Some Luck

by Jane Smiley

  “Time to get dressed,” said Mama. “The service starts at ten, and I want to walk around for a bit.”

  “What’s for breakfast?” said Joey.

  “Plenty of things,” said Mama. “Let’s go out and have a look.”

  REVEREND SUNDAY WAS more impatient. He seemed angry, and then it turned out that he was angry at the devil, who was present in the hall and holding people back from the stage. Of course, the devil seemed like a nice enough fellow, said Reverend Sunday, good-natured and whispering doubts in everyone’s ears. Simple doubts—my life is pretty good, I like my pleasures, I’m not doing anyone any harm, I’ve never passed out from drink once in my life, I’ve got a job or a husband or an automobile or whatever. I’m young—I’ve got years ahead of me to get this done. The devil always had such a reasonable voice, and so did Reverend Sunday for a while. He said, “I know the devil. The devil is always trying to make himself a friend of mine, and he isn’t that, but I know him well.” And then his face went dark, and he started arguing with the devil, making the devil tell everyone what Hell was like, how it wasn’t a simple place at all, where things were easy enough, it was a terrifying, black, burning place, and you want to talk about having years ahead of you, well, all the years you might waste before you got saved (if you ever did get around to it) were as the blink of an eye compared with those years in Hell—they didn’t even have years in Hell, they only had eons. Now he started yelling at the devil, telling him to get out of this room and out of these people and away from Reverend Sunday himself: “Get thee behind me, Satan!” And he turned his back and jumped about, as though Satan were beating him, and then he spun around and raised his arm, and began beating Satan. Next to her on the seat, Joey started crying again, but Rosanna felt she was stuck with her eyes open and her hand on her mouth. The next thing she knew, she was standing up and she had Joey by the hand. As she left the pew, two people reached out for Joey and took him, and a voice said (a kindly voice), “He’s too young, ma’am, but you go ahead,” and so she did, up the aisle, toward the stage. And Reverend Sunday changed again—after kicking Satan off the stage, he stood in front of them and lifted up his arms and shouted thanks to the Lord for speaking to the people through him.

  The crush was suffocating, but reassuring rather than frightening. Men at the end of every row of seats gently guided them and encouraged them, and if someone was stumbling or weeping too much to see where he or she was going, one of these men took the elbow and steadied the person. Up by the stage, there were places to kneel, and then the choir started singing a song Rosanna did not know, but a beautiful one, four-part harmony, and some of the people around her opened their mouths and sang along, knowing the words. What Rosanna said was “Mary Elizabeth, I know you have gone to Heaven now, just now in this last minute, I know you have left my side and gone to Heaven, and that is your home.” And for years after that, she remembered that moment when Mary Elizabeth took her arms from around her neck and flew away.

  AND SO Rosanna was saved in March—March 24, to be exact—and the baby, Lillian, was born six months to the day and the hour later, September 24 at about eight in the evening, and from the first time Rosanna looked at her (oh, the birth was so easy!), she knew that Lillian was God’s own gift to her. Never had she seen such a beautiful baby. Not even Frankie was a patch on her—her mother said so, Granny Elizabeth said so, and Walter just stared at the infant without saying a word. She was a healthy one—plenty of flesh, but not too much, eager to suck, and relaxed in her body. Rosanna had noticed that each baby, even from birth, had a way of being hugged. Frankie’s way had been to kick his legs, Joey’s way had been to go a bit limp (just a bit, he was fine), and Mary Elizabeth’s way had been to remain a little package, allowing the embrace but not yielding to it. These qualities stayed with them. Lillian’s way was to relax as if her mother’s embrace was just the most wonderful thing she could possibly know. The birth was so easy that Rosanna was wide awake and feeling fine afterward, so once everyone else had gone off to bed, around eleven or so, she sat up, staring at Lillian, who was nestled in her cradle. Walter was bunking in with the boys for the night, so the two of them were alone.

  Something no one had mentioned for weeks was that four days would bring them to the first anniversary of Mary Elizabeth’s death. Rosanna suspected that at least Walter’s mother and maybe a few of the other relatives thought that the brevity of the interval between the death and the birth was a little unseemly, but Rosanna could not possibly see it that way, now that she knew that Mary Elizabeth was looking down upon her and Lillian and blessing them from Heaven. Her cousin had had a baby a year after miscarrying a previous one, and had once said to Rosanna, “Just think, if I hadn’t lost that one, I wouldn’t have Arne,” but Rosanna didn’t see this at all like that. She would have had Lillian no matter what, but Lillian would not have been so blessed—she would not have been named Lillian, but probably something like Helen. What happened was that one day in the summer, for some reason, Rosanna kept humming a hymn to herself, it was “God Sees the Little Sparrow Fall,” and she paused to attend to the words she was singing—“He paints the lily of the field, / Perfumes each lily bell,” and she knew that the baby she was carrying was a girl, and would be named Lillian, even though there wasn’t a Lillian to be found anywhere among the Langdons or the Cheeks or the Chicks or the Augsbergers or the Vogels. She never even thought about a name for a boy. Walter didn’t say a word when she declared that the baby was a girl, nor did he say what boys’ names he liked. And so Lillian had been Lillian—“Lillian Elizabeth”—for months now, at least in Rosanna’s mind. Rosanna knew that her mother was superstitious about using a baby’s name before he or she was born—she also didn’t like this idea of nightly Bible reading—you never did that in the Catholic Church—but Rosanna was finished with that sort of superstition. Lillian was blessed. Mary Elizabeth herself had blessed her.

  1927

  NOW THAT IT WAS JANUARY, and Frank was going to school every day, even in the snow and the cold, he understood many things better than he had, and it wasn’t only ABCs and 123s. The first thing he understood was that he was taller than the other seven-year-old boy, Luke Kasten. Luke understood that, too, and stayed out of his way. He was also taller than the eight-year-old and one of the nine-year-olds (Donald Guthrie and Matthew Graham). The rest of the boys (five in number) were taller than he was and stronger, but not as smart. A couple of the big ones could hardly read, which perplexed Frank a bit, since reading was the easiest thing in the world. There were seven girls in the school, all older. The nicest one was Minnie Frederick, who lived near them and was eight. She sometimes held his hand if any of the boys happened to bully him. She would say, “Oh, Frankie, forget them, they’re stupid.” But Frank wasn’t about to forget a thing—nosirree, as his uncle Rolf would say.

  So far, since school started in September, the boys had done six things to him: Lured him into the coal shed and locked the door on him. Peeked at him in the privy. Stolen his coat and kept it for the entire very rainy day. Splashed mud on him by stomping in a puddle. Kicked him. Poured dirt down the back of his pants. It wasn’t as though Frank was the only victim—the big boys had done ten things to Luke Kasten, nine things to Matthew Graham, and six things to Donald Guthrie. Maybe those boys were not keeping track, but Frank was, because keeping track was easy for him. Wasn’t he already doing multiplication? As for Miss Jenkins, the teacher, she was always peering at them the way Irma had done before Irma got her glasses, so Frank was pretty sure that she couldn’t see much of anything. Maybe, like Irma, she didn’t know she needed glasses—what Irma said was “Leaves! Birds! I never saw any of those before!” Or maybe she didn’t have the money; glasses were expensive, according to Mama, who told Irma that if she lost hers she didn’t know how they would afford another pair. Anyway, the boys who couldn’t be seen in the back rows or at the far end of the schoolyard were getting up to plenty of trouble, climbing trees and pelting each other with a
corns and worse. And then, today, at the end of recess, when Frank was just standing there, Bobby Dugan and Howie Prince had run up to him, pushed him flat on his back, rubbed his face with snow, and run away laughing. Frank was keeping track.

  Aside from Minnie Frederick, two of the girls were nothing much to look at, two were big and imposing (they reminded him of Eloise), and two were very pretty. One of these was Alice Canham and the other was her sister, Marie. Alice was nine and never looked at him. Marie was ten and thought he was a pest. The only pretty girl who liked him was Minnie, but she liked him a lot. Her father’s farm was on his way to school, big, three hundred acres, and paid off. Frank had heard Mama and Papa talk about “the Frederick place,” but the Fredericks were Quakers, so they didn’t visit much back and forth. But that was a great thing, to say what Papa said, “free and clear.” And Minnie’s ma was known all over for her baking. All the farm ladies were proud of their baking, but Mrs. Frederick tried special things—not just bread and pies and pound cake, but drop doughnuts and cookies that Minnie brought to school and shared. When Minnie had a birthday in November, her mother sent a checkerboard cake, where all the slices were laid out on the plate like a checkerboard, chocolate and white. Frank thought this was wonderfully luxurious, but it was just the sort of thing that Mama did not have time for and Granny Mary and Granny Elizabeth thought was silly. And so Frank was friends with Minnie, also because Minnie held up her head and stabbed those big boys with her always sharpened pencils if they gave her any trouble.

  Frank stood up, brushed the snow off as best he could, and made his way toward the schoolhouse door, where Miss Jenkins was ringing the bell. She peered at him as he came toward her, then said, “Young Frank, best to develop a habit of promptitude early in your life. You’ll never regret it!” As he entered the school door, she followed right behind him, but she didn’t say a word about the snow and water dripping off his backside. All through reading and arithmetic, and then when they ate their lunches and progressed through singing and spelling, Frank dried without once shivering, and pondered his plan. This was episode four for Bobby Dugan and episode three for Howie Prince, and that was just counting what they’d done to him. All told, Bobby went after someone or other once or twice a week, and Howie helped him at least half of those times. Bobby most often helped an even bigger boy, Dallas Coggins, but Dallas was home with the grippe. Dallas did something to someone almost every day—sometimes his victim was Bobby, in fact. But Dallas was fourteen. Fourteen was two times seven. Frank didn’t think he stood much of a chance against Dallas.

  The good thing was that Frank sat behind Bobby and could watch him without being noticed. He could also see into his desk whenever Bobby opened it. It was a mess in there. But looking in there gave Frank a perfect idea, and an easy one, too.

  When he got home from school, it was still light. Mama was walking back and forth in the front room with Lillian in her arms, watching for him out the window, as she did every afternoon. He only had to walk a quarter-mile on his own, and that was on the road—the rest of the way, he walked with Minnie, Matthew Graham, and Leona Graham, who was thirteen, one of the plain girls. From the schoolhouse to the Grahams’ was through the fields, but Mr. Graham took the horses out and stamped down the snow for them. With Minnie, he went another bit, and then Minnie’s ma, in her apron, watched him until he was well on his way and could see his own barn.

  He stepped onto the porch; Mama set Lillian in her downstairs cradle, opened the front door, and helped him off with his boots. Joe came out of the kitchen, his thumb in his mouth, but didn’t say anything. No, he did not want anything to eat. Yes, he had had a good day at school. Frank knew he couldn’t express any desire to go to the barn or even to go upstairs; Mama was suspicious of his motives at all times. She said, “You carry your coat through the house and hang it in the back hall, Frankie.” It was when he was doing this that he saw it—one he had forgotten—a nice-sized mousetrap, big enough to hurt but small enough to go into the desk, in a dark corner. He looked at it, but he didn’t touch it, because Joey was right behind him.

  Joey had a way of sensing that Frank was up to something, so, for the rest of the evening, when Frank was in the house, Joe was right beside him. Frank did look for other traps when he was out helping Papa and Ragnar with the cows and the horses and the sheep, but the traps he saw were too big—he could tell just by looking that he wouldn’t be able to hide one of them in Bobby’s desk. Papa wouldn’t let him out of his sight, either, just like the others. Frank was patient. Nobody thought he was patient; someone was always saying, “Hold your horses, Frankie.” But he had stores of patience they could not understand if there was something he really, really wanted to do.

  It was when he was getting ready in the morning for his walk to school that he managed to kick the mousetrap very gently with his toe. It snapped, the bait jumped, and Frank slipped it into his pocket. He could feel it—the edge of the trap was sharp, and the spring (he could tell by the way it snapped) was a good one. He buttoned his coat, went out on the porch for his boots, and then put on his hat and mittens. Mama stood just inside the door, holding Lillian and keeping out of the wind. She kissed him goodbye. The last thing she did was to look right at him and say, “If you’ve got some mischief in your head, young man, get rid of it.”

  Frank returned her gaze and shook his head. Then he said, “I’m good, Mama. Miss Jenkins played the piano yesterday and let me sing the verses all by myself. Everyone else did the chorus.”

  “Well, stay good, then,” said Mama, before slamming the door. But even after she went inside, he didn’t put his hand in his pocket. At Minnie’s, Mrs. Frederick gave him a sugared doughnut “to keep him warm,” and they trotted onward to the Graham farm. It was cold enough so that the snow was hard, but not that cold. Minnie didn’t try to hold his hand. Frank was not sure she had seen him get pushed down the day before.

  He decided that he had to keep quiet, but not strangely quiet, and he did—he spoke when spoken to and did what he was told, and when something the other boys thought was funny happened, he laughed with them. Already, after only four months of school, he saw that if you didn’t laugh when the others laughed, they hated you all the more. So he was required to laugh when Bobby tripped Alice Canham as she was making her way back from the pencil sharpener. Right after lunch, he had a moment alone in the classroom, during which he set the trap and placed it in his own desk, ready for business.

  The problem was that Miss Jenkins lined them up and herded them everywhere—into the classroom in the morning, out for recess, back in, back out, back in, then dressed and out the door for home. Yes, she couldn’t see much, but she would see him go into Bobby’s desk. That night, Frank lay awake in his bed next to Joey, trying to think of something, but he fell asleep.

  He had never paid much attention to Bobby Dugan—he’d only tried to stay out of his way—but now he watched him carefully. The first thing he saw was that Bobby rolled and smoked a cigarette with Dallas and Howie during recess, out by the corner of the schoolyard. They did it again after eating their lunches. Frank didn’t know anyone who smoked. He also saw Bobby go into the privy and come out after spending a long time there. When Frank went into the privy sometime later, he stayed long enough to look all around. He stood on the seat on his tiptoes, reached up, and felt where the roof came down to meet the wall. He found the box of tobacco and matches pushed to the back of the space there.

  First thing in the morning when he got to school, he went up to Miss Jenkins and whispered that he wasn’t feeling well, and might have to go to the privy. Since it was a very cold day, could he keep his coat on in class? Miss Jenkins felt his head, and Frank said, “Mama says I don’t have a fever.”

  “No, you don’t. Well, we’ll see how you feel. If you need to go home at lunchtime, we’ll see.”

  When Miss Jenkins had some older kids at the reading table, Frank slipped the mousetrap into his pocket, then he huddled at his desk for the first
hour, all through geography. Just at the right moment, he thought, he staggered out of the room and headed for the privy. He went in and closed the door. He climbed onto the seat, carefully set the trap, and placed it on the box of tobacco, a little pushed back. He coughed a few times and, once back in the schoolroom, staggered to his seat. In the next half-hour, he revived; by lunchtime, he had removed his coat and hung it on his hook.