Little Blog on the Prairie

by Cathleen Davitt Bell

  “Hmph,” Nora said. She didn’t sound convinced. Then she laughed. “I guess there is one good part of this summer, though.”

  “What’s that?” I was yawning now, feeling like I could be asleep in two seconds.

  “You don’t know?”

  “Um, no,” I said.

  “Caleb,” she whispered. Her face was inches from mine, and I swear she was watching me closely to see how I would react. I kind of held my breath, knowing she was watching, letting her words travel down through my ears and into my stomach, which immediately contracted around them, trying to block them from traveling to my brain. But they flew up there anyway.

  Before, when I’d wondered if Caleb and Nora were a couple, I thought that finding out might be the worst thing that could happen. But it wasn’t. Finding out with Nora watching—this was worse. Now I had no chance of being able to control my face, to keep from showing how I felt.

  “I’m not allowed to have a boyfriend until I’m eighteen,” Nora went on, “so… you know.”

  “Oh,” I said. I thought back to how they’d been partners for kick the can. I thought back to when Nora had booted me out of the electricity shack and Caleb had barely defended me. I thought about how thin and straggly my hair looked compared to hers flowing off the edge of the bed, other times bursting in silky curls out of the braids that tried to contain it. I thought about the sight of my plain fat face in Betsy’s mirror. If I turned over, if I blinked too long, if I so much as pursed my lips or took a deep breath, I would give myself away, so I just stared straight ahead, letting my eyes pool up with tears.

  “He’s your secret boyfriend?” I eventually managed to choke out. Maybe Caleb had been thinking about Nora the other day, when I’d watched him squinting up into the sky. “He’s been your boyfriend all along?” I was trying to say something that wouldn’t reveal that I felt like the floor was dropping out of the room, and I was about to slip into a deep, dark hole.

  “Uh-huh!” Nora said. She turned her back to me, took the only pillow, balled it up under her head, and, as far as I could tell, fell asleep.

  Five minutes or so later, I said, “Um, Nora?” and she didn’t answer.

  I didn’t have it in me to try again. In fact, for a while, I was pretty sure I was going to throw up. Only I didn’t throw up. I didn’t move. I just lay there staring up at the ceiling, listening as Nora’s breath became soft and even.

  My parents were in the hospital now. I wondered if they were having X-rays taken. I’d only ever had them at the dentist, but I remembered how it felt to be under the lead blanket, sharp pieces of cardboard wedged into the soft places of my mouth.

  I imagined Nora and Caleb walking away from me arm in arm, turning to say, “Are you following us?” I heard Caleb’s voice saying, “Please, Gen—Nora and I never get to be alone.” What had I been thinking? I’d thought he liked me. I must have misunderstood. Why had I let myself like him? Did he know I did? He probably did know, I thought, and thinking about that made me want to thrash and twist in the bed. Instead, I lay still as a stone so as not to wake Nora.

  Just then, more than anything in the world, I wanted Ashley and Kristin nearby. I wanted to have my phone back.

  I don’t remember falling asleep, only Betsy shaking me awake in the morning. “Time for chores, my dear,” she said. “Jezebel needs milking.”

  “Are my mom and dad okay?” I asked.

  “Ron got in just after dawn,” she said. “They’re doing okay. Anders and Disa too.”

  Dressing next to Nora, everything she’d told me, everything that had happened, came back fresh. My hands shook so much I could barely get the buttons closed on my dress.

  I walked back to our cabin through the woods, calling out “Hey bear” a few times and then “Stupid bear,” and “Stupid, stupid bear” and “You dumb miserable bear, what were you thinking?” As I milked Jezebel, I lay my head against her side, and she kind of grunted. It was comforting, if you can believe that. I nuzzled her a little with my cheek (I knew better than to stop milking; she wouldn’t like that very well), and I said to her, “You understand how much my life stinks, don’t you, you big old girl?”

  And then I thought, “Okay. I am talking to a cow.”

  And then I thought, “That would be pretty funny to text to Kristin and Ashley.”

  For a second, I wondered about the blog I’d seen so briefly. I thought about the eighty-four comments. What did all those people have to say? Did any of them understand how much all of this stank? I started trudging back to Ron and Betsy’s. “Bear,” I called, but I didn’t have it in me to shout. “Bear,” I whispered. “Bear. Bear.” It didn’t matter. The woods were empty. The people reading the blog Kristin made weren’t real to me in any way that mattered. I was totally alone. Once I realized this, that no one cared where I went or what I did right then, I turned around and went home. I climbed the steps to the sleeping loft in our cabin, slid under the quilt, and fell back asleep.

  For the next few days, while my mom and dad were in the hospital, Gavin and I elected to stay in the cabin by ourselves—with one of us running over to Betsy and Ron’s house in the morning to get the latest report on our parents. We told Ron and Betsy it was easier that way to get to the corn, which was ready for picking, but really, it wasn’t because of that. I had thought sleeping with Gavin was the worst thing that could ever happen to me, but now I knew that sleeping with Nora was even more horrific.

  “Don’t you want to see your friends?” Gavin said one night as he headed out to fish with Erik. “Ka or Caleb are probably just hanging around bored like you are.”

  I felt sick to my stomach at the very mention of Caleb, and Ka was not much better. What if she asked me about him?

  “No thanks,” I said, adding, “And I don’t need social planning advice from my ten-year-old brother, either.”

  Mostly, what Gavin and I did together was deal with the corn.

  The corn! It was ready. We ate corn every single night. First we ate it raw. It just seemed so much easier than figuring out how to light a fire in the stove and boil water and all that. We drank warm milk right out of the pail and crunched away on raw corn on the cob.

  The next morning, we ate more corn and also some of the tomatoes. Ka came by with cheese her mom had made and a loaf of bread. We had bread and cheese for lunch, and then for dinner decided it was time to cook. Instead of boiling, we tried soaking ears of corn in water without shucking them and then putting the ears on the top of the hot stove. It wasn’t very good but it was easy, and better than raw.

  All day, we brought burlap sacks out to the cornfield and picked corn. Once the sacks got too heavy to carry, we brought them to the end of the row, and at the end of the day while I experimented with ways to cook corn, Gavin used the wheelbarrow to haul all the sacks over to a small silo next to the barn. It was starting to fill up.

  Ron went back and forth to Laramie to visit my mom and dad and the Puchinskis in the hospital. He said they were doing better, but that they were taking steroids to help repair their lungs, which had received smoke damage.

  Betsy stopped by to drop off some food and mentioned that in order to keep up with the daily trips to town, Ron had been up until two in the morning, working by moonlight in the field—and Betsy had been doing half his work on top of her own. After that, when Ron offered to bring us to see them, I said no. I knew he really couldn’t spare the time, not to mention that Betsy or Nora would have to come over to our place to feed the chickens, milk Jezebel and clean out the stall—I didn’t want them to have to do that either.

  “If this was 1890 for real,” Gavin asked, “would they have died?”

  Ron had just had a haircut and you could see his bare, red scalp through the short spiky parts of his hair in the front. He sighed. He looked up at the sky—I knew he was trying to decide whether or not to be honest.

  “Anders would probably be dead,” he said. “And Disa, your mom, and your dad would have had respiratory pro
blems for life. They might not have been able to work. Which back in 1890—before disability laws, Medicare, Social Security—would have meant you kids would have been put to work, or farmed out to relatives, or sent to live in an institution, and your parents would have had excruciatingly difficult times of it too.”

  “Wow,” Gavin said.

  Gavin was quiet a lot after that. When we were working together in the field, I wondered if he was thinking about what it would be like to have Anders die—or to have Mom and Dad not be able to breathe.

  Friday afternoon, I was napping in the loft when I was woken by the sound of the van dropping my parents off. I could see them through a chink in the wall. (Chink in the wall? No wonder the bugs were bad.)

  My mom stepped out and opened the door for my dad, who was in the front seat. I didn’t realize until I saw the two of them that I’d been kind of holding my breath while they were gone.

  Once they were inside the cabin, I could tell by the sounds they were making that they were unpacking stuff, which must have included some pills, because my mom said, “You’ll need to make a chart or something to keep track of when you take all of these.”

  “Look,” my dad said. “Someone washed all the dishes. Do you think it was Genevieve?”

  “Somehow I doubt that,” Mom said. That’s when I leaned my head all the way over the edge of the loft, “I’m up here, you know,” I said. “And I did wash them.”

  My dad was sitting down, a tin cup of water in front of him. He looked pale and there were about a half-dozen orange prescription bottles laid out in front of him on the table. My mom barely looked any better, but I didn’t focus on her for very long because mostly I was staring at what she was pulling out of a plastic bag.

  “What is that?” I asked as a breath of something I could not believe wafted up into the loft. Call me crazy, but I could have sworn I was smelling my favorite chipotle steak and cheese sandwich. From Quiznos. Quiznos is what we always get for takeout after my soccer games at home.

  “It’s food from town,” my mom said.

  I said, “Oh.” And then, “Oh!” And then, “Do we get to eat it?”

  It felt like this must be some kind of a trick. My mom passed Dad a bag of potato chips. He said, “This wasn’t my idea.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Mom?”

  And then I was standing on the porch, calling, “Gavin! Gavin! Get in here!” and a few minutes later he came running, and he was like, “What?” until he saw Mom and Dad and then the bags on the table. My dad handed him a chip.

  “How did you sneak it on the van past Ron?” Gavin asked.

  “Ron knows,” my mom said. She smiled a little, but then got serious again. “I told him we needed to visit the present day. And that we had to have a talk.”

  “A talk,” I said. I hated to have talks. And I wasn’t sure I could concentrate. The food smelled too good.

  My mom raised her eyebrows at me. “Start eating,” she said. “By all means. But once we’re full, we need to decide for real whether we’re going to stay here or leave. It won’t be one person making the decision this time around. We’re going to take a vote. And then at the next town meeting we’ll tell everyone what our decision is going to be.”

  “Wow,” I said, taking my first bite of sandwich. All I could think about was how delicious it was. The bread squished down to nothing. The meat was chewy and tender. And it was so… so… salty! It was totally salty. Maybe almost too salty. But not quite. By the third bite, the salt was no longer even registering. I was back in heaven.

  “I hope you take this decision seriously,” my mom warned, but I couldn’t answer her. My mouth was too full.

  25

  After the Quiznos meal—and our family vote—Gavin and I showed my mom and dad all the corn we’d brought in. We ate tomatoes out of the garden like they were apples.

  “We should be preserving these,” my mom said. “You get points for putting up preserves.”

  “Who cares?” my dad said. Mom shrugged.

  The next morning, after chores and breakfast, we changed into our good clothes and left for the Sunday picnic. It was cold. The leaves were still full in the trees, but up on a mountain, I’d seen a tree with a swath of red where green should be. At first I thought there was something wrong with the tree—it couldn’t possibly have changed color in the first week of August unless it was sick—but then I remembered how high up we were. This was a place where fall and winter came early. I’d once heard Nora say they could expect their first snowfall before October 15.

  We ran into the Puchinskis on the path to Betsy and Ron’s. Anders was walking with a cane and stopping every now and then to take a breath out of an inhaler. Disa was walking slowly too. My mom told us that the doctors couldn’t believe that Anders was going back to the farm after what he’d been through, but he’d insisted.

  “Kids,” Disa said to Gavin and me. “I’ve talked to your parents about this already but I especially want to thank you both as well. You all saved Anders’s and my life. Gen—I heard what you did with the fire hose, and Gavin calling in on the sat phone. That was tremendous. Thank you.”

  Anders looked chagrined. “Gen,” he said. “I’m especially sorry about all the things I said about you earlier. It’s not really my place to judge.”

  It was so embarrassing to have him talk directly to us like that, all I could do was say, “Sure, no problem.” Gavin put his head down.

  Erik fell into step with Gavin as Ka came down the path to greet us.

  “Your hair!” I said to Ka.

  She put her hand up to her head. “Matt cut it.”

  “Why would you let him?”

  “I lost a bet.”

  “It’s so … so blond.” It was short and spiky too. She looked great. And also a little bit like a boy. Like Matt.

  “I’ll dye it again when I move to Southern California so no one thinks I chose to become a soulless android,” Ka said.

  “Does your mom like it?”

  “She likes that Matt cut it. She thinks it means we’re bonding.”

  I knew better than to ask if they were.

  “Do you think we’re going to lose points because of the fire?” Erik asked us. He looked a little shell-shocked still. “My dad heard that the insurance guy said it was caused by improper cooling of the grindstone. He feels really horrible, like that makes it his fault.”

  “I don’t think it’s exactly a point earner,” Ka said.

  Erik laughed uncomfortably.

  “We’ll probably have to talk about it,” Gavin said as gently as he could manage.

  I didn’t say what I really thought, which is that once my family announced the result of our vote to stay or go, the meeting would be all about that.

  “Remember the first meeting?” Gavin said.

  “I had to pee the whole time,” I confessed. “But I didn’t know how.”

  Gavin said, “I was still looking for the swimming pool.”

  “You thought there was going to be a pool?” Ka laughed.

  Gavin shrugged. “There’s always a pool when we go on vacation.”

  Erik whispered, “My dad thought we were going to be able to hunt.”

  “Like, with a gun?” I said.

  “That’s what they did on the real frontier. They ate a lot of meat.”

  “Wow,” I said, looking sideways at Anders.

  “I guess you guys wouldn’t have been up for that,” Erik said. “You won’t even kill Pumpkin.”

  “That’s right,” Gavin said, and he looked kind of smug about the whole thing. “We won’t.”

  …

  As we walked into Ron and Betsy’s yard, all thoughts of the fire, or Pumpkin, or our first meeting, or our family’s decision flew from our minds, because here’s what Ron and Betsy had in store for us: blinding, searing light.

  The light was coming from three poles that looked like something you’d find at one of Gavin’s Little League night games—bright shining panels
filled with halogen bulbs whose rays you could see bugs swarming into. It was daytime now, but still, the lights cast an eerie glow over everything, like an alien spaceship about to suck Ron and Betsy’s house into its tractor beam. We stood at the end of the benches shielding our eyes. Anders took a puff off his inhaler and my mom rocked back on her heels like she had been knocked off balance.

  Betsy rushed over, holding her hands up at shoulder level and shaking them—in elementary school, our teachers made us do that instead of clapping. They called it “silent applause.”

  “Oh, dear, oh, dear,” Betsy said, rolling her eyes. “This is so much more—big—than I’d imagined. I’m so sorry. Please try to ignore them. Just find a seat, find a seat. Behave normally.”

  My mom and dad, Anders, and Disa just stared at Betsy, like they didn’t understand who she was. They were on a lot of medication, that was true—and feelings of confusion are a side effect. But I wasn’t taking anything and I had no idea what was going on either.

  “Betsy!” my mom exclaimed. “What is all this?” Anders was leaning in behind her.

  “Oh, dear,” Betsy repeated. “I’m so sorry. You see, we had to. We couldn’t give up the chance.”

  “The chance for what?” my mom said.

  “It’s TV,” Betsy whispered, as if she was telling us that a friend was dying. “You see, they paid us a call just two days ago and said they wanted to do a story. They’re amazing, these people, at coming in and setting up, there’s practically a little village of vehicles behind the barn and they have all sorts of satellite dishes and … and … equipment.” She laughed. “I can’t believe I used to watch this show. I can’t believe we’re going to be on it.”

  “On what?” my mom said.

  “Oh, of course, how silly of me not to say so right away.” Betsy gave a little giggle, and then a squeal. “The Happy Morning Show,” she said. “The Happy Morning Show wants to do a segment on us. Can you imagine? Something this huge?”

  “The Happy Morning Show?” my mom said. “The news thing?”