The Prairie Spy

Alan “Lindy” Linda

On a weekend a long, long time ago, one during which some of The Young Girls had blessed us by coming home to wash laundry, we found ourselves sitting around the kitchen table. The conversation flowed comfortably around all the catching up that we had to do because, at their age, sadly, they came home less and less.

Eighteen, at that point the youngest of The Young Girls, dug around in a carry bag which she had brought home with her, and pulled out something. What exactly it was that she pulled out doesn’t matter. Whatever it was, I couldn’t tell if it was something she had purchased, or had made herself.

I looked at it across the table and innocently inquired: “Is it boughten?”

At that time, she was a senior at the Arts High School down in the Twin Cities, which was, you know,  the true center of all the intelligence in the universe. She looked at me and said, “I cannot believe that you just said that.” Sniff, sniff.

Said what, I asked? Innocent.

“Boughten,” she said. How dumb, said her nose, which went up into the air another notch. How dumb, said her eyeballs, which rolled toward heaven in a plea for someone to tell her that this man was not her true father.

What’s wrong with boughten, I asked her. Maybe, I said, she just never heard tell of it. Maybe I should have said “store-bought.”

She said: “It’s not a word.”

Well, I replied, did you know what I meant when I said it?

I had her. She did know what I’d meant. Her silence said as much. So I told her that, for her information, I had gone to college for many years, and yet it took me many more to figure out that, by crackey, I could talk the way I wanted to. I’d earned that right.

They send us to school to learn right from wrong, last time I looked. The right way to eat, the right way to dress, the right laws, blah, blah, blah. You betcha. Don’t ya know. Etc. etc. etc.

To sum up, I told her, I have proved that I know the right way, so now, I can go ahead and do it any way I want to.

In the meantime, I’m trying to keep some of the good English alive, the really descriptive stuff—like boughten—that I learned back on the farm, raised by parents still smarting from the great depression. I tell you, when someone showed up at country school in a really nice shirt, or a really nice dress, the first thing we wanted to know was: “Was that boughten?” Because if it was, it was something truly special and grand. Why? Because that was a sign that there was a big other world out there, which someday maybe we’d be a part of, if’n we held our noses to the grindstone and didn’t fritter our nickels away willy-nilly.

The day mom saw her first granddaughter, she said: “Boy oh boy, you sure got a good scald on that one.”

Scald? Apparently, I’d made it out of the house without hearing that bit of vernacular. “A good scald” comes from year-after-year butchering a couple of hundred chickens, with the main obstacle between you and getting done before dark being the temperature of the water you plunked them into to convince their feathers to come off easily. 

Too hot, the skin came off with the feathers. Too cold, nothing came off. If you got a good scald going, you might be done by dark, and wouldn’t have to finish by lantern light.

Lord knows, you don’t have to talk in vernacular. Lots of times, it’s enough to slaughter the words we do have by just mispronouncing them. And it’s so easy to do.

For example, if “work” is pronounced “werk,” why ain’t “pork” “perk?” Or “fork” “ferk?”

Another favorite: “They berryed him in the cemetery outside town.”

They did? What was he, fruit? Of course he wasn’t. They didn’t berry him, they brrrrrried him. Try to keep that straight, next time you go to berrying someone.

Anyway, if they did berry him, likely they said a prare for him. Probably it was the Lord’s Prare, said like it’s wrote over there by the pitcher window by the cupboard in the kitchen.

Since slaughtering the Lord’s English is exhausting for most folk, after berrying and praring, those folk set down and et something. Ferked up some perk hot dish.

It ain’t ever better’n that.