Jane Smiley - Some Luck

“Isn’t there any water?”

“Well,” said Rosanna, “let’s see.” She stood up and lifted Lillian out of the tub, careful to retain as much of that water as she could — for plants, and maybe even animals. She dried Lillian with a towel and walked her over to the pump. Rosanna picked Lillian up and set her beside the sink, then picked up, not the pail with the muck in it, but a pot she used for boiling egg noodles. She set it under the spout of the pump, lifted the handle, and pushed it down, then did it again. Water — clear water, and cool — spurted into the pan, and she pumped again. Soon she had about three quarts — the pot held four quarts. She realized that she had panicked. Dimly, in fact, she knew how a well worked — a well was a deep hole into an aquifer. Water seeping through surrounding rock and earth filled the hole, and every well had a capacity — a gallon a minute, or two, or ten, or whatever. But Rosanna had never in her thirty years seen anything come out of a spigot other than water, and so she had looked at the muck and panicked. Lillian was staring at the water, and Rosanna gave in to temptation and said, “Well, darling, it’s a miracle. We prayed for the water, and the water came.” Rosanna knew that Walter would disapprove of misrepresenting things in this way, but the words just came out of her mouth. Lillian stared at the water and said, “A miracle.”

Rosanna took her down from the sink and said, “Let’s go find Dula and Lizzie. I think they’ve been getting up to mischief.” As they left the kitchen, hand in hand, Rosanna saw Lillian turn her head to look at the pump. She did feel guilty, a bit. But, then, what was wrong in believing in miracles? Miracles abounded. There were plenty that you could see, and plenty that you couldn’t.

PAPA THOUGHT that he could get five cows, twenty chickens, and Jake and Elsa through the winter. As for lambs and hogs, well, the hogs had been slaughtered and turned into sausage and ham, as they were every year, and the sheep had gone away, too. If things looked better in the spring — if there was some snow cover — Papa said they could start again with shoats and lambs. It was not that they could go hungry — not only did Mama have pork and beef and chicken stored in the cellar, there were deer everywhere, and turkeys, too. Papa said that all the animals were thirsty and hungry. In a way, it was a mercy to shoot them, if they were coming around, because they had lost all caution. Better to be shot than brought down by a pack of dogs.

Frank was not worried. Minnie Frederick was not worried. It was true that the Grahams, who hadn’t had many animals, only lots of corn and a few other crops, had lost their farm and moved away, before the harvest even, because Mr. Graham didn’t “have the wherewithal” to harvest fields that were parched and dead just to keep them neat — Frank and Minnie tramped through those fields every morning on the way to school. Frank wasn’t quite sure what “wherewithal” was — probably money, maybe horses, maybe gasoline, maybe someone to help him. At any rate, the Grahams were gone, had not even turned up for the first day of school. There were lots of others at school who were not worried — the worried ones must have left, Frank thought.

It was Papa who was worried, though Frank wasn’t sure about what, exactly, and didn’t dare ask. There was a word Papa always shook his head after pronouncing — it was “bank.” Frank wasn’t sure which of the three things that could go wrong at a bank Papa was worried about — the bank “going under,” the bank “cutting him off,” or the bank getting robbed. Of these, obviously, the most exciting was the bank getting robbed, and everyone at school talked about such a thing happening, because Donald Guthrie had a cousin in Ottumwa, where seven or eight guys had stolen sixty or a hundred thousand dollars from a bank in September. Ottumwa was only a hundred miles from Denby, according to Papa. The same gang had robbed a bank in Minnesota in the summer, three hundred miles away. Frank suspected they were getting closer. What Papa said about it was “Lucky to have a hundred thousand dollars in a bank in Ottumwa in this kind of drought, if you ask me.”

Mama said that there was not going to be a bank robbery — the Lord wouldn’t allow it. Frank didn’t see why not, and Papa seemed to agree with him — he said, “Well, he’s allowed plenty of ’em.” Mama said that sometimes Satan got away with things and sometimes he didn’t, but in Frank’s experience, that was true of everyone, even Joey, who hardly ever tried to get away with anything, but had killed a bluebird with the slingshot Frank had given him and gotten away with it — Mama did not allow them to shoot at songbirds. Frank himself got away with so many things that he expected to do whatever he pleased, and he did.

He expected to get away with kissing Alice Canham, and he did. He expected to get away with kissing her sister, Marie, and he did, and when Marie told Alice, Alice wanted another one. Alice was thirteen and Marie was fourteen. Chances were, thought Frank, that he would also get away with kissing Minnie, but he spent so much time with Minnie on the way to and from school that kissing her seemed like maybe not such a good idea, although, on balance, he didn’t see how holding her hand could go wrong.

In order to further chase away any worries that the boys and girls in the school might have, their new teacher this year, Miss Horton, who was maybe eighteen and maybe not — Minnie said she was sixteen and had lied about her age because her family had lost their farm and were living in a shack in Usherton and the money Miss Horton got from teaching was the only money they had — was helping them plan the biggest Christmas pageant ever, and she had been trying out all of the boys and girls for singing. There was a piano in the school; Miss Horton was the one who tuned it up and got everyone to sing. And it was Miss Horton who said to Frank, after he sang two verses of “Beautiful Dreamer” and one of “Hard Times Come Again No More” (both of which she taught him), that he sounded like an angel, and Frank said, “No one ever compared me to an angel before,” and Miss Horton said, “Well, I can see that, Frank, but you have a lovely singing voice.”

When he told this to Mama, she said that all the Vogels and the Augsbergers were good singers, so no wonder, but she agreed to help him learn the songs he was supposed to sing for the pageant. There were three of them — the whole school was going to do “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear,” and then Frank, Minnie, one of the plain girls named Dorothy Pierce, and Howie Prince were to do “The Holly and the Ivy,” back and forth between verses. Then, at the end of the first part, or “act,” as Miss Horton called it, Frank was to sing alone—“I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.” This was a song that Frank did not know, though Mama did. She said, “I think that’s rather a sad song, Frankie.”

Frankie shrugged.

“Did Miss Horton sing it for you?”

“She said she would do that next week.”

“It is not a joyous carol. I would prefer you sang something that affirms your faith.”

“Have you sung it, Mama?”

“Well, yes. Granny Mary likes that one.”

Frankie left it at that.

On Monday, when Miss Horton kept him after school to sing the carol for him (Minnie stayed, too), he found that he liked it, and he got the tune right away. On the third time, he could sing along with Miss Horton, and after the fourth time, both Minnie and Miss Horton had their mouths open.

Miss Horton said, “You sang that with real feeling, Frank.”

“I did?”

Minnie nodded.

Once they were out of the school and on the way home in the cold, dimming light, she kissed him on the cheek and said, “That’s what you get. But don’t tell.”