Jane Smiley - Some Luck

Almost every day, Mama walked past her and saw her playing with Henry and said, “You are a good, good girl, Lillian. A pure angel, and, truly, you are my salvation. Do you know that?”

And Lillian said yes, because that was what she was supposed to say. But she hardly heard Mama say these things, because she couldn’t take her eyes off Henry.

PAPA AND FRANK mostly stayed out of the house — that was the easiest thing. Once in a while, Papa said, “Well, son, your mama cannot be pleased, and that’s the way women get to be sometimes. You have to make up your mind to put up with it, and go about your business.” The outside work could have been worse — had been worse. At least this year there was almost enough rain, and the crop looked pretty good. When the sheep shearers came, Papa gave Joey all the wool, because he said that Frank had hardly done a thing for those 4-H lambs — if they had been left to him, they would have starved to death. But so what if Joey got a few bucks for his wool? Frank had stretched his rabbit skins from the winter on the south side of the barn, and then he had taken them to Dan Crest, who found a man from Des Moines who bought them for a dollar apiece — that was twenty-two dollars — and said they were good quality and “the ladies’ll love ’em.” He said what he was really looking for was fox, though. No one could resist fox. So one thing Frank did to stay out of the house was roam down by the creek and through the fields, scouting fox burrows and keeping his eyes peeled for other possibilities. Papa said that this was very “enterprising.”

Of course, he did all of his other work, too — feeding the cattle and Jake and Elsa, working the fields, fixing fence, and planting. Pruning the Osage-orange hedge had fallen to him, too, and he had hated it until a new boy at school, from out of state somewhere, had told him you could make a good bow and even arrows from the branches of the hedge, and he spent part of the winter doing that. Papa complained about all the farm work, especially now that Elsa was almost twenty and Jake was not much younger. A plan he’d had of raising a foal and getting another one had come to nothing. Grandpa Wilmer had gone out of the horse business; what were they going to do? Maybe Elsa would last through the year, and maybe not. Papa said, for the hundredth time, as he was putting them away and Frank was hanging up the harness, “Well, we’ll see what happens. Maybe Roosevelt will send us a couple of good horses, now that he’s been inaugurated,” but Frank didn’t consider himself a horseman, he considered himself a tractor man. He kept his eye peeled for tractors. There were three — two on the other side of Denby, owned by the Marshalls and the Larsens, and one about two miles north of the school, owned by none other than the Dugans. The Dugans’ tractor was a John Deere, green as a stalk of corn and with yellow wheels, and Frank thought it was much better-looking than a Farmall, but he did agree about how the Farmall was more like a tricycle, and easier to steer. Both of the tractors on the other side of Denby were Farmalls, black.

Grandpa Wilmer was not going to be the one to get the first tractor in the family. He was out of the horse-breeding business, and had sold his stallion to a breeder down in Missouri for next to nothing, a fellow who had imported some giant donkeys from France after the war and was trying to develop a new type of hinny. But for what, Frank wanted to know? Better to have a tractor.

Mama and Papa were already arguing about whether Frank should go on to the high school. It wasn’t that he couldn’t do the work — everyone knew that he could, and would — he liked the work. Miss Grant said that she had nothing more to teach him — he knew everything she knew already, and a lot of things she didn’t, and so she had him teach the younger boys, though he was not allowed to smack them if they made mistakes. The high school was a ways — three miles — and without any help on the farm, Papa didn’t see how he was going to afford anything about this. If Frankie walked, it would take him an hour (a half an hour, thought Frankie, because he could run the whole way), and the hack was slow, too, since it had to wind around to several other farms to pick up other youngsters. But how was Walter going to afford the gasoline to take him, and who would drive? And the school day at the high school was a long one, especially with the going back and forth. “Your smartest child!” shouted Mama. “You want to bury him on the farm for the rest of his life. You think this place is the be-all, end-all, and it isn’t!”

Frank’s solution was a bicycle — he’d seen one for sale at a secondhand store in Usherton, cruiser style, not very old, fifteen dollars. He knew Papa was going to object — that was always his first response to anything — and maybe it would be hard to pedal on the dirt roads sometimes, but the roadbed curved upward, and he was sure he could pedal fine if he went straight down the middle and watched for ruts. Not to mention snow and ice. The thing was to get to Usherton, and to do that he would have to take the car.

What you did when you wanted to get away with something was not to plan, but to look for an opportunity. Frank didn’t think that bicycle was going anywhere — fifteen dollars was a lot of money with everyone out of work and half the shops in Denby and Usherton boarded over — so he waited. A few weeks passed, and the argument went on about high school — Mama now wondered why a man who planned to have a family would buy a farm “off away from everything,” and Papa asked her if she understood the first thing about soil fertility and wells and taking what you could get, and Mama said she understood all of that perfectly well, thank you, then burst into tears again. Papa said Frank had eighth grade left to go, why not worry about it later, and Mama said, “He’s teaching the younger boys! There’s nothing left there for him.”

The opportunity came one morning after a not so big blowup at the breakfast table. Joey and Lillian had fled, saying they had to be at school early, and Frank was lingering behind the barn, wondering if maybe hooky wasn’t a nicer thing to do on a lovely day than sitting in that stuffy schoolhouse. Grandpa Otto drove up in his truck, and Papa wiped his hands on his overalls, ran out to the road, and got in without shouting goodbye. There had been nothing said about this at breakfast, so Frank didn’t know why Papa was going to the other farm, but so be it. Frank circled the barn and then the back of the house, until he could look into his own window. His room was empty and still, the door to the rest of the house closed. Frank pushed on the screen and climbed in to get his money.

He did know how to drive — Papa had taught him, in case of emergency. Mama had never learned; someone had to. But he hadn’t driven by himself before. Backing the car out was no problem — he just released the brake and let it slide. Once he reached the road, he started it up, backed around, and drove away without a glance. If Mama was waving at him from the porch, he would find out about it later.

He sat up as straight as he could and looked carefully at every intersection for any other vehicles. But what vehicles would there be? It was a clear day — everyone was in the fields. After maybe a half an hour, he went through those woods and over the river, which had risen almost as high as the banks, and into town. Now was the confusing part — how to get to the shop, which he had seen when he was in town with Papa a few weeks ago. But there were plenty of cars and trucks, and he just did what the ones with dirty wheels did, headed toward the farm-supply store. Probably it took him longer to get there than it would have taken Papa, but he recognized the way as he passed. As for driving, he kept to the right, used his hand signals, and maintained the same speed as everybody else, and there it was, the Back for More Store, and right in the window, the bicycle. Fortunately, no one was parked in front, so all Frank had to do was pull over, glide to a stop, and turn the car off.