The Wilder Life (46 page)

Back at home Chris was reading
Farmer Boy.
(It's officially the third book in the series, but I tend to think you can read it out of order, since it's a stand-alone story.) He said he wanted to have some idea of what I'd be seeing on my trip. One night when I was still in New York City I called home to Chicago.

“I don't get why you don't like
Farmer Boy
,” he said on the phone. “This book rules. This kid has the best life ever. There's
a doughnut jar
in the kitchen.”

“The doughnut jar really is cool,” I admitted.

“ ‘In his right hand he held a doughnut, and in his left hand two cookies,'” Chris said. I knew he was reading from the book. “‘He took a bite of doughnut AND THEN a bite of cookie.' ” He was quoting the birthday scene, where Almanzo gets to stay home from school and go sledding and wander through the kitchen double-fisting baked goods. “That is some bad-ass action right there,” Chris said.

“Whatever,” I said. “You haven't gotten to the part where it says he can't wait until the Fourth of July celebration when there will be speeches. What nine-year-old boy looks forward to SPEECHES?”

The day after that Chris had finished the book. “I think I know why you don't like this book,” he said on our next phone call. “It's because everything always works out for these people, Almanzo and his family.”

“Maybe,” I said. But, I pointed out, there was always a sense in the other books that the Ingalls family, the storybook one at least, ends up okay.

“No, no. In
Farmer Boy
they
always
win. Their horses are
the best
horses in the state. The mother makes
the best
butter anywhere. Everything they do is the most amazing successful thing ever in the history of anything.” He was right: the Wilders excelled at bully defeating and pumpkin growing; they always escaped every peril, whether it was frost in the cornfield or robbers who lurked outside the farmhouse (who were chased away by a stray dog that
of course
knew to side with the Wilders). Even when things went wrong they somehow wound up turning miraculously right, like when Almanzo threw the brush of stove-blacking at his sister and it hit the parlor wall and left a big blotch, and his sister just came up with some brilliant solution to fix it so he never got in trouble. Full of win, that Almanzo kid.

Sure, the book constantly espoused life virtues and diligent chore doing, as if to imply that the Wilder family's charmed life was purely a matter of hard work and perseverance. I was never convinced, especially after seeing the fortunes of perfectly decent folk like the Ingallses repeatedly go up in smoke and clouds of grasshoppers.

“Yeah, everything just sort of happens magically for them in
Farmer Boy
,” I said. “So annoying.”

The Wilder farm was the most impressively historical-looking place of all the Little House sites I'd seen: a circa 1850s farmhouse painted a deep red with white trim; it stood in a shady grove with an array of barns and stables alongside it. It looked like just the kind of place you'd visit on a fourth-grade field trip, where you'd learn how a spinning wheel worked and get a little handful of carded sheep's wool to take home.

It also looked very much like the place described in the book
,
which is pretty remarkable considering Laura's knowledge was secondhand. She had never been there; in fact, no one in the Wilder family had returned after they'd moved to Minnesota. Only Rose had visited here once, in 1932, when her mother was working on the manuscript for
Farmer Boy.
The book was Laura's second children's book effort (though it's now listed third in the series order); she had started writing it a few months after that trip to De Smet in the Buick. She hadn't fully conceived of the Little House series at this point; certain territories of her life and family history had yet to be visited.

By all accounts she'd intended
Farmer Boy
to be a companion to
Little House in the Big Woods
: another detail-rich account of an earlier time, another
now
for Depression-era readers. This time she'd based it on her husband's recollections, which must have been vivid, even though he was reportedly a man of few words. There's evidence that Rose considered writing a biography of Almanzo, to be titled
A Son of the Soil,
but it's believed that he was so reticent in interviews she abandoned the project. Or perhaps it was because he lacked the optimism that Rose had likely hoped to convey. “My life has been mostly disappointments,” he wrote in a letter to her in 1937. But Laura would go back to the beginning in
Farmer Boy,
just as she had when writing about the house in the Big Woods that was so cozy you wanted them to stay there forever.

Inside the Wilder farmhouse we could see what a comfortable life young Almanzo and his family had lived. The place was smallish by twentieth-century standards, but in the 1800s it would have been practically a McMansion, with its big, bright rooms with woolen carpets and stately furniture. All at once I remembered the thrill I used to get whenever I rediscovered this book and read it again, because while the book is never explicit about the Wilders' economic status, it's nonetheless clear:
they were rich!
They had a parlor
and
a dining room and, be still my beating heart,
three
barns. They'd been faithfully reconstructed here and I pointed them out to Michael.

“I know one barn's for the horses,” I said, remembering. “And then they had oxen. And sheep. And pigs. Or at least Almanzo had one, and he fed it candy.” The more I remembered of the book, the more useless I became in regard to actual facts. “They had, like,
hundreds
of animals.”

“Really?” Michael asked.

“Well, I don't know. It seems like it, though.”

We saw it all: the parlor with its fancy wallpaper, the kitchen, the upstairs bedrooms, then out to the barn complex where we learned more about nineteenth-century farm technology than we ever thought possible. I had to admit that it was one of the best house tours I'd been on throughout all my Little House travels, with the world of the past faithfully reconstructed and nary a soft sculpture doll to break the illusion.

Except that when we were in the kitchen, I'd whispered to Michael, “There's no
doughnut jar
!” No sugar barrel, either, to represent the one the Wilder children had consumed while their parents were on a trip (according to the book, the four kids had emptied that sucker out
in less than a week
).

“That was nice, but I wish there'd been pancakes,” I told Michael when the tour was over.

“Um, it's a museum,” he said. “What do you mean?”

I meant
pancakes,
ten—TEN—stacks of them on a platter on the stove, just like in chapter 8! I meant a gigantic spread of chicken pie and roast pork that Almanzo, according to the book, could “taste in every corner of his mouth.” (Next time you eat something, try to simulate this effect. IT IS NOT EASY.) I meant that this was a lovely house, but it couldn't really, truly be the
Farmer Boy
house unless all that insane food was there in some way, and I told Michael this.

“You mean they should serve pancakes here?” he said.

“No,” I said, because of course that was ridiculous. But what, then? I racked my brain. “I guess I mean they should make us
think
of pancakes.” That was what was important: not the pancakes themselves but the idea of pancakes. Like a Wallace Stevens poem but in reverse,
and with pancakes.

And just then I remembered something I'd read in the introduction of
The Little House Cookbook.
There Barbara Walker pointed out that Laura, after a childhood filled with near-starvation experiences like the one in
The Long Winter
, wrote
Farmer Boy
not just as her husband's story, but as, Walker writes, “her own fantasy of blissful youth, surrounded on all sides by food.” In other words, a whole book of wishful thinking.

With all its over-the-top dinner scenes and constant allusions to the Wilder family's good fortune, literal and otherwise,
Farmer Boy
wasn't really the smug when-I-was-your-age sermon I'd originally made it out to be, but more a wistful dream conjured up by a woman who'd spent much of her life enduring deprivation. It was a love letter to the original promise of success and prosperity that had so eluded her husband in his adulthood, when, like countless other settlers, he'd found out the hard way that the farming methods from back East were no match for the dry land of Dakota Territory.

Suddenly it all made sense—
Farmer Boy
was Laura Ingalls Wilder's
own
Laura World, an ideal realm she'd imagined, a homesickness for this place she'd never been or seen. On my trip west I'd been trying to get to the furthest reaches of a world I thought I knew. Without even expecting it, I'd found the most secret and remote part of it here. I knew it wasn't the house itself, here in this almost impossibly green and lush countryside; it was more that this house marked the spot in the other world, designated the place where this amazing Farmer Boy, the Child Who Always Had Enough, lived in Laura's head and maybe all of ours, too.

At the gift shop I bought a little flask of local maple syrup, just to have something to represent the Idea of Pancakes.

Michael couldn't quite believe that I was ready to drive back to Burlington. “Are you sure?” he asked. “The guide said we could walk down to see the river if you wanted to see more.”

“No, it's fine,” I told him.
Farmer Boy
and I had come to an understanding, or maybe Laura and I had. I didn't need to see every last thing anymore. I stood on the grass outside the gift shop and watched as the next tour group made its way from the red farmhouse to the barns. A woman hung behind the group and stopped to sit on a little bench under the grove of apple trees. She looked to be in her sixties, dressed in crisp summer clothes. She simply walked up to the bench and stayed there as long as I stood and watched, as if she'd paid her ticket admission just to sit in that one place. She was still sitting there when we left.