The Wilder Life (22 page)

I'm sure it had partly to do with the rain, but I didn't want to leave the farmhouse. After everything, it felt to me like the realest thing about
Little House on the Prairie
aside from the book itself. You could lament that the name “Little House on the Prairie” meant too many things now—that was the point of that lawsuit—but even before all that it had been a story about a place that nobody could fully remember or even find. The fact that that place was
here
was sort of incidental; after all, even in the book it had turned out to be the wrong place to have settled.

The real story had once been about land, but there wasn't really any land anymore, just an idea that everyone built on again and again—a movie, a TV show, a musical, a story of good Indians and even better settlers who become wiser every time their covered wagon arrives at the beginning once again.

This place where I was now wasn't in the middle of that perfect circle of sky or story. Once, somewhere in the distance, there'd been Indians and soldiers and squatters and Bloody Benders; maybe one of those photocopies on the rack by the door could tell me everything I needed to know. But at the same time, I didn't feel like I could ever truly know what had happened here. There had been a cabin and someone had dug a well.

I liked this farmhouse, though. The rain flung itself against the west window while Amy got more hot water for my tea. I picked out some souvenirs—a few books, a jar of local honey, a handmade sunbonnet. Amy and I talked some more and I told her I'd tried churning butter.

“You mean you've never
done
that before?” she asked incredulously. She thought it was pretty hilarious since she'd grown up on a farm—“We had our garden, we raised our own meat, we did everything,” she said—and she couldn't imagine why someone would want to make their own butter if they didn't have to.

“I know,” I said sheepishly. “It's just something I tried to do, just for the experience of it.”

“Just like coming out here,” she said. I could tell she understood. She told me about a young couple who'd come from Spain, who'd watched the TV show there, and when they came to the States the man had planned a special trip out here, and he hadn't told the woman where she was going until they were here, and when she found out she wept.

“Some people don't understand the passion that goes with these sites,” Amy said. “You might think you know, but you don't know until you're here every day and you see these people come in here.” She shook her head. I could tell she loved her job and loved helping people find this place. Every day it was being found.

She went back over to her desk to ring up the things that I had bought. I looked out the front door and could see that the rain had let up again. The little farmhouse porch framed the gray sky and the road and fence and field beneath it.

“Wish us luck with the lawsuit,” Amy said just before I left.

Months later I read that the case came to an agreement in court that fall. The terms couldn't be divulged, the news story said, but not much would change at the Little House on the Prairie site. And as I read the story on my computer screen I realized after a moment that the image of the place that had come to my mind wasn't of the place I'd seen, the farmhouse and the one-room school and the earnest replica cabin, but of the Garth Williams illustration near the end of Little House on the Prairie. The cabin and the stable stood like toy blocks and the horizon line of the prairie stretched all the way across both pages of the book. I watched for more news about the lawsuit, but the story seemed to disappear after that.

But back at the site I wished Amy good luck, and I walked out to the rental car, and then I drove back the way I had come.

I FELT LIKE I was skipping ahead of things by visiting Mansfield, Missouri, the site of Laura Ingalls Wilder's last home. After all, the place Laura had dubbed Rocky Ridge Farm was where her happy-ever-after was presumed to have taken place, long after all the events in the Little House books; shouldn't I see everything else first? But the place was only an hour east of Springfield, and here I was already.

This was where the Wilder family—Laura, Almanzo (aka Manly), and their daughter, Rose—had wound up after more than a month of traveling by wagon from South Dakota in 1894, about ten years after the events of
These Happy Golden Years,
the romantic happy-ending installment of the Little House books. In the intervening years there'd been drought and economic turmoil; Laura and her husband had endured crop failures, a fire, and a bout of diphtheria that left Almanzo weakened. They decided to start anew in a different part of the country, and with another family they set out for Missouri, which was touted as the Land of the Big Red Apple. Laura had kept a diary of the six-week trip, and this was the account that was published posthumously in
On the Way Home
in 1962 as a sort of epilogue to the Little House series. She hadn't written the diary for an audience at all; it would be nearly twenty-five years before she began writing for publication. The entries are straightforward but descriptive: in them Laura records the towns they passed through, the strangers they met, the daily temperature.

I can't tell how interesting
On the Way Home
would be to a reader unfamiliar with the Little House books. The narrative, plainspoken and in the first person, had confused me as a kid; I couldn't quite see Laura beneath it. Nothing seemed to happen in this book; there were no scenes, just dusty towns rolling by. “On the road at 7:45, a nice level road and good farms fenced with board fences,” reads a typical entry. “We passed the best field of oats that Manly ever saw.”

When Chris decided to read the Little House books for my sake, I figured he'd stop with
These Happy Golden Years,
the official end of the series, because eight books is a lot to read when you're humoring your significant other's obsession. But he was willing to keep going. “Give me the next book,” he said when he had finished
The First Four Years
and handed it back to me.

“You know, you're done with all the books in the series now,” I told him, as I pushed that last blue paperback into the box set. “You don't
have
to read beyond. It's just journals and letters from here on out.”

“I know,” he said. “But I want to know what happens next.” So I gave him
On the Way Home.
He kept it on the nightstand on his side of the bed when he wasn't reading it. Which, I noticed, wasn't very often. The rare moment I caught him reading it I asked him how it was going.

He sighed. “They're in Nebraska now,” he said. “I guess.” He read aloud: “‘Beatrice is not as large as Lincoln but a nice town, I think. We saw the courthouse, it is handsome.'”

“Look, if you can't handle the excitement, just say so,” I told him.

On the Way Home
was nearly incomprehensible to me as a kid, but when I read it again as an adult, I could appreciate the glimpses of a shakier and less romantic time in U.S. history, where people crossed the country in search of better circumstances and didn't always find them. More than once Laura mentions passing wagons coming the opposite direction from Missouri, carrying people who hadn't had luck there. There's some great details, too: after visiting a house full of children and pigs, Laura notes, “They looked a good deal alike.” But wry moments notwithstanding, there's, well, a lot of looking at oat fields.

Where things get interesting is when Laura's daughter gets involved.
On the Way Home
is where many Little House readers first encounter the ambivalent presence of Rose Wilder Lane, who wrote the book's preface and afterword in the early 1960s, a few years after her mother's death and when she herself was in her old age. In the preface she provides a bit of helpful historical context, mentioning the droughts and the nationwide economic panic in 1893, and then describes her life in De Smet just before her family set out for Missouri.

Rose's first-person perspective in these pages is considerably more knowing than Laura's girlhood point of view in the Little House books. Unlike young Laura, little Rose is so devoid of wonder that even when posing for a photo at the age of two she thinks the photographer's watch-the-birdie trick is a “stupid pretense.” At seven, Rose can read well beyond her grade level and stoically understands that her family is in crisis, with her father disabled by illness and her mother with “me on her hands,” she says. The way they live in a rented house nearly empty of furniture really isn't “like camping,” as her mother tries to cheerfully assert, but Rose knows she's supposed to pretend that it's fun. Rose comes off as very much the sad, wise kid in her narrative, like Tatum O'Neal in
Paper Moon,
only even more sullen.

Her account leaves off for a while to let Laura's entries tell the story; then it continues where the diary ends, with the family camped outside Mansfield and looking for land to buy. In the preface, Rose's recollections have a cautiously hopeful tone, but in the afterword the mood is much stranger. She recalls the day her parents get ready to go into town to buy the place they've picked out, and reverently describes the outfit her mother puts on for the occasion. If you're a Little House reader, you'll recognize it as the black Sunday-best dress from
These Happy Golden Years,
and in the midst of all the rapturous detail of basques and sleeves and ribbons and braids and bangs you can suddenly see Laura again, the way she appears in those past books. After trying as hard as I could to recognize Laura through her brusque diary entries or as the beleaguered mother in the introduction, I remember, as a kid, getting to this part in the book and feeling relieved: here she was at last. “She looked lovely,” says Rose. “She was beautiful.”

A moment later, though, the scene turns ugly. Laura looks for the precious hundred-dollar bill that they've brought from South Dakota in a wooden lap desk, the money that represents all their savings for a down payment on a new farm. It's missing. Rose's parents look everywhere, desperately riffling through the desk's contents; finally her mother asks her if she's taken it. Rose's reaction:
Not the sort of thing you'd expect to read after sixty pages of oatfield observations and weather reports, is it? The money turns up a page or two later—apparently it had fallen into a crack in the lap desk—but if there's any relief or jubilation Rose doesn't mention it; the family simply hustles over to the bank and buys the land, and from then on Laura refuses to ever discuss the incident. After reading eight books in which the phrase “All's well that ends well” is oft repeated, it's kind of a jolt to find that in this post–Little House world, all that ends well is also deeply traumatic and emotionally unresolved!

Plenty of Little House fans have wondered what motivated Rose to cap off her mother's understated travel journal with such a primal scene.
The Homesteader
editor Sandra Hume blogged about it on the fan site Beyond Little House, venting in the form of an open letter to Rose. “What were you thinking?” she asks Rose hypothetically. She thinks Rose wanted to show Little House readers that her mother wasn't always “Laura Ingalls,” the beloved figure in the books, but doesn't feel
On the Way Home
was the place to do it. “In what was essentially a companion Little House book, all I was left with was an overwhelming sense of disrespect,” she wrote. Other readers chimed in as well: “Rose's epilogue has always left a bad taste in my mouth,” one commenter said.

“She was crazy,” said another.

On the road from Springfield to Mansfield I passed billboards for stage shows in Branson, various country-themed craft and souvenir emporia, and armadillo roadkill. This was Ozark country, and although most people, myself included, consider Laura Ingalls Wilder country to be the land of big skies and empty prairies of the upper Midwest, you only have to do the math to realize that Laura had really lived most of her life here, more than sixty years. In that time she and Almanzo had worked to turn the land they'd bought into a working farm and built the house, bit by bit, until it had become one of the most impressive houses in the area.

She'd been here nearly forty years by the time she started working on the Little House books in earnest, writing them in pencil in the orange-covered notebooks that she'd bought at the drugstore in town, as all the biographies attest. As a kid, I loved this detail; I myself had steno notebooks from Walgreen's and wrote stories in them while lying across my bed on my stomach. Naturally I imagined her doing the same thing. Of course I didn't quite get that she would have been in her sixties.