The Wilder Life (25 page)

The guide pointed out a calendar that hung by the kitchen window. It was open to February 1957. “That calendar was hanging there the day Laura died,” she said, and a hush came over our group. Laura had passed away just a few days after her ninetieth birthday. To emphasize this point, the table in the dining room displayed a carefully strewn arrangement of birthday cards from schoolchildren, as if to show when time stopped for Laura, and moreover that it stopped contentedly.

We learned that the Wilders enjoyed their radio but never owned a TV. In the bedroom a 1956 Montgomery Ward catalog rested on a side table. It was a long, narrow room with two twin beds that faced each other, foot to foot, which seemed unromantic until the tour guide mentioned that Laura slept in Almanzo's bed after his death in order to feel closer to him, and then it seemed breathtakingly sweet and sad.

Everything about the house tour, in fact, felt like an homage to the bittersweetness of old age or the vanished past. In between the tour guide's segments we all had begun to talk to one another in the group, we adults at least, talking about anything we might have remembered and that connected us to a place like this.

“I just keep thinking about how much changes in a lifetime,” said the wife of the retired contractor. “We didn't have TV yet when I was little and I remember thinking that was a big deal, but I mean Laura, she saw the railroads get built,” she marveled.

Keith said that the house reminded him of his grandparents. “My grandma would never throw anything away,” he said. “Breakfast was whatever was left over, and they were happy to have it.”

“I really want to find kitchen canisters like the ones Laura had!” I said to Catherine the Pantry Lady. I couldn't say anything more profound than that, though of course I'd been moved by everything I'd seen so far. The house seemed to embody everything I loved about the Little House books—the kitchen built for dozens of daily rituals, the big windows that let you see the landscape (Laura hadn't had them curtained). I couldn't get enough.

Even the linoleum, original to the house, seemed like a tribute to the past. “We get forty thousand visitors walking through here every season, and look how it's held up,” the guide said. “They just don't make this stuff like they used to.”

The museum seemed to have a tractor beam like the Death Star: it sucked us back in after the tour. None of us could resist the big magical building full of old-timey things. There were buttons Laura had collected; the notebook with the draft of
By the Shores of Silver Lake;
the engraved name cards that had been so fashionable in De Smet in
Little Town on the Prairie.

“Are you going over to see the other house?” the retired contractor asked me as I studied a display of Little House books that had been published in Slovenian.

“It's part of the tour, but we don't know what's there, do you? Was that where Rose lived?” his wife asked.

Between the rapturous nostalgia of the farmhouse and the tractor-beam effect of the museum, I had all but forgotten there was
another
house here—a small newer one that Rose had had built in 1928. It was an English cottage-style house built with Sears Roebuck plans and called the Rock House. It was on the farm property but farther down the road, out of sight of the rest of the museum complex. Now I recalled hearing that we could drive or walk over to see it.

“No, I think Rose had built it for her parents as a little retirement house or something,” I told Mr. and Mrs. Contractor. I'd remembered this from the biographies. “But I don't know what's there.”

At the moment all I could do was take in as much as I could here in the museum. While I'd loved seeing the site in Kansas the day before, there hadn't been much to see besides the land and the well and the cabin; here, though, I could gorge myself on artifacts. Like Laura's gun.
Laura's gun!
The card next to it in the case said that she carried a revolver during the journey from South Dakota to Missouri and often used it to shoot “small game.” I liked how spunky that made her seem, though I was wondering if perhaps younger children would be troubled by the notion of Half-Pint taking out bunny rabbits and birdies like Dirty Harry. I was still contemplating this when Karen came down the aisle with her twin daughters.

“We're looking for Charlotte,” she said. “Do you know if it's anywhere?” She meant Laura's rag doll that she'd gotten for Christmas in
Little House in the Big Woods
. I told her I didn't think so; the doll would be one of the most sacred Little House relics if it still existed, and I would've seen pictures of it in the biographies.

“I guess you're right,” she said. We started sharing our personal histories with the Little House books. She told me she hadn't read the series as a child, but there was a homeschooling curriculum based on them, and now the younger kids were studying under it.

“They play Little House all the time,” she said, gesturing over at the girls. “I think they really love the family, how sweet they all were, how simple it all was. And, you know, we just love the faith that was running throughout.”

Keith nodded. I noticed just then he was wearing a sweatshirt with a logo of a Christian college. “They're just great books,” he said.

Both Karen and Keith were so nice to talk to I hoped they wouldn't pick up on the fact that I wasn't quite the same kind of Little House fan that they were. I know there are a lot of folks who can easily see Christian messages in the books, lessons about trusting and accepting the will of God in times of hardship and relying on the bedrock of one's faith to get through. There's plenty of stuff in the books that can help illustrate these things, I guess. But the Ingalls family in the books didn't appear to be much the praying types, unless the occasional hymn on Pa's fiddle counts. Mary becomes a little godly by the later books, but as for the rest of the family, their reasons for attending church seemed to have more to do with partaking in civilized town life than with religious devotion. I suppose I'm inclined to see it that way because that's how my family did things—went to church (Congregational) sporadically and understatedly. Whenever Ma Ingalls brought out the Bible, it seemed to me to be pretty interchangeable with the other books they turned to for comfort, like the novel
Millbank
and Pa's
Wonders of the Animal World,
only slightly more important.

But in the case of families like Keith and Karen's, their Laura World includes certain aspects that mine does not; in their Little House scenes the Bible is likely always close by and the Lord near at hand watching over the family through the droughts and blizzards.

I don't mind that it's this way for other people, especially if it makes the books more meaningful to them. And yet there's a moment in the 2005 movie version of
Little House on the Prairie
when, after the Ingalls family has found the spot where they would build the log cabin, they all stand in a circle and clasp hands. Pa leads them all in a prayer to thank God and bless the land. Perhaps it was added to appeal to the Karens and Keiths in the Disney demographic. But for me it changed everything about who the Ingallses were supposed to be, even though the real family was long lost under that book's myriad and slippery fictional layers. Suddenly it wasn't enough that they were good people, they had to be the
right
kind of good. I guess I found it presumptuous, but it was deeper than that: what made me uncomfortable was the idea of the prayer as an embellishment, a pious flourish.

Anyway, these were the kind of sooty agnostic thoughts that I didn't want Keith and Karen to know I had, because it would have made things awkward. Of course, it wasn't their fault that a brief moment in a TV movie creeped me out. And like I said, they were swell people. Karen even had the kids tell me what they liked most about the books.

Abigail: “They were always happy.”

Anna: “I like Laura and Mary.”

Olivia: “They were always together. And Almanzo was a very nice man.”

Jacob: “I liked the one about the farmer boy.”

“They were all just so content,” Karen added. “
So
content. Even in the hard times. And the way Laura portrayed it was all so simple. So . . . simple.” She laughed. “I guess I said that before. But it's true. It's a beautiful portrait of a life of contentment and peace and trust.”

Sometimes when I hear folks maunder on about how simple Laura's lifestyle was I wonder if they've ever thought about all the hauling and fetching and stowing and stoking it took just to boil a pot of water. But seeing Karen and Keith and Abigail and Anna and Olivia and Jacob and the older kid whose name I didn't catch, I could understand. Surely they were up to all that cheerful hauling and fetching, and wouldn't it be nice to have just a stove fire to think about rather than carpooling to soccer practice? Never mind, then.

Karen went on. “And we love Mary, too. She was so content, you know, and she never complained.”

One of the twins, Anna, I think, nodded solemnly at this.

If their photos are any indication, Laura and Almanzo were the cutest old couple ever. They stood side by side in their photos, their poses stiff but matching, and together they smiled faint, gentle smiles that seemed to tell the camera, in the nicest way possible, that they'd rather be alone.

I was nearly at the far end of the museum by now, where the items in the glass cases were getting a little random. They had Laura's glasses on display, her jewelry, her
wallet.
It turns out she was one of those people who actually fills out the little I.D. card that comes with the wallet, but maybe everyone did in those days. Apparently Almanzo never threw out any of his license plates.

And then at the very end of the room, after all the Laura and Almanzo stuff, was a section dedicated to Rose—a very nice exhibit of her typewriters and manuscripts, even some of her furniture. A long glass case displayed copies of her books and mementos from her travels: a well-worn travel bag; native craft knickknacks from Albania, Vietnam, and other exotic locales. While it was an impressive collection—very National Geographic—nobody seemed to be spending any time over on this side of the museum. I noticed people would wander over and peer at a couple of the things in the cases, but once they realized they weren't looking at Laura things they'd simply turn around.

“Mom, what's this stuff ?” I heard one of Karen's kids ask.

“I don't think it's anything about Little House on the Prairie, sweetie,” she replied. “Do you want to go back? Let's go back.” She herded the kids back over to the other side of the museum.

I'd heard that local residents had mixed feelings about Rose, who in her adulthood had lived on and off in Mansfield between sojourns in Europe and elsewhere. For a while, after she'd built the Rock House for Laura and Almanzo, she'd even lived on her own in the farmhouse, with a few of her writer friends sometimes staying as long-term guests. “Even today Rose is regarded with some suspicion in Mansfield,” says William Holtz in
The Ghost in the Little House.
“There are hints of visits by ‘men' and ‘wild parties' when ‘she had those women living with her.' ” (Sadly, Holtz's biography never mentions any raucous debauchery, literary or otherwise, at Rocky Ridge Farm, though one of the more permanent houseguests was her friend nicknamed “Troub,” so who knows.)