Little Blog on the Prairie

by Cathleen Davitt Bell

  What if my mom didn’t quit with us?

  She couldn’t stay here—no one could do the farm by themselves. Could they? If she tried, I’d be left sleeping in some hotel room, sharing a bed next to the bathroom with Gavin while my dad slept all by himself in the bed by the window. I shuddered. I squeezed my eyes and pushed the vision away.

  This was all my fault. I should never have brought my phone. And yet, all I wanted right then was to have it back, to be able to tell my friends what was wrong.

  I don’t know how long I was standing on the porch staring out at the trees, listening to the sounds of chopping, feeling stupid and sorry for myself and wishing things had been different. I do know that that’s where I was standing—on the porch, looking out toward the woods—when the screaming began.

  23

  It was a horrible sound. It was the word “Help! Help!” but I didn’t recognize it as a word at first. It was more of a shriek. Something in pain. An animal?

  But then a figure broke into the clearing from the direction of the Puchinskis’. It was Erik’s little sister Bryn—the one Gavin’s age. She was running so hard her skirt was flying from side to side with each step. Her arms were raised in panic.

  My mom came tearing out of the house and my dad was there, just in time for Bryn to take in a gasp of breath. “The mill!” she said. “It’s on fire! All the wheat. It could go. My dad sent me.”

  She didn’t have to say anything more. My dad shouted to Gavin, “Get buckets!”

  “Anja went to get Ron,” Bryn continued in a second gasp of air. “Erik’s helping my mom and dad. They’re trying to dig a trench around the mill to keep the fire from spreading.”

  My mom said, “Blankets—Gen—help!”

  I remember standing next to the table inside the cabin as my mom threw the blankets down from the loft. She gathered them up into balls to drop them over the side, but they unfurled in the air and floated gracefully down through the open space.

  Then we were following Bryn, running so hard my heart felt like a stone pounding inside the hollow box of my rib cage. We cut through the path in the woods, veered off where it went by the Puchinskis’, and headed toward the river where Anders had built his mill.

  We smelled the fire before we saw it. In the first breath I thought the smell was coming from the trees, that there was something wrong with them. The acrid air burned the inside of my nose.

  My mom and dad ran faster than Gavin and me even though they were carrying blankets and buckets. My mom looked over her shoulder right before the bend in the river and shouted, “Gavin and Gen, don’t come with us. It could be dangerous for you.” We kept running just the same.

  The air was thicker now with smoke. My eyes hurt from it and I pulled up my skirt to cover my mouth. Gavin pulled his shirt up over his. The last thing I remember before we actually saw the flames was a poplar tree by the river, its leaves rustling in the heat like this paper Santa we have at home where you light a candle underneath him and the flame makes him spin.

  As we turned the corner we could see the mill—or the fire where the mill once stood. Everything else was smoke roiling over the top of the yellow wheat growing up against the mill. I could see why Anders was worried it would go.

  Again my mother turned, but instead of speaking, she did something that I couldn’t believe and still feel weird thinking about. She bodychecked me—literally. I was running and she pushed her chest out and slammed her body into mine. I fell to my knees. She pushed me down the rest of the way and said, “Stay there. Don’t move. Don’t stand up. Breathe the air down here.” She pushed Gavin down as well. We were scared enough, we didn’t get up.

  I could see, though, and I watched what happened next. It was really fast.

  Erik was there. His face was streaked with soot. He was shouting at my father, but the fire was so loud I couldn’t hear what they were saying. My mother took Bryn by the arm and dragged her away from the smoke. Anders and Disa were nowhere to be seen.

  My dad ran from the fire to the stream and came out carrying two wet blankets. He could barely run under their weight. He wrapped one around himself and carried the other and walked—stooping—into the smoke cloud. My mom followed him first to the water and then into the smoke with a wet blanket draped around her head and shoulders too.

  When I say this went fast, I don’t mean the part where both my parents were gone. That part felt like it took hours. Erik crawled over to where Gavin and I were lying on the ground. “My mom and dad are in there,” he said. He sounded like he was reading from the telephone book. His eyes were big and round and his pupils were pricks of black. “They were trying to clear an area around the mill so the fire wouldn’t spread and then I couldn’t see them anymore.”

  “Whoa,” Gavin said. I was silent. The roof of the mill—which was black and dancing with moving red snakes of heat—lifted up off of what remained of the building’s frame, hung in the air like it was light enough to fly, and then slid over the side and crumbled. The mill no longer looked like a building but a mound.

  A black cloud of smoke shifted shape until I could see that it wasn’t a billow of smoke, but something moving deliberately—it was figures covered in blankets. They were coming toward us, and then they collapsed. A figure pulled a blanket off its head—it was my mother. “Gen!” she called out. “Come here.” Then she and the other blanketed figure, who must have been my dad, turned back into the smoke.

  Erik, Gavin, and I ran forward to the body that was on the ground. It was Disa. She wasn’t unconscious, but she looked confused. Her face was black with smoke and her dress was singed in parts and browned in others, like the skin of a toasted marshmallow.

  “Put your arm around me,” I said, wedging my shoulder under her armpit so I could help her stand. Gavin took her other side and we walked her down to the stream. Just then, Ron was there. His face was white and he was out of breath from running. He held Disa by the shoulders so he could look at her. He shouted, “Betsy!” Betsy came running behind him, and Nora was there too.

  “Tell me,” Ron said, looking right at me like he trusted me and knew I would tell him the exact shortest and most helpful thing he needed to hear, and I tried. He was putting on a fire helmet, goggles, a face mask, and fire jacket and pants as I spoke—all of which he’d gotten from a red nylon backpack that looked like something you would buy at a camping store.

  I said, “My mom and dad went in for Disa. They went back for Anders. They’re in there now.”

  He pointed to Nora, who was wearing a bright blue and yellow pack inside of which was a long coil of flat fire hose. “Help Nora,” he said. “She will explain.” And then he was gone.

  I remember that Nora looked scared. Her freckles were standing out across her nose and cheeks, and her jaw was kind of sucked in. For once, she didn’t look mean.

  “What do I do?” I said. Betsy was leaning over Disa. She had her breathing from a tank with a plastic mask at the end. She was taking her blood pressure while also instructing Gavin on how to use a satellite phone. He was holding it up to his ear and I could see that he was talking.

  “Take this,” Nora said, handing me the end of the hose. “Stick it in the water. Make sure it’s really in there, and somewhere deep.” I ran. I found a good spot, ramming the hose nozzle in between some rocks. I rejoined Nora, who had assembled a plastic black box that turned out to be a generator pump. It came to life with a loud roar and suddenly the hose went rigid. “Make sure it stays in the water,” Nora said, and unwound the hose as far as it would go—about twenty-five feet. She must have turned something on the end of the hose, because water began to shoot out of it into the mill fire.

  Just then, Ron came out carrying Anders over his shoulders, my mom and dad behind them. Anders’s left arm was draped across the front of Ron, swinging languidly. My dad was leaning on my mom, and they were all staggering. Betsy rushed to them and helped bring them out of the smoke to the place where she had Disa lying down under a
tree. She passed the oxygen tank immediately over to Anders, who was not unconscious as I’d thought, and could raise his head to make sure Disa was okay. They were both coughing, and Betsy made them lie back down. I wanted to run to my own parents to see if they were okay but every time Nora moved, the back of the hose became dislodged, so I had to keep resituating it to make sure the water was flowing in.

  She was starting to get the flames under control when Ron took over the spraying. He sprayed the wheat—really soaking it as the mill continued to burn. Nora joined me down at the stream. “I can do that if you want to go see your parents,” she said.

  I ran up the bank to where they lay. I heard the beating of a helicopter in the air above us, and then it was impossibly windy.

  “We’re evacuating you!” Betsy shouted down at the Puchinskis and my mom and dad. “You need to get to a hospital. I’ll keep the children here and Ron will meet you in the hospital.” The Puchinskis nodded vaguely. My mom looked at me—she was afraid still, I think, and I remembered how it felt when she knocked me to the ground to keep me safe. My back hurt, and I thought there was going to be a bruise from where I fell.

  The smoke and steam coming off the fire now was blown into the woods by the helicopter. Two medics jumped out while it was still running. One immediately ran over to where my mom and dad and the Puchinskis were lying. He asked Anders questions and started ripping open bags and pouches and sterilized packages that came from his blue duffel bag. The other medic started to work on Disa. My mom and dad were sitting up on their own now, but the medics insisted they lie back and they carried all four bodies on stretchers into the helicopter, one after another. It was like a movie, except the paramedics didn’t look like movie stars—one had a lot of chest hair sticking out of his paramedic shirt, and the other one was a woman who was chewing gum and had a leopard-print bandanna in her hair. Also, the helicopter looked old. Some of the paint on the body near the door was chipping off.

  Ron turned off the generator and started to beat at the pile of soaking wet black embers with a flat paddle that looked a little bit like a shovel. By the time the helicopter had lifted off I’d gotten used to the noise of it, and then when it was gone, it felt like the world was echoing and empty and I didn’t know what we were supposed to do, only that it was well past dusk now—it was getting dark. Betsy packed up her equipment, Nora rolled up the hose, and Ron stripped off his firefighting gear and put it away into the pack it came in.

  “Come, children,” Betsy said, looking very modern with her first aid kit strapped to her back but also very motherly and warm and inviting in her big dress. “You’ll sleep at our house tonight.” And so Bryn, Anja, Erik, Gavin, and I followed Ron, Betsy, and Nora into the woods to their house, where Ron washed his hands and face, changed his clothes, and then backed the white van out of the barn and drove off on the dirt road into the woods to make sure everything in the hospital was okay.

  24

  Betsy made us hot milk and put out some cookies, but I couldn’t eat them. I felt sick, and not just about my mom and dad being in the hospital. “You must have breathed some smoke in too,” Nora said, passing me a cup of water. “Drink this. You’ll feel better in a minute.”

  She was right. By the time I’d reached the bottom of the cup, the cookie was looking pretty tasty, and when I did manage to choke it down I quickly took two more and drank the milk also. Gavin, I noticed, was on his fourth cookie. Caleb’s mom came by, taking Anja, Bryn, and Erik to spend the night at the Drivers’.

  “You children did a fine job helping to fight that fire and get everyone out safe,” Betsy said. “Gen, you really kept your head, and Gavin, you knew more about operating that satellite phone than I did! Nora, tomorrow we’ll have to dry out the hose and put everything away properly, but that was a good idea you had to order it.”

  I took a fourth cookie. It really was very, very good. And it was hard in Betsy’s warm kitchen not to feel that everything was going to be okay, just as it was hard when talking to Betsy not to return her smile.

  “The fire stuff was your idea?” I said to Nora. My mouth was full and she rolled her eyes.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “It’s time for bed with you now,” Betsy said. “You children are up awfully late!” The clock up on their mantel showed ten thirty.

  Betsy had told me where we were going to sleep when we first got to her house, but the reality of the situation didn’t sink in until I’d started to recover. Because he was the only boy, Gavin got to sleep by himself downstairs on a mattress Betsy laid out in front of the fire. I was sentenced to a night in bed with Nora. It was not the slightly larger than usual bed that Gavin and I had been sharing in our cabin for the last three weeks. It was a regular twin-size bed that as an only child Nora usually got to have all to herself. After we’d changed into our nightgowns and crawled under the covers, our faces were only about two inches apart on the pillow.

  Up close, I couldn’t help but be impressed by how long, thick, and curly Nora’s hair was. It spilled out over the pillow and even down over her side of the bed when she propped her head up on her hand so she could look down at me where I was lying.

  I knew I should still be angry at her. After all, she’d been the one to turn the whole camp upside down by taking my phone out of the electricity shack and giving it to her dad. But after the fire, after working with her to pump water onto the blaze, I didn’t feel mad. Maybe, finally, I thought, we could be friends.

  At first, it seemed she was thinking that too.

  “This stinks, doesn’t it?” she whispered.

  “Huh?” I said. I was grateful to be lying down, and I could have drifted off to sleep in seconds.

  She whispered again, her blue eyes narrowed. “It stinks that I have to share a room with my parents.”

  I nodded my head. My space was just exactly as wide as my body, but I was deeply, deeply tired. I could feel myself starting to fade when Nora was whispering again. “I bet at your house you have your own room. I bet it’s huge, right? I bet it’s larger than our whole upstairs.”

  I nodded again, and sleepily conceded, “It has a trundle bed so when I have sleepovers we each get our own space to sleep.”

  “Do you have sleepovers a lot?” Nora said.

  “Well, not anymore. Not the regular kind. But Ashley and Kristin—my best friends—we sleep over each other’s houses all the time.”

  “They’re your friends?” she said. “Do they live right in your town?”

  “Of course,” I explained. “Ashley lives on my street and Kristin’s not too far—I can ride my bike.” I was almost too sleepy to notice the tone of envy in Nora’s voice, but I did notice it, and the idea that she was jealous kind of woke me up.

  She moved down to the pillow now, lying on her back and staring up into the rafters of the attic room.

  “Kids who come here,” I said. “For the summer. Do they ever come back?”

  “Sometimes, but not this year. This year, it’s all new kids.”

  “Do you get lonely?” I asked. I think I would have been too scared to ask this question if I had been looking directly at Nora.

  And I would have been right to be scared. At the word “lonely” she lifted her head and turned the force of her angry eyes on me. She was so close it was worse than usual. “Lonely?” she said. I inched my head back on the pillow as far as I could go without worrying about falling off the bed. “You want to know so you can feel sorry for me? Well, don’t, because no, I’m not lonely. Go back to your fancy house and your car and your friends and your perfect life and think, ‘Oh poor Nora, it must stink to be her,’ but if you really want to know, I am just fine.”

  “Whoa,” I said. By now I’d propped my head up on my elbow too and was fully awake. “I just asked a question.” I’d meant to whisper, but I was so sick of her being angry at me, I forgot. “Why are you so mean to me?” I said, whispering again. “What good does it do you?”

  “Because what’s th
e point,” she said, and turned away from me on the pillow. “You hate it here. Everyone hates it here. The grown-ups think they are going to love it and end up hating every minute until the end when they talk about how it’s changed them, blah blah blah. But you know. You and Caleb, Matt, Ka, you know that finding out how hard it was to live on the frontier is just a stupid waste of time. You can’t wait to get out of here and when you do, you’ll never look back. And you’re right to. This whole place is stupid.”

  “It must be awf—,” I started to say, but she cut me off.

  “You don’t know anything about it.” She turned onto her side so she could face me. “You and Caleb, Matt, Ka, Katie, all of you, you think you’re suffering. You think you’re totally deprived, but you don’t know the first thing about deprived. Think about what it’s like to have every kid in the entire country growing up normal except for you. Try to imagine what it’s like to go all winter with no one your age to talk to, then every summer meeting a new group of kids who don’t understand you. Even if you do make friends with them, you know after the summer you’ll never see them again. Think about that for two seconds and then you’ll understand why it is I don’t want you here.”

  “Some parts of this are pretty cool, actually,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah?” she said, suspicious.

  “Milking a cow is kind of cool,” I said.

  “You like milking a cow?” she said. “I thought you hated it.”

  “Yeah, that first day I did,” I said. “But now that I know what I’m doing, it’s kind of neat. And getting to know the other kids, that’s cool too. At home you kind of have to stick in your group—it’s not like you can go up to someone you don’t know at all and have nothing in common with and be friends with them. Out here everyone’s kind of forced to mix together.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “It’s pretty out here too,” I said. “At first I didn’t notice it, but now I’m kind of thinking I might even miss the mountains and stuff when I go home.”