[2016] The Practice House

by Laura McNeal

  18

  September 21, 1932

  Dear old Leenie,

  Don’t worry, I’m fine! I don’t have nosebleeds now I’m used to the air. I have seven students at Stony Bank, four girls and three lads. There were more lads last year but Clare says they hopped trains and went off to find work. One of the girls at school reminds me of Kathleen Hagy except prettier. But it’s all the same in the way of spite and meanness. This one is called Emmeline and perhaps you and Will might say a prayer for some sickness to beset her, nothing mortal please, but plenty to keep her home in bed. She and another were supposed to leave the lesson book on my desk for my first day but instead kept it themselves then put it in my desk next day and said it was there all along if I had only looked and when I called her down on it her father steps in and says his daughter is honest and honorable and oh, I could have screamed.

  There. I have just taken a few full breaths.

  The Price family is still nice as ever to me. They aren’t Mormon anymore but nice all the same. Clare is 16 and ought to go to high school in a big town, like Charlotte did, but there’s no money to pay his board. He helps his father on the farm and shoots wee creatures. You won’t believe what we ate last night: squirrel. Clare shoots them and his mother cooks them for absolute ages. Made me want to boak at first but it’s no worse than Sedgie’s Bawd Bree which is what I taught them to make from one of Clare’s rabbits. Bang bang bang. Then the skinning. What I wouldn’t give for haddock.

  You know how we used to wish it would quit raining raining raining? Listen to this song I have been teaching the wee ones in my class:

  "Rain, rain, do not go

  Rain, rain, we love you so

  Make us music on the pane

  Drum to wild wind’s fiddle strain."

  That’d be a laugh on Bellevue Cres. but not here. The Prices have planted wheat like most of the whole county and if rain doesn’t come soon, the wheat will die like the corn did in the summer and the wheat did last fall. Every day, Mr. Price gapes up at the sky and listens to the farm report on the radio like he’s getting his fortune told. Yesterday, a storm was predicted and it blew up big and black, so bruisy dark we all ran to the windows at school and then when it started chucking I said, “recess!” and we all went out in it, even me. We were drenched but when Neva and I walked home after school, dead certain the fields would be sopping and Mr. Price would be dancing with his wife, we saw it hadn’t rained on his fields a drop. Charlotte said it’s the hogback’s fault. The hogback is a ridge on their property that she says splits every storm and sends all the rain down on other people’s fields. Felt wretched for Mr. Price. He looked like Father when Mum died.

  Write and tell me about all the barrie jumpers you’ve knitted for Wee William (or Wilhemina!) to wear the moment he (or she!) is born. I hope you’re not feeling as boaky now.

  Your own,

  Deen

  19

  On the Tuesday morning of her second week of teaching, while the younger students were reciting multiplication tables in unison, Aldine looked out the window to see dust rising from the graded road to the south. A truck was coming, and as it approached, she saw that it was a truck very much like Mr. Price’s and that, trailing behind it, was a flatbed trailer that carried something covered with blankets and strapped down with ropes.

  “That’s your father,” one of the older boys said to Neva, and at once the multiplication tables fell aside. Everyone peered out as the truck and trailer pulled into the schoolyard.

  Neva was the first one out the door, calling, “Daddy! Daddy! Clare! Clare!”

  While the girls watched and the boys edged close, Clare stepped out of the truck and stretched his arms very casually as a boy will when self-consciously assuming a manly role, then joined Mr. Price in loosening the ropes that held the mysterious shipment in place.

  “What is it?” someone asked, but neither Clarence nor Mr. Price spoke. They just kept working the knots.

  “It’s probably a new outhouse on its side,” Emmeline Josephson said, and Mr. Price, smiling, said, “Not that you don’t deserve one, Emmeline.” Which Aldine wanted to characterize as a backhanded insult, even while knowing it probably wasn’t.

  When the ropes were loose, he nodded to Clarence, who gave the blankets a flourish, and there it was—a black upright piano.

  Aldine was stunned with pleasure. “It’s gorgeous,” she said, “dead gorgeous. Where in the world did you find it?”

  “Mrs. Odekirk,” Mr. Price said, and it was clear that both he and Clare were brimming with pride. To Aldine, in this moment, they both seemed boys. “Mrs. Odekirk’s arthritis was keeping her from playing,” Mr. Price said, “and after hearing you, she thought you would put it to better use here.”

  He and the boys tipped it carefully on its side and, with Mr. Price at one end and Clare and the Wright boys at the other, they soon had it inside and situated at a pleasing angle to the corners. Clare handed her several books of music, and Phay Wright set the black stool to the keys.

  “So who is it would like the first song?” she asked, and then when met with blank faces: “Does nobody play it?”

  The children all looked from one to another.

  “Then I’ll do one,” Aldine said, and started on the Gymnopédies, which she knew by heart. Her playing wasn’t perfect, and the piano was in need of tuning, but, still, it had a rich sound all in all, and the students fell quiet. She felt their eyes on her but she felt all the more Clarence’s and Mr. Price’s, and when she glanced at them, they each had a particular look, beatific almost, like angels. When she’d finished playing and they made to leave, she wanted to give them each a hug, and she would’ve, if this were Ayr, but it was not, and hugs and pecks on the cheek were not the way of it here, so she thanked them and thanked them again, and when they laid their eyes on her, she met their gaze one after the other.

  “Culture,” Mr. Price said. “That’s what’s needed here, and you’ve brought it.” His tone was earnest, but now a smile creased his face and he said, “Now if you could just bring us a little rain out past the hogback.”

  20

  Ansel and Clare had been clearing roots from one of the new fields when Ansel saw the mules and the wagon. It was Tanner, no question, but his behavior was mysterious. He pulled the mules up short and just sat in the wagon. He didn’t wave to Ansel or even look his way.

  “Give me a minute,” Ansel said to Clare, and planted his mattock.

  The ground was hard and cloddy. It took a few minutes for him to cross the field but not once did Tanner turn his way or even seem to move. Nor did he when Ansel called out to him.

  Ansel pinched the barbed wire and stooped through. He drew close enough that he could lay an arm on the cart wheel and talk in a low tone, like it was the two of them on the steps of the Methodist church. “Hello, Horace,” he said.

  Tanner didn’t turn, but something in his eyes moved.

  “Tell me what’s wrong,” Ansel said.

  Tanner seemed to be shaking his head, but it was hard to tell. It might have been a tremble in fact.

  “Are you not feeling well?”

  Still Tanner didn’t answer. The buzz of insects was in the air and, from the other side of the field, the steady chunk chunk chunk of Clare’s mattock. A steady worker. It couldn’t be said that he wasn’t.

  “Can I do something?” Ansel asked.

  Again a long silence. And then Tanner said, “Take the mules.”

  Ansel stepped onto the running board and reached forward but Tanner didn’t loosen his grip on the reins. “I mean keep them,” he said in a whispery voice.

  What this meant, Ansel wasn’t sure. “Keep them? Until when?”

  “Keep ’em and use ’em,” Tanner said. “I’ve got no use for ’em now.”

  Losing his place. He’d heard Tanner might be losing his place. Which itself didn’t carry much surprise. Dirt from his unplanted fields blew onto their own meager plants and would bury them if h
e and Clare didn’t strip-list in anticipation of every wind, digging deep parallel furrows to catch the fine silt blowing low along the ground.

  “I can’t, Horace,” Ansel said. “I can’t use them and I can’t feed them. I’m sorry, but I can’t feed what I’ve got.”

  Another silence developed, except for the buzz of insects and the distant chunk chunk chunk.

  Tanner was so still he might have been asleep. Finally, though, he turned. He looked full at Ansel. His face seemed ancient and absolutely empty. You could cast him as the dead man’s ghost. He said, “They’re good animals. They’ve got lots of work left in ’em.”

  When Ansel got back to Clare, the boy barely looked up. “Whad he want?” he asked, but even when he spoke he kept working. Ansel stared at Tanner’s wagon going slowly back the way it had come.

  “He’s up against it,” Ansel said. “Tanner’s up against it.”

  He spat on his hands before taking up his mattock.

  21

  Charlotte had a photograph album full of pictures she’d taken with the Zeiss Ikon box camera her grandfather Opa had given her mother, but her mother wasn’t much interested in it and when she overexposed a roll of the 120, she handed it to Charlotte and said, “Do with it what you will.” What Charlotte did was join the Photography Club at Abilene High and take photos galore, which she learned to develop in the darkroom that the science teacher, Mrs. Clough, had set up in the school basement, but now Charlotte had no darkroom at her disposal and they couldn’t afford the chemicals if she did, so the camera had been tucked away in her hope chest, but the photograph album with its green leather cover stayed out on the radio where others in the family, Neva especially, would sometimes take it up and finger through it, marveling at the younger versions of themselves.

  Charlotte also had a journal, which was handier since it required nothing more than a pen and privacy. She used to keep a girlie diary of her high school days in Abilene: Went to picture show with Harley and Opal, then had soda and gum. Washed and curled my head. A litany of valentines, dances, and matinees that made her sad to read now. What she missed was the fullness of things. It wasn’t the boys and romance. She’d had two boys in high school but only let one of them kiss her. She didn’t like it but she let him and when he tried to touch her beneath her shirt, she didn’t feel at all excited by the maneuvering. She felt clammy and rigid and pushed him away once and for all. After graduation, she just came back home to poor corn and wheat, failing cattle, and dead hogs. No matinees, no jitney lunches, no meetings of the Journalism Club, or the Photography Club, or the Mythology Club (where the girls voted to call her dog Artemis). For that matter, no desire to record on what day she washed and curled her head. Who was there to see it? Not Opal, founder of the Appropriate Dress Club. Not Harley, who’d married Opal one week after graduation and was probably keeping her in Appropriate Dresses with his insurance salary. For company now Charlotte had the voice of KFKB (Kansas First, Kansas Best!) while she fed clothes through the mangle and stirred lumps out of gravy. She listened to the Wonder Bakers while she spooned bread-and-butter pickles into the bread-and-butter pickle dish. She listened to Roxy and His Gang while she pieced scraps for a quilt that seemed boring now, so long had she been making it. What possessed her to do one called Wedding Ring? There was no money for new fabric, so she couldn’t sew dresses, the only thing that had ever been fun at home.

  One day the newsman talked about an editor in Texas who was forming what he called the Last Man’s Club. It was for farmers determined not to sell out and leave their farms, so they could vie with one another, she guessed, to be the last man left. It was funny in a not-laughing way. Charlotte already had a friend whose mother was making muffins out of hog shorts. Now her own family had no hogs to feed hog shorts to, and the cows had almost no feed.

  In her notebook that night, Charlotte had written: Reasons not to join the Last Man’s Club, and underlined it twice. Reasons number one and two were, Hog shorts make horrible muffins, and Artemis will starve.

  It wasn’t long until she had reason number three: A farmer in Clark County fell off his tractor while driving it all night. All night! He was ground to pieces, said the man telling the story at the Co-op. I told Dad about it when I came home because he does the same thing, trying to add acres to make up for last year’s loss, but he says he lashes himself to the seat with a rope.

  Reasons number four and five were dust and hoppers. She had seen with her own eyes a pitchfork her father kept in the barn, an artifact from the invasion of 1919. Otherwise she wouldn’t have believed a bug could eat wood like that.

  In the back of the notebook, she practiced journalism à la her junior year at Abilene, using Who What When Where Why and How.

  A new teacher, Aldine McKenna, arrived in Dorland from New York on September 1. She boards with the Price Family two miles from Stony Bank School. Miss McKenna has come only recently from Scotland. When Emmeline Josephson, aged 14, was asked to describe her new teacher, she said, “Her speech is very different so I try to translate for the younger children. All she really does is singing and poetry. I don’t know how I will pass my eighth grade exam.”

  Toward the end of October, Charlotte found reason number six. She was helping her mother make pie with the last jar of rhubarb when they got word about Mr. Tanner. Everybody knew the Tanners had been foreclosed on and the auction date was set. Still, Mr. Tanner didn’t seem like the kind of man who would hang himself. He went to church and was so gentle with Yauncy, never ever losing patience with him, though it was plain Yauncy would never be able to do more than throw bales. It was Yauncy who found Mr. Tanner in the barn.

  Who What When Where Why and How.

  She didn’t know, so she just wrote: Reason #6: Mr. Tanner.

  22

  Some days in November, his father would ask Clare to walk to school with Neva and Aldine to help light the stove and bring water. If it was really cold he just stayed a while, keeping the fire stoked and trying with uncertain knowledge and carpenter’s mud to mend the window where wind eked in. Aldine always started the day by playing the piano and leading the children (and Emmeline, when Emmeline felt like it) through their songs and recitations. A lot of the songs seemed to be about rain. The song he liked best was one he’d never heard before, a Scottish one about some poor guy without shoes or a coat or a hat and all the odd things he wore to make do. She played the piano and sang that one herself while the little kids acted it out. It was the finale, she called it, and the way the younger kids were always calling out for “the finale” was a funny thing to watch.

  The Miss McKenna of the classroom called him “Clay-dance” instead of Clare, the sound of it flipping his stomach, pushing it closed. She said “aboot” and “dinnae” and “doon.” “Coo” instead of “cow.” “Hame” instead of “home.” When she thought the school needed tidying up, she said she couldn’t stand things to be so clarty.

  She had looked at him (eyes brown, but not plain brown—deep-river brown with sunlight on the surface) with amusement when he was putting coal in the bucket and she said, “Clay-dance, how aboot you?”

  He stood up straight and felt the gaze of all the Josephson girls and Neva, heard their dresses rustle as they swiveled around in their seats.

  “How about me?” he asked.

  She asked him something that had a few familiar words in it—poem and school magazine—but the other words took him a minute to translate. He went redder still and rubbed his sooty thumb against a sooty palm.

  “One ye especially luve?” she prompted.

  “I didn’t mind that one in the book by Bryan,” he said.

  “Bryan?” she asked, her expression meant to encourage, perhaps, though he felt an idiot always. “What did he write then?”

  It wasn’t so much that he’d liked the poem—he’d just memorized it from boredom—but how could she not know which one he meant? The grammar book had only a few poems in it. Maybe this was why Emmeline Josephson was w
orried about passing her exams.

  “Would you speak a line or two?”

  He looked down and began to recite in a hurried, low monotone:

  “So we’ll go no more a’roving

  So late into the night,

  Though the heart be still as loving,

  And the moon be still as bright.

  For the sword outwears its sheath,

  And the soul wears out—”

  He stopped short. The soul wears out the breast was how it went, and he wasn’t going to say that, but Aldine was smiling at him as she had never before, as if she were lit up from the inside. “Oh, that’s a luve-ly poem,” she said, “especially if you slow down a wee bit. It’s by George Gordon, also known as Lord Byron.” Then, almost to herself, “It can be sung, as well,” which of course Neva pleaded for, and so Aldine sang it, and what had just been rhyming lines lifted from the page and hung now in the air, almost touchable.

  “Thank you, Clay-dance, for bringing it to our attention,” Aldine said. “We’ll absolutely put that luve-ly poem in our magazine.” She was smiling at him still, something he, in his own paralyzed manner, might have enjoyed more if he hadn’t felt Emmeline Josephson staring at him, too, and smiling a smile that she might well have borrowed from Charlotte.

  One afternoon, his father felt a change in weather, appraised the massing clouds, and said, “It could storm soon.” There was hope in his voice, wary hope, Clare saw, but hope just the same. His father prized his gaze from the sky. “Maybe you should fetch coats from home and take them to Neva and Miss McKenna.”

  Clare didn’t wait for his father to change his mind or for the storm to change direction (which it did of course). Still the coats were welcome and, for Clare, the walk home from school was a freezing happiness. Neva hopped and skipped to stay warm, pitching to Aldine every question Clare would have asked if he were not struck dumb by the deep-river gaze she turned on him when he spoke.