All Over Creation. Ruth OzekiЧитать онлайн книгу.
her. She’d lost so much weight, it might fit her now. She tossed it around her neck like a gym towel and went downstairs.
Will sat at the old rolltop desk. Cass draped her arms over his broad shoulders and laid her face against the plane of his jaw. She waved the letters in front of his face.
“Got ’em.”
“Good girl. You find an address?” He was poring over a ledger of old farm reports, handwritten in Lloyd’s antique script. “Poor old guy. What happened in ’75?”
“’Seventy-five?” Cass started flipping through the letters in her hand.
“The year he leased out over half his acreage to your father.”
“I don’t know. I was just a kid. Why?” She checked the postmarks: San Francisco, Berkeley, several from Texas—all places that Cass could imagine.
“He was doing so well up until then. Look at this. Those Nine-Dollar Potatoes in ’74, and then next season he goes and leases to your father. How come?”
Cass looked up. “That was the year after Yummy ran away. He had a heart attack. His first one.”
“Weird. Look at this. Two years later, after he took the acreage back, he was fighting soil contamination more or less constantly. From what he was spraying, he must have had a problem with leafroll.”
“He did. I remember Daddy going on about the aphids. Lloyd hired Daddy on to run the operation for him, but they never saw eye to eye. Daddy was a lousy farmer and lost a lot of the crop to net necrosis. He blamed Momoko’s peach tree for attracting those aphids. Wanted to chop it down, but Lloyd wouldn’t let him. Momo means ‘peach’ in Japanese.”
“I’m with your Daddy on this one. That tree’s just asking for trouble. Do you think I can take these records? It’s helpful to know.”
“You mean, do I think it’s stealing? I don’t care if it is, Will. Anyway, we own the land now. We got a right to it, I should think.”
“I asked him to show me these way back in ’83 when we started leasing. But he kept putting it off.”
“Well, now you know why.”
“He’s a proud man.”
“Daddy said he was a cheat.”
“Ornery, maybe. You know he’s not a cheat.” Will would always give anyone the benefit of the doubt, and he was right to do so.
Cass draped her arms around his neck again and held the stack of letters in front of his nose. “Look,” she said, pointing to a postmark. “Where’s Pahoa?”
yummy
Two peas in a pod. You remember how that went?
Lloyd would come in for lunch. He’d be sitting at the kitchen table, and you’d dance up behind him and throw your arms around his neck, still hot from the sun, and there would be dirt in the pores under his collar and the sour smell of fertilizer on his fingertips as he reached up to cup your chin and hold you still—remember what his cheek felt like, pressed against yours? Then Momoko, sitting across, would compare the two of you, her large husband and her eager little daughter. She’d peer, long and slow—the same appraising look she gave to a pair of melons, figuring how much longer until they’d be ripe enough to pick—and your heart would be racing. You were always so anxious. How did you know? That growing up meant you were becoming less of him. That this was something, inevitably, that any daddy would dread. Finally Momoko would press her lips together. “Hmm,” she would grunt. “Two peas in a pod.” Only she’d pronounce it more like “Tsu pi-su ina pod-do,” and then she’d give a little nod that made it for sure. Did he teach her that phrase? She seemed to enjoy saying it, enjoy her role in your ceremony, although with that act of abnegation, she put herself outside the two of you. What did that cost her? At least a small twinge of belonging, because if your heart was any measure, your face must have lit up like the sun, to hear her pronouncement. Did that hurt her, too? It was triumph to you. Flesh of her flesh, turning from her—you would have banished her entirely, had you not needed the power of her affirmation. Oh, yeah, your allegiances were firmly with Daddy.
And Daddy would chuckle. Pat your cheek. He was always as shy with his love as you were ferocious with yours, but even if its expression was tentative, the fact of his love was absolute. Then. So what the fuck happened?
It wasn’t your fault! you wanted to cry. It was just life, filtering into your prattle at the supper table, that so offended him, and how were you to know? You’d always shared what you’d learned in school, playing teacher even then, telling him all about the Pilgrims, for example, or how the telegraph was invented, or the names for the parts of a flower. “Pistil, stamen, stigma . . .” He’d frown with concentration, repeating the names after you, slowly, as though he’d never heard them before. “And what does a stamen do?” he’d prompt, pretending to be confused. And you would proudly teach, “A stamen does this and such,” and he would nod and smile at you and say, “My, my, my!” like he just couldn’t believe how one little daughter—and his, at that—could be so bright. His love for you was absolute, all right. Until you changed the subject.
It wasn’t your fault that the sexual reproduction of flowering plants failed to hold your interest. You were becoming an adolescent, after all. When your conversation veered off like a car out of control, toward shades of frosted lipstick and the boys who smoked Pall Malls in the weeds behind the maintenance shed at school, Lloyd’s face froze. He grew surly at the sight of your love beads, recoiled at any mention of rock and roll. The first time you used the word “groovy,” he choked on his gravy.
“You are not leaving the house dressed like that,” he said, catching you sneaking out the door in your worn jeans with all the holes and patches. “I won’t have you parading all over town dressed like a beggar.” You turned around to face him. “Your navel is showing,” he added, eyeing it with disgust.
If he couldn’t even tolerate your navel, then how was he to cope when life kick-started changes inside you that went deeper still?
The next year, in ninth grade, there was a man, a history teacher named Elliot Rhodes, slouching in front of the blackboard in a rumpled flannel shirt, stroking his mustache. When he read out loud in class, he looked right at you. At first you thought it was your imagination, but after a couple of times you knew it was for real, and your stomach heaved so violently you could hardly breathe at all. At first you mistook this passion for vocation—you’d always known you would be a teacher (or an explorer or a poet, you weren’t exactly sure which), and now you understood why! The power of his knowledge made you weak in the knees. That fall, he taught you all about the great civilizations of the world. He pressed you to question your beliefs, to think about real ideas. He considered Japan to be spiritual and deep, and he taught you a koan: What is the sound of one hand clapping? You carried it home in your heart and whispered it to yourself every day, stunned at its poetic profundity. When you told it to Momoko, she looked at you like you were nuts.
“But, Mom, it’s Japanese. It’s Zen.”
“Stupid. Make no sense.”
“It’s not supposed to make sense. It’s supposed to help you reach enlightenment.”
“Never heard of it. Anyway, why you need enlighten when you got good Methodist church to go to?”
“Oh, Mom.” You sighed, glancing at Lloyd before going one step further. “I don’t believe in organized religion.”
Lloyd looked up and shuddered.
At church there’d been talk. Rhodes had just graduated from some liberal college in California. He was a hippie, a commie, an anarchist, a freak. What did they know? In fact, he was a conscientious objector, and you knew this because he told you, after school, the day you lingered in