A Wilder Rose: A Novel (23 page)

That kind of freedom has always been hard won, and during the worst years of the Depression, it was even harder. Too many of the boys, and girls, who set out to look for the pot of gold at the end of their rainbows—east, west, north, south—ended up dirty, cold, sick, hungry, lost. They were reduced to panhandling on street corners and digging crusts of bread and scraps of meat out of garbage pails. And knocking on strange doors, hoping for work that would earn them a hot meal and a bed in a barn. The government proposed to take care of them by herding them together under an agency called the National Youth Administration. FDR was already concocting a dozen ambitious and costly schemes to solve the problem, when what was needed was a little common-sense charity. A little love.

All this was going through my mind as I stood beside the window that first afternoon and watched John Turner, wearing his jaunty red cap and my father’s old jacket, his head bent against the drizzle as he weeded the iris bed. But after several weeks, Jess and I ran out of make-work for the boy, and my excuse for keeping him on—work that needed to be done—had worn as thin as that blue plaid shirt. By that time, I had already developed what I described to myself as a generous and unselfish interest in the boy, whose adolescent energy and claim on the future filled the house that had been empty ever since Troub left.

But even as I professed my altruistic concern, I could see the self-interest implicit in it. I couldn’t fool myself that I was doing this for
John.
A month after his arrival, his young, energetic presence had pulled me into a healthier state of mind and body. I wasn’t writing yet, but somehow that didn’t matter. I had stopped thinking about escaping to New York. I was collecting enough royalties from
Hurricane
to pay the bills and buy the groceries. Without Troub and Bunty, I no longer had someone to care for, someone who
needed
my care. But here was the boy, and I was caught up in him—and less wrapped up in myself.

And John was himself, his own person, with his own strength, his own will, his own purposes and intentions and ways and means, quite separate from mine. In a sense, I thought, that made it safe for me to care. I had nothing to lose—or so I told myself at the time, not fully understanding how much would eventually be at stake. I had yet to recognize how one-sided my relationships with people had always been, how I always expected more than most people could give, or be, or do—and as a result had always invested more than I’d received in return. I hadn’t quite learned that lesson. John was to teach me. But that was to come.

I told the boy that I hated to turn him out into the coming winter. If he would agree to enroll in high school in Mansfield, keep up his grades, and help with the chores at Rocky Ridge, he could eat with us and sleep in the spare room upstairs that had once been Troub’s.

He was surprised—and cautious. “I don’t understand why you’re willing to do this for me, Mrs. Lane. You don’t know me, not really. You don’t know anything about me.”

That wasn’t entirely true. By this time, I already knew (I had checked) that his story about going to school in El Paso was a lie, and I suspected that there were other lies, as well. As there were—in fact, his whole story was a fabrication, start to finish. Over the course of the next few months, I learned that his parents were indeed dead, but that they had lived in Springfield, not Tulsa, and that he had an older brother, Al. After their parents’ death, the two boys had gone to live with an uncle in the small town of Ava, fourteen miles south of Mansfield. The uncle’s wife didn’t like either of the brothers, but John had been especially irritating. His habit of slouching around with his hands in his pockets annoyed her, so she sewed his pockets shut. It was the last straw for him, and he ran away. When he knocked at my kitchen door, he had been on the road for six weeks—just long enough to begin to feel desperate, especially as he thought of the winter to come.

When the whole story finally came out, he told me that he had concocted the tale about Tulsa because he was afraid I would call the sheriff and he would be sent back to his uncle in Ava. After that, he had continued to lie because he didn’t want me to know that he had deceived me.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Lane,” he said with what seemed to be genuine contrition. “I know I should have told you the truth. But I wanted to stay here.” He gave me an earnest, pleading look. “I want to stay with you.”

And with that look, my heart was completely taken, and John moved into the empty places left by Rexh, by Guy, by Troub, and by little Bunting.

I now had to learn to be a mother—never the easiest thing in the world, but even more difficult when the child has already spent fifteen years becoming the person he is. It was a daily struggle for both of us, with my exhortations about such simple things as table manners and profanity and clean socks, and his forgetfulness or—perhaps—rebellious determination to do things his way.

But as the weeks and months went on and 1933 slipped into 1934, we settled into a more-or-less comfortable family routine. I bought a used 1928 Willys-Knight sedan, and now we had a reliable car for shopping and family errands. Lucille came every morning to do the cooking and cleaning and often stayed overnight. When she did, Eddie sometimes stayed, too, and we played chess or did jigsaw puzzles. My mother strongly disapproved of John; she still didn’t care much for Lucille and even less for Eddie, whom she found “tough.” She and Papa came less often in the evenings, and when they came, they didn’t stay very long. I might have missed their company more if the house hadn’t been so full of life.

But my mother’s morning and afternoon drop-ins continued and even increased—ironic, because I had more energy to work and stories I wanted to write.
Farmer Boy
was published in November to solid reviews, and she told me she had read parts aloud to Papa. “He was surprised by some of it,” she said, frowning just a little. “He kept saying, ‘Rose has a way of making things up, doesn’t she?’ But in the end, he liked it.” She was writing the third book now, her “Indian story,” and she had dozens of questions about what to put in and what to leave out. The moment I had settled down to work on something of my own, I could count on her to show up at my door.

And with a teenager in the house, there were lots of distracting school doings: homework (I spent one entire evening trying to help John plumb the mysteries of the participle), basketball games, plays, the debate club—as well as card games in front of the fire and automobile drives and evenings at the movies. From the Sears catalogue, I ordered some much-needed new clothes for the boy: shoes, two pairs of brown corduroy pants, two sweaters, and a heavy sheepskin-lined coat.

When John opened the package, he turned pink with surprise and pleasure. “Gee, they’re swell, ain’t they?” he exulted, and I cringed. His grammar was truly atrocious. If he was going to get anywhere in the world, he would have to learn to speak proper English. Unfortunately, when I tried to help him remember to stop saying things like “ain’t” and “he don’t,” he dug in his heels, mostly to annoy me, I thought. But he wore that sheepskin coat proudly. I loved seeing him wear it and loved knowing that it had been my gift to him.

John played on the Mansfield freshman basketball team, and in February, when Mansfield played Ava, John introduced me to his brother, Al, and their uncle Jerry, who was the sheriff there. Mansfield High was very small; John’s class had only thirteen students. I wanted him to have friends, so I encouraged him to invite the young people to the farmhouse in the evenings. I put out cookies and popcorn and cider, and we told stories in front of the fire. The kids especially liked ghost stories and travel tales, and I had plenty of those to tell. It was good to have young people around. I felt energized.

Later that spring, when Catharine came for another visit, John took over the garage, which gave him a place to play his guitar (one that Papa had found for him) and his records. I invited his brother, Al, to visit on weekends and drove down to Ava to get him when his uncle couldn’t provide transportation. When the cows freshened, I put John in charge of one of Papa’s milk cows: the money from the cream check was his. After he saved five dollars and deposited it into a bank account, I doubled the amount. He was furious, which I didn’t understand then but do now. Jess and his family were still living in the tenant house, but on a rental basis because Jess had a job in town. So John earned his allowance by taking over the yard chores: mowing the lawn, trimming the shrubs, and helping me plant the garden.

It was a good time, those months, but there were a few bad patches. John had a curfew; he broke it, then lied about where he had been and with whom. He overspent his allowance and lied about that, too. He refused to speak proper English, neglected his homework, failed algebra. He was often careless around the house, ignored his chores, and talked back. But just as often, he was touchingly considerate and sweet, pitching in to do the dishes when it wasn’t his turn, or bringing in extra wood for the fireplace, or thanking me for baking his favorite pie.

I began to forget that I had once seen him as separate, his own independent person. Once, trying to persuade him to take cod liver oil when he was sick with a cold, I told him that I worried about him because he was precious to me. He shook his head, perplexed, and I told him that he would understand when he had children of his own. When I read on his face the thought that he wasn’t my child, I was surprised. In my mind, in my heart, really, he was my son—the son I had lost. He occupied a space in my soul that had been empty so long I had ceased to notice the void until he arrived to fill it.

The small, quotidian realities of daily living forced on me by John’s presence were surprisingly therapeutic. I felt fit and healthy, and found myself coping with the regular imperatives of school lunches, supper on the table, and clean clothes in the drawers, as well as the more challenging domestic tragedies of a burned-down garage and electricity off for days during an ice storm. As my life began to be livened by the unpredictable activities of a teenaged boy, the fog of dull listlessness lifted. I could see more than a day or two ahead. And I was buoyed by the news from Longmans that
Hurricane
had sold more than twelve thousand copies in its first year and was still selling. I was able to go back to work.

My mother had brought her third manuscript—now titled “High Prairie”
—
to me in February, but since Harper wasn’t expecting it until late summer, I had set it aside. The Harper editor, Ida Louise Raymond, had written to my mother to say that both
Little House in the Big Woods
and
Farmer Boy
were doing well. In January and February (slow months in the book market),
Farmer Boy
had sold 242 copies and
Little House
,
144. She added, “We think this is something to be proud of, and we’re looking forward to receiving your next book.”

I was at the Rock House for a soup-and-sandwich lunch when Mama Bess showed me the letter. She had multiplied out the two-month sales on a scrap of paper, calculating that if the two books continued to do that well, she might sell more than fifteen hundred copies by year’s end. Even with
Farmer Boy’
s low royalty rate, the royalties could amount to nearly two hundred dollars. And the addition of “High Prairie”
to the list could mean another one hundred dollars or maybe even one hundred and fifty dollars added to next year’s royalties.

She ladled chicken soup into our bowls. “That means that I could earn as much as three hundred and fifty dollars in royalties next year.”

“Wonderful!” I said enthusiastically. I couldn’t help but recall that she had earned three hundred dollars from the two
Country Gentleman
articles that had appeared in 1925 and that the articles had been easier and faster to write than a whole book. I didn’t say that out loud, though. Articles brought only a one-time payment, while the books could bring her a steady income—perhaps. There was a catch. The backlist—the older books—would continue to sell only as long as new books were added to what I now could see as a series. If there were no new books, the sales would decline and the royalties would stop coming.

“But ‘High Prairie’ is the third book in the contract,” she said worriedly. “The last one. And Miss Raymond hasn’t said anything about a fourth book.” She sat down, tucking her white hair back under the hairnet she wore at home to protect her permanent wave. “Do you think Harper will be interested in another one?” She wasn’t looking at me, and I knew she was wondering if I would be willing to do the necessary rewrite. I also knew she wouldn’t ask—if she did, she might feel obligated to say please. And thank you.

“Of course, nobody knows what’s going to happen these days,” I said. “But if the editor likes ‘High Prairie,’
and if the first two continue to sell, yes, it’s likely that they’ll offer you another contract.” I spread some of Mama’s homemade mustard on my ham sandwich and added, somewhat more cautiously, “You could probably write a book a year—as long as you have the material.”