The Prairie Thief

by Melissa Wiley

  Jessamine’s mouth opened and closed right back again. Louisa knew exactly how she felt. There were so many things you wanted to say—or shout—when Mrs. Smirch lit into you like that, and you couldn’t. Because as bad as her tongue-lashings were, they were only the beginning of what Mrs. Smirch could do to make a person’s life miserable, and both girls knew it. Louisa reached over and squeezed Jessamine’s hand. Whatever happened with Pa, Louisa was only stuck with the Smirches for a short while. Jessamine was there forever. Or until she grew up, at least.

  Mrs. Smirch berated the girls for a little while longer, then ordered Jessamine to watch the boys and Louisa to chop some carrots for the stew.

  “Mind you don’t go pocketin’ any of my carrots, now, you hear me?” she added contemptuously. “I reckon I know your thievin’ ways.”

  “I’m not a thief!” Louisa burst out. She couldn’t help it. As if she’d go stealing carrots!

  “Don’t you sass me, girl,” snapped Mrs. Smirch. “Apple don’t far fall from the tree.”

  “My pa didn’t take your things,” Louisa said through gritted teeth.

  Mrs. Smirch snorted. “Well, my grandmother’s windup clock didn’t walk to your pa’s dugout all by itself. Nor my husband’s hatchet, nor his pocketwatch, nor my china-head doll that I toted in my own lap all the way from Topeka in case the Lord ever sent me a girl-child. Never thought I’d see my poor doll again.” She sniffed as if still mourning the loss of the doll that was now slumping crazily on the mantel, next to the windup clock that didn’t seem to have been wound or set since its return. “I’m missin’ a whole sack of carded wool, too. Lord knows where your pa stashed it.”

  “Nowhere!” insisted Louisa. “I don’t know who took your things, but I assure you it wasn’t my pa!”

  Mrs. Smirch rolled her eyes. “Oh, you assure me, do you? Well, Miss How-de-do-and-la-di-da, ain’t no use your puttin’ on airs—don’t change the fact that your pa’s bound for the hot place!”

  Tears stung Louisa’s eyes, and she quickly turned away. A pile of carrots lay awaiting her on the table next to the big chopping knife. She slammed the knife through a carrot, lopping off the skinny tip. Chopping felt good. She could think of several things she’d like to chop right about now, and carrots were pretty low on the list.

  Mrs. Smirch watched her suspiciously a minute and then, apparently satisfied that Louisa wasn’t going to come after her with the knife, picked up a basket of mending and went outside to sit in the shade of the north wall, where there was a bit of a breeze. Between the late-summer sun and the hot stove, the house was stifling.

  Jessamine was outside trying to keep Charlie from throwing his precious white stone at the chickens. Now and then Louisa could see glimpses of them through the open door. The little girl looked worn out, her braids slapping her back as she ran after the boys. Louisa had a sudden urge to fix those straggly braids, comb the hair smooth and plait them neatly, like Jessamine’s ma probably used to do, like Louisa’s own ma had done for her when she was little.

  Mrs. Smirch’s ugly words were still stinging in Louisa’s head. She hadn’t been putting on airs. Pa liked her to speak properly. He said her ma always sounded like someone out of a book, and he meant that as a compliment. Pa wasn’t a learned man himself, but he had great respect for book-learning. He owned two books, a Bible and a volume of poems by Mr. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and whenever he had a spare minute he read one of those books. He always read out loud so Louisa wouldn’t be left out. He liked some passages so well, she knew them by heart. His favorite lines were the ones about the simple farmers whose “dwellings were open as day and the hearts of the owners”—

  There the richest was poor, and the poorest lived in abundance.

  She thought of that book sitting on the little round table beside Pa’s chair, in their own simple dwelling, which really did seem as open as day, as open as Pa’s big heart, especially compared to the shut-tight heart of Mrs. Smirch. Louisa was overcome with a fierce longing to go home. Mr. Smirch hadn’t given her much time to pack. He’d told her gruffly to fetch what clothes she needed, and she’d been so shocked by Pa’s arrest that she hadn’t thought to take anything more than that. She ought to have brought Pa’s book, at least, and her picture of Ma and Pa on their wedding day, Pa all stiff and starched in his new suit, and Ma with her hair swept high and held in place by a tortoiseshell comb, the only fancy thing she’d ever owned. Pa had given that comb to Louisa on her twelfth birthday. He said she had hair just like her mother’s. The comb was tucked safely into a little wooden box on Louisa’s dresser at home, waiting for her to be grown-up enough to put up her hair.

  Evangeline! Louisa’s breath caught in her throat at the sudden, terrible thought. The livestock! They’ll die with no one to look after them. Evangeline will have the milk sickness if I don’t go milk her. And the chickens—

  Home. Louisa yearned to be back home, with Pa and their books and things, and their cow, Evangeline, who was named after one of Mr. Longfellow’s poems.

  The knife fell out of Louisa’s hand as she realized she hadn’t even put the chickens in their coop before she left. Foxes and owls had likely gotten them all the very first night.

  Without thinking about what she was doing, still clutching half a carrot in one hand, she sprinted out of the house and cut across the Smirches’ pasture, headed for home. Mrs. Smirch, patching Winthrop’s breeches in her shady spot on the far side of the house, didn’t see her go.

  CHAPTER SIX

  What in Tarnation?

  HOME WAS TWO MILES AWAY. LOUISA FOLLOWED Spitwhistle Creek upstream, skirting the stands of wind-twisted cottonwood that fringed the bank. Her feet pounded on the buffalo grass, echoing her heart. She shoved all thoughts of the Smirches to the back of her mind. Surely they’d understand she couldn’t let her pa’s stock die. Anybody’d have to understand that.

  After a long time the creek swung east in a curve she recognized. Home was just over the next rise. A rough-legged hawk was wheeling in the sky right over where she figured the chickenyard would be, and her heart lurched. Would there be any hens left alive? Must be at least one, she guessed, or that hawk wouldn’t bother.

  She cut through Pa’s cornfield, the silken tassels whispering all around her. Pa’d been out harvesting that corn when the sheriff came. It needed to be gotten into the barn before the critters got it, or there’d be some hungry bellies on the place that winter. Pa just had to get home soon, he had to.

  On the other side of the field she jumped the little crawfish brook that cut across Pa’s land to Spitwhistle Creek, and she hurried to the barn. She listened for Evangeline’s mooing, but the place was eerily quiet.

  I’m too late, she thought miserably. Suddenly she wasn’t hurrying at all. Slowly she walked the last few steps. Now she could hear something, a terrible sound, a sound of faint, pitiful sighs, over and over. The last dying breaths of a poor neglected cow, it must be, and suddenly Louisa could not move. She was terrified to round the corner and look inside the barn.

  What she saw, when she did look, made her scream and jump backward.

  “What in tarnation?” yelled Mr. Smirch, starting to his feet and knocking over a pail of milk. Evangeline turned a languid eye toward him, unconcerned by the commotion.

  “What are you doin’ here, girl?” bellowed the big farmer.

  Louisa gaped at him, dumbfounded. “I . . . I got to worrying about the livestock,” she faltered. “I thought they’d starve. I didn’t know you were looking after them.”

  Mr. Smirch blinked. Louisa thought he looked almost embarrassed.

  “’Course I wasn’t goin’ to let them starve,” he muttered. “What kind of fool do you take me for?”

  “I didn’t know,” said Louisa again.

  Mr. Smirch looked away, frowning. He set the milk pail upright and stood there staring at the white liquid turning dark in the dirt.

  “I ain’t done the hens yet,” he said at last. “Why don’t
you go hunt the eggs, long as you’re here. Then you better scoot back to my place. I don’t reckon you asked leave of my missus before you lit out.” He cocked her a sidelong glance. Louisa shook her head, blushing.

  “Yes, sir,” she said meekly, turning toward the henhouse. Then she thought of something and turned back. “Mr. Smirch, sir? Would it be all right if I went in the house for a minute? I—” She groped for an excuse. “I’d like to get my sourdough starter and bring it back to your place. I need to add to it now and then or it’ll peter out.” She saw his lips press together again and added hastily, “Anyway, I need a basket for the eggs.”

  “Fine,” he growled. “You just be quick, hear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The house was stuffy inside from having been shut up all day. She pushed through a wall of heat into the big silent space that was sitting room, kitchen, and Pa’s bedroom all in one. Everything seemed strange, not quite the way she remembered it, as if she’d been gone a lot longer than just a few days. But nothing had changed, of course. This was home. Here Ma and Pa had whirled in their sky-ceilinged ballroom. Here was where Pa’s smoky voice recited poetry of an evening. He had loved the cadences of Mr. Longfellow’s verses, and the pictures they painted.

  This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,

  Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,

  Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,

  Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.

  “Ain’t no one ever wrote quite like him,” Pa would say. “He tells grand stories, like that old Greek fellow, Homer—but he tells ’em in words that trip off the tongue like a good Irish lay. I reckon it’s because he’s American, like we are, Louisa. All these people from different parts o’ the world comin’ together here to make a new life, mixin’ up their food and songs and ways o’ doing things. Ah, ’tis a fine land you’ve been born to, Louisa Brody. Full o’ possibility.”

  Oh, Pa. Louisa shook herself back to the present and fetched a large basket from the lean-to. She tucked Pa’s Longfellow book in the bottom, and the wedding picture, and the jar of sourdough starter wrapped in a rag. Then she went to her little bedroom at the south end of the house. Pa had built it with windows on two walls so she could see the sun come up in the morning and watch it sink into the prairie at night, burning the wide sky all golden and pink. She’d shoved most of her clothes into a poke when Mr. Smirch told her she had to go to his place, so there wasn’t much left in the room besides the bed and the dresser. She saw her knitting needles poking out of the rolled-up end of a sock she was making for Pa and decided to stuff that in the basket as well, along with a ball of red wool for the second sock.

  Then she moved to the dresser. Atop it sat the little polished wooden box that held her mother’s tortoiseshell comb. She wanted it with her now, in case . . . she didn’t want to think of what kind of “in case” there might be. I just ought to have it with me, that’s all, she thought. She lifted the cover off the wooden box.

  The comb wasn’t there.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Seven-Day Clock

  MRS. SMIRCH STARTED RAILING AT LOUISA BEFORE she even got through the cabin door with her basket of eggs and treasures, but Louisa was too numb inside to take in much of what she was saying. All she could think of was her ma’s missing comb. It was the only thing she had that belonged to her mother, and that ache, sitting on top of the fear for Pa that had churned in her stomach since he was taken away, made her feel like she was going to be sick. Which would only give Mrs. Smirch something else to fuss at her about, she supposed.

  Not until that night, when she lay itching and fidget­ing in bed alongside the other children, did she have a minute’s peace to think things over. Someone had to have taken that comb; someone must have gone into her house after she left and stolen it, just like someone had robbed the Smirches.

  “Louisa,” whispered Jessamine in the darkness. “Don’t let Aunt Mattie get under your skin. She just ain’t happy ’less she’s got something to fuss about.”

  “It isn’t that,” Louisa murmured, and she told Jessa­mine about the comb.

  Jessamine gasped and would have sat bolt upright if Louisa hadn’t shoved her back against the straw tick.

  “But don’t you see?” Jessamine whispered. “That’s proof your pa didn’t do it, just like you said! There’s got to be a real robber around, and soon as your house was empty, he went in and helped himself. Was anything else missing?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Louisa. But she knew she hadn’t looked too closely the short while she was in the house. She closed her eyes and pictured home, tried to recall if there’d been anything missing. She remembered how it had felt strange, as if she’d been gone a lot longer than just a few nights. But there hadn’t been anything different, had there? Pa’s books on the table, the wedding picture on the shelf, her sewing basket in the corner. The room all hushed and lonely, like it missed her and Pa.

  “Wait a minute,” she said suddenly, forgetting to keep her voice low. Jessamine shushed her and Winthrop muttered in his sleep, rolling over, scissoring his legs. Louisa waited for him to settle and then whispered, “Our clock was gone. I didn’t hear it ticking.”

  “Sure it hadn’t just run down?” asked Jessamine, but even in a whisper her voice had a trembly excitement. Louisa knew they were thinking the same thing. The Smirches’ clock had been stolen too, and Mr. Smirch’s pocketwatch. Could it be this thief, whoever he was, had a hankering for timepieces?

  “It couldn’t have run down,” she said. “It’s a seven-day clock. I wind it on Sundays. Today’s only Friday.”

  “You girls cut out that yammerin’ afore you wake my boys!” screeched Mrs. Smirch from the other room, rapping on the wall with what could only be that infernal ladle. Jessamine clapped a hand over her mouth to stifle a giggle, and even with the worry over her pa and the comb and everything, Louisa had to grin too. Mrs. Smirch was louder than a rooster at sunup—a rooster at sunup having his tail feathers pulled out.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Badger Hole

  FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS, MRS. SMIRCH KEPT such a sharp eye on Louisa that she could hardly get away to use the privy, much less slip home to see if anything else was missing. She had tried to tell Mr. Smirch (because for all he was so gruff and taciturn, he was at least nice enough to hike the two miles each way to milk Evangeline and feed the hens every day, and in the middle of his wheat harvest, too), but he brushed off her suggestions.

  “Ain’t no thief skulkin’ around your Pa’s place,” he said. “If’n there was, he’d-a helped himself to the milk cow first, not go foolin’ with combs and whatnot.” He was striding away from her before he even finished the sentence. “That there’s a mighty fine cow,” she heard him mutter as he disappeared into the barn.

  Bet that’s the only reason you’re looking after her, thought Louisa darkly. You figure you can just keep her after they hang— She couldn’t finish the thought. Oh, Pa.

  Finally there came an afternoon when Mrs. Smirch had either decided Louisa was cowed enough not to run off, or she was just so tired of Winthrop and Charlie’s squabbling that she didn’t care.

  “You girls take them boys outside for a while,” she ordered. “Take a bucket with you. Might as well go see if any nuts have dropped in the grove.”

  Jessamine shot Louisa an excited glance. Louisa knew she was still hankering after another glimpse of her hat-wearing badger.

  Mrs. Smirch was eyeing the girls suspiciously. “None of your tricks, now,” she said to Louisa. “Don’t you even think of draggin’ my young’uns all the way to your place, and you best not leave ’em neither. Any harm comes to them boys, I’ll have your hide.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Louisa meekly. As if I’d ever dream of letting those little terrors loose in my house. There wasn’t anything safe from being pawed and prodded if Winthrop and Charlie w
ere around. At least, if they weren’t busy fighting with each other. Winthrop was a teaser, and Charlie a biter. And when he wasn’t biting, Charlie was crying. But that, Louisa reflected, may have been because Winthrop was either pinching him, pelting him with pebbles, or sitting on him—sometimes all three at once.

  But today the boys seemed glad to be out in the wind, running barefoot across the prairie, war-whooping and jumping over prairie-dog holes. They raced toward the hazel grove and the girls hurried behind, hard-pressed to keep up.

  “Ain’t no chance we’ll see him today,” said Jessamine, her mouth twisting in disappointment. “Them boys’ll scare off every living creature ’tween here and Fletcher.”

  Louisa smiled at her in sympathy. She knew Jessamine’s heart was set on proving she really had seen what she said she’d seen. Louisa knew how it felt to be dead sure of something, sure right down to your bones, and have folks scoff at you for it.

  “Maybe it’ll be curious and come see what all the ruckus is,” she said soothingly. Jessamine’s eyes went all twinkly again. Seemed like the least little kind word made her blossom like a prairie rose after a good rain.

  Winthrop and Charlie thundered into the hazel grove, crushing a good many nuts under their heels as they ran. Louisa didn’t know how they could stand it. Her feet were pretty tough from going barefoot all summer, but prairie grass was one thing, and hazel shells quite another. She scooped up a couple of cracked hulls and picked out the tasty nutmeat inside.

  “If these were walnuts,” she mused, “we could make ink out of the shells. My pa told me how to do it. I don’t think it works with hazelnut shells, though.”

  “Can you write?” asked Jessamine. “I was learning how, before I came here. I can read pretty well. But Aunt Mattie says schooling is a waste of time for orphan girls.”