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didn’t even plant them in one spot, just covered ’em with manure and straw. Every so often, I grab a plant and lift it up, and look at the potatoes.” And then, when they were full, “You can go ahead and grow all the corn you want, Otto, but you ain’t gonna make a profit from it unless you feed it to your pigs. More pigs, more profit. Walking dollars is what I call hogs. We got some Durocs this year, from Martha’s cousin. I like the Hampshires for the hams, but Durocs are longer in the bacon, her cousin says.” Then there was a long conversation about hog breeds. Walter’s own hogs were Berkshires, and they liked oats. But what didn’t they like? Walter felt happy. There was talk about cars—Bill Whitehead’s cousin over in Cedar Rapids had bought his second Model T for $260, but he’d had to pay another forty for an electric ignition. “Least you can get that now,” said Ralph Smith. “Cranking that thing before the war, my uncle had his hand broke.” Walter cleared his throat but didn’t say anything. How a person could have a farm with a mortgage and a car, too, was a problem he hadn’t solved, and so he allowed his father’s preference for horses to prevail.
    Here came Rosanna with Joe, the baby. Joe was five months old now, and big and healthy. You wouldn’t know from looking at him that it had been touch and go there for a bit—though how touch and go, maybe Walter himself didn’t know. Small baby, even though he was late, according to Rosanna’s and her mother’s calculations. And Rosanna’s mother thought he looked late: “Like a little old man,” she said, “worn out and wrinkled.” And then the milk didn’t come in the first day, or the second, and there was no denying that she was worried. As for Dr. Gerritt, he was so little help that Mary just senthim away. Walter himself thought that it was the oatmeal that did the trick—Rosanna could keep it down, first with water, then with milk, then with cream, and then with butter. She got better every day, and after that little Joe got better, and look at him now. Walter’s mother said what she always did, that he was the spit of Walter himself, plenty of dark hair and fat cheeks. Walter watched Rosanna as she carried him around each table, saying, “Joey, Joey, look at all of our friends come to see you!” Joey had one hand on her cheek, and she held the other hand in hers. Rosanna said that he wasn’t as far along as Frankie had been at this age, but Walter himself couldn’t remember. A spring baby got out more, was all he knew, so he had more of a sense of Joey than he had had of Frank. Joey was still getting up in the night, but Rosanna didn’t mind. She was a little protective of him.
    The funny thing was that Frank didn’t pay any attention to Rosanna anymore—it was like he couldn’t hear her voice. His head only turned when Eloise spoke to him, or Rolf (that was a rarity), or Walter himself. Mary said this was normal, and so did Walter’s mother, but Rosanna was taking it a little hard. Her mother said, “Someday you’ll have had so many that you won’t remember the differences between one and the other.”
    And Eloise said, “You always remember that I was the worst.”
    And Mary, not to be outdone, said, “Some things do stick in your mind, miss!”
    But there was no denying that what they would do without Eloise Walter couldn’t imagine. Now she was doing some of the cooking and all of the bed making and dusting. She pumped all the water and carried it in, and all winter she had kept the fires going because Rosanna was so sick. She didn’t mind feeding the hogs and the sheep if Walter was busy. She was big, too—well developed as well as strong. As far as Walter was concerned, she had earned the right to have her lamp on whenever she felt like it—kerosene was little enough to pay if she wanted to read late or do her knitting. She had no talent for sewing, so Rosanna had made her two nice dresses and a coat.