Little Blog on the Prairie

by Cathleen Davitt Bell

  For a second, there was silence. Everyone on the benches looked up. Ron said, “Cheryl, women in 1890 weren’t accustomed to speaking out in a forum like this.”

  “Sorry!” she said, smiling. But she didn’t sound sorry. She cleared her throat. “I know enough about history to tell you that in 1890 women were already practicing law in the U.S. court system, being admitted to the American Medical Association, running for and holding political office, and in some states such as Wyoming, inside of whose borders I believe we stand right now, women had already fought for and received the right to vote.”

  “Hear, hear!” shouted Caleb’s mom, who probably had no idea there was a huge streak of black grease on her forehead.

  “That’s true,” Betsy chimed in. “Wyoming Territory. Women were voting here as of 1869. Almost cost Wyoming its statehood, but the people stayed firm.”

  Before Ron could close his mouth—it had been hanging open during my mother’s and Betsy’s speeches—my mom continued with a laugh, “What I started to say is that Doug has been working so hard clearing trees, it occurred to me that this is our farm improvement if anything is.”

  Dad stood. “Cheryl, I think you’re right,” he said.

  “Oh?” said Ron.

  My father coughed. “I’m clearing out the woods around the cabin.”

  “Well, that’s what everyone’s doing. Cutting trees and amassing firewood is part of your regular responsibility,” Ron chided.

  “I’m not sure most people are going to cut as many as I plan to,” my dad said. He was speaking quietly, the way he does when he’s angry.

  “How many do you have in mind?”

  “A four-acre parcel,” he explained. “About the same size as our cornfield.”

  I could see the slight flush of pleasure on my dad’s face when Anders Puchinski let out a whistle and Ron tucked his chin, like a turtle scooting into its shell. “You sure that isn’t too much to take on?” Ron said.

  “I’m not doing it to impress you,” my dad said. “It’s the only way I’m going to feel safe from the bears. I saw tracks when I was out in the woods this morning, and I don’t like that. Not one bit.”

  “Very well,” said Ron. “I’ll upgrade you to a six, like the others.”

  At the picnic, my mom unveiled another surprise. It was butter.

  She had made butter. All by herself.

  We spread it on bread, on radishes (my mom said they do this in France), on cold sliced grits. It was so good I felt like I’d eaten an entire McDonald’s supervalue meal.

  And when I lay back this time on the picnic blanket, I didn’t think the sky was cruel and that everyone had better food than us. The only thing in my mind was that finally, maybe, I was full.

  Matt had found a biscuit-tin lid, and he and his dad, Clark, were getting a game of Ultimate Frisbee together. Ka’s mom—Maureen—marked the end zones with people’s sunbonnets, and Matt and Caleb elected themselves captains and started dividing the teams.

  Matt picked Katie and Erik and Anders and Maureen. Caleb picked Nora and me and Ron and Ka and his dad. No one else wanted to play. And no one really seemed to know the rules. Did you have to throw the Frisbee before someone else could count to ten? Did your whole body have to be in the end zone when you caught the Frisbee for a score, or just your feet?

  It didn’t matter. At least to me. Caleb threw me the lid and said “Nice!” when I caught it, and Ka high-fived me after she’d made a score. A goth girl who high-fives? Unusual. Maybe this place was getting to her. I, for one, was pretty sure I was staying the same, even if today, I felt pretty good.

  I had no idea that next week, everything would change.

  13

  Sunday night, just as I was composing a text up in the hayloft of the barn, the battery on the phone died. I’d known that this would happen sooner or later, but it still felt like a shock, and it took some time to register the full impact of the loss.

  I left the barn in a daze that reminded me of a time when I took a soccer ball to the face during a game and couldn’t feel my cheek for an hour.

  Over the course of the next few days, all I thought about were the things I wanted to tell Kristin and Ashley. About how, after we’d weeded, the corn suddenly seemed to shoot up and sprout tassels. About how, one day, we saw minicobs forming in the crevice where the leaf met the stalk.

  Not that I cared or anything. It was just interesting.

  Without the phone, the routine of our days dragged. Every chore seemed to take twice as much time. While sweeping up ash from under the stove, I ended up having a coughing fit and I just sat down on the porch and stared out at the sky, wishing I were somewhere, anywhere, else.

  On Wednesday, I milked Jezebel the way I always did, but for some reason she gave only half her usual amount. Gavin was supposed to clean out her stall, but he was nowhere to be found, so I had to take care of it—a nasty chore.

  When I brought the milk bucket into the house, my mom was washing some tiny carrots she’d dug up from the garden—you pull the small ones so the others have room to get big. She looked tired. She was sitting at the table instead of standing at the counter, her bun had slipped down to her neck, and her eyes were drooping like she was having trouble staying awake. She used her arms to push back some hairs that were falling loose and when I put the bucket of milk down on the table, she gestured with her head toward the counter as if she didn’t have energy to speak.

  I poured half the milk into a jug for drinking—the rest went into a pail on the shelf where it would separate, the fatty parts rising to the surface—yuck. Mom managed to summon the energy to get a few words out. “Set the table?” she said, without looking up.

  “Don’t I get to rest?” I asked.

  “Sure,” she said. “After the dinner is served.”

  “But you’re working at the table,” I protested when I got the plates over to where she was—there was no room for them.

  “Set it around me,” she said. “I can’t move.” That’s when I saw that she had her feet resting on the chair opposite. I took the lid off the pot that was on the stove top and started to dish out … yup, beans. Again.

  “Is the butter all gone?” I asked. She’d made a second batch that morning and we’d had it at lunch.

  “Yes,” she said. “Took a day to set, an hour to churn, and about fifteen minutes to eat it all up.”

  My dad came in, pumped some water into a basin and washed off his hands and wet his face. Still, there was a line of dried, salty sweat at the edge of his hairline that reminded me of the tide mark on sand at the beach.

  Gavin came in next. He’d been running. I could tell from the way he was breathing.

  “Don’t worry about Jezebel’s stall,” I said, laying on the sarcasm. “I took care of it for you.”

  “Thanks,” he said, like I’d been sincere. And then, “Come here a sec.”

  My mom said, “Dinner’s already on the table,” but Gavin dragged me onto the porch anyway. “Look,” he said, and I did, though I saw nothing but the wide-open door to the barn, the edge of the trees, the garden to the left, the field up the hill behind. “No. Here,” he said.

  And I saw that he was holding his hat—the newsboy cap he’d been given on the first day, which Mom made him wear to the picnics. Now it was upside down. He was using it as a bowl. “Look inside,” he insisted, and that was kind of exciting because I was expecting maybe something good to eat. Berries? Walnuts? The Puchinskis and the Meyer-Hincheys were always finding food in the woods.

  But the hat was filled with dirt. Except some of it wasn’t dirt. Or rather, some of the dirt was moving. I saw more: some of the dirt definitely wasn’t dirt. It was worms.

  Gavin has always loved really disgusting pets. Chickens are just the most recent example. When he was seven, he had a pet snake and a pet iguana. That was when Ashley started making me line the crack at the bottom of my bedroom door with a towel when she slept over.

  “I dug them up,” he
said.

  “I thought maybe you had something good in there,” I said. “Like you’d found berries in the woods.”

  “If you were starving, you’d eat worms,” he pointed out.

  “But couldn’t you use a bucket?” I said. “You’re going to have to wear that hat when Mom makes you get all authentic at the picnics.”

  “It’s going to be worth it,” he said.

  “If you eat those worms your breath’s going to be even more stinky than usual.”

  “I’m not going to eat them,” he said.

  Mom called from inside, “Dinner’s getting cold.” Gavin slid the hat back under the porch, covering it with a large piece of birch bark weighted down with a rock, I guess so the worms couldn’t escape.

  At dinner, my dad looked directly at my mom and said, “I want to get this out of my system, so I have to say it out loud: I hate it here.”

  When she didn’t answer, he went on. “I chopped down four trees with an ax this afternoon and hauled them to the edge of our property using ropes attached to my body. All because we are spending two months of our lives and all my vacation time at a place with …” He paused here, and I imagined he was considering all the terrible things he could say about Camp Frontier. “With a bear problem,” he finally ended. “I’m trying, okay? But my hands have been bleeding.” He showed us his palms, pocked with blisters, some swollen, some already split open, pink or even bleeding.

  There was something about the way he was looking at all of us that kept us from jumping up and offering to get him something to put on—gloves, or whatever they had instead of Band-Aids in 1890. He lowered his head and went back to shoveling beans into his mouth.

  “Okay,” my mom said. “Gavin, I hate to say this, but we’re going to have to kill Pumpkin.”

  Gavin stared. “No way,” he said.

  My mom ignored him. She looked at my dad. “Don’t you think roast chicken and chicken soup would make a difference? There’s stuff I can make even just with the bone marrow.”

  “You can’t!” Gavin said.

  “I don’t know,” said my dad. He was looking at my mom kind of strangely, like she was someone who had just walked into our house and he was trying to figure out if he’d ever seen her before. “It might help.”

  I haven’t seen Gavin cry since—well, I don’t know since when, but maybe the last time was a year ago when my mom accidentally (she said) put his Wii into the garbage and he had to wait for four months until Christmas to get a new one. He choked back a sob now.

  After dinner, my dad went back out into the woods. Gavin disappeared down the path with his hat, going who knew where. I had to help my mom wash dishes.

  Washing dishes on the frontier is one of the most disgusting parts of being here. You use a rag, right? Not even a sponge. And you rub it on the dishes in greasy semisoapy water. In spite of the fact that this water has floating bits of beans and onions in it, you’re still going to pull a plate out of it and be like, “There! All clean!”

  “Is Dad okay?” I asked my mom as we were working.

  She looked at me like she was going to tell the truth and then she waited one second and lied. “He’s adjusting,” she said.

  He’s not adjusting, I wanted to say.

  Neither was I.

  And killing Pumpkin was going to make Gavin cry.

  I missed my friends. I felt like they’d been with me on this trip—they’d been just a text away—and now they were gone.

  My mom and I hung the dishtowels on the clothesline, then my mom went into the garden to weed. I sat on the fence watching her until I couldn’t take it anymore. With the vague idea of going to find Ka, I walked into the woods and headed down the path.

  It was weird. Gavin disappeared by himself all the time, but I’d never left the farm like this. I guess because I’d had the phone, I had never needed to go looking for something to do.

  As I reached Ron and Betsy’s, I noticed a little path leading off before the opening to their clearing. I decided to see where it led. Eventually, I broke through some thickly growing trees and brambles to find myself standing in front of a shed that was bigger than an outhouse, but smaller than our cabin. It was made of rough logs, just like ours, but there was something different about it. The windows, I realized. They were made of aluminum, double-hung—and were those screens?

  And what was that shiny thing on the top of the building’s roof? Could that possibly be—? I got a better angle so I could see—and yes, it was: a solar panel.

  I know they didn’t have solar panels on the frontier back in 1890 and I’m pretty sure aluminum windows weren’t part of the package either. I was pretty sure this was something I wasn’t supposed to see, but I inched my way around to the back of the shed, and a window.

  I peeked through it, into a room whose bright white walls, blue carpet, and electric lights almost blinded me after so many weeks of everything being wooden and dark and drab.

  But I wasn’t so blind I couldn’t take in the computer. Yes, that’s right: a full-on twenty-first-century desktop complete with a flat-screen monitor, wireless keyboard, and a mouse pad that I could see even from the window was a tribute to the Milwaukee Bruins.

  I think I might have convinced myself I was dreaming if Nora—real, living, breathing Nora—hadn’t been sitting at the computer, her back to me, typing away as if an 1890s girl with a secret computer habit was nothing but completely ordinary.

  She was dressed in the red and black checked cotton dress she always wore. I could see the soles of her totally authentic 1890 boots where her feet were tucked behind her chair—I could see a hole in the bottom of one that was the size of a dime. She wasn’t wearing her sunbonnet, and her fat braid was relaxing down the middle of her back like a boa constrictor getting some sun.

  When she turned slightly I noticed a few details that were not totally authentic 1890: first, she was chewing gum. Second, she was writing with a pen that has a troll head on the top that you can spin until its bright pink tuft forms a kind of I-just-got-electrocuted hairstyle. Third, she was listening to an iPod—I saw the earbuds, and then when I recognized a lanyard that Ashley had made, I realized it was my iPod. Mine!

  Lastly, she was drinking—she took a swig right as I was watching—a genuinely modern Diet Coke.

  Oh. My. God.

  So this is what goes on here.

  Not even real Coke. Not even Classic Coke.

  And not even her own iPod. Nora was listening to mine.

  I reached for my phone, and for the hundredth time remembered that it was dead.

  But not for long, I thought.

  I ran, counting on the noise of the music piping into Nora’s ears from my very own iPod to mask the sound of sticks breaking and leaves rustling as my skirt dragged along the bushes. When I reached our barn, I scrambled up to the top of the hayloft, grabbed the Clearasil box from its hiding place, pulled out the phone charger, shoved it deep into my pocket, scrambled back down the ladder, and then, making sure that no one could see me, jogged off into the woods, following the path that led back to Betsy and Ron’s.

  14

  It was funny how places were starting to seem closer together the more I walked the distances between them. The first night, the trip from Ron and Betsy’s to our cabin felt like it took forty-five minutes. When we went back for the picnic, in the light of day, it seemed to take more like ten. Now that I understood the layout of the place—our farm and the Puchinskis’ were on one side of Ron and Betsy’s house while Caleb’s family’s and Ka’s were on the other, the trip felt even shorter. Tonight, I was so afraid I’d miss my chance to charge the phone, I ran the distance in a few minutes, reaching Nora’s electricity shack before I’d figured out how to get inside.

  I sneaked up from the back again and looked in the window. I couldn’t believe my luck. Nora was gone. I opened the door and let myself into the tiny office room.

  I took a second to look around. Everything about the space was so mode
rn it looked like someone bought it five minutes ago at Staples. I checked out the minifridge—it was filled with bottles of Diet Coke lined up like good little children during a fire drill in elementary school.

  Plugged into the power strip next to the line for the computer was my iPod. Sweet! I hooked my phone up to its charger, popped the earbuds from my very own iPod into my ears, closed my eyes, and felt how amazing it was to hear music after more than two weeks of nothing more than the noises of the chickens, the woods, my brother, my parents’ fighting, and my mom going completely and utterly insane.

  I picked the song my soccer team had been listening to on a boom box in the bus on the way back from our last game of the season—”Thunder Falls”—and for a minute just missed everything and everybody from home. I thought about how much I really, really liked the twenty-first century. I liked having friends, and things to do that were fun and hard, like soccer, instead of things that were just plain hard, like dishes and milking the cow. I missed clothes that were comfortable, sidewalks that ran in front of houses, Oreos, riding my bike, and swimming.

  I felt so safe and clean and calm that when I opened my eyes, it took me a second to register that I was no longer alone in the shed. But I wasn’t. And as soon as I figured it out, I was like: RUN.

  But I couldn’t. Because the same thing that made me want to run was also blocking my way.

  It was Caleb. How long he had been there I didn’t know, but it was obvious he had been waiting for me to open my eyes and see him there. Like an ax murderer standing at your kitchen window when you’re home alone at night. Only cuter.

  This isn’t rational, but I started to scream, thinking Ron and Betsy would probably hear me through the woods. But before I could get out much of anything, Caleb clamped a hand over my mouth and whispered, “Shut up, shut up” so many times that I was finally like, “Okay” and he was laughing so hard he eventually took his hand off my mouth anyway.

  I scooted back a few feet away from him, but I didn’t leave, because by now I had come to my senses. I felt myself blushing.