A Wilder Rose: A Novel

by Susan Wittig Albert

  But I adored her. I loved to watch her brush out her hair and braid it, loved the glints and gleams in her thick, roan-brown hair, which fell loose in a shimmer down to her heels. At home, she wore it in one braid down her back; for town, she coiled it like a shining crown on her head and fastened it with her tortoiseshell pins. Beneath a fringe of curled bangs, her blue eyes gave away her mood. When she was out of patience with me, they darkened; when I pleased her, they sparkled. When she was happy, she whistled like a meadowlark, trilling and chirping and spilling song as she worked. She was young then, not yet thirty, and her skin was soft and smooth and smelled of soap and lavender. To this day, I can’t catch a whiff of lavender without seeing her as she was in those early days, my mother, young and lavender-scented and lovely.

  I especially loved the winter evenings in that tiny cabin, its log walls banked with snow and crystal icicles hanging from the eaves. In the fireplace, a fire of hickory logs blazed bright. On the hearth, my father, always silent, rubbed oil into a leather harness or smoothed a new wooden ax handle with the sharp edge of a piece of broken glass. At the table, in the circle of golden light cast by the kerosene lamp, my mother knitted woolen socks for my father and read aloud to us, her voice softly murmuring, while I sat on the floor with a pile of corncobs, building a little house of my own. In that hour, I had both a mother and a father, a measureless treasure.

  The next spring, my father traded a load of wood for a donkey that I named Spookendyke. I was supposed to ride him to school, although it can’t accurately be said that I rode him, for the ungrateful beast had the perverse habit of slumping his shoulders so that I slid off over his ears. In the classroom, barefoot and shabby and painfully aware of being very poor, I was seated with the other barefoot, shabby mountain girls, well away from the town girls in their wonderful store-bought dresses. Oh, how I coveted Becky Hooper’s red serge dress, trimmed with narrow bands of red satin, and Ethel Burney’s white stockings, and my heart ached for Josey Franklin’s shiny patent-leather shoes. I said nothing to my mother about these longings, for even a pair of the plainest shoes was beyond my parents’ reach. At home, I insisted that I would rather go barefoot to school than wear shoes. At school, I pretended that none of it mattered.

  But it did. Back in the frontier Dakota settlement of De Smet, the men and women, alike in their buckle-down grit, had worn their poverty as an earned badge of honor, and while the Ingalls family was even poorer than most, they had achieved, by virtue of their courage and stick-to-it, a certain social distinction. My mother rarely talked about it, but I knew she had felt the brutal edge of her childhood poverty as keenly as I felt mine. Mansfield was an established town with a closed social hierarchy built on seniority and wealth that was evidenced (to me, at least) by satin-trimmed dresses and patent-leather shoes. In Mansfield, poverty was a badge of shame, and my homemade dresses and bare feet were its insignia. While my father was courageous and my mother could even be gay in the face of our poverty, I was tormented, and those school days were a long nightmare.

  In the years to come, my mother would gain entry into the town’s clubs, and even establish one of her own, the Athenian Club, in Hartville, the county seat. But as a child, I was on the outside, as anyone could tell just by looking at me. Except for the Cooley boys, Paul and George, I had few friends, and no wonder: I was odd and bookish and spoke my own language, Fispooko, to Spookendyke and the chickens and the family cow. When there was time away from the work I was expected to do and wanted to do to please my mother, books were my life and my joy—books and the wild green hills and clear mountain springs where I dreamed under the hazel and sassafras hedges, edged with lavender horsemint and orange butterfly weed.

  The effect of childhood poverty stayed with me long after I came to an easier place in the world. For one thing, it taught me to hide my insecurity behind an exaggerated nonchalance, an attitude of I don’t care, which is perhaps my reason, now, for spending money I don’t have. It also—and this is more important, I think—made me a teller of tales, someone for whom the sheer pleasure of invention may overtake whatever facts might be involved, especially when I have an appreciative audience. I learned how to pose, how to adjust my story to my listeners or readers, a valuable asset for a writer of fiction. That doesn’t mean that I don’t always know where the truth lies, or that I am deceived by my own stories (although sometimes perhaps I am), or that I am not painfully honest with myself in my journals (as I certainly am). It only means that I learned, very young, to conceal the truth behind a fictional facade, which we all do to some extent—except that I have made a profession of it.

  The apple twigs my father had planted were still years away from producing, and cash remained scarce. So when I was eleven, we rented out the little house at Rocky Ridge and moved to town, to a small yellow frame house that we rented for five dollars a month, just two doors east of Mrs. Cooley and the boys. Mr. Cooley had died, and Papa took over his hauling business and his job as an agent for the Waters-Pierce Oil Company, selling kerosene, stove gas, turpentine, and linseed oil. The job required him to drive his team and wagon thirteen miles south to Ava and twelve miles north to the county seat of Hartville, each a four-hour round trip, often in the worst of weathers. Mama Bess set up a boarding table in the front room of our house and cooked for railroad men and traveling salesmen.

  All this effort brought a little more money, and life was easier, but I was still miserable in school. I was precocious enough to be utterly impatient with the ignorance of our country teachers, and I preferred teaching myself to being taught by them. I remember once being instructed to paraphrase some lines of Tennyson’s. I retorted that the lines meant more than the individual words and that you couldn’t paraphrase poetry without reducing it. Tommy Knight could, though. When he finished his plodding summary, the teacher turned to me. “Let this be a lesson to you, Miss Wilder,” he said darkly. “You fail because you do not try. Perseverance is a chief virtue. If at first you don’t succeed, try—”

  At this unendurable banality, I slammed my books on the desk and cried, “I won’t stay and listen to such stupid stuff!” And stormed home. And didn’t go back for the rest of the term. Instead, I lay in the barn and read borrowed books: History of the Conquest of Mexico by William Prescott, the Leatherstocking Tales, Sense and Sensibility, Dombey and Son, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and anything else I could put my hands on. My sporadic attendance seemed to do me no harm, and I know that I profited handsomely from my reading.

  Mansfield’s school, like most rural schools of the day, went as far as McGuffey’s Sixth Reader. When the town girls reached that great jumping-off point, many of them began preparing for their life’s work, helping their mothers at home and tatting edgings for the tea towels they embroidered for their hope chests until they married the town boys and began having town children. Thus was a woman’s life defined: her work was marriage and her place was in the home, tending husband and children and elderly parents, her own and her husband’s.

  I could see this daily all around me. But it was especially clear when Jim Miller hired young Mrs. Sims to make hats in his milliner’s shop, and the whole town was turned upside down. Mrs. Sims, who was artistic and clever with her fingers, was known thenceforth as an immoral woman. Of course, my mother had cooked meals for paying boarders, but she did it at home, as my father pointed out, not behind a plate-glass window on the main street, where every man could gawk at her. Once I was fully aware that this was my future—to be confined forever to my husband’s home—I began to plot my escape.

  It came in the person of Aunt E.J.—Eliza Jane Wilder Thayer, my father’s energetic sister, a female homesteader who had courageously proved up her Dakota claim, then worked for several years in Washington, D.C., before marrying (at the outrageously advanced age of forty-two!) a prosperous rice farmer and moving to Crowley, Louisiana. Now in her early fifties, Aunt E.J. was an indomitable woman, fearless, unfailing
ly optimistic, bright, and bossy. I think she saw something in me that reminded her of herself when she was my age. She called me her “Wilder Rose” and offered me a way out of Mansfield, at least for a year.

  “Come live with me, and you can go to high school,” she said.

  “Oh, yes!” I cried ecstatically. I had no idea what kind of place Crowley, Louisiana, might be, but I was sure that it would be more exciting than Mansfield, and we would have to go there by train. By train!

  “Absolutely not,” my mother declared firmly. She didn’t like Aunt E.J., who had been her schoolteacher when she was a girl in De Smet. (Later, in the manuscript she called “Pioneer Girl,” she confessed to being the author of a nasty bit of doggerel that included the memorable line “We laugh until we have a pain, at lazy, lousy, Liza Jane.” In a private note to me, she added that she had no excuse for such a terrible thing and that she should have been whipped.)

  I also believe, looking back, that my mother feared losing me completely; once I was able to escape her control, I might never come back. It had been a year of escalating battles between the two of us. I was considered wild by the Mrs. Grundys of Mansfield—those personifications of conventional morality—and my mother was always warning me of the dangers of being “talked about.” Silly rumors swirled about my acquaintance with a certain Latin tutor, who was fat and greasy and smelled of cheap cigars, while they might have swirled about my friendship with George Cooley, which was the more credible threat to my reputation.

  My mother rarely met a situation she couldn’t manage, but even she was ready to admit defeat. I would never have known that, except that I overheard her telling Mrs. Moore that she had come to her wits’ end with me and didn’t know what she was going to do. Mrs. Moore counseled patience, for I was “at that difficult age” and would surely straighten out in time.

  “They do, you know,” she said. “You just have to maintain the upper hand.”

  My mother sighed and allowed that she wasn’t sure she could maintain the upper hand for however long it was going to take. “And I don’t trust Eliza Jane to discipline Rose,” she added. “She needs close watching.”

  “It does take a mother to manage the wild ones,” Mrs. Moore allowed. “Have I showed you the pattern for my new spring sprigged lawn?”

  Taking advantage of the situation, I argued and begged and wept for another year of school, and Papa (who was no fonder of his bossy sister than Mama was but was desperate for some peace in his household) intervened. Faced for once with his resolve, my mother gave in. It was decided. I would be the only girl of my generation to leave Mansfield to further her education. Becky and Josey (she of the patent-leather shoes) were seized with envy—but only momentarily, for they had neither the imagination nor the will to escape. Both would marry town boys and bear town children, and while Josey would later leave Mansfield, Joplin was as far as she got.

  The year in Crowley—my sixteenth year—was educational in many ways. I not only triumphed over Caesar and Cicero and solid geometry, but I also helped Aunt E.J. hand out political leaflets and listened, awestruck, to her impassioned arguments on behalf of Eugene V. Debs, the Social Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, thereby becoming a young Socialist myself. And I made time for my first beau, an “older man” of twenty-four from the University of Chicago, who was exceedingly handsome (as I remember him, but who trusts such memories, magnified through a dozen retellings?). He drove a phaeton with red spoke wheels and polished his manners until they glittered.

  I graduated at the top of my Latin class in 1904, offered the class poem, and then returned to the relentlessly narrow life of Mansfield. But only briefly. In midsummer, my parents took me and my carpetbag to the depot, where I caught the train for Kansas City and a new life as a telegrapher. But Kansas City was just a temporary stopping point. I was embarking on a journey that would take me almost to the ends of the earth.

  After I left, Mama Bess and Papa moved back to Rocky Ridge, which by dint of work and saving and an inheritance from my Wilder grandfather now amounted to nearly a hundred acres. My father was still working off the farm as an agent for the Waters-Pierce Oil Company, and there was money coming in. My mother desperately wanted a nicer house than the little two-room affair with a loft, so she drew up the plans and, over the next several years, two local carpenters built it, with my father’s help and under his watchful eye.

  To the little two-room frame house with its loft, the carpenters added a downstairs bedroom, a washroom (which became an office after the bathroom went in), a living room with an alcove for bookshelves, and three porches. Upstairs, they added two bedrooms and a sleeping porch. In the kitchen, Mama Bess asked for the counters to be built low, to her height; in the parlor, she wanted a great many windows, window seats, a beamed ceiling, and paneling and flooring made from native oak cut on the farm and planed at the town sawmill. And at her insistence, Papa had the fireplace built of slabs of local stone, instead of the brick that would have been much easier for him to manage. She objected to the brick, she confessed in one of her articles: “I argued; I begged; and at last when everything failed I wept.” My mother got her fireplace: two sturdy slabs of Ozark rock, topped by a thick wooden mantel.

  By 1913, the house was finished and painted white. To help pay the mortgage, Papa sold the hay from the bottomland, and Mama Bess filled the upstairs bedrooms with city people who were visiting the mineral springs around Mansfield, on a paid board-and-room basis. And at last, some twenty years after we three had left South Dakota, poor as a trio of church mice, my mother had the showplace she dreamed of, a comfortable, romantic-looking farmhouse that denied the hard, inflexible realities of the farm itself: the daily work, the apple trees’ declining production, the invading scrub timber that had to be constantly kept at bay. The fact that a living could be wrested from the farm only with unceasing labor would not have been apparent to those who came from the city—or who read my mother’s articles about the joys of life on a small farm. And perhaps not even to my parents, or at least to my mother—which is understandable, for she had to insist (because she believed it) that their struggles were meaningful, were worthwhile. She had to deny their failures and, especially in her farm-journal articles, enlarge every small success into a major victory. For her, the house was the symbol of their triumph over hardships and hard times.

  But by 1928, Papa was seventy-one and increasingly lame. Mama Bess was sixty-one and mentioned her health, and his, in nearly every letter, tweaking my guilt. The farm was more than Papa could handle, and the farmhouse too much house for Mama to manage. Mansfield had an ice plant, but there was no ice delivery in the country, and my mother still relied on the springhouse in the ravine to keep the milk and butter and eggs cool. In the summer, the wood-fired cookstove turned the kitchen into an oven. In the winter, with only the coal heater in the dining room, the place was an icebox—and, of course, Papa had to cut and split and stack wood and haul coal and ashes. In every season, there was the constant, day-in-day-out feeding of animals: the chickens needed their laying mash, the pigs their slop, the cows their hay, the horses their oats.

  My parents needed electricity, central heating, hot water, indoor plumbing, a refrigerator, and a bathtub where Papa could stretch out and soak his crippled legs and feet in hot water. They needed that modern cottage I had in mind—although in retrospect, I wonder if I needed to build it for them more than they needed to receive it. Perhaps the little house I had in mind was an emblem of my success in the world of newspapers, magazines, and books, just as the farmhouse was an emblem of success for my mother, in her world. Perhaps that was why she resented the idea of the cottage, and me, and refused to even consider it.

  Convincing Mama Bess to live anywhere other than the house for which she had argued, begged, and wept was going to be a challenge.

  Looking back, I don’t know why I thought it could be done.

  The tenant house—the
first part of my plan—was a relatively easy matter.

  Papa agreed that it was impossible to get reliable farm help without a house for the hired man and his family. Mama Bess balked at the cost (less than a thousand dollars, I calculated), but she knew that Papa had to have help, and when she saw that he favored the idea, she finally agreed. He picked a site down the hill, and the project got under way. Once the four-room house was finished, Papa hired Jess Wiley to live there, do the chores, and work the farm. Jess’s wife’s name was Angela. They had one child and another on the way.

  But the cottage I wanted to give my parents—the “retirement house,” Mama Bess called it with a disdainful sniff—was another story, and my plan was stopped flat by her refusal.

  Now we were discussing it—again—at the kitchen table on a chilly, gray May morning, with the rain sluicing down the windows and the room so dark that I had lit the kerosene lamp. Troub was still in New Hampshire with her father. The spring had been chilly and dismally wet since my arrival in late March. Papa’s leg was so painful that he could barely get the chores done. Mama Bess had been up during the night with a persistent cough, and I had made her a mustard plaster, with flour and dry mustard and water, folded into a flannel sandwich that she put on her chest, under her nightgown.