by Jane Smiley
Lillian lay on her back with Lolly in her arms, looking up at the ceiling. It was dim at this end of the room, bright at the other end. Sometimes, the shadows of the trees outside quivered on the ceiling, but they only quivered. It was like looking into a pail of water and seeing the surface of the water move. Mama sat down and picked up her darning. She was doing some socks. Lillian heard the squeak of the rocking chair as it went back and forth, back and forth. One thing to think about was King Midas. Mama had read her that story only the day before, and when she came to the end, Lillian had cried, so Mama had said she would never read it again. The picture of King Midas that Mama had showed her looked regular—he had long hair, like Jesus, but also a crown. He looked nice. But he wanted a strange thing, which was for everything he touched to turn to gold. Lillian had seen that this was a bad idea from the beginning—all she had to do was touch her sausage, which was what they had for supper last night, in order to understand that having everything turn to gold at a touch would be horrible rather than wonderful. But King Midas persisted, then changed his very own child, who was a girl like Lillian, into a golden statue. And there was no turning back once it was done—Jesus did not show up to redeem King Midas, because, according to Mama, Jesus hadn’t been born yet. So that little girl, whatever her name was, was done for, and that was what made Lillian cry. Mama said, “Well, Midas learned his lesson,” and stroked Lillian’s hair until Lillian stopped crying, and the two of them prayed to Jesus that they might learn their lessons sooner rather than later, and that they would be gentle lessons rather than hard lessons. But Midas stuck in Lillian’s mind. Mama said, “Sweetheart, you have quite an imagination, I must say.”
Lillian was still awake, or half awake, and Mama began to sing a song: “Fair waved the golden corn, / In Canaan’s pleasant land, / When full of joy, some shining morn, / Went forth the reaper band. / To God so good and great / Their cheerful thanks they pour, / Then carry to His temple gate / The choicest of their store.” Lillian liked the word “corn.” Corn was yellow and sweet. She liked it on the cob and off the cob, and she liked holding a cob out to Jake and Elsa, and having them bite off the kernels and eat them. She also liked the words “joy,” “shining,” “cheerful,” and “morn.” The tune went up and down, and made her sleepier. Mama went on, “In wisdom let us grow, / As years and strength are given …” Her voice was low and almost tuneless. Lillian fell asleep.
THE MOMENT when Rosanna knew she’d been living in a fool’s paradise was the moment she pumped the second basin of water. She had already undressed Lillian and set her into the first tub of water to cool off—it would certainly be a hundred out there, at least—and Lillian was paddling mildly and dipping a couple of spoons in and out of her bath. She was half talking to Rosanna. As she said, “Lolly and Lizzie need a nap,” and Rosanna answered automatically, “I’m sure they do, they were up late last night,” the water that spurted out of the tap over the sink fell brown and thick into the pail, and then stopped. Rosanna had never seen a well go dry before. She set the pail down into the sink and put her hands on her hips. Her hands were trembling.
The farm had three wells—one beside the barn, this one by the house, and an old one that had been capped some years ago, not far from the chicken house. Rosanna had no idea how deep this well was, or how it compared with the others—sometimes that didn’t matter, water could be deep or shallow. She glanced over at Lillian. The tub the girl was sitting in was not at all large—it had a flat bottom and flared sides about twelve inches tall, and Lillian was sitting with her legs crossed. The water, which was clear, came up about six inches. In the hot weather, Rosanna had been letting her sit in the water every afternoon, just to stave off any fevers or heat strokes that might be going around. Walter and the boys had a pail outside, too, in the shade, that they dipped their bandannas in before wrapping them around their heads under their hats, or wrapping them around their mouths and noses to keep out the dust. The other thing Rosanna had taught the boys to do was to dip their wrists in the water and hold them in there long enough for the blood to cool.
Well, obviously, the first thing was to pray, so Rosanna set down the pail and went over to Lillian, and knelt beside her. She said, “Dear Lord.”
And Lillian said, in a singsong voice, “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray—”
Rosanna couldn’t help smiling. She waited for Lillian to finish, and went on: “We see that you are preparing a trial for us. The signs and the symbols are all around us—you give us no rain, and now you have dried up our well. Our crops are thirsty, Lord. We dole out little drops of moisture to them every evening, and they drink them up, but still they look yellow and dry.” She was thinking of the beans. “We thank you for your past generosity, and we apologize if we have seemed ungrateful, if we have sat down to your bounty without lifting our voices in your praise. We understand that we became proud and flaunted our pride and were punished.” Now she was thinking about how Bruno Krause had come and gone—no customers could afford to pay for such luxuries—and she had had to slaughter half of her chickens and given them away, and though at first the experience was a bitter one, it showed her that there were people, and not just bums and vagrants, but people in Denby and Usherton who hadn’t the wherewithal to buy a chicken. There were people who were starving in the midst of plenty, as it said in the Bible somewhere. “We know that the trials you send us are proper tests of our faith, and we hope to pass those tests, dear Lord.” Now she was thinking that Dan Crest was giving her almost nothing for her butter, good as it was, but he said that people didn’t care about quality when they could hardly afford to eat—he himself almost went out of business, and it could still happen if the drought—yes, he used the dreaded word—didn’t end soon, he had no idea what was next and neither did Hoover or anyone else. The oat and barley fields were brown, and there weren’t many farmers like Walter and his father, who had some from the year before. The corn looked like green sticks thrusting out of rock, it was that dry. She gripped Lillian’s hand a little too tightly, and Lillian pulled away. She opened her eyes. Lillian said, “Mama, I’m scared. You scared me,” and Rosanna coughed and said, “You pray, Lillian. The Lord will listen to you, I’m sure.”
“Pray what?”
Rosanna thought for a second, then said, “Darling, just close your eyes, and say, ‘Dear Father, please have mercy upon your children and keep us and protect us. If there is anything we have done to offend you, we give you our apologies.’ Say that.”
“What are ’pologies?”
“Saying you’re sorry—you know, like when you make a mess and Mama has to clean it up.”
“Did I make a mess?”
“No, honey, no, you didn’t. I don’t know who did. But sometimes you have to say you’re sorry and you don’t know why. Do you understand?”
Lillian shook her head.
“Someday you will. We don’t know all the things the Lord sees. Sometimes he sees things that we don’t, and they make him sad and angry, and so we have to say we’re sorry anyway.”
“Okay.” But she still seemed doubtful.
Rosanna began again, “Dear Father.”
“Dear Father.”
“Please take mercy upon us, your children, and help us.”
“Please help us.”
Rosanna didn’t correct her. “If we have offended you by doing something, we are sorry.”
“We are sorry. If—if we did a bad thing that we didn’t know.”
“Darling,” said Rosanna, “it might be that someone else did a bad thing, but it’s good if we apologize for it. Like Jesus.”
“Like Jesus?”
“Well, Jesus never did a single bad thing, but when he was crucified, he made up for all the bad things that other people had done. That’s why he was crucified.”
Lillian looked at her for a moment, then went back to moving her fingers in the water, and Rosanna wondered if she had gone too far. It was always a shock for a child to find out—to trul
y understand—what had happened to Jesus. Rosanna remembered clearly her own reaction of brooding over it for some weeks around Easter, and asking questions: Nails in his palms? Nails? He fell down three times and nobody at all helped him? Where was the Good Samaritan? In fact, it was better to have a rather thoughtless child like Frankie, who listened, then forgot about it. Who at ten still sang “Round John virgin” without recognizing that those words made no sense.
Finally, Lillian said without looking at her, “Did you do a bad thing, Mama?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Did Papa?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Frankie?”
She hesitated, but certainly this was true: “Not that I know of.” Then, “At this point.”
“Joey?”
“I can’t imagine Joey or you, Lillian, doing a bad thing or thinking a bad thought.”
“What is a bad thought?”
Rosanna regretted even beginning this. She said, “Hating someone.”
“Do you hate anyone?”
“No, and neither does Papa or Frankie or Joey, or you. Lillian, I don’t know why there isn’t any water, but the Lord will provide if we pray to him.”
“Isn’t there any water?”
“Well,” said Rosanna, “let’s see.” She stood up and lifted Lillian out of the tub, careful to retain as much of that water as she could—for plants, and maybe even animals. She dried Lillian with a towel and walked her over to the pump. Rosanna picked Lillian up and set her beside the sink, then picked up, not the pail with the muck in it, but a pot she used for boiling egg noodles. She set it under the spout of the pump, lifted the handle, and pushed it down, then did it again. Water—clear water, and cool—spurted into the pan, and she pumped again. Soon she had about three quarts—the pot held four quarts. She realized that she had panicked. Dimly, in fact, she knew how a well worked—a well was a deep hole into an aquifer. Water seeping through surrounding rock and earth filled the hole, and every well had a capacity—a gallon a minute, or two, or ten, or whatever. But Rosanna had never in her thirty years seen anything come out of a spigot other than water, and so she had looked at the muck and panicked. Lillian was staring at the water, and Rosanna gave in to temptation and said, “Well, darling, it’s a miracle. We prayed for the water, and the water came.” Rosanna knew that Walter would disapprove of misrepresenting things in this way, but the words just came out of her mouth. Lillian stared at the water and said, “A miracle.”
Rosanna took her down from the sink and said, “Let’s go find Dula and Lizzie. I think they’ve been getting up to mischief.” As they left the kitchen, hand in hand, Rosanna saw Lillian turn her head to look at the pump. She did feel guilty, a bit. But, then, what was wrong in believing in miracles? Miracles abounded. There were plenty that you could see, and plenty that you couldn’t.
PAPA THOUGHT that he could get five cows, twenty chickens, and Jake and Elsa through the winter. As for lambs and hogs, well, the hogs had been slaughtered and turned into sausage and ham, as they were every year, and the sheep had gone away, too. If things looked better in the spring—if there was some snow cover—Papa said they could start again with shoats and lambs. It was not that they could go hungry—not only did Mama have pork and beef and chicken stored in the cellar, there were deer everywhere, and turkeys, too. Papa said that all the animals were thirsty and hungry. In a way, it was a mercy to shoot them, if they were coming around, because they had lost all caution. Better to be shot than brought down by a pack of dogs.
Frank was not worried. Minnie Frederick was not worried. It was true that the Grahams, who hadn’t had many animals, only lots of corn and a few other crops, had lost their farm and moved away, before the harvest even, because Mr. Graham didn’t “have the wherewithal” to harvest fields that were parched and dead just to keep them neat—Frank and Minnie tramped through those fields every morning on the way to school. Frank wasn’t quite sure what “wherewithal” was—probably money, maybe horses, maybe gasoline, maybe someone to help him. At any rate, the Grahams were gone, had not even turned up for the first day of school. There were lots of others at school who were not worried—the worried ones must have left, Frank thought.
It was Papa who was worried, though Frank wasn’t sure about what, exactly, and didn’t dare ask. There was a word Papa always shook his head after pronouncing—it was “bank.” Frank wasn’t sure which of the three things that could go wrong at a bank Papa was worried about—the bank “going under,” the bank “cutting him off,” or the bank getting robbed. Of these, obviously, the most exciting was the bank getting robbed, and everyone at school talked about such a thing happening, because Donald Guthrie had a cousin in Ottumwa, where seven or eight guys had stolen sixty or a hundred thousand dollars from a bank in September. Ottumwa was only a hundred miles from Denby, according to Papa. The same gang had robbed a bank in Minnesota in the summer, three hundred miles away. Frank suspected they were getting closer. What Papa said about it was “Lucky to have a hundred thousand dollars in a bank in Ottumwa in this kind of drought, if you ask me.”
Mama said that there was not going to be a bank robbery—the Lord wouldn’t allow it. Frank didn’t see why not, and Papa seemed to agree with him—he said, “Well, he’s allowed plenty of ’em.” Mama said that sometimes Satan got away with things and sometimes he didn’t, but in Frank’s experience, that was true of everyone, even Joey, who hardly ever tried to get away with anything, but had killed a bluebird with the slingshot Frank had given him and gotten away with it—Mama did not allow them to shoot at songbirds. Frank himself got away with so many things that he expected to do whatever he pleased, and he did.
He expected to get away with kissing Alice Canham, and he did. He expected to get away with kissing her sister, Marie, and he did, and when Marie told Alice, Alice wanted another one. Alice was thirteen and Marie was fourteen. Chances were, thought Frank, that he would also get away with kissing Minnie, but he spent so much time with Minnie on the way to and from school that kissing her seemed like maybe not such a good idea, although, on balance, he didn’t see how holding her hand could go wrong.
In order to further chase away any worries that the boys and girls in the school might have, their new teacher this year, Miss Horton, who was maybe eighteen and maybe not—Minnie said she was sixteen and had lied about her age because her family had lost their farm and were living in a shack in Usherton and the money Miss Horton got from teaching was the only money they had—was helping them plan the biggest Christmas pageant ever, and she had been trying out all of the boys and girls for singing. There was a piano in the school; Miss Horton was the one who tuned it up and got everyone to sing. And it was Miss Horton who said to Frank, after he sang two verses of “Beautiful Dreamer” and one of “Hard Times Come Again No More” (both of which she taught him), that he sounded like an angel, and Frank said, “No one ever compared me to an angel before,” and Miss Horton said, “Well, I can see that, Frank, but you have a lovely singing voice.”
When he told this to Mama, she said that all the Vogels and the Augsbergers were good singers, so no wonder, but she agreed to help him learn the songs he was supposed to sing for the pageant. There were three of them—the whole school was going to do “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear,” and then Frank, Minnie, one of the plain girls named Dorothy Pierce, and Howie Prince were to do “The Holly and the Ivy,” back and forth between verses. Then, at the end of the first part, or “act,” as Miss Horton called it, Frank was to sing alone—“I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.” This was a song that Frank did not know, though Mama did. She said, “I think that’s rather a sad song, Frankie.”
Frankie shrugged.
“Did Miss Horton sing it for you?”
“She said she would do that next week.”
“It is not a joyous carol. I would prefer you sang something that affirms your faith.”
“Have you sung it, Mama?”
“Well, yes. Granny
Mary likes that one.”
Frankie left it at that.
On Monday, when Miss Horton kept him after school to sing the carol for him (Minnie stayed, too), he found that he liked it, and he got the tune right away. On the third time, he could sing along with Miss Horton, and after the fourth time, both Minnie and Miss Horton had their mouths open.
Miss Horton said, “You sang that with real feeling, Frank.”
“I did?”
Minnie nodded.
Once they were out of the school and on the way home in the cold, dimming light, she kissed him on the cheek and said, “That’s what you get. But don’t tell.”
“More after the pageant?”
Minnie laughed and poked him in the arm. She said, “You’ll see.”
Well, there was no snow cover yet, which put Papa in a bad mood. After supper and a short Bible reading (lately, they were getting shorter and shorter), he got up and looked out the windows of the front room, as if he could make the clouds come. Each time he sat back down in his chair and picked up his paper or his book, his scowl got deeper. And for once Lillian was fussy. Mama didn’t know why, it looked like. Twice Lillian said “No!”—something Lillian never said. As usual, Joey just sat there. Finally, Frank said, “Mama, you want to hear my song?”
Mama pursed her lips, then said, “Of course, Frankie. I would like to hear your song.”
“What song is that?” said Walter suspiciously.
