A Wilder Rose: A Novel (24 page)

And as long as her drafts were like her first try at
Farmer Boy
, I would have my work cut out for me. I would have to set aside a couple of months for every one of her rewrites, about the same amount of time I had spent ghosting the Lowell Thomas books. But I couldn’t refuse. The royalty income was important to her and Papa, and the prestige of being an author was increasingly important to her. She had given a report on her first two books to the Athenian Club in Hartsville, and another at the Interesting Hour Club in Mansfield, and she had been pleased when a complimentary article appeared in the Springfield newspaper. She couldn’t write the books herself. She understood that now: Harper’s rejection of
Farmer Boy
had been a turning point for her. She might hate to depend on me to do the work, but she had no alternative. And neither did I.

“If you wrote a fourth book,” I said slowly, “you might expand the Plum Creek section in ‘Pioneer Girl.’ The grasshoppers eating the wheat, the prairie fire—that would be dramatic.”

She picked up her spoon, hesitant. “I’ve been thinking about that. I suppose I could write about Minnesota and Iowa, but . . .” Her voice trailed off. I knew she was thinking of the death of her little brother, a painful episode in her childhood. “We did a lot of moving around in those days.” She dipped her spoon into her soup. “It wasn’t a happy time for us, you know. Pa couldn’t seem to get settled. He kept running into hard luck of every kind—crop failures, grasshoppers, drought, debts. And there was never any money. I remember what a big decision it was for Mary and me to spend a penny for a slate pencil, which we shared.”

“You
shared
a piece of chalk?”

She nodded. “Each of us had gotten a penny for Christmas. We used Mary’s penny to buy one slate pencil and agreed that Mary would own half of my penny. We sat on the same bench at school, you see, so sharing was easy. We shared our schoolbooks, too. I was littler, so I read in the front part of the book, where my lessons were, and Mary would read in the back, with pages standing up between.” She shook her head. “And now—children nowadays have so much, even in these hard times. Too much, I often think.”

I said nothing. I was remembering growing up with my own sense of never having enough of what the other children had. But I didn’t have to share my slate chalk. I thought how she must feel, remembering the days when she and Mary had to study one book together and knowing that now, children were reading books with
her
name
on the cover. Surely a heart’s dream come true, and I was glad.

She looked away, as if she were seeing into the past. “We lived in conditions that people wouldn’t tolerate today, no matter how hard up they were. The dugout, for instance. It daunted even Ma, who was so brave about such things. It wasn’t much bigger than a fruit cellar, and dug into the creek bank, so close to the water that we had to watch Carrie every single minute to make sure she didn’t fall in. And Ma’s work . . .” She shook her head and fell silent.

“Ma’s work?” I prompted.

Mama Bess put down her spoon, her soup untasted. “I’m sure you thought I worked hard while you were growing up. But you have no idea how hard Ma had to work in those years to keep food on the table and her children halfway clean. She had to cook for five on a tiny wood stove, and we drank water out of the creek—unboiled, I suppose. It’s a wonder we didn’t get sick. The washing had to be done outside, because she had to heat the wash water in a big cauldron over a campfire. When it rained, the mud . . .” She shuddered. “And the time the ox ran across the dugout and stuck his leg through the roof and the whole thing caved in and everything we owned was covered with dirt. We couldn’t afford lumber—and anyway, there was very little to be had, out there on that prairie. It all had to be hauled in on the railroad. So Pa wove a roof out of willow boughs and covered it with earth and sod. Can you
imagine
?”

I thought of the dirt-stained face of the Kansas farmer whose wife and children had given up in despair and gone back East. The Ingalls family had not persevered, either. Grandpa Ingalls gave up at Plum Creek—his last effort at farming—and went to work in Burr Oak, Iowa, where he helped run the Masters Hotel.

She shook her head again. “Today’s children get water out of a faucet. Hot water, too. They just wouldn’t understand.”

“You don’t have to tell everything that happened,” I said. “As for the drinking water, you could just say that there was a spring.” I went back to my sandwich. “This isn’t an autobiography, you know. It’s a story. A story for children. Make it an adventure. Make it
fun.
”

She frowned. “I suppose,” she said doubtfully. She picked up her sandwich. “Yes, I think Plum Creek will be the next book, if there is one. But I’ll have to leave out an awful lot.”

Mama Bess had been pleased with her “High Prairie”
manuscript when she brought it to me, saying, quite hopefully, that she felt there wouldn’t be much for me to do. If there was, she added, I should go ahead and make the changes, then show her what I had done. “I’m hoping that there won’t be very many.”

But when I sat down to read the manuscript, I saw that there would have to be quite a lot of rewriting. The narrative wasn’t as jumbled as
Farmer Boy
,
but the story (which she had based on the opening pages of “Pioneer Girl”) needed a proper beginning that would connect it to the previous book. She had included the story of Carrie’s birth, but that would be confusing to readers who had read the first book, where Carrie was part of the cast of characters.
So I took out the birth story and mentioned Carrie in the first sentence, to make it clear that this book followed
Little House in the Big Woods
:

A long time ago, when all the grandfathers and grandmothers of today were little boys and little girls or very small babies, or perhaps not even born, Pa and Ma and Mary and Laura and Baby Carrie left their little house in the Big Woods of Wisconsin. They drove away and left it lonely and empty in the clearing among the big trees, and they never saw that little house again. They were going to the Indian country.

The plot was simple. The family arrives, they build a house and plant a garden, live there for a time, and then leave. But their coming and going had to be motivated in a way that children could understand. The episodes had to be rearranged for greater coherence and knitted together with clearer time-and-place transitions. And Mama Bess’s bare-bones scene sketches had to be filled out with the kind of rich, vital sensory details that keep readers interested. Impatiently, I jotted the Albanian phrase
Shum
ë
keq
in my diary. “Very bad.” It was my private writer’s judgment on my mother’s manuscript. I would never say that in her hearing.

I worked on her book every day for more than a week, early morning to late afternoon—miserable days at the typewriter, because it was late May and the weather had turned very warm. On the thirtieth of May, the thermometer hit 125 degrees in the shade. The day after that, the thermometer broke.

The next week, I gave the rewritten pages to my mother, who had come for tea. She took them home to read and promptly got sick. (Whether there was any connection between the two events, I can’t say.) The next day, Papa telephoned me to ask me to come over and help take care of her. Dr. Fuson, who came that afternoon, lectured her about eating too many strawberries.

While I was there, she handed me the material I had given her, with only a few corrections. “I thought I had written a better book,” she said regretfully. “But I can see why you needed to make the changes. The story is much improved, Rose. It holds together better, and all your little details make the pictures so much clearer.” With a little sigh, she added, “Thank you.”

Thank you.

“You’re welcome,” I murmured and went into the kitchen to make some supper for Papa.

Altogether, I worked on the rewrite of “High Prairie” for thirty-one days, with a break in early June for John’s birthday party. I finished the rewrite the last week of June and gave it to her, along with a cover letter to George Bye that she could sign and send with the manuscript. George forwarded it to Harper, which accepted it—without revisions—a few months later. It was to be called
Little House on the Prairie
, a title suggested by Ida Louise Raymond, who by this time was head of the children’s department. The contract for the fourth book came later in the year, in November, and Mama Bess began to plan the book that would be called
On the Banks of Plum Creek
.

My mother’s project had one advantage: it served as a kind of limbering-up exercise that propelled me back into my own work. When I finished her Indian Territory book, I wrote another Dakota pioneer story, “Object Matrimony.” It had an O. Henry ending—an unexpected twist—that wrapped up the main plot in a few short paragraphs toward the end. Adelaide Neall snapped it up for the
Post
. The story brought enough to clean up the bills and keep us going for another few months.

Looking back, I don’t know how I managed to work. We suffered through a record string of hundred-degree days. There was no rain, and the drought was the worst ever for our part of Missouri. When the wind blew out of the west, it carried grit from the plains of Oklahoma and Kansas; everything was covered with a film of dust, even the dishes on the table. I was nearly at the end of my rope when some friends—the writer Talbot Mundy and his wife Dawn—invited me, and John, too, to visit. They lived in Florida, on Casey Key, near Osprey, on the Gulf of Mexico. They encouraged John to bring a friend, and he asked Jackie Mason, whose mother agreed. I didn’t have the money for the trip, but Longmans owed me a thousand dollars in royalties for
Hurricane.
George Bye sent a check, enough to fund the trip and handle expenses through the rest of the year.

I stopped work and packed our clothes, and we were on our way. Talbot and I had been corresponding for some time about several historical novellas he had published in the magazine
Adventure
, featuring a fictional Roman adventurer named Tros of Samothrace, who fought with the Britons against Julius Caesar. Talbot’s work was good, and I had been encouraging him, by letter, to collect the novellas into book form. Now they were to be published by Century, which had published
Diverging Roads
and my Hoover book, some fifteen years before. I was glad for the chance to help by writing a letter to the Century editor.

I was also glad for the sheer, mind-altering relief of three weeks away from the farm. The Mundys’ small cottage was tucked into a jungle of palms and pines, with Blackburn Bay at the back door and the Gulf at the front door. John and Jackie were on their best behavior and went off every day, exploring the narrow barrier island. On long tropical evenings, Talbot and Dawn (she was years younger than Talbot, who was nearly fifty-five) taught me to swim in the warm, silver-flecked waves that frothed against the white sand beach. They introduced me to a motley assemblage of local people, all of them enviably tanned and fit and refreshingly cynical and nonconformist—a delightful break from the Mansfielders. We went out on a sailboat and walked down the beach to a local nudist colony for an afternoon game of volleyball. We talked nonstop about politics (the Mundys and their friends were as anti–New Deal as I) and the increasingly troubling European situation.

One week, John, Jackie, and I took a bus across Florida to Miami and then a boat to Havana, where we toured Morro Castle, a sprawling Spanish fortress built in the late 1500s. We indulged in spicy Cuban food (which I regretted afterward) and spent hours in the market, buying little presents to take home. The Cuban parliament had just extended suffrage to women, but General Batista was the acknowledged power behind the presidency and the streets were full of police, a threatening reminder of the military power I had seen in the European states. The boys were both frightened and excited at the sight of the armed and uniformed men, giving me an opportunity to talk about what happens when the state imposes its power over individual citizens—an on-the-spot civics lesson.

In fact, the whole trip was magical for John, and he came to my hotel room that night to tell me how much he appreciated it.

“The island, the swimming, the big boat, and now Cuba—there’s no way I could’ve done this on my own,” he said. “I think of where I was just a year ago and I don’t know how to thank you, Mrs. Lane. You’ve changed my life.” And then he got up from his chair, came over to me, and put his cheek against mine. “Maybe I don’t always act like it, but I know that you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I would like to call you Mother.”

My heart was so full I could barely speak. “I would love that,” I managed finally, thinking that John was the best thing that could have happened to
me
, and thanking the providence that arranges such things for sending this boy to Rocky Ridge that rainy September day.

At the door, he turned and added, wistfully, “I just wish I could be all you want me to be. I’m afraid I never will.”

“Of course you will,” I said. It was only later that I thought how that must have sounded.

We had taken the train to Florida but planned to go back to Missouri by bus. John and Jackie were eager to see more of the country, so they left from the Miami bus station at the end of our Havana trip, going back the long way, up the coast to Charleston, then across to Memphis and home. I stayed on with the Talbots another few days, then took the bus home alone. The whole glorious, carefree trip had reminded me of how good it was to escape from the isolated, sunk-in-the-muck life I lived at the farm, if only for a little while. If it hadn’t been for John, I told Dawn Mundy the night before I left, I might not go back at all.

“John’s a swell kid,” she said, swinging lazily in one of the twin hammocks that Talbot had slung between two palm trees. “Smart, good looking, too. I see why you want to do something nice for him.” She paused, and the silence was filled with birdsong. “But is he worth giving up your freedom, Rose? After all, it’s not as if he’s your
son
.”