Jane Smiley - Some Luck

Walter stepped out onto the porch. He said, “You’re the hostess, Clairy, so go be with your friends,” and she hugged her arm quickly around his waist and then ran after Nat, who had come around the house with a stick in his mouth. Walter said, “Best-looking corn I ever saw.”

“You said that about ours.”

“I did. I was wrong.”

Rosanna smiled.

“I guess that anhydrous is the real thing.”

“Until it blows up.”

“Hell, it’s not going to blow up. Might freeze you to death if you fell in the tank, or suck the moisture right out of your body. They say—”

“Ugh,” said Rosanna.

“Joe is a careful young man. He knows the steps, he says the steps out loud to himself, and he follows the steps. He even says, ‘Put on your gloves,’ and then he does it. I don’t know if I could be careful like that, but he is.”

“Good thing he’s in charge, then,” said Rosanna.

“I’m not disagreeing with that,” said Walter. “I do wish Frankie and Lillian were here.”

“We can go there once the babies are born.”

“When’s that again?”

“I guess October for Andrea and November for Lillian. We can wangle an invitation for Christmas.”

Walter chewed his lip for a second, looking out at the glittering field. Rosanna forbade herself to ask yet again why he wasn’t content. Who was, after all? At last, Walter pointed to the ice-cream maker. “What’s in there?”

“Don’t you want to know,” said Rosanna, as she turned him toward the house.

They ate about four-thirty, when it was cooling down a little. Joe had set up a sprinkler for Claire and her friends. The two girls were also a little young for their age, eleven; they jumped around, shouting in the arc of water, more like eight-year-olds, which was fine with Rosanna. Henry put on some trunks he had (he had learned to swim down in Iowa City) and jumped around with them, then threw on a shirt and played fetch with the dog for at least an hour. And he didn’t make the dog do all the running — Henry had turned into something of an athlete. He had canvas shoes, and he ran with the dog, getting him to leap and race around the yard and down the road and back. Minnie remarked that North Usherton High School was installing a swimming pool, too, if you could imagine that, and might even get a swim team together.

“Who’s doing the farm work?” said Rosanna.

Walter said, “Joe, I guess. Joe is just going to farm every place around Denby by himself.”

They all smiled.

Joe had cooked pork shoulder. The conversation about the table started with Frank and Andrea and Lillian and Arthur and the children, then moved on to Korea. Rosanna hadn’t known that the North Koreans had captured Seoul, but she wasn’t surprised. Then everyone, by unspoken agreement, backed away from that subject, but not before Lois said that a man she knew at the feed store had enlisted. Walter asked who was going to the fair this year, and Minnie said she was helping with the 4-H-ers and she expected Lois to go along.

“Well, I’ll take a pie.”

“Wait a year,” said Minnie, but Rosanna thought the girl should be encouraged. Minnie was always after her to make something of herself and get off the farm, but while Minnie was at school, Lois came to Rosanna and asked to be shown how to do everything — she didn’t know how to cook or sew or even clean, really clean. Oh, she could wipe down a table and wash the dishes in hot running water and put the washed clothes through the wringer. She could crochet but not knit, and Rosanna had taught her how to knit — made her learn the German way, not the English way. But no butter churning, no egg candling or egg gathering or chicken raising, no carding or spinning of wool (even Rosanna barely knew how to do that, but Oma had done it for years). They did dye some wool blue with chopped red cabbage, red onion skins, and white vinegar, and the color was pale but attractive. Lois was knitting it into a vest. Like her mother (poor thing), Lois wanted only to bake — cookies, cakes, pies, hardly even bread. Well, maybe she would reopen that bakery — what was the name of that fellow? Those baumkuchen he had made were about the best thing Rosanna had ever tasted in Denby. She was a nice girl, Lois, and just because she jutted out her jaw every time Minnie said anything to her didn’t mean she was uncooperative. Kids go their own way.

Walter limped in from inspecting that field again. His limp was pretty pronounced some days, not so pronounced other days. Wouldn’t go to a doctor, now that Dr. Craddock had passed on. At the funeral, Walter had whispered in Rosanna’s ear that he was sure there was a carton of Camels in the coffin. The doctor who had bought the practice was named Schwartz, and Rosanna had even said, “You liked Julius. Jews are smart. Good doctors.” Walter had replied, “That’s not it.” But he still wouldn’t go. Rosanna looked away. He made his way around the table, put his hand on the back of her chair as if he really needed the support, then pulled out the chair beside hers and sat down. He said, “I can die now.”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake!”

“He knows everything I know, and more.”

“Then it’s time to enjoy it, not to die. Stick around and let him know you admire him.”

“He knows that. He was such a whiny child. Drove me bananas.”

“Well, you drove your ma bananas, too.”

“She told you that?”

“She did. She said you couldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. She might say, ‘No, you can’t do that,’ a hundred times, and you didn’t do it, because you knew you’d get a whipping if you did, but you’d wait about five seconds and then ask again, in the exact same voice, if you could do it.”

Walter burst out laughing. Then Claire ran up to them and said, “Joey says we can serve the ice cream.”

“Ah,” said Walter, “the real supper begins.”

THE WHOLE TIME that twenty-two hundred dollars was out in the world, Frank thought about it every night, and the time seemed to pass with infinite slowness. It was accompanied by another feeling that Frank didn’t understand at all, something that came to him just before he fell asleep, or just as he woke up — something new, much deeper and more pervasive than mere fear of losing money that six months ago they hadn’t known existed. The feeling had nothing to do with nightmares; once he was dreaming of trying to get to the grocery store, and had this sensation and awoke panting. It had nothing to do with his life. He felt it at work only as a shadow, he felt it at home only as a reason not to go to bed. It didn’t locate itself — he did not look at Andy and imagine her getting hit by a car, he did not look at his hamburger and think of food poisoning. His mother would have said, and had often said, that Frank didn’t have the sense to be afraid. So maybe this was a visitation of some sort — senseless and inchoate, but colored orange, and peopled with small figures. What was frightening about them was nothing that his conscious mind recognized. But he felt it. Some nights he felt it so strongly that he got up and poured himself a shot of whiskey.

He didn’t say a word to Andy, though if he woke up from one of these episodes he took her hand. When he mentioned it to Arthur, Arthur was too literal about it — Stalin had the bomb now, people in the know (did he remember von Neumann, who worked at Los Alamos?) were convinced he would use it, and Arthur himself was thinking of relocating to Maryland, because if a bomb hit D.C. the nuclear plume would be carried by weather patterns away from some towns and toward others. A friend of his whom he trusted had moved to Frederick, but it was a forty-mile commute.…

If Andy noticed anything wrong, she didn’t say a word. Frank doubted that whatever it was had to do with the war, and he had nothing around the house that reminded him of the war — his one piece of memorabilia, if you could call it that, was a picture of his father and two of his World War I buddies, so faded that the three young men were almost indistinguishable. Sometimes Frank peered at it, trying to feel something about this boy, his father, or to make a connection between the day the picture was resurrected and what he himself had been doing at the time — at boot camp, scrambling around in the underbrush in the Ozarks. But nothing clicked.