Jane Smiley - Some Luck

Even Lillian had some money, from the job she had taken at the soda fountain not far from the high school. She worked after school and Joey went by and picked her up on the way home for supper. Walter didn’t approve of how she was spending her money — on rouge and lipstick (she even had a compact, which she said was silver, though Rosanna suspected that it was only silver-plated). Being Lillian, she wasn’t spending all of it by any means — she was saving at least a third and maybe half — but Rosanna completely approved of Lillian’s ideas. It was right for a girl, especially a farm girl, who started at a disadvantage, to look as up-to-date and fresh as possible. It was right to look through the movie magazines and see what was the latest thing, and if you had the skills to reproduce this little thing or that — a snood, say — well, why not? Lillian, who had been so unhappy at school, especially after that ingrate Jane whatever-her-name-was (Rosanna knew her name) was cruel to her, had now found her footing, and the boys were looking at her. (“Let them look,” said Walter. “They can look as often as they like.”)

Only Henry remained mysterious. All he did these days was read. He had read every book that they had at his school, and he held the book right up to his face, as if he needed glasses (though he didn’t, the doctor said). His face was still beautiful, in spite of the scar beneath his lower lip (which Rosanna sometimes found herself fixating on), and he was as slender as a reed, but if he was sitting up on the sofa or in a chair, his mouth hung open as he read, making him look half asleep, and if he was lying down, his head tilted to the side and he didn’t care if his hair stood on end. Rosanna found it bizarre that such a good-looking child — even a boy — would care so little about his appearance, but all he cared about was Treasure Island and The Black Arrow and The Master of Ballantrae —or The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Sign of Four and The Valley of Fear . If he read one by an author, then he had to get hold of them all, and he pestered everyone until he had gotten whatever there was to be had in attics, storerooms, the Salvation Army shop, and the Usherton library. And all of his favorite writers were English, not American — you couldn’t pay him to read James Fenimore Cooper, for example. Just at Christmas, too, he had decided to learn German, so he made Granny Mary and Grandpa Otto “nein und ja” him, and even spoke to Rosanna sometimes in German, and would only answer her if she spoke German. Well, he was a smart boy. Strange as the day was long, but smart.

Claire was four and a half, and would start school in the fall. Of all her children, Rosanna would have said that Claire was the only one who was utterly normal. She ate whatever you put in front of her, she dressed uncomplainingly in what was clean, she played with what you handed her. She went to bed when she was told, and got up when you were ready. She had nice dark hair, shiny and thick, and she never wiggled while you braided it. She could count to twenty and spell “cat,” “dog,” “mouse,” and “Claire.” She could sing “Alouette,” “Are You Sleeping?” and “I’m a Little Teapot.” She could recite her bedtime prayer. She often looked out the window, and if you said, “Claire, you are underfoot,” she went away. She liked Walter. She went with him out to the barn and talked while he milked cows or fed sheep. She asked for nothing, just received what she was given. Granny Mary and Granny Elizabeth thought she was darling.

Well, that’s what a war did for you — it made you look around at your shabby house and your modest family and give thanks for what you had and others had lost. It made you wonder what it would be like, bombs falling through the ceiling, craters in the front yard, nights in shelters, waking up dead, as Henry said once. It made you stop talking about what you wished for, because, in the end, that might bring bad luck.

FRANK WOULD HAVE SAID that he was used to war now — he had been in the army for a year and a half, and in Africa for ten months, but even so, on the night of July 12, he felt as though he had been transported to a different world, although Sicily was not that different from Africa. The dawn crossing had been strange enough; the weather was so bad and the winds were so high that most of the soldiers doubted the invasion would be attempted, but it was, and his sergeant pointed out that if they didn’t make it they wouldn’t be alive to care, and if they did, the Jerries and Eyeties on the island wouldn’t be expecting them. And they weren’t — the beaches were clear, and there weren’t even any Luftwaffe around, only a few Italian bombers attacking a couple of transport vessels and warships. Even as they made their way across the beaches and inland, they met almost no resistance. They started to the east of the port — Licata, it was called — and then moved toward it. It was a town of graceful pale-apricot stone buildings that looked as if they had been there forever. Off to the east somewhere was Syracuse, a town Frank had learned about in his ancient-history class. And he also remembered Archimedes — there had been a picture in his math book of Archimedes using a lever to lift the world. Archimedes had figured out the value of pi. But Frank doubted that he would get to Syracuse. Licata was good enough for now.

Private Hill was eager to get into the backcountry and shoot himself some Jerries, though some Eyeties would be good enough in a pinch. The rumor was that Mussolini was in trouble, but Frank didn’t think that the invasion would necessarily go well because of that. Whenever the generals thought something would work out, Frank was immediately suspicious. He knew, for example (everyone did), that they had sent the tanks and the infantry into the Kasserine Pass without even having a good map of the place. Maybe Patton had more on the ball than Fredendall had had. He hoped Patton had a good map of Sicily, though he wasn’t counting on it. Frank himself had eleven kills. He had heard that in the marines there were whole squadrons of snipers who had dozens of kills, but that was the Pacific, where the Japs were dispersed all over otherwise worthless little islands. You had to kill them or they would kill you. All of Frank’s kills had been distant ones. That was the point of being a sniper with a precision telescopic sight — you killed them, their buddies looked around for where that came from, and if you could, you killed another one, but if you couldn’t, you snuck away. They didn’t know you had snuck away, and they started to worry.

Once they had gotten through Licata (by late afternoon), their job was to spread out, past the flats and into the hills. The river was a dry bed meandering through fields, but protected by some vegetation. Frank decided that they would make their way along it, not in it, along the edge. The whole time, they could see the road — who was driving, and who was not looking out for himself. Late in the afternoon, the riverbed diverged from the road, and tilted upward into the pale hills. It was so dry that the six of them were already dusted with white. Murphy and Jones went to the east, crossing the riverbed and following the edges of some fields, and Landers and Ruben went along the riverbank. Frank kept Lyman Hill with him. They stayed in sight of the road. Lyman was itching to shoot something, and shortly before dusk he did — a cat that was itself hunting. When Lyman flipped it on its back with the muzzle of his rifle, they saw that it was a fat cat. Lyman said, “Well, someone in this place is eating, anyway.” The residents of Licata, of which they had seen only a few, had been thin and desperate-looking. But there had been no fearsome German nests of snipers in the buildings. His sergeant at Fort Leonard Wood had proved correct: while the Brits and the Americans were wondering about the rules, the Germans were breaking them. The rumor was that the Russians were even worse: they broke the rules of war and they broke the rules of life. If you killed two Russians, somehow four appeared in their place, and if you then killed four Russians, eight appeared. That was what they had heard. When they finally defeated Rommel and took some German prisoners, some had hugged their captors, because they knew that if they got back to their own lines, they would be transferred from Africa to the Eastern Front — to Kharkov, for example, which was worse than Stalingrad. When a corporal Frank knew said to a prisoner, “What if I shoot you?” the fellow shrugged and said, “Hier oder dort, was ist der Unterschied?” Frank knew this meant, “Here or there, what’s the difference?”