A Wilder Rose: A Novel (5 page)

We kept in touch, and in early 1921, both of us were abroad again. I had been to Albania and was in Paris. Guy was posted to the AP’s London bureau, then dispatched to Ireland to cover the Sinn Féin rebellion. It was a dangerous assignment, for a bitter civil war was brewing. He tried for weeks to arrange a meeting with Éamon de Valera, the leader of the revolt. Then, one rainy night, he was blindfolded and shoved into the backseat of an automobile between two burly guards. As the car careened through the midnight streets of Dublin, he told me, he knew he was a dead man. Many informers had been taken out like this, their bodies found with an IRA death warrant pinned to a sleeve. But Guy was being escorted to de Valera’s hideout, where he got his interview, a big event in the news world.

I was recovering that spring from the breakup of a year-long romance with Arthur Griggs. Arthur was an agent for the Agence Littéraire Française; we’d met when he was looking for an English translator for several of Sarah Bernhardt’s stories. I translated them (rather freely, I confess) and Arthur placed them in
McCall’s
. When the romance ended, I was miserable about the breakup but relieved at the same time, for Arthur was a hurricane fueled by alcohol, and he’d threatened to suck me into his vortex.

In May—ah, Paris in May, nothing lovelier!—I moved into an apartment at 8 Square Desnouettes and began to assemble
The Peaks of Shala
from my Albanian travel pieces. Guy came to Paris to see me, and we went walking in the Loire Valley; a little later, I joined him in London. I needed love, all kinds of love—friendship, affection, physical passion. But I also needed freedom, craved independence, and I hadn’t yet learned—would never quite learn, I think—how to reconcile the two. He suited me, because he was detached and ironic and wanted a casual caring without commitment. After a few months, I was no longer wildly romantic about him. But he gave me a warm place to park my heart while I went about my work.

For the next several years, as Guy and I traveled separately around Europe, we wrote regularly and saw one another when we could. Then, in 1925, I went back to Rocky Ridge and he dropped in for a few days. He stayed for three months. After that, we went east together and spent another three months with friends in Croton-on-Hudson, collaborating on a magazine serial and working on his play,
Smoke
. For me, it was a good time, with trips to the city and rambles in Guy’s Ford and walks around the countryside.

Troub was staying with her father then. She joined us when she could, and I loved the energy and lightness she brought with her. It was the beginning of our friendship and time together—mine and Troub’s, I mean. When I went back to Rocky Ridge, Guy stayed in the East, and Troub came west with me.

Those three months in Croton, happy as they were, seemed to change things between Guy and me. I suppose he might have been jealous of my friendship with Troub. Whatever the motive, he began to want a closer connection, a commitment, permanence, even exclusivity. Writing from Albania later, I told him that, although I still had a kind of love for him, I didn’t want to be married. I couldn’t marry. I didn’t have it in me to be a wife. There at the bus station, on that chilly March morning, I told him again.

Years before, I had borrowed the title of my almost-biographical novel from Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken.”

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Now, I recited the lines for Guy. We fell into a long silence that was finally broken with a crash of crockery in the cafeteria kitchen.

Guy pushed back his chair and stood up. “I’m sorry,” he said, sounding resigned, and kissed me.

And then . . . and then I was back in Missouri.

CHAPTER THREE

Houses: 1928

Days on the farm do not fill diaries.

But spring in the Ozarks is unspeakably lovely. In a single madcap April week, all the countryside becomes a green riot, glorious with violets and buttercups and wild pansies and anemones. And then the elms and dogwood and maples and white oaks assert themselves, and after that, in an impetuous rush, the white flume of wild plums and the pinks of peach blossom spill across the hillsides, while the fresh spring grass surges in an emerald tide across the meadows—all of it reminding me of that very first spring we lived at Rocky Ridge.

Our family fled to Missouri from South Dakota when I was seven years old, after a series of disasters: the disease that lamed my father, the drought and hailstorms that destroyed the crops, the death of a baby boy, the loss of our house. I had burned the house. My mother was sick in bed, and I, trying to be helpful, stuffed too much slough hay in the stove and set the place ablaze. I was not yet three, but I quite well remember the searing despair I felt as I watched it burn and knew that
I
had done it. After that, there were stays with my mother’s family in De Smet and my father’s in Spring Valley, Minnesota, and two years in Florida and two more back in South Dakota. There, we stayed for a time with Mama Bess’s family and then moved into our own small house while my parents saved enough for another new start. A neighbor, Mr. Cooley, had heard that southern Missouri was a wonderful place for growing apples, and when he came back with promotional brochures about a pretty little town called Mansfield in the “Land of the Big Red Apple” and a box of beautiful apples, my mother was smitten. We would go with the Cooleys to the Missouri Ozarks and buy a farm.

We traveled, Mama and Papa and I, in a black-painted hack with an oilcloth top and curtains, a wooden hen coop fastened at the back and Papa’s mares hitched to the front, with their colts, Prince and Little Pet, following along. In the hack was a bedspring for Papa and Mama to sleep on, and Mama’s writing desk, and as many other of our scant possessions as could be tucked into or tacked onto the load. We left on July 17, traveling with Mr. and Mrs. Cooley and their two sons, Paul and George. We reached Mansfield six weeks later, on the last hot, dusty day of a hot, dusty August. We pitched camp near the town, and Papa and Mama Bess began looking for a farm. A few weeks later, they bought Rocky Ridge—forty acres and a log cabin—with a three-hundred-dollar mortgage (at a usurious 12 percent, compounded every three months) and a hundred-dollar bill, saved by my mother from her hundred days’ labor as a dollar-a-day seamstress back in De Smet and terrifyingly lost for several breathless days in a cranny of her writing desk. And then, thankfully, found again, and we could all breathe.

The green Ozark woodland they purchased was beautiful: heartbreakingly, unpromisingly beautiful. My father, a flatland wheat farmer, would later say that the place looked so rough and hostile—nothing but gullies and ridges and rocks and timber—that he was reluctant to buy it. But my mother had taken a violent fancy to the property, crying that it was the only land she wanted and that if she could not have
that
, she did not want any. My mother didn’t cry often—the Ingalls girls had been tutored in the stiff-upper-lip school, and she always said she didn’t like a row. But when tears were necessary to get the job done, she knew how to use them. My easygoing father rarely opposed her when she was set on having her way. He didn’t now, whatever his own judgment might have been. Rocky Ridge, they called it.

Our first house at Rocky Ridge was the tiny log cabin that the previous owner had built on the lip of the ravine. Its most interesting feature, to me, was the newspaper pasted as wallpaper on one of the walls, and I stood stock-still, entranced, reading. “Carter’s Little Liver Pills: What is life without a liver?” This philosophical question haunted me for years.

By the time we broke camp and moved into the cabin, we were down to our last bit of salt pork and cornmeal, with winter coming on. To earn money for food, my father cut wood and sold it for fifty cents a wagonload. With my mother on one end of the crosscut saw and my father on the other, they began to clear the land. The next spring, they set out the tiny apple trees—twigs, really—that had come with the property. My father was no orchardist, but his father had raised apple trees on the Wilder farm in upstate New York, and he was willing to give it a try. He was proud of his apples, when the trees came into bearing seven years later: Ben Davis, they were, and Missouri Pippin. He always said that his orchard was a success because he took care of each individual tree, giving it whatever it needed, which meant a great deal of work.

Mostly, from those years, I remember the work, and it wasn’t just the apples. My father turned the cabin into a barn and built a two-room frame house with a sleeping loft for me, a steep, ladderlike stair climbing up to it. My mother raised a garden and chickens and prepared every meal and washed the dirty clothes, and I was expected to help as far as my child-self was able, carrying water and stove wood and hoeing and weeding. All this backbreaking, dawn-to-dark work took both my parents away from me, but especially my mother. It made her snappish and quick with her temper, so that many things I did, or did not do correctly, or left undone, disappointed her. I
knew
her disappointment. I felt it like a lance.

Indeed, it has often seemed to me that in those days—except for a brief golden hour after supper and before bed—I had no mother, for she had no time to give me attention or affection, and I was left to ask for it or beg for it or even misbehave for it, which earned instead her sharp anger and my sullen guilt. Then, I thought this lack of mothering was my own particular privation, and I resented it and pitied myself. Now, I know that many children do not receive the mother-love they need and that they keep on needing and wanting it for a long, long time, perhaps all their lives. Do I? Do I do what I do for her now because of the lack, the emptiness I felt then? I don’t know. Perhaps. Perhaps.

But I adored her. I loved to watch her brush out her hair and braid it, loved the glints and gleams in her thick, roan-brown hair, which fell loose in a shimmer down to her heels. At home, she wore it in one braid down her back; for town, she coiled it like a shining crown on her head and fastened it with her tortoiseshell pins. Beneath a fringe of curled bangs, her blue eyes gave away her mood. When she was out of patience with me, they darkened; when I pleased her, they sparkled. When she was happy, she whistled like a meadowlark, trilling and chirping and spilling song as she worked. She was young then, not yet thirty, and her skin was soft and smooth and smelled of soap and lavender. To this day, I can’t catch a whiff of lavender without seeing her as she was in those early days, my mother, young and lavender-scented and lovely.

I especially loved the winter evenings in that tiny cabin, its log walls banked with snow and crystal icicles hanging from the eaves. In the fireplace, a fire of hickory logs blazed bright. On the hearth, my father, always silent, rubbed oil into a leather harness or smoothed a new wooden ax handle with the sharp edge of a piece of broken glass. At the table, in the circle of golden light cast by the kerosene lamp, my mother knitted woolen socks for my father and read aloud to us, her voice softly murmuring, while I sat on the floor with a pile of corncobs, building a little house of my own. In that hour, I had both a mother and a father, a measureless treasure.

The next spring, my father traded a load of wood for a donkey that I named Spookendyke. I was supposed to ride him to school, although it can’t accurately be said that I
rode
him, for the ungrateful beast had the perverse habit of slumping his shoulders so that I slid off over his ears. In the classroom, barefoot and shabby and painfully aware of being very poor, I was seated with the other barefoot, shabby mountain girls, well away from the town girls in their wonderful store-bought dresses. Oh, how I coveted Becky Hooper’s red serge dress, trimmed with narrow bands of red satin, and Ethel Burney’s white stockings, and my heart ached for Josey Franklin’s shiny patent-leather shoes. I said nothing to my mother about these longings, for even a pair of the plainest shoes was beyond my parents’ reach. At home, I insisted that I would rather go barefoot to school than wear shoes. At school, I pretended that none of it mattered.

But it did. Back in the frontier Dakota settlement of De Smet, the men and women, alike in their buckle-down grit, had worn their poverty as an earned badge of honor, and while the Ingalls family was even poorer than most, they had achieved, by virtue of their courage and stick-to-it, a certain social distinction. My mother rarely talked about it, but I knew she had felt the brutal edge of her childhood poverty as keenly as I felt mine. Mansfield was an established town with a closed social hierarchy built on seniority and wealth that was evidenced (to me, at least) by satin-trimmed dresses and patent-leather shoes. In Mansfield, poverty was a badge of shame, and my homemade dresses and bare feet were its insignia. While my father was courageous and my mother could even be gay in the face of our poverty, I was tormented, and those school days were a long nightmare.

In the years to come, my mother would gain entry into the town’s clubs, and even establish one of her own, the Athenian Club, in Hartville, the county seat. But as a child, I was on the outside, as anyone could tell just by looking at me. Except for the Cooley boys, Paul and George, I had few friends, and no wonder: I was odd and bookish and spoke my own language, Fispooko, to Spookendyke and the chickens and the family cow. When there was time away from the work I was expected to do and
wanted
to do to please my mother, books were my life and my joy—books and the wild green hills and clear mountain springs where I dreamed under the hazel and sassafras hedges, edged with lavender horsemint and orange butterfly weed.

The effect of childhood poverty stayed with me long after I came to an easier place in the world. For one thing, it taught me to hide my insecurity behind an exaggerated nonchalance, an attitude of
I don’t care
, which is perhaps my reason, now, for spending money I don’t have. It also—and this is more important, I think—made me a teller of tales, someone for whom the sheer pleasure of invention may overtake whatever facts might be involved, especially when I have an appreciative audience. I learned how to
pose,
how to adjust my story to my listeners or readers, a valuable asset for a writer of fiction. That doesn’t mean that I don’t always know where the truth lies, or that I am deceived by my own stories (although sometimes perhaps I am), or that I am not painfully honest with myself in my journals (as I
certainly
am). It only means that I learned, very young, to conceal the truth behind a fictional facade, which we all do to some extent—except that I have made a profession of it.

The apple twigs my father had planted were still years away from producing, and cash remained scarce. So when I was eleven, we rented out the little house at Rocky Ridge and moved to town, to a small yellow frame house that we rented for five dollars a month, just two doors east of Mrs. Cooley and the boys. Mr. Cooley had died, and Papa took over his hauling business and his job as an agent for the Waters-Pierce Oil Company, selling kerosene, stove gas, turpentine, and linseed oil. The job required him to drive his team and wagon thirteen miles south to Ava and twelve miles north to the county seat of Hartville, each a four-hour round trip, often in the worst of weathers. Mama Bess set up a boarding table in the front room of our house and cooked for railroad men and traveling salesmen.

All this effort brought a little more money, and life was easier, but I was still miserable in school. I was precocious enough to be utterly impatient with the ignorance of our country teachers, and I preferred teaching myself to being taught by
them
. I remember once being instructed to paraphrase some lines of Tennyson’s. I retorted that the lines meant more than the individual words and that you couldn’t paraphrase poetry without reducing it. Tommy Knight could, though. When he finished his plodding summary, the teacher turned to me. “Let this be a lesson to you, Miss Wilder,” he said darkly. “You fail because you do not try. Perseverance is a chief virtue. If at first you don’t succeed, try—”

At this unendurable banality, I slammed my books on the desk and cried, “I won’t stay and listen to such stupid stuff!” And stormed home. And didn’t go back for the rest of the term. Instead, I lay in the barn and read borrowed books:
History of the
Conquest of Mexico
by William Prescott, the Leatherstocking Tales,
Sense and Sensibility
,
Dombey and Son
,
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, and anything else I could put my hands on
.
My sporadic attendance seemed to do me no harm, and I know that I profited handsomely from my reading.

Mansfield’s school, like most rural schools of the day, went as far as
McGuffey’s
Sixth Reader
. When the town girls reached that great jumping-off point, many of them began preparing for their life’s work, helping their mothers at home and tatting edgings for the tea towels they embroidered for their hope chests until they married the town boys and began having town children. Thus was a woman’s life defined: her work was marriage and her place was in the home, tending husband and children and elderly parents, her own and her husband’s.

I could see this daily all around me. But it was especially clear when Jim Miller hired young Mrs. Sims to make hats in his milliner’s shop, and the whole town was turned upside down. Mrs. Sims, who was artistic and clever with her fingers, was known thenceforth as an immoral woman. Of course, my mother had cooked meals for paying boarders, but she did it at home, as my father pointed out, not behind a plate-glass window on the main street, where every man could gawk at her. Once I was fully aware that this was my future—to be confined forever to my husband’s home—I began to plot my escape.