A Wilder Rose: A Novel by Susan Wittig Albert

with the other barefoot, shabby mountain girls, well away from the town girls in their wonderful store-bought dresses. Oh, how I coveted Becky Hooper’s red serge dress, trimmed with narrow bands of red satin, and Ethel Burney’s white stockings, and my heart ached for Josey Franklin’s shiny patent-leather shoes. I said nothing to my mother about these longings, for even a pair of the plainest shoes was beyond my parents’ reach. At home, I insisted that I would rather go barefoot to school than wear shoes. At school, I pretended that none of it mattered.
    But it did. Back in the frontier Dakota settlement of De Smet, the men and women, alike in their buckle-down grit, had worn their poverty as an earned badge of honor, and while the Ingalls family was even poorer than most, they had achieved, by virtue of their courage and stick-to-it, a certain social distinction. My mother rarely talked about it, but I knew she had felt the brutal edge of her childhood poverty as keenly as I felt mine. Mansfield was an established town with a closed social hierarchy built on seniority and wealth that was evidenced (to me, at least) by satin-trimmed dresses and patent-leather shoes. In Mansfield, poverty was a badge of shame, and my homemade dresses and bare feet were its insignia. While my father was courageous and my mother could even be gay in the face of our poverty, I was tormented, and those school days were a long nightmare.
    In the years to come, my mother would gain entry into the town’s clubs, and even establish one of her own, the Athenian Club, in Hartville, the county seat. But as a child, I was on the outside, as anyone could tell just by looking at me. Except for the Cooley boys, Paul and George, I had few friends, and no wonder: I was odd and bookish and spoke my own language, Fispooko, to Spookendyke and the chickens and the family cow. When there was time away from the work I was expected to do and wanted to do to please my mother, books were my life and my joy—books and the wild green hills and clear mountain springs where I dreamed under the hazel and sassafras hedges, edged with lavender horsemint and orange butterfly weed.
    The effect of childhood poverty stayed with me long after I came to an easier place in the world. For one thing, it taught me to hide my insecurity behind an exaggerated nonchalance, an attitude of I don’t care , which is perhaps my reason, now, for spending money I don’t have. It also—and this is more important, I think—made me a teller of tales, someone for whom the sheer pleasure of invention may overtake whatever facts might be involved, especially when I have an appreciative audience. I learned how to pose, how to adjust my story to my listeners or readers, a valuable asset for a writer of fiction. That doesn’t mean that I don’t always know where the truth lies, or that I am deceived by my own stories (although sometimes perhaps I am), or that I am not painfully honest with myself in my journals (as I certainly am). It only means that I learned, very young, to conceal the truth behind a fictional facade, which we all do to some extent—except that I have made a profession of it.
    The apple twigs my father had planted were still years away from producing, and cash remained scarce. So when I was eleven, we rented out the little house at Rocky Ridge and moved to town, to a small yellow frame house that we rented for five dollars a month, just two doors east of Mrs. Cooley and the boys. Mr. Cooley had died, and Papa took over his hauling business and his job as an agent for the Waters-Pierce Oil Company, selling kerosene, stove gas, turpentine, and linseed oil. The job required him to drive his team and wagon thirteen miles south to Ava and twelve miles north to the county seat of Hartville, each a four-hour round trip, often in the worst of weathers. Mama Bess set up a boarding table in the front room of our house and cooked for railroad men and traveling salesmen.
    All this