[2016] The Practice House

by Laura McNeal

  The Josephson girls then, Aldine thought. That’s who they must be.

  The two little girls ran to meet Neva but the older girl did not quicken her pace, and her gaze as she looked up at the school window to see Aldine was withdrawn and appraising, as if she knew something the others did not. Aldine smiled, anyway, as an experiment, and the girl looked away, slowly, casually, as if she had not seen anyone in the window at all.

  Aldine was looking at the clock on the wall when the minute hand—it gave her a start—clicked forward to twelve and marked the hour.

  16

  Aldine opened the front door and called out, “And let us begin our day,” the very words Mrs. Lynch, her favorite teacher in Ayr, had used every morning, but now the children stared at her as if she’d just spoken Hebrew, so this time, when she repeated the words, she added a wave of the hand, motioning them in.

  “Where do we sit?” one of the girls called out amidst the sudden shuffle in the hollow room and Aldine said, “Wherever you choose,” which none of them seemed to understand, so the oldest Josephson girl said, “Front to back, youngest to oldest.”

  “Littlest or youngest?” Neva asked, and Emmeline gave her a withering look. “Didn’t I just say youngest?”

  Aldine consulted her list of students. “You would be Emmeline then?” she said to the Josephson girl when they were all seated.

  The girl looked up from her desk, her face very calm. “If you mean Em-me-line, yes, that is my name. Who I would be then, I couldn’t say, because I don’t know when then might be.”

  Silence, until one of the younger Josephsons said, “My sister’s real smart.”

  Aldine pointed to the books spread out on her desk. “Please come forward and take the one that you should be using this year.” She said it twice and then Emmeline said, “I think she wants us to take our books,” and then, as they did so, she said, “Not the one you used last year, Phay, unless you want to stay in this horrible little school forevermore.”

  While the others hooted and laughed, none less loudly than his own older brothers, Phay Wright, a freckled, coarse-faced creature, ducked his reddening face.

  Aldine passed out the songbooks, made an announcement, and again Emmeline translated. “I think she wants us to sing the song on page thirty-seven.”

  “Yes,” Aldine said. “Page thirty-seven.”

  “What about the pledge?” Emmeline asked, and Neva said, “You didn’t raise your hand!”

  Emmeline raised her hand, Aldine nodded, and Emmeline said, “What about the Pledge of Allegiance?”

  Aldine regarded her uncertainly.

  “The pledge to the flag,” Neva said, looking toward a particular corner of the room. “Except where’s the flag?”

  Aldine went to the cupboard where she’d seen an American flag wrapped on a short pole.

  “Over there!” Neva said, pointing toward a receptacle mounted on a wall near the corner. “Phay will put it up. He always puts it up.”

  Phay took the flag, pulled up a chair to stand on, and inserted the stick into its receptacle.

  “Thank you, Phay,” Aldine said, and Phay, walking to his desk, nodded gravely, glad to have his stature to a certain degree restored.

  “I’ll lead!” Neva said, and Aldine did what the children did, which was to stand upright, stare at the flag, and put a hand over the heart. While they recited, she stood and listened. At its conclusion, they all sat down. Emmeline raised her hand and, once recognized, said in a calm voice, “You don’t know the words to the Pledge of Allegiance?”

  “Not yet,” Aldine said.

  “I guess that’s because you’re not from here.”

  “Things are new for me, yes,” Aldine said. She wanted to say that she learned quickly, because she did, but it would be too demeaning—her saying to her own students, But I learn quickly.

  She raised her songbook and presented it to them, face out. “Page thirty-seven then. In the key of F.” It seemed no one understood her words. She turned the primer around and said, “A-one, a-two, a-one two three four,” and began to sing, though only Neva tried to sing along, and then she stopped, too. Aldine sang on, if only to keep these awful children at bay, and in a few moments her whole body seemed to relax and she was not just singing the words but riding them right out of the room.

  When she was done, the room fell quiet and one of the Wright boys said, “God almighty.”

  Emmeline Josephson turned and said, “Hector, that’s God’s name in vain.” Which caused Hector to shrink back.

  “This time you will all sing,” Aldine said, a tremor in her voice that she hoped they could not detect, and swept her arm toward all of them and then pointed to the page in the music primer. This time, when she began, they sang along dully. Three more songs followed, each sung as weakly as the one before, and Aldine was about to suggest another, simply because she didn’t know what else to do, when Neva said, “Maybe we should start our lessons now.”

  “Yes, yes, of course,” Aldine said and began to stare at Mr. Geoph’s cryptic note. Recitation Program: Ari. Study Group 1: Ari. Study Group 2: Ari.

  Did Ari do the recitation of the flag pledge? Is that what it meant? She had no idea.

  “Who was Ari?” she said, which baffled the class as much as everything else she said. “Ari,” she said again, very slowly. “Who was Ari?”

  “Can I look?” Neva said, nodding at the paper that Aldine held.

  But when Neva looked at the scribbling, she could make no sense of it, either. “I was in study group 1,” she said, “but I don’t know who Ari is.”

  “How do you spell it?” Emmeline asked, and when Neva told her, she said, “That’s just Mr. Geoph’s shorthand for arithmetic.” Something cunning came into her face. “But that’s not our study plans. Where are our study plans?”

  Aldine felt a bulb of sweat roll along her rib cage. This was all a mistake. The most horrible and foolish mistake. “Then let’s begin your arithmetic recitation,” she said, and when she finally made herself understood, Emmeline said coolly, “How can we recite when we haven’t studied anything yet?”

  “Sums!” Aldine said in a sudden voice. “Sums!”

  Phay Wright said, “Sooms?” and then his brothers became a chorus, saying “Zooms! Zooms!” which caused building laughter until Aldine to her own surprise slapped the top of her desk with her hand so hard that she felt a shock of pain.

  This brought stricken silence, in the midst of which Emmeline Josephson cocked her head slightly. “Would you like me to lead them?” she said in a sweet voice that Aldine knew not to trust and yet couldn’t at this moment afford to resist, and so they began. “Three plus one equals,” Emmeline prompted in a rhythmic tone and the class responded “four” in unison, and so it went, on and on, through the sums of twelves, which only Emmeline and Neva were able to answer assuredly.

  During the first recess, Aldine waited until everyone was outside, then seated herself at the teacher’s desk. To keep from crying, she squeezed shut her eyes and imagined herself on a sun-warmed rock overlooking the River Doon, eating brown bread and cheese with Leenie and hoping their father, standing in the tea-colored water in his rubberized overalls, would catch fish enough for dinner. And then her mum stirring up a white sauce for the fish and floury potatoes, shaking pepper over the sauce in the skillet, a fat cut of butter melting in the middle of it.

  She opened her eyes, took several long, deep breaths of air, and pulled out her knitting bag. She’d managed only a row or two when a sudden thought stopped her.

  An idea, from her primary teacher in Ayr.

  Aldine went to the storage cupboard, looked in, and felt as she did when she had a recipe and found all the ingredients in Aunt Sedge’s pantry. For now, before her, she saw a sheaf of colored paper, a box of old rulers, and a spool of stout string.

  17

  The Prices were making a supper of boiled eggs, canned potatoes, and pickled beets. The scantness of the offering had caused Clare�
��s mother to send him to the garden to look for a last tomato or two, but there were none at all, and so now he had to choose his way back. He’d come the long way, following the creek, but the shortcut back was by the pasture, where the hogs were buried, and the smell of them was still there. On the other hand he was longing to cast eyes on Aldine, whom he hadn’t glimpsed all day, not even at breakfast, so that was that. He would take the shortcut. The game he played was this. Would her actual corporeal self be as fetching as the girl who lived in his mind all day long? Always the answer was yes. Yes, and then some.

  When he got close to the hogs, he took a deep breath and broke into a run, but he could never quite outrun the smell. Eighteen dead of cholera. He and his father had piled them up with layers of straw and tried to burn them out of the world, but the fire went out and left a sickening heap of blackened, wasted flesh, so they had to bury them by hand, digging all day, shovel by shovel, with vultures watching just like in a Tom Mix movie, the dirt finally covering ears, snouts and trotters, swollen bellies, and black death. Everything but the smell. Anything could bring it to him, right down to singeing the hair on his arm when feeding the woodstove. A few days after they buried them, the wind had blown enough of the dry, sandy soil that hog parts began protruding. One such protuberance was a snout looking like it was coming up for air, but a day or two later it was gone. Coyotes, probably, or maybe a fox or vulture. Or maybe even Artemis. He’d seen Artemis eating a rat.

  His father was sanding the front door when he returned. “No tomatoes,” Clare told him and his father said, “No, I supposed not.” He folded the sandpaper so that he could reach a corner of the door’s inset panel.

  “Going to paint it purple this time?” Clare said, a little joke. His father always painted it the same shade of red that his own father had. As he slipped past his father and into the mud porch, Clare said, “Purple or maybe chartreuse,” which drew a small laugh from his father.

  Even if there were none of the good smells of baking coming from the kitchen, Clare was glad for the voices. All of them, but especially hers.

  “Clare! Clare!” Neva shouted when she saw him. “You should come back to school again, it was ever so much fun!”

  He smiled at Neva and then, finally, using the delay to tantalize himself, he let his gaze rise to Aldine, whose eyes seemed bright with good feeling.

  More fetching than imagined. Unquestionably more fetching.

  The table had already been set. The food was carried in. “His Highness is served,” Charlotte called out to their father, who came in and surveyed the sparse offerings without a grumble, went so far in fact to profess a love of pickled beets.

  Neva said the blessing and the serving plates began to pass.

  “So, Nevie, tell us what made the day so grand,” his father said. Which meant he’d been listening from the front door.

  “The game that Miss McKenna made up for us,” Neva said, “with planes and prizes like we’ve never had before!”

  His father turned his bemused look to Aldine, who explained the competition in spite of interruptions from Neva. Each student had been given a long length of string, and tied bits of yarn to it every twelve inches, measured out precisely, until they had fifteen knots. The boys had hammered nails high up on opposite walls and pulled the strings in taut straight lines overhead. Then after each child had made a paper airplane, it was suspended from the first knot.

  “And every time Miss McKenna gives us a star on a paper we get to use the transom pole and move our plane up to the next knot and the first one to get to the last knot wins a prize!”

  His father was smiling and nodding. “Yes exactly,” he said quietly. “That’s how it’s done.” He sounded nearly as impressed as Neva.

  “And we all gave our airplanes names!” Neva said. “I called mine Mr. Benny.”

  This provoked laughter and then Clare, feeling a little outside it all, said, “It’s a swell idea. It truly is.”

  Aldine looked up from her plate and let her dark eyes fall on him. “It wasna’ my own,” she said. “I had a teacher in Ayr who did something like it. Mrs. Lynch she was. She gave away a goldfish in a bowl.”

  His mother drew a knife through a pickled beet. “And what prize will you give, Aldine?”

  A kiss. That was what popped into Clare’s head.

  “It’s a surprise!” Neva proclaimed. “Isn’t it, Miss McKenna?”

  Aldine gave a laugh that seemed almost musical. “Aye, I’m afraid it’s a surprise surely.”

  Charlotte said, “What did Emmeline Josephson name her airplane?”

  “The Flight of the Fancy!” Neva said.

  Aldine looked up. “There was a bit more, though, wasn’t there, Neva? I believe Emmeline christened it The Flight of the Fancy Pants, but”—the prettiest smile formed on her lips—“she wrote pants very faintly indeed.”

  Everyone laughed as if this were funny, but Clare knew Emmeline Josephson, and he knew she hadn’t meant it as funny.

  “The only bad thing was that the lesson book wasn’t there, but Miss McKenna had us work from our books and come up one by one to discuss what we’d done.”

  His father grew suddenly alert. “The lesson list wasn’t there?”

  Aldine shook her head. “Wasna’ on the desktop like you thought it would be. Truly, I looked everywhere until I was frantic. It was not to be found.”

  Clare milked after supper and when he brought in the separator for washing, his father was standing over the wall telephone saying things like, “Good. No, not at all. Did they say where?”

  Clare leaned into the kitchen, caught Charlotte’s attention, and mouthed a silent “Who?”

  “Mr. Josephson,” she whispered.

  After his father said good-bye to Mr. Josephson, he waited a moment and added, “Good night, Lu, good night, Jeannie.” Which was what he always said to the two farm wives who habitually listened in. Then he set the earpiece into its cradle.

  “A mystery,” he said when he came into the kitchen where Charlotte and Aldine were already cleaning the separator. “Emmeline said that she and her sister left the lesson folder in a desk drawer after they cleaned.”

  Aldine’s jaw set and she asked what desk that might have been.

  “Yours.”

  “Truly now. And in what drawer might that have been?”

  “One of the lower ones. Where they thought it would be safe.”

  “Safe from what?” Clare said. He couldn’t help himself. “Safe from the teacher finding it?”

  His father maintained his lordly calm as always. “Let’s not get excited,” he said, and turned from him to Aldine. “You looked everywhere—all the desk drawers?”

  “I did,” she said, but then her voice slackened. “I’ll admit, though, I was a bit agitated with the minutes ticking down.”

  Clare said, “But if Emmeline knew you hadn’t found it, why—”

  But his father cut him off. “Enough, Clare. Miss McKenna can take a look tomorrow and we’ll see what’s what.”

  Charlotte, who wasn’t normally quiet during such exchanges, was notably quiet during this one.

  Later, when he stepped out on the porch and heard Artemis barking at some distance, he followed the sound and found Charlotte sitting on a fence rail east of the barn, smoking a cigarette.

  “Where’d you get that?” he said.

  She handed it to him so he’d keep quiet about it. “That would be none of your beeswax,” she said.

  He liked the way the smoke felt in his lungs. It made him feel older and more hopeful. He exhaled, gave the cigarette back to Charlotte, and said, “Pretty out here when it’s cool and the air’s still.”

  Artemis leaned into his leg and he let his hand fall to her head. Her skin was loose. When he’d come upon her in the barn eating the rat, she’d given him a low growl to keep him away, and then taken what was left of it into her mouth and carried it into a dark corner. There were doves in the rafters. He’d tried to listen to them but
all he’d heard were the wet, crackly sounds of Artemis eating the rat.

  He said, “Remember when we had barn owls?”

  Charlotte nodded but didn’t speak.

  “It was better when we had barn owls,” he said.

  From where he was standing he could see the window of Aldine’s room. The light was on but she’d pulled the curtains—she was a demon for pulling the curtains. Still, it was nice to think of her in there, writing a letter or reading a book, and maybe if it was really hot up there wearing not much or—a luxurious thought—nothing at all. Later, after she put the light out, she would open the curtains again—she did this every night—and he liked to think of her up there, lying in bed, gazing up at the stars before falling asleep.

  “What are you thinking?”

  “Nothing,” he said. He’d started at the question and wondered if she could tell it.

  After the cigarette burned down, Charlotte buried it and lit another, her face different, pretty even, in the sudden illumination. She drew from the cigarette and handed it to Clare. The chickens had settled and so had the cows so there was nothing to be heard now but the crickets. He said, “What do you think happened to the lesson list?”

  He wasn’t sure, but he thought Charlotte had just expelled smoke through her nose, a new and impressive trick. She said nothing, though.

  He said, “I’ll bet Emmeline and Berenice hid it when they were there to clean.”

  Again Charlotte said nothing, which meant, he was pretty sure, that she knew it to be true.

  “That Emmeline Josephson is a piece of work,” he said in his bitterest tone, and Charlotte gave out a sudden, harsh laugh.

  “That’s a rich one coming from the little acolyte who couldn’t take his moony eyes off Emmeline in school or church either one.”

  “Well, sure, but that was before.”

  It was a mistake talking to his sister. She had a cat inside of her and the cat never slept. It was always ready to pounce.

  “Before what?” she said, exhaling smoke, then grinning and extending the cigarette to him.