Free A Thousand Acres: A Novel by Jane Smiley

telling me a secret. “Can you believe how they’ve fucked us over, Ginny? Living and dying! I was her child! What ideal did she sacrifice me to? Patriotism? Keeping up appearances in the neighborhood? Peace with Harold? Maybe to you it looked like I just vanished, but I was out there, this ignorant farm kid! I’d never seen a fucking checkbook, never owned anything in my own name, never touched a stove or washed my own clothes! I met kids in training camp. One of them had a heart attack on the drilling grounds. The last night of training camp, there was this kid who persuaded our sergeant that he had a blinding headache. He kind of staggered down the aisle between the bunks and went into the bathroom and collapsed. The sergeant started yelling at him that he was faking it, and the guy was moaning and groaning. Some of us crept out of bed and were watching. Anyway, the sergeant was trying to kick him a little, to get him up, and he just rared back and started beating his head against the wall as hard as he could. He must have hit the tiles about six times. The sergeant was struck dumb, just like the rest of us. Then we got to him, and stopped him, and pretty soon they came with a stretcher and carried him off, and all I could think of was that that guy didn’t have to go to Vietnam with the rest of us. I was sure that was why he did it. He didn’t even have any fucking hair on his chest!” He put his hands on my shoulders and lowered his voice again. “Don’t you realize they’ve destroyed us at every turn? You bet she was sad, of course she was sad! But why didn’t she give me a fucking chance?” He put his face in his hands.
    After a minute, I mustered the gumption to say, “I don’t know, Jess,” but I was shaken and afraid. When I went to take the next tomato plant out of the flat, my hands were trembling so much that I broke the stem in two. Jess, meanwhile, got up and walked around,heaving. Finally he took off his T-shirt, which read, “ CASCADES 10K RUN JUNE 4, 1978 ,” and wiped his face and neck with it. He said, “I’d better go home.”
    “You haven’t offended me. Anyway, I’m not sure you should see Harold in that mood.”
    “I mean back to Seattle. Ah shit.” He sat down again, took some deep breaths, and managed a smile. “Ginny, none of this is new. It’s very old, I’m used to it, and most of the time, I’m better at cultivating inner peace. I stopped being mad all the time when I stopped drinking. I mean, that was when I realized that maybe Alison and I wouldn’t have lasted together. I loved her, I really did, but what I loved most was being mad at her parents for her. Being on her side, when nobody else had been that I could see. I can’t believe I’m getting upset like this now.”
    After a minute, I said, “Don’t you think it had to be, whenever you learned about your mother? Now it’s been. How am I going to believe that life is good and change is good if you don’t?”
    “I do think that.”
    We smiled at each other. I couldn’t believe that I had ever found his smile merely charming. Another lesson in that lifelong course of study about the tricks of appearance.

9
    I T HAD BEEN MORE THAN three months since Rose’s operation, and she was making a good recovery. The chemotherapy was over and she had that large-eyed, astonished-but-not-surprised look about her that I’ve since seen on other cancer patients. They had taken her right breast, the muscles on the right side of her chest, and the lymph glands under her right arm, a traditional radical mastectomy. I was still cooking for her fairly often, and, of course, seeing her every day, but she would pass into a state of irritability if I mentioned her health, so I didn’t; but I did watch her closely, looking for signs of fatigue or weakness or pain. The day after my talk with Jess Clark, I drove her to Mason City for her three-month checkup. We hardly spoke on the way there. She was annoyed at little things—the