Little Blog on the Prairie

by Cathleen Davitt Bell

  Week 3 – Wednesday

  10:30 pm

  Is Ka right? Are Ron and Betsy a front for some elaborate crime ring?

  I couldn’t resist another.

  Week 3 – Wednesday

  10:35 pm

  That would be AWESOME.

  15

  Week 3 – Thursday

  4:50 pm

  I woke up this morning to the most amazing smell. It was bacon--or salt pork, which is a lot like bacon. There was a coffee smell too, the stuff my dad calls sludge and drinks up here with no sugar because we don’t have any. But there was something else mixing all those smells together that made my stomach start gurgling immediately. And this is what it was: fresh-caught fish.

  Here’s what happens to fish when you cook it over an open, outdoor fire with some salt pork in the pan. It gets lacy on the edges. Brown and crispy. It flakes apart and the grease from the salt pork slips in between the flakes and the whole thing melts on your tongue. You can even kind of taste the river inside the flesh of the fish because it is so clean and fresh.

  I had still been sleeping when my mom and dad were awakened by Gavin and Erik Puchinski, who were shouting to them from the clearing in front of the porch. It was about five in the morning, and my mom said they were dancing around with twelve small silver fish hanging from a string that they were carrying between them.

  By the time I saw the catch, it was filleted and frying in a pan. “You two caught these?” I said to Gavin and Erik, with my mouth full, unbelieving, kneeling on my skirts at the edge of the fire and licking fish juice and salt pork off my fingers. The Puchinskis were sitting around the fire too—Erik had run over to get them. Since there weren’t enough plates or forks, I was sharing with my mom and dad and we were all eating with our fingers. Erik’s mom, Disa—who must have been pulled out of bed like the rest of us—somehow managed to be perfectly dressed in clean, ironed clothing, her hair neatly pulled back and her daughters’ hair braided as if they were ready for church.

  “We made hooks out of nails,” Gavin said.

  “Whittling them from sticks didn’t work,” Erik added. “So I pulled the nails out of a feed box in the barn.”

  “We bent them by banging them with rocks.”

  “Gavin dug up the worms.”

  “We tied the nails to some string and weighted them with rocks.”

  Erik’s little sisters were looking at him like he was some kind of superhero—and I have to say, I was also impressed.

  “Corn cake?” Disa offered, and I happily took a second from her basket.

  “What’s in these?” said my mom.

  “Just cornmeal, salt, and water,” Disa said. “We’ve been eating them since we got here and are sick to death of them.”

  “But they look so much like real food,” my mom said.

  Disa laughed. “You could make these easily. Just keep a low oven. Put some in after you’ve cooked breakfast when the stove’s cooling down, and they’ll be ready by lunchtime. They’re good, actually, with cheese.”

  “Just spending time with you makes me feel like I’m better at this than I am,” my mom said. “It’s like the way I always feel thinner around my thin friends.”

  Disa laughed. She laughed at everything my mom said—which made my mom want to keep talking, though I think Disa was laughing because she didn’t always know how to respond. “I’ve been so amazed this summer,” she said now, “that none of the other families have tried living like this before. I thought everyone would be more like us.”

  And then my mom was getting a lesson on how to make cheese, and I got up to play a game Erik and Gavin had invented with rocks.

  Here’s how the game went. Erik found a rock and scratched an X on a tree. Everyone who wanted to play gathered as many rocks as they could find and then we all took turns trying to hit the X with the rocks. Fun, right?

  Actually, it was. I was really good at it, and so were Gavin and Erik, but Anja, who was only eight, needed a lot of do-overs. No one cared except Bryn, who stamped her feet and whined “It’s not fair” while Erik rolled his eyes and made a big deal of being nice to Anja. You got the feeling Anja, Bryn, and Erik were getting a little sick of each other. But with fish in our bellies we all felt so good it was like a party. A six o’clock in the morning party. Pretty soon Anders looked up at the sky and said, “It’s getting time to get to work.”

  “How’s that mill going?” my dad asked as Disa packed up.

  “Not too bad,” Anders said. “But we need some mules or something to pull the grindstone. I’m thinking of harnessing the kids.”

  We all stared at him for a minute.

  “You’re kidding, right?” my mom was finally brave enough to ask.

  Anders gave a huge belly laugh. His red hair seemed to stand up on end, he was shaking so hard. For the first time I thought maybe he had something resembling a sense of humor. Maybe, I caught myself thinking, he’s actually kind of funny. Or maybe it was just that I was fish-drunk. There was a lot of sighing and licking of fingers, and then Jezebel was lowing at me from the barn, wanting to get milked, and it was time for Gavin to check on Daisy’s eggs before he went inside and took a nap.

  Pretty soon, though, he joined me in the cornfield, and my dad was back chopping down all the trees in the woods.

  Week 3 – Friday

  9:24 pm

  The secret to Gavin’s fish-catching zeal? We were sitting on the garden fence tonight and he told me. “Every single meal that goes by with no protein, I’m expecting Mom to serve up Pumpkin on a plate.”

  Week 3 – Friday

  9:30 pm

  For a second, the idea of Pumpkin on a plate made me hungry. And then I laughed really hard.

  16

  Week 4 – Sunday

  9:15 pm

  “You have a lot of emo on your iPod,” I said to Ka at the picnic on Sunday. It was the Fourth of July and Betsy had made each kid a cookie in the shape of the flag, decorated with red, white, and blue icing--she’d dyed it with berry juice. We were digesting the cookies and also our progress assessment scores--the Drivers and Meyer-Hincheys got eights, the Puchinskis got a ten, but we didn’t break six because we still hadn’t eaten Pumpkin.

  Ka looked at me like she didn’t know which end of my statement she should take a bite of. And then her brain figured out the most important part. “How did you get my iPod?” she said. “Do you have it? Can I see it?”

  “Nora has it,” I said, nodding in her direction. She was bringing a bucket of cold water out from the kitchen for people to take drinks from if they were thirsty.

  “Nora?” Ka breathed. “I didn’t think she even knew what an iPod is.”

  “Oh, she knows,” I said.

  And then I told her. About stumbling upon the electricity shack. About seeing Nora sitting at the computer inside. About going back when my cell-phone battery died.

  “Wait,” Ka said. “You have a cell phone? Here?”

  “I haven’t told anyone about it,” I said. “I didn’t even think I was going to use it.” I explained how my mom gave it to me the night before we left, how I’d snuck it in, if only to be able to look at it. “I just text my friends,” I said. “It makes it easier. To be able to tell someone else what’s going on.”

  “Wow,” Ka said. “So what happened when you went back?”

  I told her about Caleb’s being there and Nora’s kicking me out and how Caleb only sort of stuck up for me. About the Diet Coke. “Oh!” I said. “And I finally know what Ron and Betsy were doing before they came here.” I passed on everything Nora had told me about their past—their real past—and how I almost felt sorry for Nora, being stuck out here for the last ten years.

  While Ka and I were talking, we were sitting on a log at the edge of the woods. The Doll Club girls were setting up some kind of a doll hospital or school—or maybe it was a school for very sick kids who sometimes had to be put in bed for a long time. Gavin, Bryn, and Erik were teaching Katie how to play
the rock-throwing game. Ka had just finished telling me about how Katie and Matt got to go berry picking after dinner the night before while she’d had to say behind and finish the dishes. She and Katie alternated meals but Ka thought it always seemed like the nights when it was her turn to do the dishes, something conveniently fun came up for everyone else.

  “And by the way,” Ka said. “The Dashboard Confessional? The Yellowcard? That’s Katie’s music. She forgot her iPod for the plane ride and my mom made this big deal in the airport of making me download some albums for her to listen to. It was her way of trying to get Katie to like her.”

  “Oh, man,” I said.

  “I actually like a few of the Yellowcard songs,” she said. “But not their new stuff.”

  “Yeah,” I said, though I had no idea what she was talking about. Suddenly I wondered if I was even remotely cool enough to be Ka’s friend outside Camp Frontier.

  “So what do you think?” I said. “About the shack?”

  “What do I think?” asked Ka. “I think let’s go.”

  “Let’s go?” I said. “But if I show my face there again, Nora will tell her parents about my phone.”

  Ka stared at me in disbelief. She waited a few seconds, as if what she had to say was so obvious, she was trying to give my brain a second to get there on its own and save her the effort of explaining. “Nora’s not going to rat you out,” she said. “She’s bluffing. She can’t.”

  “She sounded pretty convincing the other night.”

  “But if she tells on you, what’s to keep you from telling on her?”

  I was starting to see Ka’s point.

  “You’re both holding knives to each other’s throats,” she added.

  “Isn’t that a little overdramatic?”

  “Oh, my God, I can’t wait to check my e-mail!” Ka squealed.

  After the picnic, my parents, Gavin, and I were making our way home when I heard footsteps behind us. It was Caleb, running. I assumed he had somewhere he needed to get to fast, so I stepped off the trail to let him pass. I was still so embarrassed about what had happened in the electricity shack, I didn’t want to talk to him. Sort of.

  But then he came to a stop where I was standing. “Hey,” he said, brushing his hair off his forehead. I could see the necklace he wore poking up over the buttoned collar of his shirt. “I didn’t realize you were leaving.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I was asleep,” he said.

  I said “Yeah” again. I didn’t say how I’d seen him drift off while his sister, Stephanie, was putting tiny braid after tiny braid into his hair or how, after he’d fallen asleep, Stephanie slept too, using his arm as a pillow.

  “Why do you have to go so early?” he asked. He still had corn-rows mixed into his hair.

  “Jezebel gets really ornery if she isn’t milked right at four thirty,” I explained. I was being funny—I hope he got that—but I was also speaking the truth. If you don’t milk a cow at the same time every day they start to make these funny noises, roll their eyes, paw the barn floor, and generally look angry.

  “Good point,” Caleb said. “I mean, think how you’d feel, if no one was letting you pee?”

  “It’s not pee.” I laughed. “We’re not drinking her pee.” The second Caleb’s eyes lit up into a smile, I felt my knees melt.

  He said, “Look, about the other night. Nora’s not that bad. I know she’s a little rough around the edges, but she’s a good kid.”

  “Yeah,” I said, wondering why he was defending her to me. Was she his girlfriend? I didn’t have the courage to ask.

  “The swimming hole my dad and I have been working on is almost done,” he said. “Maybe you can come out and swim in it with us sometime?”

  “Okay,” I said although I didn’t know who “us” was. Him and Nora? Him and his dad—the guy chewing on straw and nodding with a Southern accent? I certainly didn’t want to go swimming with Caleb’s dad, but the idea of hanging out with Nora was worse. Maybe I’d get lucky, and Caleb and I would swim with the Loch Ness monster.

  I must have been smiling at my own Loch Ness monster joke, because suddenly Caleb was smiling back at me, looking puzzled but happy. I didn’t know what else to do but keep smiling, and we stood that way until Gavin yelled, “Gen, come on,” and Caleb said, “Swimming, right?” and I turned around and kind of skipped down the path to where my family was waiting.

  Week 4 – Sunday

  3:45 pm

  Skipped? I know. It’s totally embarrassing, and yet it is also true.

  17

  When my mom had finished her oatmeal the next morning, she stood up and dumped her bowl into the basin we used to wash dishes. She poured hot water from the kettle over it and, with our one knife, scraped flakes off a bar of soap. I felt my throat closing up. After seeing the food I was eating—the oatmeal—floating around in that gray hot water slop, I couldn’t eat another bite.

  My dad finished his, took a last swig of coffee, and stood. “I’ll be getting out to the clearing,” he said.

  “What clearing?” my mom said

  “I’m calling the woods the clearing now,” he explained. “Because I’ve cut down nearly a hundred trees at this point. So as I see it, I have just as much right to call it a clearing as to call it the woods.”

  My mom laughed. “All right,” she said. “Gen, can you work on the butter while I get the washing started?”

  “Want me to pick some corn?” Gavin said. “There’s real cobs now.”

  “They’re not big enough,” said my dad. “You can come with me and help carry wood.”

  Gavin groaned. He hated this job and had splinters up and down his arms.

  But at least he didn’t have to make butter. Next to laundry, making butter was the worst job the frontier had to offer.

  Here’s what you need to do to make butter. After you get a bucket of milk, you let it sit on the counter for a day. Before long, some stuff starts to collect on the top—a skin—and then if you leave it, it gets thicker. That’s how you get cream. I know, totally foul, but you spoon that into this big wooden bucket with a paddle in it called a butter churn. Then you sit there using the paddle to mix up the cream stuff until your arm feels like it’s about to fall off. You lift the lid on the churn, check to see if you’ve got butter, and see that no, it’s not even close. So then you get really depressed. Being depressed is an enormously important part of the process; you can almost tell how thick the butter is just by how defeated and miserable you feel personally. But you keep stirring it some more anyway. It takes about five hundred million years before the stuff in the churn turns to butter, and by the time it has your arms are trembling, you have blisters on your hands, you hate your mom, and you promise that, to make it last longer, you will hardly eat any of this butter yourself. But it’s so good, that’s kind of a hard promise to keep, especially when everyone else is slathering it on everything like it’s free.

  My mom once went through this phase of making us all eat I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter! I texted Kristin and Ashley:

  Week 4 – Monday

  11:56 am

  I Can’t Believe (I know how to make) Butter!

  I hoped they got the joke. In case they didn’t, I sent a second post:

  Week 4 – Monday

  11:57 am

  Making butter is the stupidest waste of time in the world, considering you can go buy butter in any grocery store in the world any day you want. But stupid or not, I know how to do it and in fact I’m getting kind of good.

  Tuesday night after dinner and chores, I found Ka waiting for me as we’d planned on the path that led from our house into the woods. I could hear my dad hacking away at the trees not too far from us—I’d watched him and knew that he was repeating the same cycle of motions over and over: pull back, swing, chop, dislodge the ax. Pull back, swing, chop, dislodge the ax. He was going fast too, chopping at a sprint. My mom rubbed grease on his hands every night now and he was wrapping them in
rags while he worked, but still, they were blistered and sometimes even bleeding by the end of the day.

  Ka whispered so my dad wouldn’t hear. “I just went by Ron and Betsy’s and didn’t see Nora anywhere around. I think she’s going to be there.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Are you scared?”

  “A little,” said Ka.

  “Me too,” I said. “Nora’s so mean.”

  “There’s nothing she can do to us,” Ka reminded me. “She can’t tell her parents about what you’re doing without their finding out that she had a part in it too.”

  I didn’t point out that if my parents found out I’d brought the phone out here, Nora’s getting in trouble would do nothing to change what would happen to me.

  When we reached the clearing, Ka and I snuck around the back of the electricity shack and looked in the window before trying the door. Nora was there, and so was Caleb. Ka raised her eyebrows, took a deep breath, and knocked. Ka, I was learning, is very brave.

  “Hey, Nora,” she said. She sounded as calm and unruffled as if she were talking to friends in the computer lab at school. “Mind if I check my e-mail? Hey, Caleb.”

  Although maybe “unruffled” is not the best word. Because Ka was still twelve, all her dresses looked like the ones the little girls wore, with ruffles up and down the front. Ka was totally ruffled.

  Nora, who had been openly staring at Ka, not knowing what to make of her surprise visit, now focused her narrowed eyes on me. “You told her?” she said. “Didn’t you hear what I said the other night?”

  “Um,” I said. I wished I had a snappy comeback, something a girl detective from a TV show might say. Instead, I came up with “I heard you say that you would get in trouble if anyone found out camp families are in here. So I’m pretty sure you’re not going to breathe a word.”

  “Are you threatening me?”

  I didn’t answer her because just then Nora and I were both looking over at Caleb, who had started to laugh. “This isn’t funny,” Nora said to him. “I could get in a lot of trouble here. We all could.”