Jane Smiley - Some Luck

He was holding it in his right hand by the tarnished silver bowl, and when he brought it toward his face, his eyes would cross, which made Rosanna, his mother, laugh as she shelled peas. Now that he was sitting, he could also drop the spoon, and then, very carefully, pick it up again. Before learning to sit, he had enjoyed lying on his back and waving the spoon in the air, but if he dropped the spoon, it was gone. This was no longer the case. One of the qualities Rosanna attributed to little Frank was persistence. If he was playing with the spoon, then it was the spoon he wanted to play with. If he dropped the spoon, and she happened to give him a sock doll (the sock doll that her sister, Eloise, had sewn just for Frank), Frank would fuss until she gave him the spoon. Now, sitting up, he put the spoon down and picked it up and put it down and picked it up. Although he much preferred the spoon to the doll, Rosanna always told Eloise and her mother how much Frank liked the doll. Eloise was now knitting him a wool hat. It was her first knitting project; she expected to have it done before October. Rosanna reached into the basket of pea pods and took the last handful. She didn’t mind shelling peas.

Frank was a good baby, hardly ever fussy, which, according to Rosanna’s mother, was a characteristic of all her side of the family. Speaking of peas, Rosanna and her sister and four brothers were just like peas in a pod for being good babies, and here was Frank, another of the same breed, blond, beautiful, and easy, plenty of flesh but not a bit of fat, active but not fussy, went right down every night and only got up once, regular as sunrise, then down again for another two hours while Rosanna made breakfast for Walter and the hired man. Could she ask for a better baby?

Rosanna finished shelling peas and set the bowl on the blanket, then knelt in front of Frank and said, “What a boy! What a darling boy! Are you a darling boy?” And she kissed him on the forehead, because her mother had impressed on her that you never, never kissed a baby on the lips. She laid her hand gently on the top of his head.

Frank still had his grip on the spoon, but his mother’s face transfixed him. As it loomed closer and then retreated, his gaze followed it, and as she smiled, he smiled, and then laughed, and then he waved his arms, which resulted in the spoon’s being thrown across the blanket — a first! He saw it fly and he saw it land, and his head turned slightly so he could watch it.

Rosanna laughed, because on his face was a bona-fide look of surprise, very advanced, as far as Rosanna was concerned (though she would have to admit that she had never paid one iota of attention to her brothers and sister, except when they were in her way or in her charge — no one ever said that she enjoyed watching them or had a flair for it). Now Frank’s body tilted forward, and all of a sudden he fell over on his side, cushioned by the blanket. Being Frank, he didn’t cry. Rosanna sat him up again and handed him the spoon; then she stood up, thinking that she could hurry into the house and set the bread loaves, which should have completed their second rising by now, into the hot oven and be back out in a minute or two. Nothing could happen in a minute or two.

Spoon in hand, Frank saw and heard his mother’s dress swish around her legs as she went inside, and then the screen door slapped shut. After a moment, Frank returned his attention to the spoon, which he was now gripping by the handle, bowl upward. He smacked it on the blanket, and though it was bright against the darkness of the blanket, it made no noise, so he brought it again to his face. It got bigger and brighter and bigger and brighter — this was the confusing part — and then he felt something, not in his hand, but on his face, a pressure and then a pain. The spoon jumped away from him, and there was noise — his own noise. His arm waved, and the spoon flew again. Now the spoon was small and didn’t look like a spoon. Frank looked at it for a very long time, and then he looked around the blanket for something that was within reach. The only thing was a nice clean potato, into which Mama had cut two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. Frank was not terribly interested in the potato, but it was nearby, so his hand fell upon it, gripped it, and brought it to his mouth. He tasted the potato. It tasted different from the spoon.

More interesting was the sudden appearance of the cat, orange, long, and just his, Frank’s, size. Frank let the potato drop as he looked at the cat, and then the cat was sniffing his mouth and smoothing its whiskers across Frank’s cheek, squatting to inspect the potato, pressing himself into Frank until Frank fell over again. Moments later, when the door opened and flapped closed, the cat was crouched on the porch railing, purring, and Frank was lying on his back, staring at the ceiling of the porch and kicking his legs — left, right, left, right. Mama picked him up, then arced him through the air, and he found himself pressed into her shoulder, his ear and the side of his head warm against her neck. He saw the cat one last time as the porch spun around him, and beyond that the green-gold grass, and the pale horizontal line of the dirt road, and the two fields, one for oats, a thick undulating surface, and one for corn, a quiet grid of still squares (“There’s a little breeze,” thought Rosanna; “I’ll open the upstairs windows”), and around that, a different thing, empty, flat, and large, the thing that lay over all things.

FRANK UNDERSTOOD the kitchen better now. He had a chair with a table of its own where he sat several times every day, and this seat was perfect for surveying this room where he was never allowed to crawl about. He had just learned to crawl. Almost always, two men entered the room while he was sitting there, Papa and Ragnar. Papa spoke to Mama, and Mama spoke back, and there were certain things they said that Frank felt he understood. Ragnar, however, babbled unintelligibly, and Frank could not understand him even when Mama or Papa was nodding. Nodding was good and was usually accompanied by smiling. Another thing Frank did not understand was that when he himself moved or made noise, there was pain where the noise should be. Pain and noise, both. Now Mama held out her hand. Frank held out his hand in just the same way, and Mama put something hard into it, which, since he was hungry, he brought to his mouth and bit into. When he did so, the pain and noise faded a little. Mama said, “Oh, poor boy. The top ones are always worse than the bottom ones.” She slipped her finger under his upper lip and lifted it slightly. She said, “I think the left one was grown out, but you can hardly see the right one.”

Papa said, “Late teethers always fuss more, Mama told me. Les and I got ours at four months.”

Ragnar said, “Ja, ja, ja. Slik liten tenner!”

Ragnar and Papa lifted their forks and began to eat. Frank had already tasted what they were eating, though from a spoon — mush, some chicken, green beans. Mama set her own plate on the table next to Frank’s seat and sat down. She used her fork to place a green bean on Frank’s tray. When he carefully put the tip of his finger on the slippery bean, Papa, Mama, and Ragnar laughed, though the bean didn’t strike him as funny.

But it was no use. The pain enveloped him again, head to toe, and then the noise.

Ragnar said, “Han nødvendig noe Akevitt.”

Papa said, “Don’t have any of that poison, Ragnar.”

The noise increased.

Hands banged on the tray of Frank’s seat, and the bean and the crust of bread flew away.

Mama said, “We have to do something. My mother says—” But she looked at Papa and closed her mouth.

“What?” said Papa.

“Well, Ragnar is right. A clean rag knotted and dipped in whiskey. He chews on it and it eases the pain.”

Читать дальше