by Jane Smiley
While she did the hem, she watched Irma and Joe with the everlasting box of dominoes, the box that she had given Joe last summer and that he would not let out of his sight. The box itself was shredding, but he wouldn’t let Rosanna replace it. He was also now sporting a bit of tape on his forehead, just above his right eyebrow. There was nothing underneath the tape, but Joey swore that that spot hurt him, and the only thing to ease the pain was a “Band-Aid.” The “Band-Aid” was from a packet that Irma had brought with her. Rosanna had never seen one before, but then it turned out that Dan Crest was stocking them, too. They were good for little cuts, but the only people in the household who needed them were Joey and Irma.
What Irma helped him do was stand the dominoes on end in not quite such long rows, and then knock them down by touching the first one in the line. It was a good game for Joe, time-consuming, and he was getting better at it—he could set up nine or ten dominoes in a row without knocking them over until he wanted to (or until Frankie knocked them over, but Irma was good, and quick, at stopping that, too). Sometimes, she could divert his attention from the dominoes and get him to practice hopping and twirling and riding his hobby horse from Christmas. She was good at creating a circle around Joey into which Frank could not rush with ridicule, shoving, and kicking. This was because (and Rosanna appreciated this and was not jealous) Frankie liked Irma, too. Irma told Frankie stories, and sometimes Frankie told Irma stories. So Rosanna was willing to do a little more work in order to be free of those particular cares that revolved around her two ill-matched sons.
She did not, however, give Irma much leeway with Mary Elizabeth (who could now be heard calling to be picked up after her nap). Rosanna set down her hemming and, when Irma looked up, gestured to her to keep on with what she was doing. Rosanna had waking nightmares of Irma falling down the stairs with Mary Elizabeth in her arms, or Irma bumping the child’s head on the edge of the cupboard, or stumbling and falling on her. These worries Rosanna acted upon, but kept to herself.
Mary Elizabeth was not as active as Frankie and not as fearful as Joey. She was willing to try some things, but not everything. Rosanna considered that she had a thoughtful look on her face. Once, before Christmas, when she was—what?—ten months old, she had crawled over to a book and picked it up. As Rosanna watched, she opened the book and began turning pages, carefully pressing her tiny forefinger against the corner of the page and pulling it down, and then taking the page between her thumb and finger, and turning it. She hadn’t torn a single page. Now she was standing in her crib, holding her arms out.
Rosanna laid her back down in the crib to change her. She was good about that, too—she had been easy to train (Rosanna always started early and went at it with dedication, because it was better in the end not to leave it too late). Now she took Mary Elizabeth’s long johns off. They were not wet, so she carried her over to the potty and sat her upon it. Mary Elizabeth was neither a bouncer nor a wiggler. When she had produced, Rosanna handed her a page from last year’s Farmers’ Almanac, then helped her with it. Really, she was an agreeable child, and she would make a useful young woman, and wasn’t that the best kind? Rosanna adored her even though she was a bit plain (Rosanna noticed this but never, ever mentioned it and was always maybe too affectionate). She in fact suited her name, Mary (common) Elizabeth (respectable). Should there be another girl, Rosanna thought, she would name her something more elegant. Dorcas? There was a Dorcas in town. Helene? Was there a Helene? But she was one of the Carsons. She had probably started life as a mere Helen. Mary Elizabeth held out her arms, and Rosanna slipped her into the romper suit she had knitted in the fall. Then she gently gripped Mary Elizabeth around the waist while the little girl slipped her feet into her shoes. Once they were tied, Rosanna walked her to the top of the stairs and held her hand as she stepped her way down them. They were steep, steeper than most stairs, so Rosanna was careful to give all of the children plenty of practice but to watch them (even Joey, nearly three, even Frankie, at five—these stairs were no joke).
Downstairs, Joey was waiting for her with his face alight. He shouted, “Mama, Mama! Look!” and gestured at the line of dominoes.
Rosanna said, “How many are there, Joey?”
Joey looked at Irma. Irma’s lips moved, and then Joey shouted, “Sixteen!”
“Sixteen! My goodness, such a lot!”
Joey said, “May Liz! Touch it!”
“Really?” said Rosanna. “You want Mary Elizabeth to knock them down?”
Joey nodded excitedly, and Irma nodded, too. Probably this was Irma’s idea. Mary Elizabeth walked over to the table and touched the first domino; they all fell in a row, and it was really quite exhilarating to see how both children enjoyed it. Rosanna said, “Joey, you’re a nice boy,” and Irma said, “Oh, yes, I think so, too.”
THIS YEAR, when the sheep-shearing men came to shear the sheep, Frank had a job. You never knew ahead of time when the sheep shearers were going to come—Papa only had twenty sheep, so the shearers would show up all of a sudden one morning, shear the sheep, stay for dinner, and then go on to a farm on the other side of town that had lots of sheep—a hundred, maybe. Always before when they came, Frank had been told not to get underfoot—he could sit on the fence and watch, but he couldn’t climb down into the pen or sneak into the barn, either, in case he got up to something when no one was looking. And it was true that Frank liked to get up to things when no one was looking, even if he did get a whipping for it. But sheep shearing was better than getting up to things. This year, his job was to jump on the wool when they put it into the sack so that they could get a lot in. It was a great job.
On the morning when the sheep shearers showed up, Mama looked out the window and saw they were there, then called to Papa out the back door. It was a sunny day, not at all damp. Papa went to the sheep shearers and talked money to them while Mama found Frank a long-sleeved shirt with a high collar. Before he went out the door, she smoothed his socks up over the bottoms of his overalls and said, “You are going to get a bath today, and I don’t want any fuss about it.” Frank jumped down the porch steps.
Felix and Harmon took turns. Daddy and Ragnar would catch a sheep, put a rope around its neck, and pull it over to the sheep shearers. Felix or Harmon then flipped the ewe over on her back and put her between his legs. First he clipped the hair off her head, then went all around her neck. Then he started on her belly and clipped from top to bottom in smooth rows. The wool fell to one side like a blanket, and the sheep got quieter and quieter, not even baaing, because Papa said that the sheep were glad to be clipped—if you let a sheep go through the summer with all that wool, it might lie down and die. They looked terribly silly without their wool, though—silly and surprised, Frank thought.
Once the fleece was lying out flat on the ground, Papa or Ragnar folded it together and rolled it up, and then put it in the sack. Here was where Frank came in—he climbed into the sack, and while Papa or Ragnar held one of his hands, he jumped up and down all over the wool. He jumped as high as he could, and almost in one place but not quite. As he did this, the one who was not holding his hand went and caught the next sheep. Frank did not want to rest, because he wanted Felix and Harmon to see what a good jumper he was. At the end of twenty sheep, it was dinnertime, and Frank was warm in the sun, and all the sheep crowded together at the feeder the way they hadn’t been able to before. After the sheep shearers left, Mama made Frank take off all his clothes and take a bath in the kitchen. When he was clean and all dried off, she took him to the window and looked him all over for ticks, and she found a few—two on his back and two on his legs and one in his hair. She held a burnt match tip against them, and they backed out. All the time she was saying, “Ugh, I hate ticks!” and Frank was very good about standing still.
EVERY YEAR, Walter said that he was going to rip out or plow up or in some way get rid of the Osage-orange hedge that separated the field behind the barn from the back acreage, and every year, he went out there with Ragna
r and scratched his head for a minute and then just ended up trimming it. It was, as his father had always said, “horse-high, bull-strong, and hog-tight,” but it limited what he could do with that back field. The problem was that it was dense with thorns, a couple feet thick, and a quarter of a mile long. Every time you wanted to get into the back field, you had to go around it, because, as intended, there was no going through it. It was also a bit unusual for this area—more common down south, Walter had heard, where such hedges had been all the fashion in the middle of the last century (when, Walter supposed—the thought made him smile, it was so ridiculous—all American farmers were going to model themselves on the landed English gentry and farm the same land for generations and also fox-hunt across it). But if you replaced it with barbed wire, you had to keep your eye out for breaks in the fencing, and you had to be there to fix it before any animals got through. No animals got through the Osage-orange hedge. In fact, no animals with a lick of sense went near it. But the thing was so permanent, more permanent than the barn and the house, since it had been planted before they were constructed. Probably old Litchfield, from whom he’d bought the farm, had sited the barn where it was because of the hedge—it meant a quarter of a mile less fence to maintain. As a result, the barn wasn’t where Walter would have put it. That was another thing that bothered him about the farm. Rosanna liked the house, though.
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?”