Her Father's House by Belva Plain

Author:Belva Plain
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780440334620
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2003-12-02T05:00:00+00:00

A row of cans stood on the roadside with the milk going sour in the heat. It was half-past nine, and Jim, walking back from Jennie Macy's house where he had left Laura for her half day, met Clarence staring at the cans.

“Can you believe it?” he cried. “The bastards overslept and missed the pickup truck. It's the last straw.” With a violent kick, he overturned a can. “Everything! Everything I touch goes wrong!”

Jim set the can straight and said quietly, “Let's carry them back. They'll need to be emptied and scoured. No use in upsetting yourself too much, Clarence. Things happen.”

“Things don't just happen! People let them happen. Ever since Dad died, we've been going downhill. It isn't my fault, I've tried and tried, but everything I touch is jinxed. Nobody I hire will cooperate. Sometimes I think they're all against me, they want me to fail, they're envious, they soldier on the job, behind my back, they—”

Jim stared at the man's poor face, his mouth distorted as in a tear mask. He was falling apart.

“Come on. Let's start carrying this stuff back to the barn.”

“I don't want to set one foot near the barn. I'll give them a piece of my mind if I see them, and then they'll quit, and then what will I do? What will I do anyway? I'm in this mess with my hands tied and a rope around my neck. Do you understand?”

“Listen to me, Clarence. I'll go send the men down to carry these back. Then you and I will take a walk.”

In the barnyard, two young men were having a smoke when Jim interrupted them.

“We'll be down in a minute,” one said. “What's the matter? He having a fit? Tim's clock didn't go off and the milking was late for once. So what? Old Clarence is losing his—” And with his forefinger, he made the insulting circle at his temple. “Every day he finds something else to bellyache about.”

They had lost respect. They saw weakness, failure, and a sinking ship.

“I don't have time to talk about Mr. Benson.” Jim gave them a cold stare. “And you don't, either. There's plenty of work to be done around here, and you'd better get started on it.”

“There's all this land,” Clarence began when Jim returned. “I could raise hay. As a matter of fact, I did raise hay, but there was so much of it that I wasn't able to sell it all, so there's the land, just lying there eating up tax money.”

The day was one of those rare ones when the temperature is fitted to the comfort of the human anatomy, the sky is an arc of perfect blue over the flourishing land, and a human being should rejoice in simply being alive. Instead, Clarence renewed his pathetic litany of complaints.

“I know I need new machinery. Some of the stuff, unbeknownst to me, was left outside to rust. But a lot of it was old even in Dad's day. It costs a fortune to replace, and I'm already up to my ears in debt.

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