Little Blog on the Prairie

by Cathleen Davitt Bell

  “I’m surprised you’re saying that,” she said. “I would have assumed you’d want to go home.”

  “Well,” I said.

  “I assumed you brought the phone to make sure that would happen.”

  “Um,” I said.

  “I’m not going to let it,” she said. “It’s not fair.”

  “No,” I agreed.

  “It’s not fair to me,” she clarified.

  I said, “Okay, yeah.”

  It was a quiet week. A dirge of a week. “Dirge” is a word I learned in music last year. It means slow and depressing and is surprisingly useful to describe life in 1890 when you have been caught sneaking in a cell phone and accused of killing more than twenty other people’s historical reenactment buzz.

  It was getting toward the end of July, but without seeing the date stamp on my texts I lost track of the days. The corn was growing fatter, the tomatoes were ripening on the vine. I wished I’d been able to at least text Kristin and Ashley one last time to let them know I’d been caught. I wondered if they were worrying about what had happened to me.

  Thinking this might be our last week here, I started to notice stuff about the place that I hadn’t before. Like the fresh and sharp smell when you rip the greens off a carrot or spread hay that had been baking all day in the loft into Jezebel’s stall.

  Gavin caught more fish, and though Erik Puchinski and his family didn’t come over to eat it with us again, the fish tasted no less delicious. Sitting across the fire from my brother, I thought about how, if we hadn’t come here, I would never know what a fishing stud he could be.

  I noticed stuff about my family too. One day, it rained, and we spent most of the day inside, drinking tea and watching our stockings steam on the chair backs where we’d hung them to dry. Dad somehow started telling stories about Grandma and even Grandpa, who died before Gavin and I were born. In the afternoon, we all ended up taking naps.

  I woke up first and lay for a while next to Gavin, listening to the sounds of him and my mom and dad breathing in their sleep. Here we were, I thought, the four of us. At home we never spent this kind of time together. It wasn’t exactly pleasant, but it made me notice.

  During that week, I think it was Tuesday morning, I was out in the field checking the corn—the silks were starting to brown—when I heard my name. It was Ka calling, from the edge of the woods.

  “I snuck over here as soon as I could,” she said, still breathless when I met up with her at the edge of the field. “I got stuck yesterday—my whole family had to help the Puchinskis raise the walls for the mill they’re building next to the Drivers’ dam. It’s going to have a water wheel to turn the grindstone. Hey—are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I said, but I wasn’t fine. I was thinking about how Caleb had said he wanted to take me swimming once the dam was constructed. They must have finished it. Would I even get a chance to go now? “Do you think my family’s going to get kicked out?” I asked.

  “Matt’s sure you are, you lucky thing,” Ka answered. She was casual and glib—how could I explain that this wasn’t how I wanted things to go? “Clark and my mom got in this big fight over you. He said it wasn’t okay for teens to act out, and my mom said you had to look at what they were going through. As I told Matt and Katie—really, duh, they were talking about me. Matt thinks maybe they’ll make you leave in the middle of the night before the next meeting and just pretend you’re not there.”

  “They can’t do that,” I said, but the same idea had occurred to me too. “Your mom and Clark are fighting for real?”

  She shrugged. “I know,” she said. “It kind of makes me feel bad. But it’s better than the public displays of affection they were all about before.”

  Ka changed the subject. “It’s weird that Ron never said anything about the shack,” she mused.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “He must have found your phone there, right? You left it plugged in when we were all cleaning up and trying to get out of there before he got back.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So…,” she said, as if I should be following her logic. I wasn’t.

  “So what?” I said.

  “Don’t you see? He didn’t say anything about where he found it because he was worried everyone would find out.”

  “I still don’t see why anyone would care. I mean, why shouldn’t Ron and Betsy take a break from 1890 once in a while to play around on the Internet and drink a Diet Coke?”

  “Spoken by the girl who thinks it’s okay to sneak a cell phone into history camp,” Ka said—a you’re-not-getting-this tone in her voice. “For people like Anders and Ron, the total experience is important. Look,” she tried again. “I live in San Francisco, okay? Half my class doesn’t eat meat. And the other half? They don’t eat meat… or milk, or eggs. I’ve seen what happens when the cafeteria accidentally puts chicken broth in the vegetarian vegetable soup. Kids threaten to make themselves puke. Parents call in. People get fired.”

  “Really?” I said.

  “Yeah,” she answered. “This is the same kind of thing. Anders, Ron—anyone crazy enough to want to come here—they’re purists.”

  I put my head in my hands. “They must hate me so much.”

  “If it’s any consolation,” Ka said, “I don’t think everyone hates you.”

  “Gee,” I said. “Thanks?”

  “Seriously,” she said. “What you did is not bad. Matt said Caleb said your blog was actually famous or something.”

  “Yeah,” I said. But I wasn’t thinking about the blog. I was thinking about how everyone was talking about me. How I’d ruined camp not just for my family, but for everyone’s. I wasn’t a regular kid anymore. I was a bad seed. I was the chicken broth in the vegetarian vegetable soup.

  My parents were not at all in touch with the fact that at the end of the week, we were going to be asked to leave. Family dinners were quiet, with my dad breaking twenty minutes of silent eating with gems of conversation starters such as: “Next week for sure we’re going to need the kids out in the cornfield, so any work you need done in the garden should be done now.”

  “You really do sound like a farmer now,” I said after he regaled us with an account of how many trees he’d cut down a day since he changed the way he was holding the ax. I thought it was a pretty funny comment, but no one laughed. Gavin rolled his eyes and my mom and dad stared blankly at the dirty walls.

  Every time I thought my mom was done talking to me about the phone, she would turn to me out of the blue and say, “What in the world possessed you to take that out of the box I’d left it in and bring it out here?”

  One time I came back in from the woods early to get some water and found my mom holding Pumpkin under her arm, her fingers wrapped around his neck. She was trying to maneuver him onto an old tree stump that had a hatchet propped up against its side—it didn’t take a genius to figure out what she had in mind. Or that she was doing it wrong. Pumpkin could still flail and he was moving his left wing in a way that made me think he might break it.

  “Stop it!” I shouted. “What are you doing?”

  She jumped like I’d slammed a door in a room she thought was empty, gave a little scream, and dropped Pumpkin on the ground. A cloud of feathers floated down around Mom’s hair and shoulders and arms. Pumpkin limped away.

  “You can’t kill Pumpkin,” I said. “Think about all that blood.”

  “I am thinking about it,” said my mom. She started to cry. “But if we don’t kill Pumpkin, it’s just one more sign we’re not serious about this place.”

  She pulled a handkerchief out of her pocket, blew her nose into it, and put it back in. Ew. “It’s not even the chicken that’s making me cry,” my mom said. “I don’t even know why I’m crying exactly. It’s—it’s all this work. It’s, well, it’s just everything!”

  “Everything?” I said.

  “Yes!” she answered, and it was like she was even more angry now, angry at me for not unde
rstanding instantly. “That phone, I still don’t know what you were thinking. But it’s more than that too. I know you’re only thirteen, Genevieve, but you do have eyes in your head and I think you’d be able to use them to see how miserable this whole thing has been for me.”

  “But—,” I started to say. “I thought—” I wanted to tell her that I thought this was her dream, but she didn’t let me finish.

  “I wanted this not to be miserable,” she said. “I wanted it to work. But of course you thought of nothing more than how much you hate it here. Did you ever think for a minute that it would be hard for me to enjoy myself knowing how determined you were to be miserable? Did you think that maybe your attitude would affect anyone besides yourself?”

  “My attitude?” I said. “What are you talking about?”

  She gave me a look that could only be described as “duh.” And I was like, “Okay,” because she was right. “Maybe I have been a little negative.”

  She cracked a big sarcastic smile and said, “A little,” which made me laugh, I don’t know why, except that I guess for a second, she was acting like me. She was being honest. And funny too. I mean, it was funny. Wasn’t it?

  It was. She was laughing now. Or maybe she was laughing the way crazy people laugh—for no apparent reason—but I chose to believe that we were having the kind of moment of mutual understanding that had been sorely lacking between us since, well, since she first announced that we were all going to be spending our summer at Camp Frontier.

  While she wiped away her tears, I wondered if I should rub her back or say something to make her feel better. It’s weird to see your mom cry. I just stood there, watching, and wishing I were someplace else.

  The next morning, while we were weeding in the garden, Gavin said, “Gen, do you ever get scared?”

  “Scared?” I said. “Of what? Bears?”

  “Not bears,” he said. “Scared of, you know—” But I didn’t know. So I raised my eyebrows, and he continued. “Do you ever get scared about Mom and Dad?”

  “No,” I said, because honestly I had no idea what he was talking about.

  He used a stick to dig out a particularly entrenched weed next to a tomato plant. “They never talk to each other. They talk to each other less here than they did at home, and they almost never talk to each other at home.”

  I put my head down. He was right. But I’d always just assumed that’s how everyone’s parents were.

  “You haven’t noticed?” he said.

  “When we get back home, you’ll see,” I said, even though I had a feeling he wouldn’t see anything differently than he did now. “They’ll be fine. It will be like we were never here.”

  On Thursday, my mom sent me out to this box my dad had built in the stream to keep things cold—it was kind of like a refrigerator, except it wasn’t actually all that cold. You had to use the milk in twenty-four hours or it started to go bad. After dropping off the butter my mom had asked me to put in, I decided I would follow the path to Caleb’s house and see if he was around.

  I don’t know what I had in mind exactly. The two of us sitting next to a stream in dappled sunlight? Taking a walk through the woods, him holding back the branches so they wouldn’t scrape my delicate skin?

  When I got to his house, his mom was in the middle of doing laundry and Caleb was helping her. They were both red in the face and dripping wet. Susan was scrubbing a petticoat against the washboard while Caleb was wringing out one of his sister’s dresses—he’d tied the sleeves to one of the porch columns, and was twisting the dress from the skirt end.

  “Genius!” I muttered, but then Caleb looked up from his work—almost as if he could see me where I was still hidden by the trees growing close to their yard, and I caught my breath. He was gazing up into the sky, kind of squinting, and he looked serious. I’d never seen him look like that before.

  Caleb was always mischievous. Everything I’d ever heard him say was lighthearted. So now I was rocked by this sudden understanding that he had a whole other life here—a house that looked exactly like ours except that it was tucked into the shade, new techniques for doing laundry, thoughts that were serious and real and not meant to be shared in the way all his jokes usually were. I had a sudden overwhelming desire to run.

  I was certain that if Caleb saw me, if he understood that I’d walked clear across our land to his, he’d know that the only reason I had come was to find out if he liked me. And what if he didn’t? What if I’d only imagined anything between us? What if I said, “I came to say good-bye,” and he was like, “Okay, bye,” as if my leaving was the same as anyone else’s? I knew I should run.

  But I didn’t run. I just stood there watching, until some movement I made—a stick breaking under my foot? the sound of my breathing?—alerted Caleb to my presence. “Is someone there?” he said.

  I stepped out, as if I’d been walking straight down the path the whole time.

  “Gen!” Susan said, sounding surprised but not totally displeased to see me.

  Caleb smiled broadly. His hair was getting long, and he’d pulled it back from his tanned (or dirty) face and tucked it behind his ears. “A guest!” he said, and I waved, as in, “That’s me. Gen P. Guest at your service.”

  “My mother wants to know if she could borrow an egg,” I lied.

  “An egg,” Susan said. “Well, let me see.” Carefully putting the garment she was scrubbing down on top of the washboard, she climbed the porch steps and disappeared into the house.

  Caleb was instantly at my side. “Did you get in trouble?” he said. “Ka told Matt you were in serious trouble.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I guess I am. Though what are they going to do, take away TV? Keep me from going to the movies?”

  “Yeah,” he said, and laughed. “I guess I’ve never thought of it that way.”

  “My family’s probably getting kicked out, though,” I said. “That’s what they can do.”

  “What are all those people reading your blog going to do without you?” he said.

  “I think they’ll live,” I said. I was dying to say: “But what about you? Will you miss me?” Maybe I could have said it if it had been dark out. Or if his mom hadn’t been just two steps away. I thought it, though. I thought the question really hard.

  And the way Caleb looked at me, straight in the eye and puzzled, not letting go of my gaze—I was pretty sure he knew I was thinking something, and just couldn’t tell exactly what.

  Then his mom was on the porch again, the egg wrapped in a cloth. She placed it carefully in my hands and I turned to go, not a whole lot more satisfied than I would have been if I’d turned around while I was hidden in the woods, and run home.

  But still, seeing Caleb, something changed. I didn’t feel our chances of staying were better, but I did understand that we hadn’t been kicked out yet. We were still part of things.

  Later that evening, when Gavin and I were out looking for blackberries to pick for dessert—my dad had seen some in the woods and told us where to look for them—I turned to hold a branch back for Gavin, and I looked at him, right into his eyes. The fact that he had been the one to worry about Mom and Dad told me he was aware of more than I gave him credit for. “Gavin,” I said, “there’s something you need to know. Mom needs to kill Pumpkin. She thinks it’s the only way for us to really belong here. I’m telling you because I think you have the right to know. Okay?”

  Gavin’s face twisted up into an expression that was half about to cry and half “what are you talking about?”

  “You know I’m right,” I said.

  I couldn’t bear to look at him then. I looked out into the trees, noticing how they weren’t all straight up and down like they should have been. Some had fallen over and were leaning and others were growing through a mass of tangled brush.

  The next time my mom brought up the subject of the phone, I said, “Do you even know where my phone was when Ron found it?”

  “No,” she said.

  �
�It was in Ron and Betsy’s secret shed where they have a solar panel,” I said.

  My mom’s head jerked and suddenly she was facing me. “A solar panel?” she repeated.

  “Oh, yeah,” I went on. “And a computer. Where I found Nora going online. She goes online all the time in there. They all do. Ron plays solitaire and surfs organic-farming chat rooms. Betsy e-mails her sisters.”

  My mom clenched her fists. “You’re kidding,” she said.

  “No,” I answered. “They have a minifridge there too. Where Betsy keeps a stash of Diet Coke.”

  “Diet Coke?” said my mom. Have I mentioned that she is on a parent committee at Gavin’s elementary school that petitioned to have all the soda machines taken off of school grounds? She is.

  “That’s unbelievable,” she said.

  “Ka said it’s like putting chicken broth in vegetarian vegetable soup.”

  “You know something?” my mom said. “I think Ka hit the nail on the head.”

  21

  The next day, we trudged over to Ron and Betsy’s, I was sure for the last time. I half expected Ron to tell us to pack our bags before the meeting even began.

  But he didn’t. He shook my dad’s hand as we settled onto our regular bench. He nodded to my mom. He looked like someone who hasn’t slept in several days. Betsy was pale and drawn as well.

  “Now that we’ve had time to reflect, does anyone have anything more to say about Genevieve and her cell phone?” Ron began.

  Surprisingly, it was Disa Puchinski who first stood to speak. “Before we judge Gen too harshly,” she said, “I have something I want to confess to. It is bad—none of you suspected it, even my husband.” I was looking at her now. She smiled nervously at Anders, then pinched the bridge of her nose as if a headache were starting to form. “I snuck a layer of Crisco into the false bottom of my great-grandmother’s old-fashioned hat box, which Betsy said was okay to bring.”

  “Your piecrust,” said Betsy in horror.