A Wilder Rose: A Novel (14 page)

I already knew what I had to say. Troub had been trying to settle down to writing for months and hadn’t produced more than a dozen pages. Ironically, her inheritance had kept her from being a writer. Now that it was gone and she had to take her writing seriously, she might make a success of it. There was no way to know.

But while we had partly repaired our frayed relationship, I knew it was time to let each other go. It was as if we were both in the water, floundering, and each of us had grabbed hold of one end of a rope—the same rope. Neither of us had the strength to offer the other help.

Still, Troub was Troub: she wanted me to tell her what to do.

“I think you’d be in greater demand as a nurse than as a writer,” I said, speaking as honestly as I could. “At least, right away. You should probably take the Buick and go back East while I still have the money to buy the gas. If you want to sell the car, you can apply my share of whatever you get to what I still owe you for the house loan.” It was about twenty-eight hundred dollars, I thought. I softened my voice. “You can always come back, you know, when things get better. And they will.”

I didn’t believe that, somehow—that things would get better. Or that she would come back. But I had to say it.

She stared into the fire, where a log shifted and sparks flared up the chimney. After a moment, she turned back to me with a smile that trembled at the corners of her mouth.

“Of course I’ll come back,” she said brightly, blinking back the tears. “Whenever I can. And when you come East, Rose, you can stay with me. By that time, I’ll have a job and an apartment. We can do the shows together—it’ll be great fun.” She paused, watching me. “And maybe you will decide to stay. Just . . . stay with me.”

“That will be grand,” I said, around the lump in my throat. “Let’s do plan on it, Troub.”

But we both knew we wouldn’t. We’d had nearly seven years together, most of them good years, interesting, exciting years. We had shared experiences, expenses, travels. We had cared for one another in all the ways we knew how, in all the ways that mattered. But we had never laid any claim to one another, we hadn’t clung, we hadn’t clutched. We had prided ourselves on enjoying each other, without obligation. And now that we had reached the end, neither of us gave way to tears—not then, anyway.

The uncertain situation with my mother’s book was resolved in another week in a much more satisfactory way. Mama Bess (citing the “bird in the hand” adage) was still angry with me for canceling her arrangement with Knopf. But on Thanksgiving Day, in the midst of our first big snowstorm of the season, she and Papa joined Troub and me at Rocky Ridge for a holiday dinner—roast turkey and stuffing, baked sweet potatoes, home-canned green beans, pumpkin pie, and cider.

We were just sitting down to eat when Mr. Roper, who delivered for Western Union, drove up the snowy hill from town, bringing a telegram addressed to Mama Bess from Marion Fiery. I took it from him at the door and opened it, feeling that it must be bad news and I needed to know it first, so I could soften the blow. But when I had read it, I closed it again and took it to Mama Bess. She tore it open, read it, and burst into tears.

Virginia Kirkus, the children’s editor at Harper & Brothers, had agreed to take my mother’s book
.

“Thank God,” I breathed.

“That’s grand!” Troub exulted, with a grin that nearly split her face. She raised her glass of cider to Mama Bess and to me. “Congratulations, you two!”

I raised my own glass. “Congratulations, Mama Bess.”

And even Papa joined in. “Good job, Bessie,” he said heartily. “Didn’t think for a while there that it was going to happen.”

“All’s well that ends well,” my mother sighed, and wiped her eyes.

We learned later that this happy turn of events was the work of Marion Fiery herself. In an unusual move, she had asked Virginia Kirkus to tea at the Biltmore on a Friday afternoon. She gave her the manuscript and the weekend—just two days—to decide whether she wanted it. On Monday, Miss Kirkus let Marion know that she would recommend the book—which would be retitled
Little House in the Big Woods—
for the spring list at Harper. Two weeks later, Mama Bess received Miss Kirkus’s letter of acceptance and the contract, which included the two-book option. Ten days after that, another letter came, announcing that the Junior Literary Guild had chosen
Little House
as its April selection and announcing a prize of $315. I was surprised and enormously cheered. Mama Bess was thrilled by this unexpected recognition. We could breathe easily again.

Troub left one gray, chilly morning in early December. Bunty and I stood on the porch and watched her drive away with Sparkle on the front seat beside her, the Buick crammed with her belongings. Shivering, bereft, I picked up Bunting and held him tight against me, then went into the empty house, where the silence rang in my ears. In two days, it would be my birthday. I had been thirty-eight when Troub and I had begun our journey together. Now I was forty-five. The roads had diverged again. She had taken one of them, going on without me. I had stayed behind.

I got a wire from Troub four days later, letting me know that she had arrived safely and that the Palmer account in which my mother had invested—on my advice—had indeed been closed. I told Mama Bess on the way to the bridge club meeting at Mrs. Kerry’s that evening.

“I’m truly sorry,” I said as we got out of the car. “It’s all my fault, every bit of it. If I hadn’t encouraged you to invest with Palmer, you’d still have the money.”

“Well, of course, it’s too bad,” she said in a philosophical tone as we walked to the Kerrys’ house. Snowflakes had been falling all evening and the path was icy. She took my arm. “But it’s
not
your fault, you know, Rose. And it doesn’t do to cry over spilt milk. Least said, soonest mended, you know.” She lifted her chin. “Anyway, there will be some royalties coming from my
Little House
, don’t you think?”

Hearing her, seeing how brave she was, I felt as I had when I was not yet three years old, watching our little prairie house burn to the ground, knowing that I had caused the fire.

PART THREE

CHAPTER NINE

King Street: April 1939

“But you hadn’t
really
caused it, had you?” Norma Lee asked. “The fire, I mean.” She pulled the hoe toward her, making a shallow furrow in the freshly turned earth of the garden, along the length of string that marked the thirty-foot row. From the house came the sound of Russell’s handsaw. He was upstairs this morning, working on Mrs. Lane’s bookshelves. “You were so young when it happened,” she added. “Surely such a young child could not possibly remember—”

“I have an excellent memory,” Mrs. Lane broke in sharply. She bent over the furrow, dropping the dry, wrinkled seeds of the peas at two-inch intervals.

“I’m sorry,” Norma Lee said hastily. “I didn’t mean—”

“Of course you did.” Mrs. Lane straightened, pushing up the sleeves of her old green sweater, bulky over the blue cotton housedress and rickrack-trimmed apron she was wearing. Her voice softened. “I can remember far back into my childhood. You’ve seen the picture of me on the walnut dresser upstairs? It was taken when I was very young. I remember that the photographer kept putting my right hand on top of my left, and I kept putting my left hand back because I was wearing my carnelian ring. Aunt Grace gave it to me. I wanted to show it off.” She dropped the last pea, slipped the seed packet into the pocket of her apron, and straightened up. “There. You cover that row and I’ll mark the next.”

Norma Lee plied the hoe, pulling the soil over the seeds. “Another battle of wills. You defeated that photographer, I noticed.” She chuckled. “I saw the ring in the picture. It’s pretty.”

“Yes, I defeated him.” Mrs. Lane pulled up the stick that was fastened to one end of the string and moved it a foot to the left to mark the new row. “I remember how good that little victory felt, too. But that’s not my point, Norma Lee. The point is that I
remember
the day that photograph was taken. The fire was just a few months later. I remember that, too, very well. And I remember making it happen. I opened the stove door and shoved in too much slough hay. It flamed up and fell on the floor and we lost our house and all that we owned.” Her voice dropped. “Because of me. My fault.”

“But it was an
accident
,” Norma Lee protested. “And you were a little child. You didn’t mean—”

“No, I didn’t. But actions—intentional or not—have consequences, and we have to live with them.” Mrs. Lane walked to the other end of the row and moved the second stick, pulling the string taut. “It was not long after my baby brother died, and my mother was still in bed that morning. I intended to help her. Instead, I burned down our house. We lived in my father’s shanty for a while after that, but for my parents, it was the last straw.”

Norma Lee stared at her for a moment, thinking that—whether Mrs. Lane’s story was based on actual fact or was the product of a child’s dramatic and troubled imagination—she had just learned the motive behind the building of the Rock House, and behind the books, too, perhaps.

“I am so sorry,” she said softly. “Calamity upon calamity.”

“Those were hard times,” Mrs. Lane agreed in a matter-of-fact way. “I was just a small child, but I remember how my parents suffered. There were prairie fires and drought and the crops failed and my baby brother died. Hard times.” She pointed at the stick that marked the end of the new row. “You start there with the hoe, Norma Lee, and I’ll plant behind you.”

Norma Lee began making a furrow. “And then?” she prompted.

“It was hard, but we came through. People do, you know, if they have heart. If they have courage. ‘One man with courage makes a majority,’
Thomas Jefferson said. I had to write that over and over in my penmanship book in Miss Barrows’s class in De Smet, along with ‘Sweet are the uses of adversity.’ Both of them are engraved on my spirit.”

Norma Lee thought of her own childhood. In spite of the Depression, her father had steady work on the railroad, which allowed her mother to hire a girl who came in every day to scrub the floors and do the wash and another to cook the meals, so that she and her sister had never had to do any sort of housework. There had not been much adversity. Did that mean that she—and her mother and father—possessed less courage? There was a stretch of silence as she finished opening the furrow and Mrs. Lane began dropping in the seeds.

“I’ve never been captured by the myth that the prairie was somehow the Garden of Eden,” Mrs. Lane went on. “You know, Emerson and Thoreau’s idea that the wilderness was the book of God. I suppose there’s some virtue in the idea that fallen man can redeem himself and the wilderness through his hard labor. But it’s also a hellish project, and the government made it worse with the Homestead Act. I saw that early in my life, when my parents were trying to survive on three hundred and twenty acres of so-called free land, struggling against the weather to make a crop.”

“Courage,” Norma Lee said thoughtfully.

Mrs. Lane made a noise in her throat. “Adversity,” she said. “Sweet are its uses. And sweeter still its contradictions.” She straightened up and they stood for a moment, looking at their work. “Making good progress, don’t you think? Tomorrow, we’ll put in some carrots and radishes, if you’re still game—oh, and spinach. And when it warms up, we’ll plant corn and beans and squash. The weather willing, I’ll grow enough vegetables this summer to feed myself—and you and Russell, too.”

“Is that your pioneer spirit asserting itself?” Norma Lee asked with a little laugh, using her hoe to pull the earth over the seeds Mrs. Lane had planted.

“Maybe,” Mrs. Lane replied. “But I rather think it’s my instinct for self-preservation. And my refusal to buy food crops that are subsidized by FDR’s New Deal government. Farmers could do better if the government didn’t meddle and the free market was allowed to take its course. And we could all grow at least some of our food, if we invested a bit of work. And faith.”

“Faith?” Norma Lee was surprised. Mrs. Lane was not a religious person.

“Not that kind of faith, my dear. Faith in the natural order of things. Faith that these seeds will sprout—in this climate, anyway. I wouldn’t bet on it in Dakota.” Mrs. Lane pointed toward the row of berry bushes on the other side of the garden. “I gave the blackberry and raspberry bushes a severe pruning a few weeks ago. They needed it—hadn’t been pruned in years. Culling the old dead canes and cutting back the live ones makes the bushes tougher, stronger, more productive. I have faith that there’ll be enough for pies—and plenty left over for jam.” She chuckled. “Sweet are the uses of adversity. Even the simplest story in McGuffey’s
Reader
had to have a moral, you know. Patience. Faith. Courage. Although I rather imagine that these days, the moral of most stories would not be so clear—if you could find one at all.”

Norma Lee had reached the end of the row. “Courage,” she repeated, leaning on her hoe. “That was the working title of your book about Caroline and Charles, wasn’t it? I think I like that better than
Let the Hurricane Roar
.”

“That’s because you don’t know the song,” Mrs. Lane replied. In a throaty contralto, she sang:

Then let the hurricane roar!

It will the sooner be o’er!

We’ll weather the blast,

And land at last,

On Canaan’s happy shore!

“But as a title,
Courage
would have done as well,” she added briskly. She paused, frowning, holding out her hand and glancing up at the sky, which had clouded over since they had begun their work. “Speaking of blasts, was that rain?”

“Oops!” Norma Lee exclaimed, as more drops splattered into the dirt at their feet.

“Then it must be time for a cup of tea,” Mrs. Lane said, picking up the spading fork. “And we can get started on that cake for Russell. It won’t be ready by lunchtime, but we can have it for dessert after supper tonight. Oh, and bring the hoe. I don’t want that wooden handle to get wet.” They hurried into the house, leaving their tools on the back porch.

“
Let the Hurricane Roar
,” Norma Lee said, getting out the cups and the tea canister as Mrs. Lane put on the kettle. “I read the serial, you know, when it came out in the
Saturday Evening Post
. I was still in high school then. My English teacher brought the first installment to our class and said your story was the best thing she had ever read about pioneer life.”

“Really?” Mrs. Lane asked, sounding pleased.

“Truly. She said the characters were so real, and they faced so many hardships. It was realistic and optimistic at the same time.”

“Optimistic,” Mrs. Lane said. Her voice changed. “Yes, it was optimistic, especially the ending. Too optimistic. That’s what a Kansas wheat farmer told me, anyway.”

Norma Lee was going on. “I went straight home from school and read it for myself—gobbled it down, as a matter of fact, and then went back and read it again. After that, I couldn’t wait for the next week’s installment. I thought it was marvelous, and everybody in our family thought so, too. All over town, people were talking about it. There was even a piece in the
Trenton Republican-Times
, saying how good it was. I would love to hear how you came to write it.” She put the cups on the table. “And what about your mother’s book—the second one,
Farmer Bo
y
? You haven’t told me yet how that was written.”

“My dear child,” Mrs. Lane said, with a rueful laugh. “Has anyone ever told you that you are
persistent
?”

“I intend to be a reporter. I’m practicing on you.” There was more to it than that. Norma Lee was already seeing that this was a story worth remembering—and retelling, some distant day in the future. But perhaps Mrs. Lane and Mrs. Wilder didn’t want the truth told—about Mrs. Wilder’s books, anyway.

Chuckling, Mrs. Lane opened a cupboard and took out what was left of the cinnamon rolls they’d had for breakfast. She put two on small dishes and set them on the table. “Let me tell you, Norma Lee. Writing
Hurricane
, and
Farmer Boy
, too, was the nearest thing to hell you can possibly imagine.”

“I want to hear it,” Norma Lee said urgently. “Please.”

“Well, then,” Mrs. Lane said with a small sigh, and began again.