A Thousand Acres: A Novel Read Online Free Page A

have to pay seven or eight hundred thousand dollars inheritance taxes. People always act like they’re going to live forever when the price of land is up”—here he threw a glance at Harold—“but if you get a heart attack or a stroke or something, then you got to sell off to pay the government.”
    In spite of that inner clang, I tried to sound agreeable. “It’s a good idea.”
    Rose said, “It’s a great idea.”
    Caroline said, “I don’t know.”
    When I went to first grade and the other children said that their fathers were farmers, I simply didn’t believe them. I agreed in order to be polite, but in my heart I knew that those men were impostors, as farmers and as fathers, too. In my youthful estimation, Laurence Cook defined both categories. To really believe that others even existed in either category was to break the First Commandment.
    My earliest memories of him are of being afraid to look him in the eye, to look at him at all. He was too big and his voice was too deep. If I had to speak to him, I addressed his overalls, his shirt, his boots. If he lifted me near his face, I shrank away from him. If he kissed me, I endured it, offered a little hug in return. At the same time, his very fearsomeness was reassuring when I thought about things like robbers or monsters, and we lived on what was clearlythe best, most capably cultivated farm. The biggest farm farmed by the biggest farmer. That fit, or maybe formed, my own sense of the right order of things.
    Perhaps there is a distance that is the optimum distance for seeing one’s father, farther than across the supper table or across the room, somewhere in the middle distance: he is dwarfed by trees or the sweep of a hill, but his features are still visible, his body language still distinct. Well, that is a distance I never found. He was never dwarfed by the landscape—the fields, the buildings, the white pine windbreak were as much my father as if he had grown them and shed them like a husk.
    Trying to understand my father had always felt something like going to church week after week and listening to the minister we had, Dr. Fremont, marshal the evidence for God’s goodness, or omniscience, or whatever. He would sort through recent events, biblical events, moments in his own life, things that people had told him, and make up a picture that gelled for the few moments before other events that didn’t fit the picture had a chance to occur to you. Finally, though, the minister would admit, even glory in the fact, that things didn’t add up, that the reality was incomprehensible, and furthermore the failure of our understandings was the greatest proof of all, not of goodness or omniscience or whatever the subject of the day was, but of power. And talk of power made Dr. Fremont’s voice deepen and his gestures widen and his eyes light up.
    My father had no minister, no one to make him gel for us even momentarily. My mother died before she could present him to us as only a man, with habits and quirks and preferences, before she could diminish him in our eyes enough for us to understand him. I wish we had understood him. That, I see now, was our only hope.
    When my father turned his head to look at Caroline, his movement was slow and startled, a big movement of the whole body, reminding me how bulky he was—well over six feet and two hundred thirty pounds.
    Caroline would have said, if she’d dared, that she didn’t want to live on the farm, that she was trained as a lawyer and was marrying another lawyer, but that was a sore subject. She shifted in her chair and swept the darkening horizon with her gaze. Harold turned onthe porch light. Caroline would have seen my father’s plan as a trapdoor plunging her into a chute that would deposit her right back on the farm. My father glared at her. In the sudden light of the porch, there was no way to signal her to shut up, just shut up, he’d had too much to drink. He said, “You don’t want it, my girl,