Pioneer Girl (9 page)

Ong Hai whispered, “He said he ran into a fence. A guardrail. You need some tea?” He filled the kettle with water.

“Was anyone hurt?”

“Said he was by himself.”

It was impossible to know what was true.

Ong Hai added, “This is more about their fighting from the other day. Before you got here.”

I'd figured as much, since the holiday had been tenser than usual, marked by their sullen faces. “What was that about?”

“Oh, she was mad and he wouldn't apologize.”

“What is this, the apocalypse? She asked him to apologize for something? What was it?”

Ong Hai shook his head.

In the living room my mother was saying, “No more of this. No more car.”

“What's the big deal? I'll get it fixed,” Sam said.

“How? How are you going to pay?”

Sam had always had jobs, mostly at retail shops and restaurants, though he refused to work at any place our family ran. He never kept a job for long but he never seemed to lack money either. Partly this was due to our mother, but by the time I finished high school I assumed that he'd found other, less legal ways to get cash. By high school, his friends were the ones who sold weed right out of their cars at lunchtime.

“I can pay,” Sam insisted.

“Where you get the money?”

“I have some saved up.”

My mother made her little
hah
noise. Then: “No. The car is gone. I say
no more
.”

I looked at Ong Hai, who raised his eyebrows. I knew he was thinking what I was, that she had never spoken that harshly to Sam.

“I have to have a car.”

“Then buy one with all that money you saved. Because I say no more car. No more of this.”

“Whatever.”

I could hear Sam getting up from the sofa and stalking away to the basement. Probably he didn't think my mother meant what she'd said.

She huffed off to her room. Ong Hai and I prepared the egg rolls and drank tea, believing the argument would dissipate, never imagining it could end any other way.

“You should see how fast I could make these in Saigon,” Ong Hai said as his pile of rolls grew larger. He had far outpaced me. He started talking about his old Café 88 and the morning became just the two of us. That was always the best part of being back home. He never asked questions about school, and his voice never took on a tone of puzzled disapproval over what I could possibly do with a graduate degree in literature.

As we were setting out bowls of nuoc mam and plates of herbs and lettuce leaves, a tow truck pulled up to the house.

My mother emerged, went out to the front stoop, and waved. Two guys, Vietnamese, got out of the truck.

Sam came bounding up from the basement.

“The fuck!” he shouted.

We all watched as the guys hitched up the Honda. Sam ran outside, yelling. He started pulling things from the trunk and backseat—old CDs, clothes, a sleeping bag, shoes. He had no way to stop the guys from taking the car. It was in my mother's name, and she paid the insurance.

When he came back into the house he didn't say anything, didn't even look in our direction. I wondered if maybe I was more shaken than he was; I couldn't help feeling like a little kid again, scared of getting into trouble. And I couldn't believe that my mother had gone through with it. Why was she making a show now?

Ong Hai turned on the television. Football. Something mindless and background enough to diffuse the tension in the air. Quietly the three of us ate the egg rolls along with the braised short ribs and tofu tomato soup he had prepared the night before. When Sam finally reappeared the game was almost over, yet another beer-sex-car commercial was on, and Ong Hai had just brought out a pile of orange and pineapple slices.

Sam carried a backpack and an enormous duffel bag—the kind that made me think of kids in movies going to sleepaway camp, something we'd never done—out to the front stoop. My mother narrowed her eyes but didn't move. On the television, a bunch of players were on the field, slapping each other's asses. Then an old red Pontiac, the kind that looked perpetually dirty, unironically nineties, turned onto the street. Behind the wheel was Gabe, Sam's best friend from high school. The three of us—my mother, grandfather, and me—watched Sam carry his belongings to the car, heave them into the trunk, and climb into the passenger seat. He made sure not to look back at the house as Gabe drove off.

Since high school Sam had been increasingly remote, cultivating an air of self-possession and his own group of part punk, part slacker, part skater, part pseudo-artist-philosopher types. Still, I didn't believe that he was doing anything more than what my mother was doing: putting on a display, parading a point.

Ong Hai flipped the channel to another game and my mother returned the dishes to the kitchen. Then my grandfather looked at me, and he shook his head just the smallest bit, conveying, finally, the weight of what had happened. Sam hadn't just left; he was gone.

The crazy thing was that he stayed within reach: our mother still paid his cell phone bill every month. We could see the numbers he had called and texted; we could see the times of day. But whenever I called or texted him there was no response. I wondered how long my mother tried it, letting the phone ring into voice mail a dozen, two dozen, a hundred times a day. Sam didn't cave. It was a brilliant bluff, I had to give him that: he knew that if our mother canceled his phone he would be lost to us. Secretly I called some of the numbers that appeared on the bill. Sam's friends from high school, who claimed not to know where he was staying. Maybe my mother called them too. In any case, the Honda was sold and the basement where Sam had stayed became off-limits for all of us—a new addition to her litany of unspoken rules. These measures didn't make a difference, though, because now my mother was locked in the position of having to wait to see what would happen.

A year and a half later, she still was—with both me and Sam. It must have driven her crazy, not being able to corral us with the same power she'd exerted when he and I were kids. Ong Hai's benevolence now seemed a way of placating her. It hadn't occurred to me before that his patience was a gift she was aware of, might even be grateful for. It hadn't occurred to me that her commands—
Don't do this, don't do that, just do what I say—
might actually be entreaties.

—

T
he next morning I hid out in my bed, waiting for my mother and Ong Hai to leave for the Lotus Leaf. I could hear them hurrying cups of tea, opening a package of the cereal bars Ong Hai had discovered a few years back. He had a taste for sugary breakfasts, especially things like Pop-Tarts that could be held in one hand and eaten while driving.

After I saw my mother's Toyota pull away I went into the kitchen. Ong Hai was at the door, about to put his shoes on.

“Water is still hot for tea,” he said. “Here.” He reached into his shirt pocket and held out a cereal bar.

I shook my head. He placed the cereal bar in my hand anyway, along with an envelope he'd been holding. “Where you going now?” It wasn't the first time he'd guessed my intentions.

“I just need to get away from her, just for a little while.” And then, “Sam's in California, by the way. San Francisco.”

Ong Hai nodded. “He always wanted that.”

I had a feeling he didn't believe it was for real. I wondered if, in his own way, he assumed as my mother did that the family would, must, stay whole. I could see the narrative: Sam was just continuing his rebellion, boys will be boys and all that, but one day he'd figure things out, shape up, and come back home. How else could we get past Sam's stealing? The prodigal son was worldwide, historical, cross-cultural.

Ong Hai gave me a quick, awkward hug; in our family hugs weren't normal, weren't natural. Too American. “See you soon,” he said. And then he left, offering up a small smile before closing the door. I listened for the sound of his car as it started and rolled down the street. I didn't know if I had his approval. I didn't know what he would tell my mother.

I opened the envelope he had given me. Five hundred dollars. When I was a kid, it was thrilling to get twenty bucks on my birthday or on Tet and I would spend hours thinking of hiding places. Now all that money made me ashamed, made me want to get away even more.

My mother had left a stack of junk mail on the table, including the Restoration Hardware catalog that Sam had torn to write down his phone number. It was a longtime hobby of hers, to glance through catalogs and turn corners of pages she liked. The people who had rented the house before us had diverse tastes, spanning L.L.Bean, Brookstone, Victoria's Secret, and Burpee Seeds. I didn't think my mother ever ordered anything, but she seemed to savor the possibilities the way some people like to get lost in a good book. Out of habit I picked up a Chadwicks of Boston mailer and peeked at pages she'd marked, thinking, as I often did, that it might be a way to see into her mind a little, but as always it was impossible to know which item on the page was the one she liked. That boiled-wool sweater? That sterling silver necklace? So far, I'd never gotten it right; her standard response to holiday and birthday gifts never deviated from benign dismissal.

I tossed the catalog back in the pile and fixed a cup of tea. The hours alone in the house spread ahead of me. Guilt about the café and not helping out there—these I could feel filling me up as the hot water filled the teacup. Maybe I should have gone to the café after all, letting the day and every one that followed subsume me with their monotony. Sam would stay in California. My mother would continue to brood. The café would continue to struggle. Then my mother would find another restaurant to run. Ong Hai would trail along, both of us doing what we were told. It could all happen just like that.

And then there was the alternate history that my mother and Ong Hai preferred, believing in the beauty of time, its passage a cleansing. In this version, Sam would come back, maybe not right away, but one day soon. My mother's business was her business and the money was her money. We would all go on, staying home and saying little, each day turning into the past that repairs its own self.

In the stillness of the house I felt like I could see our future bodies, spun through the days into older impressions. Every movement I made was a choice between becoming visible and remaining unseen.

I picked up my phone and found Alex's number.

On my way back to you
, I typed. It sounded more suggestive than I'd intended, but I pressed
SEND
anyway.

1869. The Ingalls family leaves their log cabin in Wisconsin and heads out in a covered wagon for the yet-unseen “Indian Territory” of southeastern Kansas because Pa yearns to see the country and find fresh land. Their patch of Wisconsin had become too settled, he said—too many neighbors, too little hunting. He wants to explore. So they set off near the end of winter in order to cross the Mississippi while it's still frozen, waving to all of their family who've gathered to bid a predawn good-bye.

It isn't a good decision.

In Kansas, Pa is so certain that the government will seize the Indian Territory and hand it to white settlers that he begins a farm there, about seven miles from the town of Independence. Their nearest neighbor is Mr. Edwards, an aw-shucks, heart-of-gold “wildcat from Tennessee” who can dance a fine jig and spit tobacco farther than Laura has ever seen. He helps Pa build a log house, a well, a stone fireplace, and furniture carved from tree trunks. Ma plants gardens, Pa plants crops, and they all look ahead to harvest days.

But
Little House on the Prairie
is really about failure, Manifest Destiny, and the tension between whites and the Osage Indians whose lands are being threatened. Ma repeatedly says she hates Indians, while Pa is all about negative capability: he has respect for the leaders, makes a point to learn some of their customs, yet he also believes that their land should be his by right of whiteness.

As it turns out, Pa makes a lot of mistakes, like building their house too close to a trail. The family narrowly avoids a violent clash with the Osage, saved only by Chief Soldat du Chene. In the end, two years after arriving in Kansas, the Ingallses are kicked off the land by federal troops. Pa's surprise is surpassed only by his outrage, but there's nothing he can do. So he and Ma load up the wagon again. The books do not cover the defeat of returning to Wisconsin with nothing gained. The books never admit that Pa made any errors at all.

After Indian Territory, the Ingallses try out Minnesota, where the only housing they can afford is a dugout near Plum Creek, not far from the town of Walnut Grove. When Laura and Mary go to school they're mocked for their too-short dresses, especially by the wealthy and well-dressed Nellie Oleson, who becomes Laura's enemy. At home, Pa's questionable judgment leads him to borrow against future crops so that he can buy lumber for a new house. He predicts a splendid wheat harvest, never imagining that firestorms, bad weather, and literal plagues of locusts will destroy it all. Pa has to walk back East to look for farming work in order for the family to get by.

Then come the two missing years, the years that Laura and Rose avoided, beginning with the birth and then death, at nine months, of Laura's brother Frederick. The sole boy. The Ingallses, unable to afford seed wheat for crops, move to Burr Oak, Iowa, and run a hotel. Laura is nine years old at that point. For the family, hotel work is rock-bottom, far worse than a dugout. It means serving customers and cleaning up after them; living by someone else's clock; being denied the autonomy of farm life. It means exposure to the rough language of townspeople and to the sights and sounds that come from the proximity to saloons. And always, of course, there's the haunting memory of baby Frederick's death. Eventually they get themselves back to Walnut Grove and another piece of farmland—and then Mary falls ill with a fever that renders her blind.

The Minnesota and Iowa years are the worst in the Ingalls family. Even though Grace, the last child, is born during that time, she is yet another girl, guaranteeing that there will be no boys handing down their name. No wonder that Laura and Rose, writing, skip ahead to
By the Shores of Silver Lake
, with young Laura realizing she is no longer a little girl, that she must, as her father tells her, be the “eyes” for Mary. When a long-lost aunt unexpectedly shows up and helps Pa secure a job with a railroad company, he takes the chance to push westward, settling the family at last near the brand-new town of De Smet, South Dakota.

After their first miserable
Long Winter
of near-starvation, the Ingallses get on track: everything—the crops, gardens, chickens, and cows—grows as surely as Laura herself, who stays at the head of her class in school, popular and surrounded by friends, and who gains the notice of Almanzo. (Their real-life age gap had to be shrunk down so as not to have a twenty-five-year-old man courting a fifteen-year-old girl.) Finally Laura is able to enjoy social hours, parties, little luxuries like embossed name cards and an ostrich-feather hat from Chicago—the kinds of things her daughter would one day gather in abundance. Laura earns it all by being a seamstress and schoolteacher, and by being a good girl with a bit of a temper, a cleverness, that makes a guy like Almanzo fall for her.

Rose Wilder, who had mapped the arc of the
Little House
series, knew that it had to conclude in the happiest of ways: with a wedding. She'd made sure to set up Almanzo's character early on, and to portray him as someone who could equal Pa: savvy, kind, wiser than his peers, and excellent at all things homesteading. That depiction begins with
Farmer Boy
, the one-off volume describing Almanzo's boyhood in upstate New York. The Wilders had a lot more money than the Ingallses, and it shows in their fine-spun clothes, their horses and buggies, their house with a wallpapered parlor and horsehair sofas just for company. And especially in their meals. While salt pork, potatoes, and cornmeal mush make a rich breakfast for the Ingallses, a typical Sunday breakfast for the Wilders calls for stacks of pancakes, sausages, oatmeal with cream, and apple pies topped with cheese. The Wilders, especially Almanzo, eat constantly, which is evidence of their wealth. Even after an enormous dinner of ham and potatoes and bread and stuffing and fried apples and onions, they nibble on popcorn and apples and milk during their evenings of sewing and whittling.
Farmer Boy
makes sure that readers know Almanzo is a smart, sensible boy from good stock, who can thresh wheat, shear sheep, train horses, and grow pumpkins with equal adeptness. Which is to say, an ideal farmer and the ideal future mate for Laura Ingalls. He becomes a hero too: in
The Long Winter
he and Cap Garland risk their lives to find wheat so the townspeople can survive until spring. Later, Almanzo woos Laura by driving her around in his new buggy, pulled by the quickest team of horses in the county.

In the books, Almanzo and Pa Ingalls are parallel characters. Both smart, judicious community leaders, with a sense of humor too. Pa could build houses, farm like mad, and play a mean fiddle. Almanzo could build houses, farm like mad, and fry a mean buckwheat pancake. And in real life both men made the wrong calls time and time again.

That comes through not in
These Happy Golden Years
, the finale that Rose worked on, but in
The First Four Years
. Rose found Laura's handwritten manuscript after her mother's death but opted not to pursue its publication. After her own death, her lawyer and heir, Roger Lea MacBride, released the book and added it to the
Little House
box set. So Rose's wedding conclusion gets contradicted by doubt. Where the Ingallses in
These Happy Golden Years
enjoy a flourishing farm, in
The First Four Years
they're struggling, days marked by dust and worn calico. Laura confesses to Almanzo that she doesn't want to marry a farmer. He asks her to try it out for three years, and if it's not a success, then he'll do something else. The three years quickly turn into four, each more disastrous than the last. Still, they end up sticking it out for the rest of their lives.

Like Pa Ingalls, Almanzo Wilder is no stranger to borrowing against unplanted crops, and he conceals the debts from Laura. He fashions for her a pretty little house with a custom kitchen but when the note comes due there's no way to pay it after his crops are dashed by windstorms and hail. Their daughter, Rose, thrives but their second child, a boy, dies a few days after his birth. Almanzo suffers a bout of diphtheria so severe that he would walk with a limp the rest of his life. The last chapter of
The First Four Years
provides no break from misery: their house burns down in a fire that was accidentally started by Rose. Throughout the book Laura repeats a bitter refrain:
The rich man gets his ice in the summer; the poor man gets his ice in the winter
. She and Almanzo would not have their summer ice for many years. The worry of that, the all-consuming daily relentlessness of it, shapes the core of the book, and shaped much of their daughter's life.

—

I
t was a near-seven-hour drive from Iowa City to Rocky Ridge Farm, with a stop in St. Louis. Plotting the route, I warned Alex not to expect much more than grassy plains linking little towns named for faraway places. Lebanon. Peru. Siena. Cairo, pronounced Cay-ro. This was fly-over territory, all right, the midwestern landscape that was so easy to dismiss.

We had spent the last few days in Iowa City together, he revising short stories while I returned to the Hoover Library, where Ron greeted me by name. I kept searching the stacks of papers, but unearthed no further evidence of my grandfather's Café 88 or the subject of that mysterious 1918 note about a boy and a farm. Alex and I spent our evenings in bed, sometimes with books, sometimes without.

As soon as he knew that I wanted to visit Rocky Ridge, he suggested the road trip. He'd actually bought the complete box set of the
Little House
books from Prairie Lights while I was back in Franklin. “Huh,” he said when I told him I was impressed. “Hadn't realized this is a good way to get girls.” His favorite volume, he said, was
The Long Winter.

“Of course it is,” I said. “It's the most stark and depressing one.”

Like Alex, I was fascinated by how those blizzards of 1879 get reflected in the narrative of isolation and howling winds. As the months go on, the snow piles higher over the train tracks, preventing coal and grocery trains from reaching De Smet. By spring Pa's cheeks are dark hollows and he's too weak to lift a bag of grain on his own. “Laura and Rose had wanted to title it
The Hard Winter
,” I said, “but their publisher thought that was too severe for children.”

We were in Alex's bed, looking at maps on our phones. Nearly four hundred miles lay between us and the house where Rose had spent her childhood.

“But so much of what goes on in all those books is messed up,” Alex said. “Like when Laura says she doesn't want to have the right to vote? Or the casual descriptions of all those people who freeze to death in winter storms. Or the depiction of Indians.”

“The TV show was worse,” I told him.

Alex didn't seem to believe me, so I found some clips on YouTube. The show didn't futz around with all the traveling the Ingallses had done; it set them down in Walnut Grove, perhaps because it sounded sweeter than De Smet, conjuring the idea of old-fashioned Minnesotans, plain-faced and hardworking. Growing up, I had watched reruns of the reruns with Sam and Ong Hai, the three of us believing that that was how America used to be. I believed it even though I knew how far the show veered from the books, and how crazily. Like the episode when the TV Laura's adopted brother, who didn't exist in real life, becomes addicted to morphine, or when his girlfriend is raped and impregnated by a man dressed as a clown. Still, as a girl I couldn't help feeling persuaded by the show's opening scenes of dusty walks and distant water mills, men in dingy suspenders and women in faded floral bonnets. I liked Doc Baker and Mr. Edwards and Mr. Oleson, poor soul, who owned the general store with that shrill and snooty wife of his. I liked the folksy theme song, little Laura running through a field while her parents smiled from their covered wagon. Everything in the town went back to the Ingallses' log cabin and the laddered loft that Laura and her sisters shared. The Ingalls family was the moral compass of that town, and not much passed without their input. That was true of the books as well. Ma and Pa were supposed to be the ideal parents. As a kid I decided that, had my father lived, he would have been a lot like Pa. Always there, helping out anyone in trouble, good-hearted and filled with optimism.

Alex and I were well into watching the clown attack episode—an homage to seventies slasher flicks, according to viewer comments—before I realized I wasn't helping my case. Though he liked the idea of the road trip, Alex was skeptical that we would find anything more than kitsch and souvenirs at Rocky Ridge Farm. He doubted that the scribble I'd found in Rose's archives—her almost-poem, I called it—meant anything more than a few dashed lines of regret
—
possibly about the death of her child, or possibly about something entirely fictional.

Don't forget she was a writer
, he said.

The night before our trip, Alex mentioned that we'd be driving right past all the casinos, shows, and rides that Branson, Missouri, had to offer. When I said no way he said, “Come on. It'll be fun.” It could be a campy little holiday, he said, a nostalgic throwback to our undergrad days. “Good old-fashioned fun.”

“It'll be research,” I said.

“Don't get your hopes up.”

“I won't,” but of course, I already had.