Some Luck by Jane Smiley Read Free Book Online

Three years and she would be married, no doubt, to one of these boys who were now wolfing down his sweet corn, and what would they do then?
    Rosanna said that Walter was a worrier, but there was plenty to worry about with prices so low. You may say that hogs paid the bills, or chickens and eggs and cream. There was a fellow down by Ameswho bred draft horses and sent them back to Europe by ship, since so many horses had been killed in the war that they’d lost even their breeding stock, but the thing that made Walter nervous (and maybe this was a result of his own experiences in the war) was the length of the supply line. Let’s say that, every hundred miles, some other person got a right to take a nip of the cherry. Let’s say that. Then, if you were sending your corn and oats and hogs and beef to Sioux City, well, that was two hundred miles, and Kansas City was 250. Chicago was about 325 or so, and beyond that Walter wasn’t willing to go. You could just say that the quarters got thinner or the dollars got paler the farther they came—that was how Walter thought about it. So sending draft horses to France and Germany? That was a strange business, like wheat to Australia. Walter didn’t trust it. The wealth was right here, spreading away from this table—chickens in the chicken house, corn in the field, cows in the barn, pigs in the sty, Rosanna in the kitchen with Joe and Frank, Eloise safe in her room thinking her thoughts. Walter looked around. His work crew was revived now, and making jokes—did you hear about the farmer who won the lottery? As if there were lotteries anymore. When they asked him what he was going to do with his million dollars, reported Theo Whitehead, he said, “Well, I guess I’ll just farm till it’s gone.”
    Too much oats. Too much oats. Walter wondered why he worried about such abundance.

1923

    R OSANNA LIKED the buggy. On a brisk late-winter day when the sky was flat and hard above the frozen fields and the sun was bright but distant, and before all the horses’ time was consumed by plowing and planting, it was good to have business in town—errands to do and people to see. Jake trotted along, happy, maybe, that the buggy was so light and there was no soil to drag it through, and Rosanna hardly had to shake the reins at him. In town, he would go to the feed store/livery stable and eat his noon oats after she dropped her basket of eggs and butter at Dan Crest’s general store. It was a pleasant outing, and she would be back to the farm before two. Of course, during the week, no one was doing much—the Lewises’ washing was hung out to dry, or Edgar French had his sheep grazing along the side of the road—but, whatever anyone was doing, at least it gave you a sense of life and progress.
    On a Saturday morning, town was busy as could be. There were three churches in Denby—St. Albans (where her family went), First Methodist (where Walter’s family went), and North Street Lutheran. All the ladies from all three churches were busy with this and that, either cleaning the church, or meeting in their quilting groups and sewing clubs, or shopping, or, some of them, having luncheons. If Rosanna went to town on a Saturday (and really, with Eloise going to school, there weren’t many other days she could go), she had to dressnicely—something in a new style and nice goods. People knew her perfectly well, so no one would mistake her for a town lady, but she didn’t have to look like she was dragging herself in from the farm. At the first houses (the Lynch place, on the north side of West Main, and the Bert place, on the south side), she clucked twice at Jake and shook the whip. Best to make her entrance at a brisk pace. Saturdays were different from Sundays, when they went to church (though in the Methodist church you didn’t have to go every week, especially if you were a farmer). On Sundays, they put on their Sunday best, which was sober and dull. On Sundays, she wore a hat and tucked