A Wilder Rose: A Novel (21 page)

What I saw was deeply dispiriting. From eastern Oklahoma to western Kansas, there was no green to be seen anywhere. What had once been productive wheatland was swept clean by the wind, the soil drifted in brown, wind-sculpted dunes along fences and against buildings. This was not the country of the pioneers I had written about in
Hurricane,
where the wild grasses reached to the horizon in every direction, dancing to the wind that blew out of a clean, bright sky. The grass of fifty years ago was gone, the protective pelt of sod plowed under, the soil, millions of acres of it, sowed to wheat. When the rains stopped, the wheat died. The earth was left bare. What little moisture remained in the subsoil was baked out of it by the relentless sun. The unforgiving wind scraped it up and flung it into the air in boiling clouds two miles high, moving with a blinding force across the land, scouring paint from buildings, blasting the bark from trees, the flesh from animals.

Dust, dirt, wind. “We know where the dust comes from by its colors,” one farmer’s wife told me, holding her apron across her face. “Red dirt blows in from eastern Oklahoma, yellow-orange comes up from Texas, black comes down from northern Kansas. Sometimes it’s all colors, mixed up together. Sometimes it turns the sun bright orange.” She shook her head, marveling at the memory. “I’ve even seen the sun with a rainbow around it. A rainbow, but no rain.”

Lucille and I drove with the windows closed, but the car filled with dust and we had to tie handkerchiefs over our noses and mouths. When we stopped at a roadside café, empty because there was no traffic on the road, there was dust on the table and grit in our thin and unappetizing sandwiches. In our hotel rooms, the furniture was furred with dust and the floors were gritty underfoot.

The dust wasn’t just ugly and unpleasant. It was deadly. In Dodge City, we saw people on the street wearing masks distributed by the Red Cross. In less than an hour, one man told me, a clean white mask would be black with dust. Prairie soil, he said, was rich in silica. It had the same effect on people’s lungs as coal dust on the lungs of miners. The
Hays Daily News
reported that in the previous three months, dust pneumonia had killed twenty; half of the victims were children. Cattle and sheep, their lungs filled with dirt, suffocated in the fields where they stood. They didn’t fall over: they were held upright by the dust that was blown around and over them.

Businesses were paralyzed. The winter wheat crop was gone, and even when the flour mills could get grain, they often had to send workers home because the blowing dust couldn’t be kept out of the flour. Hospitals delayed surgeries because the dust filtered into operating rooms. Foreclosure sales were postponed due to dust storms, and the cattle auctions and feedlots had gone out of business. Dunes drifted across the roads, and travelers had to stop and shovel their way through. A locomotive in Kansas was derailed when it ran into a dune newly drifted across the tracks. Roosevelt made a train trip through the Plains states; at one stop, a farmer held up a homemade sign:
Y
OU GAVE US BEER.
N
OW GIVE US RAIN.
The president shook his head. “Beer was the easy part,” he said. He was booed.

I had attended political rallies before—in Louisiana, where Aunt E.J. was a supporter of the Socialist Eugene V. Debs; in New York, to a Communist meeting with Jack Reed—but I had never seen people in such a dark mood. They were angry. They were rebellious. Everything about Roosevelt’s New Deal agricultural schemes went against the grain of these yeoman farmers who had never taken a dime—or a dime’s worth of advice—from a government agency. Some of them were beginning to understand that their mistakes in land management were as responsible as the weather for the terrible fix they were in, and they could see the need to change their farming methods. They were ready to rotate crops, fallow the land, and abandon their sod-busting ways—whatever it took to make the land productive again.

But the scorching heat, the wind, and the drifting dust had already drastically reduced the arable acreage. The farmers felt that Roosevelt’s scheme to pay them not to plant was as idiotic as his plan to fix the price of wheat. They feared a famine. They wanted a free market. They didn’t believe that the New Deal would help them cope with the dilemma that nature had pressed on them.

Many others swallowed their anger and simply persevered. Like Caroline in
Hurricane,
when the wind blew and the dust came, they lived through moments of blind, blank terror at the vast indifference of nature; moments of courage that made them strong even as they knew the infinite smallness of human life; and moments of pride in their own indomitable efforts. I listened, humbled, as they told me they had read
Hurricane
when it came out in the
Post
and had passed the magazine from hand to hand until the pages fell out. They had seen themselves in Caroline: the waist-deep snows she attacked with her shovel were like the waist-deep dust drifts they had to shovel aside to get to the barn. The darkness in the heart of her blizzard was the same blackness of their dust storms. They were Caroline. They were metaphors for all Americans, in the bleakness of the Depression, steady in their resolve to stay.

But no, not all. Between Hays and Dodge City, heading south and west, we picked up a hitchhiker, a dark-haired boy of sixteen or seventeen in a ragged red flannel shirt, the collar frayed, the elbows out, half the buttons missing. He had left his mother’s farm outside of Independence, he said, despite her pleas to stay and finish school. His father had died and he was going to California, where he planned to find work and send money home to his mother and younger sisters.

He grinned when he said that, and added, “Ain’t everybody? Going to California, I mean. All the boys I know, they’re going to California.”

“You don’t have to go that far,” I said, and something compelled me to add, “We’ll be heading back to Missouri in a few days. You might find more work there.” I thought of Rocky Ridge and the oats to be cut, the corn to be shelled, the barn to be painted, the weeds in the flower border to be pulled. “I expect you would find work in Missouri,” I said, emphatically now. “You’d make enough to be able to send money home to your mother.”

“Naw.” The boy grinned, showing missing teeth. “It’s west for me. Ain’t you never heard the old saying, missus? Go west, young man. Go west.” He jerked his thumb at his chest. “Me, I’m going west. I’m going west and make my fortune.”

Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the countr
y
.
It was Horace Greeley who wrote that, in 1865, two years before my mother was born, four years before my Ingalls grandparents left their little house in the Big Woods and loaded up their wagon and their two little girls and set out for Missouri and then for Indian Territory, where the native grasses grew tall and the heavy black soil, once broken and sown to wheat, proved richer and more fertile than a man’s most optimistic dreams. Where the country had grown up and filled up with farmers and their children, and now that fertile black soil filled the air like a boiling black nightmare.

“Yep,” the boy mused, staring down the thin thread of road that stretched to the horizon, to somewhere else, to the not-here. “Yep. I ain’t gonna be no farmer, not me. Got enough dirt in my lungs to last me a dadgum lifetime. I mean to get me a job in the movies. If I cain’t do that, I’ll live in one of them Hoover camps and be a picker.”

When we got to Dodge City, the boy left us and headed for the train yard to hop a freight. I gave him three dollars for food, and he gave me a grin, his lips so chapped they were cracking. “Thanks, missus,” he said. “Gee, thanks.”

And then, as if the boy had opened my eyes, I began to see the other people who were giving up and heading west. I saw old cars and trucks with boxes and bedding piled high and roped on, children and dogs and chicken crates perched dangerously on the lopsided loads. But they weren’t all headed west. One farmer told me that his wife had taken their children east to Vermont, to her parents’ farm, where they could breathe clean air. If they didn’t go, the doctor said, they would be dead before the year was out. The farmer had promised to follow when he could.

The man stared at me for a long moment, his bleak, dark-rimmed eyes sunk deep in a dust-streaked face. And then he said something that struck like a lance to my heart.

“That stuff at the end of your magazine story, about that baby growing up to live in a big white house and acres of wheat fields all around—it’s a damned lie.” His voice was thick and raspy with dust, heavily accusing. “It might make some folks feel good, might even make people back East feel like it’s still possible to settle out here and get themselves a farm and make a living off of it. But it just isn’t so. If you’re going to write any more stories about pioneers, for God’s sake, tell people the truth. Don’t give them any more of your phony happy endings. Show them this.” He gestured, a helpless, hopeless gesture, toward his barn, half-buried under dust dunes, his skeletal cattle, waiting for the federal executioners. “
This
is what it comes to, missus.
This
is your hurricane.”

My hurricane. I looked around at the death of the man’s dreams, at the end of his hopes. And from that moment on, I could see nothing but blowing dust, starving animals, and people who moved like sleepwalkers and talked in voices so raspy that it was almost impossible to make out what they were trying to say.

Back at Rocky Ridge, I spent four days in early August working on the article, then scrapped what I had done and started over again. It was called “Wheat and the Great American Desert,” and it appeared—a dull, bland, badly written piece—in the
Post
in late September. I lacked the courage to include the things I had seen and heard and felt in that desert—and now understood. If I had written the truth, the
Post
would not have printed it. No magazine in the country would have printed it—at least, not then. They were all looking for hope, and I had none.

I was sick again, too—thyroid deficiency, according to Dr. Anderson in Springfield, who sent me home to bed with a half-dozen medicines. Or maybe it was bad teeth, or another malarial relapse. Or maybe it was despair.

“
This
is your hurricane,” the farmer had said. Like the dust storms, the black blizzards, it had swept away all hope.

I spent the rest of August and part of September in my bedroom, suffering from aches and weariness and constantly pounding headaches, discovering that my bed was the only escape from the terrible losses the year had brought—the pain, the disappointments, the despair.
All we have to do is remain invincible
: Mary Margaret’s glib, facile phrase was now freighted with a cosmic irony. But I no longer thought of being invincible, or even courageous. I was incapable of courage. I knew I had nothing to show of my life but the end of hope, the end of love.

That was why, I thought, no medicine could stop the pain pounding in my head. And why I so desperately missed little Bunting, the last creature on this earth that had loved me, the last creature that I should ever love.

But I was wrong. There was John.

PART FOUR

CHAPTER TWELVE

King Street: April 1939

Norma Lee noticed that the rain had started again about the time Russell joined them and they sat down to lunch. She had picked a bowl of lilacs for the center of the table, and they feasted on chicken vegetable soup, cabbage slaw, homemade Sally Lunn buns, farm cheese, and the last of the apple cobbler from the night before, topped with fresh whipped cream.

Mrs. Lane loved to cook, especially when she was cooking for guests, and the food on her table was always abundant and excellent. The cabbage and soup vegetables had come from a local farmer, and the milk, cream, and cheese came from the neighbor who also supplied both eggs and chickens. Norma Lee wasn’t sure how she felt about Mrs. Lane’s determination to avoid buying government-subsidized foods whenever possible—it meant a great deal of extra work. But she understood the principle and was definitely in favor of fresh farm eggs and cream that could be churned into butter or whipped and sweetened and dolloped onto warm apple cobbler.

It was probably a good idea to buy food from the neighbors, too. With all the scary European news—Mussolini and Hitler joining forces, German children being required to join Hitler Youth, and Stalin demanding a British, French, and Russian anti-Nazi pact—the times were terribly unsettled. Of course, the United States was not going to get involved with whatever happened over there. If it came to war, it was
their
war. Still, lots of people were saying that they aimed to grow as much of their food as they could, just in case. You never could tell what might happen.

Mrs. Lane put down her coffee cup and tilted her head, listening. “Was that the mail carrier’s car I heard?”

“I’ll get it,” Norma Lee said quickly, knowing that Mrs. Lane always liked to see the mail as soon as it came.

“You ladies stay put.” Russell pushed his chair back from the table and stood. “It’s raining. I’ll go out and get it.”

“Let me find my umbrella for you,” Mrs. Lane said, getting up. “And do watch out when you pull up the lid on the mailbox, Russell. It wants to snap down on your fingers.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Russell said dutifully and winked at Norma Lee as he followed Mrs. Lane onto the porch.

Norma Lee returned the wink with a smile. Russell called it “Mrs. Lane’s mother hen complex”—her habit of looking out for you and everybody else within shouting distance, giving instructions, making sure you had what you needed (or what
she
thought you needed) and then offering more: more advice, more help, more money. She seemed to be motivated by an extraordinary spirit of generosity, giving not just her time and attention but loans and gifts of money, even when she was short of cash—as she always was.

But beneath the surface, Russell had glimpsed something else. “If it moves and breathes,” he had told Norma Lee a few days before, “Mrs. Lane will find a way to take care of it. Or mother it, or manage it—comes to the same thing in the end.” One eyebrow raised, he regarded Norma Lee. “Including you, wife. You don’t get something for nothing, you know.”

Norma Lee had to agree. She admired Mrs. Lane enormously and was delighted—thrilled, even—that such an experienced, accomplished writer would be willing to help her improve her writing. She had been surprised, too, when Mrs. Lane had invited her and Russell to come to Danbury and stay for as long as they liked, whenever they liked. At first, she’d been reluctant to impose, but when it became clear that Russell’s carpentry skills and her willing help with the housework (Mrs. Lane was
not
a good housekeeper) were a fair trade for their board and room, she felt better about it.

“It’s a small price to pay,” Norma Lee said. “She’s a gifted writer and a wonderful person. And the best teacher I’ve ever had. Her mothering doesn’t bother me in the slightest.” She studied her husband. Russell was an easygoing guy, and nothing much ever got under his skin. But even he had his limits. “You don’t mind it?” she asked tentatively.

He shrugged. “It’s okay with me, hon, if it’s okay with you.” He paused, raising one dark eyebrow. “Some people can’t deal with it, though. They don’t like to be told what to do, even if it is entirely well meant. They think they’re being manipulated. Pushed around.”

“Some people” was John Turner, whom Mrs. Lane described as one of her “somewhat adopted” sons (like Rexh Meta, the Albanian boy, now a Cambridge graduate). Norma Lee didn’t know the details, but she understood that John, now twenty-one, had been Mrs. Lane’s project since he was fourteen. Recently, he had come to Danbury to visit. While he was there, he and Russell had talked, although Russell actually did the listening while John did the talking. And there had been a lot of talk because John had stored up a lot of complicated feelings over the years since Mrs. Lane had taken him in.

“It’s tough for the kid,” Russell had told Norma Lee at the time. “Her standards for him are always higher than he’s able to meet. Of course, he feels terrible, because she’s done a lot for him. And he’s angry at himself, because he can’t seem to stop taking whatever she’s willing to give him.”

John’s guilt and resentment had erupted the past Sunday morning over a splendid breakfast of pancakes and maple syrup, scrambled eggs, and sausage. Mrs. Lane had asked him to help Russell paint the walls in an upstairs room. He said he was going back to New York. When she insisted, he had blown up at her, stalked out of the house, and slammed the door so hard that a picture had fallen off the wall with a shatter of breaking glass. Both Norma Lee and Russell had been embarrassed, and Mrs. Lane had turned away to hide the sudden tears that came to her eyes.

But a moment later she turned back, shook her head, and said, quite surprisingly, “I wonder how many times I wanted to walk out on my mother and slam the door, but didn’t quite have the courage.”

Norma Lee’s first thought was that if Mrs. Lane had walked out and slammed the door on her mother just once, her whole life might have been different. But, of course, she didn’t say that. Instead, she offered a little story about the time she had told her mother she hated her—and when her mother had burst into tears, she had been so ashamed that they had wept together.

“I think you must have a very understanding mother,” Mrs. Lane said quietly, with something like resignation. “I would like to meet her someday.”

Norma Lee thought that armchair psychologizing was cheap and silly. But in one of her college psych courses, the professor had speculated that daughters learned their mothering styles from their own mothers, who had learned from their mothers and so on. Norma Lee found herself wondering whether Mrs. Lane had inherited her “mother hen complex” from her mother, which could account for the fact that Mrs. Lane saw Mama Bess as managing and controlling—even as she felt obliged to manage and mother Mama Bess. That double-faceted irony might have produced the subsidy Mrs. Lane had begun giving her mother in 1920, which struck Norma Lee as something like the childhood allowance her mother had given
her
. And there was that expensive little house Mrs. Lane had built for her parents, and the books she was ghostwriting for her mother. (She might not like to call it ghostwriting, but if anyone else but Mrs. Wilder’s daughter were doing that job—or if Mrs. Lane were doing it for any other author—that’s exactly what it would be called.) Generosity, yes. Obligation, yes.

But Norma Lee glimpsed something else, although she wasn’t quite able to put her finger on it. Something about those books. Something about the daughter creating the mother’s warm and happy childhood, perhaps to make up for her own lonely, poverty-stricken childhood at Rocky Ridge.

No, not just that but more: the daughter inventing the mother, creating for Laura Ingalls Wilder the identity Mama Bess had always wanted, as a famous, prizewinning author. And if that wasn’t management and control, Norma Lee didn’t know what else it could be.

Yes, cheap armchair psychologizing, and no doubt there was more to it than that. But it was a reasonable explanation for the complex mother-daughter drama in which Mrs. Lane and her mother seemed to be engaged. Norma Lee remembered what Mrs. Lane had said the previous evening, about the battle of wills she had fought with her mother since she was old enough to realize how good it felt to be willful. “She was afraid of what I would come to if she let me go, and I was afraid of what I would come to if she held on,” Mrs. Lane had said—which would explain a great deal about the tug-of-war that seemed to be going on between them. And between Mrs. Lane and John: another battle of wills and a different-but-similar mother-child drama.

Mrs. Lane looked at Norma Lee’s empty plate. “Do have another piece of apple cobbler,” she said, pushing the dish toward her. “And there’s more whipped cream in the refrigerator.”

Norma Lee was trying to think of a way to refuse the second helping when she was rescued by Russell, coming in with the mail. He put a letter and a newspaper on the table beside Mrs. Lane’s plate. “Not good news, I’m afraid,” he said, nodding to the headline.

She picked up the newspaper. “Oh, dear,” she said under her breath and then read the headline aloud. “Allies Push Russian Alliance: Three-Power Armed Pact Urged to Bolster Encirclement of Axis.” And another: “Poland Joins with Rumania: Pledges Exchanged for Resistance to Nazi Aggression.” She laid the paper down with a frown. “Such a lot of hullabaloo. Newspapers like to make their readers think there’s going to be a war—any war, anywhere. They sell more papers that way.”

Russell paused at the door, about to go to work. “You don’t think there’ll be war?”

“Not if I have anything to say about it.” Mrs. Lane gave a short laugh. “Which, of course, I don’t.”

“Don’t be too sure,” Norma Lee said. She had read Mrs. Lane’s articles on the subject in
Cosmopolitan
and the
Country Gentleman
and
Woman’s Day
. “You’re getting quite a reputation for speaking out on the subject.”

“I hope so,” Mrs. Lane said, putting the newspaper down. “We all need to speak out wherever we can. Next month, I’m going to Washington to testify before a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee. They’re holding hearings again on the Ludlow Amendment.”

“I read that support for the amendment has dropped quite a bit over the past two years,” Russell remarked in an offhand way. The bill proposed a Constitutional amendment requiring a national referendum to confirm a declaration of war, except in the case of an attack by a foreign power.

“It’s not likely to be brought to a vote again,” Mrs. Lane said crisply. “Roosevelt and his allies dug in their heels when the amendment was proposed back in ’35. Any president would, since it allows the people to curtail the power of government. But that won’t stop me from telling the Senate what I think. A government, any government, always has its reasons for going to war—land, power, political advantage, money. But it’s the mothers and sons and husbands and wives who have to pay the real cost. They should be entitled to a direct say in the matter.” She gave Russell a frowning look. “And there’s still plenty of popular support for it, Russell. The last Gallup poll said that sixty-one percent of Americans are in favor. That’s almost two-thirds.”

What Russell thought of Mrs. Lane’s staunch isolationism he kept to himself. It would likely result in an argument he couldn’t win. She was too quick for him, too nimble with facts and figures and anecdotes that supported her position. But Norma Lee knew that he felt the amendment was about as smart as calling a town meeting to vote on whether to send the fire department to put out a blaze. People would stand around and argue until the whole town was on fire.

“There are the pacifists who never want to go to war under any circumstances,” he’d said to Norma Lee not long ago. “And there are the jingoes who want to go to war even when it’s a bad idea. I don’t like the idea of turning the say-so over to people who lack the information to make a rational decision.”

When Russell put it that way, Norma Lee had to agree, although she wasn’t sure what a “rational decision” was when you were talking about war. She was from Missouri, like Mrs. Lane. She understood the isolationist sentiment that was so strong throughout the Midwest, and the thought of war made her feel cold inside. If the United States somehow got involved and began sending troops, would Russell want to enlist? Would he
have
to go?

On the other hand, she was an aspiring journalist and spent as much time as she could studying the newspapers’ coverage of current events. She had noticed that while the isolationist movement continued strong—Colonel Lindbergh had just returned from England and was taking up the America First battle against involvement—there were increasingly powerful interventionist forces everywhere. Roosevelt was pushing Congress to revise the 1937 Neutrality Act to permit the sale of arms and equipment to England and France. Headlines like those in today’s paper were fuel to the fire.

Russell smiled and nodded. “Thanks for the lunch,” he said. “I need to get back to work. I want to finish painting the shelves in your study this afternoon, Mrs. Lane. When they’re dry, we can start unpacking your books.” He pocketed a Sally Lunn bun, whistling as he left the room.

“Tell you what,” Norma Lee said. “I’ll do the dishes and frost Russell’s coconut cake if you will sit right where you are and go on with the story. We’d gotten as far as your trip through Oklahoma and Kansas with Lucille. The summer of ’33, I think.”

“Well, then.” Mrs. Lane got up from the table. “If you wouldn’t mind, when you’re done with the dishes, you could peel three or four good-sized potatoes to mash for supper. I thought I’d make a meat loaf.”

“I can make the meat loaf,” Norma Lee offered eagerly. “It’s one of my specialties. I can peel the potatoes, too.”

Mrs. Lane looked pleased. “Thank you, Norma Lee.” She picked up the letter. “While you get started on the dishes, I’ll fetch that box of quilt scraps I’ve been wanting to sort. I find that stories are easier to tell when my hands are busy.” With the letter in her hand, she left the room.