[2016] The Practice House

by Laura McNeal

When they were all seated at the table, Aldine answered questions while dishes were passed. With the bowls of chicken soup, there was a platter of pan rolls and bread. Clare helped himself to a pan roll before he realized there were only five, but he noticed that Aldine more quickly perceived the math problem before them, and took only a heel of bread before passing the platter.

  “So,” his father said in that broad way that he used at holidays and with guests, “your name is Miss McKenna. Tell us a little something about yourself. How old you are, for instance, and where you come from.”

  The young woman seemed to realize that the slower she spoke, the better she was understood, so with deliberate slowness she told them that she was twenty-two years of age, had been born and raised in Scotland, and had been most recently living with her married sister, Eileen, in New York, which was how she’d come upon the advertisement in the paper. She had applied for the position in Kansas because she’d liked poetry and music in school and thought she might be able to visit her sister on weekends now and then.

  “In New York?” Charlotte said. “From here?”

  Clare hated how Charlotte was nearly laughing at the girl. It was a big mistake to make, certainly, but not a funny one.

  “I know,” the girl said. “I see now that I was ignorant. At home things couldna’ be so far apart.”

  She suddenly bowed her head, and when she looked up again, her expression was of resolve. “I would have come anyway, for all the distance. You see, my sister and her husband and the people in the church in New York wanted to find me a husband, and they found one, but I didna’ like him that way.”

  Everyone was looking at her and leaning ever so slightly toward her, or so it seemed to Clare, everyone except his mother, who did as she usually did, which was to sit back and listen with a judging silence. He said, “It’s like Jane Withersteen. In Riders of the Purple Sage, except she didn’t want to marry a Mormon named Tull.”

  The young woman seemed confused by this, so he said, “It’s a Zane Grey book. There’s a swell movie of it with Tom Mix.”

  “His glorious wounded hero,” Charlotte explained, and Clare dropped his gaze and thought the subject was over, but the girl in her funny accent said, “Was there something wrong with the Mormon then?”

  Clare laughed. “There was something wrong with all the Mormons then. They had lots of wives and were mean to all of them. That’s how it was in the book, anyway. We don’t know any Mormons personally.”

  Some moments passed and his father said, “We got just your first letter. I’m sorry we didn’t have someone there to meet you. We should have.” He’d let his eyes fall on the girl and now he left them there.

  “I could’ve come on our neighbor’s horse,” Clare blurted, and immediately wished he hadn’t because Charlotte countered with a quick, derisive snort. “Oh there’s a picture for you—our white knight, Clare, on his black nag, Sally,” which prompted Neva to say, “But Sally’s not a black nag!” and Clare’s father in his calm voice said to Charlotte, “Don Quixote rode a skinny barn horse, Lottie, but it always got him there.”

  The Scottish girl made a pretty sound, and everyone looked at her.

  “Rocinante,” she said again, in a tone that suggested apology. “I think that was the name of the horse.” She let her eyes fall again to her plate, which allowed everyone to consider her.

  Something seemed to be happening at the table, Clare thought, some kind of shift that couldn’t be seen. It was like watching a play you didn’t understand. He nearly began proclaiming about wanted criminals just to dispel the silence, but Charlotte beat him to it.

  “Well,” she said, “Mr. Tanner’s wagon is luxury itself compared to a ride behind Clarence on Sally’s bony rumpola.”

  Charlotte followed this with a high laugh, and Clarence again felt his face color. Only the Scottish girl’s presence kept him from remarking on Charlotte’s own rumpola. And he wasn’t making himself out as a knight in shining armor. More like Tom Mix riding in on Tony the Wonder Horse.

  Charlotte turned to Aldine. “Did Mr. Tanner talk a lot about Ed and Billy?” she asked.

  Aldine looked up as if startled. “Not a very great lot, no,” she replied slowly, “but more of them than anything else.”

  His father gave out with one of his up-from-the-stomach laughs. “He likes two good mules,” he said, and shook his head, smiling. “The question would be who he would choose if it came down to his mules or his wife,” he said and laughed again.

  “Mules, no question,” Clare said, glad to have something adultlike and cynical to say.

  “What about Yauncy?” Neva said. “Who would he choose then?”

  “Oh, Yauncy of course,” his father said. “I was just joking, Nevie. Mr. Tanner’d save his wife, too, if it came to that.”

  A silence developed. Spoons clinking on soup bowls. Aldine dipped away from the bowl and sipped quietly from the side of the spoon, and soon Clare was doing so, too. Neva ate her roll and jelly, then began running her tongue in and out of the empty space where her front teeth used to be. Clare broke open his pan roll, spread it with butter, and filled it with plum preserves, and almost before he knew he was doing it, he’d reached past Neva to hand it to Aldine. “Here. Try this. It’s just as good as dessert.”

  “But . . .” Aldine said, and now she was looking at him, which he liked so much it nearly paralyzed him. “I’m full,” he heard himself say, though he wasn’t. His face was hot. “I had a potato earlier,” he explained, which he knew was more or less the same as declaring himself the king of idiots. “A raw one but we cooked it,” he said, and then he added, “We took them out with us.”

  Everyone was staring at him now and he could feel sweat beading on his forehead. He could’ve kissed Neva when she diverted attention by saying, “Daddy has the best way of cooking potatoes!” and then their father was explaining his method of digging a small hole, covering the potatoes, building a fire above them, and letting them bake from the fire burning down while they worked. He smiled at Clare. “It’s something to look forward to, isn’t it, Clare?”

  Clare nodded. “Yes sir. It is.”

  “Which goes to show that those two”—Charlotte grinned and nodded toward her father and Clare—“can find some lunatic thing to look forward to no matter how dire the circumstances.”

  When Aldine sampled the roll and jelly, her whole body seemed to slacken. “Oh, my,” she said. “Isna’ that splendid then?” As she said this, she looked at his mother, but his mother would have none of it. She became busy with her soup.

  “Didn’t your folks worry about you traveling alone?” Charlotte said.

  No, Aldine told them, her parents were no longer of this earth.

  Because nosy Charlotte was nosy Charlotte, Clare expected her to go on asking things, but she didn’t. She just nodded and drank more water. A magazine that her friend Opal had given her recommended cold water steeped with mint for shedding weight, but so far the only result he’d noticed was an increased number of trips to the library, which was what she called the outhouse.

  “So did you teach in a big school in Scotland?” his mother asked.

  “No,” Aldine said, and looked down at the oilcloth. “I haven’t taught in a school at all before now.”

  His mother’s chin rose at this. “But you went to normal school there in your town?”

  “Normal school?” Aldine asked, biting her lower lip in a way that made Clare’s own lips feel dry. Her hair, which hung straight down over her ears, was electrified by the dry air, and had been crimped slightly by the knit hat she took off for supper. The whole effect should have ruined her looks, but it didn’t. It just made her seem in need of protecting.

  “Teacher-training school,” his father told Aldine, then turned to his mother. “It was in the letter she sent the school board. They call it something else over there.”

  “Oh, yes!” Aldine said. “They do.”

  “I see,” his mother said, making it seem
somehow as if she saw a great deal. She was still annoyed about something, and there was plenty to choose from. Charlotte probably knew if it was something more than the usual too-much-dust, too-little-money, and too-many-wild-schemes. If there were secrets, Charlotte was always first to find them.

  “I’ll help Lottie with the dishes,” he offered when his mother pushed her chair back and said she was going to make up Aldine’s bed in the attic.

  Aldine looked abashed. “I can do that myself,” she said, but was told not to worry on her first night here, and Clare watched her bite her lip again and refold her napkin with her long white hands and set it on the table just where it had been so that it might seem unused.

  Charlotte did not disappoint. As she handed Clare rinsed dishes, she told him she’d been with their father in the barn that morning when Mr. Josephson came by to tell him that there would be no money for teachers in the rural schools—“No book money, no salary, no funds at all.” They’d better write to that teacher they’d hired and tell her to stay in New York, Mr. Josephson said.

  “But it was too late,” Charlotte told Clare in a hushed tone. “She was already on the train by then.” Charlotte dropped her voice still lower. “Mom doesn’t even know yet that there’s no money. She’s just mad because Aldine is here with us.”

  “Do you think she’ll stay here then?” he asked. He tried to keep his voice absolutely neutral but it was no use. At once Charlotte said in a taunting tone, “Why? What does Clay-rence care?”

  “I don’t,” he said. He rubbed at a sticky place on the pot in hand. Then, when enough time had passed, he said, “What’s Dad going to do, do you think?”

  “What does His Highness usually do?”

  Clare set the pot into the cupboard. There had been the time that everyone said no one would watch Shakespeare in Loam County, but then his father had found old copies of Othello in the school basement, directed rehearsals on Sunday afternoons, and put on a blackening face-cover for a performance before a full house at the Stony Bank schoolhouse and happily took his bows alongside Desdemona (Georgia Waterman, who was actually swell enough to make somebody jealous). And his mother had said they would not have a Christmas tree last year when there were no gifts to put under it, but his father said of course they would and they did—and a fat one at that—and he had made a wooden tractor and red-roofed barn to go to the winners of the checkers tournament they played through the afternoon.

  “Make it work, I guess,” Clare said, glad to have a father who was resourceful, especially if it meant that Aldine would be staying in the room directly above his, washing her beautiful white body in a tub that he himself washed in, and eating across the table from him with her long, slender, upturned fingers.

  “More specifically,” Charlotte said, “make women do whatever it is he wants.”

  Which was a pot-calling-the-kettle-black circumstance if ever he’d heard one. Charlotte was two years older than Clare, had bossed him as long as he could remember, and didn’t care who knew it. She could kill with looks and words. Two neighboring farmers had courted her, Milt Sculler and Albert Flint, but she’d turned them down flat. He’d heard her talking to Albert Flint and she hadn’t spared his feelings. “Oh, I just couldn’t,” she’d told him, “not now or ever after.” She’d told Clare she wanted to go to normal school in Topeka, then move out to California and be a teacher, but there was no money now, and who knew when there would ever be again.

  To get a rise from his sister, Clare said, “Isn’t it in the Bible that women should pretty much always do what men want?” and Charlotte snapped at him with her dish towel while he laughed and dodged.

  After he went to bed, he listened to his parents’ murmuring voices, pressing his ear against the wall so he could hear first his father explaining, then his mother exclaiming in a slightly louder voice, then his father in his familiar manner proposing ways the shortfall could be ignored or somehow put off, certain that rain would fall and wheat prices would rise. His mother said it would have been easier to turn away a local man, just as she’d said all along, and now what were they going to do?

  His father had begun to talk again, but his mother stopped him.

  “You’ll just have to tell her to go back,” she said, and if his father replied, Clare didn’t hear it.

  He tried to sleep. He went through all the presidents and vice presidents backward and forward. He did multiplication tables through fifteen. He silently recited Hiawatha through Nokomis, the old woman, pointing with her finger westward. He kept thinking of the girl.

  13

  In the night, with the cottonwood branch scratching at the bedroom wall and the moon throwing shadows into the room, with his wife snoring gently beside him and with the floor-creaking and water-tinkling sounds of the girl from Scotland using the chamber pot in the attic above him, Ansel Price decided that his wife was right. The girl would have to go back. He would have to tell her how things were with the school board and she would have to go back.

  And had the next morning not been a Sunday, perhaps he would have told her she couldn’t stay. But it was Sunday, and he rose before dawn because he was too awake to do anything else. Ellie didn’t stir. Nobody did. It occurred to him that they all slept soundly now because they’d all been kept awake in the night with their altered thoughts of the house and the world, and what had altered their view of the house and the world was nothing more than the girl’s intrusion into it. Rocinante. Now that was something unexpected. All the way from New York City, coming by train and asleep even now in their very attic, a Scottish girl who knew the name of Quixote’s horse.

  By the time he had fed and milked, the morning’s stillness was like a magnifying glass. The cottonwood leaves were yellow as daffodils against a bluest blue sky, and every feather of every chicken in the yard seemed a different shade of red. Indian summer had been his father’s favorite season here, and it was his, too. It was hard not to feel hope on such a day, when the wind was not blowing, and the sun was not burning. He found button mushrooms by the creek and brought in late tomatoes from the garden and knew that the smell of them pan-frying in butter would draw the others downstairs.

  He tilted the bowl of mushrooms into the buttery pan. He hoped the girl would come down first. There was no easy way of saying to her what needed to be said, but telling her when she was alone would steal less of her dignity, and dignity was something he felt sure the girl cared something about, and the circumstances of her arrival—no one to meet her and a long ride behind Tanner’s mules—left her so little of it. But just then Ellie came in from the chickens with a small bowl only half full of brown eggs and frowned at once at his profligate use of butter, and then Neva and Clare were tumbling down the stairs, and after them Lottie, so he rearranged his planning. They would feed the girl properly, and afterward he could draw her outside for a private word, and this, too, was a plan that might have worked had the girl not come downstairs in a pink dress looking altogether freshened and laying her sober brown eyes on Ellie to say in a slow, practiced manner, “Thank you, Mrs. Price, for giving me the particular room that you did. I looked out the window this morning to the most marvelous rising of the sun.”

  Which anyone in the world would see as a pleasant sentiment, but Ellie just gave the girl’s good manners a solemn nod and went back to mixing her pancake batter. The Scottish girl had brushed her hair and her face was pretty and smooth and freckled and the pink dress ornamented with a brown bow at the collar became her in a way that made you think she was spunky and fun despite the worried look that lay back in her eyes, which anybody could see and was probably why Neva was already holding her arm and asking if there were kittens in Scotland. Aldine stood awkwardly by the table until Neva begged her to sit in the chair touching hers, and after one sip of the coffee Ellie poured in her cup, she just stared at her plate.

  Ellie had begun serving pancakes with frosty efficiency. Ansel stirred heavy cream with the mushrooms, then wrapped the pan handle with a to
wel and went plate to plate spooning out portions.

  “Yum,” Neva said, and the Scottish girl, upon tasting hers, looked up smiling thoroughly and said, “Well, isna’ that divine?”

  At which he, a grown man and thinking himself well past such things, felt a thrill of self-satisfied pleasure move through his body. He said, “Wait till you taste Ellie’s plum syrup,” and after tasting the syrup, the girl said that it, too, was divine, though he could tell that Ellie, unmoved, believed that the girl had only taken a cue. He also saw her observe how much of the syrup the girl had poured over her pancakes.

  “It’s the last of it,” Ellie said, as if to Ansel. “No more till the plum bears again.”

  “We used to get lots,” said Clare, who, it was clear, had been sitting in wait of something to say to the girl. “But not so many the last two years.”

  “Not so many?” Charlotte said. “Zero plums is a lot less than not so many.”

  They ate in silence for a moment, tasting the distilled purple sweetness and feeling the life seep from the room.

  “The more reason to savor it,” Ansel said and wondered why salvaging the meal seemed so important to him. “And rest assured there’ll be more plums next summer, I guarantee it.”

  “I guarantee it, too, one hundred percent,” Neva said, trying to sound somber and adultlike, which made everyone but Ellie smile. When the Scottish girl smiled, you could see the cheerful person she must once have been, or could yet be, given something to cheer her.

  “I like that color,” Neva said of Aldine’s dress. “It’s pink as a piggy bank.”

  The Scottish girl gave out a quick, pretty laugh. “And don’t you look glad yourself then,” she said in return to Neva, who was wearing her church dress, a yellow cotton as bright as the leaves outside.

  He noticed Charlotte smiling and said, “Charlotte made that for Nevie. Lottie sews like there’s no tomorrow.”

  “It’s bonny indeed,” the girl said, and Charlotte answered, “It is, isn’t it, if I say so myself,” and sipped from her water.