Some Luck (29 page)

“You think that’s a bad thing! In this world, those are the ones who survive.”

He didn’t think toughness was a bad thing. He had cultivated it. However, it was easier to see your kid for what he was when you saw him at a distance, and Walter was afraid of what else Frankie was—ruthless, maybe. Thinking that, he looked around the room, wondering if there was a hidden stash of something, and what that would be. Cigarettes? Whiskey? Girlie pictures? Even money? He had always known that, in the hardest times, Joey was giving him all his money, while Frank was holding some back.

Walter stood up. To be honest, was that bad in these times? Take Rolf, again—he was now their example for everything that could go wrong. Granny Mary and Grandpa Otto and Opa and Oma never asked a thing from Rolf that he didn’t give them, with all apparent willingness. In the end, it was too much—that’s how Walter saw it. And he couldn’t think of Rolf now without thinking of himself falling into the well—something he still hadn’t told Rosanna about. Maybe the measure of what, over the years, he had kept back for himself was the measure of what saved him, what propelled his body of
its own volition to the front of the well and out. The joke was that if he’d killed himself he would have missed the worst year of his life, and still he was glad that he hadn’t killed himself.

He closed the door of Joey’s room behind him, and just then he could see Lillian and Henry step onto the front porch. He could hear them, too. Henry said, “Let’s go look at the lambs.”

And Lillian said, “What did you name yours?”

Henry said, “Duke.”

Walter opened the door.

IT WAS LILLIAN
who arranged it with Miss Perkins. Miss Perkins was their teacher—this was her second year. She was not a young woman; she had taught in lots of schools, including one in New Mexico, which Lillian thought was very exotic, because Miss Perkins had two potted cactuses on her desk, and sometimes she talked in Spanish to them. Miss Perkins had come home to live with her mother, who was very old and demented. They lived in Denby. For a while there were only eight students in the whole school—Joey because he was not quite ready for the high school (and didn’t want to go there anyway, he told Lillian, because he would be bullied for sure); another boy, who was twelve, Maxwell; herself and Jane; a boy named Luther, who was ten; Roger King, nine; Lois, who was six, almost seven; and Jane’s sister Lucy, who was also six. It turned out that Miss Perkins drove her car to school, and she got into the habit of picking up Lois and Lillian, because they lived on the way (Joey walked or ran, as he always had). One day after Christmas, Miss Perkins saw Henry waving like mad in the front window as they left, and asked how old he was. Lillian said, “He’s four, but he can read and write the alphabet, and in my opinion, he should do what he wants and come to school with us.”

Miss Perkins let him come on the condition that he sit at a desk and behave himself, and he was able to do that if Lillian gave him either a book or some paper and some crayons, and so he started coming to school. Walter didn’t mind because Henry was afraid of the animals, intensely talkative, and worthless on a farm; and Rosanna didn’t mind because he cried for Lillian every day anyway. Now he
was in the habit of going to school. When Mama asked Miss Perkins how it was going, she said, “Well, he’s got the biggest ears! My land, a child can read something aloud or make a remark from across the schoolroom, and Henry offers his two cents if he finds it at all interesting. At least he doesn’t correct their arithmetic sums. He’s a very forward child.”

Mama said, “You didn’t know our oldest boy, Frank, but he is the same way. It now looks as though he will go to the University of Chicago!”

“My goodness,” said Miss Perkins. “Why not Iowa State? You get everything you could want there.”

Lillian, who was standing by the front door of the car, helping Lois get out, said, “I’m going to take Lois home.”

The two ladies kept talking, and Lillian took Lois’s hand. They walked down the edge of the road, which was clean of snow—in fact, there was only snow in the ditches anymore, and the sun was almost warm. Lois unbuttoned her coat.

Lillian and Lois mounted the steps of the Fredericks’ big front porch. The Fredericks’ house was a very nice one, and Lillian appreciated it every time she visited. It had come on a train from Chicago—or, rather, all its parts had come, with instructions on how to build it—and she imagined that all houses in Chicago, all the houses Frankie saw when he was walking to school, looked like this one. She and Lois opened the big dark front door with the windows in it and went in. They hung their coats by the fireplace. Mrs. Frederick was just coming down the stairs.

She gave Lillian a welcoming glance and said, “I do think I saw some cookies cooling on the kitchen table. They might have been gingersnaps.”

“I hope they were,” said Lillian.

“Me, too,” said Lois.

Mrs. Frederick said, “I’ll go look.”

Lillian was very fond of all the Fredericks, and sometimes she lay in bed at night imagining their house, where someone was always making a joke and there was never any fighting. Lillian imagined that they had a secret about that, and she liked to come over and watch them, hoping she would figure out what it was.

ONE MORNING
, after school was out and the corn planting finished, Joe got up and went to feed the animals, and he saw a mound, pale in the early light, lying in the grassy muck of the east pasture, half under the Osage-orange bush. He knew what it was without even going to look, but he went anyway, and when he got there, he squatted down and petted Elsa for a few minutes, along her neck and the roots of her mane; then he closed her eye. She was a bit of a mess—he hadn’t brushed her in a week, maybe, and her coat, now snowy white, was grimy. What was she, twenty-three?

Jake was at the far end of the pasture, standing among the cows. He took a few steps toward Joe, then stopped and flicked his ears. Jake was over twenty himself. The only thing either horse ever did anymore was walk around and eat, sometimes with Henry on board—Jake was better at that than Elsa had been. When Henry kicked him, he would actually speed up his walk a bit and stop putting his head down to eat. He would also turn when Henry pulled one way or another on the lead rope. Joe himself sometimes got on Jake and rode through the fields—easier than walking, and more fun. But Joe hadn’t done that in almost a year. He gave Elsa a last pat and went into the barn, where he got a couple of burlap sacks and laid them over the corpse. At breakfast, Mama said, “Don’t say anything. Maybe Henry won’t notice.”

“Well,” said Papa, “he’ll notice when the rendering wagon comes out to pick her up.”

“I think they have a truck now,” said Joe.

“There you go,” said Walter. “Even the renderer drives a truck. Even the renderer hasn’t much use for animals anymore.”

A couple of weeks later, Joe came home from Rolf’s farm, where he had been cultivating the corn, and Papa stopped him as he walked out of the barn toward the house. He said, “Joey, I sold Jake to someone.”

Joe’s voice shot out of his mouth, loud, surprised, “I think of Jake as
my
—”

“But he’s just standing there. This fellow has a use for him.”

Papa spoke sharply, but he had an abashed look on his face, and Joe said, “What use would that be?”

“I guess he has an old buggy he likes to drive in parades. A light thing, nothing to pull for a horse like Jake. He’s healthy, he should have a job.”

Joe didn’t disagree with this, but he was suspicious. He said, “How’d he find out about Jake?”

“I guess the man from the rendering plant told him we had a nice horse.”

“Well, I don’t want to sell him.” Joe pushed past Papa—but gently, respectfully—and headed toward the house. It was suppertime, and he was hungry.

Papa said, “It’s forty dollars. That’s Frankie’s fees for a quarter at Iowa State.”

Joe spun around. “I thought he gave that up for a year. He was going to go up to Wisconsin and hunt fox and beaver for his fees.”

“Now he doesn’t have to.”

“What about that ‘labor school’ Eloise and Julius were talking about? Brook something? That was free.”

“I guess it closed.”

But Papa was neither asking permission nor seeking advice. The horse was sold, and Papa already had the money—the man would be by to get Jake the next day.

Mama was more thoughtful. She came into Joe’s room when he was getting into bed, and sat down. She took his hand. She said, “Lillian is crying, too. I told her, but I think I’ll wait till Henry asks. Sometimes children get used to things by not knowing quite what’s happened for a bit. But Papa and I understand how attached you are to Jake. Papa is sick about this.”

Joe removed his hand from Mama’s and pushed back his hair. He didn’t say anything.

“Joseph. It’s not just Frankie going to school for himself. He’s going for all of us. The world is changing, and someone has to go out into it and be prepared for it.”

Joe snorted.

“Son, you know that that someone is him and not you. You love the world you live in, and that’s good. He loves the world we don’t know much about, and that’s good, too. I consider myself lucky to have one of each in my boys.”

She took his hand again, and patted it, then left. Joe knew that
there was no hope for saving Jake, and it was true, he would live longer with something to do, and enjoy himself more with an equine friend—the man had another horse with an old lameness, who couldn’t pull the buggy anymore. What drove him crazy was that he couldn’t find his way around any of their arguments, never had. His own family left him confused and dumb. He didn’t think he was stupid—he could plow a straight row, repair a fence, shear a sheep, milk a cow, predict the weather, even get a robin to sit on his finger. He could mimic the calls of seventeen birds and animals, and often did for Henry’s and Lillian’s amusement (Lillian would tell the story, and Joe would pretend to be saying the parts in “real animal language”). He thought of Uncle Rolf, whose field he cultivated, whose life seemed to be buried in that very field. But he wasn’t Rolf, and would never be, thought Joe. Not in a million years.

FRANK WAS SITTING
in the Lincoln Way Café in Campustown, across from the college in Ames, and the man who had just taken his order was, to his utter amazement, none other than Ragnar, Papa’s farmhand from years ago—eight or ten, anyway. He recognized Frank, though Frank hadn’t recognized him. And now here came a woman—Irma, it would be. She looked slightly more familiar. She rushed up to him, grabbed his hands. “Goodness gracious! Frankie Langdon, welcome to Iowa State! When I saw you last you were Mr. Mischief! Do you remember hammering that row of nails into the railings of the front porch? Oh, your papa was fit to be tied! And now here you are! Where do you live?”

Frank said, “In the freshman dorm. But I want to join Sigma Chi if I can. They have a good scholarship.”

“Oh, goodness. Have they told you about the fraternity houses? Since the flu epidemic after the war, everyone sleeps in the attic with all the windows wide open through the winter. The dorms and even apartments are at least above freezing!”

Frank laughed. He said, “Like home, then.”

“And how are your folks doing? I was so worried about them.”

Frankie stiffened. “Fine. They’re fine. Henry was born. He’s almost five.”

“And darling, I’m sure,” said Irma. She squeezed his hand. “Back
to the kitchen now. But have the special. Corned beef and cabbage. On the house.”

Frank had ordered the chicken soup, the cheapest thing on the menu, but he said, “Thanks.” In a few minutes, Ragnar brought him a plate of the corned beef, with not only cabbage but some fried potatoes on the side, and a piece of apple pie. Frank made himself eat it with leisurely deliberation, even though he was ravenous.

Frank had been in Ames for six weeks, and he was sleeping not in the dorm but on the banks of the Skunk River, in a tent he’d gotten at the Salvation Army. He had kept back the dormitory money that Mama had given him, because he wasn’t all that sure he wanted to continue at Iowa State, and he didn’t want to waste a penny if he didn’t have to. Maybe it would be better in Iowa City, but Chicago had wrecked him for Ames. Everyone in Ames was just like the landscape—open, bright, friendly, dull. In Chicago, if you didn’t smile all the time, people thought you were normal. Here, they thought you were unhappy and hostile, and maybe he was.

However, he liked his classes. If the students were a uniform breed—say, Herefords, contentedly chewing their cud as they kept to the paths and filed mindlessly to their classes (now he was sounding like a communist)—then the professors were animals of every stripe, caged in their classrooms, making their tweets and roars and whinnies. He listened to their lectures, asked his questions, made his contributions, was getting high marks on tests. The cattle scratched their heads and kept turning the papers over, wondering where the clues were, but Frank did fine. Except he didn’t have a friend, and for the first time in his life, he wanted one.

Even here, as he cleaned his plate, he was the only person sitting by himself. Every table was full of kids—Irma was a good cook—and everyone was gabbing and laughing. Frank felt awkward and out of place. Somehow, he’d thought there would be someone from Chicago here, someone who was a little like Bob and Mort or even Lew. If he’d taken those guys back to his tent, they would have been inspired by the daring of it. These kids were so clean that Frank thought they would just find it dirty. So he was a farm kid. But the farm kids here were all like Joey.