The house is quiet. My mother has gone. Each boy has been delivered to his respective coal seam to scrabble doggedly in the dark for a few hours. I am ready to write. With time and solitude enough at last, I think I'll take on the Twiblings at last.
I sit. I click. And I find that the Internet is down.
I pick up the phone to call Comcast. But since they also provide our phone service, it, too, is out.
It is -10 degrees, and suddenly I feel uncomfortably like an Ingalls, cut off from the world. Oh, sure, I have a car, so I could drive all the way to De Smet if I needed to. I have a tank full of heating oil, so I need not wear my red wool flannel union suit to bed unless I crave dropseat lovin'. There's a house full of food, and even if there weren't, I have a cell phone, so I could theoretically text message those dashing Wilder brothers and ask them to bring me a bucket of lard, if pig fat I desired. But I do feel suddenly isolated with one of my lifelines down.
I suppose I should mention that last night I read The Long Winter.
I've been reading Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books to Charlie, a chapter or two a night. Farmer Boy was a favorite, but the others have been good, too. Sometimes he seems not to be paying attention as I read aloud, but then he'll break in to lament, "I just feel so bad that they had to work so hard!" (At those times I praise his empathy and then I wrap him in my shawl, line his shoes with newspaper, and send him out for his chores. And be sure to strip Bessie's bag, boy, lest she go dry like the others.)
I was reading The Long Winter because although the stories are engaging, and mostly inoffensive to innocent modern ears, I was uneasy about this book in particular. I'd remembered most of the others from my own reading as a girl, but I didn't recall this one so well and thought I should vet it first. The very title spooked me, with its notes of bitter privation. I didn't think they'd eaten each other, but then again Carrie was always sickly, and although she'd have been stringy, Pa'd been telling us for five books now what a fine cook Ma was, so, really, come on, who knew?
My point is that I didn't want any surprises. I'm accustomed to doing some heavy on-the-fly editing when I read, usually anytime Wilder mentions Indians. While I accept that most white settlers were terrified by...the people whose land their government...kind of...stole...who might be sort of...angry, so far we haven't discussed it much, beyond Charlie's outrage when a minor character claims that the only good Indian is a dead Indian. ("Bobby is a good Indian!" he insisted, eyes afire with the rank injustice of it. Bobby is Charlie's cousin by marriage. Bobby hails from Gujarat.)
With all this in mind, then, I was pleased when The Long Winter proved to include a good non-dead Indian, who turns up at the town store and warns the assembled settlers of the awful storms to come. Of course this scene is staged with plenty of heap big Injun stereotype-ums, but the overall point is that after worshiping some false gods, admiring his scalp collection, and carefully studying the Local on the 8s -- apparently his basic cable didn't go out like mine did -- he went to town to share the news. Good Indian, fully operational.
So Pa, hearing this, went back to the house to tell his family that a long winter lay ahead.
"It's going to be a hard winter," Pa said. "If you must have the truth, I'm afraid of it. This house is nothing but a claim shanty. It doesn't keep out the cold, and look what happened to the tar-paper in the first blizzard. Our store building in town is boarded and papered, sided on the outside and ceiled on the inside. It's good and tight and warm, and the stable there is built warm, too."
"But what's the need to hurry so?" Ma asked.
"I feel like hurrying," Pa said. "I'm like the muskrat, something tells me to get you and the girls inside thick walls. I've been feeling this way for some time, and now that Indian..."
He stopped.
"What Indian?" Ma asked him. She looked as if she were smelling the smell of an Indian whenever she said the word.
Reading this, I was glad I'd thought ahead. I realized that with this book I'll need to take particular care with Charlie. It won't be enough merely to contextualize the stories' casual racism, though. I'll need to explain just how come Ma is such an asshole.
I didn't know it as a child, but lately I've been suspecting it. The Long Winter cements my opinion that she's a humorless, hide-bound funsucker. She chides the girls for humming while they're sweeping, riding horses at a run, or laughing at a joke. She insists that Laura act like a lady even as she does a man's work to keep the family alive -- yes, Ma, how will your second daughter ever catch a man if she doesn't stop that whorish whistling? Her dinner surprise is codfish. And she habitually scolds her husband as if he were a child. I kept reading passages like this:
Pa paced the little room restlessly. "Why, if we'd known that claim jumper was hunkered down on Tompkins' homestead, we'd have --"
Ma gave Pa a quelling look. "Charles," she said quietly, and Pa immediately subsided.
But Laura knew what Pa had meant, and she looked thoughtfully at the stocking she was knitting. Oh, it wasn't fair. Why couldn't she be a man? she thought crossly. She could work over a dadblamed varmint with a sock full of nickels good as anyone. Although her knitting was not as fine as Mary's even stitches, she felt sure her stocking would do. But of course they hadn't had nickels in months, and they mustn't use Mary's college money.
Then suddenly Laura remembered, and dropped her ball of wool so noisily that Carrie yelped in fear. She still had her three Christmas pennies from that long-ago winter in Muskrat Territory!
and thinking, Jesus, Caroline, let the man speak. Why, I guess Charles Ingalls is free, white, and 21! Can't a man say, "Gol ding it!" in his own house?
Nor do I find her particularly likable when it comes to her children, not when The Long Winter seems to consist largely of homey vignettes like this one:
The blizzard wore on. For 232 days now the storm had raged, and according to Pa, who'd managed to cross the street to the feed store and eat butter-soaked pancakes and bacon with the Wilder boys while his family sipped listlessly at their horsehair broth, the thermometer hadn't topped -20 in a week.
Each dark day was like every other, endless hours of twisting hay, grinding wheat, and sublimating their feelings. Laura felt dull and stupid, unable to enjoy even the rare treat of a Bible verse bee. She could never beat Mary, anyway. Mary, with her beautiful blue eyes staring sightlessly into nothingness. Mary, who never uttered a word of complaint. Mary, who was always so good, and never had to do chores, and had the warmest chair near the stove, and one of these days, oh, one of these days, Laura was just going to slap that smug smile right off Mary's --
"Jesus wept," lisped little Grace. Ma said nothing, merely nodded and turned to carve the groat loaf, but her warm smile was praise enough. Laura suddenly felt ashamed of her thoughts.
But the unearthly sound of the storm outside had put even gentle Ma on edge. When Grace interrupted Mary's flawless recitation of the entire book of Revelations to whimper, "My feet are cold," Ma whirled around, shocked.
"Grace! For shame! A big two-year-old like you!"
No one expected such a violent outburst. Ma was always so soft-spoken, and her rampage of unchecked fury stunned them all. The room fell silent in surprise. Even the prairie hushed for a moment, and the howling winds dropped, chastened. The only sound in all that sudden stillness were three quick plinks as a few toes dropped to the floor.
So I'm going to have to think hard about whether to read this one to Charlie at all -- months of ice, hunger, cheerless monotony, and near-despair -- or to skip it and head straight for Little Town on the Prairie, in which Mary goes to college, Laura becomes a teacher, Carrie is still not eaten, and Almanzo starts sniffing around -- I mean, sees Laura home of a Sunday. (It is a matter of the most clanging cognitive dissonance to think of Half-Pint in torrid dropseat sex, and yet I cannot seem to stop. I suppose it is a sickness.)
I'll post this once the Internet is back, I've melted all the ice chunks out of my beard, and the train gets through so that we're no longer reduced to eating of Ma's good floor sweepings. Do you know the Little House books? Do you have any good recipes for hot water and...more hot water? What do you do on a snow day, besides hungrily eyeing the cat? Don't bother suggesting a spelldown or a hymn-off or even a knitamajig. Ma says we must save our rollicking entertainments until Christmas.
