A Wilder Rose: A Novel by Susan Wittig Albert Page A

effort brought a little more money, and life was easier, but I was still miserable in school. I was precocious enough to be utterly impatient with the ignorance of our country teachers, and I preferred teaching myself to being taught by them . I remember once being instructed to paraphrase some lines of Tennyson’s. I retorted that the lines meant more than the individual words and that you couldn’t paraphrase poetry without reducing it. Tommy Knight could, though. When he finished his plodding summary, the teacher turned to me. “Let this be a lesson to you, Miss Wilder,” he said darkly. “You fail because you do not try. Perseverance is a chief virtue. If at first you don’t succeed, try—”
    At this unendurable banality, I slammed my books on the desk and cried, “I won’t stay and listen to such stupid stuff!” And stormed home. And didn’t go back for the rest of the term. Instead, I lay in the barn and read borrowed books: History of the Conquest of Mexico by William Prescott, the Leatherstocking Tales, Sense and Sensibility , Dombey and Son , The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , and anything else I could put my hands on . My sporadic attendance seemed to do me no harm, and I know that I profited handsomely from my reading.
    Mansfield’s school, like most rural schools of the day, went as far as McGuffey’s Sixth Reader . When the town girls reached that great jumping-off point, many of them began preparing for their life’s work, helping their mothers at home and tatting edgings for the tea towels they embroidered for their hope chests until they married the town boys and began having town children. Thus was a woman’s life defined: her work was marriage and her place was in the home, tending husband and children and elderly parents, her own and her husband’s.
    I could see this daily all around me. But it was especially clear when Jim Miller hired young Mrs. Sims to make hats in his milliner’s shop, and the whole town was turned upside down. Mrs. Sims, who was artistic and clever with her fingers, was known thenceforth as an immoral woman. Of course, my mother had cooked meals for paying boarders, but she did it at home, as my father pointed out, not behind a plate-glass window on the main street, where every man could gawk at her. Once I was fully aware that this was my future—to be confined forever to my husband’s home—I began to plot my escape.
    It came in the person of Aunt E.J.—Eliza Jane Wilder Thayer, my father’s energetic sister, a female homesteader who had courageously proved up her Dakota claim, then worked for several years in Washington, D.C., before marrying (at the outrageously advanced age of forty-two!) a prosperous rice farmer and moving to Crowley, Louisiana. Now in her early fifties, Aunt E.J. was an indomitable woman, fearless, unfailingly optimistic, bright, and bossy. I think she saw something in me that reminded her of herself when she was my age. She called me her “Wilder Rose” and offered me a way out of Mansfield, at least for a year.
    “Come live with me, and you can go to high school,” she said.
    “Oh, yes!” I cried ecstatically. I had no idea what kind of place Crowley, Louisiana, might be, but I was sure that it would be more exciting than Mansfield, and we would have to go there by train. By train!
    “Absolutely not,” my mother declared firmly. She didn’t like Aunt E.J., who had been her schoolteacher when she was a girl in De Smet. (Later, in the manuscript she called “Pioneer Girl,” she confessed to being the author of a nasty bit of doggerel that included the memorable line “We laugh until we have a pain, at lazy, lousy, Liza Jane.” In a private note to me, she added that she had no excuse for such a terrible thing and that she should have been whipped.)
    I also believe, looking back, that my mother feared losing me completely; once I was able to escape her control, I might never come back. It had been a year of escalating