Facing Facts about the Past

Had I faced all the facts? It seemed like I had, but actually, you never know, just by remembering, how many facts there were to have faced. Your own endurance might be a pleasant fiction allowed you by others who’ve really faced the facts. The eerie feeling this thought gave me made me shiver in the hot wind.

In Chapter 13, Ginny thinks these thoughts while at the public swimming pool in Pike where she’s taken Pammy and Linda on a hot June day. There, she meets Mary Livingston, an older woman who was a good friend to her mother. Mary says that she heard Rose had cancer, a comment that makes Pammy wince and leave. Mary comments that kids on farms should be made to face facts early in their lives to make the realities of farm life easier to accept. Mary’s comments prompt Ginny’s thoughts here, thoughts that encapsulate the life that she’s yet to lead. She is surrounded by a pleasant fiction that Rose and Larry have allowed her, a fiction that includes the idea that she’s faced or endured something, that she has bravely acknowledged her truth. Ginny admits that facing facts might mean facing memories, memories she doesn’t want to think about. Yet she will be called to do just this soon. Ginny’s shivering hints at her internal state, that a part of her knows it must soon face something terrible and long forgotten. 

I scouted around, looking for signs of the old pond, but I couldn’t even tell where it might have been—the rows of corn marched straight across black soil as uniform as asphalt. The pond, but also the house, the farm garden, the well, the foundations of the barn, all were obliterated.

In Chapter 25, Ginny has recently had sex with Jess Clark, just after the Fourth of July, and she goes for a walk across the fields of their property. Here, she recalls swimming in a farm pond with Rose when they were children. The pond water was clean, cool, and refreshing, and her memories of it are pleasant and carefree. During the 1960s, the buildings and the pond were destroyed to make way for larger fields of crops. Ginny remembers watching the bulldozers from her bedroom window and the burning of the houses and barn. Now, as she walks through the very land that was once so full of innocent childhood joy, she is struck by the fact that she cannot even tell where the pond had been. The facts about the pond are all in the past. It has been wiped out, just as her memories have been. This new physical landscape represents the new, but false, inner landscape in which Ginny lives, a personal reality that is fractured from the whole truth of her childhood. However, unlike the pond, the facts of her childhood can and will be resurrected and faced.

Her hands dropped to her sides. It was clear that she couldn’t think what to do for a moment, that I could tell her everything, pour it right into her ear, with no resistance on her part.

These thoughts are Ginny’s in Chapter 45, the final chapter of the novel, after she and her sister Caroline argue about the true nature of their father, Larry. Caroline and Ginny have been sorting through the objects in their childhood house and deciding what they want to keep, when they begin arguing about their father’s mental health just before he died. Caroline believes Larry was a good man, just confused in his old age, and that Ginny and Rose simply like to ruin things, especially her memories of their father. Caroline claims that Ginny has no proof that he wasn’t a good man, and she declares she won’t listen to another word Ginny has to say. Ginny realizes that this is the moment in which she could make Caroline face the ugly facts about the incest, too. Ginny knows that Caroline would not be able to deny what Ginny so clearly remembers. Ginny also knows that the facts would shatter Caroline’s naive and rosy perception of a sweet and loving father. However, she decides not to, even though she knows Rose would have. Before Ginny can reconsider, Caroline storms out of the house, slamming the door behind her. The two sisters will probably never see each other again.

Farmers’ Relationship with the Land

It took John and Sam and, at the end, my father, a generation, twenty-five years, to lay the tile lines and dig the drainage wells and cisterns. I in my Sunday dress and hat, driving in the Buick to church, was a beneficiary of this grand effort, someone who would always have a floor to walk on.

Here, in Chapter 3, Ginny tells the story of how spongy land that was sometimes under two feet of water was methodically and slowly transformed into a fertile and productive farm through ingenuity, technology, and hard work. When Ginny was a child, she imagined the tiles like the checkered floor tiles in her school, but she later learned about the intricate cylinders and plastic tubing that were called “tile lines.” This ingenious drainage system produced prosperity because it allowed the farmers to work the soil with machinery even the day after a big storm. Ginny mentioning that she’d always have a floor to walk on is her metaphorical way to say that she felt like she had her bearings, that she had a solid foundation, and that she felt secure. This feeling was true when she was a young child, and in some ways, it is true as the novel begins. However, as Ginny’s relationship with the land changes, these feelings of stability and security are destroyed.

What is a farmer?
A farmer is a man who feeds the world.
What is a farmer’s first duty?
To grow more food.
What is a farmer’s second duty?
To buy more land.

What are the signs of a good farm? Clean fields, neatly painted buildings, breakfast at six, no debts, no standing water.

In Chapter 8, Ginny thinks about the Ericsons, a family who used to live next door. Her father Larry added the Ericsons’ acres to his after they could not pay their taxes. Ginny comments that her father’s ideas about the land were as rote as a catechism, which is what she expresses here in these lines: more work, more food, more acres, more discipline. Larry was fiscally conservative, but he lusted for land and took whatever he could get, even if others might see his actions as greedy or distasteful. Larry viewed and treated his daughters the same way. He lusted for Ginny and Rose and took whatever he could get from them in the most brutal of ways. The Cook farm was always in order and always used the latest new farming methods, including pesticides and fertilizers. The Ericsons, by contrast, farmed differently. They trained dogs and made ice cream, two activities that Larry Cook found foolish and wasteful. In Larry’s eyes, the Ericsons’ lack of discipline led to their failure for, he believed, their relationship with the land was frivolous and pleasurable.

‘It’s more than one person is. One person don’t break a farm up that lots of people have sweated and starved to put together.’ Harold was beginning to heave with anger. ‘If you’d have been sons, you’d understand that. Women don’t understand that.’

In Chapter 26, Harold responds to Ginny after she mentions that a farm isn’t everything. Just after the big storm, the night that Larry wanders out into the rain and ends up at Harold’s, Harold visits Ginny in her kitchen. Marv Carson has just left, worried about the dysfunction in a family to whom his bank has just loaned a lot of money. These words reveal that Harold believes that a farm is everything, especially these big farms that have been created over generations by so many hardworking people. He believes that Ginny and Rose have mistreated their father. Harold believes that the sisters owe Larry everything and that they should apologize to him for letting him go out into the storm. Harold and Larry share the misogyny that Harold overtly expresses here. Men have a different relationship to the land, he believes, one that women cannot understand. For Harold, it’s that simple.

Achieving Freedom from Repressed Anger

But Rose’s anger! Some of my clearest memories were of watching her, unable to look away, watching her shine with anger. No matter how well you knew to keep back from it, you couldn’t keep back all the time.

In Chapter 19, Rose shows how she is the opposite of repressed. The five friends have played their last Monopoly game, which ends when Rose blows up and dumps the board on Pete’s lap. The evening gets even worse when Ty takes a phone call that Larry has wrecked his truck and landed in the emergency room. On the drive to the hospital, Ty confronts Ginny with his opinion that she and Rose are handling their father wrongly. He thinks they should be more respectful and tolerant of Larry’s quirks and his habits. To avoid a fight, Ginny tells him that he’s right. She does not want to be angry like Rose. Rose’s anger is frightening to behold and can be violent and destructive to witness. Holding back is Ginny’s habit. Watching silently is, too. At this point in the novel, Ginny loves her family and her husband, but soon, very soon, she will have sex with Jess, another step toward freedom and letting her anger shine.

I felt another animal in myself, a horse haltered in a tight stall, throwing its head and beating its feet against the floor, but the beams and the bars and the halter rope hold firm, and the horse wears itself out, and accepts the restraint that moments before had been an unendurable goad.

Here, in Chapter 25, Ginny reveals her inner reality. This lyrical comparison perfectly describes Ginny at this point in the novel. It is the first morning when everything has changed, the morning after Larry’s tirade, the storm, and Rose’s disclosure about the incest. Ty has just left, Rose comes downstairs, and Ginny is cooking breakfast. In the garden, the tomato plants are intact. Ginny thinks about the time right after her mother died and how hard it was just to get through each day. This image of the horse comes to Ginny’s imagination. For the first morning ever, she is awakened to and acknowledges her anger and her frustration at being confined. She’s been tied up like a beast. Ginny’s father is her goad, a spiked stick used for moving farm animals. However, the word “goad” also means to provoke or annoy, another definition that easily describes how Ginny’s father affects her. Here, she feels worn out, the way she did after her mother’s death, but she’s not giving up. Like a horse, she won’t be haltered forever.

But then I had something else, too. I had a burden lift off me that I hadn’t even felt the heaviness of until then, and it was the burden of having to wait and see what was going to happen.

In Chapter 45, in one of the final moments of the novel, Ginny thinks this after she pours the poisoned sausages down her garbage disposal, grinds them, and washes them away with a long stream of water from the faucet. She admits that she has misgivings about pouring poison into the sewage treatment system that serves the city, but that doesn’t stop her. When Ginny feels the heavy burden lift, she feels relief from worry and fear of what might have been. She no longer has to wonder if Rose or someone else is dead because of her actions. Ginny no longer has to dread going into her father’s house. She no longer has to fear her family’s wrath, judgment, or pain. Ginny is no longer responsible for anyone but herself, even her nieces. At this moment, the climax of the novel, Ginny is finally free from all that has mentally imprisoned her all of her life. Her anger is still with her, but it no longer feels like a heavy weight.

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