Little Blog on the Prairie

by Cathleen Davitt Bell

  I saw my dad’s eyes get a little wider, and it was clear he didn’t know how to be done talking, but he was afraid to confess anything more. When I tell you that this was worse than seeing his paunchy belly with no shirt on—which I did when he was working out in the field—you should know that it was really, really bad to see his belly.

  “Why are the other families just staring at him?” I whispered to Ka.

  “I don’t know,” she whispered back.

  Meanwhile, my dad was looking around at everyone like he was deciding something. Finally he said, “I guess we’re the camp underachievers this week. All we’ve done is weed and I barely feel like I’m making a dent. No mill plans in the works. No swimming holes. We’re not building onto the cabin anytime soon.” He sat down.

  There was silence. I don’t know what there was supposed to be—applause? Pats on the back? I had the feeling there should have been something, some response, and instead, it was just absolutely silent.

  Finally, Ron prompted, “Maybe you’ll come up with an idea over the course of the week.” He clapped his hands. “Okay,” he said. “I think the women are getting anxious to show off the dinners they’ve brought with them. If no one has anything else to add, I’ll do the progress assessments. Starting with the Puchinskis.

  “Anders, your early rising has helped you—and that’s appropriate to farm life, where you had to be out in the fields as soon as the sun was up. You’re the only family to complete the weeding of your crop in a week and Disa’s improvisation in the kitchen is admirable. The cookies you shared with me on our visit were delicious. I’m giving you an eight.”

  Disa, who so rarely spoke, looked up from her knitting to smile and nod, her black hair slicked back neatly into a bun.

  “Drivers—” That was Caleb’s family. “You’re doing all right with your farming, but your work in the house is below par. The chicken Peter cooked over an outdoor fire was a standout, but Betsy says you’re lacking a regular kitchen routine. You need to keep the fire regular, the water on, the floor swept. I’m giving you a six.

  “Meyer-Hincheys—” That was Ka’s family. “You called it bonding, but when I visited your place last week all I saw your kids doing was fighting. And whatever you want to call it, it’s getting in the way of work on your farm. On the frontier, a family was an economic unit, and putting together and pulling apart was less common because of that. You get a six as well.

  “Welshes. Okay, you have problems inside and out. Betsy tells me you’ve been living on a diet of beans and cornmeal. Your weeding is quite slow, especially considering that half the time you seem to be pulling up corn plants instead of weeds. I’m giving you a four.” He clapped his hands to show that the assessment was over and looked at Betsy. “Picnic time?” he said. Betsy nodded.

  “A six?” Ka said as we stood up and reached for the baskets we’d stored under the benches. “I thought we did better than that.”

  “A four?” my mom said.

  “At least we get to eat,” said Gavin.

  But “eat” wasn’t exactly the right word for what we did after everyone laid out their blankets in the shade. Mostly we watched other people eat.

  There were strawberries and salad. There were hard-boiled eggs and bread with jam. There was spinach and sweet potatoes. There was a raspberry rhubarb pie with a crumb topping.

  And what had my mom brought? It was a dish she claimed to have invented. She unveiled it as if it were a big treat. “Onion sandwiches!”

  They were exactly what they sound like—bread with cold fried onions in the middle. “I was looking at these chive thingies in the garden and I just had an inspiration to pull them up, and then when I saw that they were onions, I was thinking I’d do a focaccia. But I’ve been having trouble with bread and there’s no olive oil. Aren’t you glad we waited to assemble them until now?”

  Mom valiantly pretended she couldn’t see the Meyer-Hincheys’ piles of fresh berries and the Drivers’ fritatta. “Imagine if the onion goop had been soaking into the bread all morning during that meeting?” She lowered her voice. “Especially while Anders was going on and on.”

  “That meeting?” said my dad. “I don’t know if it deserves to be called a meeting. It was more like a humiliation festival. And I think we should have gotten higher than a four.”

  “Well, it’s only the beginning of the summer,” my mom reasoned.

  “Hmph,” my dad said. His tone reminded me how he’d rail against the parents at my soccer games who stood on the sidelines and yelled at their kids, at the coaches, and at the ref. “No one is as concerned about the bears as they should be.”

  “Doug, please,” my mom said. The Puchinskis were looking at us. “Try your sandwich.” And then, “I’m not in love with this format either,” she whispered. Her eyes strayed to Disa Puchinski, who was holding a biscuit so flaky all she had to do was grasp the edges and twist and it pulled exactly in half. “Those look incredible.”

  For a second, our family just stared, feeling depressed together, surrounded by everyone’s lettuce and strawberries and flaking pastry. Our picnic blanket, which doubled as a tablecloth, wasn’t even all that clean. Gavin had spilled a bowl of beans on it the night before.

  Gavin was the first to take a bite of the onion sandwich. “Mom!” he said. “Hey! This sandwich is actually good.”

  “It’s good?” said my mom. If he’d told her she was just elected president of the United States, I’m not sure she could have looked more pleased. “You like it?” She took a bite. “It is good,” she said.

  I took a small bite myself, and I have to say, it was pretty tasty. The bread was not as rock hard as her first couple of attempts had been. And the onions were sweet and rich and they sort of melted into the bread. “Okay,” I said. “You’re right. This is good.”

  But my dad couldn’t be swayed. “I’m not coming to this meeting next week,” he sulked.

  “Well,” said my mom with her mouth full. “I’m not either.” At first I was like, “Does that mean we’re quitting?”

  But then she finished chewing. “I’m not coming back here until we have something more to show for ourselves. I think it’s time to harvest Pumpkin.”

  Gavin nearly choked on his sandwich.

  “Pumpkin?” he said. “The chicken?”

  “By harvest,” I said. “Do you mean kill?”

  “Pumpkin’s a rooster, guys,” my mom said. “He doesn’t produce eggs, so we have to eat him.”

  “But he’s going to bleed if we kill him,” Gavin said.

  “Yes.” My mom nodded. “That’s true.”

  “What if we kill Daisy by accident,” I said. “And then we don’t have any more eggs? Do you even know which of them is which?”

  “Daisy’s the one with the brown patches,” my mom said.

  “No,” Gavin said. “Daisy’s the one with the orange dots on her wings.”

  “I thought the orange dots one was Pumpkin,” my dad said.

  Gavin handed his sandwich back to Mom.

  “Why are you giving this to me?” she said.

  “Because I can’t eat another bite of it,” he said. I wish I’d been principled enough to take the same stand, but I’ve always been a faster eater than Gavin, and my sandwich was long gone.

  “Oh, Gavin,” my mom said. “Come on.”

  He turned his back.

  “Okay,” she said. “What do you say to not doing it this week? We’ll find something else to eat this week.”

  Gavin stuck his hand out from behind his back. My mom returned his sandwich.

  I lay back on the blanket, staring up at the sky. The cruel, bright blue sky, twinkling at me through the trees. My family was the camp losers. Why were we even here? Why couldn’t we spend our summer somewhere where there was food to eat?

  I closed my eyes, wishing not for the first time that this whole place would just disappear, and that I’d wake up and find myself back at home, in my clean room. (Well, okay, it was n
ever all that clean, but at least it was carpeted, warm, and dry.) Food should be something you just walked downstairs to the kitchen for, without having to argue over killing it or whether there was enough.

  As I lay there, I felt a shadow fall across my face and I opened my eyes to see Caleb standing over me. I sat up. He was holding a plate of food. I noticed a slice of the fritatta his family had been eating before and a piece of chicken—it wasn’t fried, like Nora’s. It was a drumstick, coated in herbs.

  “I thought I might broker a trade,” he said, looking first at me, but also at my mom and dad. “We don’t have very much bread—my mom hasn’t figured out how to get it to rise more than an inch. Would you be interested in donating, say, half a loaf of bread to our picnic in exchange for this plate of food?”

  My mom was blinking, as if she thought that Caleb might be teasing. It didn’t help that he was standing right in front of the sun and it was shining behind him, like he was an angel who had just stepped out of the clouds. My mom laid a hand across her heart. My dad stood up. Gavin ducked his head. And after I kind of mumbled something—I mean, I was pretty much dying with embarrassment—Caleb unloaded the food he’d brought and took some of my mom’s onion-sandwich bread back to his family. He didn’t come back or say anything else. But Nora was looking over at me, glaring.

  Week 2 – Sunday

  8:49 pm

  Caleb Driver’s leather necklace is the cutest thing I have ever seen.

  Week 2 – Monday

  9:35 am

  When my mom said we had to get the laundry done this week and I asked, “Do we take it to Betsy’s?” she laughed so hard I was worried they’d have to call some men in a van to take her away.

  10

  Week 2 – Tuesday

  7:45 pm

  Ron had told us that every family would be given a cow the second week of camp, but I’d forgotten all about it until this morning. Gavin and I were pulling up potatoes in the kitchen garden, and suddenly there was Nora, leading a cow by a rope. She looked like she’d marched right out of an illustration from a Mother Goose book, with her cap and her braid and her boots and her long dress that she wore like it wasn’t driving her totally crazy the way mine was.

  Week 2 – Tuesday

  7:45 pm

  Sometimes--and I know this is pathetic--I have to force myself to remember that Nora should not look normal to me, that 1890 should always cause a shock to the senses, but it’s hard sometimes to remember.

  When Nora looked up and saw us, she frowned, or at least I think she did. Her sunbonnet was casting a shadow over her face like she was some kind of gunslinger in a Western. She draped the cow’s lead (that’s a word I was about to learn) over a hook outside the barn, and took a few steps toward me and Gavin where we were on the fence, so we could hear her without her having to shout. “You kids ever milked a cow before?” she asked, her hands on her hips, her elbows sticking out. Then she turned and walked back to the barn.

  Somehow we knew that we were supposed to follow her, though following Nora was the last thing in the world I wanted to do.

  I know that no one should expect a girl like me—who grew up in the suburbs drinking milk out of a carton—to know anything about milking a real cow. But still, I couldn’t come up with a single way to admit that to Nora without feeling like she was winning some kind of game.

  So when we got inside the barn, where Nora had led the cow and she repeated her question, I said, “Sure, I’ve done it before,” and I’m not sure whose glare hit me first, Nora’s or Gavin’s. The looks they were giving me were like searchlights crisscrossing over my body, looking for some evidence of a lie.

  Immediately, I thought, “Should I take it back?” I could say I’d milked a fake cow at the petting zoo we used to go to that had wooden cutout cows with big fat rubber udders filled with water and hanging down so kids could practice squeezing out milk.

  But I didn’t say that. I shrugged and I said, “Tons of times. What’s the big deal?” It was stupid, okay, I know that.

  “Great,” Nora said. “So you should be all set.”

  I was scrambling now, thinking, “What am I doing?” And “Why did I say that?” I was thinking that it would be ugly when it finally came time to try to get milk out of this animal. I was thinking that maybe my dad would know what to do with the cow, the way he’d known all about bears.

  For now, though, this was about Nora and me. I had my fight face on, the mask I felt forming during soccer games, when I knew I couldn’t let the other team get even one shot on goal.

  My fight face worked. Nora maybe—at least for a second—believed me. Her expression changed. She’s really pretty, or at least she could be—and while she was feeling surprised, she kind of forgot for a second to look mad.

  In fact, she looked kind of impressed, and I found myself wishing I did know how to milk a cow because I liked the idea of Nora being impressed with something I could do. For a second I wished she was someone on my soccer team who I could hang out with and practice corner kicks or juggling. She could be pretty cool if she were a normal kid my age.

  It was just a second before she pursed her lips right back into the sneer and said, “Okay, then. Jezebel here’s ready to go, so get yourself a bucket.”

  “Now?” I asked, and I think it was the question—or maybe the desperation in my voice when I asked it—that gave me away. Nora’s smile uncurled like a snake.

  “What’s going on?” my mom said when I burst into the kitchen. I tried not to look too panicked. I was thinking maybe I could figure out how to milk a cow just by trying. I was thinking that maybe all that experience at the petting zoo when I was—what? seven?—would somehow make me look like a pro. And while I was thinking all this I was standing dumbstruck inside the doorway, my hands clenched at my sides. It was all I could do not to put them on my head and pull at my hair and say, “Oh, God what have I done?”

  “Gen?” my mom prompted.

  I didn’t answer her because just then I was realizing that I’d forgotten what I’d come in for.

  As if she could read my mind, Nora called from outside, “Milk bucket’s on a hook by the door!” Oh yeah, I thought, and I grabbed the tin bucket I hadn’t even noticed before, hanging exactly where Nora had said it would be.

  I gave myself a pep talk. “Be brave!” I said. I held my head high and carried the milk bucket like I’d been carrying one every day of my life. Actually, I held my head too high. I didn’t see one of the chickens—I still didn’t know if it was Daisy or Pumpkin, it was the one without the orange spots. When I stepped on it, it let out this huge squawk and I was like, “Sorry, sorry!” I kept walking and tried to look like, well, like someone who knew how to milk a cow.

  Once I was inside the barn, up close and personal with the cow—Jezebel—I had a moment of intense doubt and I bet it showed.

  Jezebel was a reddish brownish color with white spots and big haunches, but the main thing about her up close is that she is just simply very large. The top ridge of her bony back came up to my shoulder, and I’m not sure that Gavin was taller than she was.

  I had to think. I had to make a plan. I had to find her udder. I looked down.

  At the petting zoo, I think they had little stools for the kids to sit on, but I didn’t see any of them around. Maybe there was some trick to milking cows on the frontier? Did people slide underneath them on a board on wheels like a mechanic working on a car? Did they squat?

  I was getting ready to try that when Nora said, “Stool’s over there.” I followed her gaze to the far corner of the barn, where sure enough I found a three-legged stool. Okay, I thought. This is a good thing. I knew there was supposed to be a stool, and there it is. I can do this!

  The first mistake I made was to put the little three-legged stool down behind Jezebel. Fortunately, she kicked it away before I was sitting on it. I quickly picked up the stool from where it had landed, as if I could keep Nora from seeing what had happened, but of course she did.
When I glanced up, she was shaking her head like she should have known. I tried putting the stool more to the side of the cow this time, and then I lowered myself on top of it.

  From this angle, Jezebel loomed even larger, and when she shifted on her feet a little bit, I jumped up. I’d thought for a second I was about to be crushed. “Easy, girl,” Nora said, rubbing Jezebel on the shoulder, and talking to her so nicely Jezebel calmed right down.

  I needed someone to talk that soothingly to me. All my life I’d heard about people milking cows—you think it’s no big deal but with a cow this close I realized I was actually in danger.

  When I looked up again, Nora had her eyebrows raised and her lips turned down in a sneer.

  Gavin was taking a few steps back and had this kind of psycho smile on his face—like he was half thinking he should run, and half thinking that the entertainment experience of a lifetime was about to begin.

  “Well?” said Nora.

  I felt like I was in a dream. I adjusted the stool’s position slightly and, even though my stomach felt like it wanted nothing more than for my entire body to collapse around the stool, to bring it nowhere near that cow—and what kind of name was Jezebel anyway? It made the cow sound so angry—I laid a hand on Jezebel’s shoulder like Nora had, and lowered myself onto the stool for the second time.

  I pulled the bucket up under the udder. I mean, I’m not totally dumb, I knew where you were supposed to put your hands, and that you needed to squeeze and the milk would come out.

  What I didn’t know is that you’re not supposed to squeeze too hard. I guess in my desire to seem like I knew what I was doing, I really wrenched Jezebel the first time. She grunted and moved to the side, but I held on. I squeezed again. Jezebel grunted again, and tried to take a step away.

  “You’re supposed to push the milk out with your hands, not send it back up into the cow,” said Nora. “It hurts her, don’t know you that? You want me to show you?”

  The only way to combat how humiliating this was was to pretend I hadn’t heard Nora. But when I squeezed again, I relaxed and also pulled down as I was squeezing, gliding along—I don’t know how I knew to do that but maybe I’d seen it on TV or something—and a huge, I mean an enormous, squirt of milk splashed into the bucket. It was so much it actually sprayed my face. I had to wipe off my eye with the sleeve of my dress.