Jane Smiley - Some Luck

At the bottom of the steps, Lillian was looking up at them. She said, “Mama, Mama! Guess what! Jane has a new sister! They named her Gloria.”

Rosanna stepped off the bottom step and set Henry on his feet. He put his hand in Lillian’s. Rosanna said, “How wonderful. ‘Gloria’ is a good name.”

“Can we make up a box of clothes and toys for her?”

“Goodness, child, everything we have is for boys, and old and patched. If Frankie didn’t wear it first, then Joey did, then you, then Henry.”

Lillian kissed Henry and then gave her mother a serious look. She said, “I don’t know if they have anything, Mama.”

It was true that Jane was a ragged child, though loving and sweet. The Morrises went to some tiny church somewhere, the sort of church where there wouldn’t be any old clothes or hand-me-down dolls. She said, “We can ask Granny Mary to look for some nice things at the Catholic church. But when we wrap them up, don’t you say where they came from, all right?”

“A secret?”

“Your secret and my secret.”

Lillian nodded. Then she said, “Oh, my goodness, Henry, I have a whole new story to tell you! About a cat this time, named Petie. He wears boots!” They walked over to the sofa, and Lillian helped him crawl up onto the cushion.

THIS YEAR, because of the tractor, Walter had planted the corn in a new way — not drilling in a grid, but in long rows. And he only planted twenty acres, enough for seed for next year and for their own animals. The government was paying them not to plant, but, as Walter pointed out to Rosanna, it wasn’t paying them enough to buy someone else’s corn. He did buy a lister — a Go-Dig lister, and it cost him ten dollars, which seemed like a little but was actually a lot. He had thought that maybe he could make some of the machinery he had used with the horses work with the tractor, if he modified it a bit, and that had worked with the oat seeder, and he thought it might work with the oat threshing. But he couldn’t resist the lister. The fact was that, if the rain was going to hold off, then he had to plant the corn deeper — not two or three inches, but five or six, down where the soil was still moist. And the fact was that he was going to know that that plume of dust was lifting behind him and swirling into the sky, and he was not going to turn his head to look at it.

The lister did a thing for corn that Walter had never seen before — you set the disks one way the first time you cultivated the field, and they turned the dirt toward the middle, between the rows, making a little mound there, and letting the corn shoots, planted so deep, make their way to the surface. And then, a few weeks later, when the cornstalks were taller and thicker, and in danger of falling over, you set the disks of the lister the other way, and they piled the soil against the row of stalks, supported them, and protected the ground moisture (as if there were ground moisture). Walter couldn’t help liking it. And the whole operation took a couple of days each time — none of that struggle, especially on hot days with the horses to get a few rows done, bringing buckets of water for them, swatting the flies, worrying about them when you saw their flanks heaving and their nostrils flaring, just from the sun and the humidity. Walter hadn’t realized how taxing it was to worry about Jake and Elsa. He had said they were work animals and prided himself on knowing that their value lay in their productivity, no different from a pig or a chicken, but, unlike the pigs and the chickens, they had names. The tractor had no name, except “Farmall.” It was a relief.

But it was no secret to Walter as he drove the tractor from one end of the twenty-acre cornfield to the other that a tractor was a pact with the devil. How could it be that when they woke up one morning they found dust caked on the west side of the house, and the air so thick you had to wear a wet bandanna outside, keep all the windows shut, and wipe the inside sills anyway? Iowa had prided itself on not being Oklahoma, but how much of a sign did they need? Of course, he did not reveal these thoughts to Rosanna. So he finished planting in a quarter of the time it normally took — that meant that he was looking to plant more, he was looking across the street at other farmers’ fields, wondering how much they were planting, and how that was going to depress the price of corn if they were all using tractors to plant. There could be a lot of farmers with horses, but not so many farmers with tractors. That much was evident right off the bat. And yet. And yet, with the lengthening days, Frankie stayed longer at the high school, learning about girls, no doubt, but also about kingdom, phylum, class, order, genus, and species, and also about the French Revolution and the English Revolution and the American Revolution and the Russian Revolution and the Industrial Revolution and the revolution of the Earth around the Sun and all the other revolutions there had been and would soon be, all kinds of things that Walter didn’t know much about, and all of which would draw Frankie like a moth to the flame, because if there was anything Frankie loved, it was making chaos his business. A tractor was what he and Joey needed to get their work done, and so be it, and perhaps, as Rosanna said, the Lord would provide, as he had all along, and didn’t Walter know that he was just a worrier, always a worrier? So did driving a tractor make more worry, or less? Yes, the horses were not suffering, and you weren’t as close to the dry dirt, but you were driving into the unknown, and at a pretty good clip.

WALTER HADN’T BEEN to the state fair since before Rosanna came along, and Rosanna had never been — the oat harvest was in August, and there was too much farm work to do. But with the tractor this year, and Walter harvesting the oats with Bob Marshall’s combine in three days, with help only from Frankie and Joey — well, there they were, with free days in August, and Joe got to take his ewe to the fair after all (Walter had been saying, “We’ll see,” all along, and this time they saw something good rather than something disappointing).

It made Rosanna a little nervous. She was used to Usherton, and had been to Des Moines when she was a girl three or four times, but Frankie would be clamoring to go on all the most dangerous rides, and it would certainly be hot, and how would they get the ewe there? But it turned out to be easy after all. Roland Frederick was taking his truck — and he would take the six-month-old ewe and Joey. His brother, who lived in Cedar Rapids but had grown up on the family farm, had agreed to come for three days and feed both the Frederick animals and Walter’s, because Minnie and her mother were both entered in the pie contest — Lorene with peach and Minnie with blackberry. Lois would go in the car with Walter and Rosanna; Lillian promised to read the two children stories all the way down and all the way back. Frankie had fox money left from the winter (five skins, three dollars apiece), and he promised to give Joey a dollar for the midway. And so, said Walter, if they couldn’t afford it, they would worry about it later, because the chance had presented itself, and were they really not going to give Joey the opportunity to repeat his county-fair victory? They both knew that Joey needed all the encouragement he could get.

The ewe, named Emily, was a Southdown. Joey had told Rosanna that he preferred the bare-faced Cheviots, “but they’re not in fashion, so you’re not going to win with a Cheviot. When I grow up, though, I’m going to have all Cheviots.” And all shorthorns for both milk and beef, and all Percherons and all Chanticleers. Rosanna hoped that what Walter sometimes said to her wasn’t true — that here Joey was, only twelve years old, and already the world had passed him by.