by Jane Smiley
“His carol for the pageant.”
“That should be harmless, at least,” said Walter. He put down his paper.
Frank stood up and went over to the stove and clasped his hands in front of himself, the way Miss Horton had told him; then he began confidently, “I heard the bells on Christmas day, / Their old familiar carols play, and mild and sweet …” Just there, the same thing happened—there was something about those words, “mild and sweet,” that was delicious and drew him onward. The way the notes seemed to go more deeply into him as they got lower (at “goodwill,” he had to open his throat and chest to get down almost an octave to that note) made him stop seeing his audience. When he was finished, he saw that Mama and Papa were gawking at him. Papa said, “Frankie, you sang that song as if you knew what you were talking about.”
Mama said, “After this year, maybe he does know.”
They exchanged a glance.
“Good boy,” said Lillian.
Mama said, “You know, Opa was a wonderful singer when he was young. He was in a boys’ choir back in Germany that sang for the king.”
“What king?” said Joey.
Mama shrugged. “I don’t know. German kings, who could tell. A Frederick of some sort. Opa had to wear a satin outfit. But when we were children, he sang German songs for us. Then he stopped. I don’t know why.”
“He stopped because of the war,” said Papa.
“Well, yes, of course,” said Mama. “That must be it.” She sighed. But then she reached out and Frankie gave her his hand, and she said, “If you are given great talents, Frankie, you are to use them in the service of the Lord. Do you understand?”
Frankie nodded, of course, but he didn’t understand at all, really.
1931
WALTER WAS DOING a thing that he knew he shouldn’t, but since he didn’t have many animals to take care of for the time being, he couldn’t help himself—he was walking down to the creek just to check how it was flowing. Frankie and Joey were at school, studying about something entirely unrelated to farming, he hoped, and Rosanna was cleaning up after dinner (poached eggs on toast and some fried potatoes). The afternoon was sadly clear and bitter cold, especially brilliant to the west, which was where all things good and bad came from. There was snow, but his boots went right through it. He tried to ignore this.
If you’d asked Walter how many things about the now mercifully passed year of 1930 he’d found shocking, he would have said that nothing shocked him, but that was not true and he knew it. The question was not what was shocking, but what was not shocking. For example, he had been shocked when his corn yield turned out to be thirty-five bushels an acre—the crop had looked so bad that he had expected it to be lower, more like thirty, or less. After ten years of forty to forty-four bushels an acre, maybe he was just spoiled. And then, after the Grahams left, a farm not half a mile away, he and some of the neighbors, hating to see the crop just standing there, had gone to the bank and asked to harvest it and divvy it up. The Grahams got twenty-one bushels to the acre. That shocked everyone, but they didn’t talk about it among themselves—bad luck to do that. Walter could see the Graham house now, and the Graham fields. Walter hurried his steps to get out of the sight of those windows, flat and dark against the brightness of the air. Two on the other side had been broken by someone or something—maybe birds—and Walter had gone over and boarded them up, but that made the place look done for, made you want to peep inside and see the sofa and the dishes they had left behind. Even clothes and shoes.
The oat crop had been worse than the corn crop, more’s the pity for the horses and the cows, but the real shocker was that, with all the news about the drought (and it was worse to the south and the west) that they’d gotten over the radio, through gossip, and in the papers all year, prices had still dropped. How was that? Walter wondered. A bad crop year was supposed to be good for someone, and yet last year, 1930, had been good for no one. Of course, his father laughed. He could afford to laugh—he owned his own farm free and clear—but, more than that, his father always laughed at farming and what a joke it was on the farmer.
Rosanna said, “So—no one can buy food because of the Crash, but does that mean they are just going to let the people starve? Why don’t the churches buy it up? Or some rich people? The food is there, the people need it. Are they going to let it rot in the bins while people starve?” And, irritated, Walter said, “Yes, probably they are, Rosanna.” She found the Grahams’ empty house an abomination for the same reason. She said, “People are roaming the roads and living outdoors in the cold and freezing to death, and that house is sitting empty.” But there was no answer for her that Walter understood well enough to make. She would say, “I gave away my chickens. I even gave away my eggs. Better that they feed someone than get thrown on the trash heap!”
Walter said, “You are a Christian woman, Rosanna.”
So he’d paid his mortgage (just barely) and saved enough seed for the spring (just barely), and they could make it through another year, but what were they going to do for shoes for the children (yes, he had thought of rummaging through the Grahams’ junk) and bits of harness that broke, and how were they going to hire someone to dig the well by the house deeper? For two months now, Rosanna had gotten hardly a drop out of it—Walter and Frank carried water from the well by the barn, which was still producing, though not at the rate it had been. The Graham farm was just a little higher than his, and he suspected that the reason they left had as much to do with the wells as with the crops—that farm had never had as good water as the farms around it.
He also had no sense at all of how things were going to go in the coming year. His hopes had risen right around Thanksgiving with a pretty good snow, maybe six inches, but ice and rain a day later had washed it right away. Then another rain, and he’d felt bleak until, around the middle of December, there’d been five inches, and then another inch and another—a week of snow, until, finally, there were twelve inches on the ground, which made it hard to get to Frank’s pageant, but when they were at the pageant, Walter could not believe the exhilaration all around. When Frank sang his carol, yes, he did a good job, but you would have thought he was Al Jolson, the way all the parents in the audience jumped up and clapped for him. It probably hadn’t been good for Frankie, but Rosanna was happy, and even though you could almost see Frank’s head swelling, Walter had refrained from dampening their pleasure. Well, the snow was still there, hadn’t melted, giving the fields a rest and a promise.
Walter came to the creek. The water was about eighteen inches deep, and crusted with ice from the banks toward the middle though right in the middle it burbled along, dark against the pale ice. Maybe the ice and water were six feet across, or seven. Three years ago, the creek had been three feet deep and twelve feet across (though that was in February) and hadn’t dried up all summer, and the year Lillian was born, it had stretched bank to bank—you could swim in it if you dared, which he did not. Well, that was the year of the big floods down south, and which did you want in the end? That was another year when it seemed like he would finally get a good price and he didn’t, just the same price as always. Something, he thought, maybe stupidity, did not equip him to understand the life that he led.
THE FIRST TIME Frank heard the word “communist” was the day of Opa’s funeral, when Eloise came home from Chicago. He heard Granny Mary tell Mama when they were standing in the kitchen with their backs to the door, “Eloise isn’t a communist. It’s that boyfriend.”
Frank went over to the plate of sandwiches and took another one. He was of course sorry that Opa had died, at least in a way. He, Joey, and Lillian had gotten to say goodbye to Opa only four days before—Mama had kept them home from school and dressed them in ironed shirts and pants, then she and Papa had taken them in the car to Opa and Oma’s house, where the bed was in the front room. Opa was lying there, covered up to the chin even though the weather was pretty hot. Opa’s head was tiny, and his eyes were closed. Frank could just he
ar him breathing, but that was about it. Mama had led them to the bed one by one, and had each of them take Opa’s hand and say, “Goodbye, Opa, the Lord be with you. I love you,” then give him a kiss on the cheek. His cheek was wrinkled and dry, like an autumn leaf. Mama said he was alive, and Frank supposed it was so, but it was a faint sort of life, Frank understood, and ready to be gone.
Frank was an accomplished eavesdropper (though he would not have called it that—he would just have called it “paying attention”), and so he had overheard all sorts of stories about Opa: Born in 1840, before there was even a state of Iowa, came to America on a tiny ship with no windows that he was allowed to see out of, met Oma just after the War Between the States, in Cleveland, Ohio, where, apparently, everyone spoke German just like back in Germany. And then they came to Iowa.
Granny Mary now said to Mama, “Well, Opa always said, better a communist than an agriculturist. But he only said it in German.”
“A communist was a different thing in those days.”
Frank’s ears might have been ten feet across, but he loitered innocently at the table—he had two ham sandwiches and an egg salad, which he liked very much. He reached for a schnecken.
In Iowa, to hear Opa tell it, he plowed his fields on his hands and knees with a spoon, although Oma always tapped him on the knee when he said this and exclaimed, “You had Tata and Mosca, the two best Belgian draft horses in the county!”
“Ja, well, they watched me and whinnied to me if I was doing a good job with my spoon!” Then everyone would laugh. Opa started with sixty acres. (“That many! In Germany, no simple man like your opa ever had sixty acres! He had six feet by four feet, most of the time.”) Eventually, Opa ended up with eighty acres, and was happy with that, he always said. Uncle Rolf had been farming them for him for ten years now, Frank thought. He had them in hay some years and oats some years.
Frank saw Granny Mary start to cry again, and took his plate out of the room. Granny Mary said, “I was always so glad that he was my papa. I always was.” And Mama said, “We all were.” Mama put her arm around Granny Mary.
Eloise was sitting on the sofa with Lillian on one side and Joey on the other. She was playing paper, stone, and scissors with them, and Lillian was laughing. They tapped their three fists on Eloise’s knee and made their bets. Joey opened his fist, Eloise opened her fist, and Lillian spread her forefinger and middle finger, then pretended to cut the “paper” produced by the other two. Frank set down his plate and said, “Can I play?”
Eloise said, “Sure,” and Joey scowled. Lillian said, “Frankie hits.”
“He does?” said Eloise.
Joey said, “If he’s the rock and you have scissors, Frankie says he can punch you in the arm.”
Eloise looked at him. “Is that true?”
“It’s not a hard punch.”
“Yes,” said Lillian decidedly, “it is.” Lillian was four and a half now, but even though she was small, Frankie thought she talked like a six-year-old or a seven-year-old. He said, “I won’t hit this time. I’ll stop that rule for now.”
“Okay,” said Eloise.
They played four rounds. Frank won one round with paper; Joey one with rock; and Eloise two, one with scissors and one with rock. Lillian yawned and leaned against Eloise, who put her arm around the little girl. Joey reached for Eloise’s wrist and looked at her watch. He said, “It’s nine-fifteen already.”
“Late,” said Eloise.
“So go to bed,” said Frank. He wanted to find out what a communist was.
At the very thought of bed, Joey yawned.
Frank said, “I’m not tired.”
“Are you ever?” said Eloise.
Frank shrugged. Actually, the answer was no. Even when he went to bed at night, it was because he was told to, not because he was tired. Frank asked Eloise, “Do you miss Opa?”
“Sure. Everyone misses Opa. He was always nice. He’s the only person I ever met who was always nice.”
“Why was that?” said Joey.
“He said he left his naughty side in Germany,” said Eloise. “Standing on the dock, calling to him, as the boat left the harbor. His evil twin. For years, I thought he really had a twin.”
“Did he?” said Joey. But Frank knew the answer.
“No. It was just a way of talking.” They were quiet for a long time after that, and, just like a miracle, Joey yawned again and got up from the couch, while Lillian, who should have been in bed hours ago, closed her eyes and fell asleep. Frank said, “Eloise?”
“What?”
“What’s a communist?”
Eloise only smiled.
“Are you a communist?”
“Not quite. Did someone say I was?”
“No.”
“Then why do you bring it up?” She shifted on the sofa and laid Lillian out flat, then took a shawl that Granny Elizabeth had made off the back of the sofa and laid it over her.
“They said your beau is a communist.”
Now Eloise laughed out loud.
“Why are you laughing?”
“At the idea of Julius Silber ever being called a ‘beau.’ He would call himself my comrade.”
“What’s that?”
“My friend and fellow worker, someone who wants the same things I do. We don’t use words like ‘beau’ or ‘fiancé.’ They’re too French. Julius is English.”
“So a communist is someone who doesn’t like French things? Grandpa Wilmer is like that.”
Eloise pursed her lips and sat back, then said, “Well, Frankie, either you are putting me on, or you’re really interested. I can’t ever tell with you.”
“I want to know. I do.”
She blew out some air and looked toward Granny Mary, then said, “Communists are people who see how unfair the world is and want to make it more fair. They see that some people have much, much more than they will ever need, and other people have nothing, and they don’t think that there is any special reason for that, like God ordaining it or something.”
“Why do you think it is?”
“I think there are a lot of reasons, but the reasons are different here than they are in France, say, or England. Julius was born in England, so he has different ideas from mine.”
“How?”
“Well, in England things are really unfair, and have been for centuries, and if a person tries to better himself, he really can’t, because the system won’t allow it; but in America things that are unfair are more changeable, because they’ve only been unfair for, say, seventy or eighty years, and so—well, and also, the country is so big that if things are unfair in, say, Virginia, you can go to Texas or California and try it there.”
“I would go to Chicago.”
Eloise, looking just like the image of Chicago that Frank always thought of, in her smooth black dress and short hair that was waved and pressed against her head, patted him on the cheek and said, “I keep waiting for you.”
“Are things unfair in Chicago?”
“Well, Julius and I talk about that every day. Let’s say that they are less unfair than they are in England, and Julius likes it because he can live there and do what he wants, but it’s pretty wild. There are gangsters, you know. But if they repeal Prohibition, I think things will calm down there.”
“Are things unfair here?”
“Nothing is unfair here but the weather. However, the weather is pretty unfair lately.”
This, Frank knew, was true. He looked at Eloise for a moment, then said, “Can I kiss you good night?”
“Sure.” She offered her cheek, and he bent toward her, but her smell was so good that he ended up kissing her on the lips. She pushed him away and said, “Oh, Frankie. Goodness. What is Rosanna going to do with you?”
THE CORN HARVEST WASN’T over yet, but anyway Papa put Joey and Frank in the car and left in the middle of the afternoon. He drove them a hundred miles, to a town called Centerville. Joey fell asleep in the car and then was cranky, but they both woke
up pretty good when they saw how many people were gathered to listen to a man who was named Christian Ramseyer and was a congressman, though not “our” congressman—too bad for us, according to Papa.
Frank and Joey ran around in the crowd while Papa talked to other farmers they saw. Everyone was dressed in work clothes, not like when you went to church, but when Mama said she wanted the boys to dress properly, Papa said they were making a statement. “Don’t make it too loudly” was what Mama said, and then they left.
The farms all the way over looked just like the farms around Denby, but they did drive through Ames and look at the buildings at Iowa State College, where Eloise had learned to be a communist, according to Papa. When Frank said that Eloise said she wasn’t a communist, Papa said, “Well, why did she marry that Red Jew, then?” and Frank still hadn’t figured out what he was talking about. Anyway, no one was invited to the wedding, and they didn’t have a honeymoon.
After everyone ran around for a while, and ate some sausages and corn on the cob, they all went into a building (so many that they were spilling out) and listened to Representative Ramseyer talk about how he was going to save the farmers, and Frank liked what he heard. Representative Ramseyer was older than Papa, but he shouted like a preacher, except that everyone shouted along with him: “We want an honest dollar!”
“Yes!”
“A stabilized dollar is an honest dollar.”
“Yes!”
“Farmers will be able to pay their debts!”
“Yeah! Yeah!”
“And buy a few things for their families! Like shoes!”
“Yay! Yes!”
“People would be able to find jobs!”
“Yes!”
“And the banks would stand instead of collapsing! The solution to our difficulties is a simple one, though not easy. But I am working for you!”
“Yes! Yes!”
All the men and boys roared and jumped. Frank thought it was a little like that Billy Sunday time, but not as scary, and on the way home, Papa was as happy as Frank had seen him in months, telling Frank and Joey all about how America worked and communism did not, and that much was clear to every farmer, every hick, every Hoosier, even if it wasn’t to big-city types like Julius whatever-his-name-was.
