Jane Smiley - Some Luck

The funny thing was that Frank didn’t pay any attention to Rosanna anymore — it was like he couldn’t hear her voice. His head only turned when Eloise spoke to him, or Rolf (that was a rarity), or Walter himself. Mary said this was normal, and so did Walter’s mother, but Rosanna was taking it a little hard. Her mother said, “Someday you’ll have had so many that you won’t remember the differences between one and the other.”

And Eloise said, “You always remember that I was the worst.”

And Mary, not to be outdone, said, “Some things do stick in your mind, miss!”

But there was no denying that what they would do without Eloise Walter couldn’t imagine. Now she was doing some of the cooking and all of the bed making and dusting. She pumped all the water and carried it in, and all winter she had kept the fires going because Rosanna was so sick. She didn’t mind feeding the hogs and the sheep if Walter was busy. She was big, too — well developed as well as strong. As far as Walter was concerned, she had earned the right to have her lamp on whenever she felt like it — kerosene was little enough to pay if she wanted to read late or do her knitting. She had no talent for sewing, so Rosanna had made her two nice dresses and a coat. Three years and she would be married, no doubt, to one of these boys who were now wolfing down his sweet corn, and what would they do then?

Rosanna said that Walter was a worrier, but there was plenty to worry about with prices so low. You may say that hogs paid the bills, or chickens and eggs and cream. There was a fellow down by Ames who bred draft horses and sent them back to Europe by ship, since so many horses had been killed in the war that they’d lost even their breeding stock, but the thing that made Walter nervous (and maybe this was a result of his own experiences in the war) was the length of the supply line. Let’s say that, every hundred miles, some other person got a right to take a nip of the cherry. Let’s say that. Then, if you were sending your corn and oats and hogs and beef to Sioux City, well, that was two hundred miles, and Kansas City was 250. Chicago was about 325 or so, and beyond that Walter wasn’t willing to go. You could just say that the quarters got thinner or the dollars got paler the farther they came — that was how Walter thought about it. So sending draft horses to France and Germany? That was a strange business, like wheat to Australia. Walter didn’t trust it. The wealth was right here, spreading away from this table — chickens in the chicken house, corn in the field, cows in the barn, pigs in the sty, Rosanna in the kitchen with Joe and Frank, Eloise safe in her room thinking her thoughts. Walter looked around. His work crew was revived now, and making jokes — did you hear about the farmer who won the lottery? As if there were lotteries anymore. When they asked him what he was going to do with his million dollars, reported Theo Whitehead, he said, “Well, I guess I’ll just farm till it’s gone.”

Too much oats. Too much oats. Walter wondered why he worried about such abundance.

ROSANNA LIKED the buggy. On a brisk late-winter day when the sky was flat and hard above the frozen fields and the sun was bright but distant, and before all the horses’ time was consumed by plowing and planting, it was good to have business in town — errands to do and people to see. Jake trotted along, happy, maybe, that the buggy was so light and there was no soil to drag it through, and Rosanna hardly had to shake the reins at him. In town, he would go to the feed store/livery stable and eat his noon oats after she dropped her basket of eggs and butter at Dan Crest’s general store. It was a pleasant outing, and she would be back to the farm before two. Of course, during the week, no one was doing much — the Lewises’ washing was hung out to dry, or Edgar French had his sheep grazing along the side of the road — but, whatever anyone was doing, at least it gave you a sense of life and progress.

On a Saturday morning, town was busy as could be. There were three churches in Denby — St. Albans (where her family went), First Methodist (where Walter’s family went), and North Street Lutheran. All the ladies from all three churches were busy with this and that, either cleaning the church, or meeting in their quilting groups and sewing clubs, or shopping, or, some of them, having luncheons. If Rosanna went to town on a Saturday (and really, with Eloise going to school, there weren’t many other days she could go), she had to dress nicely — something in a new style and nice goods. People knew her perfectly well, so no one would mistake her for a town lady, but she didn’t have to look like she was dragging herself in from the farm. At the first houses (the Lynch place, on the north side of West Main, and the Bert place, on the south side), she clucked twice at Jake and shook the whip. Best to make her entrance at a brisk pace. Saturdays were different from Sundays, when they went to church (though in the Methodist church you didn’t have to go every week, especially if you were a farmer). On Sundays, they put on their Sunday best, which was sober and dull. On Sundays, she wore a hat and tucked her hair in a tight bun. On Saturdays, she looked her age, twenty-three; on Sundays, she looked like her mother.

Of course it wasn’t warmer in town, but it seemed as though it was. Rosanna pushed back the hood of the buggy in the sunlight, and waved to people on the sidewalk (Miss Lawrence, her old teacher; Father Berger, who was friendly even though she never went to St. Albans anymore; Mildred Claire, who had known her mother forever). Waving to Father Berger reminded her of her girlish anxieties about baptizing Frank and Joe. She had been positively loco about it with Joe, and then it passed. She put her head around the hood and looked at Father Berger again. Old man now. Her mother and the other ladies in the altar society complained about him incessantly.

Then that girl, Maggie Birch, who was Eloise’s best friend, waved her down and ran over to the buggy. Rosanna gave her such a nice smile, even though she considered the girl a little fast, or, if not that, maybe “sneaky” was the word. But Maggie, too, was wearing a big smile. “Good morning, Mrs. Langdon. I was hoping I would run into you.”

“Hello, Maggie. How are you today?”

“Fine, thank you, Mrs. Langdon.” She hesitated.

Rosanna said, “I understand from Eloise that you are going in for secretarial school, Maggie.”

“Mama says I can, yes. I can go down to Usherton for a course and stay with my aunt Margaret and her husband, Dr. Liscombe. Do you know them?”

“I’m sorry to say I don’t.”

“They have the biggest house. I’m sure I’ll get lost in all the rooms. But … I was wanting to ask you.”

“What?” said Rosanna.

“Well, did you know the Strand Theater down there?”

“Of course,” said Rosanna. Jake snorted and shook his ears — a fly this time of year!

“I would really like to go and see a picture, and my cousin George has an automobile now and says he will take me, but I would like Eloise to come along.”

“That’s ten miles,” said Rosanna. “Thirteen miles from our place.”

“Georgie is a good driver,” said Maggie.

Rosanna regarded Maggie, and tried to decide whether to ask her the question that came to her lips — was this something she and Eloise had discussed? Of course it was, said the girlish side of Rosanna, and best not to know, said the maternal side. So Rosanna said what mothers had said since the world was young: “We’ll see.”

A pout passed over the girl’s face, and Rosanna realized that the condition Mrs. Birch had placed on the trip was that Maggie could only go if Eloise or someone went along. Rosanna shook the reins and left it at that. If she saw Maggie’s mother in town, which she well might, she would speak to her about it.