Little Blog on the Prairie

by Cathleen Davitt Bell

  “Matt sees him,” Ka whispered.

  “He can’t,” I said.

  “Trust me.”

  And she was right, because the second Erik got close to the can, Matt started to sprint and kicked it out from under him at the last second. “Jail for you, Red,” he said, and Erik slunk off to join his sisters. If Matt was a kick-the-can expert because his dad taught gym, Ka, with her gym teacher mom, had probably also acquired some serious skills.

  When I turned to say something about this to Ka, she was already gone. I could see her crouched-down form sneaking from one tree to another, but I doubted that anyone else could. She kept low to the ground and was perfectly silent. She was patient too, waiting before each move for Matt to turn away.

  She reached the opposite side of the yard and started to make noises that I wouldn’t have thought were intentional if I hadn’t seen how perfectly silent she’d been before. Matt heard all of them, standing still each time to listen. I knew it was risky, but I reached for my phone anyway.

  Week 1 – Friday

  8:54 pm

  Matt and Ka play kick the can like a couple of covert military operatives. My training at Camp Sunshine doesn’t even remotely measure up.

  Pretty soon, the noises seemed to move from where I knew Ka was hiding to about twenty feet away. Ka must have been throwing sticks or maybe rocks. When Matt headed over to the spot where the rocks were hitting, I even saw her arm flash out from behind a tree. She was brilliant—she’d tricked him into following a nonexistent target.

  Matt took a few steps, then a few more, keeping one hand back behind him, pointing to the can as if he were maintaining some kind of invisible hold on it, prepping his body to run fast.

  While he was looking away, I followed Ka’s example, running to a tree closer in to the can. I checked to see if Matt had seen me. I knew I had to hurry because soon, he was going to be close enough to see her.

  The can lay in the shadow of a tree, next to all those eight-, nine-, and ten-year-olds who had started to play patty-cake games like they were on the bus on a field trip to Great Adventure. Matt was just far enough into the woods that he might not beat me to the can in a sprint. I started to move.

  I was holding my skirts in my hands, wishing the lace-up boots had better traction. Actually, I would have settled for any traction. People didn’t start wearing sneakers until the 1920s or something, and I slipped on every piece of crushed grass or spot of mud I touched. Still, I was booking. I could feel my skirts flowing out behind me and my knees pumping up toward my chest. The can was close. It was impossible for me not to get it and then—

  I did it. I kicked the can.

  The entire pack of Doll Club girls cheered. Running and screaming, they disappeared back into the woods, their braids flying out behind their heads. I hate to admit it, but they looked cute, their boots kicking up behind their skirts as they ran.

  “Aargh!” Matt screamed in mock anguish. I was already on the run by the time he made it back into the clearing, but I heard him shout, “Whoever did this to me, I won’t forget you!” He sounded like he was half laughing, half imitating a villain in a superhero movie.

  “It was Gen!” Anja shouted out, even though that meant she gave away her hiding place and was recaptured ten seconds later. To avoid Matt’s seeing me next, I stopped myself in midsprint and swung around a tree trunk, where I thought I’d be out of sight.

  What I didn’t realize is that there was already someone hiding there. It was Caleb. I nearly sat on him.

  “Ooh,” I said, pulling myself back up to standing. But he grabbed my hand and pulled me down so I was right next to him, my skirt landing in a pouf, some of it even covering his legs. Reaching over to pull it back onto my lap, I could smell the still-new wool of his rough shirt and pants.

  “Stay down,” Caleb said. “He’ll see you.”

  Our faces were so close I could see that his wide eyes were flecked with darker and lighter colors—they looked gray from a distance, but really they were half green. I felt delicious and warm and tingly inside. “Have you been here all the time?” I said. I didn’t really care where he’d been. I was mostly just glad to have him here now.

  “I’ve been moving around,” he said. “I saw your kick.” He lifted up a hand for a high five, and when I hit it, he closed his fingers around my palm. For a second, I didn’t understand. We were totally still. Then I realized that Caleb must have been listening to some rustling in the woods that I was too distracted to hear. Matt called out, “Cara and Stephanie!” putting them in jail again.

  Caleb pulled me to my feet. He whispered, “We’ve got to get moving.” He was still holding my hand and I was paying no attention to the game, I was so amazed by the feeling as he led me deeper into the woods.

  It was dark now and we didn’t see Nora until we were almost on top of her. “Look who I found,” Caleb said to her, then explained to me, “We’ve been holed up back here, and I was on a can-kicking scouting mission when you beat me to it.”

  Nora looked from my face down to Caleb’s and my hands. I let go.

  “Three’s too many for a stealth team,” she said, speaking to Caleb only, ignoring me. “We’ll get caught.”

  And then she stormed off.

  “Is she mad?” I said.

  Caleb shrugged, and I couldn’t tell if his shrug meant “Hey, I don’t care.” Or if he was shrugging because he didn’t want to tell me.

  But then, a few minutes later, Nora was back. She smiled at both of us, put her finger to her lips, and said, “We have to stake out a perimeter. My dad taught me this. For hunting. Gen, you stay here, and Caleb and I will find spots on either side of you. Move a few feet forward every minute or so, okay?”

  What I didn’t realize is that the animal being hunted was me. Shortly after Caleb and Nora disappeared in different directions, Matt shouted from about two feet away, “Gen behind the tree!” And even as I sprinted toward the can—he beat me to it—my brain was busy realizing that Nora must have alerted Matt to where I was. A minute later, Caleb was captured too—he surrendered so easily I wondered if maybe he’d let himself get caught just to hang out in jail with me. And then when Nora straggled in a second after him I wondered if she’d let herself get caught to keep tabs on him.

  The three of us watched from jail as Ka came in, then Gavin, and finally Katie, ambushed during a heroic last-ditch attempt to set us all free. The game was over and it was dark, so instead of picking a new It, we just stood around talking in little groups, waiting for the parents to finish chatting as well.

  While we were standing around, Nora kept herself glued to Caleb’s side. She laughed at everything he said, and played with the strings on her bonnet. At one point she even grabbed folds of her skirts and jiggled them a little, showing off her ankle. I think maybe it was supposed to be flirty, but to me she looked like a wannabe cancan dancer.

  I caught myself thinking, “Does my ankle look cute sticking out from under my long skirt?”

  And then I immediately crushed that question with a command: “Have some dignity, Gen.”

  At the end of the night, as my family trudged back through the woods to our cabin and cornfield and kitchen garden and so-far-eggless chickens, Gavin said, “All I did was hide behind a tree and get caught before I even made a run on the can, but still, it was fun.” I thought about how Caleb and I had sat at the base of the tree, him holding my hand, and Nora or no Nora, I knew exactly how Gavin felt.

  Week 1 – Saturday

  6:23 am

  Last night, Gavin told me my butt was keeping him from sleeping so I pushed him out of the bed and then I got in trouble. Typical.

  Week 1 – Saturday

  7:37 am

  Gavin hunted around for forty minutes this morning and he finally found it. An egg! For breakfast!

  Week 1 – Saturday

  2:24 pm

  Gavin and me lying on our backs in the shade.

  Gavin: Do you think that watching clouds
in 1890 was what they did instead of watching TV?

  Me: I don’t know but the idea that they considered cloud watching entertainment is maybe even more pathetic than the fact that they always had to eat beans. Gavin: I think the beans part is just us.

  9

  Week 2 – Sunday

  9:43 am

  One of Gavin’s jobs is to carry ashes from the stove to a big bin in the out-house. We all pour some ashes down the hole when we’re done. Everyone has ashes under their nails. Ew. Getting ready for the Sunday picnic--that’s this morning--my mom made us all scrub our nails clean.

  On Sunday, while I cleaned up the breakfast dishes and made the beds, Gavin hauled a new bucket of ashes to the outhouse and brought in a load of wood. My mom packed up the picnic basket, and my dad made sure that the doors and windows were locked up tight in case the bears came while we were gone.

  As we passed Ron and Betsy’s house, I pointed. “Imagine!” I said to Gavin. “A bedroom with a door!” I was being sarcastic, and talking a little like our grandma, but I was also kind of serious. My mom heard me and smiled, which immediately made me wish I’d kept quiet. If I sounded too cheerful, she might get the idea that I liked it here.

  After the game of kick the can two nights before, kids kind of smiled at each other as we took our seats on the family benches. Ka sat with us since there was barely enough space on her bench for her mom and stepdad, Matt, Katie, and Cara.

  “I bet Matt was really impressed with himself after he shut us all down the other night,” I said.

  Ka rolled her eyes. “They gave him the Hinchey Hooray.”

  “What’s the Hinchey Hooray?”

  She performed a mute clapping routine, sticking her fists into the air, chanting and ending with “Ouga ouga Hinchey.”

  I let my mouth drop open in an obvious, silent groan.

  “I know,” she said. “They do it all the time. They keep asking me if I want one. And I’m like ‘Ouga this.’” She made an obscene gesture.

  Once the meeting got started, Ron made the “leader” from every family stand up and report on what was happening at their farm.

  Caleb’s dad, Peter, went first. He was chewing on straw again, and while all the other men had changed into shirts with collars and long pants, he was wearing an undershirt and work pants—you got the feeling he was the kind of dad who was always in sweatpants at home. Caleb’s mom, I noticed, looked wrinkly—or maybe it was just the dirt caked on her face that made her wrinkles stand out. By Friday’s kick the can game, she had lost her bow, and now she had a piece of string tying her hair back that looked like the twine you’d use to bind newspapers at the curb.

  In his slow Southern accent Caleb’s dad described all the different potatoes they were growing, and then announced his farm improvement project. “We notice that there’s nowhere for kids—or adults for that matter—to swim. So I was thinking that Caleb and I would take a crack at damming up a spot we checked out on the creek to make a swimming hole. I remember one at my grandparents’ when I was a kid and I thought it would be good for the family and the farm to have a place to wash and play.”

  “That’s your farm improvement?” asked Ron, leaning on the word “farm” as if maybe Peter needed reminding of what that word meant.

  I’d never seen someone nod with a Southern accent before, but Peter did just that—a low-chin, exaggerated bow. “Yes, sir,” he said, and he sat down.

  Ron shook his head, laughing a little. Betsy smiled and said, “I think a washing hole sounds nice. And it’s lovely to see a man thinking of his woman’s ease.”

  Ka elbowed me in the ribs. “Thinking about a woman’s what?” she asked.

  “Clark?” Ron said next, pointing to Ka’s stepdad, who besides looking sporty, blond, and healthy, also looked young. He had clear skin and very little facial hair. When he spoke, he kept his voice intentionally low, and I wondered if he was compensating.

  “We’ve spent this week working on jelling as a team,” Clark began, running a hand through his hair—he probably had no idea that because it was dirty, it stood on end when he did that, making him look even younger. He cleared his throat. “A teen, two tweens, and a nine-year-old is tough. But Ron, I’d say we’re really bonding!”

  “Uh… no,” Ka whispered. “All we ever do is fight.”

  “Any improvements you’re thinking about?” Ron asked.

  “Yes, Ron,” said Clark. “We’d like to build some extra beds, and maybe a partition in our downstairs, or maybe an extra room.”

  “Or maybe a planet where they can send me to live all by myself,” Ka muttered.

  Clark plowed forward, his light eyebrows furrowed. “As you know, Ron—” I guess Clark was also one of those grown-ups who think people will take them more seriously if they address the person they’re talking to by their first name. “We’re a recently blended family and it’s pretty tough on the kids to be sharing space. We were thinking Matt could sleep downstairs—maybe we’d rig up a room for him off the side of the house, and the girls could have their own beds with us upstairs, or maybe even separate, with some sleeping downstairs in the kitchen.”

  “He’s totally freaking out about the fighting,” Ka whispered. “And the other day, I thought my mom was going to cry.”

  “That sounds like an admirable project,” Ron said. “And typical of an 1890 frontier. Settlers would begin with a need for basic shelter, and build onto the original structure as the years progressed.”

  He turned to the Puchinski bench. Red-haired, red-faced Anders was squirming in his seat like a kid who knows the answer, waiting to be called on by the teacher.

  “Our week has been full, that’s for sure,” Anders began. “On Monday, first thing I divided the kids into work teams, and then established a grid for weeding the field. I decided to incentivize the weeding by assigning a number value to each quadrant of the field…”

  “Have you noticed that every sentence out of his mouth begins with ‘I’?” Ka whispered when he was a long three minutes in—the man talked and talked and talked. And Ka was right. Anders took credit personally for every single activity on his farm that week—and that was a lot to take credit for, as the Puchinskis were doing about three times as much as the rest of us combined. They’d dug a secondary well and small-scale irrigation system for their garden, weeded their entire wheat field, expanded the chicken coop, killed a chicken and rendered its fat, built a shade pavilion by the field so they could eat their noon meal out there and save the time of coming in, and Disa—the muffin-baking mom—had sewn curtains for all the windows in the house out of the bolt of calico fabric each cabin had been rationed—I was using ours as an extra pillow.

  “Is he going to stop soon?” I whispered to Ka.

  “Or ever?”

  “Whew!” said Ron when Anders was finished. Actually, technically, Anders hadn’t finished. Ron had cut him off. “That’s impressive. Sounds like there’s a lot going on. Have you thought about what you would like to do for your farm improvement project?”

  “Oh, yes,” Anders said, the look of irritation that had crossed his sunburned face the second Ron had cut him off replaced by a new interest in his own idea. “I’ve been thinking about our wheat crop. I know you sell it and in 1890 that’s historically appropriate—with access to trains, major markets commodity farming had already become the name of the game—but what about milling some for use here? It could be kept in cold storage and would last through the winter. I’ve been improvising with some plans for jerry-rigging a millstone, or going back to some hand-milling techniques. If anyone has any ideas, please come talk to me after the meeting.” He laid a hand on his wife’s head. “And I hope you all get a chance to note Disa’s corn biscuits, because she’s been experimenting all week to get them just right. The ones we’ve brought for our picnic today look mighty fine.”

  My stomach literally growled. Ka giggled.

  Ron looked over at my dad. “Doug?” he said. “Your turn. You want
to say something?”

  My dad looked surprised. I guess he’d been assuming my mom would do the talking. I know I had.

  “That’s okay,” my dad said. “We’re not really doing very much on the farm this week. Just settling in.”

  “Why don’t you tell us about it?” Ron prompted. “Stand up, Doug,” he added, like my dad was a fourth grader giving a book report.

  My dad stood. “We haven’t done anything on the order of the Puchinskis,” he said.

  “Own what you are doing,” said Ron. “Even if you’ve been idle, this is the place for a reckoning.”

  At the word “idle,” I saw my dad’s chin duck back and his eyebrows shoot up. He’s a big guy, with a big paunch, and when he squares his shoulders, it’s impressive. “I certainly wouldn’t describe the past week as idle, Ron,” he said, and there was something so extra courteous in his tone that I could tell he was angry. Also, I think I was just noticing this for the first time, there was something leaner about my dad’s face. Was he losing weight?

  “All week we’ve been out in the cornfield,” he went on. “Meanwhile, the kids have done a bang-up job getting the hen to lay some eggs. But I have to say, what I feel should really be the first priority is keeping us safe from the bears. Bears are…” He paused. “Unacceptable.” He sighed. He looked exhausted. It was weird—my dad wears a suit every day, with the ties Gavin and I give him for Christmas and his birthdays. On weekends he wears one of three sweatshirts and jeans. In his new clothes there were moments when he seemed to be a stranger.

  “This camp…” He looked down at my mom and she smiled at him, kind of encouraging, kind of nervous, like she didn’t know what he was going to say next. He didn’t smile back. “This camp wasn’t my idea,” he said. “And I think this last week I’ve been figuring out what it’s all about. For instance, I didn’t know that I could eat only so many beans.” He was joking then, trying to make up for saying too much when he’d meant to say so little, but no one smiled or even nodded.