Some Luck: A Novel

by Jane Smiley

  “Not if I give him the car.”

  It took about five breezy hours to get there, but Eloise wasn’t happy to see them. She took a long time to come to the door, and then went straight back to her typing. The apartment was a mess, and the sheets were sitting folded on the unmade bed of the guest room. The sound of typing stopped, and then she appeared in the doorway, her cigarette in her hand. She said, “A fellow we know from the Party in England was here for a week. He left yesterday morning, but with all these things in Europe, I haven’t had a moment.”

  “What things?” said Lawrence.

  “The explosion two nights ago at the train station in Tarnów, Poland, and now this.”

  “Now what?” said Lawrence.

  “The Germans have already destroyed Wieluń, some little town, and they’re crossing the border in about ten different places. Julius has gone down to party headquarters to see if there’s any news about what Stalin is going to do. Julius is just off the deep end with Chamberlain. He keeps saying that if Chamberlain hadn’t been playing footsie with Hitler all spring, this wouldn’t have happened.”

  “What do you say?”

  “Well, half the time I say that accelerating the world revolution is our job and we must welcome armed conflict.”

  “What about the other half?” said Lawrence. Frank thought he sounded truly curious.

  “The other half of the time I have no idea what to say.” She looked over her shoulder, out the window. It was almost dark. A moment later, there was a knock on the door. Eloise said, “That’s Olivia Cohen, bringing Rosa home. Don’t talk about this with her, all right?”

  But all through supper, Rosa watched Julius cough and groan and put his head in his hands. Finally, he pushed his plate away and left the table. Rosa said nothing, only glanced after him once.

  The next morning, Eloise got Frank and Lawrence up, handed them ten dollars, and said, “I want you to take Rosa to the beach, and then get her some lunch, and then take her to a double feature. Julius and I have meetings all day.” The lake was calm, and the beach was crowded. Lawrence and Frank looked at the girls while Rosa, who was a good swimmer now, played in the water. When it got hot, Frank stripped down to his trunks, which he had brought along, and swam as far out as he could—far enough out so that the people on the beach and lifeguard’s stand disappeared against the bright Chicago skyline. He floated there for a while, his face pointed toward the sky, and then he swam back in. A girl of about fourteen had joined Rosa, and was helping her build something in the sand. Lawrence was asleep on his back with a newspaper over his face. The front page of the paper was full of Poland. Looking at it made Frank’s scalp prickle, because, no matter what Lawrence said about this being Europe’s problem, and about how maybe Julius, as an Englishman, a commie, a Jew, was taking it too seriously, Frank thought that of course it had to do with him, of course it did. Wasn’t it true, as Mama always said, that he was drawn to trouble? And this was the biggest trouble in the world.

  AT THANKSGIVING, everyone teased Joe about how now he was rich. Walter had gotten forty-two bushels of corn per acre; Joe had gotten fifty-two. Fifty-two bushels an acre was unheard of. And because of the war in Europe, he had sold it for two bits a bushel, which came out to over a thousand dollars. Since the seed he had hybridized the year before was leftover seed, and this crop was from the seed he had harvested, and since he had done all the work himself, he had cleared almost nine hundred dollars. Papa said, “Well, I’ll have to charge you room and board.” Mama said, “Oh, my goodness, Walter, don’t even mention such a thing,” but everyone else seemed to know he was joking.

  Frank said he could buy a new Ford for five hundred dollars, and Henry said he could buy a windup handcar with Minnie and Mickey Mouse pumping the handles, and Lillian said that he could buy a horse—Jake—he could go buy Jake back from those people. But Joe knew what he was going to buy—he was going to buy seed, of course.

  It wasn’t until the next morning, over breakfast, that Joe and Papa got into an argument about it. Papa said, “There’s a lesson for you in this, boy.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Joe.

  “You know what the lesson is?”

  “I don’t know if I do.” He meant that he didn’t know Papa’s lesson. But he knew his own—it was to get out of the house in the morning before Papa got up.

  “The lesson is, you got to buy seed, because the corn you grew is sterile. What seed are you going to buy?”

  “I’ll go into town after Christmas and see what they have.”

  “Better to go out to the corncrib before Christmas and see what you have.”

  Joe felt his jaw clench.

  “Son.” Walter smoothed his voice. “You did something good, especially for a kid who was only sixteen at the time. You experimented. You tried something and learned something and you got a payout.”

  “Yes, sir. But—”

  “But your payout isn’t what you think it is. Remember four years ago, when your uncle Rolf left that field fallow?”

  Joe nodded.

  “And then he plowed that clover under? Well, that was his real legacy to you, Joey. Because then you bred your ‘hybrid,’ and then you saved that seed, and then you planted it and you got fifty-two bushels an acre, but you have to divide that number by three. Seventeen is what you really got.”

  Joe ate a bite of toast, and then took his handkerchief out of his back pocket and blew his nose. He could hear running around upstairs—that would be Henry. If Henry got down before Joe was out of the house, Henry would want to tell him a story. Joe said, “I understand that.”

  “You grow your own hybrid seed, and you got to set aside a field for that every year—that’s a field that is out of production.”

  “If I do it every year, then it’s only out of production for a year. If I had four fields—Anyway, you grow your own seed every year—you sell most of the crop and keep some. What’s the difference? And you switch varieties, so sometimes you have to buy seed, too. I want to try crossing some Hickory King with some Boone. Those Hickory King plants can get eight feet tall.”

  “You think the price of corn is up and is going to stay up.”

  “No, I don’t. I have eyes in my head. But I think we ought to take advantage when it is up.”

  “I don’t like your tone.”

  Joe said, “Sorry, Papa.” But Walter’s voice was loud, too, and Joe wasn’t sure what they were fighting about.

  Walter said, “You think it’s easy now. Fifty-two bushels an acre! Scarcity is your friend, not plenty. What’s going to happen to you if everyone gets fifty-two or sixty, or whatever?”

  “I’ll try to get seventy.”

  Walter just shook his head.

  1940

  AFTER CHRISTMAS, Professor Cullhane was assigned another graduate student (in addition to the one he had, Jack Smith, whom Frank didn’t care for, partly because he always had his nose in a chemistry beaker and had never actually fired a gun) and two more undergrads, Bill Lord and Sandy Peck. He gathered them in the lab and he said, “Now, gentlemen, as you know, a hundred years ago, gunpowder—or black powder, as they called it—was made from charcoal, sulfur, and saltpeter, though I would call that potassium nitrate. As most of you know, black powder has fallen out of favor, or you might say it’s been superseded by cordite and other deflagration explosives. But look around you. Where are you? You are in the heart of corn country, and our job, our contribution to the war effort we see in Europe—and make no mistake, the war effort that we will soon be part of—is to figure out a way to take the materials at hand and forge them into weapons. Our plowshares, you might say, through no fault of our own, must once again become swords.” All the others gaped, Frank knew, because they vaguely recognized those words, “swords” and “plowshares.”

  “Where do we get sulfur? From volcanoes and hot springs. That’s not our business here. Where do we get saltpeter? Well, we should be getting it from manure piles, because that’s the safest an
d most abundant source. And where do we get the char? Fellas, that’s what this lab is all about. We want black powder without the black smoke, without the corrosion of the gun barrels. We want weapons that fire shot after shot without cleaning the barrels, and we want that from cornstalks.” Then he introduced them all to one another, and told them how Frank and Jack had been working on this for a year now, “and we’ve made progress.”

  But they hadn’t made progress. Frank and Professor Cullhane had tried to reduce the cornstalks to char in fourteen different ways in order to produce a purer, less smoky product. They had taken the char and ground it into powder, milled it into granules of several different sizes, sieved it through a flour sifter and cheesecloth and medical gauze. Professor Cullhane had been careful about where he got his sulfur and his saltpeter—he had even made himself some saltpeter by going over to the vet school and loading wheelbarrows of cattle manure, sheep manure, and horse manure (all carefully separated) into tanks that he purchased. Frank could see that it wasn’t going to work, and when, in the fall, they had gone out shooting (supposedly pheasant along the railroad tracks, just to pretend that they were doing something normal), Professor Cullhane had come back profoundly discouraged—the barrels of their guns, new when they started, were already showing the effects, much more quickly than the professor had expected. No modern army would fight with this stuff. Cullhane had said to Frank, “If the Germans invade, we aren’t going to hold them off for long with this.” Frank had laughed, but Cullhane hadn’t been joking. It was then that Frank realized that Cullhane really did think that the Germans might invade. Even at twenty, Frank didn’t see how that was possible.

  But then the college had come to Professor Cullhane, and given him more money—two thousand dollars—to continue with his “war work,” and it turned out that a lot of that money came straight from the army. Frank was happy to keep getting a paycheck, especially since Cullhane, now that they had a larger workforce, wanted to go over every single process they had already tried, just to see if they’d made a mistake. The paycheck combined with the—okay, he could admit it—strangeness of the project and his feelings of luxurious comfort in Ames persuaded Frank to take fewer classes, extend his degree for another year. And, anyway, what else was there for him to do with himself?

  After the meeting broke up, Frank took the other two undergrad boys out behind the Chemistry building in the freezing cold and showed them the manure tanks. He said, “We need to scrub those out and fill them again. I suppose we should start right now.” Bill, who said he was from a farm over by Sioux City, stepped forward, but Sandy, who was from Des Moines, stepped back, his jaw dropping. That look on his face, that city-boy, frat-boy look, gave Frank the best laugh of his day.

  IT WAS AUGUST, no school. Lillian was at Granny Elizabeth’s, helping her can tomatoes, beans, and peaches. Joe was cultivating the cornfield behind the barn, and Mama and Claire were taking a nap. It was not a terribly hot day, Henry thought, but it had been so hot all week that he had slept in only his drawers, with all the windows and doors open. Mama told him not to complain—didn’t he remember four years ago, when it was over a hundred for weeks on end and the well almost dried up? Mama hated complaining. But Henry didn’t remember that. Summer was summer, winter was winter. One was unbearably hot, and the other was unbearably cold.

  Papa had to go to another farmer and buy a part for the oat thresher, and he told Henry to come along. As soon as they drove in the lane and pulled up beside the barn, Henry saw that there were boys here. One was a little older than he was—dressed in overalls, no shirt, barefoot. The other was big, at least twelve, and dressed the same way. The minute they got out of the truck, the farmer said, “Well, now, I meant to find that thing and I forgot all about it. It’ll just take a second. What’s your boy’s name? Henry? Henry, you go off with Sam and Hike here. Boys, half an hour of peace, please.”

  Sam was the younger boy, Hike the older one. As soon as they were out of sight of the barn, Hike kicked his brother in the backside, and then laughed. Sam turned on him and punched him in the stomach. It was Hike who started to cry. Henry slowed down, and the other two got pretty far ahead. They turned around. But they didn’t run at him—Sam just called out, “Don’t mind Hike. He’s just slow. He can’t even read.” Henry didn’t like to, but he caught up. They were heading toward a field where horses were grazing, and he liked horses. He counted them; there were six, four chestnuts and two blacks. Hike and Sam climbed on the fence, and then Henry did, too. The three of them hung their elbows over the top rail, and Henry said, “What are their names?”

  Hike said, “Daisy, Rose …” He paused.

  Sam added, “Daffodil, Iris, Hawthorn, and Poppy. Ma names them. She likes flowers.” Iris and Daisy, two chestnuts with white blazes, came to the fence, and the boys petted their noses. Hike said, “Let’s go to the ravine.”

  “Yeah,” said Sam. “There’s something there.”

  “What?” said Henry.

  “Another horse,” said Sam.

  But the horse was dead. Henry could see that from the rim of the ravine. It was lying there, a big white, bulky, fly-covered mound. It was scary and repulsive—the eyes were gone, the hanging tongue was black, and the coat was crusted over with something. Only the tail was strangely graceful—long, pale, and curving across the dry dirt. “Something’s going to happen,” said Hike.

  “What?” said Henry.

  “You’ll see.”

  The two boys ran down the slope of the ravine and picked up sticks. Sam shouted, “Come on!”

  Henry made his way down, sliding as best he could on his heels. It was almost midday, and the sun, high in the summer sky, was pouring heat into the ravine, which was full of other trash, too. Henry tried to step carefully. The other two boys ran around barefoot, even though there were nails everywhere, and wooden boards broken into splinters, and sharp stones, and parts of all sorts of things sticking up. But they took their sticks and scurried about the horse anyway, poking it and whacking it. Sam shouted, “Get a stick! There’s some over there!” He pointed, but Henry didn’t do anything, just stood for a minute by the horse’s head, then stepped away from there, so that he wouldn’t have to look at the eye sockets. Surprisingly, the horse didn’t smell very terrible—but it was huge, much bigger than the horses in the pasture. The boys were particularly intent on beating it across the belly, hitting, then poking, then hitting, then poking. There seemed to be a plan, and it wasn’t until the horse exploded that Henry understood what the goal was.

  Hike had been beating the belly just in front of the back leg, and then he smacked it furiously one time and poked it leaving a hole. The hole made a sound, and then a line along the bottom of the belly ripped open, and gas and liquid leapt out, the belly ripped in another spot, and more gunk poured forth. Most of it flowed, but some of it popped, and bits landed on all of the boys, including Henry himself. It was the worst thing he’d ever smelled, and it was on him in stinking dots. Hike and Sam started laughing and jumping around, even though it was on them, too. Henry thought he was going to pass out and fall down.

  Papa’s head, and then the head of the farmer, appeared above the rim of the ravine, and the farmer shouted, “Goddamn you boys! I told you to stay away from this dump! I am going to whip the hides off you! I say stay away, you don’t think I mean stay away?” He came sliding down the slope, and Sam and Hike ran up the other side, dropping their sticks on the way. Henry could see Papa and climbed up to him. Papa said, “Let’s go. Never should have come here. These are lowlifes here. Didn’t even have the part, and tried to sell me six other things. That stinks!”

  He told Henry to take off his shirt and throw it in the back of the truck. When they got home, he sent him to the spigot by the barn and had him scrub it. Henry did it pretty well, he thought. But he doubted that he would wear that shirt again.

  Over supper, Joey asked if Papa had found the part, and when Papa said no, Joey said, “Did you see Jake?”


  Papa said “Nope,” and Henry said, “Who’s Jake?”

  “Our horse we had. We gave it to them to pull a buggy. If I’d known you were going there, I would have come along—”

  But Papa was biting his lip, and then Mama said, “What, Walter?”

  “They had horses,” said Henry. “They had four chestnuts and two blacks. The boys were mean boys.”

  “Not worth talking about, you ask me,” said Papa, and that was the end of that.

  But when it was dark and Henry was getting into bed, Joey appeared in the doorway of his room—something he never did, Joey never came upstairs—and he said, “They didn’t have a white horse?”

  Henry didn’t say anything, but he must have grunted without meaning to. Then Henry said, “Something bad happened.”

  Joey sat on the bed. “Tell me.”

  “I couldn’t stop them.”

  “What?”

  “They were beating the white horse with sticks. He was dead and down in a ditch, and they beat him until—”

  “Until what?”

  “He didn’t have any eyes.”

  “Until what?”

  “Until he blew up, kind of. His stomach. It got on me.”

  Joey put his hand over his face and nodded. Henry could see that he was crying. Henry had never seen Joey cry. Joey said, “You didn’t have to stop them. It’s okay, Henry.”

  But Henry cried anyway. Joey left the room. Henry cried for a pretty long time, then fell asleep. He wished he had taken a bit of the tail, just a few hairs, which he could have given to Joey.