We wake up to find the cozy tunnel gone, the snowdrifts scoured (again with that word, which I didn’t realize how evocative it was until Wendy brought it up) down to the bare ground.
We also find out it is the middle of February. (Ma answers the question that Laura asks “stupidly.”) Just two chapters ago we learned the train wasn’t going to come at all; that was in January. Since then the family has been subsisting on brown bread and potatoes and warming themselves with quick-burning hay fires.
Now things are getting raw. Laura deigns to interpret a remonstration from Ma (“Never complain of what you have. Always remember you are fortunate to have it”) as an indicator that the family might … starve? No, Ma tells her. If the family has to, they’ll kill and eat the stock. She shushes Laura who audibly protests; the girls are coming downstairs.
Pa goes to Fuller’s and comes back with a rumor: a settler south of town (“18 or 20 miles southeast of here”) has wheat. Foster, that troublemaking rascal, is behind the rumor. But it just might be true. Pa bandies about the idea of trying to find the guy—
–NO. Ma says, quite simply, not just no but hell no. Surprised by her intensity, Pa tries to talk to her but she’ll hear no more about it. Now comes my favorite use of italics in the series:
You don’t go hunting for that wheat.
Italics usually imply emphasis. Sometimes they represent volume. These italics indicate neither of these. It’s just Ma: “She was quiet but she was terrible.”
As a parent, I often long for Ma’s mastery of quiet and terrible.
Pa accepts her answer. He has no choice. But Ma’s outburst has rattled her; she spills the tea she’s pouring for Pa.
After doing the chores Pa inquires about the state of the wheat and the potatoes. Inside the folded-over, nearly empty sack, there’s wheat enough for the breakfast bread, and only six potatoes remain. Pa asks for the milk pail. (Why doesn’t he know where the milk pail is?)
Now we’re down the street at Royal and Almanzo’s where they’re devouring another stack of ’Manzo’s famous pancakes. When Pa comes to the door they’re excited to see another human being, greeting him with fervor and offering him pancakes. Pa declines and asks about wheat to sell. Royal says they’re sold out and says hey, have some pancakes anyway. Pa ignores him and steps over to the wall, removes the saddle and pulls the plug to fill his milk pail with wheat kernels. Almanzo is astounded and mightily protests as Pa calmly continues; Royal is amused, tipping “his chair back against the wall,” hands in his pockets, grinning at his brother.
When the pail’s full, “Pa thrust the plug into the hole.” Oh dear. Where’s Ann Romines when you need her?
Pa calmly explains to a dumbfounded Almanzo how he did the math and decided the inside of the room didn’t fit the outside. “I figured you had grain there. It’s the only thing likely to run out of knothole.”
Talk of Almanzo’s seed wheat leads to a discussion of the phantom wheat in some settler’s shanty outside town. Royal tells Pa he shouldn’t go: “Who’d take care of your folks if you got caught in a storm and …” – I love this, how he talks with an ellipsis – “got delayed or anything?”
Pa puts that aside and asks again for a price on his pailful of wheat. Almanzo tries to give it away, which Pa refuses. They settle on a quarter.
Then they all sit down to pancakes and sugar-cured ham. I was surprised to read how many of you thought Pa was being selfish eating the pancakes while his family was down the road, starving. I’ve always been relieved reading this, knowing that Pa is getting such a good meal. He worked so hard in such physically demanding conditions to provide for his family, all day, every day, and I’ve always been heartened to think of this extra nutrition he got to help him along. Thank you, Wilder boys!
Pa makes it home just as the next blizzard strikes. He shows Ma the wheat and she gratefully and wondrously strokes the kernels (calling to mind, for me, the baby chicks she strokes in the dark in Little Town). Pa tells her he can’t say where he got it, but “there’s more where that came from.”
Imagine Laura Wilder, over seventy years old, writing about her nineteen-year-old future husband’s wheat saving her family from starvation. (Or at least from killing their stock.) How much of the drama was real? How much was manufactured to fit comfortably into the story? We’ll never know, but I like the idea of her ruminating over this and deciding what to share with the world about the man she loved—or the boy she fell in love with.