Some Luck (14 page)

“Whip me.” Whack.

“Why did you touch the nails?” Whack.

“I wanted to find it.” Whack.

“Are you going to do that again if I tell you not to?” Whack.

“No, Papa.” Whack.

But of course he did. Nails, after all, were not the same as crawling under the front porch, or climbing to the very top of the tree, or standing on the roof of the house, or dropping from the hay loft (where he was not supposed to be in the first place) onto Jake’s back. What would happen if they got electricity (that was the rumor lately, especially since they were so close to town; it was expensive but
worth it, everyone said), Walter could only imagine. For Frankie, the wires would be a constant temptation just to try this with a screwdriver or that with a fork. It seemed as though Frankie had to be taught every single lesson in every variation. And, yes, Miss Jenkins, over at the school, said that Frankie was the smartest child she had ever seen in her life, and was on to division, not to mention training for the spelling bee at the end of the school year (“And I do not know who is going to give him any competition”). Certainly, he went to school willingly and even enthusiastically every morning, so that was something to be thankful for.

Walter didn’t know what to make of his two boys. If you looked at it a certain way, then the one who needed the beatings to toughen him up, namely Joey, never did a thing to earn a beating, because he hadn’t the gumption, and the one who got the beatings learned nothing from them. Looking back on his own childhood, Walter saw a much more orderly system: His father or mother told them the rules. If they got out of line, even not intending to, they got a whipping to help them remember the next time, and they did remember the next time, and so they got fewer beatings, and so they became boys who could get the work done, and since there was plenty of it, it had to get done. That was life, as far as Walter was concerned—you surveyed the landscape and took note of what was needed, and then you did it, and the completed tasks piled up behind you like a kind of treasure, or at least evidence of virtue. What life was for Frankie he could not imagine.

What life was for Lillian was color. As soon as the boys moved out of that bedroom, Rosanna drove into town and went to Dan Crest’s and bought a half-gallon of pink paint, and then she painted Lillian’s walls pink. When the paint was dry, she put up curtains she had made, pink and white stripes with white ruffles all around the edge. Then it turned out that Granny Mary and her sister had spent the whole winter braiding and sewing a rag rug—pink, white, and green, for Lillian’s room, an oval ten feet long—and his own mother had crocheted her a pink bedcover. Rosanna then framed profiles of people and animals she had cut out of paper—a farmer, his wife, a cow, a horse, a pig, a lamb, a rabbit, a squirrel, a fox, and a bird—and hung them on the walls. It took her two full days to fix up the room.

For certain, it was now the nicest room in the house, nicer than
the front room, even. But this was not for the neighbors. Walter could see that when he stopped at the top of the stairs on the morning the room was finished and watched Rosanna through the doorway, holding the seventeen-month-old Lillian on her hip and going from picture to picture, saying, “And on his farm, he had a what? A pig! Yes! What a good girl!”

ROLAND FREDERICK GOT
himself a tractor. It was a Farmall, gray, small, and nimble, with the two front wheels close together, kind of like a tricycle, and Walter could hear it when the wind was right. Two times in the same week, when he was out in the field behind the Osage-orange hedge, he could see it, too, making its compact and noisy way across Roland’s western forty acres. The next time he went to town, he got the story.

The Farmall man, coming into Denby, looking around and seeing who had the biggest house and the nicest barn, had offered to let Roland try the tractor out for a week. He ended up leaving it there for ten days, and, not having heard from Roland, he took a driver out to get it and drive it into town. But Roland was nowhere to be found, and the tractor, sitting in front of the barn, couldn’t be turned on—no gasoline—so the Farmall man left Roland a note, saying he would be back the next day.

Sure enough, that very afternoon, Walter saw and heard Roland—moving rather fast, Walter thought—finishing up his planting, and without any horses or help. It was a lot of noise, but Walter was impressed. His own farm was only half the size of Roland’s, and he planted much less corn, but he and Ragnar were not more than half done—the wires were up for the last part of the field, but he hadn’t drilled the corn yet. After watching Roland, or, rather, the tractor with the minuscule bent figure of Roland sitting in the seat, make its way across the horizon, he went into the barn.

Of course Jake and Elsa were there, and of course they nickered to him (it was suppertime, at least as far as they were concerned). Elsa was fifteen this year and Jake was thirteen—grayed out now, almost pure white. His father had given them to him when he came back from the war, and they were six and four then, strong, handsome, darkly dappled, and well behaved, a prize team. That very year,
Roland Frederick had had a team of young Shires drag his plow into a deep ditch. One of the horses had broken a leg, and the plow had been rendered unusable—Roland had had to borrow someone else’s to finish for the year. Walter and his father had considered themselves a little superior to Roland that time, because they had the sense to breed Percherons, and good lines, too. In fact, given Roland Frederick’s lack of feel for horses, it wasn’t a surprise that he was riding the first tractor Walter had ever seen. Walter went back outside and watched until he couldn’t make out anything more in the twilight, and then headed to the house for supper.

He couldn’t imagine what a tractor might cost. A thousand dollars? If so, that was a year’s income for him, minus the $268 he had spent on putting up the new addition to the house. And even though his father was talking about getting out of the horse-breeding business, Elsa wasn’t that old—he could either put her in foal to his father’s stallion now, and have himself a horse ready to work in four years, when Jake was seventeen and Elsa was nineteen—or he could buy one or two of his father’s colts and raise them. Just thinking about these ideas was reassuring. How long would a tractor last? No one knew. He washed his hands in the pail of water Rosanna had left by the dry sink on the back porch, and kicked off his boots, thinking with satisfaction that he had things figured out.

At the supper table, over Rosanna’s meatloaf, he said to Frankie and Joey, “Did you boys see Mr. Frederick’s tractor?”

“I heard it,” said Rosanna. “Noisy thing! Don’t know how he can stand sitting on the seat in the middle of all that racket.”

“I saw it,” said Frankie.

“How’d you manage that?” said Walter.

Frankie shrugged.

Up in the hayloft, thought Walter, but he didn’t press it. He said, “What did you think?”

Joey said, “Is Mr. Frederick going to shoot his horses now?”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” said Rosanna.

“Send ’em to the slaughter, more likely,” said Ragnar.

“He’s only got two, and they’re old,” said Walter. “If he buys that tractor, he can turn them out. He’s got plenty of grass for two horses in among the cows.”

“If we got a tractor, would you shoot Jake and Elsa?” said Joey.

“No,” said Walter. “Anyway, I prefer horses. This is what horses do. You boys listening?”

Joey and Frankie nodded.

“Every spring, horses pull the plow and then the planter, and so they plant their own oats. In the summer, they pull the thresher. What’s the thresher, Frankie?”

“The thresher takes the oats from the straw. This summer, I’m going to ride the thresher, and make the oats go into the wagon.”

“That’s right. So, when the oats are threshed, then the horses are fixing their own supper, and when the oats and hay are hauled to the barn, the horses are putting their supper away. Then what happens?”

The boys’ mouths had opened a little bit.

Walter said, “In the winter, the horses take their own manure out and spread it on the oat field. What does that do?”

“Fertilize!” shouted Frankie.

“So where do the horses go to get food?”

“Out to the barn,” said Joey.

“Right where they put it,” said Walter. “Where does Mr. Frederick go to get gas for the tractor?”

This was a stumper.

Neither boy knew the answer.

Walter ate a bite of meatloaf and some potato, and said, “Texas. And, boys, if you have to go to Texas for something, you don’t need it.”

He of course spoke with a good deal of self-satisfaction. But he knew anyway that that tractor was going to buzz around his head like a pesky fly, and it did, all night long, in and out of all sorts of dreams that otherwise had nothing in common with one another.

ROSANNA KNEW
that not only Walter, but Granny Elizabeth and all of the Langdons would be upset when they heard the news, so she didn’t exactly tell them. Instead, she got up early that Sunday morning and had breakfast all made by six—a good breakfast, too, pancakes and some raspberries she went out and picked off the bushes, bacon, and oatmeal with sprinklings of brown sugar, because Walter couldn’t start his day without oatmeal. Then, while they were eating, she laid out the boys’ Sunday best, which she had spent an hour
the previous afternoon ironing, and of course they all thought they were heading off to their own Methodist church in town, where all the Langdons had gone forever, the same church that Rosanna had once considered radically Protestant and fearsome. But no, she said, after she had Lillian dressed in a beautiful green dress with a white pinafore (she herself was dressed very plainly, in a flat sort of blue dress, with her hair in a secure bun), they were going a bit farther afield, just to try it out, to the Assemblies of God church in Usherton.

“Usherton!” Walter scowled. “That’s—”

“Eleven miles door to door,” said Rosanna. “Twenty minutes, and right on the north end of Second Street. We passed it two weeks ago, when we went to the picture show.” Walter had wanted to go to the picture show and see Buster Keaton in
Steamboat Bill, Jr
. Rosanna, knowing this was an opportunity to look for the church, had gone along, not said a word about missing their Bible reading for that night. Even so, she wasn’t quite sure about the right way to think of pictures.

“Well, I—”

“We need to try it,” said Rosanna. “We need to.” And she spoke with such a tremor in her voice (not intended) that Walter didn’t even finish his sentence.

From the moment Walter started organizing the boys, and then Ragnar, around the prospect of being gone for almost three hours rather than just over one, like most Sundays, Rosanna could feel herself relaxing. The fact was, Rosanna had been feeling in danger lately—more and more every day and week—and her own avid Bible reading did not ease her feeling. She had tried several methods—starting at the beginning and reading, opening at random, looking for familiar stories and starting with the passage Pastor Gordon used in his Sunday sermon. But she always foundered sooner or later. When she began at the beginning, she could not get past the shoals of names and genealogies, because she didn’t know if there was more there than met the eye. Opening at random could be enlightening, but more often than not it was confusing—what was she to make of opening somewhere in Leviticus and reading all those rules she couldn’t understand? But, then, Jesus did some unaccountable things, too—not miracles, like the loaves and the fishes, but denouncing that
tree because it wouldn’t give him fruit. Catholics did not read the Bible, were not even allowed to read the Bible, and surely this was the reason. In the Catholic Church, it was all laid out for you in the missal and the progression from one holy day to the next, and everything made sense, but, then again, you were not saved in the Catholic Church—she knew that—so mere intelligibility wasn’t enough. Pastor Gordon’s sermons were very dry, almost always about either brotherly love or service to the community, and never once about salvation, the feeling of salvation, as if Pastor Gordon hadn’t yet experienced that feeling. So—nothing there.

What she needed was for Walter, and especially Frankie and Joey, to be saved, as she had been, and they were not going to get that from the First Methodist Church (never followed by a second one) of Denby, Iowa. But she had overheard Lucy Morgan and Dan Crest talking at the store about the Assembly of God, and the pastor there, Roger Elmore, a personal friend of someone named E. N. Bell, who was famous and important in some way that Rosanna didn’t understand but appreciated anyway. “And also a fiery preacher,” said Lucy. “Set ’em all alight, even the icy ones!” and Dan Crest laughed. Rosanna knew that that was what Walter needed. And the boys needed to do more in Sunday school than fill in the stripes of Joseph’s coat of many colors.

It was a beautiful day, especially for late June, not very hot and with a little breeze. Walter never minded a drive once you got him off the farm—he liked to see that he was further along in his work, or at least that it was done more properly, than at the farms along the way. They skirted their own town, so it was all farms and fields until they got to the Iowa River. It was shady right around there, and a minute or two later, they came to the church. Only then, as they were driving down that street, did Rosanna remember that she knew no one in the church—not even Lucy Morgan, if it came to that, because her mother knew Lucy Morgan, but Rosanna had only ever spoken to her one time. It occurred to Rosanna that she should have told Lucy Morgan that she would like to visit her church.

They parked down the street, and walked back toward the church building, which wasn’t terribly big. Lillian insisted on walking and not being carried, but she put her hand in Rosanna’s very obediently and asked no questions—she was such a good child. It was as if she
knew where they were going, and that she would be welcomed there. Semiconsciously, Rosanna slowed her steps so that Lillian preceded her just a tiny bit, so that Lillian’s beautiful and shining face would be the first one someone might see.