[2016] The Practice House

by Laura McNeal

  “See?” he called to Yauncy. “She’s right as rain.”

  Yauncy sat back down but Mrs. Tanner was silently crying, a handkerchief balled in her hand, and when Mrs. Odekirk sat down, she kept Yauncy’s hand on her lap, patting it in that benign, confident way she had.

  Ansel nodded at Aldine, who was just staring out, hand to throat, and he mouthed the words, “Go on,” nodding again when she didn’t move, trying to coax her into a prompt that would get the play moving again. Every time he looked at her he felt the desire to hold her and kiss every part of her, a longing that he tried to convert to some acceptable feeling, like friendship or paternal care. “Go on,” he said again gently.

  Aldine stepped across the stage, finally, and whispered into Emmeline’s ear, and Emmeline said miserably, “Blow upon the clouds, Jack Frost! Fill the air with snowflakes!”

  Harlon wasn’t dressed as Jack Frost. He was holding the pitchfork-trident. Still, Emmeline’s line had roused him, and he pushed open the crack in the curtain. After some rustling, he came back out with handfuls of mica and cut-paper flakes, which he began awkwardly to toss, and a bucket appeared behind him, above the curtain, and began to shake sawdust down onto the stage.

  Neva looked at Berenice and Melba, but none of them spoke. It was Phay who finally remembered the line and shouted it. “Hurrah!” he said gamely. “Hurrah! Here comes the snowstorm!”

  Aldine started clapping, so Ansel joined in, and others, too, but with restraint, and the children bowed in uncertain little waves. A few of them, including Neva, smiled despite the confusion. The older ones, who Ansel guessed knew how Horace Tanner died, might have known what had disturbed Yauncy, or they might have thought it was yet another time when Yauncy was different and flubbed things for himself or others, hopeless to blame or help. Mrs. Tanner gathered up her coat and stood to go, thinking either that the event was over or that it was over for her.

  Perhaps fearing that the other parents would leave, Aldine said, “And now we hope you’ll all enjoy our next entertainment, a song called ‘Rain Drops.’”

  Mrs. Tanner didn’t sit back down, but pulled Yauncy along with her, not roughly, but firmly. He let go of Mrs. Odekirk’s hand.

  “Please don’t go, Mrs. Tanner,” Aldine said. “It’s all right.”

  But Mrs. Tanner just shook her head and kept walking, and people let her pass, looking like they wished they could put on their own hats and coats and disappear into the dark.

  Aldine had to wait while the two Tanners went out the door, the sound of Yauncy’s big feet loud upon the hollow floor. The children shuffled out holding paper raindrops as big as their heads, but they sang uncertainly now, in hushed voices, and could not keep together well enough for all the words to come through. Ansel thought that would be all until he saw that the last song on the program was the song he’d so often heard Aldine singing to Neva, the one he had sung with her himself before Ellie chided him. He wished it wasn’t included, or that Aldine would see that calling it a night would be best for all, but she didn’t.

  She looked scared, but she stepped forward and said, “Our last number is a Scottish ballad I’ve taught the children. I hope you’ll enjoy it—it’s about making do. Emmeline Josephson, who has excellent handwriting, has ta’en the trouble to write out some of the last verses for you so you can sing along at the end. If you like,” she added, and Ansel tried to give her an encouraging nod when she glanced at him.

  She seated herself at the piano and looked toward the curtain, one edge of which was gripped by a small hand. The hand belonged to Phay, who held a sheepskin, and who in a wavering voice introduced them to Bryan O’Linn’s troubles. The props for the song were funny: a feed sack, a graniteware pot, a turnip from somebody’s root cellar. The women in the audience, stilled by Mrs. Tanner’s grief, managed to smile as the children sang about Bryan’s lack of hosiery, trousers, watch, and shoes. On the last verse Aldine sang alone, a cappella, with her hands still on the piano keys.

  “Bryan O’Linn, his wife, and wife’s mother,

  Were all going over the bridge together,

  The bridge it broke up and they all tumbled in,

  ‘We’ll go home by water,’ says Bryan O’Linn.”

  He knew the parents in the audience had smiled and clapped, not with gusto, but at least enough to be polite, and he knew that the children had enjoyed putting on most of the show, but that was not what any of them would remember. They would remember the rope, and poor Mrs. Tanner walking away with her damaged boy, and the way Aldine had nonetheless kept the show going, probably so she could sing at the very end and show her voice to such advantage.

  34

  It wasn’t so bad, the play, she didn’t think now, though it all seemed bad while she hung there in the air. The next day, at the very beginning of school, Aldine had told the children that they had all performed beautifully and that what had happened with poor Yauncy was no one’s fault, least of all theirs, and then Harlon Wright said, “I thought Yauncy was the best part of the show!” which got a big laugh from his brother and wasn’t nice, but it did help to put the sorry part of it aside and allow them all to think about the good parts if they wanted to.

  It would be a short day, which made the other children happy but not Neva. She liked being at school with Miss McKenna and doing her lessons and being warm and singing songs. And today would be the day for the airplane prize because there were a week’s worth of tests and papers coming back today and her plane and Emmeline’s were almost nose and nose with only three more knots to the finish. On Miss McKenna’s desk the goldfish with its long ribbony tail hovered and stared and sometimes did a graceful turnabout.

  Right after the pledge and the singing, Miss McKenna pulled the tests out of her bag and looked them over dramatically.

  “If I got hundreds on every one of those, I’ll be right in the thick of it,” Phay Wright said, and Harlon said, “If you got hundreds on every one of those, my name is Agnes Turpentine,” which was a new one in Neva’s book and for some reason made her laugh. Maybe it was nervousness.

  “I’ll pass out the hundreds first so you can move your planes,” Miss McKenna said, and everyone watched while the different students received their papers one by one and then used the transom pole to move their plane.

  “Emmeline,” Miss McKenna said, “receives three perfect scores.”

  This was met with a general groan, and Emmeline, smug as a queen, moved her plane ahead the three knots to the finish line. Which meant Neva needed four to tie. Almost before she’d made that computation, Miss McKenna said, “Neva receives three perfect scores.”

  Neva looked down at her desk. Phay said, “That’s good, though, Neva. That’s real good.”

  She rose and moved her Mr. Benny plane to a spot just behind Emmeline’s. She didn’t look at Emmeline. She knew what Emmeline’s face would look like if she did, all rosy and glorying and pretending to be nice.

  She could hardly remember the rest of the day, except she’d made it a vow not to let anyone know how bad she felt because she didn’t want Emmeline Josephson to have that satisfaction, so she was taken by surprise when Clare over supper said, “So who won the goldfish?” and all of a sudden the dam broke and she was crying like a baby and running from the room with her face burning in shame.

  That was the bad part.

  The good part was the next day when Clare walked all the way to town and went to Oswald’s Five and Dime and traded this and that and came home with a goldfish in a bowl that was just for her. She named it Goldo and said it might go on stage with Groucho, Harpo, Chico, Gummo, and Zeppo.

  35

  At first Ansel thought the huge cloud rising might mean rain. It was from the southwest, the right direction for a good hard rain. Storms like this were violent in the beginning, with lightning and thunder and gusts of wind. These things fell upon you before the rain.

  But there was no lightning or thunder. Just darkness billowing, a roiling cloud that went, he s
uddenly realized, from earth to sky, not sky to earth.

  Artemis barked at it, but Artemis always barked at storms. The chickens quarreled their way to the coop. It was noon on a Saturday, the middle of February, and he assumed everyone was home. Clare, Ellie, Neva, and Charlotte came first to the porch or windows, then the yard, expecting the sucking mineral cavity of air that brought rock-hard showers. Not until the mountainous clouds reached them and he saw larks trying to outfly the wind did he realize the air was all dirt and no water, as if hell had come up from the ground. In the next moment they were blasted with dirt, almost swallowed by it, and they covered their eyes to run for the house.

  For a few minutes they just stayed in the living room, wiping their eyes and faces, tasting dust on their teeth, breathing in the particles that swirled through the air. No one even sat down. They were used to blow months, used to spitting dust out like tobacco juice, but this was something different. The dust blotted out the sun. He kept staring out at it. He couldn’t close his eyes. If he closed his eyes, he would imagine the world ending. Things like that happened. Not ending, maybe, but close to it. An asteroid, then dust, then the world turned into another place. It happened to the dinosaurs; why couldn’t it happen to humans?

  “Is it smoke?” Ellie asked. She was holding a potato and a peeler, which she didn’t set down. “Is there a grass fire, do you think?”

  “No,” he said. “It wouldn’t have so much dirt in it.”

  “Maybe we should be in the cellar,” Clare said, leaning down so he could peer out the window. “Maybe it’s a tornado.”

  Ansel was still staring out. Tornadoes were dark, it was true. “But it came from the ground, not the sky,” he said. “It’s the ground blowing.”

  “But why is there so much of it this time?”

  Neva’s eyes were enormous, and when she coughed they all stiffened, afraid that it would be like the night she couldn’t stop for over an hour and had to gasp deep to get any air at all. He said they should breathe through wet handkerchiefs for a while, like when you were filtering out smoke. He got them all to sit down, and with the handkerchief pressed to her mouth, Neva’s coughing stopped.

  “Shouldn’t someone go up and see if Aldine’s okay?” Clare asked.

  “Yes,” Ansel said, glad he didn’t have to be the one to suggest it. “Charlotte, you go.”

  “She isn’t here,” Charlotte said through her handkerchief in an even voice. She had one hand on Artemis, who normally wasn’t allowed in the house.

  “What do you mean—where is she?” Ansel couldn’t keep the annoyance out of his voice, even though Ellie had asked him to go easier on her. “Why didn’t you say so before?”

  “I forgot,” Charlotte said. What made her words cheeky was the indifference with which she delivered them. “She said she was going to work on a geography project at the school, but that’s not what she’s really doing. What she’s really doing is reading one of my books and smoking her cigarettes with ivory tips.”

  They were all looking at him over their handkerchiefs like the monkeys labeled Speak no evil. He bolted up and said he was going to the school. He didn’t wait to see what Ellie would say about it. Aldine was an outsider. This was no better than a blizzard. She could stumble out of that school and be lost in a minute. He clapped the wet rag back over his mouth and pulled the door tight behind him, to keep the dust out.

  36

  What Aldine noticed first was the loss of light. The page she was reading turned gray, as if night had fallen. Her tarry glowed like a pinched candlewick. At home, such darkness meant one thing, and she thought, It’s going to chuck it doon. A good rain would be a relief to everyone and most especially to Ansel, though she had told herself to call him only Mr. Price in her head now.

  Did she love him? When she was alone, she let herself remember his face that day in the barn or his fingers playing the dulcimer. It was like turning on a faucet. You let it all pour out and wash over you. Then she turned it off and went on being what she was, a teacher in his house who would never do any of the bad things Ellie and Charlotte suspected her of doing.

  Not until she stood up and looked out the wavy glass did she become afraid. She could barely see the American flag on its pole, flung out by gritty winds, and she wondered if Mr. Marvin, who lived on the nearest farm and raised and lowered the flag every day of the year, would come to take it home. She could hear what sounded like rocks pit the wall of the school, a rattling, angry assault of airborne pieces. She opened the front door without stepping out, and into her nose and mouth came the smell of pulverized loam and a taste like burned chalk. The road leading back to the Prices’ had disappeared. She set the door closed, and looked around. She drew close to the stove, where she had built, as she usually did on these cold Saturday afternoons when she stole away, a comforting fire, one that now gave merely adequate heat. She opened the door to the stove, threw her cigarette butt into its orangey mouth, and crouched there with the door ajar, watching the coals for a long moment. A sudden burst of wind blew right into the roof and shot down the stovepipe, throwing freezing air and lit cinders out onto the floor. It was as if the stove had spit at her, and she flung the door closed before she stomped out the live red crumbs.

  She went again to the window. In the yard, the flag was like a reddish waving shadow and then as she stared at the strange thing that it had become, it vanished. She kept staring at the spot but she could not see it at all.

  Going out in it would be an idiot’s business. That much was sure.

  The blue curtains they’d used for the Winter Entertainment were still folded up on a back shelf, and she prepared herself like an animal in a burrow, laying them out in layers until she had a makeshift bed. She watched for spiders but not especially. She covered herself with the last panel, even her head, and hoped, as she hoped nightly, that when she woke up it would all be over. What the it was, she didn’t know. The winter. The pennilessness. The aloneness. The badness. The curtains smelled of mothballs and clarty sheep, still clotted here and there as they were with the wool that had served for winter clouds, which no one believed looked a bit like clouds except Neva. Neva did. Aldine laid her head on the novel she’d been reading and fell into grainy sleep.

  37

  The truck started when Ansel tried it the third time, his hands gritty, the seat gritty, the whole machine rocking slightly in the brown wind. Things whose position he thought he knew—the coop, the western fence—were hidden like furniture in a room when the lights go out. He drove slowly, blindly, and came within sickening inches of the porch and then the cottonwood. Creeping along the road, he knew that he would only be aware that he had veered from its relative safety if he struck something or sank into the sand that lay in drifts along the edges. His nose was raw and—a disquieting surprise—he tasted blood in his throat. Still, he had found the road, and the road was straight. There wasn’t likely to be another car headed for him even on a clear day, so he drove slowly ahead for what seemed the right distance to the school, and then kept going and going and going, praying and squinting and searching and yet certain that he’d somehow passed it, until, at last, he spotted what he thought must be the edge of the school fence. He did not feel any pride in finding it. He felt only gratitude. He rolled slowly forward until he banged into something that turned out to be the flagpole.

  He forced the car door open against the wind and choked his way across the schoolyard, glad they had decided to sink the flagpole so close to the building, and glad when his outstretched hand touched something solid. He tried not to breathe as he felt his way along the boards of the outer wall, remembering the direction of the door but not the distance, tripping on the steps and scraping his knuckles. “Miss McKenna?” he shouted, and when he climbed up the steps and found the doorknob, he felt himself caught like a thistle in a barbed wire fence.

  He had to close the door behind him and use the rag on his eyes, then his nose and mouth. It was like having the flu, this storm. The
dust gave him a sense of bodily pain and a thickness of mouth that was physically nauseating. Then he could see the bundle on the floor, a dark, twisted shape, her pale, lovely face rising in the center of it. “What is it?” she asked. “Is a tornado coming?”

  “No,” he said, though he couldn’t be sure. A ferocious gust hit the side of the school and he said, “Come on. I’ll drive you back to the house.”

  “No,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  Instead of answering, she lay back down. “I can’t.”

  That was a surprise.

  “Do you want to sit here a minute and see if it dies down?”

  “Yes,” she said, her smooth, pale face sideways on the blankets. He couldn’t figure out what the light-colored clumps were. It looked like maybe she had torn the stuffing out of thick blankets. Then he remembered the play.

  He didn’t really think the storm would die down. A normal wind could blow for ten or twenty hours. Once, a wind had blown for one hundred hours. If it blew for even three, the sun would go down and it would be even harder to get home.

  “All right,” he said. “We’ll wait a minute.”

  They listened to the wind against the walls. It made him think of being in the barn with her that afternoon and he felt both dread and happiness.

  After a while, she said, “Do you believe in fate, Mr. Price?”

  “I suppose so,” he said. “In a certain way.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t believe in using it as an excuse. But things shape us. We’re led to certain things and have certain gifts.”

  “I think I shouldn’t have come,” she said.

  “That’s my fault,” he said. “I’m sorry you feel that way. But you’ve done a lot of good.”

  “No. I haven’t.”

  “Don’t say that.” The wind was a whuffing sound, then a rising, swarming rush. He wondered if there was anything diagonal in the walls for lateral stress. He eased close to Aldine and bent near and still, as you would make yourself near and still with a spooked horse. She reached out and touched his shoe.