Jane Smiley - Some Luck

“Oh, my goodness!” exclaimed Mama. “What in the world are you doing? I thought you were taking a nap!” She grabbed Henry by the shoulder, and now she whirled him around. “Do I not get a moment’s peace? It’s freezing out there! You don’t have any shoes on, even!” Then she hugged him and started to cry. Out of the corner of his eye, Henry could still see the red thing.

RIGHT AFTER the state fair — all the way to Thanksgiving, maybe — Frank had hardly thought about that girl, Libby Holman. The whole episode just seemed like a little hard bit of a thing that was in your shoe or something. You stopped, shook it out of your shoe, and kept walking. He never told anyone about it (but, then, he never told anyone about anything), and he decided not to think about it, either. He was sure that girl was older than eighteen; when he thought about her, she seemed weird and not like a girl. Whatever sense he had had of being flattered had evaporated as fast as dew in the morning.

Then, at Thanksgiving, a funny thing happened at church (they didn’t have the gas to go to church every week, but Mama made sure they went once a month and on special days). At Thanksgiving, Pastor Elmore gave thanks for being guided to embark upon a new crusade, which was “Nipping It in the Bud.” He said, “In these hard times, O Lord, we know that our young people are being led astray by their own thoughts and also by the sinful things they see around them. O Lord, preserve your children from the Jews in Hollywood who infest our world with evil thoughts of bodies and carnality, bare legs, and heaving bosoms. O Lord, you know of what I speak!” And the congregation had said, “Amen!”

On the way home, Frank had heard Papa say, “Now, why did he bring that up?”

And Mama said, “Well, didn’t you see that that Mae West picture came to town? I guess some boys went to see it.” Then she cleared her throat, and Frank knew she was thinking that there were big ears in the back seat, which there were. Some boys at high school, boys from Usherton, had been talking about that movie — not about how naughty it was, but about how it was not nearly as naughty as another one, called I’m No Angel . The boys who were talking about I’m No Angel had sneaked into the theater when the ticket taker went out back to piss in the alley and thought he had locked the door. Well, he hadn’t.

It wasn’t that Frank knew what Mae West looked like or anything about the movies, even though he had listened closely to what the boys were saying. But that phrase, “I’m no angel,” went together with Libby Holman and Pastor Elmore, and the thing that was lodged in his shoe (in his mind, he knew) got bigger and he couldn’t shake it out. If he stayed awake at night and didn’t fall right to sleep, he had to turn on his side, away from Joey, and push his cock down between his legs, but even then it got bigger. This was called jerking off. The boys at school talked about that, too. And about whores. Two boys, Pat Callahan and Linc Forbes, had been taken to whores by their fathers when they turned sixteen. Frank was wondering if that was the reason Libby Holman asked him his age. Maybe she was a whore, and if he was sixteen she was supposed to charge him some money.

Of his rabbit and fox money, Frank had kept back eight dollars and given the rest to Mama. Papa had gotten nothing for the oats and nothing for the corn after harvest — the cost of planting, when you factored in fuel for the tractor and a repair that a man had had to come out and do (and he had taught Papa how to do some repairs himself, so the money had been worth it, but still they paid him partly in eggs and butter), had been more than the corn and oats were worth, even when processed through hogs and cows and sold as milk, beef, and pork — beef was selling in the winter at under ten cents a pound. Only Mama, with her chickens and cream, and Frank, with his fox pelts, were actually bringing in cash, and all of that was going for three things, shoes, coal, and mortgage. With luck, Papa said, there would be an early spring and the coal would hold out. And no one at school had it much better. The two boys Frank knew who smoked cigarettes were stealing them, and the ones who saw movies were sneaking in. Every time they went to church, Mama put a quarter in when they passed the plate. That was fifteen eggs. Frank kept the eight dollars behind a loose board next to the gun case. Since Walter no longer hunted, even deer, Frank was the only person who went near the gun case (and Mama made him store his bullets out in the barn).

But, Frank thought, if Libby Holman were a whore, she wouldn’t have seemed so sad after he came on her skirt, but that part made him feel strange, too, both the coming and the look on her face, and the sound of her voice when she said, “Ugh.” He had thought that Pastor Elmore was on to something when he talked about his new crusade, but then Mama had made him and Joey go to a class where the man from Des Moines who specialized in all of this didn’t say a word that was useful — it was all about kissing girls and magazines and striptease (“It’s not worth it, boys, it really isn’t,” and “Thank the Lord that Iowa is still dry, boys,” and “The girls you really like, and who are worth your time, depend on you to keep yourselves and your thoughts clean!”). The night of that class, Frank lay in bed thinking about it, and he couldn’t for the life of him make a link between Libby Holman, that cold night in the car, sitting there with her clothes all rumpled and her hair messed up, and the light from the state-fair midway glaring down across her cheek, and what that fellow said. Jackson Clifford, his name was: “Call me Jack Cliff, boys. Wherever you are now, I’ve been there!”

IT COULD HAVE BEEN colder. Other springs had been, Walter knew. Here he was forty now. Wasn’t that something? Walter thought. Been on this farm for fifteen years, and the day he walked through the farmhouse and decided that this was the one he could afford was as clear in his mind as anything. Now he was forty and had a belly and his hair was backing off his forehead, just the way his father’s had, and the oddest thing was that his eyes were lighter and lighter blue, as if that was where the graying was taking place, not on top of his head. Walter carried both pails across the barnyard, which was wet but not squelching. Down to four milkers now, which he didn’t mind compared with starving to death. He and Joey between them could milk four cows in half an hour. He stepped onto the well cover, which was crisscrossed with bindweed that he should have rooted out, but in fact he rather liked the flowers that would come in the summer. He set the pail underneath the spigot and began working the pump handle. The water came pretty quick — two up, two down. Good well, Walter was thinking.

When the well cover broke away underneath him and the pail fell into the well, Walter threw his arms out straight to either side. The edges of the well caught them above the elbows. Walter looked down. The pail made a splash.

The dark, wet sides of the well dropped maybe twenty feet to the surface of the water. He could just make out the edges of some of the bricks that had been used to shore it up, and he wasn’t actually afraid, just startled. Startled at the sight of his own boots hanging there, maybe fifteen feet above the dim shine that would have been his death if he hadn’t thrown out his arms. He had never fallen into a well before. It was children who fell into wells.

Of course, he was only preliminarily saved. He had to figure out how to move forward or backward or upward somehow, and for the moment, the instinct that had thrown his arms out wasn’t operating. He took a deep breath and looked around. Rosanna was in the house; you couldn’t see the well from the house. He had left a barn door open by mistake. He took another deep breath. It was a chilly day. The water would be chillier still.