by Laura McNeal
“You falling asleep up there?” Ansel asked mildly when he returned to the ladder, and he could see it gave the boy a start. He’d been watching Aldine.
Clare stood, slid the heavy screwdriver through the eyebolt, and raised both hands to it.
“A few more good turns,” Ansel said, and stood idly holding the ladder and taking things in. The goldfish twirled lazily in its bowl atop Aldine’s desk. Neva’s paper plane trailed Emmeline Josephson’s Flight of the Fancy by the length of only one knot. She wouldn’t catch up, though, he knew, not with so many school days missed.
“It’s not so bad,” Melba said of the old curtain, and Aldine said, “It will do, though, won’t it?”
They were quiet then and the silence spoke volumes, in Clare’s opinion.
Then a voice from behind said, “It’s wonderful!”
Everyone turned and there was Neva, looking shrunken and small in their mother’s winter coat. She held Milly Mandy Molly by her long monkey arm.
“It’s wonderful!” she said again. She stepped forward and couldn’t keep her eyes from the curtain. “They’re the clouds Jack Frost will blow on! It’s the sky he’ll fill with snowflakes!”
Miss McKenna went at once to Nevie, knelt down, and reached her arm around her shoulders. His father drew close, too. “Did you walk?” Berenice asked, and Melba said, “You look all-overish, Neva. Are you frozen through?”
“No, but she is,” Neva said, nodding at her stuffed monkey.
Clare was watching his father put a scoop of coal in the stove when the front door flew open and in walked his mother, looking like a wronged goddess. “There you are,” she said in a tight, cold voice and for one odd moment he thought his mother was talking to Miss McKenna, but she stepped forward and roughly pulled Neva away from Miss McKenna’s embrace. Then she picked up a ruler.
“Hand,” she said.
Neva set the monkey gently to the floor and held out her open hand, but his mother couldn’t do it. She couldn’t strike Neva and she couldn’t forgive her, either. She squeezed out the words one by one. “Never ever ever do that again. Never ever ever do . . .” Neva covered her eyes with her hands but his mother kept saying it until his father stepped forward and wrapped his arm around Neva and said softly, “The girl knows now, Ellie. She knows.”
31
The night of the Winter Entertainment, the air was blessedly still, and the moon was almost full. It shone on the eastern fields in the usual way, enormous and unknowable, lighting Charlotte’s path to the truck. Clare had helped Neva glue flakes of mica all over the cut-paper raindrops and snowflakes and tiaras that were required for the program, and as Charlotte laid them in the back of the truck, she stopped to look up at the constellations she knew, a short list that began with Orion and ended with the Pleiades. At the single night meeting of the Mythology Club, Harley’s dad had allowed them to look through his telescope and she had stared at Jupiter while Harley’s dad was saying, “There’s a storm on Jupiter that could hold two earths like peas in a pod.”
A storm so big it could hold our whole world twice over and so enduring that astronomers had been watching it since 1665—that was what Harley’s dad had said. She scanned the sky for Jupiter, trying to remember if it shone in the west or southwest, and when she found the brightest of the white lights, she imagined storms more powerful than the ones that swept Kansas, winds blowing unchecked on an even larger plain. She felt the shiver she sought, the tiny fragile nothingness of herself, and then it was gone, replaced by the wool blanket she held in her hands, the paper props, and the excitement of having somewhere to go after dark. She didn’t care if it was Aldine’s big moment to show off. Charlotte had washed and curled her head for this. She had cleaned the dust off every stitch and crevice of her Sally shoes. She had patted her forehead and cheeks with the face powder her mother kept on her dresser. She was going to enjoy herself.
Charlotte had arranged to ride to the school with her father in the truck, thus ensuring that he would not take Aldine. Clare would drive Aldine, Neva, and their mother in the Ford. When she’d written out those lines from Venus and Adonis, she didn’t mean them to induce Aldine to flirt with their father. Far from it. She’d intended it to be a little trial for Clare and maybe even a boost, and, sure, she had to admit it, a little amusement for herself. It was Clare’s handwriting she’d imitated; no one would’ve thought anything else. Her father’s penmanship, when he wrote down in the account book what they earned and what they spent, was better than her own. How for the love of God could Aldine have failed to notice that? And how could her willful ignorance have knocked down the perfectly sturdy walls of Charlotte’s plan and left them far behind? Really, it was as if Aldine could control men just by willing it so.
Charlotte had been in the barn that day because the barn was a place to go when she wanted to get away from everybody and it was too cold to go outside. She read sometimes, if there was something to read. Sometimes she napped in what had been the horse’s stall with Artemis curled beside her. She added things to her notebook. She’d been napping that day, in fact, or she would have told her father she was there. The first thing she heard was Aldine’s singsongy brogue, and when Charlotte peered out through the rails, it was like watching a play, except with bad lighting.
Now they were all coming out on the porch, chattering to each other and pulling on coats, the bright scent of Joy in the air, the perfume from Opa that her mother saved and portioned out by the half drop, so this was a sure sign that she wanted to make the event a special occasion, too. Neva’s hair was French braided and pinned into loops that she kept taking off her mittens to touch. Charlotte had moistened Neva’s cheeks and eyelids with cold cream, then crushed a little mica between her fingers and touched it to Neva’s face, a trick Charlotte learned in Dorland. Neva would be both a fairy and a snowflake in the play, provided that her cough stayed quiet. Clare wore a tie with his old plaid barn coat and it looked as if he’d oiled his hair. His pale face was moony and handsome in its own way, and Charlotte felt a little sorry for him, remembering that he had stayed home while she was larking around with Opal in Abilene, that he’d been waiting for a turn that didn’t come. And her plan to play Cupid had failed, too, at least for him.
Aldine stepped out of the house, but she might just as well have stepped from the pages of Vogue or Harper’s Bazaar, beaming with expectant pleasure, ready to take her place in the spotlight, all dark hair and eyelashes and ungodly thinness, her feet small and graceful even in laced-up boots. It wasn’t fair to despise Aldine for this, but she did just the same. Aldine never met Charlotte’s gaze now, not since the day in the barn. Charlotte knew her father hadn’t done anything with Aldine that afternoon, but there had been something odd about her father’s look, something that reminded her of that day in the post office when she caught him seeming like someone other than her father, and there was something too meaningful in the wretched way he held Aldine’s boot, kneeling before her, telling her she shouldn’t go. No, he hadn’t done anything wrong, but he’d been poised to, and she couldn’t stand it, she just couldn’t, and without even knowing what she was doing she’d felt herself standing up and walking toward them and saying, Hullo, Dad. She didn’t blame her father. He was just a man and inside every man was a boy, and as could easily be seen, every boy could be twirled on his own axis by the right girl. And Aldine was the right girl for just about every boy in the county. So the blame went where it belonged—to Aldine, for being pretty and skinny and spritely and talking in that trilling way that everyone with a thingie found so charming. For visiting her father alone in the barn. For living with them month after month and seeing everything they did not have. And she blamed herself, too, just a little, for making the dumb love letter and slipping it into her book.
“Time to go,” her father said, cranking the Ford for Clare and then hopping into the truck. Without a look at anyone else, Charlotte quickly slid in beside her father and, under the storm of Jupiter, they dro
ve toward Stony Bank School.
32
Neva didn’t care if Emmeline rolled her eyes. Neva loved the Winter Entertainment. She and Melba had the best parts. The songs were vivacious. Her Ray Fairy costume was vivacious. Melba was a vivacious Cloud Queen. That was one of their hard spelling words, vivacious, but it was ever so perfect.
She adored the program that Mrs. Odekirk had typed twenty times so that each member of the audience could have a “nice memento.” She and the Josephson girls (except Emmeline, who said she would work on her math instead) had glued each sheet to stiff purple paper that Mrs. Odekirk had gone to Kress in Dorland especially to buy, and Neva planned to keep hers forever and ever.
***A WINTER ENTERTAINMENT***
FEBRUARY 1933
PRESENTED BY THE STUDENTS OF STONY BANK SCHOOL
***
POEM: “THE WAVES OF THE SEASHORE”
BY GENEVA LOUISE PRICE, MELBA JOSEPHSON, AND PHAY WRIGHT
PLAY: “THE SNOW STORM”
BERENICE JOSEPHSON—JILL
EMMELINE JOSEPHSON—MOTHER NATURE & SUN QUEEN
MELBA JOSEPHSON—CLOUD QUEEN
GENEVA LOUISE PRICE—RAY FAIRY
HARLON WRIGHT—JACK FROST & OLD OCEAN
PHAY WRIGHT—JAMES
SONG: “RAIN DROPS”
BY ALL
SONG: “BRYAN O’LINN”
BY MISS MCKENNA AND ALL STUDENTS
THE END
She went behind the curtain rigged up by the work party but mostly by Clare and her father. Emmeline wore a long, gold, drapey dress that had been her great aunt’s, with green velvet leaves that fluttered along the sleeves and hem. She had waved her hair and she let Miss McKenna powder her face and rouge her lips and she wasn’t fooling anybody. She was excited in spite of herself.
Neva said her part of the poem to herself and tapped her foot to keep the beat.
“Roll on, roll on, you noisy waves,
Roll higher up the strand.
How is it that you cannot pass
That line of yellow sand?”
She hadn’t known, when the inspector came last week, that this beat was called iambic tetrameter, but she knew it now because the inspector told her. She didn’t like the inspector because he didn’t like Miss McKenna. You could tell from the straight line of his mouth and his stiff mustache. He had frowned at the planes on their strings along the ceiling and he didn’t stop frowning while Miss McKenna explained what they were. Neva had come up to him when he was alone and told him that Miss McKenna was the best teacher she ever had and the man stared down at her with his stiff face and said, “Well, missy, you haven’t had many teachers yet, have you?” Neva hoped the inspector was struck by lightning and never came back again.
She felt a cough coming, held her breath until she’d fought it back down.
“Roll on, roll on, you noisy waves,” she whispered again, rubbing her index finger ever so lightly across her fairy wings so she could feel the powdery bits of mica. The grown-ups were loud on the other side of the curtain, and she liked it when she heard her father’s laugh and her mother’s hellos to Mrs. Odekirk and Mrs. Wright. She could also hear Yauncy’s funny nasal voice and that was a nice surprise. Nobody had seen Yauncy since Mr. Tanner fell out of his hayloft and broke his neck.
“About ready then?” Miss McKenna asked, her shiny black hair glistening around her face. She was like an angel, she really was, dropped down from heaven for them. She kept going child to child, adjusting crowns and wings and collars. Neva felt the clogging of her windpipe again, and held her breath again. If she coughed, her mother would come behind the curtain and ruin everything, especially the magical surprise, because that was what it was, a magical surprise, Clare pulling on a rope threaded through a pulley way up on the highest beam and lifting her up into the sky. She could hardly believe it was going to happen but it was. When the Sun Queen called, “Fly, little Ray Fairy, down to the ocean!” Neva was going to fly. It would be the most magical thing ever done in the entire history of Stony Bank School.
Neva inhaled, and felt the cough seizing her, and stumbled out the door so she could cough where no one would hear her. But Miss McKenna followed her out.
“Are you all right?” she asked when Neva finally stopped coughing. “Your father gave me the Pinex just in case.” She held up the little bottle of cough syrup.
Neva took a sip, not very much, and held it in her mouth, because the syrup looked good but wasn’t. Clare said it had more alcohol than rum but Charlotte said how would he know? All Neva knew was that it burned when it went down. She closed her eyes, swallowed, and hoped it would take the other stuff in her throat down with it. She opened her eyes and took a deep breath. “I’m fine now,” she said.
33
No one could have foreseen the connection, was Ansel’s opinion. Especially not Aldine. Those who blamed her for what happened were ready to blame her for anything—like Josephson and his daughter. Everyone was enjoying the night well enough before the rope trick, laughing and clapping at their own bright-cheeked children as they recited and sang and bowed in their blue-gray glittery getups. He felt a swelling flood of fondness and gratitude move through him when Neva said her solemn lines about the ocean waves and Ellie hooked her arm in his, leaning against him in a way she hardly ever did anymore.
He’d loved coming into the schoolhouse, finding it warmed by the stove, the funny stage curtain hanging at one end of the room, the paper airplanes strung up overhead. In his chair next to Ellie, he closed his eyes and inhaled. He’d sat in this very schoolhouse as a boy, and while sitting here had fallen in love with books and singing and any number of little girls, but what he had really been doing, he thought now, was falling in love with this place, and all that it was. Him so small and so different then. But not entirely so.
Aldine’s program itself was charming everyone. They all chuckled at wispy Phay Wright, dancing on his tiptoes and saying, “Mother Nature! Mother Nature! Will you send us some snow?” Ansel had no idea that the youngest Wright boy could be such a ham, pretending to ice skate across the floor, showing Emmeline’s regal Mother Nature how he’d pack a snowball with his hands.
Emmeline looked almost benevolent when she smiled at him and said, “Well, child, I will see what I can do for you. My plants and seeds need a snow blanket. I will send for Jack Frost. Jack Frost! Jack Frost!”
Harlon Wright appeared stage left in a union suit covered all over with paper snowflakes—and so did Old Ocean and the Sun Queen, both of whom were played once again by Harlon and Emmeline, who were breathing so hard after their costume changes that they could hardly speak their lines. Old Ocean said something about calling the Ray Fairies, and when Neva came running out shedding mica from her blue gown and paper wings, he couldn’t keep himself from clapping a little.
“Here is the vapor for you,” Harlon told her in his deepest Old Ocean voice, holding a pitchfork that was tipped with paper triangles so it would look more like a trident—a clever touch, in Ansel’s view.
Then Neva cried gaily, “I will fly with the vapor!” stretching out the word fly and spreading her arms dramatically, triumphantly. They could all see the rope, of course, and she was wearing a harness that looked like Clare’s work, so it was no surprise when someone on the other side of the curtain (Clare, it turned out, had slipped away from his chair) pulled Neva-the-Ray-Fairy up into the air in fits and jerks while she, with visible effort, lifted her legs and stretched out her arms in the posture of flying. Her expression was serene, as if her ability to think of this ungainly suspension as flight could make it actual, and for a moment Ansel felt a swelling pride in his daughter’s happiness, and in his son’s ingenuity, and in Aldine’s influence on them all.
Ansel would remember that sentiment, and wonder at its completeness and purity, and also its brevity, because in the next instant everything changed.
Old Ocean didn’t quite finish his line, something that began “I shall soon—” when Yauncy
Tanner began to groan and bawl and point, standing up so suddenly from his chair that everyone around him stood up, too, in surprise or confusion or maybe fright. The sound reminded Ansel of a cow when calving hurt it deep inside. Yauncy was taller than plenty of men and all of the women, and he was heavier, too, than most. “Et oun!” he yelled. “Et oun!”
That was when the similarity struck him, and likely other people: the rope looked like the one Yauncy had found his father hanging from that day in the barn.
Neva didn’t know what was the matter, and Emmeline just stared at Yauncy, her wreath of artificial daisies slightly crooked and her cheeks pink from makeup and heat. Aldine, standing to the side of the stage, looked paralyzed, but Mrs. Odekirk stood up on her stork-thin legs and took Yauncy’s hand, the one his mother wasn’t already clinging to, and said, “It’s all right, Yauncy. She’s not choking.” Yauncy was still agitated, frantic even, moving toward the stage, and Emmeline backed into the curtain, as if Yauncy were coming to grab her, so Ansel could only think to help Neva get down. “Let’s get her down, then,” he called gently to Yauncy, and he stepped around Mrs. Odekirk and around little Phay in his snow clothes and reached up to hold Neva by the waist. Neva had by this time lost her angel-flight pose and was hanging like a lamb in a winch, looking not a bit grateful for his interference with her big moment, but she didn’t fight him, either, as he held her tight and undid the hook and set her gently down on the wooden floor.
