Pete and Alice in Maine by Caitlin Shetterly

Author:Caitlin Shetterly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-07-04T00:00:00+00:00

“Are we allowed to settle here?” asks Iris.

“Oh, sure. It’s America. We can go anywhere we want.”

“Anyone can?”

“Well, mostly.”

“But there were those people, the ones with the chain saws—”

“That was just Covid politics, honey.”

“Are there still wolves on the prairie?”

“Not many. I don’t know. Not many, I guess. Now it’s bedtime for you—let’s not think about the Trail of Tears or wolves or Ma and Pa and three little girls on the prairie anymore. Until tomorrow, okay?”

“Can I go get Ingmar?”

“You need a cuddle?”

Iris nods, solemn as a priest.

“Run along. Pee first.”

Iris comes back holding tightly to Ing, his long body trailing almost the length of hers, his feet skidding over the floor. She squeezes him a little too tightly under his shoulders and he looks the slightest bit panicked as she crawls into bed, still holding him, and shoves him under the covers next to her, now pinning him down as she cups her body around his.

“Good night, sweetie. Good night, Ing,” Alice says almost breezily.

Iris notices that her mother seems distracted. Ready to go downstairs. Ready to go down and fight with Daddy, she thinks to herself. She squeezes more tightly to Ing. But Ingmar uses his bottom paws to push against her, and scuttles down under the covers and off the bed. Iris feels alone and wants to go to her mother. But she worries that she might find her parents fighting or her mother crying, or, even worse, that cold silence that sometimes descends, and things feel very ominous. So she scrunches down the covers and peeks her eyes just over the top. Like this, finally, she falls asleep.

When Iris goes outside the next morning, she carries the old rusty Swiss Army knife she found in the barn in her hand and likes the feeling of her blue-flowered dress swishing around her calves; she likes imagining it’s a “calico,” and under her baseball cap, she has had her mother braid her hair into two long pigtails. Outside, she doesn’t think about Staples and Arby’s or Indian Territory. She sees a huge field of grasses and black-eyed Susans around her little house on the shore of a great ocean, and she can pretend she’s on the prairie. She can pretend she is surviving with her resilient family far away from everything they know. And in a way she is, they are.

After the almost-drowning incident she isn’t allowed anywhere near the beach alone. And so Iris asks Pete to cut her blocks of sod bricks. Pete goes out with an old shovel and digs from somewhere in the middle of their field and brings the bricks back, one by one. She notices how the dirt falls over his arms and how she’s not sure she’s ever seen her father with his hands in the earth before. Each block has at its base a mystery of tangled roots and bugs scrambling for safety and worms writhing about. She holds each one over her head and peers into the dirty darkness, trying to catch a glimpse of an inner life.

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