Little House on the Wasteland

One: The Big Woods

There came a time when they had to leave their little house in the Big Woods of what was once Wisconsin.

That cabin of log and stone was the only home that Laura had ever known. She had been no older than Baby Grace when Ma and Pa had found it, hidden safe among the tall trees, up in the untamed hills beyond the Laketowns and the ruins of Greensbay.

The talk of leaving had begun after Pa's last trip to market. Twice yearly, Pa would travel down to the shores of Great Mishgan Lake to trade. He would leave with his handcar loaded up with bundles of furs and their surplus soy and perhaps a few blocks of Ma's handmade soaps, which smelled of lavender and pine. He would return with powder for his gun and salt to cure their meat and dozens of other necessaries for life in the Big Woods.

That fall, however, when Pa returned from the Laketown Market, he said that things had changed. It was no longer the safe place to trade that it had once been. Pa wasn't sure if he could go back, maybe not ever again.

Ma and Pa tried not to discuss it around Laura and Mary. But some nights, when Laura was supposed to be asleep, she would listen. She would crawl to the very edge of the loft where she and Mary slept and try to scoop up her parent's hushed voices into the tiny ladles of her ears.

Laura tried hard to sort through what they said. The trouble in the Laketowns had something to do with the fighting in the East, she understood that much. Boats had always come and gone from the harbors along Great Mishgan Lake, but now instead of trade goods they brought loads of desperate people. Displacees, Pa called them. Laura heard him tell Ma that they were flooding into the Laketowns by the hundreds, packed tight into their overcrowded boats or else staggering up the old number roads from the Illinoy.

The displacees had thrown the communities around Mishgan Lake off balance, it seemed, though Laura didn't exactly understand. Ma and Pa spoke of town councils and taxes and shipping rights and more grown-up things that were all too much for Laura to keep straight. All she knew was that things had changed somehow. They were one way, and now they were a different way. And now they had to leave the Big Woods.

Mary, who knew that spying was very bad, never joined Laura at the lip of the loft, but this did not stop her from badgering Laura to relate every word that had been said. Her pretty eyes, pale blue-gray like Ma's, would fill with tears whenever Laura told her that Pa was talking again of leaving.

Mary was older. She had memories. They were blurry but they were there, memories of a time before they'd found the little house, a time when they had moved from place to place, scavving and foraging. The thought of going back to the roads frightened her.

When Mary was small and Laura was smaller, Ma and Pa had come across the little house. It was all by itself, hidden deep among the trees, far from any settlement. Pa said that it had been built by the parkrangers, a people who had lived in the Big Woods long ago back in Lectric Times. Pa reckoned no one had touched it in many years.

They found the house covered over in moss and creepers, but its stone foundations were strong. They found the remains of its roof veiled amid a cacophony of branches, but its rafters stood straight and tall. And sitting right in its center had been the big black stove that heated the house from loft to pantry and cooked their suppers night after night atop its flat iron surface. Pa had replaced the rotting beams with good new timber, and from then on the roof of the little house kept them warm and dry, while its strong stones kept out bears and wolfdogs.

Many of Laura's favorite things had been found among the scav buried secret inside the little house. Sealed in a chamber underground, in the room that would become their pantry, Pa had found Laura's favorite old paperbook, A Children's Illustrated Book of Animals. Among the rubble that had clogged the loft, they found Laura's favorite painting, the one of an old Merican city at night, its gigantic towers wrapped in amber streaks of lectric light. Even Oprah, Laura's ragdoll, had shiny black hardmold buttons for eyes, buttons likewise scavved from among the belongings that the parkrangers had left behind.