by Jane Smiley
Lillian nodded, and five minutes later they were standing on the front porch. Frankie came out and said, “It’s a boy. His name is Henry.”
Lillian was only momentarily displeased; obviously, it was a very good baby, because everyone had on such big smiles. She walked through the front room without taking off her coat, and straight into Joey and Frankie’s room, where Mama was leaning back in the bed, and Granny Mary was walking around with Henry in her arms. Lillian heard her say, “My land, cut the cord with the kitchen shears—well, I hope he boiled them first! Might as well be the Dark Ages around here,” and then they saw Lillian and zipped their lips, as they so often did. But Granny Mary said, “Come here, child,” and sat down on the corner of the bed with the baby.
He yawned. His fists clenched and his mouth opened wide and he even made a noise, and then his mouth closed and he looked at her a bit cross-eyed, and Mama said, “He can’t see anything yet.”
Lillian said, “His eyes are open.”
Mama laughed. “Well, it’s not exactly like kittens, sweetheart.”
Lillian gazed at Henry’s face, and he seemed, she was sure, to return her gaze. She lifted her hand and moved it toward the baby—Henry. Granny Mary said, “Are your hands—”
But Mama said, “It’s fine.” And Lillian put her hand on Henry’s forehead, which was as soft and warm as anything she had ever touched. She said, “I love you, Henry.” And she did.
1933
IF YOU HAD TOLD Rosanna that having Henry the way she did would have tossed her down such a deep dark tunnel as it seemed to have when she looked back on it from, say, mid-January, she would not have believed you. Faultless baby, but a despair no amount of prayers could relieve, even a visit by her pastor, all the way from Usherton. Nothing Granny Mary could concoct by way of teas or tonics or even cookies or cakes could lift her spirits. She looked out the window (Oh, the wind had poured in the windows, so cold and shrill. No one could hear her, it was terrifying), she looked down at her own feet (Her own belly looked like a rock, as hard as that, pressing that poor baby out, no matter what she wanted or thought best), she looked at the walls (The walls had shivered and waved as if they might collapse on her), she looked at Henry, and every adorable curl of his hair, every delightful smile, every clenching of his little fist or kicking of his legs, was something that might not have happened if events had gone another way. The sun went down, and she turned on one of the new electric lights; somehow their stark yellowness and the odd shadows seemed ominous. She wept.
Without knowing it, she had been perched on the point of a pin, balanced there between life and death, between what happened to Mary Elizabeth and what happened to Lillian, and she had blindly stumbled forward, and, yes, everything had turned out well—better than well—another beautiful, happy child—but she had been on the head of that pin before and had fallen into the abyss, and then the six years after Lillian’s birth had simply been a cloud of ignorance. She had thought such a thing could never happen again, but it happened all the time! Hadn’t Walter’s brother Lester, whom he had never known, died of measles when he was two? Yes, said Granny Elizabeth, but—Rosanna didn’t listen to the “but.” Hadn’t Oma’s sister back in Ohio fallen down the cellar stairs? Granny Mary had never heard that, but Rosanna was sure it was true. Grandpa Wilmer had gotten scarlet fever as a boy and almost died, and Granny Mary herself had gotten lost among the cows when she was three and they hadn’t found her for almost a day. Only an hour, and how did Rosanna remember all of these things, said Granny Mary—they were best forgotten, or you couldn’t go on, especially as a farmer. Granny Mary didn’t even read obituaries anymore. She thought Rosanna should make herself think good thoughts, but good thoughts were the worst, because all around the good thoughts, bad ones clamored for her attention, and the better the thoughts (how darling Henry was, and how helpful Lillian was—not jealous at all), the louder the clamor of the bad thoughts.
Even after she was up and around, and all the bedclothes and towels were laundered, and she was engaged in the routine that she knew so well—cooking, cleaning, nursing, napping, changing—the very corners of the house itself, the walls and the doors, were stamped with the feelings and sights and sounds of that day—she could be stirring oatmeal at the stove and thinking nothing, and the sound of the wind rising around the corner of the house made her heart flutter and her spirits sink—why was that? Oh, the next picture that came into her mind was the boys’ windows from the bed, open to the October breeze.
Praying, she came to feel privately, was worse than useless, because every time she articulated that thing that she wanted relief from, it flooded her; the very word “Jesus” began to make her nervous. Then she tried reading the Bible, but there were lots of terrifying things in the Bible—episodes she had read through blindly before, and not just the Slaughter of the Innocents—that she now saw much more vividly in her mind. You could cry over Noah’s Ark if you were in the mood. It was not helpful for her mother, or Walter’s mother, to say they’d known new mothers who had just the same thing happen to them, though neither of them, thank goodness …
Now I know, Rosanna thought. I’m almost thirty-three. I really know what it means to be alive. And she wept again.
LILLIAN COULD REMEMBER one time, it was before she went to school, maybe she was four or three. Anyway, she was sitting talking to Lizzie about being a grown-up, and Frankie came onto the porch with his shotgun in one hand and a dead rabbit in the other—Lillian remembered that, because she didn’t like guns, so she had turned Lizzie over to hide her eyes—and Lillian had looked up from her doll bed and said, “When I grow up, I’m going to marry Mama.”
Frankie stared at her, which was the first thing that told her she had made a mistake, and then said, “You can’t marry Mama. You have to marry a boy, and somebody you don’t know.”
Lillian had felt genuinely surprised by this new rule, but of course, if it was a rule, then Lillian would certainly follow it. With greater age and sophistication, she had come to understand that what she’d been saying to Frankie was that she loved Mama completely, better than anyone in the world. However, now there was Henry.
The only other baby Lillian knew at all well was Lois, Minnie’s sister, who would soon be three. Lois was much more interesting to Lillian than she was to Minnie, or, apparently, to Mrs. Frederick, who didn’t like her to get underfoot and when she set her food in front of her said, “Eat it or starve, my girl. It’s your choice.” It was true that Lois usually ate her food, but Lillian was sometimes afraid that she wouldn’t. Occasionally, Lillian had been at the Fredericks’ when Mrs. Frederick was doing something and looked up and said, “Goodness, where’s the baby gotten to now?” One time, they looked all over for her and found her in a closet. From all of this, Lillian gathered that Lois was not an especially valuable child, though to all appearances she was perfectly adequate—she walked and talked and didn’t cry all that much, and she never had a tantrum that Lillian had seen, though Minnie said there were some. Perhaps that was the key—tantrums? Lillian herself had never had a tantrum, and they were obviously indulgences to be avoided.
Lois was a puzzle that was to some extent solved by Henry, because Henry was so wonderful and delightful a child that clearly it was the case that some were better than others, and you were fortunate to get a good one. Even though Mama was sad a lot of the time now, which seemed to be the way you got once you’d had a baby, she never looked at Henry without a smile, and she picked him up and took him in her arms as if she could not help herself. Lillian felt the subtraction of attention from herself not as a loss, but as a bit of newfound freedom and as a recognition that nothing was more valuable than a baby, if it was a very good baby.
She stroked his head, and she encouraged him to hook his fingers over her finger, and she drew pictures of him at school, and she sat next to his cradle and talked to him. She sat quietly on the sofa, against the back so that her lap was as big as it could be, and Mama put him in he
r arms. She practiced holding him and jiggling him the way Mama did, and her reward was that sometimes, when Mama was busy, she got Henry in her arms if he was fussy, and she would jiggle him and he would stop crying. As he got older, she made faces at him that got him to laugh, and once he was sitting up, she showed him how to clap hands and to look up and down and from side to side. Really, there was no one more fun to play with than Henry. By contrast, Papa, Frankie, and Joey were intensely dull, because they talked all the time about what they were doing and what they wanted and what they thought, topics that Lillian could not care less about. With Henry, you had to watch carefully, and guess what he was thinking, and then do something that showed whether you were right or wrong. Mama said he could only be thinking about whether he was hungry or tired or wet, but Lillian did not agree. She thought he was thinking about a lot of things, like the shadows on the floor and the raindrops hitting the windows, and Mama, of course, and Lizzie and Lolly and the hand-me-down rocking horse some Vogel cousins had brought when they came at Christmas to see the baby. Possibly about Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf—Lillian had told him, not the version that Mama told her, where the Wolf ate Little Red Riding Hood, but the version Granny Mary told her, where the Wolf was going to eat her but since he had eaten the Grandma he wasn’t very hungry, so he tied a string to her wrist and fell asleep; once he was asleep, Little Red Riding Hood tied him to the bedpost and ran and got the Woodsman, who came in with his ax and slit the wolf from his throat to his belly button and let the Grandma out. She also sang songs to him—there were plenty of those, and Lillian had a good memory for them. At school, she learned “America the Beautiful,” at church she learned “I’ll Fly Away,” from Frankie she learned her favorite, “Hard Times Come Again No More,” and from Granny Mary she learned a song about a girl named Laurie who sat on a hill, “Her golden jewelry sparkles as she combs her golden hair.” From Granny Elizabeth, she learned a song about a silkie, which seemed to be a monster, that she didn’t understand, but sang to Henry anyway, and from Mama she had learned the saddest song of all, which was “Banks of the Ohio,” but she didn’t sing that one for Henry, she only hummed it from time to time.
Almost every day, Mama walked past her and saw her playing with Henry and said, “You are a good, good girl, Lillian. A pure angel, and, truly, you are my salvation. Do you know that?”
And Lillian said yes, because that was what she was supposed to say. But she hardly heard Mama say these things, because she couldn’t take her eyes off Henry.
PAPA AND FRANK mostly stayed out of the house—that was the easiest thing. Once in a while, Papa said, “Well, son, your mama cannot be pleased, and that’s the way women get to be sometimes. You have to make up your mind to put up with it, and go about your business.” The outside work could have been worse—had been worse. At least this year there was almost enough rain, and the crop looked pretty good. When the sheep shearers came, Papa gave Joey all the wool, because he said that Frank had hardly done a thing for those 4-H lambs—if they had been left to him, they would have starved to death. But so what if Joey got a few bucks for his wool? Frank had stretched his rabbit skins from the winter on the south side of the barn, and then he had taken them to Dan Crest, who found a man from Des Moines who bought them for a dollar apiece—that was twenty-two dollars—and said they were good quality and “the ladies’ll love ’em.” He said what he was really looking for was fox, though. No one could resist fox. So one thing Frank did to stay out of the house was roam down by the creek and through the fields, scouting fox burrows and keeping his eyes peeled for other possibilities. Papa said that this was very “enterprising.”
Of course, he did all of his other work, too—feeding the cattle and Jake and Elsa, working the fields, fixing fence, and planting. Pruning the Osage-orange hedge had fallen to him, too, and he had hated it until a new boy at school, from out of state somewhere, had told him you could make a good bow and even arrows from the branches of the hedge, and he spent part of the winter doing that. Papa complained about all the farm work, especially now that Elsa was almost twenty and Jake was not much younger. A plan he’d had of raising a foal and getting another one had come to nothing. Grandpa Wilmer had gone out of the horse business; what were they going to do? Maybe Elsa would last through the year, and maybe not. Papa said, for the hundredth time, as he was putting them away and Frank was hanging up the harness, “Well, we’ll see what happens. Maybe Roosevelt will send us a couple of good horses, now that he’s been inaugurated,” but Frank didn’t consider himself a horseman, he considered himself a tractor man. He kept his eye peeled for tractors. There were three—two on the other side of Denby, owned by the Marshalls and the Larsens, and one about two miles north of the school, owned by none other than the Dugans. The Dugans’ tractor was a John Deere, green as a stalk of corn and with yellow wheels, and Frank thought it was much better-looking than a Farmall, but he did agree about how the Farmall was more like a tricycle, and easier to steer. Both of the tractors on the other side of Denby were Farmalls, black.
Grandpa Wilmer was not going to be the one to get the first tractor in the family. He was out of the horse-breeding business, and had sold his stallion to a breeder down in Missouri for next to nothing, a fellow who had imported some giant donkeys from France after the war and was trying to develop a new type of hinny. But for what, Frank wanted to know? Better to have a tractor.
Mama and Papa were already arguing about whether Frank should go on to the high school. It wasn’t that he couldn’t do the work—everyone knew that he could, and would—he liked the work. Miss Grant said that she had nothing more to teach him—he knew everything she knew already, and a lot of things she didn’t, and so she had him teach the younger boys, though he was not allowed to smack them if they made mistakes. The high school was a ways—three miles—and without any help on the farm, Papa didn’t see how he was going to afford anything about this. If Frankie walked, it would take him an hour (a half an hour, thought Frankie, because he could run the whole way), and the hack was slow, too, since it had to wind around to several other farms to pick up other youngsters. But how was Walter going to afford the gasoline to take him, and who would drive? And the school day at the high school was a long one, especially with the going back and forth. “Your smartest child!” shouted Mama. “You want to bury him on the farm for the rest of his life. You think this place is the be-all, end-all, and it isn’t!”
Frank’s solution was a bicycle—he’d seen one for sale at a secondhand store in Usherton, cruiser style, not very old, fifteen dollars. He knew Papa was going to object—that was always his first response to anything—and maybe it would be hard to pedal on the dirt roads sometimes, but the roadbed curved upward, and he was sure he could pedal fine if he went straight down the middle and watched for ruts. Not to mention snow and ice. The thing was to get to Usherton, and to do that he would have to take the car.
What you did when you wanted to get away with something was not to plan, but to look for an opportunity. Frank didn’t think that bicycle was going anywhere—fifteen dollars was a lot of money with everyone out of work and half the shops in Denby and Usherton boarded over—so he waited. A few weeks passed, and the argument went on about high school—Mama now wondered why a man who planned to have a family would buy a farm “off away from everything,” and Papa asked her if she understood the first thing about soil fertility and wells and taking what you could get, and Mama said she understood all of that perfectly well, thank you, then burst into tears again. Papa said Frank had eighth grade left to go, why not worry about it later, and Mama said, “He’s teaching the younger boys! There’s nothing left there for him.”
The opportunity came one morning after a not so big blowup at the breakfast table. Joey and Lillian had fled, saying they had to be at school early, and Frank was lingering behind the barn, wondering if maybe hooky wasn’t a nicer thing to do on a lovely day than sitting in that stuffy schoolhouse. Grandpa Otto drove up in
his truck, and Papa wiped his hands on his overalls, ran out to the road, and got in without shouting goodbye. There had been nothing said about this at breakfast, so Frank didn’t know why Papa was going to the other farm, but so be it. Frank circled the barn and then the back of the house, until he could look into his own window. His room was empty and still, the door to the rest of the house closed. Frank pushed on the screen and climbed in to get his money.
He did know how to drive—Papa had taught him, in case of emergency. Mama had never learned; someone had to. But he hadn’t driven by himself before. Backing the car out was no problem—he just released the brake and let it slide. Once he reached the road, he started it up, backed around, and drove away without a glance. If Mama was waving at him from the porch, he would find out about it later.
He sat up as straight as he could and looked carefully at every intersection for any other vehicles. But what vehicles would there be? It was a clear day—everyone was in the fields. After maybe a half an hour, he went through those woods and over the river, which had risen almost as high as the banks, and into town. Now was the confusing part—how to get to the shop, which he had seen when he was in town with Papa a few weeks ago. But there were plenty of cars and trucks, and he just did what the ones with dirty wheels did, headed toward the farm-supply store. Probably it took him longer to get there than it would have taken Papa, but he recognized the way as he passed. As for driving, he kept to the right, used his hand signals, and maintained the same speed as everybody else, and there it was, the Back for More Store, and right in the window, the bicycle. Fortunately, no one was parked in front, so all Frank had to do was pull over, glide to a stop, and turn the car off.
The woman in the store was glad to sell the bicycle. She said, “Oh, it’s so nice when a young person has a chance to see the countryside, and this is a lovely Columbia, hardly used.” She smiled at Frank’s fifteen dollar bills, and held the door for him as he wheeled the thing out. She said, “Is your father—?” But Frank just pretended he had nothing to do with the car and got on the bicycle and rode it around the corner. It was harder than he’d thought it would be, but, then, the streets were paved, so it was easier in that way. In all this planning, he’d forgotten that he’d never actually ridden a bicycle.