Some Luck (10 page)

Really, it was amazing, Walter thought, as he sharpened the shears, how things about your farm that you didn’t mind—or hardly even noticed—when you bought it, came to wear you down over the years. When you first walked onto your place, you were so glad to have it that everything looked good. Or perfect. Then, year by year—it had been six years now, six springs, summers, falls, and winters (mud, heat, harvest exhaustion, snow)—all the extra steps began to tell on your affections. And every wrong thing about a farm involved extra steps: that was what that long, impenetrable hedge represented to Walter.

Even so, Walter knew he was less and less able to imagine any other life. He was thirty now. Ten years before, he’d been working for his father—head down, it felt like, his eyes lifted only as far as the next hill of corn. He’d had skills his father approved of, like planting a cornfield in a perfect grid, or fixing a harness so it looked practically new. And then, not unlike a bomb blast, two years after that, where was he, northern France, if you called Cambrai France (some people didn’t, they called it “Kamerijk”), and the grid of corn had turned into acres of blood and mud, and what he noticed wasn’t the tanks they’d used there, supposedly for the first time ever, but the fugitive birdcalls in the din and tiny purple berries in the blasted hedges. Except for the tanks and the fighting and the trenches, Cambrai had looked almost familiar, so flat was it, the horizon low against the sky. And then that was over and he had the influenza on his way home, in Georgia, and he recovered, and Howard, on the farm with his parents, did not, though his mother did, and over the years she had said more than once, “It should have been me that died,” at which point his father would leave the room and his mother would put her face in her hands. The only thing Walter knew to do was to pat her on the knee.

But here he was, and prices were up, and there was Rosanna, and all his ideas about some of those towns he had passed through—Cedar Rapids, Chicago, New York, London, Paris—had simply vanished. He’d been a farm boy. And now he was a farmer, and no longer a boy, and it was disorienting how quickly Frankie was superseding him as the hope of his own father and mother and wife for something that
had nothing to do with Osage-orange hedges and badly sited barns and too many cows and not enough hogs (or vice versa).

Well, the clipping was easy when he got down to it—he could go along one side in the morning and the other side in the afternoon and get the whole thing done in a day, and then there it stood, stiff and solid and thorny—a thorn in his side, but only in his side, since his father wished he had something like it—what drove his father crazy about cows was the way they leaned against every fence, but no cow leaned against an Osage-orange hedge—and Frankie loved to throw the hedge apples at the side of the barn, and Rosanna thought the seeds were delicious, if only you could get at them more easily, and the wood burned slow and hot in the winter. Rosanna liked it, too, because you could split one of the fruits, which were certainly not oranges, and rub it along the baseboards and door and windowsills of the house, and it kept out insects and spiders. Sometimes, Walter even cut fence posts from the stems of the hedge—they were straight and strong. The list went on. Walter pricked his thumb on a thorn, but, then again, you could do that on barbed wire, too, as he’d done so many times.

IF ANYONE REMEMBERED
that rearing a child on a farm was dangerous, it was Rosanna. Always her eye was out the window. Always she was stepping to one side to look through a doorway. Always she was making sure the gate across the steps leading down from the front porch to the wide, wide world (and particularly the road) was closed. Always she was putting shoes and boots outside and washing hands, not to mention handkerchiefs and bandannas. Walter had been offered a nice yearling bull for free, but Rosanna wouldn’t let him get one until … well, she hadn’t decided. And no large hogs, only feeder pigs that got sold after a few months. The children didn’t play in the barn by themselves and were not allowed in the loft, even though Rosanna’s own brothers and cousins had loved sliding and jumping in the oat hay. She herself had loved it, the stalks were so smooth and fragrant, but a child someone knew, somewhere, well, something had happened to him about hay, she didn’t know what. What she did know was that some farmers understood that the death of someone around the farm, often a child, was the price of farming.
Sad but true, and in all ways, not only that one, the price of farming was high.

On the day it happened, she was not thinking about these things, but she had been, and later she did again. That day, a Saturday, it was raining. Dinner was finished—a simple meal of leftover potatoes and some pieces of chicken. Ragnar and Irma had gone to town, and Walter was out in the barn, fixing the corn sheller—he and Ragnar thought this rain would be followed by frost, and after that would come the corn harvest. Walter was good at using all his spare moments to get his equipment into shape.

Rosanna was knitting. She had some nice wool, not from their own sheep (which was a little coarse, she thought), but fine dark-gray fiber from a flock of Leicester Longwool sheep that a friend of her mother’s had down by Newton. She was making Walter a sweater for Christmas, with cables, and she didn’t want him to see it, so she could knit only when he was outside or away. Joey had his box of dominoes on the couch—she had talked him into accepting a new box. She had her eye on Frankie, who had his eye on the dominoes but knew better than to touch them, at least when Rosanna was in the room. To Frankie she had given a deck of cards. At the moment, he was turning them over one by one, but any minute, she knew, he would ask her to play a game with him—they would probably end up playing old maid, which Frank didn’t like much but would play. He looked up at her. She said, “Why don’t you try building a house? Remember, we did that?”

“That was hard.”

“Yes, but it gets easier with practice. Uncle Rolf once used almost the whole deck.”

“How many?”

Rosanna turned her work and made something up: “Forty-six cards.” This shut up Frank.

Now she turned to Mary Elizabeth, who had been stacking blocks but looked up at a flash of lightning in all the windows, and the subsequent clap of thunder. In fact, all of the children looked at her, but she said, “At least five or six miles away, and moving west.” Of course she was afraid of lightning—anyone in country as open as this had to be. But they were inside, that was reassuring, and the house and the barn both had lightning rods. Who was it—

Mary Elizabeth stood up, and the thunder clapped again, and Mary Elizabeth started jumping up and down. She was not crying and didn’t seem afraid, just excited, was what Rosanna was thinking as she held out her hand toward the girl, and at that very moment the windows lit up, and Mary Elizabeth went down, flat down, on her back, and she hit the back of her head on the corner of a wooden egg crate, and as the thunder clapped, she was utterly silent and still. Rosanna stared at her, her own hands lifted with her knitting. It was Frankie who said, “Mama, what happened?”

Rosanna threw down the knitting and lunged forward from her rocking chair, but then she knelt beside her baby without touching her. The windows lit and thunder clapped again, and the rain outside seemed to pour down on the roof and the porch as out of a bucket, and Rosanna had no idea of any kind what to do.

Distractedly, she took Mary Elizabeth’s hand in her left, and placed her right palm on the girl’s forehead, as if there might be a fever, but of course there was nothing of the sort. Rosanna said, “Mary Elizabeth? Honey?”

The lightning and the thunder seemed incessant now. She glanced around the room. Frankie was right behind her, but Joey was staring from the sofa. She said, “I need to—”

But what did she need to do? It seemed impossible to do anything. The lightning and thunder roared again, this time almost simultaneously, and Rosanna put her elbows on her knees and her face in her hands, just for a moment. Frankie said, right in her ear, “Mama? Is she dead?”

Rosanna sat up. Over the din, she exclaimed, “No, of course not. She’ll be fine!” and just then, Mary Elizabeth’s eyes did open, and then she started to cry. Rosanna slipped her hands under the little girl’s body and gently took her into her arms, then stood up and carried her to the sofa. After that, perhaps she sat there with her daughter moaning in her arms for forty-five minutes—at least that—until the storm subsided and Walter came stomping in from the barn, soaking wet and full of news, already talking—“You should have seen—I thought”—until he was standing in the doorway from the dining room and said, “What happened?”

Frankie said, “May Liz fell down.”

Walter pushed his wet hair out of his face and stepped toward her. “Is she all right?”

No, she wasn’t trying to sit up, though she had said a few words.

“How did she fall down? Was she climbing on something?”

Rosanna said, “I think the back of her head hit the corner of the egg crate.”

“She’ll be fine,” said Walter. “We just need to give her a few hours.”

The vomiting began before suppertime. Walter ran out to start the Ford. He took Frankie and Joey with him, to get them out of Rosanna’s hair. Rosanna wrapped Mary Elizabeth in a blanket and carried her out into the rain, leaning her own body over the baby’s so she wouldn’t get wet. Walter opened the door, and Rosanna slid into the passenger’s seat of the Ford. The boys sat in the back. All the way into town (past Dr. Gerritt’s office and on to Dr. Craddock, who was younger and newer to the area), Rosanna knew it was merely appearance that was moving her forward. Though she was telling the boys that Mary Elizabeth was asleep, so they had to be very quiet, sleep was certainly a thing of the past now.

1926

R
OSANNA READ
in the paper that Billy Sunday was going to come out from Chicago and do a revival in Mason City—not in a tent, like the old days, but in the theater, and only for two nights. He still came to Iowa fairly often, because that was where he had started out, however many years ago, where he’d played baseball and lived in the orphanage and all, and he still had fond memories of the place and the people.

Father Berger had thought Billy Sunday was the devil, and no one in Rosanna’s family had ever seen him. All the time he was most famous, they acted as if he didn’t exist. But Rosanna got a bee in her bonnet, and it was to take the boys and go up to Mason City and see the famous man.

What was it now, five and a half months since that day, the crashing, thundering day when Mary Elizabeth, such a good child, had passed out of this world for no reason at all? Not a mark on her, and yet she went from talking and running around to lying in Rosanna’s arms to being buried in Walter’s family plot in the space of a weekend, and who was to blame but Rosanna herself? Though no one said that; everybody said the very opposite, in fact—what could she have done, such a freak accident, like that time when … And here was where Rosanna stopped listening. After a month or two, she had garnered massive praise for not succumbing to her grief, but how could
you do that on a farm? Never could you say to the corn, you must wait to be harvested; never could you say to the cows, you must put off being milked; never could you say to the boys, don’t get up today; never could you say to the winter weather, I don’t want to build yet another fire.

But she had changed. She hardly ever went into town now—Irma took the eggs and the butter to Dan Crest and got whatever she could for them. She was more particular about cleaning and cooking, and it wasn’t only the winter weather that kept her inside, just as it wasn’t only the farm work that kept Walter out in the barn. If he didn’t want to look at the spot where their child had made that passage from life to death, Rosanna didn’t want to stray far from it. She felt, as soon as she saw the notice in the paper (not thought—she had no thoughts at all, really), that Billy Sunday might give her some new memory, or insight would enter her the way the sunlight entered the windows. Whose fault had it been? Well, obviously hers, but also the fault of the weather, and, beyond that, the heavens. The room had been so dark and so loud.

WALTER DIDN
’
T MIND
Billy Sunday—he’d been to a revival in Cedar Rapids as a boy, a tabernacle affair, a week long (though the Langdons had only stayed three days). Back in those days, Billy still did his patented slide into the middle of the stage (just as he’d slid into home plate those seasons when he was playing in Chicago for Cap Anson). He jumped around and shouted, and Walter had found it entertaining to hear him exhort the members of the audience to “Get on the Water Wagon!” His mother felt that the Sundays may have been a very unfortunate family, and that certainly life was harder in those days during and after the War Between the States, and you had to make your way as best you could, God knew, and Mary Jane Sunday, who had been a Corey, had done the best she could, but, really, they were not the same sort of people as the Chicks and the Cheeks and the Langdons, and so she was immune to his preaching. As Walter remembered, she had sat primly in the tent, glancing around with a small smile on her face. His father had been more susceptible, maybe because of Sunday’s energy and athletic fame, not to mention that his grandfather had been a good farmer over in Story County.
After the revival, he had spent a few months reading his Bible in the evenings. But inertia prevailed—they’d gone back to their former religious habits (just enough participation to be able to say they did it, and to keep up friendships with the other members of the church). They didn’t dance (didn’t care for it), but they did play cards (euchre and cribbage), and his father didn’t think that a drop of whiskey from time to time was a damnable thing. That Rosanna wanted to cart the boys all the way to Mason City and then stay in a hotel there (three dollars per night) he thought was strange, but if it got her through this time, he welcomed it, and so did his mother when he mentioned it in town. She said, “She knows what she wants, though maybe she doesn’t know what will work. But if you don’t give her what she wants, she’ll spend the rest of her life thinking that that was the one thing that might have worked.”