A Wilder Rose: A Novel (6 page)

It came in the person of Aunt E.J.—Eliza Jane Wilder Thayer, my father’s energetic sister, a female homesteader who had courageously proved up her Dakota claim, then worked for several years in Washington, D.C., before marrying (at the outrageously advanced age of forty-two!) a prosperous rice farmer and moving to Crowley, Louisiana. Now in her early fifties, Aunt E.J. was an indomitable woman, fearless, unfailingly optimistic, bright, and bossy. I think she saw something in me that reminded her of herself when she was my age. She called me her “Wilder Rose” and offered me a way out of Mansfield, at least for a year.

“Come live with me, and you can go to high school,” she said.

“Oh, yes!” I cried ecstatically. I had no idea what kind of place Crowley, Louisiana, might be, but I was sure that it would be more exciting than Mansfield, and we would have to go there by train. By train!

“Absolutely not,” my mother declared firmly. She didn’t like Aunt E.J., who had been her schoolteacher when she was a girl in De Smet. (Later, in the manuscript she called “Pioneer Girl,” she confessed to being the author of a nasty bit of doggerel that included the memorable line “We laugh until we have a pain, at lazy, lousy, Liza Jane.” In a private note to me, she added that she had no excuse for such a terrible thing and that she should have been whipped.)

I also believe, looking back, that my mother feared losing me completely; once I was able to escape her control, I might never come back. It had been a year of escalating battles between the two of us. I was considered wild by the Mrs. Grundys of Mansfield—those personifications of conventional morality—and my mother was always warning me of the dangers of being “talked about.” Silly rumors swirled about my acquaintance with a certain Latin tutor, who was fat and greasy and smelled of cheap cigars, while they might have swirled about my friendship with George Cooley, which was the more credible threat to my reputation.

My mother rarely met a situation she couldn’t manage, but even she was ready to admit defeat. I would never have known that, except that I overheard her telling Mrs. Moore that she had come to her wits’ end with me and didn’t know what she was going to do. Mrs. Moore counseled patience, for I was “at that difficult age” and would surely straighten out in time.

“They do, you know,” she said. “You just have to maintain the upper hand.”

My mother sighed and allowed that she wasn’t sure she could maintain the upper hand for however long it was going to take. “And I don’t trust Eliza Jane to discipline Rose,” she added. “She needs close watching.”

“It does take a mother to manage the wild ones,” Mrs. Moore allowed. “Have I showed you the pattern for my new spring sprigged lawn?”

Taking advantage of the situation, I argued and begged and wept for another year of school, and Papa (who was no fonder of his bossy sister than Mama was but was desperate for some peace in his household) intervened. Faced for once with his resolve, my mother gave in. It was decided. I would be the only girl of my generation to leave Mansfield to further her education. Becky and Josey (she of the patent-leather shoes) were seized with envy—but only momentarily, for they had neither the imagination nor the will to escape. Both would marry town boys and bear town children, and while Josey would later leave Mansfield, Joplin was as far as she got.

The year in Crowley—my sixteenth year—was educational in many ways. I not only triumphed over Caesar and Cicero and solid geometry, but I also helped Aunt E.J. hand out political leaflets and listened, awestruck, to her impassioned arguments on behalf of Eugene V. Debs, the Social Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, thereby becoming a young Socialist myself. And I made time for my first beau, an “older man” of twenty-four from the University of Chicago, who was exceedingly handsome (as I remember him, but who trusts such memories, magnified through a dozen retellings?). He drove a phaeton with red spoke wheels and polished his manners until they glittered.

I graduated at the top of my Latin class in 1904, offered the class poem, and then returned to the relentlessly narrow life of Mansfield. But only briefly. In midsummer, my parents took me and my carpetbag to the depot, where I caught the train for Kansas City and a new life as a telegrapher. But Kansas City was just a temporary stopping point. I was embarking on a journey that would take me almost to the ends of the earth.

After I left, Mama Bess and Papa moved back to Rocky Ridge, which by dint of work and saving and an inheritance from my Wilder grandfather now amounted to nearly a hundred acres. My father was still working off the farm as an agent for the Waters-Pierce Oil Company, and there was money coming in. My mother desperately wanted a nicer house than the little two-room affair with a loft, so she drew up the plans and, over the next several years, two local carpenters built it, with my father’s help and under his watchful eye.

To the little two-room frame house with its loft, the carpenters added a downstairs bedroom, a washroom (which became an office after the bathroom went in), a living room with an alcove for bookshelves, and three porches. Upstairs, they added two bedrooms and a sleeping porch. In the kitchen, Mama Bess asked for the counters to be built low, to her height; in the parlor, she wanted a great many windows, window seats, a beamed ceiling, and paneling and flooring made from native oak cut on the farm and planed at the town sawmill. And at her insistence, Papa had the fireplace built of slabs of local stone, instead of the brick that would have been much easier for him to manage. She objected to the brick, she confessed in one of her articles: “I argued; I begged; and at last when everything failed I wept.” My mother got her fireplace: two sturdy slabs of Ozark rock, topped by a thick wooden mantel.

By 1913, the house was finished and painted white. To help pay the mortgage, Papa sold the hay from the bottomland, and Mama Bess filled the upstairs bedrooms with city people who were visiting the mineral springs around Mansfield, on a paid board-and-room basis. And at last, some twenty years after we three had left South Dakota, poor as a trio of church mice, my mother had the showplace she dreamed of, a comfortable, romantic-looking farmhouse that denied the hard, inflexible realities of the farm itself: the daily work, the apple trees’ declining production, the invading scrub timber that had to be constantly kept at bay. The fact that a living could be wrested from the farm only with unceasing labor would not have been apparent to those who came from the city—or who read my mother’s articles about the joys of life on a small farm. And perhaps not even to my parents, or at least to my mother—which is understandable, for she had to insist (because she believed it) that their struggles were meaningful, were worthwhile. She had to deny their failures and, especially in her farm-journal articles, enlarge every small success into a major victory. For her, the house was the symbol of their triumph over hardships and hard times.

But by 1928, Papa was seventy-one and increasingly lame. Mama Bess was sixty-one and mentioned her health, and his, in nearly every letter, tweaking my guilt. The farm was more than Papa could handle, and the farmhouse too much house for Mama to manage. Mansfield had an ice plant, but there was no ice delivery in the country, and my mother still relied on the springhouse in the ravine to keep the milk and butter and eggs cool. In the summer, the wood-fired cookstove turned the kitchen into an oven. In the winter, with only the coal heater in the dining room, the place was an icebox—and, of course, Papa had to cut and split and stack wood and haul coal and ashes. In every season, there was the constant, day-in-day-out feeding of animals: the chickens needed their laying mash, the pigs their slop, the cows their hay, the horses their oats.

My parents needed electricity, central heating, hot water, indoor plumbing, a refrigerator, and a bathtub where Papa could stretch out and soak his crippled legs and feet in hot water. They needed that modern cottage I had in mind—although in retrospect, I wonder if I needed to build it for them more than they needed to receive it. Perhaps the little house I had in mind was an emblem of my success in the world of newspapers, magazines, and books, just as the farmhouse was an emblem of success for my mother, in her world. Perhaps that was why she resented the idea of the cottage, and me, and refused to even consider it.

Convincing Mama Bess to live anywhere other than the house for which she had argued, begged, and wept was going to be a challenge.

Looking back, I don’t know why I thought it could be done.

The tenant house—the first part of my plan—was a relatively easy matter.

Papa agreed that it was impossible to get reliable farm help without a house for the hired man and his family. Mama Bess balked at the cost (less than a thousand dollars, I calculated), but she knew that Papa had to have help, and when she saw that he favored the idea, she finally agreed. He picked a site down the hill, and the project got under way. Once the four-room house was finished, Papa hired Jess Wiley to live there, do the chores, and work the farm. Jess’s wife’s name was Angela. They had one child and another on the way.

But the cottage I wanted to give my parents—the “retirement house,” Mama Bess called it with a disdainful sniff—was another story, and my plan was stopped flat by her refusal.

Now we were discussing it—again—at the kitchen table on a chilly, gray May morning, with the rain sluicing down the windows and the room so dark that I had lit the kerosene lamp. Troub was still in New Hampshire with her father. The spring had been chilly and dismally wet since my arrival in late March. Papa’s leg was so painful that he could barely get the chores done. Mama Bess had been up during the night with a persistent cough, and I had made her a mustard plaster, with flour and dry mustard and water, folded into a flannel sandwich that she put on her chest, under her nightgown.

I was pouring tea and once again summoning my arguments, trying to get her to consider the cottage. “Just think about it, Mama Bess,” I coaxed. “Wouldn’t it be better to have a smaller house that would take less work to keep up? And electric lights and an electric water heater, so you wouldn’t have to heat dishwater and bathwater on the stove? An electric range in the kitchen, so Papa wouldn’t have to carry wood and ashes?” I sat down across from her. “And if you and Papa had the cottage, I could live here and rent this place from you—I’ll pay sixty dollars a month for it, which would amount to a bit of extra income, don’t you think?” Sixty dollars a month was twice what they could get for the place as it was, if they advertised it for rent, but I would be glad to pay it, even for the months I planned to travel.

“No,” she said. Her blue eyes darkened and she set her mouth in that hard way that meant she didn’t want to hear another word on the subject. Her roan-brown hair—short, now, and softly waved—was already liberally streaked with white, and her once-fresh face was lined, the skin sagging.

“But
why
?” I persisted. “Papa is willing—he’s told me so. In fact, he’s enthusiastic about the idea.” That was an exaggeration, but not by much. Papa knew that the new house would be easier for her to manage. “Really, if you don’t want to think of yourself, think of Papa and how much he has to do every day to keep this old place going. He can barely get to the barn and back sometimes. I have the money, and my Palmer account is growing like all get-out. I’d like nothing better than to do this for you. I’ll furnish it, too, and even hang the curtains. You won’t have to do a thing except walk in and take off your coat.”

I meant every word of it. She had worked so hard for so long and so bravely, and I very much wanted to give her this gift. But her mother had trained her never to be beholden to anybody. She hated to accept generosity, even (or perhaps especially) from her daughter. She had accepted my annual subsidy for the past eight years because they couldn’t manage the taxes and doctor bills without it. But the house, the house
I
wanted to give her, was an expensive luxury, and—built on my success as a writer—a different matter entirely.

But just at that moment, there was a loud crash in the shed at the back of the kitchen, where the firewood was stacked.

“What in the world . . . ?” my mother exclaimed.

“Sounds like something fell over,” I said. “I’ll go see.”

I was getting to my feet when Papa—trailed by his anxious Airedale, Nero—limped into the kitchen, leaning heavily on his cane and dragging his crippled foot. He was a short man, no taller than my mother, and frail, his white hair thinning, his face lined and leathery from long hours in the sun. Fumbling, he pulled off his dripping coat and hung it on the peg by the door. Then he hooked his cane over the back of his chair and dropped into it.

“Whew,” he said, his voice cracking. “That last load of stove wood just about finished me, Bess. Dropped the whole damned armful on the floor.” He wiped his face on the sleeve of his work shirt. “Knocked over the water bucket, too.”

I gave my mother a “there now do you
see
?” glance. “Let me pour you some coffee, Papa,” I said. “Then I’ll go mop it up.”