"A Thousand Acres"

[fiefoe]

I was grateful that the storm and the crazy rantings got downplayed, but then the inevitably awful revelation came, followed by death and maiming.

• 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.
• 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.
• 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).
• You’re such a good daughter, so slow to judge, it’s like stupidity.
• 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.
• 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
• “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.”
• 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.
• 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.
• A wash of pale pink seeped upward from the lower margin of the sky and rimmed the clouds with fire. Above them, clear blue shaded to lavender.
• Daddy thinks history starts fresh every day, every minute, that time itself begins with the feelings he’s having right now.
• These were things of hers that our mother didn’t mind us playing with. We were out of her hair and we treated them carefully, as the holy relics they were. Now, when I seek to love my mother, I remember her closet and that indulgence of hers.
• But they said in the thirties the dust storms were the worst, for the way that the dust got in everywhere, no matter how you sealed windows and doors and closed your eyes and put blankets over your head. So it was that Harold’s accident and its aftermath got in everywhere, into the solidest relationships, the firmest beliefs, the strongest loyalties, the most deeply held convictions you had about the people you had known most of your life.
• “If Daddy got to them and hurt them in any way I would help them learn about evil and retribution. If he doesn’t, then they can have the luxury of learning about mercy and benefits of the doubt.”
• She said, “I can’t accept that this is my life, all I get. I can’t do it. I thought it would go on longer, long enough to get right. I thought that I would fucking outlive him, and he could have that, half my life his, half my own.
• the way manners seemed to contain things, make them, if not quite comfortable, then clear and hard.
• it was easier to see a life as a sturdy rope with occasional knots in it. Every life I knew of in Zebulon County was marked by conflict and loss. Weren’t our favorite conversations about just these things—if not how some present tangle was working itself out, then how past tangles prefigured the present world, had made us and our county what it was?
• Except our feelings stood around us like ramparts, and we could not unknow what we knew.
• People keep secrets when other people don’t want to hear the truth.”
• been foolish, a waste of our money, an extra fillip of defeat that he could have avoided, but what it looked like at the time was our crowning failure as a couple.
• That capacity Rose had, of remembering, knowing, judging, as if continually viewing our father through the cross hairs of a bombsight, was her special talent, and didn’t extend to me.
• By dinnertime, the marvelous engine of appearances had started up.
• I lifted my eyes to the stars. They were dim in the humidity, and they dimmed further while I watched them. I put my fingers to my eyelids. Tears.
• That’s the thing that kills me. This person who beats and fucks his own daughters can go out into the community and get respect and power, and take it for granted that he deserves it.”
• “He loves me, Ginny. You don’t think I would let him have anything private with my own sister, do you?” “I didn’t know you were jealous like that.”
• ONE BENEFIT, WHICH I HAVE LOST, of a life where many things go unsaid, is that you don’t have to remember things about yourself that are too bizarre to imagine. What was never given utterance eventually becomes too nebulous to recall.
• No “I,” like Daddy, that inflated with each declaration, but a diminishing point, losing himself more and more bitterly in contemplating the target.
• I was given to know that my feelings were paramount, that it was up to me to establish the degree of closeness that would be comfortable and the appropriate way for us to behave toward one another. I saw that the delicacy and concern were necessary to her, because they were a thrilling reminder of everything new and delicious.
• and heroics. Men against nature, men against machine, men against the swirling, impersonal forces of the market.
• of everything that brought us together. It was separate, but part of everything else, suspended grains that would precipitate to the bottom of the beaker when she chose the fatal jar.
• The suit, Jean felt, was relatively clear-cut, especially in light of the fact that the harvest had been successful, and had looked right, too.
• I saw this as my afterlife, and for a long time it didn’t occur to me that it contained a future. That it didn’t, in fact, was what I liked about
• I preferred them to have been productive, but now to be dead, like Daphne du Maurier or Charles Dickens, so that their books formed a kind of afterlife for them and seemed as distant and self-contained, for me, as Heaven or Hell.
• Otherwise, my life passed in a blur, that blessing of urban routine. The sense of distinct events that is so inescapable on a farm, where every rainstorm is thick with odor and color, and usefulness and timing, where omens of prosperity or ruin to come are sought in every change, where any of the world’s details may contain the one thing that above all else you will regret not knowing, this sense lifted off me. Maybe another way of saying it is that I forgot I was still alive.
• You see this grand history, but I see blows. I see taking what you want because you want it, then making something up that justifies what you did. I see getting others to pay the price, then covering up and forgetting what the price was.
• Do I think Daddy came up with beating and fucking us on his own?” Ty winced. “No. I think he had lessons, and those lessons were part of the package, along with the land and the lust to run things exactly the way he wanted to no matter what, poisoning the water and destroying the topsoil and buying bigger and bigger machinery, and then feeling certain that all of it was ‘right,’ as you say.”
• When it came right down to building something on what we had, it scared him to build on death and bad luck and anger and destruction.
• She used my hand to pull herself up in the bed. “So all I have is the knowledge that I saw! That I saw without being afraid and without turning away, and that I didn’t forgive the unforgivable. Forgiveness is a reflex for when you can’t stand what you know. I resisted that reflex. That’s my sole, solitary, lonely accomplishment.”
• crowned with soil so pale that the corn only stands in it, as in gravel, because there are no nutrients to draw from it.
• Rose left me a riddle I haven’t solved, of how we judge those who have hurt us when they have shown no remorse or even understanding.