Little Blog on the Prairie

by Cathleen Davitt Bell

  “I haven’t used it all,” Disa rushed to explain. “I just wanted to be sure I had an option. This may sound silly, but a frontier cabin without a woman turning out delicious baked goods—it just doesn’t seem authentic to me. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to get the same results working with lard.”

  “The muffins you made on the first day?” Clark said.

  Disa nodded mournfully. “I’m telling you about this now, because I think before we decide what should happen to Gen, you should all know that she is not the only one who broke the rules.”

  For a second there was silence. Then suddenly everyone was talking.

  “I never would have thought…”

  “Of all the—,” someone else began.

  “If you want to see a frontier cabin where no one’s making delicious baked goods, come to our place,” Caleb’s mom shouted above the rest. “And here I’ve been feeling like I’m inadequate and you’re using Crisco.” Then she smiled. “Though I’m such a noncook I don’t think I even really know what Crisco is.”

  “It’s—” Disa looked around and realized this probably wasn’t the time or the place to explain.

  Maureen stood up next. Out of her pocket came something that looked like a pen. “This,” she said, holding it up for everyone to see, “is mascara. I have worn it so long that my lashes are simply gone if I don’t.” She paused in her matter-of-fact way and sighed. She seemed sad and I wondered for a second if she was sad about Ka. “Because I’m not using any real makeup remover and this is a very good, waterproof essential, I’m only applying it a few times a week. I didn’t sneak in anything else.”

  She sat down, slipping the mascara back into her pocket.

  “I brought in the last Harry Potter book,” Cara Hinchey said in a voice so soft I could hardly hear it. “I’d finished the sixth one just before we left and I really wanted to see what happened. I ripped off the covers and hid it inside my allergy pillow.”

  Matt admitted to a deck of cards. Caleb stood to show off his leather necklace. “It wasn’t really sneaking since you all can see it,” he said. “But I don’t think guys wore necklaces in 1890.”

  “Indians did,” Erik suggested.

  “Leather would have been available,” Betsy said.

  Caleb’s father stood. “This one’s really bad,” he said, and he pulled from his pocket a flat, gray box.

  “Is that another cell phone?” Ron asked.

  “No,” Peter drawled. “It’s a handy little device that lets me follow the game.”

  “The game?” said Ron.

  “Baseball,” Peter explained. “I can’t believe that none of y’all know that I’m a huge Braves fan.” Suddenly he’d flipped the top up and was demonstrating how the box worked. “You see here, when the Braves are playing, this little square comes on. It’s box scores, basically, but it’s updated by satellite. I figured it was okay because you could get box scores in the newspaper in 1890. This would just be a little faster of a delivery method.”

  “How’d you get it in?” Ron asked.

  “My sleeves,” he said. “While I was changing from my regular shirt into my 1890 one, I slipped it from one sleeve into the other.”

  At this point, the gasping and whispering had subsided. In fact, Peter’s smile was so broad, Maureen and Susan laughed.

  Anders Puchinski stood up, and I wondered what he could possibly confess to. It seemed incredible to me that he had snuck in anything at all.

  He hadn’t. “Peter, if you don’t mind my interrupting your fascinating demonstration, I want to say that I don’t find any of this funny.” He glared at his wife. “I came out here because I don’t need modern life. I don’t want it. Disa—I thought you felt the same way. I thought all of you felt the same way.” He crossed his arms. “But now it seems that Ron and Betsy and I are the only ones who haven’t been cheating.”

  Disa hung her head in shame. Peter Driver looked sheepish and shrugged. Clark and Maureen pursed their lips.

  It was then that Ron stepped forward, and I think we all shared a silent sigh of relief. Anders would stop making us all feel guilty.

  Ron raised his hands, palms forward, like a priest about to begin a Sunday sermon, his gesture a promise of mercy and understanding.

  But before he had a chance to say anything, my mom rose from her seat.

  “Actually, Anders,” she said. “The only ones not cheating are Susan, Doug, Clark, me, and you.”

  Ron and Betsy turned to face her, their faces frozen in identical midthought spasm—like when you pause a movie to go to the bathroom and the actor is left with his mouth twisted and one eye half squinted.

  My mom continued, as if she were addressing Anders alone. “I take it you haven’t heard anything about the ‘electricity shack’?”

  Anders shook his head, but his eyes did not leave my mother’s face.

  My mom paused, making sure she had everyone’s attention, and then explained about the electricity shack, and what was inside it.

  “There’s a computer?” Anders asked when she was finished. He shook his head, like he was chasing away a sneeze, then looked from my mom to Ron and then back again, like he was hoping one of them would explain that it was some kind of legitimate 1890s device that just happened to be called a computer. An early typewriter? An abacus?

  “Campers aren’t supposed to go in there,” Betsy wailed. “It has nothing to do with Gen’s phone.”

  “Of course it does,” my mom said. “Where do you think Gen’s been charging the darn thing? That’s where she left it.”

  “No, the phone fell out of her pocket,” Ron said, raising his voice over my mom’s and Betsy’s. “When she was in our barn the other day.”

  “What?” I said.

  “Nora found it,” Betsy explained. “Right after you came over last week. She said it must have slipped out of your pocket when you were in our barn.”

  “Nora found it?” I said. I was standing now, looking for her. The one thing I needed to see was her face, and when I located her, I saw she had the good sense to look like she was about to throw up. Found it, had she? More like grabbed it before Ron had a chance to see it, then used it to have me nailed to the wall.

  It made me sick, to think that Nora was behind all the misery of the last week. That my family was embarrassed and on the verge of getting kicked out of camp not because I had accidentally left my phone behind, but because Nora had willfully turned it in. I felt steam rising inside my head. Heat coming into my face. I was an engine without an exhaust system. I didn’t know what else to do but roar. “That’s a lie!” I shouted. “I knew you were lying.”

  “Are you calling my daughter a liar after you’ve been lying this whole summer?” Ron wasn’t being quiet and gentle now. His voice was booming.

  My dad stood. “She’s calling anyone a liar she needs to.”

  Anders pointed a finger at my dad. “You people,” he said. “You’re the problem. You shouldn’t even be here. You don’t want to be here.”

  “Oh, it would be better if we were Diet Coke addicts?” my mom said. “That’s what passes for good frontier behavior these days?”

  “Let’s calm down, everyone,” Peter said, standing.

  “Yes, please. Arguing isn’t going to get us anywhere,” Maureen begged.

  But Anders wasn’t listening. “They don’t even have the backbone to kill a chicken, let alone control their own children.”

  Ron jumped in with, “Do not tell me they haven’t killed that bird yet.”

  Then my mom: “Oh, for the love of Pete, can we leave this issue alone? Gavin’s a ten-year-old boy! Pumpkin is like his pet.”

  Then Nora to her mom: “I told you they’d wreck it.” She pointed a finger right at me. “You’re the problem here. You’re ruining it for everyone.”

  I yelled back at her: “Me ruining it? Me? This is outrageous is what it is,” I said. “That you can stand up in front of everyone and tell such total lies! Everyone saw m
e plug the phone in at the electricity shack.” I knew I shouldn’t talk anymore—when you’re as mad as I was, you can only get yourself into trouble. But I kept talking anyway. I couldn’t let Nora get away with lying.

  I met Ka’s eyes. “You were there,” I said. “You saw me plug my phone in.” To Erik: “Remember when we were cleaning up after Ron came by and Nora locked him out? That’s when I forgot to grab my phone.” Matt and Katie and Erik were nodding, but their faces were pale. “You guys remember, right?” I looked at Gavin. “You saw it too.” And to Caleb: “It was plugged in next to all those iPods. You were playing that Green Day song, and then we went online just before Nora told us all to hide from Ron.”

  Why was everyone suddenly looking so much more horrified than before?

  “Um… Gen?” Gavin said, tugging at my sleeve. “Ixnay elling-tay oh-nay everyone-way.” (Translation: You are a bone-head.)

  But the damage was already done.

  “You—,” Anders said. He was staring at Erik.

  Ron had Nora fixed in a tractor beam of a gaze.

  Matt, Katie, and Ka had their heads down, and Caleb was looking at his mom, a puppy-dog expression of supplication on his face.

  “I think you just got everyone in a whole lot of trouble,” Gavin said.

  Still staring at his daughter, Ron’s face went from its usual gray white pallor to red. His eyes were bright with anger. “I can’t believe what you have done,” he said. “You betrayed your mother and me. You have stepped on everything we have given our lives to build.”

  He stopped for a second and in his silence we could hear Betsy crying. “We did this for you,” she said, addressing Nora through her tears. “And you’ve made a mockery of it, using what you know would be dreadfully embarrassing to us to entertain—and corrupt—your friends.”

  “I’m not sure a few songs on an iPod qualifies as corruption,” my mom said.

  “Don’t tell us what qualifies as corruption,” Ron said. Betsy nodded, blinking back tears. “You clearly don’t have the slightest idea.”

  “Now, that’s not fair,” my mom began.

  “I want you to know something,” Ron said, cutting my mom off. “I was planning to forgive the phone.

  “Look!” he said, pulling out a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket. “This is covered with notes. I’ve been thinking hard about all of this, reading some of the histories we keep about the frontier. Something that I keep coming back to is that only about twenty percent of families survived out here. In 1850, in Oregon territory, forty-four families are listed on the U.S. Census. Ten years later, only nine of them remain. They died, they went home, they starved, they left family heirlooms behind, and sometimes abandoned even their children. There are stories of families getting through a winter by digging a hole in the ground and living in it for months, like animals. They were desperate to be here and did desperate things to hold on to their claims.

  “I was going to share this with you and tell you my conclusion, which is that what really separates our time from back then is community. People back then knew their neighbors and helped them—helped them to survive—and forgave them, which I was planning to do as well.

  “But after today, I just want you gone. All of you. This—the way we live here—is luxury compared to the old frontier. We’re dishonoring the original frontier people by even having the kind of conversation we’re having now. They would have been thrilled to have milk cows and chickens and a variety of vegetables growing in their gardens. And yet you—you people—,” he spat. “And even my own daughter. You can’t live for eight weeks without your iPods and your cell phones and God knows what else.”

  “I—,” I started. Somehow this was all my fault.

  “No,” he said. “Don’t even try to explain yourself. I’m ashamed of you, all of you. I’m ashamed of myself. You’re right, Anders. We don’t need the electricity shack. We don’t need a computer or Diet Coke. I don’t want to be like you people. That’s why we left the modern world. I thought bringing you out here would teach you something, but I can see now that I was wrong. So go home,” he almost whispered. His anger, his booming voice, even his calm sense of resolve was gone like air from a leaking balloon. “All of you. Back to your cabins. I don’t want to see you and your… children anymore right now.”

  “Let’s take another week?” Betsy said, her hands wrapped in her apron as if she were going to tear the fabric of it in two.

  Ron turned without answering her and walked into his barn. The rest of us gathered into our family groups without speaking. It would have felt like a parade—all of us in our costumes wandering down the path into the woods in a line—if it hadn’t also felt like a funeral.

  “If we had to spend a winter living like animals in a hole in the ground,” Gavin said on the walk home, “we would totally have died.”

  My mom, dad, and I nodded in silent, grim agreement.

  And then my dad added, “Not that we did much better out here.”

  22

  That night, over a fresh pot of beans, we were silent. You could hear forks scraping the tin plates as we poked and stirred. Then more silence. Finally my dad said, “I think we need to leave.”

  “Leave?” echoed my mom, and she choked out a fake laugh.

  “Yes,” said my dad.

  Mom started to sputter. “But—,” she said. “Ron’s crazy. He’ll calm down. It’s not just us.”

  “I don’t care about the others, who snuck in what, who corrupted whose children. It’s not working for us. And I’m starting to—” He put his head in his hands. “I’m starting, I think, to lose my mind.” He raised his head and smiled helplessly, and for a second he was my old dad again. The dad who would see a joke in everything, who would be able to place the whole idea of our having to leave early—the quadruple humiliation of it all—as just one more detail in the absurd tapestry of life.

  But his smile faded quickly. That funny, easy dad was not hungry, sick, and exhausted. That dad was not well on his way to cutting down two hundred trees by hand.

  My mom shook her head, stood as if she could pretend that the meal—and thus the conversation—was over. She laid her plate, which still had a bunch of beans on it, in the basin. She took my plate and put it in the basin as well. I wasn’t finished, but I didn’t say anything. I was too scared of whatever was happening between my parents. But when Mom tried to take Gavin’s plate too, he protested. “Hey,” he said. “I’m not done.”

  My mom sighed and sat back down at the table. My father took another bite. I took a bean off Gavin’s plate and popped it into my mouth. Then Mom looked up at my dad and there were tears in her eyes.

  “Okay,” she said. “Okay, this is maybe—probably—not exactly what we all imagined it would be.”

  “At the least,” Dad said. “I know this makes you sad, but you have to admit it goes deeper than being different from what we imagined.” My mom didn’t say anything. “Come on,” he said. “Admit it. This was a mistake. You’re the only one who wanted to come and even you are miserable.”

  My mother sniffed, looked around for something to dry her eyes on, and found nothing. My dad fumbled for a moment in his pocket, pulled out a bandanna handkerchief, and passed it across the table to her. “It will be hard to go back home and tell everyone we failed,” he said. “It will be hard to admit to Ron and Betsy that we’re the first family in the history of the camp to give up. But we can go home, and we’ll be fine. We’ll get some rest. I’m still on vacation. We can plan a trip. We could even just rent a car here and do some sightseeing on the way back. We’re probably not far from some national park or something.”

  “It’s nice to see you’re finally taking some interest in vacation planning,” my mom said, a sob escaping even as she cracked this joke. Or sort of joke. It also sounded like she was mad.

  “I’m sorry,” my dad said. “I know I should be more involved with our vacation planning. With everything. And I promise I will be. Look, we�
��ll get past this. It’s a bump.”

  “Is it?” my mom said. “Is it really just a bump?” It was strange how one little question coming from her could sink us deeper into the hole my dad was trying so valiantly to climb out of. “I don’t think it will be a bump for me.” She swallowed, and if I could have stuffed the bandanna into her mouth to keep her from saying what came next, I would have. “I think for me this will be a failure,” she said. “I think this is about us working together as a family, and if we can’t do it, I don’t know…” She let her voice drift away. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Okay,” my dad said, his head now in his hands. He looked up. “Then let me put it this way,” he said. “I’m going to finish that clearing. I said I would clear those trees, and I will. But after that I am leaving. If Gen and Gavin want to come with me, they are welcome to. You should feel free to stay.”

  He stood up from the table and pushed back his chair, leaving his food on his plate. He lifted his hat from a hook on the wall and held it in his hands. He opened his mouth to speak, and then closed it again.

  No one knew where he was going when he left the cabin, and after the door had swung shut behind him my mom continued to stare as if the back of the door might contain the answer to a puzzle she was desperate to figure out. After a few minutes, she stood. She poured boiling water over the basin of dishes, and I picked up a rag and a wooden spoon to begin trying to work off the grease. Before long, we could hear the sound of chopping. As usual. How much longer would he be out there? How many more days did we have left? I put down the dish I was scrubbing and stood in the open door of the cabin, looking out in the direction of the woods. “Is he trying to finish all those trees off tonight?” I said.

  My mom sighed. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just don’t know.”

  I felt like I could taste how it would be for us to rent a mini-van and drive to the Grand Canyon. I thought about eating at Denny’s and IHOP on the road, and my mouth began to water. Wouldn’t that be better?

  But what about Ka? What about Caleb? And Nora—I hated thinking of her satisfied smirk on finding out that I had quit.