Lorrie Moore - 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

“Money people always act nice,” her father said. “Why shouldn’t they?”

“Oh, Pa!” Helen said, tapping at his arm. “What do you mean by that? You always been nicer than anybody I know, that’s the truth. Real nice. A lot of them with those big farms, like Paul’s father, and that tractor store they got — they complain a lot. They do. You just don’t hear about it. And when that baby got polio, over in the Rapids — that real big farm, you know what I mean? — the McGuires. How do you think they felt? They got troubles just like everybody else.”

Then her father did a strange thing: here they were seven or eight miles from home, no house near, and he stopped the car. “Want to rest for a minute,” he said. Yet he kept staring out the windshield as if he were still driving.

“What’s wrong?”

“Sun on the hood of the car…”

Helen tugged at the collar of her dress, pulling it away from her damp neck. When had the heat ever bothered her father before? She remembered going out to the farthest field with water for him, before he had given up that part of the farm. And he would take the jug from her and lift it to his lips and it would seem to Helen, the sweet child Helen standing in the dusty corn, that the water flowed into her magnificent father and enlivened him as if it were secret blood of her own she had given him. And his chest would swell, his reddened arms eager with muscle emerging out from his rolled-up sleeves, and his eyes now wiped of sweat and exhaustion… The vision pleased and confused her, for what had it to do with the man now beside her? She stared at him and saw that his nose was queerly white and that there were many tiny red veins about it, hardly more than pen lines; and his hair was thinning and jagged, growing back stiffly from his forehead as if he had brushed it back impatiently with his hand once too often. When Eddie, the oldest boy, moved away now and lost to them, had pushed their father hard in the chest and knocked him back against the supper table, that same amazed white look had come to his face, starting at his nose.

“I was thinking if, if we got home now, I could help Ma with supper,” Helen said. She touched her father’s arm as if to waken him. “It’s real hot, she’d like some help.”

“She doesn’t know you’re coming.”

“But I… I could help anyway.” She tried to smile, watching his face for a hint of something: many times in the past he had looked stern but could be made to break into a smile, finally, if she teased him long enough. “But didn’t Ma hear you talk on the phone? Wasn’t she there?”

“She was there.”

“Well, but then…”

“I told her you just talked. Never said nothing about coming home.”

The heat had begun to make Helen dizzy. Her father opened the door on his side. “Let’s get out for a minute, go down by the river,” he said. Helen slid across and got out. The ground felt uncertain beneath her feet. Her father was walking and saying something and she had to run to catch up with him. He said: “We moved out here seventeen years ago. There were six of us then, but you don’t remember. Then the boy died. And you don’t remember your mother’s parents and their house, that goddam stinking house, and how I did all the work for him in his store. You remember the store down front? The dirty sawdust floor and the old women coming in for sausage, enough to make you want to puke, and pig’s feet and brains out of cows or guts or what the hell they were that people ate in that neighborhood. I could puke for all my life and not get clean of it. You just got born then. And we were dirt to your mother’s people, just dirt. I was dirt. And when they died somebody else got the house, it was all owned by somebody else, and so we said how it was for the best and we’d come out here and start all over. You don’t remember it or know nothing about us.”

“What’s wrong, Pa?” Helen said. She took his arm as they descended the weedy bank. “You talk so funny, did you get something to drink before you came to the bus station? You never said these things before. I thought it wasn’t just meat, but a grocery store, like the one in…”

“And we came out here,” he said loudly, interrupting her, “and bought that son of a bitch of a house with the roof half rotted through and the well all shot to hell… and those bastards never looked at us, never believed we were real people. The Hendrikses too. They were like all of them. They looked through me in town, do you know that? Like you look through a window. They didn’t see me. It was because hillbilly families were in that house, came and went, pulled out in the middle of the night owing everybody money; they all thought we were like that. I said, we were poor but we weren’t hillbillies. I said, do I talk like a hillbilly? We come from the city. But nobody gave a damn. You could go up to them and shout in their faces and they wouldn’t hear you, not even when they started losing money themselves. I prayed to God during them bad times that they’d all lose what they had, every bastard one of them, that Swede with the fancy cattle most of all! I prayed to God to bring them down to me so they could see me, my children as good as theirs, and me a harder worker than any of them — if you work till you feel like dying you done the best you can do, whatever money you get. I’d of told them that. I wanted to come into their world even if I had to be on the bottom of it, just so long as they gave me a name…”

“Pa, you been drinking,” Helen said softly.

“I had it all fixed, what I’d tell them,” he said. They were down by the river bank now. Fishermen had cleared a little area and stuck Y-shaped branches into the dried mud, to rest their poles on. Helen’s father prodded one of the little sticks with his foot and then did something Helen had never seen anyone do in her life, not even boys — he brought his foot down on it and smashed it.

“You oughtn’t of done that,” Helen said. “Why’d you do that?”

“And I kept on and on; it was seventeen years. I never talked about it to anyone. Your mother and me never had much to say, you know that. She was like her father. — You remember that first day? It was spring, nice and warm, and the wind came along when we were moving the stuff in and was so different from that smell in the city — my God! It was a whole new world here.”

“I remember it,” Helen said. She was staring out at the shallow muddy river. Across the way birds were sunning themselves stupidly on flat, white rocks covered with dried moss like veils.

“You don’t remember nothing!” her father said angrily. “Nothing! You were the only one of them I loved, because you didn’t remember. It was all for you. First I did it for me, myself, to show that bastard father of hers that was dead — then those other bastards, those big farms around us — but then for you, for you. You were the baby. I said to God that when you grew up it’d be you in one of them big houses with everything fixed and painted all the time, and new machinery, and driving around in a nice car not this thing we got. I said I would do that for you or die.”

“That’s real nice, Pa,” Helen said nervously, “but I never… I never knew nothing about it, or… I was happy enough any way I was. I liked it at home, I got along with Ma better than anybody did. And I liked Paul too, I didn’t marry him just because you told me to. I mean, you never pushed me around. I wanted to marry him all by myself, because he loved me. I was always happy, Pa. If Paul didn’t have the store coming to him, and that land and all, I’d have married him anyway — You oughtn’t to worked all that hard for me.”

In spite of the heat she felt suddenly chilled. On either side of them tall grass shrank back from the cleared, patted area, stiff and dried with August heat. These weeds gathered upon themselves in a brittle tumult back where the vines and foliage of trees began, the weeds dead and whitened and the vines a glossy, rich green, as if sucking life out of the water into which they drooped. All along the river bank trees and bushes leaned out and showed a yard or two of dead, whitish brown where the waterline had once been. This river bent so often you could never see far along it. Only a mile or so. Then foliage began, confused and unmoving. What were they doing here, she and her father? A thought came to Helen and frightened her — she was not used to thinking — that they ought not to be here, that this was some other kind of slow, patient world where time didn’t care at all for her or her girl’s face or her generosity of love, but would push right past her and go on to touch the faces of other people.