Read Online A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley - Free Book Online Page A

felt remorse. I stopped doing that when I stopped drinking." I looked up. He smiled more broadly and said, "I'm all sweetness and light these days. Life affirmed."

    "I believe in that." I dug another hole, then hazarded, "You look younger than Loren in some ways, but your face looks older. Harder.

    Or maybe just more knowing."

    "Really?"

    "I think so."

    "I think you look younger than Rose, ) I didn't have a reply for this, since it scared me a little to think of him looking at me at all. I said, "What did your-Alison look like?"

    "Most people would have said she was rather plain. Square and solid, rather a long face. She was transformed by love."

    I glanced at him sharply, to see if he was making fun, and he caught my look. He said, "I'm not joking. She had beautiful eyes and nice teeth. When we were making love and other times, too, when she was very happy and excited, the expressions on her face made it beautiful.

    She could also be very graceful if she wasn't thinking about her body or feeling self-conscious about it."

    "I'm impressed that you noticed."

    "We worked together at the crisis center. I watched her a long time before I fell in love with her. There was plenty of time to notice."

    "That's the homely woman's dream, you know. That someone will see actual beauty where others never have."

    "I know."

    I planted three or four more plants before we spoke again. Then I said, "Rose usually looks better, but her operation took a lot out of her."

    "What was that?"

    "Loren and Harold didn't tell you?"

    "That Rose had an operation? No."

    "How irritating."

    "Why?"

    "Because it makes it seem as if it wasn't worth talking about. She had breast cancer. She just had the operation in February."

    "I doubt if Harold, or even Loren, has ever let the words 'breast cancer' pass his lips." He smiled.

    looked deep into the hole I was digging. "Well, what did they tell you about your mother?"

    "They just said cancer."

    "Well, it started out as breast cancer. Later on, it was just plain cancer. Lymphatic."

    "Now it's your turn to tell me some things."

    "Like what?"

    "About my mother."

    Disapproval ofjess Clark's absence throughout Verna's illness and death was a neighborhood article of faith, so my voice was a little tight when I said, "Are you sure you want to know?"

    "No."

    "Well, think about it."

    "It was that bad, huh?"

    "The lymphatic cancer actually wasn't that bad, as cancers go. She felt kind of under the weather for a month or two, but would not go to the doctor, then Loren kind of abducted her into the doctor's office, and he made the diagnosis. She died within two weeks. It was quick, and she was pretty active until the diagnosis.

    "What would be hard for me to hear, then?"

    I could taste the dust on my lips. "All she talked about was you.

    According to Lore, she was convinced that at the last moment you would come or call."

    "No one told me anything about it."

    "She wouldn't let them. She was relying on some kind of psychic communication. She said that when you were a little boy, you always came before you were called, just when she was thinking of calling you, and that you were a very loving little boy. She was depending on that.

    I thought maybe Harold or Loren should call you and engineer a little psychic communication, but they said they had no idea where you were.

    Once Loren called a Jessie Clark in Vancouver, but It was a woman.

    'How, uh, how was the end?"

    "How do you think? Awful, of course. She was very sad."

    He didn't say anything for some minutes, and I kept planting. I could tell by the sun that it was getting toward late morning, and I still had twenty-live tomato plants to go. I pushed them farther into the shade and spilled a little water over the dirt they were rooted in.

    I had been a little hard with him, maybe. On the other hand, my own mother had died when I was fourteen. Rose and I nursed her for two months, in the living room. I missed two hours of school in the