 4-H and FFA. Remember that steer I raised? I took him to shows all over the state. Bob. Bob the Beef I used to call him. I liked him, I liked taking care of him, and I liked the money I made when he was slaughtered. I was the perfect future farmer, psychologically, I mean.

My care for old Bob was absolutely real, but it only went so far.

From the moment Harold told me he was mine, Bob was dead meat."

"What happened?"

"I changed my mind about meat, about the way meat is produced in this country, about what it does to your own body. I mean, I suppose Bob lived a good life. I showered him with attention. But he's the exception. He had a name. You know that the new hybrid breeds of chickens fatten so fast that they can't support themselves on their own legs? I mean, since they're all in cages after all, they don't really have to, and I suppose if their legs are bad, they don't want to get out, either. But it disgusts me. I don't want to eat it, I don't want to do it."

I went up to him and said, "But, Jess, you don't have to be a farmer, and if you are, you don't have to raise livestock. This seems kind of off the track to me. First you were talking about Harold, now you're talking about why you're a vegetarian."

He looked at me speculatively, rubbing his hand over his chin as if he had a beard. "Okay. Okay. The thing is, Harold loves me. He loves me like a lover. I've been gone so long that he's not used to me any more, and he wants to win me, and he thinks he can win me with the farm, even though he must know from things I've said that I wouldn't farm the way he does, I would use the land for other things. And I'm not sure that I want to be fixed, either. Harold wants to fix me right here in Zebulon County."

His voice sounded horrified. I said, "You sound like he wants to fix you the way Bob the Beef was fixed."

He laughed. "Well, maybe it would feel like the same thing. I don't know. But when I think of myself ten years down the road, I wonder if it'll be Loren and me, the Clark brothers, Frick and Frack, living in their concrete house, hunched over their plates, grunting and shoveling it in with a big spoon, three times a day."

"We're here."

"Yeah, you're there. You've made your families and your lives, and they're yours." He sounded as deeply, unself-consciously envious as I'd ever heard anyone sound. I felt struck, pierced. We didn't say anything more for a long, breezy moment. Finally, I said, "Anyway, how do you know Harold wants to give you the farm? Is he dangling it in front of you?"

"Hints. Just hints. After Pete said the other night that Harold had been talking about changing his will in the co-op, I started paying attention. Lots of hints."

"Well, wait till he does something concrete."

"That's what you all did, and look what happened."

"We were sort of caught with our pants down, weren't we?"

Jess laughed and I laughed and for a moment everything seemed remote and not very important. I wondered if maybe that wasn't the right way to look at things after all, standing in the dump, smelling the wild roses, and taking the long perspective.

Jess said, "I feel better. The more I talk about it, the less important all of this seems. Something will come to pass. Thanks."

He smiled warmly at me, then wrapped his hand around my arm, pulled me toward him, and kissed me. It was a strange sensation, a clumsy stumbling falling being caught, the broad, sunlit world narrowing to the dark focus of his cushiony lips on mine. It scared me to death, but still I discovered how much I had been waiting for it.

OUT WEST, EVEN AS CLose as Nebraska and South Dakota, there were farms that dwarfed my father's in size, thousands of acres of wheat or pastureland rolling to the horizon, and all owned by one man. In California there were unbroken rows of tomatoes or carrots or broccoli miles long, farmed by corporations. In Zebulon County, though, my father's thousand acres made him one of the biggest landowners. It was not that the farmers around us were unambitious.

Perhaps there were those who dreamed of owning whole townships, even the whole county, but the history of Zebulon County was not the history of wealthy investment, but of poor people who got lucky, who were sold a bill of goods by speculators and discovered they had received a gift of riches beyond the speculators' wildest lies, land whose fertility surpassed hope.

For millennia, water lay over the land. Untold generations of water plants, birds, animals, insects, lived, shed bits of themselves, and died. I used to like to imagine how it all drifted down, lazily, in the warm, soupy water-leaves, seeds, feathers, scales, flesh, bones, petals, pollen-then mixed with the saturated soil below and became, itself soil. I used to like to imagine the millions of birds darkening the sunset, settling the sloughs for a night, or a breeding season, the riot of their cries and chirps, the rushing hough-shhh of twice millions of wings, the swish of their twiglike legs or paddling feet in the water, sounds barely audible until amplilied by millions. And the sloughs would be teeming with fish: shiners, suckers, pumpkinseeds, sunfish, minnows, nothing special, but millions or billions of them.

I liked to imagine them because they were the soil, and the soil was the treasure, thicker, richer, more alive with a past and future abundance of life than any soil anywhere.

Once revealed by those precious tile lines, the soil yielded a treasure of schemes and plots, as well. Each acre was something to covet, something hard to get that enough of could not be gotten Any field or farm was the emblem of some historic passion. On the way to Cabot or Pike or Henry Grove, my father would tell us who owned what indistinguishable flat black acreage, how he had gotten it, what he had done, and should have done, with it, who got it after him and by what tricks or betrayals. Every story, when we were children, revealed a lesson-"work hard" (the pioneers had no machines to dig their drainage lines or plant their crops), or "respect your elders" (an old man had no heirs, and left the farm to the neighbor kid who had cheerfully and obediently worked for him), or "don't tell your neighbors your business," or "luck is something you make for yourself." The story of how my father and his father came to possess a thousand contiguous acres taught us all these lessons, and though we didn't hear it often, we remembered it perfectly. It was easily told-Sam and John and later my father had saved their money and kept their eyes open, and when their neighbors had no money, they had some, and bought what their neighbors couldn't keep. Our ownership spread slowly over the landscape, but it spread as inevitably as ink along the threads of a linen napkin, as inevitably and, we were led to know, as ineradicably.

It was a satisfying story.

There were, of course, details to mull over but not to speak about.

One of these was my grandmother Edith, daughter of Sam, who married John when she was sixteen and he was thirty-three. The marriage consolidated Sam's hundred and sixty acres with John's eighty. My father was born when Edith was eighteen, and after him two girls, Martha and Louise, who died in the flu epidemic of 1917.

Edith was reputed to be a silent woman, who died herself in 1938 at forty-three years old. My grandfather, a youthful fifty-nine by then, outlived her by eight more years. I used to wonder what she thought of him, if her reputed silence wasn't due to temperament at all, but due to fear. She was surrounded by men she had known all her life, by the great plate of land they cherished. She didn't drive a car. Possibly she had no money of her own. That detail went unrevealed by the stories.

Land was purchased around the time she died. In fact, land was bought twice, first the hundred and eighty acres in the southwest corner, then, some months later, but also in 1938, the two hundred and twenty acres east of that. My father always said that frugality was the key-his father had managed to save money on machinery, and when the acreage came on the market, they could afford to pay a dollar more per acre for it. Some time later, I found that this was only true of the first piece. The story of the second parcel was more complicated, less clearly imparting one of those simple lessons. The farmer was Mel Scott, who was a cousin by marriage to the Stanleys.

He wasn't known to be much of a farmer, but he had good land, and a reasonable acreage for those times. The trouble was, he refused to go to his cousins for help or advice, because he didn't want them to know how badly he was doing. He forbade his wife to divulge anything to her family, which eventually meant not seeing them, as her clothing and the children's clothing fell to rags. No going to church, no invitations made or accepted. Scott, meanwhile, sought advice of my grandfather, and money of my father, his neighbors, which was shameful enough but nothing compared to the humiliation of standing before Newt Stanley or his wife's other wealthy, powerful, and outspoken cousins, who had not resisted the marriage, but had mocked it a little. He didn't borrow much money from my father; there wasn't much to borrow.

Then it came time to pay the taxes, and Mel Scott came over late one November night and knocked on the beveled glass front door of the big Sears Chelsea. I imagine it as one of those winter nights on the plains, clear and black, when space itself seems to touch the ground with a universal chill, and a farmer who has walked a half mile over the fields, despairing but fearful, too, and full of doubts, arrives at the dark house of his neighbor. He knocks lightly on the door, almost, at first, wishing not to be heard, then again, with more pride (it's no sin to be struggling-everyone is struggling). No one answers, there are no lights, only the rattle of feed pans from the hogs and cattle in the barn. So he turns, and walks to the edge of the porch, and maybe thinks about just going home. But it is so cold, getting colder, and the half mile expands to a marvelous distance. Surely he will die before he covers it again on foot. So he knocks again, more loudly, and shouts, and my father, who sleeps in one of the front bedrooms, awakens from his hardworking slumbers and comes down. My grandfather gets up. A light is turned on, an agreement is made. My grandfather will pay the taxes if Mel Scott will sign over his land. He can then farm it on shares and buy it back when commodities prices go up. The taxes aren't much. Twenty years before, a man could have paid them without thinking about it. Those times are sure to return again.

They shake hands all around, and, a little warmed by the last coals in the kitchen range, Mel sets out for home. He is saved, hopefulhe has gotten what he wants. But getting what he wants removes the veil of panic that has kept him stumbling forward a single step at a time for these last years, and reveals to him that he no longer wants what he wanted before, what he thought he always wanted.

Time, Mel thinks, to sell up, to move to the Twin Cities and get a job.

How could they make it through the winter, anyway? When he gets home, he is ecstatic with the cold, the crystalline air, the high pressure that hums over the whole defenseless breast of the continent, and ecstatic, too, with a hope that turns failure into success, plans for a trip, a new life, city time. The next day he signed the farm over to my father and grandfather, and he borrowed a little more money to cover the expenses of moving. My father and grandfather took over the land and the few crops still standing in the fields. They knocked down the buildings when I was a teenager, and after that there were only traces, the shadowy depression of the pond in the fields and the circle of the old well, filled in, to show that lives had been lived there.

The Stanley brothers were furious. Said my father had engineered it all, to get a whole farm for the taxes and something over, a fee, you might call it, for the disposal of the encumbering family. It was a transaction my father never spoke of knowledge that came to me through gossip thirty years later. When I used to sift through it, I didn't see how it especially redounded to my father's or grandfather's discredit. A land deal was a land deal, and few were neighborly. But I now wonder if there was an element of shame to Daddy's refusal ever to speak of it. I wonder if it had really landed in his lap, or if there were moments of planning, of manipulation and using a man's incompetence and poverty against him that soured the whole transaction.

On the other hand, one of my father's favorite remarks about things in general was, "Less said about that, the better."

The death of my mother coincided with the departure of the Ericson family, and our purchase of that farm. In fact, I remember that after my mother's funeral, after the service and the burial and the buffet that Mary Livingstone and Elizabeth Ericson served at our house for the mourners, I followed Mrs. Ericson across the road, carrying some empty serving dishes, and after I put them beside the sink, I walked into the living room. The parrot cage was covered, and the dogs were outside.

The rest of the family was still at my house, and the Ericson house, the house I later came to call my own, was the one that was still as death. I pushed aside some books and newspapers, and sat on the sofa.

The parrot wasn't entirely silent beneath his covering. I could hear him scrape the perch with his talons and mutter to himself. A cat walked through the room and marked two chairs by rubbing his arched back against them. I liked the silence and the sense of companionship I felt from the animals, and I experienced, for the first conscious time, the peaceful selfregard of early grief when the fact that you are still alive and functioning is so strangely similar to your previous life that you think you are okay. It is in that state of mind that people answer when you see them at funerals, and ask how they are doing. They say, "I'm fine. I'm okay, really," and they really mean, I'm not unrecognizable to myself. Anyway. In the midst of this familiar silence and comfort, Mrs. Ericson came into the room, surveyed me from the doorway, then sat down beside me. She was wearing an apron with a red and white checked dish towel sewn to it, and she wiped her hands on the towel as she sat down. She was not one to mince words, and she said, "Ginny, sweetheart, I have some more bad news for you. Cal and I have sold the farm to your father, and we're moving back to Chicago. We just can't make it here. We don't know enough about farming."

I looked at her looking at me, and ii, retrospect, I think that I did feel everything gentle and fun and happy draining away around me.

I think that though I was only fourteen and not accustomed to judging my life or my father, or demanding more of our world than it offered of itself I knew exactly what was to come, how unrelenting it would be, the working round of the seasons, the isolation, the responsibility for Caroline, who was only six. I didn't cry then. I had been crying all morning and I was at the end of tears. I said, "I wish you would take me with you," and Mrs. Ericson said, "I wish we could," and then she cried, and then some people came in the back door with more plates, and she got up from the couch. I said, "Can you uncover the parrot's cage?" She nodded. When she left the room, I sat staring at the green back of the parrot and his preternaturally limber neck.

His head worked up and down and swiveled around like an oiled machine, then, finally, carefully, using his beak, he rotated on his perch and cocked his head to eyeball me. I said, "Hi, Magellan." He said, "Sit up! Reach for it!" And I laughed.

Three weeks later, the Ericsons were gone, and my father carefully boarded the farmhouse against the wind and dust. Five years later, when he took off the boards and Ty and I moved in, I had stopped thinking about the past-my mother, the Ericsons, my childhood.

I loved the house the way you would any new house, because it is populated by your future, the family of children who will fill it with noise and chaos and satisfying busy pleasures.

Nothing about the death of my mother stopped time for my father, prevented him from reckoning his assets and liabilities and spreading himself more widely over the landscape. No aspect of his plans was undermined, put off questioned. How many thousands of times have I seen him in the fields, driving the tractor or the combine, steadily, with certainty, from one end of the field to another. How many thousands of times has this sight aroused in me a distant, amused affection for my father, a feeling of forgiveness when I hadn't consciously been harboring any annoyance. It is tempting to feel, at those moments, that what is, is, and what is, is fine. At those moments your own spirit is quiet, and that quiet seems achievable by will.

But if I look past the buzzing machine monotonously unzipping the crusted soil, at the field itself and the fields around it, I remember that the seemingly stationary fields are always flowing toward one farmer and away from another. The lesson my father might say they prove is that a man gets what he deserves by creating his own good luck.

THE MoNoPoLY GAME ENDED with the news that Caroline and Frank had gotten married in a civil ceremony in Des Moines. The paragraph, in the Pike Journal Weekly that was published the twenty-second of June, said, "Miss Caroline Cook, daughter of Laurence Cook, Route 2, Cabot, and the late Ann Rose Amundson Cook, was married to Francis Rasmussen of Des Moines, on Thursday, June 14. The ceremony took place at the Renwick Hotel in New York City, New York. Mr. Rasmussen's parents are Roger and Jane Rasmussen, of St. Cloud, Minnesota. Congratulations!

The bride, a lawyer in Des Moines, will continue to use her maiden name-more girls are, these days!"

We might not even have seen it if Rose hadn't taken the girls into Pike to buy some sneakers at the dime store and picked the newly printedJournal Weekly from a stack on the counter. Dorothy, checking her purchases, said, "I see your sister got married," and Rose, for whom this was the freshest possible news, said, "Yes, it was a very small ceremony.

Dorothy said, "Those are nice, too."

Rose followed the girls to the car, gripping the paper and reading the item over and over. In the car, Linda said, "Why weren't we invited to Aunt Caroline's wedding?"

Rose said, "I don't know. Maybe she's mad at us."

Rose was beyond mad and well into beside herselfwhen she banged into my kitchen and slapped the paper, open to the paragraph, down on the counter in front of me. I was peeling potatoes for potato salad.

I read the paragraph.

Rose said, "She didn't mention a word about this when you talked to her Friday, did she?"

"No."

"Or Tuesday?"

"Well, no. She had other things on hen" "Don't say that! Don't come up with an excuse! Just look at it, and admit what it shows!"

"I don't quite understand. I mean, this wedding has already taken place?" I glanced at the publication date, today, then at the paragraph again. "Don't you think there's a mistake?"

"Do you want to call Mary Lou Humboldt and ask her about it?

Then next week, she can put in a little item about how the Cook sisters don't seem to know what's going on with Caroline."

"Maybe we should call Caroline.

"For what? This is for us! This is how she's letting us know."

Then she told me what she'd said to Dorothy at the dime store.

"The thing is just to take it in stride, to not even be surprised. And I'm going to send her a present! An expensive present, with just a little card saying, 'From Rose and Pete and the girls, thinking of you both."" I laughed, but when Rose left, I realized that I felt the insult physically, an internal injury. It reminded me that she wasn't in the habit of sending birthday cards, or calling to chat, that when she used to come home to take care of Daddy, she didn't bother to walk down the road to say "Hi" unless she needed something. It reminded me of how she was, a way that Rose found annoying and I usually tried to accept. It reminded me that we could have taught her better manners, had we known ourselves that good manners were more than yessir, no sir, please, thank you, and you're welcome.

The men didn't agree that Caroline had done anything especially insulting. The wedding, the marriage, was her business and Frank's, and they probably didn't want to make a big deal of it. Ty, especially, was annoyingly dismissive. Pete kept saying, "Come on, let's play.

Rose, take your turn. I've heard enough about this goddamned wedding to last me the rest of my life." He was winning. He had all the green properties and Boardwalk, plus all the railroads. The dice were working for him, and we kept landing on his properties. Every time he laughed in greedy glee, I got more irritated. Ty was driving me crazy, too. He kept muttering, "Ginny, settle down." I blazed a couple of looks at him, but he didn't pay any attention. Rose and I locked eyes across the table just as Pete and Ty spoke simultaneously.

Pete said, "My turn, pass Go, collect two hundred dollars! Yeah!"

And Ty said, "I think if we all just concentrate on the game we'll have a better time."

Rose said, "Aren't you having a good time, Ty?" in a sugary and deeply sarcastic voice, and Ty, taking her seriously, began, "Well, not really-" and the mere fact that he couldn't read her tone of voice was the last straw for me, and I said, "My God!" with evident exasperation.

I was watching Jess. I had been watching Jess all evening. Along with watching everything else, I had a third eye for Jess alone, a telescopic lens that detected every expression that crossed his face.

At the sound of my voice, shrill, angry, yes, I admit it was both those things, his expression was one of irritation, so immediate but fleeting that he himself might possibly have forgotten the flicker of that response. But I could not. Seeing his expression, and recognizing it, was stunning, like running headfirst into a brick wall. Ty said, "Settle down, Ginny."

Pete said, "Take your turn, Jess. You are looking straight at Boardwalk, brother."

Rose said, "I'm tired of this game," and she picked up the table by the legs and dumped the board and the pieces in Pete's lap.

There was a long silence. Pete's face reddened and he bit his lip.

The girls, on the couch, looked up and stared. Ty looked at me as if this were the result of my failure to settle down, and Jess bent down to pick up his property cards. He said, "Unrestrained capitalism always ends in war. I think Rosa Luxemburg said that. Shall we count our points overall?"

I looked at Pete. He was furious. My own ill-humor vanished and I felt a muscle-clenching anxiety rise in my chest and begin to grip my throat. The fact was that Rose hadn't complained of him hitting her in about four years-he had reformed after he broke her arm, and there was no reason to believe that he was more likely to strike out tonight than any other of the nights in the last four years when Rose had acted provoking. Even so, I was at once in a panic, much more so than Rose, who seemed rather elated by her action. I have to say about Rose that it often seemed like fear wasn't in her, or caution, either. In Pete's worst years, it never seemed to occur to her to scale back her behavior, to seek fewer disagreements, or to be more conciliatory.

Most of the time she wouldn't even live by that basic wifely rule of thumb, "What he doesn't know won't hurt him." He was supposed to know, and supposed to agree, or at least accept. She'd say, "This is the real me, the stand-up me. He's got to get used to that. If I let him beat me into submission, then what kind of life would I have?"

'What kind of life do you have now?" I would say.

And she would reply, "One with self-respect, at least."

When he broke her arm, by knocking or pushing her down in the bathroom (I was never quite able to picture it when she told me) so that she fell on her wrist on the tile floor, she was relentless. She wore a cast for eight weeks, and she made a sleeve for it with the words PETE DID THIS glued on it in felt letters. Every time he raised his hand, or even his voice, she threatened to wear the sleeve. She did wear it once, to show that she was unashamed and meant what she said. Pete, I suppose much intimidated by the thought of the jokes that he would have to endure at the feedstore and all over town, changed after that. His manner with everyone else grew a little more irritable, and his battles with my father sharpened, but it was a small price to pay. When the doctors discovered Rose's cancer, one of the first things she said was, "I guess I don't want to die just when Pete and I are finally figuring it out."

Her idea was that there was no such thing as provocation, that no matter what she did, Pete simply should not hit her, and therefore ifhe did hit her he was entirely wrong, and therefore she was perfectly free to do whatever she wanted. The result was that I lived in fear for her. Once she said, "If it were you being hit, you wouldn't be afraid, either. You'd be mad, I promise."

Now she said, "Pete, why don't you go outside and have a smoke?

I'm going to make some decaf."

The girls went back to their projects, and I said, "You girls getting tired? You can go upstairs if you want." They shook their heads without looking at me.

Jess had set the table back up and retrieved all the game pieces.

Now he began putting them in the box. Ty was adding points. He said, "What happened to our hundred bucks?"

Jess said, "We never collected it. We never decided what the prize was going to be."

"We'd better decide before we find out who won.

I glanced over at the list. A couple of columns were decidedly longer than the others, but I couldn't read the scribbled initials at the head of each column. I said, "We played. That was the-" and Rose came in from the kitchen with the coffeepot, and Pete opened the front door and stepped in, flicking his cigarette butt behind him, and the telephone rang, and Rose said, I'll never forget it, "What's that?" as if she'd never heard a telephone before in her life.

Ty answered and listened, said, "Okay. Okay. Thanks. Thanks.

We'll be right over." My sense of panic, which had eased back, slipped over me again. Ty put down the phone and said, "Your old man's wrecked his truck. He's in the emergency room in Mason City, and it doesn't look like he'll have to stay, so they want us to come get him. The truck's in the ditch over by the state park. They're going to pull it out with one of the park vehicles tomorrow morning and impound it until the results of his blood test come back."

Rose said, "Was he drunk?"

"They won't know that officially for ten days or so.

"Did they arrest him?"

"Not yet."

Rose said, "It's about time."

I said, "Is he hurt?"

"Banged up. He hit his cheek on the steering wheel and cut it.

They think that's all."

"We'd better go, huh?" Ty nodded and took his car keys off the hook at the bottom of the stairs. As we were walking around the house to the car, I saw Jess through the windows, picking things up. He looked perfectly at home.

My car then was an eight-year-old Chevy; usually, when I drove Rose to Mason City, I borrowed her car, which was almost new, a '78 Dodge. It was odd, I suppose, how Ty and I never rode in the Chevy together. If we went to a movie or somewhere for supper, we took the pickup, but now he went straight for the car and got in on the driver's side. The seat belt on the passenger's side was twisted and stiffened with disuse. I gave up on it, and all the way to Mason City, I couldn't get accustomed to the sense of danger I felt, of imminent disaster. Ty drove smoothly and silently. The car breasted the gravel roads, seeming, like a moldboard plow, to roll the fields and the ditches to either side of us. I shook my head to get rid of the illusion, but I could not. It came of driving so low to the ground. Ty rolled down his window an inch or two and the wind carried fear right into my face. I could feel myself focusing on these sensations-the car speeding into the earth, the wind slapping me with dread-and Ty said, "Ginny, you and Rose are going about this all wrong.

"How's that?"

"You could just endure it. You could just cross each bridge as you come to it."

"As if things aren't getting worse.

"I don't know if they're getting worse.

"You must be blind."

"And what if they are getting worse? Taking this attitude isn't going to make them better."

"What attitude?"

"An attitude like Rose's. Making everything he does into a big deal."

"I think going in a ditch and getting picked up for drunk driving is a big deal."

"Well, that is. That is. But this other stuff-" Ty glanced at me, rubbed the corners of his mouth with his thumb and forefinger, then slowed down and pulled to the side of the road. He looked at me for a long time. He said, "Ginny, I don't exactly know what to do, but I've always thought the best way to deal with your father is to sort of hunker down and let it blow over. In one ear and out the other. Grin and bear it. Water off a duck's back. All those things."

I stared at him, too. I stared at him from a long distance, seeing his flat cheeks and square face, the creviced fans at the corners of his eyes, the bill of his cap, the plain hopeful visage of a plain man.

The other face, Jess's face, was never out of my mind, leaner and more hawkish, more suspicious, less benign. One face somehow met you, looked back at you, was the impenetrable and almost simple face of innocence. The other, the more you looked at it, the more it escaped you. Its very features seemed elusive, seemed to promise a meaning, or even a truth, that was more complex and interesting than anything you had ever before imagined. I kept staring at Ty. God knows what he was thinking. But I was wondering whose face was truer. He smiled. His upper lip stretched into a long archer's bow, Ty's big smile that made him look handsome and mischievous. I smiled, too.

I said, "You're right." He put the car in drive and pulled back onto the blacktop.

It was easy enough to say. And it was true that I didn't want to be angry the way Rose was. Ty didn't like it, and Jess, too, just for that one moment at the game table, had registered a visceral recoil that frightened me. But Rose's anger! Some of my clearest memories were of watching her, unable to look away, watching her shine with anger. No matter how well you knew to keep back from it, you couldn't keep back all the time.

It was nearly forty miles from our place to Mason City. We drove it in a kind of wholesome silence, carrying our whole long marriage, all the hope and kindness that it represented, with us. What it felt like was sitting in Sunday school singing "Jesus Loves Me," sitting in the little chairs, surrounded by sunlight and bright drawings, and having those first inklings of doubt, except that doubt presents itself simply as added knowledge, something new, for the moment, to set beside what is already known. As if nothing were contradictory and all things could be believed simultaneously. My love for Ty, which I had never questioned, felt simple like that, like belief. But I believed I was going to sleep with Jess Clark with as full a certainty.

MY FATHER WAS SITTING UP at one end of a bench, leaning back against the wall with his eyes wide open. A square of white gauze was pressed to his cheek with adhesive tape that ran into his hair.

Instinctively, I followed his gaze, just to check on what he might be thinking about before disturbing him. Ty, though, walked right up to him and said, "Dad? Larry? You okay?" He stood up and began to walk out of the emergency room, without speaking to us or to the nurse behind the desk, who called, "Mr. Cook? Mr. Cook?" She looked at me. I stepped forward, announcing that I was his daughter.

"Oh," she said, still evidently disconcerted. "Oh. Well, he has some Percodan to take for pain, just two pills. If he needs more, he'll have to get a prescription from his family physician." Then, apologetically, for some reason, "There wasn't any loss of consciousness. He's been wide awake for, let's see, the whole time he's been here. We had him in observation for two hours." She patted my arm. "He'll be fine."

"How has he been acting?"

She smiled, actually looking at me for the first time. She said, "He isn't very talkative, is he? When the doctors were working on him, right at first? Well, one of them said, 'You know, I think he can talk. He just won't." That's kind of unusual." She spoke brightly.

I said, "Not for him, lately. Is that all? We can just leave now?"

She lowered her voice. "You can. But I think the police will be calling you. It takes about ten days for the blood level test to come back, though."

"You mean the blood alcohol level?"

"But you can be thankful he wasn't seriously injured. He's just fine, really." She returned to her spot behind the desk.

He was sitting in the backseat, on the passenger side. After I got in and arranged myself Ty turned and said, "Ready to go, Dad?" but there wasn't any response. We turned out of the hospital parking lot and onto the empty avenue of light and gloom that we had just turned off.

Each house, large and close to its neighbors, rose like a solid and discreet blossom out of its neat lawn and thick embracing shrubbery.

It was nearly midnight. Every window on the long protected block was dark.

My father was so quiet that it was easy to believe that he had learned his lesson, that there would have to be no discussion of keys or drinking or of the whole situation we found ourselves in. It was easy to believe that he was quiet because chastened, even embarrassed. Ty, too, was quiet. Perhaps they had already talked, come to some agreement, and Ty would present me with that when we got home. I said, "Daddy, have you got those pills the nurse gave you?"

The question went unanswered, so unanswered that it got to be like a question that no one had ever expected would be answered.

Whether or not he had the pills turned out to be none of my business.

That was the answer.

In the silence, it was easy for my mind to drift, and it drifted back to the thoughts of Ty and Jess and my future that I had been thinking a very short time-half an hour-before. With my father in the car, such thoughts took on a new coloring. What had seemed scary but pleasant, even innocent (only thoughts after all), now seemed real and shocking.

Even the comfort I had felt in Ty's and my privacy as we were driving in the dark seemed fugitive, luxurious. I looked again at the houses we passed, now not so prosperous as those around the hospital, and I saw a new meaning in them, in the obvious differences between them-junk on a porch here, two nice cars in an open garage there, a painted swing set and a homemade sandbox across the street. The families who lived here had only the most tenuous links to one another. Each lived a distinct style, to divergent ends. That was what was to be envied, not, as I had thought as a child, the closeness or the sociability, but the uniqueness of each family's fate, each family's, each couple's, freedom to make or find something apart from the others.

My father groaned. I froze, staring ahead. Ty said, "Are you having some pain, Larry? You sure you want to leave the hospital?

We can go right back." To this there was no response either. We were left to assume that our course of action, taking him home, was what he wanted. We drove on. The front end of the car looked higher. I caught myself listening to the engine, as if we were hauling a trailer, as if carrying my father home were taxing more than just my peace of mind.

Ty and I traded a couple of secretive, eye-rolling glances, and he smiled at me. His smile told me what to do-be patient, endure, maintain hope-and I wondered where it came from with him, this endless stoicism. It was so heavy and dumb and good! So foolishly receptive!

When would taking it turn into asking for it? Maybe it already had.

Maybe if we had conducted our lives differently in the past, had not been so accommodating, nor so malleable-how was it that everyone had left the land and we had stayed behind? How was it that I had not even thought of college, of trying something else, of moving to Des Moines or even Mason City? Then there was the image that things always looped back to, those live miscarried children. It was my habit to think that if I could be a certain way, embody a certain attitude, a child would come to me and stay with me. The attitudes I had tried were obvious-receptive to conception, then protective. Now I saw my error, though. Who would stay with a mother who merely waited? Who accepted things so dully, who could say so easily, something will happen, we'll get another chance.

No! It was time to sit up, to reach out, to choose this and not that!

Ty's steadiness was getting us, getting me, nowhere. I shifted in my seat and noticed that we were turning onto Cabot Street Road. Almost home. I spun around and said, "Daddy!"

His eyes had been closed, but now they popped open. He lifted himself in the seat with a grunt. Ty's head swiveled toward me.

"I know you're hurt, and I'm sorry you got in an accident, but now's the time to talk about it. You're going to be in real trouble pretty soon, when the state troopers come over. You've got to take this to heart. You simply can't drive all over creation, and you especially can't do it when you're drinking. It's not right. You could kill somebody. Or kill yourself for that matter."

He looked at me.

"They're probably going to revoke your license, but even if they don't, I will, if you do it again. I'll take away the keys to your truck, and if you do it after that, I'll sell it. When I was little, you always said that one warning ought to be enough. Well, this is your warning, and I expect you to pay attention to it. And another thing, you're fully capable of helping around the farm, and I can tell that you're bored without it. Rose or I will give you your breakfast at the regular time from now on, and you can just go out and work afterwards.

We aren't going to let you sit around. You're used to working, and there's no reason why you can't keep working. Ty and Pete can't do everything all of a sudden.

It was exhilarating, talking to my father as if he were my child, more than exhilarating to see him as my child. This laying down the law was a marvelous way of talking. It created a whole orderly future within me, a vista of manageable days clicking past, myself in the foreground, large and purposeful. It wasn't a way of talking that I was used to-possibly I had never talked that way before but I knew I could get used to it in a heartbeat, that here I had stumbled on a prerogative of parenthood I hadn't thought of before (I'd thought only how I would be tender and affectionate and patient and instructive). I eyed the old man. I said, "I mean it about the driving, and Rose will back me up."

He held my gaze, and said in a low voice, as if to himself "I got nothing."

I thought he was just trying to get my sympathy. I said, "There's enough for everybody, for one thing." For another, I thought, you gave it away of your own accord. But I didn't dare say it. It made me too mad.

Ty got him up to bed, but not before I said, "Breakfast at seven, Daddy. Ty will wait for you at our place, and you can work something out about what you want to do tomorrow."

Back at our place, Ty said, "Maybe he shouldn't work tomorrow.

We don't know what sort of trauma there's been."

"Give him an easy job, for a couple of hours. His life doesn't have any structure. That's exactly the problem. Now's the time to do something about it, when he's ashamed of himself."

Ty got out of his pants and sat down to take off his socks. I roamed the room, picking up objects and putting them down. Power pumped through me. I cruised into the bathroom, the two other bedrooms, one used for guests who never came, one for old furniture. I looked out windows in every direction. It was a benign summer night, breezy and thick. Back to our room. Ty was stretched out on his back, his hands behind his head. I said, "I learned something tonight."

"Take charge?"

"Yes, but more than that. It was something physical, not just in my mind. Not just a lesson."

"Hmm."

"Do you believe me?"

"Oh, I believe you."

"Well, what?"

"Ginny, it's after midnight. You said you'd have breakfast on your father's table by seVen. Let's just see if the thing you learned tonight is true tomorrow, okay?"

ú "Fine."

He closed his eyes. I marched across the hallway to the west-facing bedroom and looked toward the Clark farm, staring and staring until I could hear my husband's breathing deepen and slow.

In the morning, there was a fair amount of grunting and groaning.

I was immune to it. I set my father's breakfast-French toast, bacon, a sliced banana and some strawberries, a pot of coffee-in front of him, and I handed him the syrup and the butter, and the sugar for his coffee, and I straightened up the kitchen after myself I served him well, but I withheld my sympathy. On the other hand, he didn't ask for it. He finished eating, pushed his plate away, and stood up.

I moved to the window after he banged out the door, and watched him trudge up the blacktop toward our place, where Ty was waiting in the barn. Normally he would have climbed into his truck and driven the quarter mile, so he walked as if he were disoriented, surprised by the very act of walking. He was stiff. His shoulders hunched. His legs swung out and around. That was something he needed, too, more exercise. He didn't look back, but Rose waited until he was a dot on the road to cross from her place.

I was wiping the range with the dishrag. The screen door slapped, and Rose said, "He's okay, then?"

"He should check in with Dr. Henry in Pike today, and maybe get some more painkillers. They gave him two Percodans, but I don't know if he's taken any. I'll get him there this afternoon. The state troopers won't be coming around for another ten days or so, not until the blood test is back from the lab."

"They ought to put him in jail. I just can't believe how lenient they are."

"Nobody got hurt, Rose. It would have been different-" "That's pure luck."

"You get to take credit for that luck, legally, just like if your luck is bad and somebody does get hurt, you have toRose planted herself in the center of the doorway to the living room, and listed her hands on her hips. "Jeer, Ginny, don't you get tired of seeing his side? Don't you just long to stand back and tell the truth about him for once?

He's dangerous! He's impulsive and angry, and he doesn't give other people the same benefit of the doubt that they give him!"

"I know that. Last night I really gave him a talking to-" "Sometimes I hate him. Sometimes waves of hatred just roll through me, and I want him to die, and go to hell and stay there forever, just roasting!"

"Rose!"

"Why are you saying 'Rose!" in that shocked way? Because you're not supposed to wish evil on someone, or because you really don't hate him?"

"I don't. I really don't. He's a bear, but-" "He's not a bear. He's not innocent like that-I raised my voice above hers. "Last night I told him in no uncertain terms that if he drove drunk again, I'd take the truck keys away from him. He heard me, too. He was looking right at me. Ty's putting him to work. I think things'll improve. He's hard to live with-" Rose turned on her heel and stomped into the living room. I followed her. She was standing by a little bookcase. Twenty issues or so of Successful Farming magazine were stacked there, brochures for farm equipment, some National Geographics, a Bible, two Reader's Digests, and a book of American folk songs. Nothing personal, or reminiscent. She was staring down at the Reader's Digests, tapping the top one with her fingernail. She said, "Sometimes I hate you, too."

I waited. I thought at once of Linda and Pammy, the way they sometimes confided in me instead of in their mother, the way I liked to give them things, or take them places that Rose wouldn't have approved of if she'd known. For years, they had been the unspoken issue between us, and I at once felt guilty, sorry that she could justifiably accuse me of undermining her, of wanting them so much to be mine, sometimes, that I couldn't help imagining what it would be like if they were.

"I hate you because you're the link between me and him."

"Who?"

She threw up her hands in exasperation. "Daddy, of course. Don't be so stupid. You're such a good daughter, so slow to judge, it's like stupidity. It drives me crazy."

I smiled. "Just last night, I was thinking the exact same thing about Ty-" She ignored me. "Every time I've made up my mind to do something-get off this place, leave Pete, go back to teaching just to earn the money-you stop me. When I was little, I mean really little, three or four, you were like this wall between me and him, but now you're the path, you don't keep him out, you show him the way in, every time you're reasonable, every time you pause to wonder about his point of view. Every time you stop and think! I don't want to stop and think!"

I stared at her. She pushed her hair back with her hand, then put her list on her hip, defiant. Except that on the way down, her lingers fluttered over the vanished breast, the vanished muscles. She stared me back, then tossed her head and looked out the window. I said, "I'm not like him. I don't always sympathize with him. But I can't say I have any faith that he's going to meet us halfway. I think it's practical to try and work around him sometimes."

It was funny how I wasn't offended by her angry talk, how I thought it was okay, and even something of a relief for her to talk about hating me sometimes, but in a certain tone of voice, an embarrassed tone of voice. I'd thought Rose's negative feelings would carry more conviction than that. Her embarrassment amounted to a reprieve. I stepped toward her, alive with the sense that I'd had the night before, that the tables could be turned on our father, that he could be taken in hand and controlled; we just had to agree on our plan and stick to it. She looked skeptical. I said, "Anyway, the point is, yes, you're right, I've let him get away with a lot of stuff. We all have. But we can set rules, and I think the rules can be pretty simple."

Rose walked to the front window and stood with her back to me, staring west across the fields. It was a picture of monochromatic greenness these days. The corn, which grows with mechanical uniformity that can seem a little surreal if you think about it, had put forth six or eight pennant-shaped leaves that floated in smooth jointless arcing opposite pairs, one above the other, and were large enough now to shade out most of the black soil of the field. Corn plants are oddly manlike-the leaves always reminded me of shoulders, the tassels of heads. I stood next to her and looked at her face. After a few moments, she looked back at me. She said, "Ginny, tell me what you really really think about Daddy."

"Well, I don't know." Except that I did know. All sorts ofthoughts had been crystal clear to me all night long, but now that she asked for them, their simultaneity made it impossible for me to choose one over the other and have it be the main thing I thought about Daddy.

I licked my lips. Rose bit hers, I thought, then, to keep from saying anything that would influence me. I sorted, knowing she meant for me to answer. I was also aware of the crisp morning colors of what we were looking at, the shadow just in front of us, the green field and sunny blue sky beyond. I said, "I love Daddy. But he's so in the habit of giving orders, no back talk. You know."

She looked at me.

"I mean, he drinks and everything. I don't know how that colors things."

She continued to look at me.

"I'm willing to admit that he's been drinking a long time, probably as long as we've known him. I haven't really thought about it, but I'm sure if we sat down and worked it out-" She kept looking at me. I said, "Rose, you're making me nervous.

What do you want me to say? I mean, the type of thing."

She looked at me, then out the window. I said, "I mean, Mommy hasn't been around to tell us what to think of Daddy. I wonder about whether they were happy. Whether she liked him. Or he liked her.

Though everybody liked Mommy. I think different things."

She cleared her throat, and I took this as my cue to fall silent. She said, "Shit, Ginny."

I laughed. I guess I had expected her mouth to open and some other voice, some oracular voice, to issue forth, echoing and deep.

She pursed her lips, rapidly recomposing herself into the Rose I knew and relied on. She rolled her eyes, seemed about to make a joke at Daddy's expense, or mine. That would have been okay, too.

Finally, she said, "I don't hate you, Ginny. I know what I was saying, but I don't know what it means, exactly. Or how to tell you what it means. Or something. Let's say the real story here is what you think.

He's a pain in the butt, we divvy up the work. Maybe rules will do the trick. We can try it."

"I can't describe what it was like, just to say to him, okay you have to do this, and you can't do that. I mean, it's so simple."

"Famous last words." She put her arms around me, and her grip was strong, stronger than it had been. I said, "Love ya, sis, " in a kind of play tough voice.

She said, "Me, too. United front, right?"

"Right."

Ty AND I DIDN'T PURSUE our conversation, didn't thrash out what it was I had learned or what it meant. I acted more decisive and made rules.

I sensed that Ty disapproved, but it was a touchy subject, and I was afraid to talk about it because I hated friction with Ty. It was easy to discount his unvoiced opinion, too. After all, his dad had died so conveniently, just when the son was old enough to appreciate afresh what the father knew, while they were still working smoothly together, before age made the father unreliable or cantankerous. Ty loved his father, who was a kindly man, not very ambitious, and it had always been easy for him just to shift that love to my father. When I thought about it, new things came clear, about Ty and my father and us all.

One was that Daddy's and Pete's storms gave a quiet steady worker like Ty lots of power, because not only would he calmly pursue his aims while they ranted, more often than not each of them would appeal to him for support. He would propose a solution, his solution. One reason for discounting his disapproval, I started to think, was the new way I saw him pursuing his selfinterest all these years, all in the guise of going along and getting along. It made me sort of mad, to tell the truth.

And then there was the willful positive thinking, the self-induced illusion that everything would turn out fine, when we had all kinds of evidence that it wouldn't. If I was angry at myself for dopily accepting everything that had come to me, I was angry at Ty, too, because every fear I'd had of trying something new, of resisting, of creating conflict was a fear that he'd encouraged. I associated this with his father, with all his family's decades on the farm, never losing any ground, but never gaining any, either. It may have been impossible that someone as hesitant as myself could be seen as potentially wild or impulsive, but in our house I supplied the zip-the hint of the unpredictable, even if it was only an attempt at a Chinese recipe taken from the "Today" section of the Des Moines Register.

I told myself that it wasn't what Rose and I were going to try with Daddy that Ty objected to, but the fact that we were going to try anything.

I knew that I shouldn't be mad at Ty for being what he'd always been, patient, understanding, careful, willing to act as the bulwark against my father, but I was mad at him.

Jess Clark thought Rose and I were taking exactly the right line.

The fact is that the same sequence of days can arrange themselves into a number of different stories. On the one hand, we had my father's story-the incidents were the occasions of his increasingly erratic behavior, and the representations of that were here and there; the kitchen cabinetry buckling and swelling in the driveway, his impounded truck at wherever the state troopers kept such vehicles, the front right fender, it turned out later, smashed flat against the wheel, the hollowed-out headlight, the bumper twisted up under the right front quarter panel, even the ditch grass and weeds pinched in the cracks.

And there was the couch that finally came, white brocade, about as inappropriate a couch for a farm living room as you could imagine.

Then there was the trail of clues to our arguments about him with Caroline-a flurry of phone calls, followed by that number never appearing on our bill again, the item in the paper that appeared innocent but was intended to humiliate and succeeded in doing so, followed by a big bill, over a hundred dollars, for the Cuisinart Rose ordered from Younkers and had sent with the equally humiliating card-"Nice to read of your good news, Rose Lewis and family."

It was an involving story, frightening and suspenseful, full of significance, if only to our family, and mystery, too, since Daddy only acted, and never revealed his motives. It was a story the neighbors surely followed with relish, eager for clues to what was really going on, and ready to supply any memories or speculation that would explain unaccountable twists in the narrative.

But really the story of those days was the story of Jess Clark, of the color and richness and distinctness his presence in the neighborhood gave to every passing moment. When I think of him, or of that time, I think vividly of his face and ligure, of how startling it was, for one thing, to see someone nearly naked in running shorts with no shirt in a world where men wore work pants, boots, and feed caps on the hottest days. I think of the muscles of his legs, defined by years of roadwork into sinuous braids of discrete tensions.

I think of his abdomen and arm and back and shoulder muscles, present in every man, but visible in Jess, like some sort of virtue.

But the fact is that it's impossible to think of him by himself apart from everything else. What concentrated itself in him diffused through the rest of the world, too. I always expected him to manifest himself at any time, because everything I saw around me had gotten to be him-it reminded me of him, expressed him, promised something about him. When he showed up, things were complete. When he didn't show up, they were about to be.

Harold Clark began talking frequently and openly about changing his will. Harold was the sort of man who prided himself on knowing everyone, which meant joking in a familiar iashion with men, women, boys, and girls alike. Not long after my father's accident, I was taking Pammy and Linda for an afternoon swim in Pike. I was to drop them and Rose was to pick them up. Halfway to Cabot, I realized that my fuel gauge was on empty, so I pulled in at the Casey's on Dodge Street there and got out to pump some gas. I didn't notice Harold's truck, but when I went in to pay, there were Harold and Loren stocking up on doughnuts and slices of pizza. Loren was paying, and Harold was back by the cooler, picking out a drink. He was laughing, and his voice rang around the room. "Yeah, Dollie," he was saying to the woman behind the counter, "I've got myself into a fix now. One farm, two boys. Two good boys is a boy too many, you know. Pretty soon there are two wives and six or eight children, and you got to be fair, but there's no fair way to cut that pie. One farm can't support all them people, so some who have The get-up-and-go get work in town, but you don't want to cut them out just because they got some spirit. So the wives start squabbling.

That's the first thing, ain't it?" By this time he was back at the counter, and he fixed her with an impudent eye. Dollie had gone to eighth grade with Harold, so she looked right back at him, and said, "What you know about wives, Harold Clark, 5 ever impressed me much."

He laughed as if this were a compliment and went on, now seeing me and including me in his audience. "But the best thing is' I'll be dead when all this happens, and when the Good Lord says, 'Harold, take a look at the mess you left," I'll say, 'I was just trying to be fair. I had two good boys and I followed Scripture, because didn't You Yourself say that everybody gets the same day's wage, whether they show up late to the vineyard or early?" And He'll say, 'Yes, I did," and I'll say, 'Well, there You have it, blame Yourself."

Harold laughed a full roaring laugh, Loren smiled, and Dollie cocked an eyebrow at me. After Harold left, she said, "It's a crime the way he talks in front of those boys. And only in front of them. When one of them isn't along, Ginny, he don't say boo about his will or after he dies or anything. He talks about buying stuff like he's never going to die."

"How are you, Dollie?"

"My granddaughter's going to Soviet Russia on a church exchange trip, did you hear about that? Six church members and six -Hers.

She's the youngest. She's going to take along some project she did on hog scours. Bob Stanley rigged it up through Marv Carson, somehow.

Marv knows Senator Jepsen now, through some bank thing."

"Hmm." I must have sounded preoccupied. She looked at me sharply as I turned from the counter, and said, "Those Clark boys should know that Harold's all talk. They shouldn't be counting any chickens. My guess is he don't have a will at all, and certainly no provisions for paying off any taxes."

I thought she must be telling me this as a sideways compliment to my father, to our whole family, for being prepared. Or else as a veiled insult. It was hard for me to tell what the neighbors thought of us.

I said, "If I'm talking to Loren or Jess and it comes up, I'll tell them, Dollie."

"Somebody ought to. But you know, Loren is like Harold's shadow, and I don't really feel comfortable with that older one. I've known him since he was a little boy, but when he comes in here, I always mistake him for a tourist. He's just not familiar any more.

Pammy opened the door and said, "Come on, Aunt Ginny, we're boiling."

Then the Clarks' deep freeze gave out, and Jess brought over packages of steaks and chops for us to keep until they could get the repair man out from Sears. Ty was sitting at the table, eating his breakfast.

Jess asked how Daddy was, if we'd seen the truck, then said, "You'd better go downstairs with me, Ginny, and show me where to put these so they don't get mixed in with your things."

When we were leaning into the freezer, he kissed me on the ear, and whispered, "Meet me at the dump tomorrow afternoon. Harold is taking your dad to Zebulon Center for some extension program, and Ty is going along to the auto parts store."

I stepped away from him. "He told me.

"I want to talk to you.

I turned from the freezer and walked up the cellar steps. My luck held. The kitchen was empty; Ty was out starting the truck. He waved to me as he turned toward the road. When Jess came up from the cellar, I said, "Want me to help you bring the rest of the stuff over?"

I could hear Harold yelling as soon as I opened the door to get out of Jess's truck. He shouted, "Who told you to leave the sprayer in that field?" and then something unintelligible. Loren came around the corner of the house, and I realized I was standing and staring. I smiled, and he smiled sheepishly back at me. I followed Jess into the house. Through the kitchen window on the barn side of the house, I could see Harold heading toward the barn, kicking at some dirt or gravel in his path, but then, when Loren appeared again, carrying a socket wrench, Harold spun toward him with his hands out, as if he were going to strike him or strangle him. Loren set down his tool and kind of deflected Harold's progress toward him. Jess said, "Fuck this!"

and went out of the kitchen. Soon he appeared with the other two, and shouted, "Harold! Dad! Hey!" He grabbed Harold by the arm. I found a brown paper sack and started filling it with the white packages of meat that were wedged into the refrigerator. The freezer stood open, pulled away from the wall, stinking of that sour frozen smell, and, faintly, of meat and blood.

The door opened, and Jess manhandled Harold into the kitchen.

Harold's face was purple. Jess said, "Now sit down!" and halfpushed him into a chair. Then he said, "I told him to leave the sprayer in that field! It was my mistake. Now leave him the fuck alone!"

I thought Harold would turn and explode at Jess, but instead he sniffed a couple of times and gazed at him. Finally, he said, without looking at me, but in a chipper voice, "Ginny, I got quite a temper and that's the truth. I apologize."

Jess was filling a bag with the last few packages and some colorful blocks of frozen succotash and spinach from the grocery store. He rolled his eyes. "You should go out and apologize to Loren is what you'd better do."

Harold pulled out a yellow handkerchief and wiped his nose, then shoved the handkerchief back into his pocket. Now he looked at me.

I was standing with the chilly bag in my arms, ready to get out of there. Harold leaned toward me and confided, "I gotta say, Ginny, that everything about that boy gets me these days. I'm the first to say he don't deserve it, but I just look at him, and it makes me mad.

The way he walks, the way he talks. He's getting fat, too. Hell, the way he says yessir and no sir and jumps when I get on him. That makes me the maddest. This time last year, he couldn't do no wrong for me, now he can't do no right. I expect it's Jess's fault."

"No, Harold," said Jess, "it's your fault, because you give in to it.

If you know how you feel, you ought to control yourself."

"Ginny, I admit I ain't so good at controlling myself." He said this as if I was to absolve him of the necessity of doing so, with a smile or a joke. Harold was actually grinning at this point, looking right at me. I said, "I guess I agree with Jess, Harold. I guess I think you could control yourself if you really wanted to."

Harold got up and headed for the living room, still smiling. He said, "Well, you ain't got any kids, so you don't know what it's like."

Jess shook his head in exasperation and we scurried out. Loren had left in his pickup, I suppose to get the sprayer. We got in Harold's truck and slammed the doors. I said, "I'd like to know what's going on with Daddy and Harold."

"I don't know about Larry, but Harold's just showing off same as always. I wonder if he's really as angry with Loren as he makes out.

He loves to act sly for the sake of acting sly." He started the engine.

"I'm beginning to think there isn't any reward for putting up with all of this."

"A big farm and the chance to run it the way you want is a reward."

"You're kidding."

He pulled onto the blacktop. "No, listen. I got some stuff in the mail. Did you know there's an association of organic farmers in this state? Guys who've never gone to chemicals, or who stopped using chemicals ten or fifteen years ago. It's pretty inspiring. And in spite of no publicity and ridicule and stiff opposition, it's a pretty lively and growing association. There's a guy over near Sac City that I thought I'd go visit, if you want to come along."

I rolled my eyes. Jess laughed and leaned toward me. I could smell the fragrance of him. I pressed my lips together. "You were having a lot of doubts a few days ago.

"That was before I found out about this. Ginny, this is important!

This is something that brings both halves of my life together."

"Harold isn't going to let you farm organically in his lifetime."

"We'll see. He's pretty high on me now, and I haven't held back with him, saying what I think he's doing wrong. He listens to me.

We stopped in front of my back door. There was no one around. I said, "You are so unrealistic. I'm beginning to think that's one of your virtues." As he went through the door, he pinched me lightly on the rear. I laughed, but said, "No, really. You've changed us all now.

You've come along and just turned us all upside down, and it's because you only do what you don't know you're doing." I put the bag I was carrying in his arms and started clearing breakfast dishes off the table. He stood there for a moment-I could feel him there-then ran down the cellar steps. The house seemed to float on him, on his being there. To work at a daily task and sense this was a goading, prickling pleasure for me, invested significance in the plates I was rinsing and the leftovers I was scraping into the garbage can.

The events of that day and the next morning seemed then like they would be only advertisements on the wall of a tunnel that led to the next afternoon. My father's trip to the doctor, where his cuts and simply waited in the waiting room; even the receptionist was out of the office. Dinner with Ty, then the afternoon in the farrowing house, helping him with the last of the newborn pigs. You had to clip out their eyeteeth, which were sharp and would get sharper, and dock their tails so they wouldn't get chewed on and infected. The sows didn't love this, our handling the baby pigs, but in the first few days they were still amenable and almost sleepy. We castrated about twenty little boars. By suppertime we were stinking and drenched with sweat, and in spite of the fans the farrowing house was so hot that the air-conditioned living room gave me the shivers when I walked into it.

Showers, then macaroni and cheese for supper, bed before dark.

I lay awake in the hot darkness, naked and covered by the sheet.

Every so often, I lifted the sheet and looked under it, at my blue-white skin, my breasts, with their dark nipples, the foreshortened, rounded triangles of my legs, my jutting feet. I looked at myself while I thought about having sex with Jess Clark and I could feel my flesh turn electric at these thoughts, could feel sensation gather at my nipples, could feel my vagina relax and open, could feel my lips and my fingertips grow sensitive enough to know their own shapes. When I turned on my side and my breasts swam together and I flicked the sheet for a bit of air, I saw only myself turning, my same old shape moving in the same old way. I turned onto my stomach so that I wouldn't be able to look, so that I could bury my face in the black pillow. It wasn't like me to think such thoughts, and though they drew me, they repelled me too. I began to drift off maybe to escape what I couldn't stop thinking about.

Ty, who was asleep, rolled over and put his hand on my shoulder, then ran it down my back, so slowly that my back came to seem about as long and humped as a sow's, running in a smooth arc from my rooting, low-slung head to my little stumpy tail. I woke up with a start and remembered the baby pigs. Ty was very close to me. It was still hot, and he was pressing his erection into my leg. Normally I hated waking in the night with him so close to me, but my earlier fantasies must have primed me, because the very sense of it there, a combination of feeling its insistent pressure and imagining its smooth heavy shape, doused me like a hot wave, and instantly I was breathless. I put my hand around it and turned toward it, then took my hand off it and pulled the curve of his ass toward me. But for once I couldn't stand not touching it, knowing it was there but not holding it in my hand.

Ty woke up. I was panting, and he was on me in a moment. It was something: it was deeply exciting and simultaneously not enough. The part of me that was still a sow longed to wallow, to press my skin against his and be engulfed. Ty whispered, "Don't open your eyes, and I did not. Nothing would wake me from this unaccustomed dream of my body faster than opening my eyes.

Afterward, when we did open our eyes and were ourselves again, I saw that it was only ten-fifteen. I moved away, to the cooler edge of the bed. Ty said, "I liked that. That was nice," and he put his hand affectionately on my hip without actually looking at me. His voice carried just a single quiver of embarrassment. That was pretty good for us. Then I heard the breeze start up, rustling the curtains, and then I heard the rattle of hog feeders and the sound of a car accelerating in the distance. The moon was full, and the shadows of bats fluttered in the moonlight. The sawing of cicadas distinguished itself the barking of a dog. I fell asleep.

With Jess Clark in that old pickup bed in the dump the next afternoon, it was much more awkward. My arms and legs, stiff and stalklike, thumped against the wheel well, the truck bed, poked Jess in the ribs, the back. My skin looked glaringly white, white like some underground sightless creature. When he leaned forward to untie his sneakers, I felt my cheeks. As clammy as clay. Jess eased me backward. I didn't watch while he unbuttoned my shirt. He said, "All right?"

I nodded.

"Really?"

"I'm not very used to this."

He pulled back, away from me, the look on his face unsmiling, suddenly cautious.

"Yes," I said. "Please." It was humiliating to ask, but that was okay, too. Reassuring in a way. He smiled. That was the reward.

Then, afterward, I began all at once to shiver.

He pulled away and I buttoned three buttons on my shirt. He said, "Are you cold? It's only ninety-four degrees out here."

"Maybe t-t-t-terrified."

But I wasn't, not anymore. Now the shaking was pure desire. As I realized what we had done, my body responded as it hadn't while we were doing it-hadn't ever done, I thought. I felt blasted with the desire, irradiated, rendered transparent. Jess said, "Are you okay?"

I said, "Hold me for a while, and keep talking."

He laughed a warm, pleasant, very intimate laugh and said something about let's see, well the Sears man would be out tomorrow, at last, and I came in a drumming rush from toes to head. I buried some moans in his neck and shoulder, and he hugged me tightly enough to crack my ribs, which was just tightly enough to contain me, I thought. He kept talking. Harold was feeling a little sheepish, and making Loren tuna-and-mushroom-soup-with-noodles casserole for dinner. Jess had promised to put it in the oven at four-thirty; what time was it now?

The farmer near Sac City had called him back, four hundred and seventy acres in corn and beans, only green manures and animal manures for fertilizer, the guy's name was Morgan Boone, which sounded familiar, did it sound familiar to me? He said Jess could come any time. Jess held me away from him again, and gazed at me for a long minute or two.

I looked at the creases under his eyes, his beaky nose, his serious expression. His face was deeply familiar to me, as if I'd been staring at it my whole life. I took some deep breaths and lay back on his shoulder. The sky was steel blue, the sun caught in the lacy leaves of the locust trees above us. I wanted to say, what now, but that was a dangerous temptation for sure, so I didn't. I said, "What time is it?

Did we ever ligure that one out?"

"Three-fifteen."

"I left the house at one.

"It seems like a lifetime ago."

"Is that true?" But I found it hard to believe that such episodes as this weren't fairly routine for a good-looking guy on the West Coast.

I tried to sound joking. "You've done this before."

"Well, I've slept with women before. I haven't done this before."

I said, "I haven't slept with men. I've slept with Ty."

"I know, Ginny. I know what that means.

"Maybe you do. Maybe not." I thought of saying, last night was the best ever with Ty, last night when I dreamt I was a sow. I could ask someone likeJess, someone good-looking and experienced, what that meant.

Someone like Jess might be able to tell me.

I sat up and reached for my underpants. The world had an odd look, as if it were not itself but a panoramic, co-degree photograph of itself.

I glanced at Jess again, then lay down on his shoulder. He said, "I trust you. I've trusted you since the first time I saw you again at that pig roast. That's part of what draws me back here."

"Oh," I said. "That."

Jess laughed, but didn't pursue it. I sighed, wondered when Ty and Harold and Daddy and Pete would be back. Rose, too, had gone off to Mason City with the girls. I could feel myself disengaging from Jess.

It was a natural will-less process, an ebbing that was more reassuring than anything else, since it seemed to mean that I could be satisfied as well as full of longing. My nose itched, and I sat up and wiped it on the tail of my shirt. Jess sat up, too. We smiled at each other, another degree of ebb. When he leaned forward to reach for his shirt, he ran his hand down my shin and said, "You have nice ankles. I keep noticing them." Then, "May I ask you a question?"

"Sure."

"You are such a nice person. How come you and Ty don't have any kids?"

"Well, I've had live miscarriages."

"Jesus. Oh, Ginny."

"Ty only knows about three. He couldn't stand it after that, so I've sort of kept the fact that we're still trying to myself." A harsh look crossed Jess's face, and I felt another jolt of fear. I reached for my jeans, saying, "Well, of course I shouldn't deceive him. I know-" "It's the fucking water."

"What?"

"Have you had your well water tested for nitrates?"

"Well, no.

"Didn't your doctor tell you not to drink the well water?"

"No."

He stood up and started pulling on his jeans, then sat down and put both his socks on without speaking. I could tell he was very upset. I said, "Jess-" He exploded. "People have known for ten years or more that nitrates in well water cause miscarriages and death of infants.

Don't you know that the fertilizer runoff drains into the aquifer? I can't believe this."

"It wasn't that. It just hasn't worked. Rose drank the water-" "It's not uniform. It doesn't affect everyone the same, and not all wells are the same. Yours might be closer to the drainage wells."

"I don't know."

"Are you still trying?"

We looked at each other, both contemplating the absurdity of this question in the circumstances, and smiled. "Not today," I said. "I put in my diaphragm."

"Hey-" He reached into his pocket and pulled out a blue plastic capsule. I said, "What's that?"

"A condom. Except that I forgot I remembered to bring it." I took it and rolled it around in the palm of my hand. It was comforting, his forethought. I handed it back to him and he jumped out of the truck bed, then helped me down. We kissed, tenderly and thoughtfully, the way, maybe, people do when they have become unafraid to kiss one another, and then I ducked around the wild rosebushes and headed for home without looking back. I felt distinctly calm, complete and replete, as if I would never have to do that ever again.

At the supper table, after telling me about his trip to Zebulon Center, who he saw and how my father acted, Ty said, "Say, Gin, were you protected last night?"

I looked up from my plate and then pushed it away from me. It knocked against the water glass. I said, "Well, not exactly. But I just finished my period. It's all right."

"You sure?"

I snapped, "Does that question mean you doubt my knowledge or my truthfulness? Which one?"

He snapped back, "It means that there are things I'm not ready for yet.

" "It's been almost two years.

"It's been almost three years.

He was right. It was the fourth one I'd been thinking of. I could feel my face get hot. I raised my voice. "All right, then. It's been almost three years. That proves my point even more.

He got up and left the kitchen, closing the screen door carefully behind him. I watched him out the door without moving from the table.

He stepped into the road and turned toward the corner of 686 and Cabot Street Road. I watched him stride away, and listened to the thin sound of his boots on the blacktop. I sat there for a long time, staring out the door, struck for the first time at what I had done and thought and felt that day, how, to the eyes of almost any outsider, it would look like I had become my own enemy and the enemy of all my family and friends. That was when the fear settled over me for good. After a while I went upstairs and took out my diaphragm and washed it and put it in its case.

You DiDN'T HAVE To WAIT LoNG if you had some money to spend and were set on putting up new farm buildings, hardly long enough for a few second thoughts. And it didn't take long, after you looked at the brochures, for your eyes to travel automatically to the best equipment-farrowing crates, ventilation equipment, feed- and waste-handling equipment, heated floors. For live years, Ty had been saying that he would like to double the size of our hog operation, from live hundred finished hogs per year to a thousand, with a small breeding operation on the side-the "Boar Boutique" he called it.

Loren Clark had minored in Animal Science in college, and they had always passed articles about hog breeding back and forth.

When we started looking at brochures from confinement systems manufacturers in the week after Daddy signed over the farm, it rapidly became clear that four thousand finished hogs per year was somehow a more optimal number, ambitious but manageable, the sort of number that gained the respect of your neighbors. Four thousand was a number that Marv Carson liked, for one thing, two hundred to two hundred and twenty productive sows, three turns, and it was a number that the Harvestore dealer kept speculating about. It was also the number that bounced off the walls at the cale in town, the number that other farmers fantasized about and "knew" was the best economy of scale, not too large for a family operation but enough to keep you busy, solvent, and interested.

Pretty soon, four thousand hogs became our plan, and Marv Carson gave us a $300,000 line of credit.

The plan was to convert what remained of the old dairy barn to enlarge the farrowing and nursery rooms, add a gestation building, a grower building, and a finisher, to build a big Slurrystore for waste, and put up two small Harvestores for the corn that would serve the hogs for feed. These would run along Cabot Street Road from our house west, partly because the dairy barn was already there, but also because Cabot Street Road was a busier road, and better maintained than 686.

I think Ty, for all his experience with the basics of farm contrivance, where convenience and practicality, and even happenstance, precede any notions of appearance, still envisioned the barn transformed and these other buildings laid out in a park-like setting, perhaps even magically elevated so they could be viewed from a distance and admired, the way we admired farms down near Tama or Cedar Rapids, that crowned hillsides and looked off to the south. At breakfast or dinner, Ty would pick some brochures off the stack that lay next to the telephone in the kitchen and thumb through them, or he would scan the drawing the Harvestore man had given him, with the shapes of our house and barn crisply ruled in, the width of the road and the new driveways marked, the wide circle of the Slurrystore as neat as could be, drawn with a compass, the narrower circles of the Harvestores nestled against the gestation building. After perusing these, he would give a little disbelieving shake of his head, a low "Hmmp" of satisfaction, and sometimes say under his breath, "Isn't that something?"

As my father got more difficult, it got to be, for Ty, that the new buildings were what would save us, the marvelous new silos, the new hogs, the new order, epitomized by the Slurrystore, where all the waste from the hogs would be saved until it could be returned to the ground-no runoff no smell, no waste, a closed loop. Ty was sure my hither's enthusiasm for the future would blossom when he saw the buildings go up, even though he had no patience for the brochures Ty tried to show him. You couldn't resist baby pigs, how lively and pink they are, eager, climbing all over the sow, scrambling for the forward teats, playing with one another, squealing, watching watching watching through the bars of the farrowing crates, their little black eyes shining with curiosity. If my father could sit tight until our place seethed with this life and movement, he would, Ty was sure, be reborn into a contented retirement, busy, as the farmers at the cafe said, solvent, and interested.

That field had been planted in corn before we'd thought of any new plans, so on the day when Marv Carson came out with the permits (which he'd been able to hurry through because the president of the bank was the brother-in-law of the county building inspector, and which he brought out to us even though it was a Saturday), Ty got out the plow and plowed under twenty acres of waist-high corn stalks. Daddy was working with Pete that day, cleaning and oiling the combine, which they always tried to do during the midsummer lull. The next day, everyone skipped church. Time was essential, if Ty was to get those sows breeding again, and begin paying off the money that was about to be spent. The site supervisor from Kansas, where we'd ordered the buildings, the Harvestore man from Minnesota, the head contractor from Mason City, and Ty and Pete gathered and started measuring, so that work could begin first thing Monday morning. Sunday night, the cement mixing truck pulled up, and Ty was out of bed and at the site by live-thirty a.m. I was supposed to take Daddy to Pike, to the chiropractor, so he could be aligned after the shock of his accident.

Rose said, "Get him to shop, too. There must be something he needs, socks or something. You could use up a whole day."

"We could have dinner at the cate."

"That's a good idea. Then tomorrow, he and Pete can finish with the combine. That should take a few days. If we're going to keep him busy, then we've got to keep him really busy."

I nodded at that. We were standing by my back door, and over her shoulder I saw Jess Clark come jogging down the road. He stopped to watch the construction. Rose turned, saw him, looked back at me, and smiled a very small smile. I wondered if I had betrayed myself but said in a light tone, "What are you doing today?"

"Linda bought some material for a sweat suit outfit. I said I would help her cut it out. You know what that means.

"Tears and rage?"

"You got it. You know, you can buy these outfits at the K-mart in Mason City for something like twenty-live bucks. They're cute, too.

But Linda won't have a thing from K-mart now. Does your sewing machine work on that kind of fabric?"

"I think so. You can do it at my house if you want."

"We'll see." Now she had turned, and was surveying the construction site. She turned back to me. "One last favor?"

"Sure."

"Get the chiropractor to talk to him about exercise. I'm sure that's his problem more than the accident."

"Whatever you say.

"You'll see." Her voice was rich with irony. I laughed and got into my car.

Daddy was waiting beside the kitchen cabinets in his driveway.

Since breakfast, he had changed out of his overalls and was now wearing clean khaki trousers and a dark blue shirt. I pulled up, and he got in without saying anything. When we turned past the busy construction site, he pivoted in the seat and stared out the back window until long after everything was lost in the dusty haze.

I could not drive with Daddy, or even be in the same room with him, without a looming sense of his presence, but once he turned forward in the seat and began to look out the window, I took up my now habitual thoughts of Jess Clark. It had been live days since our rendezvous at the dump, two days of rain, the others filled with business, family duties, and now building. It was readily apparent that privacy would be minimal at best, maybe for weeks. Since the Monopoly games had ended, Jess didn't come around as regularly, and so there wasn't even the fearsome pleasure of maybe exposing myself to the scrutiny of the others as I handed him cups of coffee or asked idle questions about Harold.

I told myself that all of this was okay with me, that a life could be made of this proximity, that maybe that was the only possible life to make, since the other paths, which my imagination had instantaneously traveled, were all equally impossible. To imagine ourselves living together somewhere else, on the West Coast, say, was to imagine that we were not ourselves, and, in a way, that we had nothing for each other, since what we had for each other seemed to grow out of our entwined history and to be specific to this place.

But to imagine ourselves together in this place was to imagine collisions and explosions, seismic movements of the earth we were standing on. It was to imagine everyone around us dead, in fact.

And I imagined it, with a current of muted fear that ran under my usual eagerness to imagine the worst. To imagine Jess gone was to imagine two other impossible things, that he had never returned (but he had, and at times I realized this afresh with a pressing feeling that felt a lot like remorse), or, sometimes, that I was the dead one. When I made myself imagine him leaving, going back to Seattle, getting married, having children, being dead certainly seemed preferable to returning to the life I had lived before his return.

My father said, "That's a nice place."

I looked right, but we were past it. I said, "Ward LaSalle's place?"

Ward was Ken's second cousin.

"Fields were real clean."

"I see you took the gauze off your cut, Daddy. It looks pretty good."

"Let the air get at it."

"Today, maybe. But you don't want to get into the combine with an open wound, do you? Do you have some antibiotic ointment at home?"

He didn't reply.

"We can get some.

It was silly to think that Jess would never marry. Being like Loren was just the way he didn't want to be.

"What's the matter with you?"

I started. "What?"

"What's the matter with you? That semi passed and you acted like you were going to jump out of your skin."

I hadn't even seen the semi.

It was remarkable how my state of mind had evolved over the last live days. I could distinctly remember the strength I felt as I walked away from Jess, ducked under the rosebushes and trotted toward my house.

I'd wanted to put distance between us. I had literally had enough of him, was full of him, and while not precisely happy or elated, I felt finished somehow, made right. We had promised nothing, not even spoken of the future-what we were doing seemed more essentially a culmination of the past, only a culmination of the past.

I don't know why I was surprised to find how quickly those feelings drained away, how eagerly I longed to have again what I thought had been sufficient for a lifetime.

I don't know why I was surprised to discover myself questioning all my memories of Jess, sifting through them for clues about his feelings and plans. I knew about his feelings and plans. He was all the things he had told me-restless, fearful, torn between what he would have called American greed and Oriental serenity. I knew what was up with Jess, but it was suddenly all mysterious.

I don't know why I was surprised to discover everything changed, since it was obvious in retrospect that I had sought to change it.

And I was surprised to discover how my mind worked over these things, the simultaneity of it. I seemed, on the surface, to be continually talking to myself giving myself instructions or admonishments, asking myself what I really wanted, making comparisons, busily working my rational faculties over every aspect of Jess and my feelings for him as if there were actually something to decide.

Beneath this voice, flowing more sweetly, was the story: what he did and what I did and what he then did and what I did after that, seductive, dreamy, mostly wordless, renewing itself ceaselessly, then projecting itself into impossible futures that wore me out. And beneath this was an animal, a dog living in me, shaking itself jumping, barking, attacking, gobbling at things the way a dog gulps its food.

Daddy said, "That Spacelab thing is going to go right over this area, according to the paper."

I said, "What?"

"The thing that's falling. Goes over here all the time. It's going to be something when it falls, let me tell you."

I glanced at a passing field, flat and defenseless, and thought for a moment about meteorites and space capsules, things glowing in the atmosphere, then making holes in the ground. I felt a visceral flutter of fear. It was his voice that did it, I think. I said, "Don't worry about it. You could draw it to you. ' He turned his big head and looked at me. I smiled. I said, "That was kind of a joke, Daddy."

He said, "What happens is people don't watch out. They get careless because they weren't taught right."

I said, "You can't watch out for Skylab, Daddy. The pieces are too heavy."

"They were careless with that whole thing. Shouldn't even be falling.

The joke's on them, isn't it?"

"I guess so." After a second I said, "I thought it was supposed to be cooler today." We came into Pike passing the elevator that sat right by the freight tracks. The chiropractic office was the first office at the bottom of Main Street. I pulled into the shade of the overhang.

When I got out, Daddy said, "What are you doing?"

"I'm going to walk down Main Street. I'll be back and then we'll go over to the Pike's Peak and have dinner." He huffed. I said, "I don't want to sit in the car. It's awfully hot."

"What if I'm done before you come back? I gotta wait for you."

"It's air-conditioned in the office. Just chat with Roberta."

"You wait. You can window-shop some other time."

"I'll meet you at the Pike's Peak, then."

"I don't want to walk there in this heat."

I squinted down the street at the bank clock: 11:12, 87 degrees.

"It's only a block and a half and it's not that hot, Daddy. The walk will do you good." This conversation made me breathless, as if I were wearing a girdle with tight stays.

"You wait. I want to ride."

I glanced toward the chiropractic office. Roberta Stanley, the receptionist, was just inside the door, watching us argue. I said, "It's boring to wait, Daddy. I didn't bring a book or a magazine or anything." I hated the note of pleading that crept into my voice.

Where was the power I had felt only a few days before, the power of telling rather than being told?

Inspired by just that note of pleading, Daddy raised his voice a little. "You wait."

I got back in the car. It was the presence of Roberta Stanley that made me get back in the car. Daddy turned and walked heavily toward the door. Roberta got up from behind her desk and opened it for him.

After he went in, Roberta lingered a moment, smiling at me. I gave a wave, and she waved back. I scrunched down in the seat. All of the Stanleys would certainly hear about this, since Roberta was a terrible gossip. I hated to think about how people felt about us. It didn't matter what it was, disapproval, ridicule, even sympathy or fondness.

I hated to think of them having any opinion at all.

There was a remote possibility that I would see Jess Clark in Pike.

He was often the one to run into town if they needed something, and he had gotten into the habit of doing all the food shopping, since neither Harold nor Loren ever remembered to accommodate his vegetarianism.

That would be nice, I thought, just to see him ambling down the sidewalk, just to watch him from a distance, his ligure imbedded in its surroundings. One of many, a manageable size. He didn't appear, but thinking of him sparked the voices, and I gave into them, sliding farther down into the seat. The effect of sliding down, of relaxing, was to arouse me slightly. I closed my eyes.

Daddy ordered the full hot dinner special-roast beef with gravy and mashed potatoes, canned string beans, ice cream, three cups of coffee.

I had grilled cheese on Roman Meal bread, potato chips, pickle, and a Coke. We sat across from one another, and I saw him eyeballing my plate. He said, "That all the dinner you're gonna eat?"

"I'm not hungry for some reason."

"Hmmp."

"You really shouldn't be eating all that. That's too much. It's a hot day."

"You said it wasn't hot before."

"Daddy, if you got more exercise, you'd feel better. A little walk down Main Street from the chiropractor to the cale wouldn't bother you.

"I can walk it. I don't want to. I walked plenty in my time, and now I want to ride."

"Did Dr. Hudson talk to you about exercise? It's importantHe waved me off with his fork.

"Then I hope you don't get your license taken away.

He drank from his coffee. "You shouldn't talk to me like you do.

I'm your father."

"I try to show respect, Daddy."

"You don't try hard enough. You think because I gave you girls the farm, you don't have to make up to me any more. I know what's going on."

"That's not true, Daddy. We do our best." I smiled. "You're not the easiest person to get along with, you know."

"I don't like it when people are lazy, or when they don't pay attention. This is a hard business, and takes hard work."

I continued to smile. The second half of my sandwich lay on my plate, and I was hungry for it, but instead of eating it, I made myself say, "I don't think you can say that we're lazy. Anyway, I don't think you show us any respect, Daddy. I don't think you ever think about anything from our point of view."

"You don't, huh? I bust my butt working all my life and I make a good place for you and your husband to live on, with a nice house and good income, hard times or good times, and you think I should be stopping all the time and wondering about your, what did you call it, your 'point of view'?"

I felt myself redden to the hairline, and pushed my plate away. "I just want to get along, Daddy. I don't want to light. Don't light with me?"

"You know, my girl, I never talked to my father like this. It wasn't up to me to judge him, or criticize his ways. Let me tell you a story about those old days, and maybe you'll be reminded what you have to be grateful for."

"Okay." I was smiling like a maniac.

"There was a family that had a farm south of us. The old man was older than my dad, and he'd come in and drained that land down there, him and his sons. He had four sons, and when the youngest was about twelve, he came down with that polio thing. This was a long time ago, before I even went to school. Well, that boy was all crippled up by the time I remember him, but he didn't stay in the house, nosiree. The old man got him out there and made him plow his furrows as straight as the other boys, and he whipped him, too, to show him that there wasn't any way out of it. There were a couple of daughters, and one up and left home when she was about sixteen, calling her father all kinds of a bully and slave driver, but the thing is, that boy did his share, and he respected himself for it. It was the old man's job to see to that."

"How do you know?"

"What?"

"How do you know he respected himself for it, that that was what he needed?"

"I saw it!" He was beginning to huff and puff.

I said, "Okay, Daddy. Okay. I don't want you to be mad. Let's go down to the Supervalu. You need some coffee at your place, and I need some things, too. I don't know whether these building people expect to eat with us or not."

"You girls should listen to me.

"We'll try harder, Daddy."

It was easy, sitting there and looking at him, to see it his way.

What did we deserve, after all? There he stood, the living source of it all, of us all. I squirmed, remembering my ungrateful thoughts, the deliciousness I had felt putting him in his place. When he talked, he had this effect on me. Of course it was silly to talk about "my point of view." When my father asserted his point of view, mine vanished.

Not even I could remember it.

LATER oN, WHEN I LooKED BACK, what I remembered about that day was the morning, my fear that Rose sensed something between Jess and me, my argument with my father at dinner, the ceaseless thoughts of Jess Clark that were simultaneously bewitching and tedious, a kind of work that I could not stop performing. The afternoon slipped by me. It was true that when we went by the building crew and I said, "Want to stick around for a while and watch them pour the footings?" Daddy didn't answer. But in our life together, we had long passed the point of eloquent silences. When I slowed down to pull in next to my house, he waved me forward, down to his house, and when I pulled in there, he got out without a word. I could, of course, read by his demeanor that he was displeased, but how this displeasure would incubate I could not and did not know.

At home, there was a definite sense of worthwhile accomplishment. The Harvestore man from Minnesota had a cup of coffee and left to go back to Minnesota. The confinement building man from Kansas was staying at the motel in Zebulon Center, and said that while there was a company policy against meals with the people they were working for, because it screwed up expense account tax deductions, he'd be llappy to make one exception and eat with us the next night, if we wanted. I told him we'd barbecue some of our own pork chops. It would be Tuesday, I knew, Daddy's night, but he might eat barbecued pork chops if a stranger was eating with us. Or he might not. It was a gamble. The Kansan was a pleasant wiry man, half a head shorter than Ty, who'd actually grown up on a wheat farm in Colorado. He kept looking out the window, across the south field. Once he said, "If this had been my dad's place, I never would have left. This looks like paradise to me, that's for sure.

Ty said, "We try not to forget how lucky we are.

We walked him out to his truck. A cool wind had picked up, damp and full of rain. The Kansas man said, "Think we'll get it?"

Ty said, "Feels like it." Dark clouds were piling up on the western horizon; blinding streaks of platinum sunlight shot toward us over their humped crests. "There's been some good-sized storms this year, but mostly they've missed around here. I expect we're about due."

"Now when I was a kid, we used to go tornado chasing."

"I did that once."

I turned and stared at Ty.

"Damn risky thing to do, but farm kids are crazy.

They laughed. The Kansas man got into his pickup and wheeled onto the blacktop, waving as he left. I said, "I guess he won't care that that motel doesn't have a cellar."

"Doesn't sound like it."

The weatherman said the storm would come through Mason City about midnight. We were, in fact, already under a tornado watch. I dished up a chicken stew I'd made in the Crock-Pot in the morning and told Ty a little of what had happened at the elevators and in between, about Daddy bringing up Skylab, but I tiptoed around the argument, knowing he would disapprove. He told me about the progress of the building. I listened for news of Jess Clark, but he didn't mention anything. It looked like a quiet evening. It may be true that just about this time, during our after supper conversation over the dishwashing, I did hear a truck stop at the corner, turn, and accelerate toward Cabot. It may be that I heard that, or it may be that it's inserted itself into those memories.

At any rate, Rose called about nine and said that Pete's truck was gone and that they thought Daddy might have taken it, since he had a key from last winter, when his truck was in the shop. Five minutes later, they blew in the front door, Linda and Pammy in tow. Pete was in a father, and, though trying to calm Pete, Rose, too, was furious. She kept saying, "I can't believe this," and Pete kept saying, "If he wrecks that truck, I'll kill him. We ought to send the cops out looking for him, or he's never going to learn."

Rose paced back and forth. "If they'd put him in jail for a night or two last week, it might have brought him to his senses. Now he just thinks he can get away with anything."

Ty said, "Why don't I go into Cabot and see if he went there? He might have just gone to the Cool Spot."

Rose said, "He's probably driving all over creation."

After they left, Linda said to me, "Did Grandpa steal the truck?"

"Not exactly."

"Dad said he did."

"Your dad is pretty mad. But we all own the trucks and things together. You can't steal what you own.

"Mommy said that she wanted us to come down here, because she didn't want us to be alone in the house if Grandpa came back."

"Your mom's pretty mad, too."

Rose opened the screen door and came in. She said, "We might get quite a storm. I didn't notice it before." Her arms were crossed over her chest. She surveyed Linda and me. Pammy had gone into the kitchen, and in this little silence, I could hear the refrigerator door close.

Rose said, "Yes, I am pretty mad, but you make it sound like I'm just mad, as if I were crazy or something. I'm mad at your grandpa, Linda, because of things he has done, not just to get mad."

I said, "I realize that, Rose. But we don't know the explanation.

There could be a reason. As soon as he does anything, you shoot first and ask questions later."

"We were sitting right there. We would have taken him where he wants to go. He took the truck without asking. He snuck around."

She addressed this to Linda, an admonishment, a moral lesson.

"Rose, he thinks he has a right to everything. He thinks it's all basically his."

"Yes, he does." She said this righteously, as if the mistakenness of this perception was self-evident.

Pammy came into the room, and I said to the two girls, "Maybe there's something on TV. This could be a long night, with the storm and everything. We ought to have the television on, anyway." They moved obediently to the couch, and ended up watching the only thing we could get, which was a performance of the New York City Ballet on PBS.

During the news they drifted off Pammy rolled back against the arm of the couch, her head flopped and her hair in her face. Linda lay against Pammy, breathing deeply, her mouth open. I set down my knitting and gazed at them, thinking how they often seemed bewildered and wondering if it had always been thus with them and, bewildered myself I had taken that to be a normal condition. Rose said, "Let's carry them up to bed for now anyway. If there's a warning, we can wake them up and get them into the basement, but it looks more like just a bad rain to me." After we came down, Rose stood at the door, watching the gathering storm and waiting for the truck.

A pair of headlights turned off the road, momentarily crossed the back wall of the room, went dark. Rose stayed where she was and didn't say anything. I sat still. After a long, quiet moment, punctuated by the bang bang of two truck doors closing, Ty's voice, low and calm, said, "Ginny, come out here please."

This was it.

Rose pushed the screen door and I followed her. Our father was standing in front of the truck. Ty was behind him. He said, "Larry has some things to say. I told him he should tell you them himself."

Daddy said, "That's right."

Rose took my hand and squeezed it, as she had often done when we were kids, and in trouble, waiting for punishment.

Daddy said, resentfully, "That's right. Hold hands."

I said, "Why shouldn't we? All we've ever really had is each other.

Anyway, what are we in trouble for? Why are you getting ready to tell us a bunch of things? We haven't done anything wrong except try our best with you."

Rose said, "It's going to storm. Why don't I take you home and we can talk about this in the morning?"

"I don't care about the storm. I don't want to go home. You girls stick me there."

I said, "We don't stick you there, Daddy. It's the nicest house, and you live there. You've lived there all your life."

"Let me take you home." Rose's tone was wheedling.

I urged him. "It's been a long day. Go on with her, and then tomorrow we can"No! I'd rather stay out in the storm. If you think I haven't done that before, my girl, you'd be surprised."

A wave of exasperation washed over me. I said, "Fine. Do what you want. You will anyway."

"Spoken like the bitch you are!"

Rose said, "Daddy!"

He leaned his face toward mine. "You don't have to drive me around any more, or cook the goddamned breakfast or clean the goddamned house."

His voiced modulated into a scream. "Or tell me what I can do and what I can't do. You barren whore! I know all about you, you slut. You've been creeping here and there all your life, making up to this one and that one. But you're not really a woman, are you? I don't know what you are, just a bitch, is all, just a dried-up whore bitch." I admit that I was transfixed; yes, I thought, this is what he's been thinking all these years, waiting to say it. For the moment, shock was like a clear window that separated us. Spittle formed in the corners of his mouth, but if it flew, I didn't feel it.

Nor did I step back. Over Daddy's shoulder I saw Ty, also transfixed, unmoving, hands in pockets. Then Pete turned the corner and drove up in his own pickup.

Rose said, "This is beyond ridiculous. Daddy, you can't mean those things. This has got to be senility talking, or Alzheimer's or something. Come on, Pete and I will take you home. You can apologize to Ginny in the morning." Pete turned out his headlights and got out of the truck, his voice, sounding flat and distant, said, "What's up?"

"Don't you make me out to be crazy! I know your game! The next step is the county home, with that game.

"I'm not making you out to be crazy, Daddy. I want you to go to your house, and for things to be the way they were. You've got to stop drinking and do more work around the place. Ginny thinks so, and I think so even more than she does. I'm not going to put up with even so much as she does. We do our best for you, and have stuck with you all our lives. You can't just roll over us. You may be our father, but that doesn't give you the right to say anything you want to Ginny or to me."

"It's you girls that make me crazy! I gave you everything, and I get nothing in return, just some orders about doing this and being that and seeing points of view."

Rose stood like a fence post, straight, unmoved, her arms crossed over her chest. "We didn't ask for what you gave us. We never asked for what you gave us, but maybe it was high time we got some reward for what we gave you! You say you know all about Ginny, well, Daddy, I know all about you, and you know I know. This is what we've got to offer, this same life, nothing more nothing less.

If you don't want it, go elsewhere. Get someone else to take you in, because I for one have had it." Her voice was low but penetrating, as deadly serious as ice picks.

Now he looked at me again. "You hear her? She talks to me worse than you do." Now he sounded almost conciliatory, as if he could divide us and conquer us. I stepped back. All at once I had a distinct memory of a time when Rose and I were nine and eleven, and we had kept him waiting after a school Halloween party that he hadn't wanted us to go to in the first place. I had lost a shoe in the cloakroom, and Rose and I looked for it madly while the other children put on their coats and left. We never found it, and we were the very last, by live or ten minutes, to come out of the school. Daddy was waiting in the pickup.

Rose got in first, in her princess costume, and I got in beside the door, careful to conceal my stockinged foot. I was dressed as a hobo.

Daddy was seething, and we knew we would get it just for being late when we got home. There was no telling what would happen if he learned about the shoe.

It was Mommy who betrayed me. When I walked in the door, she said, "Ginny! Where's your shoe?" and Daddy turned and looked at my foot, and it was like he turned to lire right there. He came for me and started spanking me with the flat of his hand, on the rear and the thighs. I backed up till I got between the range and the window, and I could hear Mommy saying, "Larry! Larry! This is crazy!" He turned to her and said, "You on her side?"

Mommy said, "No, but-" "Then you tell her to come out from behind there. There's only one side here, and you'd better be on it."

There was a silence. Rose was nowhere to be seen. From upstairs I could hear Caroline start to cry and then shush up. Mommy's head turned toward the sound, then back. He said, "Tell her."

She said, "Virginia, come out from behind there. Out to the middle of the room. He's right. You shouldn't have lost your shoe."

I did what she said, live steps. I kept my gaze down, on the fringes of my hobo pants that we'd cut earlier in the day. My hands were covered with the makeup I'd rubbed off my face, so they looked strangely red and black. When I got to the middle of the room, he grabbed my arm and pulled me over to the doorway, leaned me up against it, and strapped me with his belt until I fell down. That was what a united front meant to him.

I said, "Daddy, if you think this is bad, then you'd be amazed at what you really deserve. You don't deserve even the care we give you. As far as I'm concerned, from now on you're on your own.

Rose flashed me a look, perplexity mixed with vindication. She said, "Your house is down the road. You know where it is, and you can get there. I'm going inside, out of the storm."

Daddy said, "How can you treat your father like this? I flattered you when I called you a bitch! What do you want to reduce me to?

I'll stop this building! I'll get the land back! I'll throw you whores off this place. You'll learn what it means to treat your father like this. I curse you! You'll never have children, Ginny, you haven't got a hope. And your children are going to laugh when you die!"

Rose pulled me into the house, slamming the door behind us. Ty and Pete were left standing out there. Through the window, I saw them sort of urge Daddy toward the truck, but he swung out at them, landing a punch on Pete's cheek. Pete threw up his hands, then turned and came in the house, sputtering, "What an asshole! This is it. This is really it!" Daddy was now staggering down the road.

Ty crept along a little ways behind him. There was lightning by now, and big crashes of thunder. Rose turned on the TV as if she were more interested in the progress of the storm than what we were going to do, or think, or be after this, but her hand was shaking so much she could hardly manipulate the dial. I turned back to the window. Just when I was thinking that Ty was getting pretty far away, the sky let loose a flood, not drops or sheets but an avalanche of rain that hid Ty and my father completely from sight, even hid the two trucks parked not ten feet from the window.

The electricity went out.

From upstairs, two small voices started calling, "Mommy!

Mommy! Come find us!"

Pete said, "Shit!"

Rose said, "I hope he dies in it." By the lightning flashes, I could see her making her way around the furniture to the bottom of the stairs.

From upstairs came two sharp screams.

Rose called, in a stern voice, "I'm coming! No more screaming!"

Pete said, "You got any kerosene lamps? This could last all night."

Ty staggered through the door, his boots sloshing, every stitch of clothing sodden, rain streaming down his face and chin. He said, "I lost him. I lost sight of him. I'm surprised I even managed to get back here."

EVENTUALLY, WE SETTLED oN THE PLAN that until the storm passed, Rose and the girls would stay at our house, Pete would go home and check on things there, and Ty would check at Daddy's and then wait there ifDaddy hadn't gotten home yet. After the storm, they would look around, and if Daddy hadn't been found in an hour or so, we would call the sheriff.

Things were awkward between Ty and me. What I looked for him to say was that he didn't believe anything Daddy had said, didn't believe the unspoken gist of his denunciation, either-that I was a worthless and unlovable person. He said nothing about this, possibly because to mention it would give it more credence than it was worth.

I wanted him to say that when he drove Daddy home from town, he didn't know what Daddy wanted to say to me, but he said nothing about that, either, and I felt an irresistible temptation to imagine that Daddy was speaking for Ty as well as himself that they had agreed on these things beforehand. I found his dry socks and his poncho.

Of course I wondered why Daddy had chosen just those terms for me, whore, slut. Of course the conviction that he had some knowledge of my time with Jess Clark materialized, whole and fully armed, in my new awareness. Perhaps that was what he and Ty spoke of on their way home.

Perhaps this was where the story of my father flowed into the story of Jess Clark. Certainly a child raised with an understanding of her father's power like mine could not be surprised that even without any apparent source of information he would know her dearest secret.

Hadn't he always?

I sat in the dark after Ty and Pete left. Rose was upstairs, talking to Linda and Pammy, getting them to go to sleep in spite of everything, since because of everything there was something intolerable about their inquisitive and fearful presence. I was still in shock, or maybe in suspension, waiting for the catalyst. It was easy to see, all of a sudden, that my life until now had been, at least, predictable, well-known. What I had had to do I knew I could do, whether I actually preferred to do it or not.

Rose descended the stairs, carrying the kerosene lamp, which she set on the newel post at the bottom. She called up, "There. You can see a little light. It's right at the bottom of the stairs like I said."

There was a faint "okay," just audible over the sound of the rain.

She came and sat down across from me. There was nothing to do, since we had already unplugged the appliances and the television. It was clear that we would have to talk about it. I wondered how she would start.

I wondered, too, what Jess Clark would say to all this. It seemed like nothing could batter that out of me. Impossibilities disguised as possibilities floated out of the depths-Jess must have told, Jess must have entertained Harold and Loren with the story, and Harold told Daddy, even ifJess didn't tell, he probably thinks about me the same way, no, he doesn't think that way at all, he knows me better than that, he would stick by me if I asked him toRose said, "Well, the almighty has spoken. Trembling yet?" Her tone was drawling and blase.

"You were shaking. You could barely turn the TV knob before."

"Shit, Ginny, I'm still shaking. I wish I hadn't stopped smoking.

God, I want a cigarette."

"I want to throw up.

"Oh, honey."

"Just try to maintain the right attitude, or we'll cry."

"I'm not going to cry, and you aren't either."

"Say, 'He's crazy.

"He is crazy. He's bananas. You can always tell when they go on and on about some conspiracy at work. Or sex. When they bring up sex that's a sure sign."

"Was this what you call foaming at the mouth?"

"Remember that guy who used to pilot the spray plane when Daddy was having the crops sprayed from the air? He supposedly got very crazy as he got older. They used to find him in the crawl space under the kitchen, hiding out."

"Who told you that?"

"Marlene Stanley heard it from Bob, who knew that family up near Mason City. And he had this terrible rash. They didn't know if it was some reaction to all those chemicals, or whether it was from crawling around under the house."

"You think Daddy's having some reaction to chemicals?"

She shrugged. "Remember last Christmas when Harold Clark was going on and on about how he didn't expect to live live more years, and his dad had died at ninety-two? If you drive around, you can pass all the houses. This one lived to be ninety, this one eighty-seven, this couple ninety-three and ninety-two. That generation is gone, though."

"Grandpa Cook was only sixty-six. Daddy's two years older than that now. And Grandpa Davis was seventy."

"Well, I don't know ifthey were like the others. Don't you wonder if they all didn't just implode? First their wives collapse under the strain, then they take it out on their children for as long as they can, then they just reach the end of their rope. I used to fantasize that Mommy had escaped and taken an assumed name, and someday she would be back for us. You want to hear the life I had picked out for us?"

"Sure."

"She was a waitress at the restaurant of a nice hotel, and we lived with her in a Hollywood-style apartment, you know, its own door, two floors, two bedrooms and a bathroom up and living room and kitchen down. Nice shag carpeting, white walls, little sounds from the neighbors on either side, sliding door out to the back deck. There had to be neighbors on both sides. I thought it would be scary to live on the end."

"I guess I never really thought about not living on the farm. Isn't that funny? I wanted it to be different, though, in some ways.

"Ginny, you sound so mild. Aren't you furious?"

"What good is that? If it is some chemical thing, what good does it do to be furious? We still have to deal with it."

"It wasn't any chemical thing twenty years ago.

"Well, he's always had rages, I admit. Maybe I would have been more conciliatory tonight if I hadn't suddenly remembered-" The phone rang, and I answered it, even though you weren't supposed to in a thunderstorm. Ty wanted to know if Daddy had reappeared, if I thought the storm was letting up. I said, "No to both. Not there, either, huh?" Rose came over and sat down next to me on the couch. I hung up the phone. The light from the kerosene lamp seemed marvelously bright now that I had adjusted to it, and Rose's face seemed to gather it and reflect it, her skin the warm glowing color of the light itself. In this forgiving radiance, the angles wrought by the chemotherapy only looked like youth, the largeness and depth of her eyes only looked like beauty.

After I hung up the phone, she sought my gaze and held it, then said, in a tight voice, "Ginny, you don't remember how he came after us, do you?"

"I remember the shoe incident. I was remembering that when he was yelling at me, the way he made Mommy-" "I don't mean when we got strapped or spanked."

"Came after us?"

"When we were teenagers. How he came into our rooms.

I licked my lips and switched my legs so the right crossed over the left. I said, "We slept together while Mommy was sick."

"And then, that Christmas, we moved into separate rooms. He said it was time we had separate rooms."

It was true that we had had separate rooms. Mine had been yellow, our old room, and Rose's pink, the former guest room. I did not, in fact, remember the transition, which was odd, nor did I remember exactly wanting my own room. I said, "Well, of course I remember having separate rooms. I don't remember why."

"He went into your room at night."

"What for? I don't remember that at all."

"How can you not remember? You were fifteen years old!"

"I'm sure I was asleep. Grandpa Cook used to prowl around looking at everybody. It was like checking the hogs or something."

"It wasn't like checking the hogs with Daddy."

"What are you saying, Rose?"

"You know."

"I promise you I don't know." And I didn't. But I was afraid anyway.

I was a captive of her stare, staring back.

Rose inhaled, held her breath. Then she said, "He was having sex with you."

"He was not!"

"I saw him go in! He stayed for a long time!"

"Times always seem longer in the middle of the night. He was probably closing windows or something." My voice came out conciliatory.

"I checked my clock." She looked flushed.

"Oh, Rose. How am I going to believe that you woke up twenty-one years ago and saw Daddy go into my room and checked your clock and then saw him come out and checked your clock, and that constitutes evidence that he was-" Still staring at her, I jumped over this part. I said, skeptically enough, I hoped, "Anyway, Daddy may be a drinker and even a rager, but he goes to church-" "It's true." Now her voice was low, penetrating, demanding belief.

But I felt stumped as well as dismayed. Sometime later, I said, "Okay, say it's true. Did I ever mention it at the time?"

"He threatened you. He made sure you wouldn't tell me."

"How? I told you everything."

"He said if you told me, I'd be really jealous, and wouldn't like you any more. You were fifteen. You didn't have much spunk. You believed that."

"I told you this at the time?"

"You never said anything at the time."

"Well, then." I sat back, breaking away from her gaze, trying to summon some older-sister authority. I said, to the room, because I was afraid to look at her just then, "Why are you saying this?"

"I realized that you don't remember the other day, in Daddy's living room."

I caught my breath in a little surge of angry frustration. "But it didn't happen."

"But it did."

"Well, why don't I remember? Do you think I'm lying?"

"That's the way it happened with me." She might as well have been reciting a pickle recipe, her tone was that flat. I was certain I hadn't heard her clearly.

"What?"

"Because after he stopped going in to you, he started coming in to me, and those are the things he said to me, and that's what we did. We had sex in my bed."

"You were thirteen!"

"And fourteen and fifteen and sixteen."

"I don't believe it!"

She looked at me from a long distance. "I thought you knew. I thought all these years you and I shared this knowledge, sort of underneath everything else. I thought if after that you could go along and treat him normally the way you do, then it was okay to just put it behind us."

I stared at her. "What about Caroline?"

After a bit she said, "I'm not sure. I mean, he told me that if I went along with him, he wouldn't get interested in her. He presented it as a kind of biological fact. I suspect he never tried anything with her, mostly because she acts like she feels differently toward him than we do. She humors him and sympathizes with him. He doesn't overwhelm her the way he does us."

"But he doesn't overwhelm you! You stand right up to him!"

"He likes that. All those dates and escapes when I was in high school?

It made him think he had to subdue me. He liked it."

"You sound like you were trying to keep him interested!"

"Well, I was afraid he'd try something with Caroline, and she was only eight or ten. But I was flattered, too. I thought that he'd picked me, me, to be his favorite, not you, not her. On the surface, I thought it was okay, that it must be okay if he said it was, since he was the rule maker. He didn't rape me, Ginny. He seduced me. He said it was okay, that it was good to please him, that he needed it, that I was special. He said he loved me."

I said, "I can't listen to this."

Rose sat quiet, looking at me. There were three quick thunderclaps, the heavy pressure of rain against the house. I concentrated on that.

"Ginny."

"What?"

"He went into your room. I watched him."

"Maybe I was asleep. Maybe he was just thinking about it and decided not to do it for some reason. Maybe you were prettier."

"That's not the way it works. I've read a little about it. Prettier doesn't make any difference. You were as much his as I was. There was no reason for him to assert his possession of me more than his possession of you. We were just his, to do with as he pleased, like the pond or the houses or the hogs or the crops. Caroline was his, too. That's why I don't know about her."

Of course I was staring, registering the shifting expressions on her face, the flickering play of the light. Of course I was wondering whether she would lie to me. When we were children, young children, nine and seven or so, she had done a lot of lying. I had been the blurter, always stumbling into self-betrayal without a moment's thought. She had been more calculating, and even said to me once, "Why do you answer every question they ask you? Just tell them what they like and they'll leave you alone." She steadily returned my gaze.

Finally, I threw myself back against the couch and exclaimed, "Rose, you're too calm. You're so calm that it's more like you're lying than it is like you're dredging up horrors from the past."

"I am calm. This is a surprise for you, if you say so. But it isn't a surprise for me. I've thought about it for years. I told Pete, too, after my broken arm."

"Did he believe you?"

"Pete would believe Daddy's capable of anything. His attitude toward me is more complicated. He knows how he should feel, and he tries to feel that way. It helps that we have daughters. If Daddy did anything to them, Pete would kill him. That's partly why I stay married to him.

I glanced toward the stairs, suddenly certain that Linda and Pammy were sitting at the top, taking this all in. The stairs were empty. I said, "Is that why you keep them away from Daddy?"

"And why I send them to boarding school. Though it gave me a little shiver, having him driving all over, down to Des Moines and everything.

I'm not sure the school would prevent them from going out with him."

It took me a while to get out my next question. It felt as if fear had literally jammed wadding into my mouth. Finally, I said, "Has he even" "Not that I know of. I bought the books, and we went through all the drills and stuff. I prepared them without mentioning Daddy.

And I've kept my eyes peeled. And we were in our teens."

"It didn't happen to me, Rose."

She shrugged a little.

I spoke angrily all of a sudden, surprising myself "I don't know what to say! This is ridiculous!" All at once I started to cry. "I mean, the strangest thing is how idiotic I feel, how naive and foolish. God, I am so sorry he did that."

Rose sat calmly, almost impassive. "Don't make me feel sorry for myself. That's the hardest. The more pissed off I am, the better I feel."

"Okay. Okay. Okay."

She moved close to me and put her arms around me. We sat quietly beside each other for a few minutes. I tried to stop crying, but it was like I had been shaken to a jelly and I didn't know how to reconstitute myself. Then, right in my ear, I heard her voice. She was saying, "He won't get away with it, Ginny. I won't let him get away with it. I just won't."

THE SToRM DIMINISHED AFTER MIDNIGHT, though it was still raining heavily. Ty and Pete came back and went out again. Just after two, Rose and I lay down on our bed, and Rose, I think, went to sleep. I got up to check on the girls, who had thrown off their covers.

Everyone seemed to have taken refuge in my house, as if pursued.

Linda's leg was thrown over Pammy's and their hands lay together: they must have been holding hands, but their grip on each other relaxed when they fell asleep. I had known them since they were born, repeatedly hefted that remarkably dense weight that only babies and toddlers have.

Countless moments with each of them seemed immortal to me-the time when Pammy was about eighteen months and we were all sitting at the dinner table, and Pammy raised her arms overhead and said "Up!" so we all raised our arms over our heads and shouted "Up! Up! Up!" until Pammy slammed both her little palms on the table and cried "Down," her own joke that she laughed at uproariously. When Linda was a baby, she squeezed all her food in her list until it oozed out between her lingers, and only then would she eat it. How could anyone approach them with ill intent? How could anyone be moved not to protect them, but to hurt them, especially like this, in the middle of the night, at the sight of their harmless, resistless sleeping bodies?

But of course, it hadn't been their bodies, it had been ours, or Rose's, rather. But mine, too, if he entered my room, even if he just closed the windows, even if he only checked to see if I was asleep.

I lay there then as boneless as they did now, tangled in my nightgown, my hair striped across my face. And the fact was, that though I could not imagine my father doing what Rose said he did, I also could not imagine him doing what I was doing then, looking down on his daughters with appreciation and affection, feeling for us the tenderness I felt for Pammy and Linda. I shivered, pressed the coverlet around them, and backed out of the room. I was still dressed, but I got into the bed beside Rose, who was lying on top of the spread with the quilt pulled over her head. I must have fallen asleep.

The ligure in the bedroom door, when I awoke, was Jess Clark.

When he saw me move, he bent down beside me and said, "Your father's at Harold's. They don't know I'm here," and that said everything I needed to know about secrecy, conspiracy, danger. I rolled out of bed without waking Rose, and pushed him ahead of me down the stairs. It was lour-ten by the hall clock.

Both trucks were still gone.

The rain had ended and the windows were just beginning to lighten.

I remembered what Rose had told me.

I looked at Jess Clark and burst into tears.

He took me into the kitchen, turned on the light, and made us coffee, held my hand, and searched my face while he talked to me.

As far as Jess could tell, Daddy had wandered for about forty minutes or an hour until he got near Harold Clark's barn. Instead of going inside, he had staggered around, talking and shouting to himself and that is how Loren Clark had found him when he got home late from the movies in Zebulon Center. Loren brought him in the house and they tried to get him out of his wet clothes, but he'd insisted on calling Ken LaSalle and Marv Carson before he would change. Harold let him, and the two of them came out in the storm and met him at Harold's. "He was raving," said Jess, "and Harold was kind of smiling. He likes people to be stirred up."

"They all do! It's hateful. This is going to be all over town by breakfast. It's going to be all over town at breakfast, because Marv Carson eats at the cale every morning."

"So let it. What do you care? Tell me what happened?"

I smoothed my shirt then, and put my hand to my hair, which was apparently standing on end. The fact was that so many things had happened that as I woke up, I found myself stumbling over them one at a time. I wondered where Ty was, if he had called the sheriff.

I opened my mouth to speak and there were too many things to speak about, too many ways to speak about them when, to Jess Clark, of all people, I had to speak in just the right way. I looked at his painfully strange and familiar face and instantaneously everything dissolved into a strong solution of shame, even my doings with Jess himself which I realized I had been setting apart and cherishing until then. I dropped my eyes to the vinyl tablecloth, red and white plaid.

Finally, I said, "What did Daddy say?"

"He said you whores had sent him out into the storm and that he wished he'd had sons."

"We didn't! We tried over and over to get him to go home! He cursed us! When we-" He squeezed my hand. "1 didn't believe him, Ginny. I knew there was more to it than meets the eye.

"I know he was drunk. He always fools me, because when he gets drunk, it's just a change of mood. He doesn't stagger around or slur his words or anything. Then I fall for it. I forget he's just drunk."

"I don't think you have to excuse him because he was drunk."

Shame is a distinct feeling. I couldn't look at my hands around the coffee cup or hear my own laments without feeling appalled, wanting desperately to fall silent, grow smaller. More than that, I was uncomfortably conscious of my whole body, from the awkward way that the shafts of my hair were thrusting out of my scalp to my feet, which felt dirty as well as cold. Everywhere, I seemed to feel my skin from the inside, as if it now stood away from my flesh, separated by a millimeter of mortified space. I listened carefully to Jess's talk, and found it unquestionably sound and full of concern through its every vibration, but this wasn't reassuring. My body told me that my shame was a fact awaiting his discovery. He said, "Please do tell me what happened." He smiled, and suddenly, belatedly, my longing for him woke up, but now it was attached to my shame like its Siamese twin, and the longing itself was newly but fully shameful, and I remember thinking of our talks, the kiss, the lovemaking, and saying to myself the good part is over already.

I found a flat, steady voice to speak in, and I used it. I told him about Daddy's taking Pete's truck and all the aftermath of that; what Daddy had said and how Rose and I had replied; I even told him what Rose had told me later, and how I did not believe her, but didn't not believe, either. He watched me attentively, his usually expressive features still and serious, but his eyes burning into mine.

Without speaking, he drew everything out of me, and after it was over, I knew that I was somehow at his mercy, not because he had exerted power or claimed me, but because in spite of my shame I had exposed myself to him in every particular.

He drained his coffee cup and said, "Oh, Ginny." He said, "Oh, Ginny, they have aimed to destroy us, and I don't know why."

I had forgotten in my own recitation his old grievances against Harold and his mother. I said, "Maybe they have, Jess. Maybe they have aimed right for it' Ty came in about five-thirty. The sun was well up by that time, and the sky clear and crystalline. Before he had a chance to question Jess Clark's presence, I said, "Jess, tell Ty," and he told Ty where Daddy was, and who was with him. Ty said, "I wondered where he'd got to. I drove every little road, tractor path, and drivable gully between here and Cabot. There weren't too many of those after this storm.

I got up and poured him some coffee, then asked, "Did you look at the crops?"

Things look okay, but this was a gully washer for sure."

"Where's Pete?"

"I don't know. We had a little disagreement."

This alarmed me. "What do you mean?"

"Pete said Larry would turn up and he wasn't going to waste his time on him. That was how we resolved it' Jess said, "Then what did you disagree on?"

"Pete wanted to shoot him."

I smiled, thinking this was ajoke, but Ty didn't smile back. I said, "Really shoot him?"

"Really shoot him. But I think really really shoot him only for about a minute. Pete's pretty fed up. Fortunately, he's only got a twenty-two."

This wry tone was strange for Ty, but I let it pass for the time being.

Jess got up and took his poncho off the door hook. Ty didn't say anything, so Jess only cocked his eyebrow and smiled his goodbyes to me. My eyes and my heart followed him right out the door.

To Ty, I said, "Did you sleep at all?"

"Naw, not really." He rubbed his hands over his face, ruffling his stubbly beard. I remembered another thing that I still didn't know whether Ty agreed with the things Daddy had said to me. I stood up from the table and opened the refrigerator door. I said, "How about a couple of fried eggs and some of those sausage links?"

He said, "That's fine." His tone was cool. He was just sitting there, and his expression was distant and unfriendly. He looked out the window, mostly. Broaching all the topics between us took more courage than I possessed at the time, and so I didn't broach them, and so I think it was then that a new formal relationship began for us, and that was when we started to work out what to do with each other and our situation according to our notions of duty and loyalty, and after a while it got to be clear how very much we differed in these notions.

When he had eaten his breakfast, Ty said, "I guess I'd better check the fields first thing. I promised to help finish those footings this morning, but God knows, with this rain-" His voice trailed him out the door. Rose came down as the truck roared away. She was wearing some jeans of mine and an old shirt of Ty's. She said, "I'm going to run home and get the girls some clothes before they wake up." She was perky enough-her usual morning self.

I said, "Daddy's at Harold's. He got Ken and Marv over there in the middle of the night."

"Yeah, well." She shrugged. "All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty together again." She banged out the door, and I put some sausage links in the pan for her and the girls.

While they were cooking, I went out to check my garden. Something that always has amazed me is the resilience of plants. My tomato vines showed no ill effects from the onslaught of the storm, weren't even muddy, since I had made it a point to mulch them with old newspapers and grass clippings. Some of the tenderest marigolds had been beaten down, and the trellis for the peas had fallen partly off its framework, but all the greenery sparkled with new life. I didn't touch anything, certainly didn't tread among the rows, but I stood off to the side and took it all in as if it were a distant promise.

The fact is, I was already exhausted with the effort of it all, already hopeless, already recalling those months just after my mother died as if nothing had intervened between that time and this, and what I remembered was the labor of it all, a labor as impossible as standing in your boots and lifting yourself into the air by the bootstraps. I remembered how you are never the same, but you get to the point where relief is good enough. I felt another animal in myself a horse haltered in a tight stall, throwing its head and beating its feet against the floor, but the beams and the bars and the halter rope hold firm, and the horse wears itself out, and accepts the restraint that moments before had been an unendurable goad. I went back in the house and flipped the sausages. Pammy and Linda were sitting sleepily at the table.

MOST ISSUES ON A FARM return to the issue of keeping up appearances.

Farmers extrapolate quickly from the farm to the farmer.

A farmer looks like himself when he goes to the cale, but he also looks like his farm, which everyone has passed on the way into town.

What his farm looks like boils down to questions of character. Farmers are quick to cite the weather, their luck, the turning tides of prices and government regulations, but among themselves these excuses fall away. A good farmer (a savvy manager, someone with talent for animals and machines, a man willing to work all the time who's raised his children to work the same way) will have a good farm. A poor-looking farm diagrams the farmer's personal failures. Most farmers see farming as an unforgiving way of life, and they are themselves less than indulgent about weedy fields, dirty equipment, delinquent children, badly cared for animals, a farmhouse that looks like the barn. It may be different elsewhere in the country, but in Zebulon County, which was settled mostly by English, Germans, and Scandinavians, a good appearance was the source and the sign of all other good things.

It was imperative that the growing discord in our family be made to appear minor. The indication that my father truly was beside himself was the way he had carried his argument with us to others.

But we couldn't give in to that-we were well trained. We knew our roles and our strategies without hesitation and without consultation.

The paramount value of looking right is not something you walk away from after a single night. After such a night as we had, in fact, it is something you embrace, the broken plank you are left with after the ship has gone down.

We knew that first and foremost we had to buy time, though I'm sure we would have disagreed on what we were buying it for. Ty probably thought everything would blow over, or, at least, we would get so far in the building that turning back would be impossible-the new world would have risen around us, harder to dismantle than to keep. He was thinking of Marv Carson. Rose certainly thought that with a little time, Daddy would fall back into our hands, her hands. Linda and Pammy must have felt that everything would get back to normal if we all, or at least they, hunkered down and pretended things were fine enough.

Pete may have been struggling hard with himself buying time for his temper, hoping to be brought willy-nilly to a less furious state of mind. I always imagined that Pete was well-intentioned, that even when he did lose control, he still hoped nothing bad would happen. I wanted time, too, not because I expected it to solve an iota of our problems, but because I would have done anything to put off the future.

Should none of us appear in public, the belief would become universal that we had something to be ashamed of. Rose shopped harder in Pike and Cabot than she had in a year, riffling through every sales rack, bringing home a hundred dollars' worth of groceries, and deploring my father's drinking (but in an indulgent, daughterly, respectful sort of way) to five or six inquisitive women, including Marv Carson's mother.

Pete spent the afternoon sitting around the feedstore in Pike, then the John Deere dealer in Zebulon Center, ostensibly doing business, but really doing the same thing Rose had done.

Ty worked and joked and urged on the builders.

I made Ken LaSalle two pots of coffee and sat with him in our kitchen, eliciting from him his every doubt, his every concern about Daddy, all the worries he had ever had about our farm and our family situation.

Marv Carson came knocking on the door about noon. He had a six-pack of little green bottles of Perrier water from France that he'd ordered from a distributor. I offered him some dinner-we'd had macaroni and cheese. "Oh, Ginny," he said, "not cheese. Never cheese. Terrible mucus buildup with cheese. Haven't you noticed that?"

I said, "I thought the point was to eat everything, but keep it running through the system."

"That is a good basic plan, but I've had to modify the profile of my intake over the summer. Do you have any peanut butter?"

I got out the bread and the peanut butter and some crab apple jelly.

Then I got down a sealed jar of hot pepper jelly. He picked that up and made himself a sandwich. I was still finishing my salad from dinner. He opened two bottles of the Perrier water and pushed one over to me. He said, "I can't hide from you I'm worried, Ginny.

I'm just worried sick. Everyone down at the bank is worried about this thing with your dad."

I wrinkled my forehead and made a skeptical, good-humored look.

These worries were absurd. We hadn't even thought of them before Marv got there.

Marv said, "This is a big loan, Ginny. One of the biggest in our portfolio now, though I shouldn't be telling you that. And frankly, there isn't as much money in the till as you might think. Rural banks are having a hard time this spring finding cash. When the officers considered the loan, there were plenty of other applications on the table, let me tell you."

I was smiling. I had been smiling ceaselessly since he came through the door. I said, "Everything about the farm is the same as it was, except that Ty and Pete and Rose and I have more control than we did.

That can only be good, right? Isn't Ty-" I gestured out the window.

"Look at him. He's healthy as a mule. Isn't he one of the best in the township? Doesn't everybody say that?"

"Nobody's not saying it now, Ginny-" Marv developed and produced an enormous belch, then said, "Ah. I like to keep ahead of things. On the leading edge. I don't like what I hear about your dad."

"He's in a snit about something right now, but he'll get over It.

It doesn't affect the farm operation. Ty and Pete were way ahead on the farm work all through June. Ask Loren Clark."

"That did appear to be the case."

He opened two more little green bottles, and drank his quickly. I was watching him, so he said, "Just flushing the system. You should, too.

Everybody should. If you did that regularly, your hair would shine more.

I said, "Don't worry, Marv. Promise me you won't worry. Everything is fine, really."

"You got a teaspoon of sugar I can have?"

I got him a spoon and handed him the sugar bowl. He looked at his watch, and at exactly twelve-thirty, he dosed himself with a teaspoon of sugar. Our conversation paused while he timed himself.

He checked his watch again. He said, "Everybody in this town is friends, Ginny. Even all the feuding parties have been feuding for so long that they're practically friends. These times we're in are so unsettled that it makes me nervous. Interest rates flying everywhere.

All the old rules disappearing. It's like Depression times. People can make lots of new enemies in times like these."

"We're not going to be your enemy, Marv." I smoothed my voice, made it soothing. "Just ignore Daddy. He'll settle down."

"I've got to listen to you, Ginny." He stood up. "I'm going back to my own office, now. I've got some things to do at one, and I forgot the Tabasco. I'll be by again."

I was right behind him, smiling and guiding him toward the door.

An hour later I received Harold, though the sight of him hopping, almost dancing, from his truck to my back door, the sight of his glee, incensed me.

"You got a problem, girlie," he exclaimed as soon as he saw me.

I held the screen door open for him. "You think so, Harold?"

"I know it." He saw the coffeepot. "I'll take some of that."

"I'll make fresh."

He sat down at the table. "Your dad don't want to come home here, don't want to lay eyes on any of the whole pack of you.

"I'm sure he's been ripping us up one side and down the other."

"The thing about girls is, they always got minds of their own."

"Don't you think Jess and Loren have minds of their own?"

"Jess come around, didn't he?" Harold grinned. "He called me, I didn't call him."

"Did you know where to call him?"

"The thing was, I wasn't going to call him and he knew it."

"Harold, we've treated Daddy perfectly well for years, and you know that as well as anybody."

"I know it."

"Then tell him to come home, and don't encourage him. I know you like to stir him up." The coffee started boiling, and I poured Harold a cup.

"He's a stubborn man. It don't matter what I do or I think. He don't like being told he's wrong, especially when it ain't clear how wrong he is."

I crossed my arms over my chest. "So what do you tell him?"

"I tell him to wait and see what happens. I tell him that you girls ought to come to him. I told him that."

"I'm sure Rose doesn't agree with you, Harold. He stole Pete's truck!

He threatened us and cursed us! One of these days, right in the middle of this, some state trooper's going to come around and arrest him.

That hospital said his blood alcohol level test would take about ten days. He went out in the storm because he wanted to. He was like a baby, yelling threats about what he was and wasn't going to do. Just like a baby!"

"I know it."

"How long are you going to keep him there?"

"He's got a right to stay. We been friends for sixty years and more.

"Fine."

"Now that's a woman's word, that 'fine' business. You know it ain't fine. But you say that 'fine' and then everybody gets mad, and you know it's going to make everybody mad, too."