Some Luck (2 page)

Oh, Rosanna, just twenty, but with the self-possessed grace of a mature woman! He could see her profile as he approached the house in the dusk, outlined by the lamplight behind her. She was looking for him. Just in the tilt of her head, he could see that she had some project in mind. And of course he would say yes to her. After all, no fledgling had it easy, farmer or crow. Hadn’t he known since he was a boy the way the fledglings had to fall out of the nest and walk about, cheeping and crying, until they grew out their feathers and learned to
fly on their own? Their helpless parents flew above them, and maybe dropped them a bit of food, but flying or succumbing belonged to them alone. Walter put his foot on the first step of the porch, and felt his customary sense of invigoration at this thought. On the porch, he stamped two or three times, and then slipped out of his boots. When the door opened, Rosanna drew him in, and then slipped her arms inside his unbuttoned jacket.

ON THE FRONT PORCH
, sitting up (he had just learned to sit up) on a folded blanket, Frank Langdon, aged five months, was playing with a spoon. He was holding it in his right hand by the tarnished silver bowl, and when he brought it toward his face, his eyes would cross, which made Rosanna, his mother, laugh as she shelled peas. Now that he was sitting, he could also drop the spoon, and then, very carefully, pick it up again. Before learning to sit, he had enjoyed lying on his back and waving the spoon in the air, but if he dropped the spoon, it was gone. This was no longer the case. One of the qualities Rosanna attributed to little Frank was persistence. If he was playing with the spoon, then it was the spoon he wanted to play with. If he dropped the spoon, and she happened to give him a sock doll (the sock doll that her sister, Eloise, had sewn just for Frank), Frank would fuss until she gave him the spoon. Now, sitting up, he put the spoon down and picked it up and put it down and picked it up. Although he much preferred the spoon to the doll, Rosanna always told Eloise and her mother how much Frank liked the doll. Eloise was now knitting him a wool hat. It was her first knitting project; she expected to have it done before October. Rosanna reached into the basket of pea pods and took the last handful. She didn’t mind shelling peas.

Frank was a good baby, hardly ever fussy, which, according to Rosanna’s mother, was a characteristic of all her side of the family. Speaking of peas, Rosanna and her sister and four brothers were just like peas in a pod for being good babies, and here was Frank, another of the same breed, blond, beautiful, and easy, plenty of flesh but not a bit of fat, active but not fussy, went right down every night and only got up once, regular as sunrise, then down again for another two hours while Rosanna made breakfast for Walter and the hired man. Could she ask for a better baby?

Rosanna finished shelling peas and set the bowl on the blanket, then knelt in front of Frank and said, “What a boy! What a darling boy! Are you a darling boy?” And she kissed him on the forehead, because her mother had impressed on her that you never, never kissed a baby on the lips. She laid her hand gently on the top of his head.

Frank still had his grip on the spoon, but his mother’s face transfixed him. As it loomed closer and then retreated, his gaze followed it, and as she smiled, he smiled, and then laughed, and then he waved his arms, which resulted in the spoon’s being thrown across the blanket—a first! He saw it fly and he saw it land, and his head turned slightly so he could watch it.

Rosanna laughed, because on his face was a bona-fide look of surprise, very advanced, as far as Rosanna was concerned (though she would have to admit that she had never paid one iota of attention to her brothers and sister, except when they were in her way or in her charge—no one ever said that she enjoyed watching them or had a flair for it). Now Frank’s body tilted forward, and all of a sudden he fell over on his side, cushioned by the blanket. Being Frank, he didn’t cry. Rosanna sat him up again and handed him the spoon; then she stood up, thinking that she could hurry into the house and set the bread loaves, which should have completed their second rising by now, into the hot oven and be back out in a minute or two. Nothing could happen in a minute or two.

Spoon in hand, Frank saw and heard his mother’s dress swish around her legs as she went inside, and then the screen door slapped shut. After a moment, Frank returned his attention to the spoon, which he was now gripping by the handle, bowl upward. He smacked it on the blanket, and though it was bright against the darkness of the blanket, it made no noise, so he brought it again to his face. It got bigger and brighter and bigger and brighter—this was the confusing part—and then he felt something, not in his hand, but on his face, a pressure and then a pain. The spoon jumped away from him, and there was noise—his own noise. His arm waved, and the spoon flew again. Now the spoon was small and didn’t look like a spoon. Frank looked at it for a very long time, and then he looked around the blanket for something that was within reach. The only thing was a nice clean potato, into which Mama had cut two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. Frank was not terribly interested in the potato, but it
was nearby, so his hand fell upon it, gripped it, and brought it to his mouth. He tasted the potato. It tasted different from the spoon.

More interesting was the sudden appearance of the cat, orange, long, and just his, Frank’s, size. Frank let the potato drop as he looked at the cat, and then the cat was sniffing his mouth and smoothing its whiskers across Frank’s cheek, squatting to inspect the potato, pressing himself into Frank until Frank fell over again. Moments later, when the door opened and flapped closed, the cat was crouched on the porch railing, purring, and Frank was lying on his back, staring at the ceiling of the porch and kicking his legs—left, right, left, right. Mama picked him up, then arced him through the air, and he found himself pressed into her shoulder, his ear and the side of his head warm against her neck. He saw the cat one last time as the porch spun around him, and beyond that the green-gold grass, and the pale horizontal line of the dirt road, and the two fields, one for oats, a thick undulating surface, and one for corn, a quiet grid of still squares (“There’s a little breeze,” thought Rosanna; “I’ll open the upstairs windows”), and around that, a different thing, empty, flat, and large, the thing that lay over all things.

FRANK UNDERSTOOD
the kitchen better now. He had a chair with a table of its own where he sat several times every day, and this seat was perfect for surveying this room where he was never allowed to crawl about. He had just learned to crawl. Almost always, two men entered the room while he was sitting there, Papa and Ragnar. Papa spoke to Mama, and Mama spoke back, and there were certain things they said that Frank felt he understood. Ragnar, however, babbled unintelligibly, and Frank could not understand him even when Mama or Papa was nodding. Nodding was good and was usually accompanied by smiling. Another thing Frank did not understand was that when he himself moved or made noise, there was pain where the noise should be. Pain and noise, both. Now Mama held out her hand. Frank held out his hand in just the same way, and Mama put something hard into it, which, since he was hungry, he brought to his mouth and bit into. When he did so, the pain and noise faded a little. Mama said, “Oh, poor boy. The top ones are always worse than the bottom ones.” She slipped her finger under his upper lip and lifted it slightly. She said,
“I think the left one was grown out, but you can hardly see the right one.”

Papa said, “Late teethers always fuss more, Mama told me. Les and I got ours at four months.”

Ragnar said,
“Ja, ja, ja. Slik liten tenner!”

Ragnar and Papa lifted their forks and began to eat. Frank had already tasted what they were eating, though from a spoon—mush, some chicken, green beans. Mama set her own plate on the table next to Frank’s seat and sat down. She used her fork to place a green bean on Frank’s tray. When he carefully put the tip of his finger on the slippery bean, Papa, Mama, and Ragnar laughed, though the bean didn’t strike him as funny.

But it was no use. The pain enveloped him again, head to toe, and then the noise.

Ragnar said,
“Han nødvendig noe Akevitt.”

Papa said, “Don’t have any of that poison, Ragnar.”

The noise increased.

Hands banged on the tray of Frank’s seat, and the bean and the crust of bread flew away.

Mama said, “We have to do something. My mother says—” But she looked at Papa and closed her mouth.

“What?” said Papa.

“Well, Ragnar is right. A clean rag knotted and dipped in whiskey. He chews on it and it eases the pain.”

The noise grew not louder, but more shrill, and came in little gusts. Frank kicked his feet.

Papa cocked his head and said, “Try it, then.”

Mama set down her fork and got up from the table. She went out of the room. Frank’s gaze followed her.

For every time Frank looked at Papa, he looked at Mama five times or ten times, even when Papa and Mama were both in the room. It seemed perfectly natural to him. Papa was tall and loud. His mouth was large and his teeth were big. His hair stuck up and his nose stuck out. When Papa’s hands went around him, he felt trapped rather than cuddled. When Papa lifted him and put his face down to meet his, there was a distinct sharpness that made his nose twitch. When Papa touched him, he could feel the roughness of his fingertips and palms against the bare baby skin. Papa shrank him. And when
Papa was close, Frank had discovered, there was more likely to be noise. Frank had nothing to do with it. It just happened. Now, in the long moment when Mama was gone, Frank looked away from Papa toward the window.

“All right,” said Mama, “I found it in the sideboard. But you’ve got to put some sugar in the knot or he won’t be able to stand the bitter taste.” She reached for a cup on one of the shelves, and poured something into it. After that, she lifted the tray of Frank’s chair, all the while anchoring him with her hand, and then she took him in her arms and set him gently on her jiggling knee. The noise subsided considerably. But even so, she did put a thing in his mouth, first burning and then moist and sweet, and anyway something to suck upon. Papa said, “Ragnar, the English for that is ‘sugar tit.’ ”

“Oh, Walter,” exclaimed Mama. “For goodness’ sake.”

Ragnar said,
“Sukker smokk.”

Mama said, “I am sure you are telling Ragnar all the best dirty English words while you are cleaning the hog pens.”

Frank felt his mouth working, pulling the sweetness through the bitterness. Normally while sucking, he would be looking at Mama, the curve of her jaw and the fall of her blond hair half covering her ear, but now he stared at the ceiling. It was flat, and as he sucked, it seemed to lower itself onto him. The last thing he heard was “Did he fall asleep?”

The jiggling continued.

NOW THAT HE
was crawling, Frank found that many doors were closed to him. Most of the time, in fact, he was confined to a space in the dining room that was nowhere near the woodstove in the front room, or the range in the kitchen. Many things were denied him that he once enjoyed, including the quotidian miracle of the flung spoon—he could have a spoon only when he was secure in his high chair in the kitchen (and he now had a strap to tie him in, since he felt no scruples about arching his back and sliding downward beneath the tray in his attempt to find the floor and take off). Things that he picked up, no matter how small, were removed from his grasp before he could give them the most cursory inspection, not to mention get
them to his mouth. It seemed that he could never get anything to his mouth that he actually wanted to get there. Whatever he grabbed was immediately removed and a cracker was substituted, but he had explored all the features of crackers, and there was nothing more about them that he cared to find out.

The only thing he had left was standing beside one of the cane-seated chairs in his confinement pen and banging on it with his hands, sometimes one, sometimes the other, sometimes alternately, sometimes together. The cane in the middle and the wood around it presented an interesting contrast. His fist smacked the wood and it hurt just a little, though not enough to matter. His fist smacked the cane and then bounced. He also laughed when he pushed the chair over, but that could backfire if he then fell down—his balance was improving, but he wasn’t walking yet. These were seductive feelings, but no substitute for everything else in the house—the staircase, the windows, the basket of firewood, the books that could be opened and closed and torn, the rocking chair that could be tipped over, the cat that could be chased (though not caught), the fringe of the rug that could be chewed. He couldn’t even go out onto the porch anymore—when that door flew open, a cold blast shot through it that made him gasp.

Mama and Papa came and went. When he made noise (he now knew where the noise came from and how to make it whenever he wanted to—you opened your mouth and pressed the noise out and there were a variety of noises that produced a variety of effects upon Mama and Papa), she appeared from beyond one of the doors—the kitchen door—and she had a cloth in her hands. She said, “Frankie hungry? Poor boy. Two more minutes, baby.” The door closed and she was gone. He pounded his fist on the cane-bottomed chair. The noise he made was “ma ma ma ma ma.” The kitchen door flew open. Rosanna said, “What did you say, Frankie?” She stepped into his enclosure and came down to him. She said, “Say it again, baby. Say ‘mama.’ ”

But he said something else, who knew what. It was just noise for now. When she stood up, he did another thing, which was to look up at her and raise both of his arms toward her. It had the desired effect: She said, “You are the most beautiful baby!” And she picked him up,
sat down on the cane-seated chair, then opened her dry, hard front to reveal the desired warm, soft object beneath. Frank settled himself into her lap.

It was not the same as it had been, though. There had been a time when her lap was enough, the crook of her arm was enough, the breast itself and the lovely nipple were enough to envelop him in pleasure. Now he was half distracted even while enjoying himself. His gaze rolled around the room, taking in the top corners of the doors, the moldings, the pale light floating up from the windows, the design of the wallpaper, Mama’s face, and then around again, looking for something new. Mama absently stroked the top of his head. Her body relaxed and she slumped against the back of the chair. In the quiet of the room (quiet because Frank himself was making no noise), other sounds manifested themselves—the howl of the wind curling around the corners of the house, the clattering of ice against the house (muffled) and the windows (sharp). Sometimes the wind was so strong that the house itself creaked. Just then there was a loud cracking noise followed by a longer, higher sound. Mama sat up. She lifted Frank more toward her chin, said, “What was that?” and stood. They went to a window.