Jane Smiley - Some Luck

“No.”

“Now I have to give you a whipping.” And then he took off his belt and grasped the buckle, and holding Frankie by the upper arm, had him take down his pants.

“What did I tell you?” Whack.

“Not to touch the nails.” Whack.

“If I tell you not to touch the nails, you are not to touch the nails.” Whack.

“I wanted to find it.” Whack.

“What do I do if I tell you not to touch the nails and you touch the nails?” Whack.

“Whip me.” Whack.

“Why did you touch the nails?” Whack.

“I wanted to find it.” Whack.

“Are you going to do that again if I tell you not to?” Whack.

“No, Papa.” Whack.

But of course he did. Nails, after all, were not the same as crawling under the front porch, or climbing to the very top of the tree, or standing on the roof of the house, or dropping from the hay loft (where he was not supposed to be in the first place) onto Jake’s back. What would happen if they got electricity (that was the rumor lately, especially since they were so close to town; it was expensive but worth it, everyone said), Walter could only imagine. For Frankie, the wires would be a constant temptation just to try this with a screwdriver or that with a fork. It seemed as though Frankie had to be taught every single lesson in every variation. And, yes, Miss Jenkins, over at the school, said that Frankie was the smartest child she had ever seen in her life, and was on to division, not to mention training for the spelling bee at the end of the school year (“And I do not know who is going to give him any competition”). Certainly, he went to school willingly and even enthusiastically every morning, so that was something to be thankful for.

Walter didn’t know what to make of his two boys. If you looked at it a certain way, then the one who needed the beatings to toughen him up, namely Joey, never did a thing to earn a beating, because he hadn’t the gumption, and the one who got the beatings learned nothing from them. Looking back on his own childhood, Walter saw a much more orderly system: His father or mother told them the rules. If they got out of line, even not intending to, they got a whipping to help them remember the next time, and they did remember the next time, and so they got fewer beatings, and so they became boys who could get the work done, and since there was plenty of it, it had to get done. That was life, as far as Walter was concerned — you surveyed the landscape and took note of what was needed, and then you did it, and the completed tasks piled up behind you like a kind of treasure, or at least evidence of virtue. What life was for Frankie he could not imagine.

What life was for Lillian was color. As soon as the boys moved out of that bedroom, Rosanna drove into town and went to Dan Crest’s and bought a half-gallon of pink paint, and then she painted Lillian’s walls pink. When the paint was dry, she put up curtains she had made, pink and white stripes with white ruffles all around the edge. Then it turned out that Granny Mary and her sister had spent the whole winter braiding and sewing a rag rug — pink, white, and green, for Lillian’s room, an oval ten feet long — and his own mother had crocheted her a pink bedcover. Rosanna then framed profiles of people and animals she had cut out of paper — a farmer, his wife, a cow, a horse, a pig, a lamb, a rabbit, a squirrel, a fox, and a bird — and hung them on the walls. It took her two full days to fix up the room.

For certain, it was now the nicest room in the house, nicer than the front room, even. But this was not for the neighbors. Walter could see that when he stopped at the top of the stairs on the morning the room was finished and watched Rosanna through the doorway, holding the seventeen-month-old Lillian on her hip and going from picture to picture, saying, “And on his farm, he had a what? A pig! Yes! What a good girl!”

ROLAND FREDERICK GOT himself a tractor. It was a Farmall, gray, small, and nimble, with the two front wheels close together, kind of like a tricycle, and Walter could hear it when the wind was right. Two times in the same week, when he was out in the field behind the Osage-orange hedge, he could see it, too, making its compact and noisy way across Roland’s western forty acres. The next time he went to town, he got the story.

The Farmall man, coming into Denby, looking around and seeing who had the biggest house and the nicest barn, had offered to let Roland try the tractor out for a week. He ended up leaving it there for ten days, and, not having heard from Roland, he took a driver out to get it and drive it into town. But Roland was nowhere to be found, and the tractor, sitting in front of the barn, couldn’t be turned on — no gasoline — so the Farmall man left Roland a note, saying he would be back the next day.

Sure enough, that very afternoon, Walter saw and heard Roland — moving rather fast, Walter thought — finishing up his planting, and without any horses or help. It was a lot of noise, but Walter was impressed. His own farm was only half the size of Roland’s, and he planted much less corn, but he and Ragnar were not more than half done — the wires were up for the last part of the field, but he hadn’t drilled the corn yet. After watching Roland, or, rather, the tractor with the minuscule bent figure of Roland sitting in the seat, make its way across the horizon, he went into the barn.

Of course Jake and Elsa were there, and of course they nickered to him (it was suppertime, at least as far as they were concerned). Elsa was fifteen this year and Jake was thirteen — grayed out now, almost pure white. His father had given them to him when he came back from the war, and they were six and four then, strong, handsome, darkly dappled, and well behaved, a prize team. That very year, Roland Frederick had had a team of young Shires drag his plow into a deep ditch. One of the horses had broken a leg, and the plow had been rendered unusable — Roland had had to borrow someone else’s to finish for the year. Walter and his father had considered themselves a little superior to Roland that time, because they had the sense to breed Percherons, and good lines, too. In fact, given Roland Frederick’s lack of feel for horses, it wasn’t a surprise that he was riding the first tractor Walter had ever seen. Walter went back outside and watched until he couldn’t make out anything more in the twilight, and then headed to the house for supper.

He couldn’t imagine what a tractor might cost. A thousand dollars? If so, that was a year’s income for him, minus the $268 he had spent on putting up the new addition to the house. And even though his father was talking about getting out of the horse-breeding business, Elsa wasn’t that old — he could either put her in foal to his father’s stallion now, and have himself a horse ready to work in four years, when Jake was seventeen and Elsa was nineteen — or he could buy one or two of his father’s colts and raise them. Just thinking about these ideas was reassuring. How long would a tractor last? No one knew. He washed his hands in the pail of water Rosanna had left by the dry sink on the back porch, and kicked off his boots, thinking with satisfaction that he had things figured out.

At the supper table, over Rosanna’s meatloaf, he said to Frankie and Joey, “Did you boys see Mr. Frederick’s tractor?”

“I heard it,” said Rosanna. “Noisy thing! Don’t know how he can stand sitting on the seat in the middle of all that racket.”

“I saw it,” said Frankie.

“How’d you manage that?” said Walter.

Frankie shrugged.

Up in the hayloft, thought Walter, but he didn’t press it. He said, “What did you think?”

Joey said, “Is Mr. Frederick going to shoot his horses now?”