Little Blog on the Prairie

by Cathleen Davitt Bell

  I didn’t dare look up at Nora. I squeezed some more. “You going to milk one-handed?” I heard her say. “We’ll be here all day.” So with my other hand I took another teat and milked that one too. And as I pulled on first one and then the other, I felt like someone out of a movie, which must have meant I was doing it right.

  I gave Nora a huge, sticky-sweet bubble-gum-ice cream-with-candy-worms-and-Sour-Patch-Kids-on-top smile. “Surprised that I can do this?” I said.

  Nora turned around as if she were somehow bored of the whole thing now, like something about the view through the open barn door was fascinating.

  I kept milking. Squirt, squirt—the sound made me want to laugh, like someone had just burped. Little by little, the bucket was filling up. The milk was warm, and the smell reminded me of a road trip when Gavin spilled milk from McDonald’s in the car and we had to live with it all the way to my aunt and uncle’s house in upstate New York. It wasn’t a sour smell, but it was really heavy. We’re talking intense milk.

  Nora turned to Gavin. “Cow’s going to be living here, you’ll need to know how to muck out a stall.” She might as well have said “I’m going to take you out back and beat you to a bloody pulp,” her tone was so mean.

  Gavin—who didn’t yet know that mucking out a stall meant shoveling straw soaked in cow poo and pee—looked from me to Nora and back to me again. I nodded, to show him that it was okay, and also to show Nora that Gavin couldn’t be bossed around by her—the only person who was going to be bossing him was me.

  Before I’d faked my way into milking the cow, I don’t think it would have occurred to Gavin to check with me about something he was going to do. Suddenly, Gavin and I, we were a team.

  Ouga, ouga, Welsh!

  Week 2 – Tuesday

  8:57 pm

  For dessert we had warm milk with a few spoonfuls of leftover coffee and this tiny bit of brown sugar my mom’s been saving as a treat--café au lait.

  Week 2 – Wednesday

  7:56 am

  I milked the cow again! I can milk a cow! I’ve done it twice now--in the afternoon yesterday and this morning. Take that, Nora-know-it-all!

  11

  Just after breakfast on Wednesday, my mom called me into the house. “Don’t work in the corn today,” she said. “I need your help with the washing.”

  “The washing?” I said. I wasn’t sure what she meant by that.

  “Laundry,” she clarified. “We need clean clothes.” She took a whiff as if to confirm something she suspected. “Gen, is it you?” she said. “I smell old pee.”

  “No!” I said, but of course it was. My second pair of stockings were stiff with crusted dirt and sweat, so I’d switched to the ones that still had the evidence of my first adventure in the outhouse. My mom sniffed again, and I opened the door to try to bring fresh air into the room, hoping she wouldn’t understand why I was doing it. I guess giving the tights a second chance had been a mistake.

  Week 2 – Wednesday

  5:24 pm

  In theory, doing laundry doesn’t sound that bad. You heat up lots of water, add soap, soak the clothes, scrub them, wring out the dirty water, soak them again, scrub them again, wring out the dirty water--again--soak them, rinse them, wring out the water, rinse them a second time, and then wring out the water one more time before hanging them out to dry. Sounds easy, right?

  Week 2 – Wednesday

  5:27 pm

  No.

  It’s not easy.

  Doing laundry is a nightmare.

  Week 2 – Wednesday

  5:37 pm

  Here’s the main problem with laundry (if you really want to know, and trust me, you don’t)--everything starts off about ten times dirtier than normal laundry at home. I mean, the white shirts, the bibs and petticoats--they were brown. And on top of that, washing them doesn’t really help. By the end of the day, you’re hoping to get things to a place where they’re maybe as dirty as the stuff you would put in the hamper at home.

  “Ooh, laundry!” Betsy squealed when she came by and saw the ugly scene. Every pot we had was filled with water and heating up on the stove. There was a washtub on the floor overflowing with suds. My mom had taken out this thing called a washboard, which is made of wood covered in wrinkled tin and looks like something you’d use as a musical instrument in elementary school, but is actually something you’re supposed to use to scrub out the dirt from clothes. You rub them up and down on the board, and then wring them out, soak them in the water, and do it again.

  I think I rubbed more skin off my knuckles than dirt out of the clothes.

  By the time Betsy arrived there were puddles of water on the floor. Our hands were red and chapped. My mom had sweat pouring down her face—God knows I could feel it dripping down mine. The muscles in my upper arms were burning and so weak from trying to wring out these enormously heavy shirts and petticoats that I could barely get them to move.

  “This… is… awful,” my mom panted from behind the tub of bubbles. She was trying to rinse a pair of bloomers and every time she wrung them out, there was still muddy water coming off them.

  “Historical records show that any family with even the tiniest bit of disposable income sent their laundry out,” Betsy chirped. “And something fairly sad to keep in mind is that for women who needed to earn money, doing laundry for other people was one of the few jobs they could count on. Can you imagine doing laundry not just for your household, but for someone else’s as well?”

  “They must have had a technique,” my mom said.

  “It gets easier over time,” Betsy said. “But it’s the worst chore. I think that’s one of the reasons you get it out of the way on Mondays.”

  “Wash on Monday,” my mom recited. “Iron on Tuesday. Mend on Wednesday. Churn on Thursday. Clean on Friday. Bake on Saturday. Rest on Sunday.”

  “Very good!” Betsy clapped. “I follow that myself.”

  “I remember it from Little House on the Prairie,” my mom said.

  “You wash every Monday?” I asked. “I was hoping we could get through the rest of the summer without doing laundry again. Wearing dirty clothes is so much better than this.”

  “Unless you smell like pee,” my mom said.

  “Oh, you two, you’re funny.” Betsy laughed. Neither my mom nor I explained that we hadn’t been kidding.

  When Gavin and my dad came in for lunch, which Betsy insisted on calling dinner, my mom and I just stared at them from behind the clouds of bubbles and steam. We were dripping by then. I don’t know if it was water or sweat. Our hair was soaked. “Don’t even think about eating right now,” my mom said.

  But the second she mentioned eating, I realized I was starved.

  “We have to take a break,” I said.

  “You’re right,” she agreed. “We need to eat.” She let the petticoat she’d been wringing out drop back into the dirty water, then realized what she’d done and slapped her hands on either side of her head. I once saw a woman in a movie react that way when she realized she’d left her stove on, and the next scene was of the house on fire.

  Quickly, we assembled lunch. Cold beans spread on cold grits, which can be sliced when they congeal. Totally foul, but no one was complaining because clearly my mom was not in a position to hear it.

  When we looked over at the buckets again after lunch, I felt the blood draining down to my feet. “I can’t do it,” I said. “I can’t wring out another shirt.”

  But my mom must have been revived by the meal. “Change of scene,” she said, starting to drag the washtub out onto the porch. “Grab a handle.” Though my arms were still as weak as Jell-O, I did.

  She was right. It was better working outside. At one point, after a particularly painful bout of wringing—my dress had to be scrubbed three times because of the grass stains—my mom pointed out to the yard and said, “Look at that view.”

  I did. The sky was what the art teacher in my school calls a highly saturated shade of blue, dotted with white p
uffy clouds. The only noise I could hear was the wind moving in the tops of the trees way above us. They were everywhere, the trees, their trunks lost inside the green light filtering through the leaves. “It looks like something on a Hallmark card,” I said.

  Mom laughed out loud. Then she pinched the bridge of her nose and sighed. “You can take the girl out of the twenty-first century…,” she began.

  Instead of saying “But you can’t take the twenty-first century out of the girl,” which is where I guessed she was going, I said, “But you shouldn’t take the girl out of the twenty-first century, because the twenty-first century has washing machines.”

  My dad came back from the cornfield early and hammered a nail to the outside wall of the house, tied some rope to it, and then strung it to another nail he hammered into the side of the barn. “There,” he said. “That ought to help.”

  It did. Pretty soon, we’d draped all the clothes we’d washed over the line to dry. After we dumped the last tub of dirty water over the side, I was resting on the porch, when my mom asked me to fill the wood bin.

  “What are you doing now?” I said.

  “Ironing,” she answered, her face grim.

  “Ironing what?” At home, anything that needed to be ironed got sent to the dry cleaners.

  “Everything,” Mom said.

  “But it’s still wet,” I said.

  “Not for long,” she explained. “And if you let it dry all the way, the wrinkles are harder to remove.”

  I hauled myself up to a standing position and loaded my poor, aching arms with wood. My mom pulled two irons, which were actually flat metal triangles with handles, out from under the counter where the pump was.

  She found a board leaning against the wall behind the door and laid it across the backs of two chairs. When the first iron was hot, she spread a petticoat across the board, took an iron off the stove, being careful to hold it with a folded-over rag in her hand, and laid the iron down on the petticoat.

  Immediately, something didn’t smell right, and when my mom lifted the iron away, there was a dark brown triangle-shaped print where the iron had been. The cotton was smoking.

  “Is that supposed to happen?” I said.

  My mom didn’t answer. She put the iron down on the stove, closed the damper to shut down the fire, walked out the front door, put both hands on her hips, and stood on the porch, shaking her head.

  “What?” I said.

  “I’m done,” she answered.

  And I was afraid enough of the look on her face not to ask her done with what.

  That night, after dinner, which was cold grits and beans again, my dad brought the clothes in from the line and my mom made an announcement. “Life on the frontier was more fun than this,” she said.

  The muscles in my arms were burning and I couldn’t open and close my fist without skin splitting. “What about laundry isn’t fun?” I said.

  She ignored me. “In 1890, there would have been musicians in the family. Storytellers. Games. We would have done more than just stare out at the trees and think about home.”

  “I’m not staring at the trees,” my dad said. “I’m looking for bears.”

  “Fine,” said my mom. “But can’t we sing while you’re staring?”

  “I don’t sing,” Gavin said.

  “You used to,” said my mom. “You and Gen used to sing all the time.”

  “When?” said Gavin, as if he didn’t believe her.

  “In your cribs,” my mom explained, a dip in her voice acknowledging that, okay, she was going back pretty far in time. “Gavin, when you were two and Gen was in kindergarten, you would sing back and forth to each other across the hall as you were going to sleep.”

  The memory of when we were that small must have triggered some cooperative spirit in my dad—my parents love thinking about that time. In pictures they always look happy and healthier: hiking with Gavin in a backpack carrier and me totally psyched to have my own water bottle, or sitting out on the patio at Grandma’s house eating muffins. Without taking his eyes off the tree line, Dad said, “Okay, we’ll sing.” Gavin started to complain and my dad said forcefully, “We will all sing.”

  And so we lined up in a row on the edge of the porch, and sang songs we all knew the words to. The list was pretty short. “Twinkle Twinkle,” “ABC,” “Erie Canal,” “Feelings,” “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” And “Jesus Christ, Superstar,” which Gavin and I had been in the chorus of during my mom’s my-children-will-perform-in-school-plays phase.

  Our voices sounded really small and warbly against the big night sky.

  Week 2 – Thursday

  7:50 am

  I am so tired that last night I fell asleep sitting up on the porch at 8:30 pm.

  12

  I had to be careful about texting now. Every time I turned the phone on, I got a beep and a message telling me the battery was low. I didn’t know how much longer I had.

  But it was hard to resist. Sending a text made it seem like my friends were right next door.

  Week 2 – Friday

  9:17 pm

  Ka snuck out tonight and came over after dinner. We spent an hour coming up with former lives for Ron and Betsy. I’m not going to write them all because there are too many.

  Week 2 – Friday

  9:17 pm

  Okay, here’s one: grizzly-bear wrestlers in a circus sideshow.

  Week 2 – Friday

  9:19 pm

  This one’s pretty good too: identity thieves (they’re off the grid because they’re on the lam).

  Week 2 – Friday

  9:21 pm

  Yoga instructors who had to leave the business because Ron’s so stiff he couldn’t touch his toes.

  Week 2 – Friday

  9:23 pm

  Spies in a forgotten sleeper cell left over from the Cold War.

  Week 2 – Friday

  9:25 pm

  Cult leaders who are pretending this is just a summer camp but really are jump-starting a commune--just wait until the fall when they won’t let any of us leave!

  Week 2 – Friday

  9:27 pm

  Okay, I’ll stop.

  …

  On Saturday morning, we were still finishing breakfast when Nora came by carrying two more chickens—Macduff and Macbeth. “You get six total,” she said. “Cassandra and Romeo are coming next.”

  “Who names them?” my mom asked.

  “My mom gave Pumpkin and Daisy their names, but when she’s stumped my dad has this Reader’s Digest Abridged Shakespeare set,” Nora explained. “We just rotate through the names. This is the third Romeo we’ve had this year—all hens too.”

  “Do Macbeth and Macduff get along?” my dad asked. “You know, in the play, Macduff kills Macbeth?”

  “Don’t know and don’t care,” Nora said. “A name’s a name. You gotta kill them all in the end, so it’s better not to get attached.” We’d followed her out to the barn, where she was holding open the door to the coop with her hip and shoving the chickens inside without letting Daisy get out. “Where’s Pumpkin?” she said. “Did you finally get after him with the hatchet?”

  Gavin winced. “He likes to sit in this one box in the barn,” he explained.

  “Weird rooster,” Nora said. “You know you’re going to have to get to him sooner or later.” She squinted off to the fields like she was looking for something on the horizon. “Pumpkin’s still young enough. He’ll be good—tender.”

  Gavin made a face.

  “I know you eat chicken at home, right?” Nora said. “Bet you buy them all cut and wrapped up nice in plastic in the grocery store, don’t you?”

  “It’s different,” Gavin said.

  “Oh, please,” Nora said. “Chickens are stupid, even for birds. A lamb that comes when he’s called—now that’s hard for a kid to watch get killed. I know. I did it. And a pig? Forget it. Pigs are like dogs. You should never get to know your pigs too well.”

  “Did you have to lea
rn that the hard way too?” my mom asked. She sounded like she was trying to use the voice she uses on Gavin’s friends when she needs to remind them that she’s in charge when they’re at our house, her would-you-like-me-to-call-your-mother-and-see-if-you-get-to-eat-candy-before-dinner? voice. But it wasn’t quite working—she sounded a little like she was begging Nora for something.

  And whatever it was she was begging for, Nora wasn’t giving it up. “I had to learn everything the hard way,” she said.

  Sunday, when we arrived at Ron and Betsy’s for the third picnic, Anders Puchinski—whose sunburn was peeling so badly I half expected him to add discarding his skin like a snake to his list of many accomplishments—talked on and on about the wheat mill he was building, how he’d located a couple of grindstones and had been working on cutting them down to the right size. Disa had made her first pie crust. The Drivers had found the right section of the stream to dam up to make their swimming hole and had started hauling rocks over to it the day before. My dad talked about finishing weeding the cornfield, what a great feeling that was. The Meyer-Hincheys hadn’t built an addition or even a new bed, but they’d moved Matt, Katie, and Cara downstairs, while Ka now slept upstairs with the parents. Every time anyone in the happy blond family mentioned Ka, they sighed. Even Cara, who was nine.

  Then it was time for progress assessment numbers.

  The Puchinskis had met all of their goals. They got another eight.

  The Drivers hadn’t done laundry. They got a six.

  The Meyer-Hincheys hadn’t finished weeding their millet. They got a six.

  “And the Welshes,” Ron concluded. “You have yet to kill one of your chickens, but more significantly, you haven’t even selected a farm improvement project. I’m giving you a four.”

  My mom jumped out of her seat. “Wait,” she said.