Upside Down in a Laura Ingalls Town

by Leslie Tall Manning

  We headed down the hill into the silent town, the only wagon in site. Maybe this is where real ghost towns come from, I thought as Dad guided Willow to a spot in front of Murphy & Sons.

  Wendell looked up from behind the counter when the three of us walked through the front door. “Brooke…”

  Dad interrupted our hellos. “I need to speak with your father, Wendell.”

  “Yes, sir.” He disappeared into the back of the store.

  “Aren’t we in town to see the sheriff?” I asked.

  “I want to speak with Mr. Murphy first.”

  “About what?”

  Mr. Murphy came out from the back of the store with his arms full. “Mr. Decker,” he said, placing the packages on the counter.

  “Mr. Murphy. I’ll just get to it. Our crops are gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Deer.”

  Mr. Murphy nodded like he wasn’t surprised. “Think you can manage till the end of September?”

  Dad sighed. “We still have our cow, and she’s producing every day. And our chickens are still laying. But…well…we have a pig. She’s healthy. Got anything for trade?”

  “Not unless you want some French gloves or Jane Austin books. Thanks to the drought, we haven’t got any fresh stock. Not to mention the soldiers wiping us out of necessities. Had a full store a week ago, but now about all that’s left are ladies’ items.”

  “Any suggestions?”

  “Could get you a butcher. He’ll take part of the animal in trade, but you’ll still have plenty of meat to last you.”

  Rebecca Lynn tugged at Dad’s arm. “Daddy, no…”

  Dad ignored her and continued speaking to Mr. Murphy, but I barely heard his words. I couldn’t stop thinking about Bambi, the way I’d dissed her most of the time, even when she’d done nothing to deserve my cold shoulder. It wasn’t her fault she was born a pig. Now I wished I’d pet her more; treated her with a little more respect. I should have played with her, the way Rebecca Lynn had. My stomach grew nauseous with guilt.

  “Sounds good,” Dad was saying.

  “Dad,” I said. “You can’t.”

  “We need to survive, Brooke. It’s how our ancestors did it.”

  “But we aren’t our ancestors.”

  “Why do you think the producers gave us a pig? To dress her up and put her in a dog show?”

  “She has a name, Dad…Bambi…”

  “Bambi,” Rebecca Lynn said, crying.

  “Should never name your stock,” Mr. Murphy said.

  Pissed off, I walked out of the store. Wendell followed me.

  I stood next to Willow and placed my forehead against her thick neck. “This is bullshit.”

  “Careful, Brooke.” He nodded up to the camera sitting in the corner of the porch ceiling, then looked in the store where Rusty stood with his lens focused on my dad and Mr. Murphy. “You don’t want to end up like the Duffys.”

  “The Duffys?”

  “You didn’t hear? They were sent home.”

  “Why?”

  “For doing something…un-neighborly.”

  Dad came out of the store. “Heading to the sheriff’s office.”

  Rebecca Lynn and Rusty followed him down the sidewalk, but I stayed beside Willow, stroking her mane.

  “I’ll be there when the butcher comes,” Wendell said.

  “You will?”

  “Of course. Bambi will need you. But you’ll need me.”

  The man in the leather apron knelt down in the mud while my sister and I spoke words of comfort in Bambi’s ear. Wendell handed me a treat to give her, and she nibbled it and cooed. It was the first time I’d ever heard her make such sweet sounds.

  It’s the first time you’ve noticed anything besides how dirty she is.

  Wendell walked over to the fence and stood by Dad. The butcher leaned toward Bambi, his long, sharp knife glistening under the sun, and for one quick second I was sure I could see fear in Bambi’s eyes. But then the fear was gone. Blood poured from her neck onto the mud. She fell onto her side. A loud grunt escaped her, and then her breaths came fast, like she had just finished a race. Moments later, her breaths stopped altogether, and her eyes grew vacant.

  Rebecca Lynn cried over Bambi, telling her how sorry she was, her tears dripping onto that face as round and sweet as a peach. I cried too. Sully lay down beside the pig and licked her snout. My sister and I stroked Bambi’s bristly belly.

  The butcher stood up and absently wiped his knife on his apron as he spoke to my dad. “Need to get her cleaned and gutted, pronto.”

  “Girls,” Dad said, “why don’t you go on into the house?”

  I nodded, taking my sobbing sister by the hand. As I led her out of the pen, Wendell touched my arm. His eyes were filled with tears.

  I mouthed, “Thank you,” but what I really wanted to say was “I love you.”

  Dad and the butcher and Wendell went out to the smokehouse to make our pig safe for eating. Wendell stayed for an early supper, which I refused to cook. So Dad and Wendell took a chunk of the meat and slowly cooked it in the fireplace while Rebecca Lynn and I wandered around the property, staying clear of the empty pen, salvaging what we could of tomatoes and carrots from the garden. Soon, Dad called us in. At first, I had a hard time staring at the pieces of freshly cooked ham on my plate, but then I remembered the only other foods we could count on were beans, rice, sunflower seeds, cheese, eggs, and a piece of fish if we were lucky enough to catch one.

  As I ate my meal, I thought to myself, Thank you, Bambi. Thank you for helping us survive.

  I said this last prayer believing that eating your pet pig was just about the most horrible thing that could happen when you lived out in the backcountry. Little did I know while eating my dinner in the calm of the summer evening, things were about to get a lot worse for our little homestead.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Maybe it was the mid-August heat and lack of rain. Maybe it was the fact that our stomachs grumbled all the time, and there was Prudence up in that comfortable mansion with servants fanning her and a lifetime supply of whatever she wished for. But probably it was because what Prudence had done to us went beyond playing a part. She could play Bitchy Betty all she wanted, but messing with my dad’s crops was over the top. Because we our crops were gone, Bambi had to be sacrificed. It would have been easy enough to send a message to the producers, ratting her out, but I wanted to tell her to her face what kind of loser she was. I marched up to her house with a bee in my bonnet, as the old-time ladies used to say. Rusty followed me up the hill and porch steps with a spring in his step, like there was a new bike waiting for him.

  Nanny answered the door. “Hello, Miss Brooke.”

  “I’m here to see Prudence.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  As Rusty and I stood on the porch, I gazed down the driveway. The pecan trees were eerily still, like they were waiting to see what I would do.

  Footsteps approached the door. As Prudence stepped onto the porch, and before she had a chance to open her mouth, I said, “I know what you did.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Do you know how hard my father worked to get those crops planted and cared for? Thanks to you we’re going to starve.”

  Carl and his camera suddenly appeared on the other side of the door. We were being filmed in stereo.

  But I didn’t care. Sabotaging a neighbor’s crops trumped giving Prudence a piece of my mind. Besides, women back in the day got pissed off at one another. Neither anger nor jealousy was a modern concept.

  “Starve?” Prudence asked. “What on earth are you talking about?”

  “You stole our chance to—”

  “I’ve never stolen a thing in my life. Not even another girl’s boyfriend, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “If you didn’t do it, then who did?”

  “Did what, exactly?”

  “Scattered corn all around our garden in the middle of the night. The deer ate our crops.”<
br />
  “First of all, I don’t go anywhere alone in the middle of the night. And secondly, you couldn’t catch me in that swamp you call a garden. Besides, what reason would I have?”

  “Money? Jealousy? Or maybe just because you’re a—” I said as clear as a bell so the microphones would take in every ounce of that one-syllable word. “Bitch?”

  “That is a foul mouth you have there, Brooke Decker.”

  “Yeah? Well, you have a foul attitude, Prudence Miller.”

  “I did not do what you accuse me of.”

  “Then explain this.” I pulled the ripped purple bonnet from my apron pocket and held it up.

  “Where did you get that?” she asked, grabbing it from my hand.

  “Where do you think?”

  “Nanny stole it from me.”

  “She did not.”

  “The two of you are in cahoots. You planned this together.”

  “I was wrong,” I told her. “You’re not a bitch. You’re a loser, with a capital L.”

  “L also stands for lady. And if I were less of one, I’d push you right off my porch.”

  “Go ahead. Lady or not. Do it.”

  Prudence moved closer and placed her palms against my shoulders. It was like being pawed by a kitten.

  I laughed. “That all you got?”

  There was no time to prepare as she repositioned her hands against my corseted chest and pushed. I soared through the air backward and tumbled over the edge of the porch into a large boxwood plant. The air left me, and for a moment, with my eyes closed, I struggled to breathe. When I opened them again, the large glass eye of the camera glared down at me. My angry reflection stared back. It took everything I had not to slam that camera into Rusty’s face.

  I stood up and brushed off my dress. My hands had tiny bloody scratches on them from the bushes. “You want to fight?” I asked, anger spilling into the air. “I used to hang out with mostly boys in my old neighborhood. If I can kill the enemy in a game of Tour of Duty, I can certainly kick your prissy butt.”

  I waited, but Prudence didn’t respond.

  “What’s the matter? Afraid you might get dirt on your imported dress?”

  The cameras were no longer poised on my face. Carl and Rusty aimed at something over my shoulder.

  “What—?”

  I turned around to see Wendell standing a few feet behind me on the path.

  “Brooke?” he said, his head cocked to the side.

  “Wendell. What are you doing here?”

  “Your father told me where you were. What’s going on?”

  “Just came up for a visit,” I said, fixing my bonnet and ineffectively smoothing out my dress. I wanted to tell him what Prudence had done to our garden, but his frowning face stopped me. “Is something the matter?”

  “There’s bad weather headed our way. My dad told me to warn you all.”

  “Bad weather?”

  “Your father wants you home. I need to get back as well.”

  As if on cue, thunder rumbled in the distance, and the trees which had been absent of wind only minutes before, shook the branches until their leaves sprinkled down onto the driveway.

  I shot Prudence a look: Next time you won’t be so lucky. Then I followed Wendell down the driveway, hiding the tiny scratches on my hands within the folds of my dress.

  By the time Wendell and Rusty and I headed across the road to the cabin, a wild gust caused the dirt to swirl up and pepper our faces. I covered my nose and mouth with my apron. My bonnet fell back from my head. Then the wind came on so strong it nearly knocked me over. Wendell held onto me as we made our way to the gate where Dad stood waiting.

  “Where’s your sister?”

  “I don’t know.”

  As Dad went off to find her, I walked with Wendell to his wagon. The trees lining the Millers’ driveway were bending in the wind. Rusty stood in the road filming the churning sky above our farm.

  “Be careful going home,” I told Wendell as he grabbed the reins.

  “I’ll be fine. Got extra weight in the back.”

  A half-dozen bags of feed were laid out on the wagon floor. My mom and dad had done the same when I was little with bags of sand in the trunk of the car in our pre-SUV days.

  Wendell leaned over and I stood on tiptoe as he kissed me on the lips.

  “Good luck,” we said at the same time.

  I waved goodbye as Wendell headed down the road. I guess Rusty felt safer in the Millers’ house than in our wobbly shack because he had already headed up the driveway. I highly doubted National Geographic would be calling him anytime soon.

  As he hiked up the hill, lightning crackled a few miles in the distance, thunder exploded across the hills, and a surge of nervousness moved down my spine and into my shoes.

  The sky cracked open as I stood on the front porch. A torrent of rain gushed down sideways as Dad and my sister came running across the yard. Rebecca Lynn had the milk bucket in her hand, but the wind grabbed it and chucked it off into space. Dad scooped her up and carried her, soaking wet, into the cabin.

  “What about Gretchen, Daddy?” Rebecca Lynn cried as he set her down. “She’s still in the corral. We need to put her in the barn with Willow!”

  Dad didn’t answer. “Close the upstairs shutters, Brooke. I’ll get the ones down here.”

  I tossed my bonnet onto the table, hurried up the ladder, leaned out and grabbed the shutters outside the tiny window, and latched them closed. When I came back down, the room was dark except for the fire. Dad and Rebecca Lynn were dragging our porch rockers into the room. Our tiny cabin creaked and moaned like an arthritic old man. The wind screeched at a high pitch while we slid the bench from the table to the front door. As we pushed the bench up against it, the wind knocked against the other side, threatening to come in.

  Rebecca Lynn shouted over the rain and wind. “What about Sully?” Ever since Bambi’s sacrifice, Sully had hung out in the barn with Willow like he needed a new best friend. “And what if the chickens get scared?”

  Dad knelt down and took Rebecca Lynn’s hands in his. “We can’t worry about them right now, do you understand? We need to protect ourselves.”

  He turned to me. “Brooke, go grab the quilts and pillows.”

  I did as he asked. Dad took the quilts and made up a small bed under the kitchen table. Next, he told me to gather up whatever food we had left. While Rebecca Lynn helped me fill an empty feed sack, Dad collected the lanterns and a bottle of kerosene and put them next to the makeshift bed. He tossed some wood into the fire, which blazed high and made the room bright. The wind above the chimney whistled as it sucked on the flames. I grabbed my guitar and slid it under the table.

  “I’m scared, Brooke,” my sister whispered.

  “It’ll be okay.”

  “Is it gonna be bad?”

  “I hope not.”

  “When will it stop?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I want to go find Sully.”

  “Dad said no.”

  “What if he’s scared?”

  “He’s probably hiding in the barn.”

  “What if the barn flies away?”

  I didn’t have an answer.

  Dad checked the cast iron pot in the fireplace. I had kept it filled with water since our first day in the backcountry, and Dad offered me an appreciative smile. The three of us crawled under the wooden table, huddled together, and listened to the wind. It died down for a short time and then picked up speed again, causing tree branches to reach down and claw at the roof. The rain was relentless, slapping against the sides of the cabin. The wind shook the building like a snow globe.

  Mother Nature was now the main star of Upside Down in a Laura Ingalls Town: Hurricane Edition. It hit me how alone we were, just the three of us, not only cut off from our neighbors, but cut off from the real world.

  Nearby, there came a loud splitting like the crack of a rifle, and then the sound of a giant tree hitting the earth. Rebecca Lynn s
creamed as one of my two mixing bowls crashed to the floor and broke into pieces.

  My favorite bowl, I thought, not realizing I’d had one until that moment.

  Rebecca Lynn cried, and Dad held her. When another tree fell, like a giant falling from the top of a beanstalk, Dad didn’t look like our protector anymore. He looked like a man who had deliberately set up his family for a tragedy and would soon have to deal with the consequences.

  “Are we going to make it?” I asked.

  He nodded, but it was only out of courtesy.

  Rebecca Lynn whined, “I have to pee.”

  “No,” Dad said.

  “But I can’t hold it…”

  Dad crawled out from under the table and grabbed the empty dish bucket. We turned our backs as my little sister tinkled. When she came back under the table, she said, choking on her words, “I want to go home. I want Mommy.”

  Dad held her while my hand rubbed circles against her back.

  I pictured us being picked up the next day by a limousine, Novak the producer sitting in the back smoking a fat cigar while he tells us how amazing we were for braving the elements, how he wasn’t responsible for what Mother Nature had cooked up, how we would be so pleased when we saw the edited version on cable. Then the producer’s mouth moved again, but this time his words were mean: “You didn’t get the money,” he was saying. Dad would ask him why, and he’d point to me and tell me it was all my fault. I’d performed a modern dance while holding my modern iPod and wearing modern makeup; I’d accused and even threatened another contestant when I had little proof she had done anything; and I’d spent a large fraction of air time dodging the glass eye of the camera. Novak would add, “Your family would have died out here a hundred years ago if left to your own devices.”

  Letting my mind get carried away with what I thought could happen wasn’t going to help the situation. Who cared about the money right now anyway? What mattered now was my family.

  We remained huddled under the table. I had to pee but held it in. Dad read loudly from Harper’s Weekly as the storm raged. We munched on sunflower seeds and grapes, pretending we didn’t hear the shingles as they peeled from the roof, or the rain as it poured into the attic and dripped through the floorboards, splashing onto the table over our heads. We pretended we didn’t hear a thing as another and then another tree crashed to its death. I thought I heard Gretchen’s anguished moo, but convinced myself it was only the wind. I pictured Willow, our sweet mare, with Sully cowering beside her, and prayed the barn would hold steady; the last of our carrots, still out there in the field, drowning in what was now a muddy lake; and the grapes yet to be picked flying in the wind somewhere over the Appalachians.