A Thousand Acres: A Novel Read Online Free Page B

you’re out. It’s as simple as that.” Then he pushed himself up from his chair and lumbered past me down the porch steps and into the darkness.
    Caroline looked startled, but no one else did. I said, “This is ridiculous. He’s drunk.” But after that, everyone got up and moved off silently, knowing that something important had just happened, and what it was, too. My father’s pride, always touchy, had been injured to the quick. It would be no use telling him that she had only said that she didn’t know, that she hadn’t turned him down, that she had expressed a perfectly reasonable doubt, perhaps even doubt a lawyer must express, that his own lawyer would express when my father set this project before him. I saw that maybe Caroline had mistaken what we were talking about, and spoken as a lawyer when she should have spoken as a daughter. On the other hand, perhaps she hadn’t mistaken anything at all, and had simply spoken as a woman rather than as a daughter. That was something, I realized in a flash, that Rose and I were pretty careful never to do.
    I went into the Clarks’ kitchen and put the plates and forks into the trash can. When I turned toward the back door, Jess Clark was standing right beside me, and I could see his quizzical look in the light from the porch. His face was familiar and exotic at the same time, friendly and interested but strange, promising knowledge that none of my neighbors could possibly have. In my movement toward the door, I bumped against him, and he gripped my arm to help me get my balance. I said, “Where did you come from?”
    “Didn’t you hear me bang the door?” His hand lingered on my arm, then he lowered it. “I was looking for some more trash bags. You know, I’ve been thinking that there’s something missing in this kitchen, and now I realize what it is. It’s the cylinder of bull semen. I used to eat with my foot up on it.”
    I gave out a distracted, “Is that so?” He looked into my face. He said, “What’s the matter, Ginny? I didn’t mean to scare you. I was sure you heard me.”
    “I was thinking that my father is acting crazy. I mean, I wasn’t actually thinking it, I was panicking about it.”
    “You mean the corporation thing? It’s probably a good idea, actually.”
    “But he’s not the good idea type. That wasn’t him talking, that was some banker talking. Or else, if it was him talking, he was talking about something besides accepting his mortality and avoiding inheritance taxes. That would be an awfully farsighted and levelheaded thing for him to do.”
    “Well, wait and see what happens. Maybe he’ll wake up tomorrow and have forgotten all about it.” Jess’s voice was confident and flat, without resonance, as if everything he might say would be the simple truth.
    “But it’s already a tangle. It’s already an impossible tangle and it’s only been five minutes.”
    “I don’t see why. You said yourself you were panicking—” He went on, “Anyway, I always think that things have to happen the way they do happen, that there are so many inner and outer forces joining at every event that it becomes a kind of fate. I learned from studying Buddhism that there’s beauty, and certainly a lot of peace, in accepting that.” I sniffed. A smile twinkled sheepishly across his face. “Okay, okay,” he said, “how about this? If you worry about it, you draw it to you.”
    “My mother said that about tornadoes.”
    “See? The wisdom of the plains. Pretend nothing happened.”
    “We always do.”
    I felt suddenly shy about speaking so openly to someone I hadn’t seen in thirteen years. I said, “Let’s keep my doubt between us, okay?” The thought of Harold broadcasting this around the neighborhood as he liked to do was a chilling one. Jess caught my gaze and held it. He said, “I don’t gossip with Harold, Ginny. Don’t worry.” I believed him. I believed everything he said, and felt reassured.
    It was true that if my father