by Jane Smiley
Papa said, “Put him back in his chair. He’s got some food to eat.”
Granny stood up and then picked Frank up and carried him to his chair, which Eloise had set back in place. Frank sat quietly. They were back where they started, everyone straight and tall, no wiggling. Frank was hungry. It had never been about not being hungry. Granny Mary put his spoon in his hand. Frank used it the best he could, but he ate the sausage with his fingers. Papa didn’t seem to mind that.
After Frank had eaten three bites, Papa said, “How’s Rosanna?”
“Tired,” said Granny. “So tired. I wish this child would come. I do.”
The room ceased shaking, and Frank took some breaths.
Papa said, “He screams, but he doesn’t cry or whine. I’ll say that for him.”
WALTER THOUGHT he probably grew too much oats, but if you were a Langdon and your mother was a Chick, then it was natural to plant oats, eat oats, feed oats, bed oat straw, and, most of all, enjoy all the stages of oat cultivation. He had talked his brother-in-law Rolf—who had taken over Opa and Oma’s farm, though the old folks were still living in the house—into planting forty acres this year, too. Rolf was twenty, but he had as much gumption as a ten-year-old, Walter thought. Rosanna had gumption for both of them.
Walter especially liked binding and shocking the oats—the weather was hot, and grit of all kinds got into your hair and your clothes and your boots and your eyes and your nose, but a field of shocked oats was an accomplishment, and foretold a barn-load of straw and grain that would get everyone, animals and people, through the winter. Oat straw was a beautiful color—paler than gold but more useful.
And Walter also liked the sociability of August—men and boys from all over the county came to his farm, and he went to their farms, and there was plenty to eat and to talk about. It didn’t hurt that Jake and Elsa were an admirable team of horses to be pulling the binder—patient, strong, good-looking, stylish grays. Didn’t matter who was driving them—a boy could drive them and they would do their job. No running away, like Theo Whitehead’s team of Shires did that year, breaking up the binder on the fence line, and slowing the threshing by four days while everything was put back together.
When they came in for dinner, Rosanna had it all organized out back, under the hickory trees. Tables with cloths lined up in the shade, and the bread and the beans and the caramelized carrots and the sweet corn and the watermelon and the slaw all set out, so that they sat themselves down at their places, and out she came with the roasts, two of them, enough for everyone to have plenty, with her own butter in the middle that she made and salted and sold to the store in town—the best butter in the county, everyone said.
In addition to their own two families, there were the Whiteheads and the Lewises and the Smiths, whom Walter and Rosanna only saw at threshing and harvest, everyone in family groups, the men to help with the threshing, the women to help with the cooking, and the youngsters to play—Rosanna set the youngsters up in the side yard, with two different kinds of swings, a tire swing and a bench swing—and the girls were put in the charge of Eloise, who had them turning the crank on the ice-cream churn. Even though Walter didn’t grow any peaches, and didn’t know anyone who did, Rosanna got some in town—a peck of them—and the ripest went into the ice cream. Of all the families who did their threshing together and therefore their eating together, Walter’s family was the only one who made ice cream. The day at Walter’s was a long one, because he grew so much oats.
But look at Frank, an advertisement for oats if ever there was one. He was inches taller than the Lewis boy, who was a month older, and he could outrun that Lewis boy, too. What was his name? Oh, Oren. The big boy, almost four, was David. David Lewis was standing facing Frank as Walter passed them, shouting, and Frank was smacking the ground with a branch he’d found. Oren was standing there, looking back and forth between the two of them, and this is what Walter heard—he heard David shout, “Okay, Frank, you stand there, and you tell me what to do.” This was enough to make Walter chuckle, and then Frank called out, “David, run to me, push me!” Frank dropped the branch and spread his arms.
When David ran at him, Frank turned his shoulder to the older boy and knocked him down. Then the boys rolled over in the grass. Rough play, and Walter knew Rosanna and Emily Lewis would stop it, but since Frank had dropped the branch, it was hand-to-hand combat—all boys, Walter thought, needed plenty of that, especially Oren, who stood there with his thumb in his mouth. It was his private opinion that he and Howard hadn’t been allowed enough shenanigans—when they weren’t put to tasks, they were to sit still, do as they were told, speak when spoken to. As a result, he sometimes thought he had never known Howard at all. Walter sped up his step. He was hungry, and he didn’t want to hear anything from Rosanna about letting those boys get away with murder.
As soon as Walter washed his hands at the pump, that was the signal for all the men to clean up as best they could and find themselves places at the table.
The first thing all of them did was down several glasses of water, and then the chorus went around: “Hot one! How hot do you think it is? Over a hundred yet? Not so damp, though. Humidity was worse the other day, over at Bill Whitehead’s. Down by the river there, always damp.” Head shaking. “Got a good crop, though, say that for him.” Then, “Try this, Rolf. Rosanna knows her slaw. Nice piece of meat, Walter. Lean, but tasty, I’ll say. How many you gonna slaughter this year? I got jars of brisket and sausage bursting out of the cellar, don’t know why, just can’t eat enough of it, I guess. Didn’t have to kill a chicken until May this year. Nice melons, too. Soil around our place isn’t sandy enough for good melons. How’s your potatoes looking this year? I didn’t even plant them in one spot, just covered ’em with manure and straw. Every so often, I grab a plant and lift it up, and look at the potatoes.” And then, when they were full, “You can go ahead and grow all the corn you want, Otto, but you ain’t gonna make a profit from it unless you feed it to your pigs. More pigs, more profit. Walking dollars is what I call hogs. We got some Durocs this year, from Martha’s cousin. I like the Hampshires for the hams, but Durocs are longer in the bacon, her cousin says.” Then there was a long conversation about hog breeds. Walter’s own hogs were Berkshires, and they liked oats. But what didn’t they like? Walter felt happy. There was talk about cars—Bill Whitehead’s cousin over in Cedar Rapids had bought his second Model T for $260, but he’d had to pay another forty for an electric ignition. “Least you can get that now,” said Ralph Smith. “Cranking that thing before the war, my uncle had his hand broke.” Walter cleared his throat but didn’t say anything. How a person could have a farm with a mortgage and a car, too, was a problem he hadn’t solved, and so he allowed his father’s preference for horses to prevail.
Here came Rosanna with Joe, the baby. Joe was five months old now, and big and healthy. You wouldn’t know from looking at him that it had been touch and go there for a bit—though how touch and go, maybe Walter himself didn’t know. Small baby, even though he was late, according to Rosanna’s and her mother’s calculations. And Rosanna’s mother thought he looked late: “Like a little old man,” she said, “worn out and wrinkled.” And then the milk didn’t come in the first day, or the second, and there was no denying that she was worried. As for Dr. Gerritt, he was so little help that Mary just sent him away. Walter himself thought that it was the oatmeal that did the trick—Rosanna could keep it down, first with water, then with milk, then with cream, and then with butter. She got better every day, and after that little Joe got better, and look at him now. Walter’s mother said what she always did, that he was the spit of Walter himself, plenty of dark hair and fat cheeks. Walter watched Rosanna as she carried him around each table, saying, “Joey, Joey, look at all of our friends come to see you!” Joey had one hand on her cheek, and she held the other hand in hers. Rosanna said that he wasn’t as far along as Frankie had been at this age, but Walter himself couldn’t remember. A spring baby got out more, was
all he knew, so he had more of a sense of Joey than he had had of Frank. Joey was still getting up in the night, but Rosanna didn’t mind. She was a little protective of him.
The funny thing was that Frank didn’t pay any attention to Rosanna anymore—it was like he couldn’t hear her voice. His head only turned when Eloise spoke to him, or Rolf (that was a rarity), or Walter himself. Mary said this was normal, and so did Walter’s mother, but Rosanna was taking it a little hard. Her mother said, “Someday you’ll have had so many that you won’t remember the differences between one and the other.”
And Eloise said, “You always remember that I was the worst.”
And Mary, not to be outdone, said, “Some things do stick in your mind, miss!”
But there was no denying that what they would do without Eloise Walter couldn’t imagine. Now she was doing some of the cooking and all of the bed making and dusting. She pumped all the water and carried it in, and all winter she had kept the fires going because Rosanna was so sick. She didn’t mind feeding the hogs and the sheep if Walter was busy. She was big, too—well developed as well as strong. As far as Walter was concerned, she had earned the right to have her lamp on whenever she felt like it—kerosene was little enough to pay if she wanted to read late or do her knitting. She had no talent for sewing, so Rosanna had made her two nice dresses and a coat. Three years and she would be married, no doubt, to one of these boys who were now wolfing down his sweet corn, and what would they do then?
Rosanna said that Walter was a worrier, but there was plenty to worry about with prices so low. You may say that hogs paid the bills, or chickens and eggs and cream. There was a fellow down by Ames who bred draft horses and sent them back to Europe by ship, since so many horses had been killed in the war that they’d lost even their breeding stock, but the thing that made Walter nervous (and maybe this was a result of his own experiences in the war) was the length of the supply line. Let’s say that, every hundred miles, some other person got a right to take a nip of the cherry. Let’s say that. Then, if you were sending your corn and oats and hogs and beef to Sioux City, well, that was two hundred miles, and Kansas City was 250. Chicago was about 325 or so, and beyond that Walter wasn’t willing to go. You could just say that the quarters got thinner or the dollars got paler the farther they came—that was how Walter thought about it. So sending draft horses to France and Germany? That was a strange business, like wheat to Australia. Walter didn’t trust it. The wealth was right here, spreading away from this table—chickens in the chicken house, corn in the field, cows in the barn, pigs in the sty, Rosanna in the kitchen with Joe and Frank, Eloise safe in her room thinking her thoughts. Walter looked around. His work crew was revived now, and making jokes—did you hear about the farmer who won the lottery? As if there were lotteries anymore. When they asked him what he was going to do with his million dollars, reported Theo Whitehead, he said, “Well, I guess I’ll just farm till it’s gone.”
Too much oats. Too much oats. Walter wondered why he worried about such abundance.
1923
ROSANNA LIKED the buggy. On a brisk late-winter day when the sky was flat and hard above the frozen fields and the sun was bright but distant, and before all the horses’ time was consumed by plowing and planting, it was good to have business in town—errands to do and people to see. Jake trotted along, happy, maybe, that the buggy was so light and there was no soil to drag it through, and Rosanna hardly had to shake the reins at him. In town, he would go to the feed store/livery stable and eat his noon oats after she dropped her basket of eggs and butter at Dan Crest’s general store. It was a pleasant outing, and she would be back to the farm before two. Of course, during the week, no one was doing much—the Lewises’ washing was hung out to dry, or Edgar French had his sheep grazing along the side of the road—but, whatever anyone was doing, at least it gave you a sense of life and progress.
On a Saturday morning, town was busy as could be. There were three churches in Denby—St. Albans (where her family went), First Methodist (where Walter’s family went), and North Street Lutheran. All the ladies from all three churches were busy with this and that, either cleaning the church, or meeting in their quilting groups and sewing clubs, or shopping, or, some of them, having luncheons. If Rosanna went to town on a Saturday (and really, with Eloise going to school, there weren’t many other days she could go), she had to dress nicely—something in a new style and nice goods. People knew her perfectly well, so no one would mistake her for a town lady, but she didn’t have to look like she was dragging herself in from the farm. At the first houses (the Lynch place, on the north side of West Main, and the Bert place, on the south side), she clucked twice at Jake and shook the whip. Best to make her entrance at a brisk pace. Saturdays were different from Sundays, when they went to church (though in the Methodist church you didn’t have to go every week, especially if you were a farmer). On Sundays, they put on their Sunday best, which was sober and dull. On Sundays, she wore a hat and tucked her hair in a tight bun. On Saturdays, she looked her age, twenty-three; on Sundays, she looked like her mother.
Of course it wasn’t warmer in town, but it seemed as though it was. Rosanna pushed back the hood of the buggy in the sunlight, and waved to people on the sidewalk (Miss Lawrence, her old teacher; Father Berger, who was friendly even though she never went to St. Albans anymore; Mildred Claire, who had known her mother forever). Waving to Father Berger reminded her of her girlish anxieties about baptizing Frank and Joe. She had been positively loco about it with Joe, and then it passed. She put her head around the hood and looked at Father Berger again. Old man now. Her mother and the other ladies in the altar society complained about him incessantly.
Then that girl, Maggie Birch, who was Eloise’s best friend, waved her down and ran over to the buggy. Rosanna gave her such a nice smile, even though she considered the girl a little fast, or, if not that, maybe “sneaky” was the word. But Maggie, too, was wearing a big smile. “Good morning, Mrs. Langdon. I was hoping I would run into you.”
“Hello, Maggie. How are you today?”
“Fine, thank you, Mrs. Langdon.” She hesitated.
Rosanna said, “I understand from Eloise that you are going in for secretarial school, Maggie.”
“Mama says I can, yes. I can go down to Usherton for a course and stay with my aunt Margaret and her husband, Dr. Liscombe. Do you know them?”
“I’m sorry to say I don’t.”
“They have the biggest house. I’m sure I’ll get lost in all the rooms. But … I was wanting to ask you.”
“What?” said Rosanna.
“Well, did you know the Strand Theater down there?”
“Of course,” said Rosanna. Jake snorted and shook his ears—a fly this time of year!
“I would really like to go and see a picture, and my cousin George has an automobile now and says he will take me, but I would like Eloise to come along.”
“That’s ten miles,” said Rosanna. “Thirteen miles from our place.”
“Georgie is a good driver,” said Maggie.
Rosanna regarded Maggie, and tried to decide whether to ask her the question that came to her lips—was this something she and Eloise had discussed? Of course it was, said the girlish side of Rosanna, and best not to know, said the maternal side. So Rosanna said what mothers had said since the world was young: “We’ll see.”
A pout passed over the girl’s face, and Rosanna realized that the condition Mrs. Birch had placed on the trip was that Maggie could only go if Eloise or someone went along. Rosanna shook the reins and left it at that. If she saw Maggie’s mother in town, which she well might, she would speak to her about it.
Ethel Corcoran. Martin Fisk. Gert Hanke. Len Hart. Old, young, old, old. To all of them, Rosanna raised her whip and smiled and called, “Hey!” And then she was in front of Crest’s, and she shouted, “Whoa!” to Jake, who had anyway already stopped by the hitching post, where some boys were pitching pennies against the wall of the store, shouting and
jumping about. Rosanna got out and tied Jake to the post, right between a Ford and a new Chevrolet coupé. “Coupay!” said Rosanna to herself as she lifted out her crock of butter. Dan Crest came to the door of the store and opened it. He took the crock from her hands. He said, “So sorry we didn’t see you last Saturday, Mrs. Langdon. Four—count ’em, four—of your best customers were in here, looking for your butter. You know Mrs. Carlyle? She won’t make a pie crust without it.”
“I use lard myself,” said Rosanna.
“Well, she’s French on her mother’s side,” said Dan Crest.
He set the crock on the counter and said, “I hope there are eggs, too?”
“Only three dozen.” said Rosanna. “I candled them all myself, and they are large. I cleaned them again this morning.” When she went out to get the crate, one of the boys who had been pitching pennies was petting Jake on the nose. She said, “Rodney Carson, you make sure nothing happens to Jake and I’ll give you a nickel.” A nickel was equal to one egg, if she took it in trade. If she asked for money, she got four cents. But she got five dollars for the butter, and six in trade. Rodney Carson said, “Okay, Mrs. Langdon. Jake is a nice horse.”
“Yes, he is,” said Rosanna. It was lovely how even the most elementary social intercourse lifted her spirits. Especially this time of year, when the farm was as dirty as could be, with thawing and freezing and damp everywhere. Just to put on your clean clothes and your clean shoes and your nice gloves and your best hat and drive the buggy out onto the road—well! She said, “I’ll be back in a bit, Rodney.”