Jane Smiley - Some Luck

“What things?” said Lawrence.

“The explosion two nights ago at the train station in Tarnów, Poland, and now this.”

“Now what?” said Lawrence.

“The Germans have already destroyed Wieluń, some little town, and they’re crossing the border in about ten different places. Julius has gone down to party headquarters to see if there’s any news about what Stalin is going to do. Julius is just off the deep end with Chamberlain. He keeps saying that if Chamberlain hadn’t been playing footsie with Hitler all spring, this wouldn’t have happened.”

“What do you say?”

“Well, half the time I say that accelerating the world revolution is our job and we must welcome armed conflict.”

“What about the other half?” said Lawrence. Frank thought he sounded truly curious.

“The other half of the time I have no idea what to say.” She looked over her shoulder, out the window. It was almost dark. A moment later, there was a knock on the door. Eloise said, “That’s Olivia Cohen, bringing Rosa home. Don’t talk about this with her, all right?”

But all through supper, Rosa watched Julius cough and groan and put his head in his hands. Finally, he pushed his plate away and left the table. Rosa said nothing, only glanced after him once.

The next morning, Eloise got Frank and Lawrence up, handed them ten dollars, and said, “I want you to take Rosa to the beach, and then get her some lunch, and then take her to a double feature. Julius and I have meetings all day.” The lake was calm, and the beach was crowded. Lawrence and Frank looked at the girls while Rosa, who was a good swimmer now, played in the water. When it got hot, Frank stripped down to his trunks, which he had brought along, and swam as far out as he could — far enough out so that the people on the beach and lifeguard’s stand disappeared against the bright Chicago skyline. He floated there for a while, his face pointed toward the sky, and then he swam back in. A girl of about fourteen had joined Rosa, and was helping her build something in the sand. Lawrence was asleep on his back with a newspaper over his face. The front page of the paper was full of Poland. Looking at it made Frank’s scalp prickle, because, no matter what Lawrence said about this being Europe’s problem, and about how maybe Julius, as an Englishman, a commie, a Jew, was taking it too seriously, Frank thought that of course it had to do with him, of course it did. Wasn’t it true, as Mama always said, that he was drawn to trouble? And this was the biggest trouble in the world.

AT THANKSGIVING, everyone teased Joe about how now he was rich. Walter had gotten forty-two bushels of corn per acre; Joe had gotten fifty-two. Fifty-two bushels an acre was unheard of. And because of the war in Europe, he had sold it for two bits a bushel, which came out to over a thousand dollars. Since the seed he had hybridized the year before was leftover seed, and this crop was from the seed he had harvested, and since he had done all the work himself, he had cleared almost nine hundred dollars. Papa said, “Well, I’ll have to charge you room and board.” Mama said, “Oh, my goodness, Walter, don’t even mention such a thing,” but everyone else seemed to know he was joking.

Frank said he could buy a new Ford for five hundred dollars, and Henry said he could buy a windup handcar with Minnie and Mickey Mouse pumping the handles, and Lillian said that he could buy a horse — Jake — he could go buy Jake back from those people. But Joe knew what he was going to buy — he was going to buy seed, of course.

It wasn’t until the next morning, over breakfast, that Joe and Papa got into an argument about it. Papa said, “There’s a lesson for you in this, boy.”

“Yes, sir,” said Joe.

“You know what the lesson is?”

“I don’t know if I do.” He meant that he didn’t know Papa’s lesson. But he knew his own — it was to get out of the house in the morning before Papa got up.

“The lesson is, you got to buy seed, because the corn you grew is sterile. What seed are you going to buy?”

“I’ll go into town after Christmas and see what they have.”

“Better to go out to the corncrib before Christmas and see what you have.”

Joe felt his jaw clench.

“Son.” Walter smoothed his voice. “You did something good, especially for a kid who was only sixteen at the time. You experimented. You tried something and learned something and you got a payout.”

“Yes, sir. But—”

“But your payout isn’t what you think it is. Remember four years ago, when your uncle Rolf left that field fallow?”

Joe nodded.

“And then he plowed that clover under? Well, that was his real legacy to you, Joey. Because then you bred your ‘hybrid,’ and then you saved that seed, and then you planted it and you got fifty-two bushels an acre, but you have to divide that number by three. Seventeen is what you really got.”

Joe ate a bite of toast, and then took his handkerchief out of his back pocket and blew his nose. He could hear running around upstairs — that would be Henry. If Henry got down before Joe was out of the house, Henry would want to tell him a story. Joe said, “I understand that.”

“You grow your own hybrid seed, and you got to set aside a field for that every year — that’s a field that is out of production.”

“If I do it every year, then it’s only out of production for a year. If I had four fields — Anyway, you grow your own seed every year — you sell most of the crop and keep some. What’s the difference? And you switch varieties, so sometimes you have to buy seed, too. I want to try crossing some Hickory King with some Boone. Those Hickory King plants can get eight feet tall.”

“You think the price of corn is up and is going to stay up.”

“No, I don’t. I have eyes in my head. But I think we ought to take advantage when it is up.”

“I don’t like your tone.”

Joe said, “Sorry, Papa.” But Walter’s voice was loud, too, and Joe wasn’t sure what they were fighting about.

Walter said, “You think it’s easy now. Fifty-two bushels an acre! Scarcity is your friend, not plenty. What’s going to happen to you if everyone gets fifty-two or sixty, or whatever?”

“I’ll try to get seventy.”

Walter just shook his head.

AFTER CHRISTMAS, Professor Cullhane was assigned another graduate student (in addition to the one he had, Jack Smith, whom Frank didn’t care for, partly because he always had his nose in a chemistry beaker and had never actually fired a gun) and two more undergrads, Bill Lord and Sandy Peck. He gathered them in the lab and he said, “Now, gentlemen, as you know, a hundred years ago, gunpowder — or black powder, as they called it — was made from charcoal, sulfur, and saltpeter, though I would call that potassium nitrate. As most of you know, black powder has fallen out of favor, or you might say it’s been superseded by cordite and other deflagration explosives. But look around you. Where are you? You are in the heart of corn country, and our job, our contribution to the war effort we see in Europe — and make no mistake, the war effort that we will soon be part of — is to figure out a way to take the materials at hand and forge them into weapons. Our plowshares, you might say, through no fault of our own, must once again become swords.” All the others gaped, Frank knew, because they vaguely recognized those words, “swords” and “plowshares.”

“Where do we get sulfur? From volcanoes and hot springs. That’s not our business here. Where do we get saltpeter? Well, we should be getting it from manure piles, because that’s the safest and most abundant source. And where do we get the char? Fellas, that’s what this lab is all about. We want black powder without the black smoke, without the corrosion of the gun barrels. We want weapons that fire shot after shot without cleaning the barrels, and we want that from cornstalks.” Then he introduced them all to one another, and told them how Frank and Jack had been working on this for a year now, “and we’ve made progress.”