Some Luck by Jane Smiley Page B

bull-strong, and hog-tight,” but it limited what he could do with that back field. The problem was that it was dense with thorns, a couple feet thick, and a quarter of a mile long. Every time you wanted to get into the back field, you had to go around it, because, as intended, there was no going through it. It was also a bit unusual for this area—more common down south, Walter had heard, where such hedges had been all the fashion in the middle of the last century (when, Walter supposed—the thought made him smile, it was so ridiculous—all American farmers were going to model themselves on the landed English gentry and farm the same land for generations and also fox-hunt across it). But if you replaced it with barbed wire, you had to keep your eye out for breaks in the fencing, and you had to be there to fix it before any animals got through. No animals got through the Osage-orange hedge. In fact, no animals with a lick of sense went near it. But the thing was so permanent, more permanent than the barn and the house, since it had been planted before they were constructed. Probably old Litchfield, from whom he’d bought the farm, had sited the barn where it was because of the hedge—it meant a quarter of a mile less fence to maintain. As a result, the barnwasn’t where Walter would have put it. That was another thing that bothered him about the farm. Rosanna liked the house, though.
    Really, it was amazing, Walter thought, as he sharpened the shears, how things about your farm that you didn’t mind—or hardly even noticed—when you bought it, came to wear you down over the years. When you first walked onto your place, you were so glad to have it that everything looked good. Or perfect. Then, year by year—it had been six years now, six springs, summers, falls, and winters (mud, heat, harvest exhaustion, snow)—all the extra steps began to tell on your affections. And every wrong thing about a farm involved extra steps: that was what that long, impenetrable hedge represented to Walter.
    Even so, Walter knew he was less and less able to imagine any other life. He was thirty now. Ten years before, he’d been working for his father—head down, it felt like, his eyes lifted only as far as the next hill of corn. He’d had skills his father approved of, like planting a cornfield in a perfect grid, or fixing a harness so it looked practically new. And then, not unlike a bomb blast, two years after that, where was he, northern France, if you called Cambrai France (some people didn’t, they called it “Kamerijk”), and the grid of corn had turned into acres of blood and mud, and what he noticed wasn’t the tanks they’d used there, supposedly for the first time ever, but the fugitive birdcalls in the din and tiny purple berries in the blasted hedges. Except for the tanks and the fighting and the trenches, Cambrai had looked almost familiar, so flat was it, the horizon low against the sky. And then that was over and he had the influenza on his way home, in Georgia, and he recovered, and Howard, on the farm with his parents, did not, though his mother did, and over the years she had said more than once, “It should have been me that died,” at which point his father would leave the room and his mother would put her face in her hands. The only thing Walter knew to do was to pat her on the knee.
    But here he was, and prices were up, and there was Rosanna, and all his ideas about some of those towns he had passed through—Cedar Rapids, Chicago, New York, London, Paris—had simply vanished. He’d been a farm boy. And now he was a farmer, and no longer a boy, and it was disorienting how quickly Frankie was superseding him as the hope of his own father and mother and wife for something thathad nothing to do with Osage-orange hedges and badly sited barns and too many cows and not enough hogs (or vice versa).
    Well, the clipping was easy when he got down to it—he could go along one side in the morning and the other