A Thousand Acres: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

stare at me, hesitating to ask if I was putting on too much weight. If I kept the secret, I thought, I could sustain the pregnancy. Except that when I did get pregnant I was so excited that I told Rose, and so when I lost the baby, one day when Ty and my father had gone to the State Fair for the weekend, I had to tell Rose, too. Then she made me promise not to try any more. She said I was getting obsessed and crazy. So I didn’t tell her about the next one and when I lost it the day after Thanksgiving, no one knew. I was lucky again—Ty had gotten up early to help Pete with some late bean harvesting—and I just wadded the nightgown and the sheets and the bed pad into a paper bag and took them out and buried them under the dirt floor of the old dairy barn, where the ground wasn’t frozen yet. I thought I would dig them up sometime and carry them to the dump, but I hadn’t yet. Digging them up would make me want to try again, and I wasn’t quite ready. I also wasn’t ready to give up. At thirty-six, I had five years left, maybe two or three more chances to come out of my bedroom one morning and say, “Here, Ty, here’s our baby.”
    One of the many benefits of this private project, I thought at the time, was that it showed me a whole secret world, a way to have two lives, to be two selves. I felt larger and more various than I had in years, full of unknowns, and also of untapped possibilities. In fact, I was more hopeful after the two last miscarriages than I had been after the first.
    Beyond Rose’s house, my father’s windows, too, were dark. I realized that I hadn’t thought to ask if I needed to go over and gethis breakfast in the morning. That was something Rose and I generally agreed upon each night. When Caroline was staying, she liked to do it, but she had gone home with Rose after my father left the party. I opened the window and squinted through the screen. I was sure I could see his truck parked by the barn, Pete’s truck parked next to their porch, the roof of our truck, below, glinting in pearly peace. The summer sounds of bullfrogs and cicadas hadn’t begun yet, but a breeze was soughing through the pines north of the house, the hogs were clanking their feeders in the barn. It was the same calm and safe vista that was mine every night—the one that I sometimes admitted to myself I’d been afraid to leave when high school was over and the question of doing something else came up. It suited me, and it was easy to let it claim me every night, but I had wishes, too, secret, passionate wishes, and as I sat there enjoying the heavy, moist breeze, I let myself think, maybe this is it, maybe this is what turns the tide, and carries the darling child into shore.

5
    A T SEVEN, WHEN I TIPTOED up the stairs to see why my father hadn’t answered my announcements of breakfast, I found that he wasn’t there. The bed had been slept on, rather than in, and my father had gone out in shoes—his boots by the back door were the reason I thought he was still in bed. Beside the barn, the truck was cold to the touch, and I was just going over to see if he’d dropped in on Rose and Caroline when a big maroon Pontiac pulled into the yard. My father got out of the passenger side, and Marv Carson got out of the driver’s side. Marv looked groggy but willing, already decked out in suit and tie. He scurried eagerly in my father’s footsteps as they came toward the porch. My father said, “Ginny, Marv’ll be eating. Marv, go wash up, now.” Marv looked around as he stepped through the door, for a sink, I suppose. I said, “I’m sure you’re clean enough to eat, Marv. Go on and sit down.”
    I set out sausage, fried eggs, hash brown potatoes, cornflakes, English muffins and toast, coffee and orange juice. My father pulled out his usual chair and sat down, then shoveled the food onto his plate with his usual appetite. I was trying to judge whether he was wearing the same clothes he’d had on the day before, when he