User:AprilShowersBringMayFlowers/The Prairie Thief
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| Author | Melissa Wiley |
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| Illustrator | Erwin Madrid |
| Genres | Fiction, fantasy fiction |
The Prairie Thief is a 2012 fictional book by Melissa Wiley telling the tale of life on the prairie in the early 1880s.
Plot summary
[edit]In August 1882 in Colorado, twelve-year-old Louisa Brody lives with her Pa in a dugout on the prairie. Her dear Pa is soon accused of thievery, and is locked thirteen miles away in jail. She is sent to live with her neighbors, the cruel Smirches, who were also the family who accused Pa of stealing their stuff. Louisa soon makes friends with orphaned nine-year-old Jessamine, whose family – mother, father and big brother – had died of cholera. One of the Smirch boys, Winthrop, says to Louisa one day, “Your Pa’s gonna hang.” This stays with Louisa throughout the story. Soon, Louisa and Jessamine discover a hole with a creature living in it. The creature is assumed to be a badger, but it apparently wears a pointy hat so for a while the creature’s identity is unknown. But one day, the other Smirch boy, Charlie, loses his so-attached white stone into the hole, and begs Louisa to find it. Louisa crawls into the hole, and sees a pair of eyes looking at her. She assumes that it is the “badger”, but it is actually not. The creature ends up giving her the stone. A few weeks later, after some bafflement over who this creature is, Louisa reads a few poems by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow from her Pa’s book. She reaches up to scratch her head, but Mrs. Smirch’s sharp eye catches her and she begins earnestly searching for lice in Louisa’s hair. She soon finds some, and threatens to cut out all of Louisa’s hair. Louisa does not want this, and instead runs out the door and is surprisingly not caught. Outside, she hears a wolf howling in the distance, and climbs up a nearby tree in safety. She hears somebody among the nearby bushes, and is so surprised by it that she falls out of the tree. She is, for a “long moment”, very dizzy and surprised-shocked. Then she discovers that it was not at all a badger living in the hole, but a living “brownie”. The brownie shows him to his underhill house, but to get there he and Louisa have to go through a tunnel full of spiders. Louisa’s “strangest day” is more strange than she imagined, as she soon learns that the brownie can have “conversations” with any animal that would listen. As the night darkens, Louisa and the brownie have a conversation over “horseradish” tea. Louisa soon discovers that the brownie was the one doing the stealing, and that he was drinking tea out of her eggcup, and had various furniture from her Pa’s dugout as well. She spends the night in a small bed in a small bedroom where the brownie sleeps. The next morning, she decides to stay with the brownie. In the daytime, the brownie tells her his life story. It is quite long; he emigrated from Ireland with his wife and Louisa’s parents. His wife had some “selkie” blood, making her an invalid. Six months before he told Louisa all this, his wife had left the house and never returned since. The brownie had lived since very lonesomely, and reduces to the point of tears in the end. Just after he finishes the story, Jessamine comes, and tells Louisa that her Pa will have a trial that begins the next day. After this, the brownie tells Louisa that he has “arranged a ride” for her. Louisa at first assumes that she will be riding a pony, or horse. But after the brownie actually brings her “her ride”, she discovers that it is not at all a horse but a pronghorn antelope, or deer. The “pronghorn” is very easily startled; Louisa had to get on slowly and carefully or else she would “lose her only chance to save her Pa.” After the pronghorn starts going, she is very uncomfortable riding it, and imagines a time when she and her Pa saw a train roaring by, and thinks that she is “roaring by” on this pronghorn just like the train. When she gets off by the creek, she washes her face and cleans her dress. On her “best worst day”, she faces wolves as well. She sleeps by the creek for that night, and runs to town early the next morning. She finds her Pa in a jail cell, and they rejoice and hug. Pa begs her to tell the truth, but Louisa leaves the brownie out of it. She is trying to protect him. When the jury begins, Pa speaks first and says what things were in the dugout and he, nor his daughter, did it, because she was "not a liar". Mr. Smirch speaks next and says his son Winthrop discovered the things in the dugout, and started all this by his father telling the sheriff and the "thief" being carted away to jail, where he'd been for the past week. Then Louisa spoke, and all this time old Amos Parker, a man on the jury, had been asking everybody to tell "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." Pa and Mr. Smirch had done this, but Louisa would tell "the truth and nothing but the truth" but not the truth. She was still trying to keep the brownie out of this conversation. When at last Louisa had spoken, she thought it was over, but she had spoken too little. Judge Callahan, the judge, then wants a private conversation with her. She is taken out of the room, and they talk for a while. This is when the judge finds out that Louisa is hiding something, trying to protect a friend. In the after-moments of silence, Mrs. Mack, the judge's housekeeper, comes in. Louisa recognizes her kind of face, and figures out that it was the brownie's wife. She finds out that she had cooked for the judge in those six months since she "disappeared" from her husband. The judge and his housekeeper both soon realize that the "poor mite" (Louisa) had been living in fear for the past week. Not just that, she was probably starving. At this, Louisa thought of the brownie's "terrible tea", and hoped she would be getting better food than that from the brownie's wife and the judge. They give her some potato chowder, and once she tries it, she thinks it is "the best food she had ever tasted in her entire life". Her Pa's trial is then wrapped up, but it takes an hour to round up all the men and townsfolk again because almost all of them were going home to eat dinner. Louisa does not show up because she was in "sore need" of a good meal. Louisa also tells Mrs. Mack that she says her Pa's reputation will be forever altered and he will be tagged as a "thief" and she could not imagine how Mrs. Smirch would feel about that, as their nearest neighbor. Then Mrs. Mack comes up with a plan. Her plan is to find a crow, give it Mrs. Smirch's ladle, and have the ladle dropped from the bird's claws onto Mrs. Smirch's feet as she's passing by. They then find a crow and give it the ladle. The ladle ends up landing on Mrs. Smirch's head, not her feet. But the plan still worked. Then, many weeks pass, and an early October snow dusts the Colorado prairie, making it so cold that there had to be three quilts on Louisa's bed. She and the brownie, and Jessamine, reunite and become good friends, inviting each other over for tea, sometimes horseradish, but sometimes regular tea. One day, a coyote with a leprechaun comes to meet Louisa and Jessamine, and they hope to become friends someday.
Characters
[edit]| Character | Summary | |
|---|---|---|
| Louisa Brody | The protagonist of the story whose father is a "thief" and is in jail while she lives with her awful neighbors (and also the family who accused her pa of the crime), the Smirches. | |
| Pa | Louisa's father who is erroneously accused for thievery and locked thirteen miles away in jail. | |
| Ma | Louisa's mother who died when her daughter was a small child. | |
| Jessamine Henry | The nine-year-old niece of Mr. Smirch who comes to live with her uncle's family after her own family died of cholera. | |
| Mr. Smirch | A humble man who takes Louisa in after Pa is carted off to jail. | |
| Mrs. Smirch | Mr. Smirch's sour-mannered wife who treats her children (and adopted children) like animals. | |
| Winthrop | The six-year-old Smirch boy who says "your pa's gonna hang", which stays with Louisa throughout the book. | |
| Charlie | The four-year-old Smirch boy who becomes attached to a white stone, leading Louisa to discover the brownie's identity. | |
| Judge Callahan | The judge who leads Pa's trial. | |
| The Brownie | A magical friend of Louisa's who helps her on her journey to her Pa, and is the actual "prairie thief", though no one believes this at first. | |
| Mrs. Mack | Judge Callahan's cook and housekeeper and the Brownie's wife. | |
| Amos Parker | An old man who works for Judge Callahan, significant because he doesn't usually work at all. | |
| Child | A child Louisa sees doing farmwork as she is riding the pronghorn. | |
| Other Characters | The background characters outlined in this story. | |